Happy New Year (from Belinda Carlisle!)

From the Pop Culture Fiend Archives, here are a couple of rare photos from a 1980's shoot with Belinda Carlisle. Happy 1989 everyone!

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Beauty and the Beat Turns 40

Go-Go's Rock the Sunset Strip

Belinda Carlisle on Arsenio Hall

More Belinda

Great Album Covers: The Score, Head Games & Vacation

Go-Go's Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (About F**king Time!)

Great Album Covers: Breakfast in America, Big Lizard in My Backyard and She's So Unusual

The cover for Supertramp's 1979 smash Breakfast in America is nothing short of a masterpiece of composition. It features the view from an airplane window of a wonderfully inventive interpretation of New York City. In the foreground, a smiling waitress poses like the Statue of Liberty. In her right hand she holds a tray with a glass of orange juice substituting for a torch. In her other hand, instead of a tablet, is a menu featuring the album's title. Behind her is a model cityscape of Manhattan -- an assortment of high rise buildings and skyscrapers represented perfectly by plain but cleverly arranged salt and pepper shakers, condiment bottles, coffee cups, egg cartons and other breakfast-related items. A year following its release, this album deservingly won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package.

Cover art doesn't get much more on the nose than what you see on this, the Dead Milkmen's first album. But the cartoonish illustration (designed by the band's drummer) is also whimsical and consistent with the band's style of injecting humor into its hardcore punk.

Photographed by the legendary Annie Leibovitz, the cover of Cyndi Lauper's 1983 debut LP She's So Unusual helped establish her zany persona. The shot captures Lauper in the middle of some jerky, uninhibited barefoot dancing in front of a wax museum in Coney Island, a Brooklyn, NY neighborhood close to where Lauper grew up. The photo's kinetic energy and the cover's bright splashy colors convey the playful, care-free spirit of both the artist and American zeitgeist in the early 1980's. Interestingly, several decades after the album's release, several additional photos from this cover shoot surfaced (see below.)

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Great Album Covers: The Score, Head Games & Vacation

Great Album Covers: Honey, 1984 & Parallel Lines

How Today's Teenagers Are Embracing Nirvana and Other 90's Pop Culture

There are no less than three high schools within four miles of where I live. As a result, the neighborhoods I travel are always crawling with teenagers. In the last several months I've noticed a very curious fashion trend among this set, in that they're often sporting hoodies, sweatshirts and t-shirts featuring 90's bands. Hardly a day goes by in fact when I don't see a pimply-faced sophomore in Nirvana gear. I've also seen Metallica quite a bit, Snoop Dogg, Death Row Records, Foo Fighters and Slipknot. Now I need to stress that this is more than anecdotal (I'm not a big fan of any of these acts so I have no subconscious tendency to notice anyone repping them.) This is something that's both very real and being perpetuated with intention. Apparel makers are cranking out 90's-related clothing and retailers are aggressively promoting it in the teen market. 

Just the other day I saw a large poster in Tilly's window featuring a kid wearing a Nirvana shirt. It made me wonder -- why are merchandisers reaching back to pop culture from thirty years ago to appeal to today's teens? Are they just giving these kids what they've newly discovered and are now embracing? 

Beginning points for cultural trends are often difficult to pinpoint but at the same time, retro style is nothing new. Fashions, music and pop culture figures are often resurrected as they experience periods of nostalgia, usually about twenty years after they first emerged. The 1970's looked back at the 50's with Sha Na Na, American Graffiti, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Grease. The 80's saw comebacks for big hair, stirrup pants, miniskirts, paisley ties and penny loafers -- all popular in the 1960's. The 90's saw revisits to the 70's in The Brady Bunch films, That 70's Show, and the re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy. But currently, for unknown reasons, it seems the first decade of the 2000's is being overlooked in favor of what was popular in the 1990's. 

I ventured into the aforementioned Tilly's to see if I could discover more and realized that my observations were one hundred percent accurate. The store was loaded with apparel celebrating 90's pop culture, including Mike Tyson, the Chicago Bulls (who won six NBA titles in that decade) and Ice Cube. During a subsequent perusal of Tilly's website I found even more 90's apparel -- Friends, The Simpson, Aaliyah, Tupac, and tons and tons of... you guessed it... Nirvana. What is it about that particular band that elevates them so much among today's youth?... Is it their music?... Almost certainly not. This 90's craze that's taking place wasn't triggered by teens going through their parents CD collection and discovering grunge classics like "All Apologies" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Could it be the imagery and typography?... After all, the "Nirvana" lettering is pretty cool and the album covers for Nevermind and In Utero, as well as the "zonked out smiley face" logo are all pretty iconic. Yes, the aesthetics of graphic designs for the band are certainly a factor -- but the main reason Nirvana apparel is so ubiquitous today is largely due to the 90's nostalgia I've described and the fact that, while grunge didn't age well or sustain its popularity in subsequent decades, Nirvana is almost unquestionably the seminal band of that era. The same way the Sex Pistols and The Clash still carry the mantle and are revered in punk rock (the most significant rock sub-genre of the 70's) that's the esteem that Nirvana is held in when it comes to grunge (the most significant rock sub-genre of the 90's.) 

