Episode 2: Bring Back The Time!

[0:00] Jason: You know, last time we did this, you just had a lot of problems.

[0:05] Bobby: I pushed the button last time.

[0:07] Jason: I know, but it just took you way too long, all right?

[0:10] Bobby: Well then, maybe you should push the button.

[0:11] Jason: Well, they don’t wanna wait this long, do you know what I’m saying?

[0:16] Bobby: Okay, are we recording?

[0:19] Jason: Yes, we’re recording.

[0:20] Jason: You know what? Forget this, just push the damn button, I’m pushing the damn button, here we go.

[0:24] Speaker: Let’s take a trip back in time, so strap yourselves in tight. It’s time for Bobby and Jason’s Awesome ’80s Podcast.

[0:43] Jason: What a surprise, man.

[0:45] Bobby: Oh my, that adds a nice medley to it, I kinda dig it, I’m digging it.

[0:52] Jason: I’m telling you, man, just watching that video and seeing that, how crazy is that?

[0:56] Bobby: All right, we’re gonna get into that, but let’s step back and let’s tell the people who we are, ’cause maybe they don’t know. Anyway, I’m Bobby Catalano and I’m with my buddy Jason Pascoe.

[1:06] Jason: Yes.

[1:07] Bobby: And we are the Awesome ’80s podcast, here we are.

[1:12] Jason: Here we are.

[1:13] Bobby: This is episode.

[1:13] Jason: We are live on tape.

[1:14] Bobby: Episode two in 2022, that’s a lot of.

[1:18] Jason: Season two.

[1:19] Bobby: That’s a lot of twos.

[1:22] Jason: That’s right, so if you wanna go back in time and listen to us when we did it before, 2016.

[1:28] Bobby: I know, right, it’s all about the ’80s. We sound so much better now. So what’s going on, man? What did you think when that new, that New Kids on the Block video dropped last week?

[1:39] Jason: I just was blown away, I felt all of a sudden exactly what they say in the song, I felt like I was 18 years old again.

[1:49] Bobby: It’s crazy, I remember when Jason showed me the video and he goes, after we watched it, he said, “This feels like we’re home, we’re back in time.” And it did, all the great references to it, and even the title, Bring Back the Time, it’s perfect.

[2:06] Jason: Oh, we’re stealing that one for this podcast, man.

[2:07] Bobby: I know, right, we’re stealing it, there’s our title.

[2:12] Bobby: Yo, and the collaboration with all those artists from that time, I thought it was ingenious, what’d you think?

[2:19] Jason: Oh, brilliant. I know when they did that tour a year or two ago, before COVID, the Mix Tape tour where they had Tiffany and I think Debbie Gibson on it, and the track that they did for that was pretty hot too, but they did not do all the stuff they did in this video, it’s just crazy good.

[2:39] Bobby: I like how they don’t take themselves serious, and they have a lot of fun with it. I liked seeing Rick Astley, he was.

[2:47] Jason: Oh, yeah, I loved it too, man, it was great, he was drenched, he was just drenched in sweat, it was so funny.

[2:53] Jason: Yeah, just a perfect Talking Heads imitation, awesome. He did something recently with the Foo Fighters where he came out on stage and they did one of his tracks.

[3:04] Jason: I can’t remember which one it was at the top of my head. But he’s got such a great sense of humor about the ’80s, it reminds me of two guys that I know.

[3:13] Bobby: That’s what he reminds me of. The thing about Rick is he’s actually a really good singer, people make fun of the guy ’cause he had this big hit, and it was kinda whatever, and I liked it, it was a good dance song, but I don’t think he got any respect for his voice.

[3:28] Jason: No, you’re absolutely 100% right. And here’s a little bit of nerdism, he actually got a grant from the government of the UK. I might be saying this a little bit wrong, but this is the gist, back before he was famous, he got a grant from the government to record his record. So he basically got a grant to be the pop star that he is today.

