Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The entire series can be found on YouTube!

This week, Johnny screws up, making the type of mistake that Ryan never would have!

Episode 3.7 “Hate On Your Dial”

(Dir by Allan Eastman, originally aired on November 6th, 1989)

This week’s cursed antique is an old car radio from 1954.  Smear it with the blood of someone who has just died and the car will transport you back to …. 1954.  That seems like an oddly specific curse and a kind of pointless one.  What if the car radio ends up in the possession of someone who doesn’t care about 1954?

(And, to make clear, Jack does specifically state that the curse involves going back to 1954.)

The car radio does end up in the possession of Ray Pierce (Michael Rhoades), a racist auto mechanic who uses the car to go back to 1954 so that he can hang out with his father in Mississippi.  His father (Martin Doyle) is a member of the Klan, along with his friend, Joe (played, in an early performance, by Henry Czerny).  The 1954 scenes are filmed in black-and-white.  When the show travels back 1954, the first thing we see is an “I Like Ike” billboard, featuring Dwight Eisenhower and a Confederate flag.  Obviously, someone in the show’s Canadian writer’s room didn’t know who supported segregation in 50s and who didn’t.  There was a political party wrapping itself in the Confederate flag in 1950s Mississippi but it wasn’t the Republicans and their candidate wasn’t Dwight Eisenhower.

This episode features Johnny making another one of his trademark mistakes, this time selling the cursed radio to Ray’s “slow” brother, Archie (played by Cronenberg regular Robert A. Silverman).  Only after Johnny sells it does he realize it was probably cursed.  Micki yells at him for not checking the manifest before selling it.  Then Jack yells at him too.  Jack remains angry with him for nearly the entire episode.  It’s understandable that Jack would be upset but then again, maybe they shouldn’t have left inexperienced Johnny alone in the shop in the first place.  Maybe they shouldn’t even be selling antiques at all.  That would definitely solve the problem.

Anyway, this episode featured some of the worst Southern accents that I’ve ever heard and it also featured a cursed objects that didn’t make much sense.  Johnny learned an important lesson about being careful about selling things and I guess that’s a good thing.  That said, Ryan never would have made that mistake!