"Who's Behind The Door?" by Zebra

1983 / #61

Rate Your Music score: 3.63 out of 5!

Forgot about this one?

This lost hit by this New Orleans band got a few airings on MTV in my day. And the video dredges up a memorable battle we had with our TV set.

Fast-forward to 1:39 in the above video. For no apparent reason, some kids appear on a computer monitor - and they're green. When I saw this video when I was growing up, I thought our TV was acting up again - because our TV used to do this very thing.

For several years, images on our TV screen - including people - would frequently turn green. If you'd stomp your foot, it might return to normal. Sometimes I'd be in another room when my parents were watching TV. I knew the TV was turning green when I heard feet stomping in the living room.

This set also cut off the edges of the picture. I thought U2 was just called 2, because the title and artist tags that appeared on one of their videos on MTV were cut off.

We invested much of our hard-earned money into trying to get the TV fixed. It seems like we lost much of 1981 because the TV was in the shop so much. But nothing fixed it. The TV would still occasionally turn green until we got rid of it.

If I remember correctly, we sold this set to a guy my dad knew at work for something like a dollar. Later, I was told that the TV worked beautifully after that guy purchased it from us. By the time we sold it, we had also gotten a small set for the den, because nobody could agree on what to watch. That's Incredible! often lost out to college basketball.

The TV that we sold was replaced by a new set that worked great for years. But it was reduced to shambles when a power outage somehow shorted out most of our appliances. The electric company refused to accept any responsibility whatsoever, and we only got something like $10 from our insurer. The TV was probably the biggest loss. That was right after I moved out when I was in college, so I didn't have standing to handle the situation my way. If it was up to me, a minimum of one complimentary booger would have been imminent. An insulting booger would have been even better!

I now recall that having the extra set for the den didn't solve our problems completely. People who ended up watching their shows in the den often left garbage laying around and were always stinking up the place. It got to be as bad as a public restroom.

Who's behind the door? In our household in much of the 1980s, whoever was behind the door of the den must have been a slob!