[3:52] Bobby: I didn’t know that, so great fun fact, how cool is that, huh? Great fun fact from the ’80s. And we also had an appearance from Salt-N-Pepa, who were, oh my God, they were great back in that time, and they still sound great.

[4:04] Jason: The whole way they shot it too, the whole way they sang it, was just like, the young kid in me was like, when we first saw it, we were just like, “Oh my God!” But of course, we texted each other as soon as it hit YouTube.

[4:15] Bobby: You know what? One of my favorite parts, ’cause I’m a big Michael Jackson fan, and some of you may caught it, was the reference to the Bad video, and instead of switchblade knives, they had switchblade combs.

[4:28] Jason: Now wait, here’s my question. Are you gonna go with the Bad video for that one? Are you sticking with that one as your recall for that particular thing?

[4:37] Bobby: I don’t know, let me think about that. But I just love the reference and how they had fun with it.

[4:45] Bobby: It was great. And I think their fans, The New Kids have a legion of fans still today, and I think they’re gonna love this video. And I think even anybody who is a fan of the ’80s and ’90s and the music and the clothes and the fashion, they’re gonna dig it also.

[5:05] Jason: Oh, yeah, especially everybody out there who’s listening to this. If you’re listening to this podcast, and you’re hearing all the ’80s stuff that’s all over the place, and you’re just like, “Wow,” just so you know, anybody who’s listening, we’re riding right along with you.

[5:19] Jason: We love it just as much as you do, it’s awesome.

[5:21] Bobby: We do. And it’s cool to see The New Kids still doing their thing. I was lucky enough to be hosting Dance Party USA when The New Kids on the Block came for their debut performance, and I think it was 1989, and they came, they were just really nice guys.

[5:41] Bobby: They were younger, they were just coming up, and they sang their, I forget what the first hit was.

[5:48] Jason: I think it was I’ll Be Loving You Forever.

[5:49] Bobby: I’ll Be Loving You Forever? That sounds familiar to me, too.

[5:53] Bobby: And anyway, they performed, and they did a great job. And of course all the Dance Party dancers were screaming, freaking out.

[6:02] Bobby: It was a great time. And I just remember how nice they were to everybody, they were just humble.

[6:10] Jason: Which, I don’t mean to interject, but I’m going to, on Dance Party, it might surprise some people who are listening, maybe not, there were a lot of acts that weren’t very nice, that were all into themselves and basically treated the dancers and the regulars and everyone like whatever, we were just lucky to be there to see them.

[6:35] Bobby: It’s true. We won’t name names, but.

[6:37] Jason: No, we won’t name names. But The New Kids on the Block, then there were some that were super-duper-duper nice.

[6:43] Bobby: Yeah, they were genuine, or different groups. I got to speak with all of them many times, I became friendly with Donnie, and he was really cool. I did so many things with them from ’89, ’90, ’91. They did a lot of stuff with Dance Party USA. We had this big contest, I think it was in 1990, where a winner, a fan from the show, got to go see The New Kids live at Nassau Coliseum in New York.

[7:17] Bobby: And we picked up the winner in a limousine, we drove the winner to go backstage to meet and greet all the New Kids on the Block. And you gotta remember, at this time, they were like The Beatles, this was a huge event.

[7:32] Jason: It’s Nassau Coliseum.

[7:33] Bobby: Yeah, exactly. So to go backstage and to actually interact with them was a big deal.

[7:41] Bobby: And for me, I was a spectator, I was the host, and I enjoyed just being backstage and seeing. Again, I saw the New Kids on the Block being very generous and friendly with all their fans, and that’s something they always did, every time I was with them, they were always kinda reachable.

[8:05] Jason: They kinda treated you, the stories that you’ve told me about it, ’cause I’d already left the show at this time, you said that they were just like normal guys. They would talk to you as a normal person, like guy stuff.

