I have my sister Beth to thank for introducing me to music in the early 80s.  It started with her giving me a copy of Weird Al's first album on cassette, and then continued on for years while she endured my constant presence in her room where I'd sit Indian-style in front of her turntable, endlessly flipping through her albums and studying the artwork intensely.  Beth was eight years older than me and as far as I was concerned she knew everything there was to know about being cool.  The record covers, the artwork and design choices made by the bands, photographers, artists and the graphic designers who worked on their albums, was just as important as the music was in helping to define my sister's personality.  After my sister passed late last year my mother encouraged me to take some of her stuff, things that reminded me of her, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.  All I really wanted was her phone because it held her collection of music, and that was all I wanted since it was stuff that I know was running through her head.  On a trip back down to visit my parents this past July my mom surprised me with a stack of Beth's old records that she found in her closet.  I couldn't have taken them from my sister's house, but I'm glad my mom could because it gave me another chance to feel like I was seven years old again, sitting in my sister's room and trying to decipher her code for being cool.

This isn't the sort of thing that I typically open up about on the site, but it's an example of how visceral and personal music and all the trappings that surround it can be.  As we break new ground funneling our personal collections of albums and singles onto tiny devices and phones I think we're losing an important aspect of the music.  Album covers, specifically the sleeves on 45 singles, added another dimension to the music we loved and gave the musicians an opportunity to explore their ideas even further through art and we're limiting the size of that canvas to half of a credit card.  I've been reading Vincent Price's autobiography I Like What I Know (which is really an excuse to examine his love of art), and he mentions that his first real exposure to the artwork of the world masters was in a book that featured most of the paintings crammed down to the size of a postage stamp.  For him it was the definition of frustration, and he was only liberated when he was first able to travel abroad and see these works first hand in the museums of Eastern Europe.  Liberated is actually an understatement as he describes being devastated by the beauty and intricacy of Rembrandt's full canvases.  While I hesitate to claim that seeing the full-size album artwork will devastate the viewer to provide some special appreciation and insight into the music that an iPod screen won't afford, I do think it’s a shame how we're marginalizing the work none the less.

This is one of the reasons that I'm excited about the release of Matthew Chojnacki's new book, Put the Needle on the Record: The 1980s At 45 Revolutions Per Minute, which celebrates the 45 sleeve artwork of musicians like Kate Bush, the Smiths, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, the B-52's, Prince and more…

Chojnacki, who culled the images of the covers from his own extensive collection, has done an excellent job of chronicling the styles, artwork and design of 80s music.  The book is set up so that each cover is featured on it's own page with commentary on the art provided by Chojnacki as well as the artists, musicians and executives that worked on them.  There's some interesting anecdotes on the covers, for example, the hullabaloo surrounding the Smith's third single off of their debut album, "What Difference Does it Make"…

The band initially wanted to use a still of Terrance Stamp from the 1965 thriller The Collector, but after the actor objected they reshot the cover staging a note-perfect parody of the still in question.  I find this fascinating as the whole situation is almost a shorthand for describing the tone of a lot of the band's music, which tends to play with juxtaposition of dark lyrics beautifully sung over very pop-y hooks and melodies.  This dueling tonality is reflected in the band's response at replacing a still from a disturbing film (featuring Stamp's character Frederick standing at a door with chloroform, about to subdue a woman he's kidnapped and held captive - which closely echoes the lyrics to the song) with a similar shot that is so much more wholesome and cheeky (in which Morrissey is holding a glass of milk and looks slightly less depraved.)  Add to that the title of the song, and it almost seems as if the whole thing were planned.

Chojnacki also does a great job of pairing up covers, displaying them in two page spreads, so that you can see the similarities in style and design choices that ultimately defined the era.  Whether it's focusing on the disinterested, heavily made up (almost clownish) portraits of New Wave icons like Pat Benatar and Gary Numan, or showcasing the eerie similarities between the covers of two popular female musicians that couldn't be further apart in style (Kate Bush & Dolly Parton)…

…Chojnacki is really paying a lot of attention to the layout of the book which I find really exciting.

