1983

Movies

I had never missed a new James Bond movie and in ‘83 Octopussy came out with Roger Moore playing James Bond, although he was not as good as Sean Connery, Moore did a good job. Maud Adams was the “Bond girl” who played the role of Octopussy, arguably the best name yet for a Bond girl.  

A Christmas Story came out about a young boy who wants a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle, also known as a BB-gun much like the ones my brother and I got about the same age as the boy in the movie.  The boy’s mother was against it always saying, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”, but his father prevails and he gets the gun for Christmas when he hurries outside to try it out, shooting a target on a metal sign in the backyard; when he fires, the BB ricochets back and hits him in the face. Believing at first that he has indeed shot his eye out, he realizes that the BB only knocked his glasses off.   I still watch the movie most every Christmas season when it plays on TV.

Other notable movies for me was Tom Cruise in Risky Business about the adventures of a high school senior while his parents were on vacation was classic. With my interest in the NASA space program I had to go see the movie The Right Stuff based on the book by Tom Wolfe about the first seven U.S. astronauts that I had raptly watched on TV in the ‘60s.   

The movie Cross Creek came out about the life of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings who wrote the book "The Yearling", which won the Pulitzer Prize. I remember we were all in tears when Mom and Dad took us to the drive-in theater to see the Yearling.  Both the books, movies and Rawlings have a special interest to me since Cross Creek is about 20 miles from Gainesville where I grew up and now live and is only a few miles from Micanopy where Dad grew up while Rawlings was writing The Yearling.  In 2018 after moving back to Gainesville I visited Rawlings’s house which is now a State Park.  Next to her house is The Yearling restaurant where you once could get a fresh water “seafood” platter that had frog legs, catfish, alligator tail and cooter, all fried of course.   They now have burgers like “The Marjorie” and “The Rawlings” but they no longer have cooter on the menu.

TThere were a number of science fictions movies that came out in ’83. I was disappointed in Something Wicked This Way Comes, a science fiction movie based on Ray Bradbury’s book that I had read. Then there were the “space westerns” that came out following the success of Star Wars, Space Raiders and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, neither very good.

But the movie of the year had to be the third Star Wars movie, em>Star Wars VI The Return of the Jedi, it was the highest grossing movie of ’83 and is still one of my favorite movies. Yes it was confusing that the third Star Wars movie was titled the sixth. It would be over fifteen years later before we got to see Star Wars I.

Music

There wasn’t a lot of new music that came out that was memorial for me, "Every Breath You Take" by The Police was probably the best.  I got really tired of hearing Michael Jackson’s "Beat It" on the radio.  

TV

Bob Ross

On TV I continued to watch Magnum, P.I.  The A-Team that started in January of ’83 was pretty good. Knight Rider that had a self-driving car that was smarter than the star of the show Michael Knight was interesting at first but soon got to be repetitive. Dallas was the most watch show again for the year but I never watched it.  I continued to watch Star Trek and Kung Fu reruns pretty regularly.   In 1983 I regularly watched shows on PBS TV stations and particularly liked This Old House with Bob Vila which became one of my favorites shows.  On January of ’93 The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross aired for the first time on PBS and  I loved the show, I had painted a half dozen or so paintings by this time and found it fascinating how Bob, with his long fuzzy hair and slow soft voice, could turn a blank canvas into a completed painting in a half hour.

Wedding and Birthday