[8:19] Bobby: Yeah, absolutely. We did the Philadelphia River Cruise, we went on one of those river boats. We went with Donnie and the rest of the guys, and also they had a bodyguard, his name was Biscuit. And Biscuit was a big dude, cool dude, real friendly, and I think they produced a rap song with him.

[8:40] Bobby: But he was considered their bodyguard. I think they just liked hanging out with him, he was just a cool kinda guy.

[8:47] Bobby: But it’s funny, we were doing a segment, and I think it’s the first time that Donnie heard me speaking, and he was like, “Dude, I wanna do a record with you.”

[9:02] Bobby: Awesome anecdote, and I’m still kinda waiting for that 35 years later. But he was just, you know what I mean?

[9:08] Jason: Maybe you have to get in touch with him about it.

[9:10] Bobby: I know, right, we’ll have to work on something with that. Anyway, he was just real nice, and it’s great to see these guys continue to flourish.

[9:21] Jason: Well, and continue to accept who they are in their point in time, and especially with this song that they’re dropping and the actual shows that they do, that they embrace it. So many other bands and groups from that time, they all go through stuff, but they don’t really embrace things.

[9:38] Jason: And with everything in the world today, today I went out and I went to two or three different stores, today was the shopping day, and in each store, on the sound system is ’80s music. One of them was like, “Let’s Hear It For The Boy,” another one was like this Glass Tiger song, and then there was another one that was Hall & Oates’ “Out of Touch.”

[9:57] Jason: I mean, literally in every store, Target and whatnot. So there’s some magic in the air, and the fact that they’re doing it like this and accepting it and embracing it and amplifying it is just pretty fucking cool.

[10:14] Bobby: It makes sense, right? They see that people still have a need and they wanna hear and reminisce and go back in time, and I think they read their fans well, and there’s a lot of new fans who didn’t even know who they might have been back in the day. They’re probably finding a legion of new fans from this new release.

[10:37] Jason: Oh, yeah, from their mothers and their fathers.

[10:41] Bobby: Their mothers and their aunts and their grandmothers. I got a question, so when you were doing your errands and hearing all this great ’80s music, did you break out in dance, or did you just chill?

[10:51] Jason: I did not.

[10:52] Jason: Did not want to embarrass the wife, kind of kept my dance moves to myself.

[10:56] Bobby: If I was with you, I think we would’ve started dancing, or I would’ve made you dance.

[10:59] Jason: Yeah, but it’s just one of those things, I just happened to notice it as I go in, you go in and you listen to stuff.

[11:04] Jason: It’s not always that stuff, and then you’re hearing Tears For Fears, and you’re like, “Wow,” it’s like something following me around here.

[11:12] Jason: Especially, like I said, after this video dropped that you and I were just like two, back in high school on the rotary phone talking to each other.

[11:21] Jason: How cool is that?

[11:22] Bobby: I know, right? So if some of you haven’t seen this video by New Kids on the Block, Bring Back the Time is the name of the track, and they collaborate with Salt-N-Pepa, with En Vogue and Rick Astley, and yeah, man, you gotta check it out. If you guys are having trouble finding it on YouTube, we’re gonna stick a link in the description here so you guys can just click on it and go enjoy this great video and go back in time with the New Kids on the Block, with En Vogue, with Max Headroom.

[11:57] Bobby: He made an appearance.

[11:58] Jason: Oh, that’s right, Max Headroom, he made an appearance, that’s right.

[12:00] Jason: Donny did Max Headroom, that’s awesome.

[12:01] Bobby: And yeah, all those great memories, man.

[12:05] Jason: What a great time to be from the ’80s, isn’t it?

[12:09] Bobby: It’s exciting.

[12:10] Jason: Now, any one of you that has been following us for any amount of time knows that we are not very technically smart.

[12:19] Bobby: They do have a name for us, we’re called The Glitch Bros. Do you remember that?

[12:22] Jason: More like Neanderthals.