And so it was that I came to realize that the reason I'm seeing so many Nirvana shirts is less about the band and their music and more about the position they hold in connection with 90's. When you think about it, it could just as easily have been Pearl Jam except Curt Kobain's premature death by suicide has led to a certain romanticization of the artist's life, thereby creating greater recognition and appreciation for his work. 

In any case, if there's one thing I can't abide it's posers. If they truly like Nirvana's music that's one thing, but these teenagers running around in the band's tees just because all the other kids at the mall are are just plain annoying. And hey, as long as we're paying tribute to 90's alt-rock, I say we get retailers cranking out apparel featuring Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Blind Melon, 4 Non Blondes, the Pixies, Liz Phair and of course Alanis Morissette.

Matthew Perry was Beloved by All -- but his Untimely Death Hits Gen X-ers the Hardest

Matthew Perry's recent, sudden death sparked an outpouring of grief and fond remembrances within the Hollywood community. It also brought a great deal of sadness to fans of the actor and just about anyone who's ever watched and loved him on television. Perry's talent extended far beyond a single TV show (I first noticed him in a guest shot he did on Just the Ten of Us in 1989 and also thoroughly enjoyed him opposite Salma Hayek in 1997's Fools Rush In.) Still, the actor will always be most remembered most as hilarious smart-aleck Chandler Bing on Friends. And therein lies the reason why Perry's death is especially painful for those of us in Generation X. It's because Friends is undeniably a Gen X show. 

In Friends first season (1994) we learn that Monica (and her high school classmate Rachel) are twenty-six years old. The rest of the gang is also right around this same age, with Ross (and possibly Phoebe) only slightly older. So when you do the math, Monica was born in 1968, placing her and the rest of the Friends squarely in Generation X. Numerous storylines and references throughout the series back this up. From Ross's fixation on Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi, to Chandler's Flock of Seagulls haircut and admission of rushing the stage at a Wham concert, clearly these characters grew up in the 80's and thus are unquestionably part of Generation X. That clarified, it's no wonder that Perry's death hits us the hardest. We've lost one of our own. 

My high school class recently had a well-attended reunion and though I wasn't able to make it, I took time to pour over the gallery of photos that were posted online in the days after. While clicking through, I smiled and laughed seeing faces from my past for the first time in literally decades. The funny thing was I wasn't even friends with most of these people. I made all of my lifelong friendships during college and to this day remain in touch with only a single high school pal. Nevertheless it warmed my heart to see people I spent four of my most formative years with and know, despite the abundance of receding hairlines and expanding waistlines, they were alive and doing well. Somehow, we all tend to have very strong sentiments towards our peers and those with whom we've shared a common, significant experience. But the flipside of that feel-good sentiment is the gut-punch and sense of loss we suffer when we learn that one of our comrades is now gone.

That's what many of us are feeling with Matthew Perry's death. Friends was the ongoing story of six Gen X-ers trying to make it in the world as they laughed with, leaned on and loved each other. As we did with the abundance of teen movies in the 1980's (e.g., The Breakfast Club, Fast Times, Risky Business) Gen X-ers saw authentic versions of themselves and their lives in the Friends characters -- whether it Ross (smart and sensitive and carrying unrequited love) or Phoebe (so unapologetically authentic and in her flakiness) or Chandler, with his rapier wit and brandishing sarcasm to hide underlying insecurities.

Many will say that Friends is a show that belongs to far more that just a single generation and that it appeals to Millennials and Zoomers as much as any other age group. This is certainly true. Enough time has gone by now that we can safely say that Friends, and many of it's themes, storylines and characters are classic. Nevertheless, the show provided a different experience for us Gen X-ers who tuned in during its original run. We were watching ourselves -- young adults in their mid-20's, living post-college life in the 90's, going through the same things we were at that same moment in time. For example, when Friends debuted, many Gen-X women (my girlfriend included) had just moved out of their parents' house, started their first real job and were realizing independence for the very first time -- just like Rachel in the pilot episode. Like Joey, many of us were pursuing a career in acting or the arts and working odd jobs to pay rent while we pursued our dream. And while young people watching the show for the first time even today can definitely relate to universal themes like this, at the time it originally aired Friends meant the most to Gen-Xers who got to come home, click on the TV and see Ross, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey and Chandler living their same lives -- or perhaps the lives they wished we had. These were our peers... our contemporaries... our cohorts. And losing one of those is often the hardest blow to take... 