Speaking of that Kate Bush cover to her single Army Dreamers, this is yet another great example of how the artwork can really accentuate the music.  Whereas the album that the single is derived from has a much more general tone playing off of Bush's overall personality as a musician, the single offers the opportunity to switch gears and focus on the message of the song.  Playing off of the idea of a mother welcoming home her son who has been killed in action, the cover features Bush made up to resemble a 40's era WWII bombshell.  I think it's ingenious how John Carder Bush (Kate's brother and the graphic designer of the cover) pulls out a bit to feature the photo actually pinned to a piece of corkboard, metaphorically showcasing her as a "pinup".  Again, like the Smith's, the image is a little silly and upbeat with the inviting pink background, while the song features dreadfully depressing lyrics accompanied by up beat music.  The design was actually taken another step further with the actual vinyl record which featured a dull military drab green center sticker that plays off of the tone of the lyrics.

All in all, I'm really excited about this book and the chance to flip through a bunch of this artwork from the eighties.  Not only does it give an opportunity to relive the art and design of the era, it also helps to highlight some wonderful songs, helping to put them more in the context of how they were envisioned when they were released. I know these graphic designers and artists put a lot of thought into the covers, and Put the Needle on the Record is the perfect way to explore their work.  Having just come off of illustrating and designing the cover to a friend's debut album (The Serenaders My One and Only You), I can attest to time and effort that goes into the process…

I spend a lot of time writing about branding and marketing, and I suppose in a way I'm sort of an amateur semiotician trying to understand pop culture.  A large chunk of my interests, the toys, television shows & cartoons, books, and various related merchandise and pop culture that I grew up with has sort of hard to deconstruct in the past few years because of the resurgence in popularity of a lot of that stuff.  The re-launches of franchises, big budget movie reimagingings, new cartoons like the ThunderCats, G.I. Joe, and Transformers, the unlimited stream of new merchandise (T-Shirts, retro packaging, masterpiece and "classics" toylines), all of this stuff makes the landscape murky and hard to keep in focus.  I mean, when I have to qualify my thoughts on the Smurfs to friends when talking about the cool new book I read, illustrating how interesting I thought two-thirds of the covered history was while trying to ignore the long chapter on the recent film, I start to feel a little weird.  On the whole I really don't care much for the regurgitation of 80s era franchises we keep seeing these days, yet I also feel a little uncomfortable with the curmudgeonly, old-fart role that sort of casts me in.  "This junk doesn't hold a candle to the stuff from back in my day…"  I'm not that guy, or at least I don't want to be.

This is really just my long-winded attempt to rationalize why I find it so refreshing and comforting when the calendar gets closer and closer to Halloween.  Because I really wanted a strong concept when creating this site I've found that I've painted myself into a corner a bit when it comes to content.  Halloween is the one main exception, the time of year when I tend to stray away a little from nostalgia and I open the door to more contemporary pop culture commentary.  This past year has been a bit rough, and right now all I really want to do is jump feet first into a pool of Halloween-y goodness.  Thankfully I've been running into more and more, early, seasonal fun.  For a lot of you it might be too early for the orange and black, but I think I'm going to indulge a bit and share what I've found so far…

Traditionally the early adopter market consists mainly of the hardcore target audience for products and services.  If this holds true for holidays as well, then the target audience for Halloween is apparently women ages 15 to 60, who spend a lot of time trying to make stuff smell nice.  Well, that's my guess after watching two mall chain stores, Bath & Body works and Yankee Candle, wheeling out their Halloween displays at the beginning of August, three full months before All Hallows Eve.  I'm finding it both hilarious and comforting in a very weird way.

