The Retro Revolution

Welcome one and all to Retro Revelations. With this blog, I intend to have an outlet to talk about my many "old school" passions. I imagine that the subject matter will lean heavily towards classic films, as anyone who knows me will attest I am an unabashed film fanatic, most especially to the older stuff. But so as not to limit myself, I'm also from time to time, as the mood strikes me, going to be writing about anything from classic video games, to classic comic books, to music, to novels, to whatever happens to strike my fancy.

Seeing as we're already mid-way through the month of October, I can safely predict that many of my initial posts will have varying degrees of Halloween spirit in their making. And that's all the more fun, because growing up, as a little kid, Halloween was probably my absolute favorite time of year. Christmas was right up there too, and it didn't hurt that my birthday was right between the two (in fact every four years or so it lands on Thanksgiving which made it even better). But there was always just "something" about Halloween, or as the ancient Celts originally called it, "Samhain". The time of year, dead in the middle of Autumn, just always seemed magical to me, and the feelings and imagery that came along with Halloween always attracted me. It wasn't just the candy (though back then I certainly loved that), one of my huge obsessions as a child was monsters and mythology. If the imagery around the site isn't hint enough, I've always loved Godzilla, he was a childhood hero of mine (weird right?). But Halloween was open season on any kind of monster imaginable, from vampires to werewolves to zombies, skeletons, giants, witches, ghouls, ghosts, you name it, it was there. And I ate it up just as much as I did the mountain of candy I typically wound up with at the end of the night.

I'll admit, getting into my early adult years, my love for the season kind of waned a bit, not the season itself, but Halloween specifically. This was due directly to the fact that, sadly, once you cross that threshold into adulthood,  the holiday starts becoming less about the fun of dressing up and trick or treating, and more about what dumb costume you can slap on and how many parties you'll be able to make it to during the course of the night. But, annoying drunk kids trying to ruin an otherwise perfectly awesome holiday aside, once I got into my later 20s, the true love and appreciation of the whole deal gradually started drifting back to me. Things are never quite as awesome and quite as striking as they seemed when you were a kid, open and experiencing everything full-blast. But the elements of the season that attracted me so back then, are by and large the same things that draw me to it now.

And with that in mind, I'll be writing several pieces over the rest of the month, talking up all kinds of stuff Halloween related.