The portal in the drugstore
It was called the spinner rack.
For a kid growing up in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, or even the early 80s, the spinner rack was a portal. Give it a spin and suddenly you were surrounded by cowboys, superheroes, monsters, comedians, cartoon characters, television stars, talking animals, and complete weirdness.
And perhaps the strangest thing about the spinner rack was this: Everything eventually became a comic book. Not just superheroes. Everything. If America loved it, somebody would put staples in it and sell it for twelve cents.
A flea market of ink
Today, most people think of comic books as a medium dominated by caped crusaders. But for decades the comic-book world looked more like a flea market than a superhero convention.
You could buy comic books starring television celebrities. Comic books starring cartoon characters. Comic books starring movie stars. Comic books starring mascots. Comic books starring animals. Comic books starring puppets. Comic books starring people who had absolutely no business starring in comic books.
“A dairy mascot had her own adventures on the spinner rack.”
Celebrity logic
Take Lucille Ball. Millions watched I Love Lucy every week, so naturally there was an I Love Lucy comic book. The same logic applied to Lassie. Kids loved Lassie. Therefore Lassie became a comic book. Simple.
But the rabbit hole goes much deeper.
Mascots and oddities
Even Elsie the Cow, the smiling mascot of the Borden dairy company, appeared in comic books. Think about that for a moment. A dairy mascot had her own adventures on the spinner rack. Nobody thought this was strange. It was simply how the world worked.
Television cartoons made their way into that same economy of staples and ink, letting characters who already lived in our living rooms become keepsakes you could fold, trade, and hide under a mattress.
The First Cartoon Crush
When Animated Characters Stole Our Hearts
Ask a roomful of men about their first crush and you will occasionally hear a sheepish pause, followed by a confession: she wasn’t real. She was Judy Jetson or Wilma Flintstone, Daphne Blake in her impossibly perfect scarf, April O’Neil with a microphone and a look that said “move along, I’ve got this.”
The list rolls forward across generations—Ariel and her forbidden shipwrecks, Belle with her library and her patience, Jasmine with her horizon-hungry stare, the inked dynamite of Jessica Rabbit, and Gadget Hackwrench, engineer of every basement heart.
The secret is that it was never purely about the hair, the waistline, the drawing style, or the dress. It was about personality and humor, kindness and intelligence, the promise of adventure and the possibility of a world larger than your block.
Cartoon crushes were rehearsals for imagination and empathy. They were our first lesson that affection could be sparked by spirit, not just surface. Looking back, they weren’t embarrassing at all—they were the sound of us growing up, frame by frame.
When Television Lost Control
Elvis Costello's Sixty Seconds of Beautiful Chaos
For about ten seconds, everything seemed perfectly normal.
Elvis Costello and the Attractions began “Less Than Zero,” the approved NBC song, the one that had been rehearsed, signed off, and slotted neatly into the night's broadcast clock. Then Costello stopped, turned to the band, and said, “I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen...there's no reason to do this song here,” and the band launched into “Radio Radio.”
Somewhere, NBC executives probably experienced simultaneous heart palpitations, while the audience in the studio had no idea they were watching television history.
Not every modern reader remembers why it mattered. In the 1970s, network television was a cathedral of control: songs approved in advance, camera shots rehearsed, standards departments involved, artists expected to comply.
Except...
One skinny Englishman with Buddy Holly glasses decided he wouldn't.
The moment is not just about Elvis; it's about live television itself. TV sold the promise that “Anything can happen,” while almost nothing ever did because everything was rehearsed, timed, and approved. For sixty unforgettable seconds, anything actually happened.
It belongs to the same secret lineage as Johnny Carson's unscripted breaks, the first moon landing, the “Heeeere's Johnny!” entrance, Ashlee Simpson's busted lip-sync, and Captain Kirk kissing Uhura—moments that stick because they were not supposed to happen.
Lorne Michaels' later reaction wasn't simple anger. With time came appreciation for the mythology, the way that incident folded itself into SNL's identity as a place where artists occasionally broke the rules.
And then there's the contrast with now. In 1977, you either saw it or heard about it Monday morning. There was no clip to replay, no hashtag, no algorithmic afterlife. The performance lasted only a minute, but it endured because it reminded people that live television still held one magical possibility: someone, somewhere, might decide not to follow the script.