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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Rocket Man Fell Before He Took Off


For five or six years I have been entertained and educated daily by Uncle John's Bathroom Reader page-a-day calendar.

Today is the first of over a thousand pages that a teenage buddy was on the page of the day.

On today's page it tells that Billy Joe Royal, is best known for his 1965 hit "Down in the Boondocks", thought he was about to make a big comeback in the mid-1980s with a song called "Burned Like a Rocket". It was released to radio stations in January 1986 - just days before the Challenger tragedy. Nobody was in the mood to buy a rocket song. It flopped.

3 comments:

  1. Hey, I remeber "Down in the Boondocks". So I guess I did know of Billy Joe.

    I also remember Commando Cody, King of the Rocketmen. I was an usher in a movie theater in my high school days, '52 -'53''54. On Saturday afternoons, I would be the manager of the Roxy where they had the Roy Rogers and Hopalong movies. And the serials. Loved them all.

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  2. ps. Commando Cody never fell. You could see the wire he was sliding across.

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  3. Si,
    I definitely remember Rocketman, landing on both feet and taking off running - nothing to it, and all the other cliff-hanging serials of the time.
    It seemed it seemed a sure death fall when it ended, and the next week, at the beginning you see from another angle where he was no place near the edge.

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