Episode 10: “The Owls of Olivewood”
If you were going about your normal day, how many owls would you need to see before you thought something was wrong?
If you were going about your normal day, how many owls would you need to see before you thought something was wrong?
Actually, scratch that. Too soon for that.
So, have you ever remembered a show or something from childhood, and you start hunting around the web for it, maybe even start asking people about it, and you draw enough utter blanks you begin to suspect you somehow conjured it all up? Not the Mandela effect, where a bunch of people misremember the same thing the same way, but a show, a song, a commercial, some bit of ephemera that seems to exist only in your memory?
Stop right there, soldier! Do not Google. Do not ask someone about it face to face. In fact, if your supposedly lost thing somehow comes up in casual (or “casual”) conversation afterward, extricate yourself quickly; don’t panic but don’t dawdle either. Just make your excuses and leave the area.
And for god’s sake do not start posing questions on message boards.
In my former life I was a pop-culture obsessive – Star Trek to Star Wars and everything in between, though with a fantasy/quest lean. If you needed to see (but not touch) a 5-inch tall “Taz” Tasmanian Devil figure, I was your guy. My closet was devoted to shelving. The figures made me feel melancholy, but in a comforting way. As if I’d saved them from oblivion, deposited them outside of time. My girlfriend Shayna (how I enjoy saying that) calls it a non-toxic trait, my “green flag.”
It started with “Pop Trash -- The Pop-Culture Nostalgia Podcast!” which I had agreed, somewhat against my will, to start up with Kyle, whom I’d gotten friendly with on shift changes at the 7-11 while admiring each other’s retro t-shirts. They actually made more sense on him, since he was a little older than me.
Kyle makes up for his cheery acquiescence on the clock with a forceful personality off it (“a barreling sort,” to quote Shayna). He took over just by he being himself and me being myself. He’d been in radio and could instantly slip into a shouty, friendly, ready-for-anything mode. Argument and conflict energized him, paralyzed me. Peace and calm are my bag, not rough and tumble.
So: A two-guy operation with classic mismatched personalities (which can sometimes work), cranking out one show a week, the drudgery ratio climbing as I ended up handling more of the back-end technical bits -- which I actually was better at, my suspicions of weaponized helplessness on Kyle’s part aside.
That division of labor wasn’t in our official contract, written down tres cool style on a barroom napkin at Lily’s, sitting next to the taps with $2 cans of Pabst, facing the somewhat illicit (in Ohio) bottle of Everclear behind the bar. Shayna didn’t join us anymore. I’d caught him giving Shayna an unwanted kiss when he thought I was still in the bathroom at Lily’s, so she doesn’t come with me anymore.
The real problem was the usual one: No one cared. Listener numbers had flatlined at a low plateau and my publicity posts to my embarrassingly meager friends list were met with at best some version of “it’s in my queue,” which translated as “Let us never speak of this again.” The Discord channel I had painstakingly set up to bolster the podcast was a wasteland, my own pleading attempts at conversation starters scattered in the void.
Kyle wanted us to invest in better equipment (“gotta spend money to make money”) and I had none, which put us at something of an impasse. The night before we recorded our ninth episode, “TV That Time Forgot But You Remember,” I laid up in bed, pondering how to extricate myself without totally alienating Kyle, who I considered a friend.
On the day it happened we were recording the podcast in Kyle’s surprisingly tidy apartment, Kyle glancing side-eyed at my page of scribbled talking points. “It’s all about spontaneity, Bryan,” I could almost hear him saying, chiding my overpreparation.
“And now the question of the day,” he announced into his mic, launching into his standard ten-minute mark segment: "If you were going about your normal day, how many owls would you need to see before you thought something was wrong? Zookeepers excepted.”
A pause for the audience to recover its breath, then, “So does anyone else remember an episode of the early-80’s Ted Knight comic vehicle Too Close for Comfort, where a frankly insufferable supporting character claims to have been kidnapped and is, ahem, romantically assailed by two enormous women in the back of a van, one of whom may or may not have been a man? Or, on a lighter note, that short film when the witch made blueberry pancakes that made everyone who ate them happy? And everyone who saw it suspects they dreamed it, maybe because they all saw it during class in 5thgrade with the lights out, half-asleep?”
I interrupted -- at least it felt that way -- “Or, to move into this millennium, the comedy starting Sinbad as the god Shazaam! that everyone swears they remember but was never actually filmed.”
“Or was it? Can we be absolutely sure?” Yes, but I murmured “Good point” anyway.
“So how does this happen?” Kyle asked. “Can memories somehow coalesce into reality? If you think about something long and hard enough can you somehow manifest it into collective memory, or even collective reality?”
“It’s also possible it did happen and we just have no proof,” I said. “Remember that pop culture was held cheaply back then. The BBC taped over priceless Doctor Who into the 1970s. And there were rumors of a 13th episode of Fawlty Towers—"
“That all happened across the pond of course, but the point stands,” Kyle said and I was swallowing annoyance when a strange thought flicked into my brain pan. “The Owls of Olivewood,” I heard myself say.
