is available for viewing on Hulu. I’ve been waiting to see this one for a long time. If you’re a Netflix fan, it is “coming soon” to Instant Watch (or so my queue says). I liked King of Kong better, but Chasing Ghosts is fun.

The first, and perhaps worst offender, was the group dance. You know how these scenes go. One guy brings a new dance routine to the party and then everybody starts doing it.

To be honest, this one did at least have a humorous payoff. Plus, it was choreographed by Paula Abdul, so that’s something. Unfortunately, I can’t say that about the many other times we see the group dance, such as in Encino Man

or Teen Wolf

I first became aware of the group dance in the video for The Communards “Never Can Say Goodbye” cover. I think I saw this video on VH1′s Pop Video, and they stated that the singer really wanted to do a group dance.

I realized right away how ridiculous the group dance is. How could everybody learn the moves that fast and do them right? Why doesn’t anybody just laugh at the idiot who tries to start the dance? And how do they pick up the new moves they’ve never scene that always get added once everyone is dancing? But, illogical though it is, there you have it. In movie after movie after movie.

Not all of the channels came in clear, though. The premium channels (HBO, Showtime, etc.) were there but scrambled. So were the Pay-Per-View channels. “Scrambled” meant that the picture was distorted. The audio was fine, but the picture was pretty near indecipherable. Here’s a perfect example of a scrambled Pay-Per-View WWF match:

Did this scrambling keep me from watching these channels? Of course not. I watched them all the time. In fact, when I was 12, I had my appendix taken out and got a week off of school. That week, Pay-Per-View was showing Aliens and Club Paradise (there were only two Pay-Per-View channels on Columbus cable at the time, and each showed only one movie over and over again). I “watched” both repeatedly. I mostly had to fill in the video portion from what I heard in the audio portion. But there were some moments, some glorious moments, when the picture would just come in perfectly. This ususally happened when the screen was mostly bright, like during the beach scenes in Club Paradise.

For years, I thought I was the only one to watch scrambled cabled. While watching an episode of VH1′s I Love The 80s a few years ago, I learned that everybody did it. And to be honest, I kind of miss it. It made TV-watching a more active activity. You really had to focus on the screen. It made it a more imaginative one as well.

At the end of the movie, there is also a quick shot of Brooke Adams. That’s worth the rental alone. If The Stuff doesn’t work for you, try It’s Alive and God Told Me To, a couple other Cohen films.

My worst weird association is the Castlevania/”Endless Summer Nights” association. Though weird, I can at least explain this one. I used to play Nintendo while listening to the radio through a huge pair of stereo headphones. At the time I was playing Castlevania, Richard Marx’s “Endless Summer Nights” was in heavy rotation on the Columbus airwaves. And so I somehow put the two together. I particular put the song with Castlevania‘s second stage. I still hear it in my head today whenever I kill Medusa. To get the affect, start both videos below, then turn off the volume of the Castlevania video and watch it while Marx croons.

While this weird association is perhaps the worst, there are others, most of which are inexplicable. I associate Chicago’s “Love Me Tomorrow” with The Dark Crystal, Toto’s “Africa” with The Beastmaster, and the G.I. Joe hangglider with The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I imagine that these weird associations are a byproduct of living through an era where so oversaturated with media that it often overlaps. I also imagine that you have some weird associations as well.