R.I.P. Matthew. 

Board Games of the 1970's Highlighted Americans' Angst

*AUTHOR'S NOTE: Board games are commonly defined as "any game of strategy in which pieces are moved on a board." For the purposes of this article, I'm using the slightly broader definition of "any competitive or strategic game played with pieces or paraphernalia on a tabletop."

To be sure things were tense in the 1970's both domestically and abroad. In the previous decade, high profile assassinations, race riots from coast to coast, the Manson murders, chaos at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and southern backlash against the Civil Rights Movement highlighted a decade in which social unrest was more overt than any other time in our nation's history. But as the 70s rolled in, upheaval, threats and alarmism abounded in a much more subversive way — one that created a palpable tension among the American populace. While we distracted ourselves with innocuous AM radio hits like Me and You and a Dog Named Boo, One Bad Apple and Kung Fu Fighting, in our gut we were terrified by the stress-inducing events that were happening all around us. We lamented the Kent State shootings, fretted about gas shortages, shook our head in disbelief at the corruption of Love Canal, worried that Three Mile Island or some other nuclear disaster would cause our doom, and secretly feared murderous wackos like Ted Bundy, Son of Sam and Jim Jones.

So could it be that all of the fear, pressure and angst built up during the 1970's manifested itself in, of all things, the decade’s most popular board games? Consider some of the ones that were best selling and most played at the time and the gameplay each involved:

Operation put our nerves to the test as we tried to steel ourselves and "take out his spare rib for $100." Touch the sides with those tweezers and you’d trigger a loud buzzer indicating you’d botched the surgery and killed the patient. (Talk about stress!) Meanwhile Perfection, which debuted in 1973, had us racing against time to place cut out shapes in their corresponding holes before the timer ran out and the whole thing went kaplooey in our faces. This unforgiving game demanded just what its name specified -- perfection. Getting some or most of the shapes in place meant bupkis so the game's all or nothing, tension-building premise had us all sweating from start to finish.

Perhaps the most ominous-sounding popular games of the 70s — Headache, Trouble, and Sorry — all had us maneuvering our pieces across the board in an effort to either outrace or sabotage our opponents. In its way, it was the perfect metaphor for the rampant consumerism and "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality that drove the US economy in the 70's before inflation took hold during the Ford administration. 

Think this is all a bit of a stretch?...  Well clearly something was going on in the 70's as we Americans, for whatever reason, played out the abundance of stress the decade had to offer with our dice, game tokens and pop-o-matics. An assortment of other forebodingly named games gained popularity during the time:  Kerplunk, Down the Drain, Don’t Tip the Waiter, Ants in the Pants, and of course, Don’t Break the Ice, which can be considered a not so subtle metaphor for the spectre of the US-Soviet Cold War. Similarly, Risk provided a much more literal representation of what might occur if the USSR (or some other communist regime) conquered the globe.

Stay Alive, introduced in 1971 and advertised as being "quite deadly", had the stated objective of simply surviving. The game was wildly popular throughout the decade, possibly because it embodied our fears for our soldiers fighting in Vietnam, as well as for Patti Hearst during her kidnapping and the hostages held in Iran.

Finally, the defining political event of the 1970's was most certainly Watergate and its surrounding mysteries of who committed the actual break in, “what did the president know and when”, as well as who Deep Throat could be. Parker Brothers seized upon these same mystery and crime solving themes with its detective game Clue, released in the U.S. in 1972 within weeks of the actual Watergate break in. And just like Watergate, Clue featured investigation, cover ups, accusations, and efforts to either guess or prove which of several characters committed the crime. 

Whatever you choose to believe about our choice of board games during 1970's, thankfully, the 80's were a lot more relaxed and carefree. (Fyi, that's the decade when less emotionally taxing fare like Trivial Pursuit and Scattergories were best sellers, and just before the popularity of board games in general began to slump, thanks to the rise of home video consoles like Nintendo and Sega Genesis.)

And the Most Beloved (but Embarrassing) Artist of the 80's is... Adam Ant!