I've never really been a "candle guy", though I did spend an inordinate amount of time buying and burning incense in my later teen years (a time I'd like to thankfully forget.)  So needless to say I don't find myself browsing though the insane collection of scents at my local Yankee Candle very often.  At the end of July though, while walking through the mall with the wife, we saw a sign for what appeared to be a big Halloween-themed release party for their new wave of Boney Bunch candle holders.  We joked that we'd be the first couple in line that next weekend and I promptly forgot about it.  The next week we just happened to be in the mall again when I remembered and we figured it couldn't hurt to check it out.

To our surprise there were quite a few people lurking around the store that afternoon, and we'd even missed out on the official Boney Bunch party hours, so I'm guessing that these holders are pretty popular.  I have to admit that there's a certain Tim Burton-esque charm to the character designs though I found intriguing, and before I knew what was really happening I was in line with a box of tea lights and a corresponding holder.  Though we really get into the holiday, we haven't really build up a sizeable collection of holiday knickknacks, so I guess we're starting.

The collection basically consists of a series of skeleton people in a few different themes.  There's a harvest farm set (featuring a pitchfork wielding undead farmer), a romance set (with a some husband and wife skeletons, as well as some dating skeletons rowing boats and the like), and Santa Skeleton set.  The figural candle holders are cute, but there's a macabre humor running through the series that involves a lot of beheading and chainsaws that I find fun.  I couldn't imagine picking up too many of the pieces though as collecting these feels a little too close to starting a collection of Hummel or ceramic clowns.

Our other adventure featured a trip to our local Bath & Body Works since the wife was getting low on hand lotion and shower gel.  If there's one time when I act like a typical man it's when we set foot in this place, and I basically turn into a voodoo style zombie man servant that just hold her purchases and pays for them at the end.  I was already to zone out when I spotted a table full of Halloween soap and suddenly I was more excited to be in this place than my wife.  It was kind of sickening actually…

We got a small taste of the B&BW Halloween offerings this past year while stocking up on small bottles of hand sanitizer we planned to give out at the Up! Fair.  They still had a bunch of discount bottles left over from the season at the time so we bought a ton of Vampire Blood (plum) and Candy Corn scented hand sanitizers.  Since we caught the display early this year I was curious to see what other sorts of spooky soaps they carried…

Unfortunately, B&BW isn't known for their cheap prices, so I'd suggest waiting for a sale to pick up some of this stuff, but there was a lot of cool stuff worth waiting for.  In particular we liked the scents and label designs on their foaming soap dispensers, but there was a ton of different stuff that was pretty cool.  The little bottles of hand sanitizer were pretty cool too, featuring varieties like Zombie Tonic, Scary Cats, Bones, Skulls, and a trio of scents with neat glow-in-the-dark labels.  Unfortunately the scenes on these little guys are pretty hit and miss.  Not sure if it's just me, but I prefer hand sanitizer to be unscented, or in some form of citrus that just smells clean.  I tried the Zombie tonic, which is marshmallow scented, and my hands smelled like I molested a bag of cookies for the rest of the day.

So far these instances have been enough to tide me over, but I can feel the itch for Halloween browsing growing and I hope Target doesn't decide to roll out another year of "discount" Halloween.  I'm really in the mood to be blown away this season…

So I recently caught the first couple episodes of the newly relaunched ThunderCats cartoon and it got me in the mood to break out the first season of the original show on DVD and watch a bunch of episodes.  Sort of like the Transformers posts last month, I figured I'd run through a bunch of scenes and aspects that I found interesting.  Before I get to that though, I wanted to say that I'm enjoying this new series even though I think it's making some very weird choices story-wise.  For the most part I really like the changes the writers have made to the back-story, picking a relate-able age for Lion-O, ignoring the Superman origin of escaping the destruction of Thundera, and introducing some familial ties to the characters; heck, even tying in Mumm-Ra to the legend of the Eye of Thundera feels like a move in the right direction of making sense of the enormous amount of ideas presented in the original series. T here are some odd aspects to the story though, that I feel just don't work.

