You know you’re ready to compete in the Pan Pacific Masters Games if you were one of those kids who ran home from school in your Bata Scout or Bata Ponytail shoes, threw your homework in the corner, grabbed a cheese and Vegemite sandwich and jumped in a beanbag and waited for the TV to warm up to watch any of these classic shows:
The Banana Splits Adventure Hour
Remember The Banana Splits – a fictional, furry rock band featuring Fleegle a guitar playing beagle, a gorilla named Bingo on the drums, Drooper a bass playing lion and keyboardist Snorky, an elephant?
Drooper and Bingo offered questionable advice to viewers in the Dear Drooper segment, while Fleegle was the reporter for Banana Splits News. Snorky never said a word, probably because elephants don’t talk.
Segments each episode included Uh-oh, Chongo – It’s Danger Island!, Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel and The Arabian Knights?
And who could forget the six-wheeled Banana Buggies that the band used to tear around on?
Admit it, you wanted one!
Get Smart
If you’ve ever wanted the undeniable convenience of a shoe phone, a cone of silence in your office or to marry someone called 99, you’re ready to compete at the Games.
Get Smart was a Cold War – James Bond parody featuring the likeable but hapless CONTROL secret agent 86 Maxwell Smart who invariably saved the day against the equally bumbling and stumbling efforts of ‘the international organisation of evil’ KAOS.
Most fans remember The Chief for his eternal patience, Agent 99 for actually saving the day every episode, the megalomaniac Siegfried for his remorseless, but strangely admirable attempts at world domination, Hymie the emotionless robot and Agent 13 who was usually stationed inside unlikely places such as cigarette and washing machines, lockers, rubbish bins or fire hydrants.
And admit it. You also wanted one of those 1965 Sunbeam Tiger two-seater roadsters that Max drove in the opening sequence.
Batman
Na,na,na,na,na,na,na,na,na,na…
Way before Michael Keaton put on his latex Batsuit in the first Batman movie and turned things all dark and broody, the real Batman and Robin were pow-ing, biffing and kapow-ing with gay abandon across our 1960s black and white TV screens.
The true believers hold Adam West and Burt Ward as the yardstick by which all Batmen and Robins since are measured. Yes we do.
A true Masters Games athlete will remember the way, with one flick of Commissioner Gordon’s Batsignal into the Gotham City night sky, it was down the Batpoles and into the Batcave to take care of those pesky villains who never seemed to ever stay long in jail.
We’re talking Riddler, Penguin, Joker and Catwoman, who like the villainous minx she was always seemed to be trying to beguile Batman. Thank Heavens he was somehow strong enough to resist her puuurrrrfect skin tight cat suited charms.
Robin on the other hand could never resist a good Holy!
Holy Fate Worse than Death!, Holy Sudden Incapacitation!, Holy Contributing to the Delinquency of Minors! , Holy Priceless Collection of Etruscan Snoods!…
We have no idea what that last one is about, but we know with atomic batteries for power and turbines for speed, you always wanted a Batmobile.
Lost in Space
Have you ever looked to the Heavens on a clear night and wondered whatever became of that lovely space family, the Robinsons?
If you haven’t, chances are you weren’t a big fan of the Lost in Space television series.
It told the entirely plausible story of astrophysicist Dr John Robinson who takes his family across the Universe in the navigationally-challenged saucer-shaped Jupiter 2 spacecraft to land on planets that remarkably all have oxygen, trees and gravity.
But the big stars of the show were the young and ever-resourceful Will Robinson, the cleverly-named The Robot and the haughty, bumbling, self-serving, greedy and manipulative coward Dr Zachary Smith (not to be too unkind), whose girlie screams of “Oh the pain! Save me William!” whenever the Robot warned of “aliens approaching” could be heard from Earth.
And girls, we have three words for you: Major. Don. West.
He used to pilot the Chariot – the all-terrain vehicle the space explorers used to explore all terrains that looked like a Los Angeles backlot.
OK, you probably never really wanted a Chariot of your own because it was see-through and a bit dorky, but we’ve got a theme going here, so go with it.
And who could forget Bewitched, the Monkees, Kimba the White Lion, The Addams Family, The Munsters, F-Troop…we could go on forever.
So, if the recollection of any of these shows made you smile, you’ve made the Masters grade.
See you on the Gold Coast from 1-9 November for the 2014 Pan Pacific Masters Games!
(Image: www.artasylum.com)
The new system was born here and filagra this is not something that we would like to see. Caverta whilst better in some elements but not important for us.