Started an open-ended discussion on Reddit recently asking which 80's band or artist do/did you love BUT are kind of ashamed to admit. The many responses ranged from the obvious (Tiffany, Kenny G, New Kids on the Block) to the obscure (Sigue Sigue Sputnik.) The conversation sparked remembrances of long forgotten acts like Cameo, Winger and El Debarge, shout outs to the criminally underrated ABC and Human League, and confessions by unabashed metal heads of their secret love for Madonna and Debbie Gibson. But surprisingly, the number one artist (measured by mentions in comments and subsequent upvotes) was British new waver Adam Ant... 

No, I'm not kidding; Adam Ant won in a landslide... 

What's funny is I thought of him when I put together the above collage image intended to spark this discussion -- but I never imagined he was so beloved by others.

Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis and the News, Genesis, Pet Shop Boys and Warrant all fared well but the top five are listed below.

Adam Ant - 101

Air Supply - 67

Wham/George Michael - 57

Ratt - 57

Go-Go's - 33

The Cure - 26

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10 Songs That Defined The 80's

Family Guy's Funniest Pop Culture References, Vol. 2

The Pink Panther experiences the downside of corporate shilling.

   

Peter meets the "Dons" of pop culture.

 

The Game of Thrones walk of shame (Aretha Franklin style!)

   

Peter gets a little lost was traveling on the Great Space Coaster.

Now we know what happened to the other three Friends cast members.

   

It's true -- you never realized how disturbing the Lost in Space plots actually were.

   

Popeye is having health problems.

   

Peter falls in love with Kathy Ireland (sort of) and croons a Billy Ocean tune.

   

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Family Guy's Funniest Pop Culture References

The Pop Culture Fiend Photo Gallery is Finally Here!

The Pop Culture Fiend Archives includes an extensive collection of popular (and obscure) periodicals dating back as far as the early 1980's. My closets house crates and bins with literally hundreds of magazines (from a wide variety of genres) including Time, Newsweek, People, Us, Ebony, Sports Illustrated, Flex, Ironman, Muscle and Fitness, Runners World, Tennis, Men's Health, GQ, Vanity Fare, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Photo and Rolling Stone. The collection also includes defunct titles like Maxim, Stuff, Spin, Spy, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, Life, U.S. News & World Report, Sport, Parade, Premiere, Movieline and Playboy; along with several short-lived and/or long forgotten ones like Details, Detour, Model, Mouth to Mouth, Code, Bikini, Razor, Inside Sports, and Mirabella.

Now in addition to these full issues that take up far too much of my closet space, there were also scores of other issues that I chose to get rid of... but not before I clipped and saved a ton of their best and coolest articles and photos. These photos now occupy yet another plastic storage container in my humble dwelling and now, after many, MANY years, I've finally gotten around to scanning/digitizing them so they can be preserved and shared. You can scroll to see some of my first batch and I'll also be posting a lot of these to relevant communities on Reddit, including subs like r/OldSchoolCelebs, r/80s, r/90s, r/ClassicScreenBeauties and r/GenX.

Finally, know that many of these photos are extremely rare. I Google image searched a bunch of them and in many instances didn't find them anywhere else on the internet. So I guess props to me for being the conscientious custodian and curator of this content. After all, there aren't many of us who possess such a volume of 30-40 year old magazines and photos, or who would take the time to scan, digitally enhance, upload and publish them online.

I guess that's just what makes me the Pop Culture Fiend.

Richard Gere in costume for The Cotton Club - 1984

Belinda Carlisle - 1988

Farrah Fawcett - 1990's

Bruce Willis

Cybill Shepherd

Salma Hayek

Patti Smyth (former lead singer of Scandal) - 1988

80's stars Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Melissa Gilbert & Rob Lowe at an anti-nuke event

Billy Joel & Christie Brinkley

Natasha Henstridge

40 Years Ago, Risky Business Legitimized Teen Comedy

With due respect to the John Hughes' classic The Breakfast Club, the most important teen movie of the 1980's may very well be Risky Business. Released 40 years ago, Paul Brickman's Risky Business legitimized teen comedy like no film before it and set the stage for the “High Renaissance” of that subgenre that took place in the middle of the decade.