Kyle frowned. “Refresh my memory.”
“It was a cartoon I watched when I was 8 or 9, so in the mid-1990s. I don’t remember many details. Just this creepy, quiet, blue-tinted world and this scene, maybe near the end, with a bunch of owls in the trees filling the screen just…staring out at me.”
“A parliament of owls, perhaps?”
Whatever, Kyle. “It had a distinct Riki Tiki Tavi vibe.”
“Chuck Jones, 1975,” Kyle filled in, of course.
“But more intense.” Sad was the word I wanted, but I didn’t want to ruin the vibe again.
Kyle punched some keys, frowned. “Well, sports fans, my Google Fu is failing me but maybe we can jog some memories out there. Imagine this,” he said, voice dropping into a low register, aiming for portentousness. “It’s 1995, more or less, and you’re home from school, loaded up on Dr. Pepper and Pop Rocks. You’re powering through your homework so you can watch the cartoon you saw advertised in TV Guide for 5 o’clock, right before the local news. And suddenly there it was: The Owls of Olivewood, perhaps introduced with a dripping Munsters-style font on screen and some ominous music….if any of that rings a bell, you know the drill, hop on to our socials and drop us a word.”
Someone did, in fact, eventually.
We kept firing up more examples of lost television; I didn’t flag around the 45-minute mark as usual but felt a strange new energy pulsing within me. Kyle even let me talk about the cringy rape joke I swore I’d heard on a Benny Hillrerun. The recording stretched past the hour mark. Finally, Kyle signed off with his trademark poetry-slam-adjacent monologue: “Indeed, the past was a different place. Serial killers, teenaged runaways crossing an emptier, wilder country where someone could become hopelessly lost and not be expected anywhere in particular, not leashed to a portable phone slash tracking device. What have we lost in trade for our digital security blankets?”
After we signed off, after I’d saved the raw file, planning to dub in some suitable copyright-free music at the right places later, Kyle said “That was a good one.” He fumbled for the cigarettes he kept quitting. “Say…we don’t have a topic next week. Why don’t you put something together on this Owl thing. Lots of folks with spare time on Reddit. Start gathering thread and we can do it for Episode 10.”
There would be no Episode 10.
I began the hunt for “Olivewood” the way everyone did, but the internet revealed not a trace. So I tried the old humble bit on Reddit: “Hoping this hive-mind of geniuses could help me out, surely I’m not the only one that remembers a cartoon I watched on TV as a young mite, 1994 or thereabouts with this creepy midnight-blue background with owls in the trees and disturbingly quiet, if that makes sense….”
“Any luck?” Shayna asked two nights later.
“No one else remembers it. Not even vaguely. One asshole on Reddit says I’m an attention whore. Another somehow got his way to our Discord channel and kept repeating Tell Me More. Dude I told you all I know.” And a few others had posed the same sensible question – what local market did you see it in? In other words, where had I lived at the time? I looked back at my post and was shocked to see I hadn’t included that vital bit of information. Why not?
“Maybe it wasn’t owls, Bryan. Maybe it was crows or some other avian. That would throw off the search.”
“Maybe.”
That night I lay in bed, feeling odd, like I was glowing from inside, some new version of me forcing itself to the surface.
I woke up sweating at 3:18 a.m. I’d had sweaty dreams before, especially after a night at the dive, standard stuff: Trying to run with lead feet, stuck in the back of a car with no driver. But this one was fiendishly involved, down to school parking rules and the precise summer hours of the “barn pool” where our family had membership. It seemed to stretch years, with humdrum stretches where little happened besides me wandering around our suburban neighborhood, sometimes at night with friends, sometimes on my bike alone, following the bright morning sidewalk like found gold on a glowing morning.
And sometimes, riding up a certain hill, at a break between houses, I glimpsed the city skyline.
But what city?
I waited until after breakfast, then said, casually as I could. “Shayna, did I ever tell you I lived in Texas as a kid?”
“You’d be lying.”
“Well I did. A suburb of Dallas.”
“No,” Shayna replied calmly, “You grew up in Georgia, moved to Ohio, college and job here, met me, game over. Anything else is just dream infection. It will pass.”
But Shayna’s rock-bottom common sense didn’t reground me this time. The details refused to fizzle away in the light of day. Did I dare call my mother to confirm where I grew up? She would really start worrying about her little boy then.
I was definitely eight at the start of the Dallas experience because I had a birthday shortly after we moved (from where, though?) when I turned nine and only a few kids came to the new kid’s party. We played three-on-three soccer in the front yard and the team I was on won 6-4 but I was stuck playing goalie and had to chase the ball down the street twice at my own birthday party. Which meant we’d had a big yard to play in.
My mother worked in an office with an elevator and soft carpet and I had a babysitter and I went to a private school with uniforms and I got paddled in 6th grade for talking in class.