On March 13, 1987 — also known as my fifteenth birthday — MTV decided change up its Friday Night Party Zone formula by having legendary horror host John Zacherle, the Cool Ghoul himself, cause Downtown Julie Brown to flee the set and make may for the FRIDAY NIGHT HORROR ZONE.

That’s some first rate acting, Julie. No wonder you landed a role in Sharknado 5.

(Full disclosure: I have carried an irrational grudge towards Downtown Julie Brown since the time I took the last commuter train out of Boston after catching a Dead Milkmen show at the Paradise in the late 1980s, and I was stuck behind a trio of drunk white girls who spent the entire trip to Mishawum Station loudly trying to top each other’s impressions of her.)

Regrettably, the rest of the hour-long block fails to live up to that promising start. The fault wasn’t Zacherle’s, who gamely indulged in the candy-cornball bits and punny patter he was brought on to do. The problem was in the playlist which, apart from Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” and Ozzy’s “Bark at the Moon” was same slow pitch MOR stuff one could’ve gotten by flipping the channel to VH-1.

Expecting too much from MTV has been a fool’s errand since the station’s inception, but 1987 was also a banner year for the kind of music that attracted black-garbed humanities majors with notebooks full of poetry and severe Vitamin D deficiencies. It would’ve been nice for Siouxsie or the Sisters or the Phantasmagoria Era Damned to make a token presence, but instead we got Stevie Ray Vaughn and Los Lobos and the fucking Motels.

Oh, and Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters theme, but that was to “spooky music video” blocks what “Achy Breaky Heart” would be to 1993 wedding receptions.

Last time I checked, there was a copy of the show up on YouTube, though all the original commercials present in my archived version trimmed out. That’s a damn shame, because they went a long way towards offsetting the disappointing video selections and give an fascinating glimpse of the State of Things circa Spring 1987.

Besides such timepieces as spots for the Spellman Center (the only treatment ward for AIDS in New York at the time), the Blake Edwards bomb Blind Date, and Michael J. Fox flogging Diet Pepsi, there’s an early commercial for the Nintendo Entertainment System in there…

…in which a group of youths in totalitarian breakdancing wear are assaulted by a Skynet subnode formed from the console’s original “Black Box” lineup of games.

There’s also a sport for the then-recently released Nightmare on Elm Street 3 featuring testimonials by audience members whose extreme levels of 1987-ness are more terrifying than anything in the actual movie.

These dudes are my favorite, and not because they resembled the group I sat with in the cafeteria during 9th Grade.

Recommended listening: Yeah, it’s so obvious that it borders on a cop-out, but the classics never go out of style.