The early 1980's was an era filled with “high school boys looking to get laid” comedies (e.g., Porky's, Losin' it, My Tutor) that were thin on story and heavy on goofy, sometimes inane, humor. But then Risky Business comes along, featuring that same teenage boy out for sex... except now we get to see WHY he's experiencing that sexual frustration (as well as a ton of other anxiety.) We witness the pressure he feels (some applied by his parents, some self-imposed) to raise his SAT score, join school clubs he has little interest in, and get accepted into the college not he, but his parents want. Tom Cruise's Joel Goodson was the first Gen X hero – bored, disillusioned, forced down paths he's not sure he wants to tread and enduring a suburban hell complete with a pristine home/prison, successful parents he can never please or measure up to, and a voice in his head warning he'll “never have a future.” As Joel courageously tries to live up to his surname, his attempts to relieve his growing angst by defiantly maxing the volume on the family stereo and joyriding in his dad's Porsche prove insufficient. Though the apprehension he feels about where he's headed in life is apparent, relief seems unattainable. That is until he's pointed to call girl named Lana with the promise, “It's what you want... it's what every white boy off the lake wants.” It's this exploration of the unknown – the dark, not so pristine world of sex, prostitutes, and life or death run-ins with “killer pimps” – that drives the story of this restless, uneasy Gen-X teenager.

It wouldn't be until the middle of the decade – with Hughes' Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful trilogy – that teen comedies would so earnestly acknowledge and portray the contemporary fears and anxieties of those of us who came of age in the 80's. Joel's experience in Risky Business underscored a generation's gnawing need to subvert societal conventions and oblivious parents who failed to recognize how much emotional turmoil we were in as we struggled to figure out who we were and what should come next. In the process, we also had to navigate our way through expectations of continuing the American familial tradition that existed since the Great Depression, whereby each succeeding generation acquired more wealth and success than their parents. In these ways, Risky Business actually defined Gen X, crystallized its world view and authored its motto with the ironic and oft quoted line, “Sometimes you gotta say, 'what the fuck.'”

Risky Business would proceed to enter the zeitgeist in several ways. The scene where Joel slides across the hardwood floor in his socks became instantly iconic and has been parodied in everything from The Simpsons to video game commercials. Cruise's wardrobe in the film -- Docksiders, button down dress shirts, Izod polos – became the standard for preppies everywhere and after he sported 60's style Ray Bans in multiple scenes, the brand saw a resurgence that continues to this day. Risky Business proved particularly popular among college students, so much so that within six months, it was screening on university campuses and the film's one-sheet was pretty much the coolest thing you could have hanging in your dorm room. By the following fall, the film was a mainstay on HBO and its many memorable lines -- including “Get off the babysitter!”, “Porsche, there is no substitute.” and “Looks like University of Illinois!” -- were being quoted ad nauseum.

Risky Business further set itself apart with its artful cinematography (Lana’s first appearance; the train sequence) and an ethereal original score by Tangerine Dream that proved a huge departure from the typical teen movie soundtrack full of contemporary pop and new wave hits.

The end result saw audiences immediately embracing the film and its stars. Risky Business grossed $63 million on a $6 million budget and, boosted by positive word of mouth and a strong second run, would finish as the eighth highest grossing film of the year and the #2 comedy behind only Trading Places. An unknown Rebecca De Mornay (who won the role of Lana after Michelle Pfeiffer passed) was catapulted to Hollywood's A-list and, though she worked sparingly, graduated to starring roles in The Trip to Bountiful, The Slugger's Wife, and the And God Created Woman remake. Over her career, she's delivered a string of stellar but overlooked performances in films like Runaway Train, The Three Musketeers and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Oh, and that Cruise guy did okay too – starring in films that grossed a combined $10 billion at the box office, earning multiple Oscar nominations and becoming what many consider to be “the last Hollywood movie star.”

Now, forty years later we can look back at Risky Business and it's cleverly written script as the teen comedy that broke the mold and forged an alternative paradigm for the sub-genre. With its more serious take on the teen experience – in this case, through its The Graduate-like themes of eschewing the supposed American dream of an Ivy League education, landing a high paying job, and moving to the suburbs – Risky Business paved the way for John Hughes' films, Say Anything, Adventureland, and virtually every other smart, thoughtful teen comedy that followed.

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The Evolution of the 80s Teen Movie - How Bob Clark, Gen X, and Home Video Changed the Landscape of American Cinema
The Evolution of the 80s Teen Movie - How Bob Clark, Gen X, and Home Video Changed the Landscape of American Cinema - Part II
Welcome to Pop Culture Fiend

Explaining to an Alien How Humans Brush Their Teeth

… So long story short, a prospective employer asked me to take a writing assessment. 

It's for a gig as a freelance marketing writer for an “undisclosed” company. Now this assessment was pretty involved and required me to complete several exercises with both short and long form responses. It was also clear that I would have to conduct research and do some serious strategizing before formulating my answers. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

A local hair salon wants to run Facebook ads for the Christmas holiday season. They're offering 10% off gift cards that can be used at the salon. Their goal is to retarget potential customers who have visited their website. Their target audience is women ages 18-65 years old. What is your recommended ad copy for their remarketing campaign?

