Darren and Robin share their memories of learning music at school and in private piano lessons, and eventually buying guitars and drums, recording equipment, and forming bands. Includes some terrible/awesome home recordings from the 1980s and early 1990s.

Growing Up '80s

Piano Lessons to Rock Band? Playing Music in the 80s

This time, Darren and Robin talk about our memories of Construction Set games and programs from Electronic Arts and other similar software that allowed us to create in addition to playing.

C64 Construction (and Destruction) Games

Join your friends, Robin and Darren as they talk about all the things that they love about Steve Lisberger and Disney's 1982 classic, TRON! If you don't know what we're talking about, you're listening to the wrong podcast.

TRON the Movie

Board games! Back when we were little kids, "let's play a board game" might be suggested when we claimed to be bored. But, as we grew up, we found a number of board games that really entertained us. And this was all pre-Catan. We also talk about a bunch of board game adjacent games that we played in the 1980s.

Board Games

Strap yourself into your Edgley Optica ultralight for 90 minutes of one of Robin's favourite movies ever! Slipstream is an oft-forgotten sci-fi movie from 1989 staring Star Wars' Mark Hamill, Aliens' Bill Paxton and Jurassic Park's Bob Peck. And if that doesn't get you wanting to watch it, Slipstream was produced by Gary Kurtz (who also produced Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back) and was directed by Steven Lisberger who also directed Tron! With all the big names involved in its production it's gotta be great, right? Well... it's not great. But it does have a lot of great elements in it and even Darren agrees it gets better with subsequent viewings.

Slipstream: Temper Your Expectaions

That big fat orange cat was a great source of entertainment and influence upon us as young kids at the beginning of the '80s. After a bit of a history lesson, listen to how Darren and Robin first discovered Garfield and collected the comics. They also had a few stuffed toys from the Garfield comics and Darren rediscovers a rare and strange alternate Garfield comic/story compilation from his childhood.

Growing Up Garfield

Collecting Comic Books! How we were introduced to comics and realized that we were collectors. We talk about buying the comics that everyone bought, and how we discovered the comics that we liked. How about the comic book stores in the neighbourhood? We go through it all!

Comic Book Collecting

Robin and Darren go on a full ramble about things that fascinated us as kids in the '80s. Naturally we're talking about home computers, but also, Space Shuttles, how-to-draw books, the paranormal, and awesome vehicles, like the A-Team Van, and Winnebegos!

Things That Fascinated Us

Tears for Fears awesome Songs from the Big Chair gets the spotlight this episode! Darren and Robin talk about their memories of the album, listen to all the songs, talk about how they liked it as kids in the '80s and what makes this album stand up so many decades later.

Songs from the Big Chair

No Olympic Games for you this summer? No problem! Robin and Darren talk about the classic Epyx title: Summer Games for the Commodore 64 and host a min-Summer Games for you. Are you Team Australia or Team Canada? Check out the bonus VIDEO podcast and watch us play Summer Games: https://youtu.be/SviLqATFquo

Summer Games on the Commodore 64

Robin and Darren talk about their favourite breakfast cereal memories, and also discuss important cereal history facts, some of those "foreign" cereals, and especially talk too much about that Canadian classic, Shreddies.

Shreddies... Breakfast Cereal

Darren and Robin talk about some of the micro computers used in schools around the world, from Robin's experiences with the MicroBee in Australia in 1987, to the excellent BBC Micro series by Retro Man Cave in the UK. Then we focus on our own schooling in Ontario, Canada where we had Commodore computers, and in high school, the ICON computer system.

Computers At School

Do you remember going to the corner store when you were younger? Robin and Darren talk about their collections obtained from their local corner store in the 80s: candies, magazines, Wacky Packages, trading cards and more!

Corner Store Collections

Robin and Darren take a stroll down 80s lane, talking about all the various game systems and computers they had growing up.

A Walk Through Our Systems

When Darren was a kid, The Last Starfighter movie scared him to the movie theatre floor. But he's ok now! Today, Robin and Darren go deep into the 1984 Sci-Fi / Monster movie classic: The Last Starfighter. They talk all about the movie, special effects, computer graphics, the video game, Star Wars connections and all those scary monsters! Yeah, somewhere along the way, our numbers got mixed up... let's call this episode 10.

The Last Starfighter

Canadian Couch-Sitters Darren and Robin talk about all the great movies, video games, comics, music and other stuff from the 80s that they loved as they grew up and that they still enjoy!

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Growing Up '80s

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