[12:23] Bobby: The Glitch Bros. But we do have an update, we do have an update on Weekend with Bob.

[12:31] Jason: Weekend with Bob.

[12:35] Bobby: Oh, man, what a fine, fabulous fiasco. We’ve been waiting to update you on the Weekend with Bob for many months, and finally we have some news.

[12:44] Jason: Oh, we have some news.

[12:47] Bobby: So anyway.

[12:48] Jason: Go ahead.

[12:48] Bobby: You sound much better reading the news. Some of you may know, in 2021 last year, we started, the DVD was on sale on Amazon, and it was supposed to include a lot of bonus features, a lot of cool stuff that Jason and I did.

[13:02] Bobby: Like, we watched it, the entire thing, and we did a video commentary, which was very exciting.

[13:12] Jason: But we did it also, I think it was really early, either before or after the COVID thing. You get to see Bobby’s fabulous hairstyle.

[13:21] Bobby: That was my COVID hairstyle, that was pretty awesome.

[13:24] Jason: Your hippie phase.

[13:25] Bobby: Very long, down to my shoulders. And also we have a blooper reel on there where Jason makes lots of mistakes.

[13:34] Jason: Me?

[13:37] Bobby: Okay, I’m lying, both of us. And then what else did we have? We had some early acting reels of me in school in New York City when I was in acting school, and there’s actually a clip there with Marlon Dale acting with me.

[13:52] Jason: No, wait, get it right, it is the Marlon Dale.

[13:55] Bobby: Right, the Marlon Dale. So you get a glimpse of Marlon and me back in acting school, I think it was the early ’90s. And then what else was on there, the bonus features, there was a podcast.

[14:10] Jason: I think there’s some podcasts on there.

[14:11] Bobby: Yeah, there’s three podcasts.

[14:12] Jason: There’s a little flying by the seat of our pants interview about Weekend with Bob, with somebody who’s very not qualified to have interview.

[14:19] Bobby: That I actually liked. Yeah, the intro video was nice, Jason and I did that.

[14:25] Bobby: With all the Star Wars stuff behind us, it was very cool. So anyway, finally, the Weekend with Bob, the new release, which is available right now on amazon.com, and it’s the collector edition they’re calling it. We’re gonna have a link, we’ll bring you directly there. And if you haven’t purchased it and you wanna grab it with the correct bonus features, you can go do that.

[14:54] Bobby: So for those of you who already bought the DVD last year and you didn’t get the bonus features and you were pissed off and mad at me.

[15:02] Jason: I was pissed off, blame me and blame Jason, that I didn’t get mine.

[15:02] Bobby: It wasn’t our fault, it was a glitch, there was some miscommunication.

[15:12] Jason: Just so everybody knows, it’s Weekend with Bob. Jason was just along because as Bobby put it, this is a team effort.

[15:20] Bobby: Oh, man, you’re right, you’re right. But things happen, there was miscommunication, but we’ve cleared that up. But anyway, if you’ve already purchased it, all you gotta do, we’re gonna give you the email, I’m gonna put this information in the post.

[15:37] Bobby: You email the company and show them proof of purchase, and they will send you free of charge a new DVD disc with the bonus features. So you can keep the one you have and you’ll get an extra disc at no charge.

[15:57] Bobby: Isn’t that exciting? That was pretty good.

[15:59] Jason: So yeah, Weekend with Bob, which is a fabulous bring back the time to 1987.

[16:06] Bobby: Yeah, we had a good time, that was Wildwood, New Jersey, and it was just like, I was a little skinny guy, I was about a buck 40.

[16:23] Jason: With, holding a couple pounds of bananas, a buck 40.

[16:25] Bobby: Driving my father’s car, eating bananas the whole time, and not talking to anybody, meeting no girls.

[16:35] Jason: Meeting no girls.

[16:36] Jason: Just hanging out by yourself, winning prizes for yourself on the boardwalk.