See what I mean?... Serious stuff.

So I get all the way through the assessment to the final exercise and I get this weird curve ball thrown at me that I'm not even sure is for real – maybe it's just a joke or maybe they're trying to see how I would handle an assignment for something way out-of-the-box?... Anyway, this was it:

We're aliens from another planet who have just landed on earth. We understand the English language, but many human activities and normal routines are foreign to us. We also consume food the way butterflies do, so we don't have teeth. To the best of your ability, please help us understand the average human's routine for brushing one's teeth.

I was both annoyed and amused that they asked for this – so much so that I absolutely could not resist having some fun and giving it back to this company in spades. So check it out below -- my response to how I would explain to an alien how humans brush their teeth:

Greetings aliens. How ya doing? Thanks for coming all the way across the galaxy for this. 

Today I'm going to explain to you how to brush your teeth. Teeth, by the way, are these things we humans have in our mouths that cut, mash and pulverize the food we consume before we ingest it. It's important to remember that if we don't brush our teeth, they will decay, rot and fall out -- and then we'd have no way to eat corn on the cob, Tootsie Rolls or Wendy's Baconators -- so you can see why this is so critical. Okay, here we go!

First, we move to an area of the home we call the "bathroom sink." We then turn a handle to start a flow of running water. Hey, did I mention that before we enter the bathroom we should really knock first because someone else could be in there giving themselves a bikini wax or a coffee enema or God knows what.

So to brush our teeth, we begin by squirting this gel-like substance (called "toothpaste") out of this tube onto this short stick with bristles on the end that we call a "toothbrush." We apply enough gel to cover the bristles and then rub the brush back and forth, and up and down on our teeth. (We're told by our experts here on earth to use a circular motion when we do this but trust me, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.)

Now periodically, as we are brushing, liquid will build up in our mouths until it's full. When that happens we go ahead and spit out the liquid/toothpaste build up. We try to make sure that it goes in the sink and down the drain because if it doesn't and the mess just lies there, our wives will yell at us.

Next, we add more toothpaste and repeat the brushing process. The experts here on earth (a sadistic group of men and women we call "dentists") say you should brush for about two minutes. That's really just kind of a loose rule though because sometimes you're running late for work or you just want to brush really quickly because you had Italian for dinner and you want to get that garlic taste out of your mouth so you make out with your girlfriend.

Okay, almost done. After we've completed the brushing (and spitting) it's time to "rinse." So what we do is we take our hand and we cup it so we can catch some of the running water in it. By the way, I forgot to mention that the water should ALWAYS be running. Sure, we could turn the faucet handle and only run the water when we need to -- but we're just stupid, lazy humans and destroying our planet by wasting all that water is a lot easier.

We then slurp the cupped handful of water into our mouths and swish it around for a few seconds. Now we spit the liquid out. (Yes, more spitting. Aren't we humans disgusting?) Then we look in the mirror and admire the great job we did by smiling at ourselves. (Maybe even give ourselves a sexy wink because dammit, we deserve it!)  

Lastly, we always leave the toothbrush on the sink and NOT in the toothbrush holder because moving it that extra 12 inches is just way too much work. 

And that's how humans brush their teeth! Tomorrow will be your next lesson... "How to take a dump."

No bullshit, this is what I replied with and sent back.

As I read it back now, it reminds me of this scene in Sleeper, where Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) comes out of a cryogenic freeze in the year 2173 and is asked by scientists to identify the people in a series of photographs from the 20th century. Miles' deadpan explanations are hilarious as he gives his take on everyone from Joseph Stalin to Bela Lugosi. 

A Deep Dive into Barry Allen's Speed: Exactly How Fast is The Flash?

With the recent release of the new movie The Flash, I've found myself pondering the iconic character, his bio, as well as his powers and abilities -- in particular, how fast he's portrayed to be. When it comes to comic book heroes and their superpowers, this sort of speculation is common and makes for great geek debate. But it's worth noting that the Flash character has undergone a good deal of retconning over the years. In addition, the recently concluded WB “Arrowverse” TV series The Flash has greatly added to and confused Flash's mythology, sometimes even venturing into storytelling that deviates from canon. So for this article, I chose to go back and look at the DC Comics Flash and bring to light references to the speed of this earlier version of the character. To help with this I dug into the Pop Culture Fiend Archives and my stash of DC comics from my youth. 

