Agent Palmer

Consider this a love letter to lazy Saturday mornings, sugary breakfast cereals, and a production company whose hits knew no bounds.

Those of us fortunate to have been raised in the 1980s and 1990s fondly recall great Saturday morning cartoons by the handful. This, of course, was long before the ill-fated fall of that blessed Saturday morning programming block forever changed in September 2014. While it’s easy to look back now with fond memories, you might be surprised to learn that many of Saturday morning’s greatest hits were maintained by a single production house.

There is something uniquely wonderful about the autobiography of Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, and it is indeed the author Michael Collins.

Collins writes of his journeys into the astronaut corps and of his flights on Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 with such descriptive simplicity, that the book is both hard to put down and hard to continue without taking a moment to think about the story he has just told.

I recently had the privilege of being honored by my friends with a special episode of Our Liner Notes for having infiltrated 100 different podcast episodes. The very definition of “Proxycasting,” a term coined by Bill Sweeney of The Wicked Theory Podcast, which means “Palmer doesn’t need his own podcast, he has yours!”

And while that episode was, in fact, my idea, I have no doubts about its origin as a fairly egotistical start, but what happened at the end is worth noting on a very serious level

Not that long ago, I appeared on Our Liner Notes to argue with my friend and show host Chris Maier about the merits of both the movies and soundtracks for Heavy Metal vs. Rock ‘N Rule.

Despite our differences, we came to one very important conclusion. Since I had watched Heavy Metal in my early teens and only came to discover Rock ‘N Rule some 20 years later, while he had come to Rock ‘N Rule a bit earlier and then watched Heavy Metal recently, also about 20 years later, our opinions were extremely influenced by when we watched these films more than the films themselves.