[16:41] Bobby: Well, actually, I don’t think I won anything, and that’s part of the problem.

[16:45] Jason: All I can say to anyone listening, if you’re thinking about doing this, I had the opportunity to watch this several times, and all I can say is the memory will stay with me forever.

[16:59] Bobby: Forever. The first time Jason watched it, I had to bribe him with a pizza, he said, “Well, if you get a pizza, then I think I can weather the storm for 33 minutes and watch a Weekend with Bob.”

[17:17] Jason: So what a great time to be from the ’80s with everything that’s going on now. I have a theory, is that with all the lockdowns and with all the stuff that we’ve been going through, everyone, the world, over the past two years now.

[17:35] Jason: Is that you look back, and the things that are going on in the world today, I’m not political or whatever, going on in the world today, it just doesn’t look too happy and shiny. But when you look back and you see all the stuff popping up in the ’80s, the ’80s just seem like, especially to the younger generation, a magical time.

[17:54] Jason: And just watching this video we talked about earlier, The New Kids on the Block, and taking a trip back to ’87 with Bob Catalano. Dance party in the ’80s. And everything, it just, doesn’t it give you the warm and fuzzy feelings?

[18:09] Bobby: I’m feeling warm and fuzzy just listening to you. I’m shedding a tear, I’m shedding a tear because you make me want to go watch Weekend with Bob again.

[18:26] Jason: And I’m shedding a tear for that Iroc that I miss.

[18:29] Bobby: Ooh, I miss the Iroc. We crushed the Iroc.

[18:34] Jason: So everybody out there, just so you know, we’re trying to get on a more regular schedule with these things, but you know how life is, hang in there.

[18:43] Bobby: Jason and I wanna give a shout-out to our winner, our big winner, who won the contest recently on our Facebook page, Gwen Stevens. So we’re excited for her.

[18:53] Jason: Congratulations, Gwen.

[18:54] Bobby: Congratulations. And Jason, tell them about the VIP mailing list.

[19:00] Jason: Well, if you’ve entered either one of our contests, you’ll notice that we ask you to put your email in and your name, and that is so we can just email you and let you know when we’re gonna drop some new stuff or something new is coming along.

[19:13] Jason: Because we hear from Facebook people, they send us messages, Bob tells me about this, that, everybody doesn’t always see it when it pops up. So if you’re on the list, we’ll open this up for other people as soon as we get our web designer to make something for people to sign up for the mailing list.

[19:34] Jason: But we’re gonna let you know exactly what’s going on on the mailing list and on the Facebook page, of course. And we’re planning on dropping a lot more stuff.

[19:43] Bobby: Right, and we’re gonna also have more contests. Gwen won this one, this was our second contest we’ve had since we’ve came back, and we’re gonna have more coming in 2022.

[19:54] Bobby: So you’ll have more chances to win some really cool ’80s swag.

[19:59] Jason: We’re still going through the attic.

[20:02] Bobby: We are, there’s still digging stuff up.

[20:04] Bobby: There is many more things out there that we’re finding, and I’m gonna dust the things off, I promise, I’m gonna get the dust cloth and clean things off.

[20:15] Bobby: Yeah, so exciting times, Jay, all those dust balls and dead mice, exciting times in 2022. Between the New Kids on the Block video and this podcast, it’s just overload, ’80s overload.

[20:29] Jason: It’s crazy. But this is something cool for you to listen to, like we said, the podcast is back, you just gotta put up with us.

[20:36] Jason: We’re a little old now, we like to take our time doing stuff, you know what I’m saying?

[20:40] Bobby: I think it’s time to get a pizza pie, buddy, I’m hungry.

[20:43] Jason: I think it’s time, too. Do you know exactly how we end this thing? Do you remember now?

[20:47] Bobby: I do. Five, four, three, two.

[20:53] Bobby: Boom. You guys take care, we’ll see you next time. Have a good one, everybody, and we will see you next time around.