To begin, it's important to remember that 1956-1970 was the "Silver Age of Comics" and 1970-1985 (a timeframe that encompasses my aforementioned collection) the so-called “Bronze Age". The Flash from these two eras is none other than Barry Allen, a Central City police scientist who gained his super speed via an accident in which he's accidentally doused with a mix of chemicals after a lightning strike in his lab (more on this later.) This iteration of the Flash is widely considered to be the definitive version of the character – moreso than Jay Garrick, the original Flash created by Gardner Fox in the 1940's, and also more than Wally West, who began as Kid Flash before later succeeding Barry. The Barry Allen version is also the Flash appearing and/or referenced in the new Flash movie, the aforementioned Arrowverse series, 2017's Justice League and other “Snyderverse” DC pics, as well as several recent video games based on the DC Universe like Justice League Heroes and the Injustice series. So there's no question that when looking to determine how fast "The Flash" is, it's best to begin with Barry Allen, as this is the version who appears the most across all of pop culture.

So with Barry as the focus, when you examine his history and look for references in the comics about his speed, you discover a lot of inconsistency. Early Silver Age issues make a big deal about Barry running on water (something by the way, that would be scientifically possible for a human running even as "slow" as 50 mph) as well as overcoming gravity by running up the sides of  buildings. On the higher end of the scale, we see Silver Age Flash breaking the sound barrier. Comic book writers magnifying each of these specific exploits made a lot of sense at the time. In the 50's and 60's, rocket technology, jet engines, Chuck Yeager going Mach 1, etc., represented the outer reaches of what humans could achieve -- so an “ordinary man" gaining powers to match these types of things was superhuman enough for the comics. (It's very similar to the way Superman, around the same time, was heralded for being "more powerful than a locomotive.") But as we moved into the 1970's and travel faster than sound became so routine that even commercial airlines offered it, the limits of Flash's speed predictably creeped up and his exploits (as we'll see) became more fantastical. 

As Barry carried on through the Silver and Bronze Ages, his extraordinary speed resulted in cool new powers, like the ability to generate mini tornadoes and even time travel. (In the comics, this sometimes -- but not always -- occurs through a combination of Flash's otherworldly speed and a device known as the "cosmic treadmill", which was first introduced in 1961's The Flash #125.) Now follow me here: the speed of light has been calculated since at least the 17th century and in 1905 Albert Einstein theorized time dilation -- the idea that time passes more slowly for objects moving at high speeds and that this effect becomes more pronounced as the object approaches the speed of light. Further theorizing maintains that if a person could actually reach the speed of light, time would in fact stop relative to that individual. So if Silver Age Flash writers like Fox and John Broome knew all this, than by having Barry run so fast that he travels back in time, were they implying that Barry could move faster than the speed of light?...  It's entirely feasible, likely even, that the creative talents at DC were keenly aware of Einstein and his theories. He was, in fact, quite well known and heralded at the time of his death, which was only a year before the Barry Allen character was created. Is it crazy to think that the creators of a fictional character possessing super speed would use Einstein's thoughts on light speed as background and inspirational material for stories about the "fastest man alive?" It's worth noting that the concept of time dilation (i.e., time slowing down and potentially stopping as you approach the speed of light) has been incorporated into Flash comics and TV portrayals over the years, so it seems that at least some Flash writers familiarized themselves with the scientific implications of superspeed and used them to make the Flash and his flirtations with light speed more credible and "realistic." Silver Age Flash comics were also the first to recount incidents of Barry vibrating his molecules so quickly he's able to pass through walls and solid objects. Mastery of his body down to this molecular level is what enables what is arguably Barry’s most notable superpower --- traveling to other universes. This occurs in numerous Flash tales beginning with #123 Flash of Two Worlds. 

Flash's speed has even been defined via comparisons to Superman and in the pages of various DC titles the two have actually raced several times. Many of these head-to-heads were interrupted by emergencies of some sort but the record shows that Barry has bested Kal-El in the vast majority of their matchups. I bring this up because as I painstakingly poured through the history of Barry Allen’s Flash for references to precisely how fast he can run, I happened across a discussion of Superman vs. Flash that actually quantified the latter’s speed quite conclusively. Specifically, within my Justice League of America issues, I recalled an item in the "JLA Mailbag" (a monthly Q&A with DC's editorial staff that appeared at the back of many issues during the late 70's) where a reader asks how fast the Flash can run around the earth. The rather definitive answer given is that while fellow JLA member Superman can fly around the entire earth in about one second, the Flash can run around the earth in 1/10 (.10) of a second. With the circumference of the earth being approximately 25,000 miles, this means the Flash can travel 250,000 miles per second – about 33% FASTER than the speed of light. Extrapolating further, we get a measurement of Flash's speed of 15,000,000 miles per minute and a whopping 90,000,000 miles per hour! This 90,000,000 mph figure represents the highest quantification of Barry's speed during the Silver or Bronze Ages. It is not, however, faster than Modern Age Barry Allen. I'll explain...

