Ronald Regan is going to hell for a great many reasons.  

   The main reason being that he is responsible for the deregulation of television.  I hold him personally responsible for the death of the late-night movie and the rise of the info-mercial. 

   Stations that used to have "Movies til' Dawn" now just sell their dead air time to telephone psychics, to jerky skinned hucksters in jogging suits hawking juicers, to beaming bathing suit bimbos squeeze, squeeze, squeezing those extra inches off hips, thighs, and buttocks with cheek-sizers, to hard-sell record clubs pushing original 70's hits from original 70's artists.

   But once.....

  Once upon a time independent stations filled midnight to four A.M. with really, really bad movies.  Movies so bad that the studios sold them to local television stations for a song and were happy to be making any money off these stinkers at all.

  There were Theme Weeks featuring crummy movies with common blood. Movies like "Squirm" (killer worms) and "Frogs" (killer frogs) and "Night of the Lepus" (killer bunny rabbits).  Entire months were devoted to poorly dubbed rubbery monsters from Japan. Why, Vincent Price, the cheap soy filler in the sausage of low-budget horror was king of midnight movies! 

   All of these tasty cinematic morsels were sliced into bite-sized pieces and mixed with low production value commercials from mostly-honest used car dealers (remember Cal Worthington and his dog Spot?), and mostly-honest attorneys, and mostly-honest anti-drug public service announcements that the stations had to show to keep their broadcast licence (my favorite had Motley Crue singer Vince Neil telling us to "Party Responsibly", so very eighties)

   Those days are pretty much gone now.  Its all Citrus-Slicers and Wonder-Mops after midnight. Whenever I hear about Regan's Alzheimer's and how "The Great Communicator" now sits around the ranch muttering incoherently and making shapes with his pudding I'm happy about it in a nasty way ...who says there's no justice?

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