Two Eddies ruled the `80s: Eddie Van Halen and Eddie Murphy. Both of them started the decade as heroes, but by the end, something changed. Was it the Eddies, or was it us?

Eddie Murphy has a new movie out, so let's focus on him.

Murphy first got my attention as a guest on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. He started his set by asking all of the ladies in the audience to check out his butt, then did a routine about how black guys and white guys have different butts. He even pointed out that Johnny Carson had no butt! Never before had I seen a comedian so irreverent on the Tonight Show, and I loved it!

I started watching Saturday Night Live again. "Little Richard Simmons," "James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub," "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood," the classic skits just seemed to ooze from Murphy's pores. Forget Akroyd, Belushi or Chase, Eddie Murphy was the guy who made Saturday Night Live the powerhouse it once was.

The skits were only the beginning. "If you paid to see me up here with a Buckwheat wig on, you're a stupid motherfucker. Stay home and watch that shit for free," he told an audience on his first comedy album. His LP's were to my generation what Richard Pryor and George Carlin had been to the `70s generation. Murphy's cassettes were the hippest contraband going, stuff you copied from friends and listened to with your door shut so your mom wouldn't confiscate it. We were in tears laughing at the concept of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton discovering homosexuality, or Mr. T threatening to "bunch up my butt cheeks and rip your dick off."

Hollywood came calling, and Murphy had the best streak of comedy movies ever. 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop (I&II and III) and my favorite, Trading Places ("Once you've had a man with no legs you'll never go back!"). Despite being black, Eddie Murphy defined the term "white hot." I bought a magazine dedicated to him, which is still around here somewhere, that claimed he was a millionaire by the time he was 21 -- all for clowning around. The second I read that, he became one of my idols.

With Coming to America his acting evolved and he turned out yet another great movie. Then came Harlem Nights, made with his hero Richard Pryor, which everyone but me seemed to like. I rented his third concert film, Raw, and the only part that was really memorable was his impersonations of Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, which were spot on.

And what came after that? Dr. Doolittle? The Nutty Professor? Honey I Shrunk the Kids (no, wait, that was Rick Moranis)? Pluto Nash? He went from playing a wiseguy, street-smart kid to Jerry Lewis-type roles the old Eddie Murphy would never have considered.

In the middle of it all came the story that he had been arrested for picking up a transsexual. He claimed he had just been giving him/her a lift. Yeah. Did they turn him on by saying they loved The Distinguished Gentleman? We had to start wondering why Eddie had been inspired to write so much material about gays.

In the meantime his stand-up audience had been seized by new voices. Sam Kinnison and Andrew "Dice" Clay were the new favorites, although to me they just sounded like a lot of cussing without Murphy's wit. But I was only one man, and the rest of the world moved on to these new guys, and they might as well have because Eddie Murphy wasn't cranking out comedy records anymore.

Then, long after I thought his career dead, he surprised me by setting critics' tongues a-wagging with his performance in Dream Girls (I got it to see Beyonce Knowles). He got nominated for a Oscar, and it looked like he was a shoo-in. But no, he didn't get it; reportedly his reasoning was that it was because he had released another (weak, corny, low-grade) comedy around the same time, so it kept him from being considered a serious actor. He left the Oscars early in a huff.

Now he's got a new movie where he plays a human-shaped spaceship that falls in love with a earthling: Meet Dave. Does he read these scripts before signing a contract, or does he take whatever lands in the mailbox? I think I'll take a couple of hours one evening and crank something out, send it to him and see what happens.

He once defined white hot, but now Eddie Murphy defines "things were better then."