For DC, the Bronze Age ended with 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths in which DC's "multiverse" was eliminated in favor of a single Earth and the entire DC universe was neatly consolidated. The fallout from this was particularly impactful for the Flash because in Crisis on Infinite Earths #8 Barry Allen dies as a result of running so fast and with such intensity that he literally disintegrates. At the same time, to maintain consistency, The Flash comic was canceled. When it was brought back shorty after, Wally West became the new Flash until Barry's return in 2009's Flash: Rebirth. When Barry returns, he is notably faster than he was during his original run through DC's Silver and Bronze Age comics. This is significant because the explanation provided in Rebirth for Barry's absence for more than 20 years is that he wasn't actually dead but rather that he became one with (and/or was trapped in) the Speed Force. 

So now we have to take another step back...

The Speed Force is an energized plane of existence from which DC's "speedsters" draw power. Modern issues of The Flash, the WB series, the new movie, and every other modern take on the Flash include the Speed Force as part of the character's lore. It was introduced, in part, to address and/or resolve questions regarding the anatomical damage a human body would most certainly suffer by running at such incomprehensible speeds. The Speed Force puts a powerful aura around whoever is tapping into it, thereby protecting them from speed-related friction, G-forces, etc. In other words, the Speed Force explains why Flash's costume (and skin) don't tear off... how he's able to see and hear while he runs... and why he doesn't constantly cause sonic booms. 

But the Speed Force is much more than just a protective barrier. It’s also a cosmic realm speedsters can use to travel anywhere in space and time. Those deft or experienced with the Speed Force can enter it and exit anywhere they like. Those not so skilled can get trapped and lost in the Speed Force indefinitely.

But here's the thing... The Speed Force was never a part of the Flash's original lore... Not even close. The first reference to it occurs in 1994 in The Flash #91 written by Mark Waid. He and other Flash writers, including Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns, through their stories, established the Speed Force as an integral part of the Flash's mythology moving forward and also retroactively applied it to Barry Allen's history, along with Jay Garrick's, and well, all other speedsters (good and evil) who ever existed in the DC universe. 

This means that Barry's speed and all of his speed-related past deeds, including time travel, are now explained as being made possible by the existence of the Speed Force. Johns, in Flash: Rebirth even took things a step further by explaining that Barry actually created the Speed Force himself when the lightning bolt struck him in his lab. Once that happened, the Speed Force began expanding in time and space to empower all speedsters before and after Barry. (This origin, however, has been contradicted multiple times and it's now generally accepted that the Speed Force has always existed.) Still, as confusing as its origin may be, the main thing to know about the Speed Force is that it essentially removed all limits to how fast the Flash can travel, up to and including light speed and even beyond.

Modern Age DC comics back this up.  JLA Vol 1. #89 begins with Wally West outrunning a nuclear explosion to save a city of 532,000 people by carrying each inhabitant (1-2 at a time the comic tells us) 35 miles away to safety until every single person is evacuated. Wally does this in .00001 microseconds. I was told there'd be no math but I'm told this equates to a speed of roughly 13 trillion times the speed of light. (But again, that was Wally West and this article is about how fast the definitive Flash, Barry Allen, is.)

Upon Barry's "rebirth" he too demonstrates enhanced speed and performs feats infinitely more impressive than he ever had previously, including running in the sky. It seems the "new" Barry is more dialed into and able to draw more power from the Speed Force than most other speedsters apart from Wally West. This results in a vast increase in Barry's top speed during the Modern Age. And it's precisely because the existence of the Speed Force has been retconned into Barry's history, there are presumably no limits to how fast he potentially could have been during the Silver and Bronze Ages either. Looking at it this way neatly reconciles and gives more credibility to the 90,000,000 mph attestation by the DC editorial staff I identified earlier.

In the end, we know this is the world of comics, which is rife with inconsistencies, contradictions and countermanding in matters relating to both character bios and storylines. Arguably, it's Wally who has proved most adept at marshalling the Speed Force and usurping its power to reach new limits but Barry too has used the Speed Force to reach incomprehensible speeds. Depending on how much he's able to tap into it, he has unlimited speed -- faster than light, faster than thought, faster than death, faster than time... He's even fast enough to live an all-encompassing, entirely instantaneous existence... 

So yeah, he's pretty freaking fast.