First, the concept of treating "technology" like magic, as if it were some mystical unknown fairytale, is just weird and goes against the logic of what technology is.  With magic, which is heavily prevalent in the world of the ThunderCats in both series, there is no real basis for why it works or exists because it's completely fictional and a product of fantasy.  There's no science or reason to it, it just is.  Technology on the other hand has its roots in reality, in the simplest of tools (levers, wheels and inclined planes), and even though a graphing calculator might be light years ahead of an abacus, it's a natural progression of the concept.  Granted the tech introduced in the show is of a more advanced and alien design than what we currently have in the world, but it's not to say it's stuff that out of the realm of possibility.  It's the science fiction aspect of the series.  So to treat technology as if it were a fairy tale, a part of fantasy, though interesting, just seems like a plot device full that's at odds with itself by the very nature of the difference between science fiction and fantasy.

The other weird plot point is that at the end of the first episode we're left with a group of ThunderCats that are more less seeking vengeance for the destruction of their kingdom and the murder of their people and king.  Don't get me wrong, I love a good vengeance/revenge story, but I think it's the wrong way to frame a story about heroes.  The Punisher, the Bride from Kill Bill, Lone Wolf and Cub; these characters aren't heroes and are beyond redemption.  It's a weird choice to frame the ThunderCats story with this sort of anger and intensity.  Not only does it possibly lead to unjustifiable actions by the "good" characters, it's also hard to keep that intensity going over the course of an extended series.  Either every story has to tie into Mumm-Ra and the revolt of the Mutants, or there's going to have to be a pretty darn good reason to stray from the path to have a stand alone story without it feeling like a waste of time.  The beauty of a lot of 80s era cartoons was that they were set up in such a way that you could go anywhere with the characters.

Well, anyway, that's how the new show's introduction came off to me.  Getting back to the original series and the point of this article though, first thing's first, let's get the naked cat out of the bag so to speak.  By that I mean…

Why were the ThunderCats freaking naked in the pilot episode!?!

I have absolutely no idea why Leonard Starr (the pilot's writer) or the guys in charge of production on this series decided it would be a good idea to introduce the ThunderCats as a race of seriously naked cat people.  Not only are the characters naked, but they don't even have any distinguishing genitalia.  They all have creepy Barbie Doll crotches and it's just weird and disturbing.  I mean I know there is a history of anthropomorphized cartoon animals that aren't wearing clothes (Porky Pig's missing pants anyone), and I understand that there are plenty of mammals in nature that just have the fur on their backs, but this goes beyond that.  Way beyond that…

I mean there's even a point where Jaga takes all the characters aside and gives them each magical clothing (and weapons) stating that "…on our planet you needed no protective clothing or special weaponry…".  My question then is why is Jaga wearing clothes from the very beginning then?  I almost get the vibe that Jaga's been traveling off-world or something, which he may very well have, but from a design standpoint it's just really wonky.  Maybe it was the writer's intent to showcase the characters getting fancy new uniforms, but then why not introduce them in some common bland tunics or something that they eventually change out of?

Honestly, it probably wouldn't seem so weird if the character design on all the ThunderCats didn't allude to the idea that their faces, chests and neither regions aren't covered in fur. Or the fact that though naked, they're all wearing boots.  It also doesn't help seeing scenes with Kit and Kat, or a naked Cheetara waking up a very young, naked Lino-O.  Maybe it's just me, but seeing naked women and adolescent young boys and girls in cartoons for kids is just wrong…

Speaking of weird decisions in the pilot episode, why did Lion-O grow to full adulthood while in the suspension capsule?

While preparing for the long journey to Third Earth the ThunderCats are ordered by Jaga to make the trip in a series of suspension capsules that will slow their aging and enable them to survive the trip.  He mentions offhand that some aging does occur, but when their ship crash lands on Third Earth Lion-O has grown to full adulthood and it's treated like an anomaly.  What's weird is that none of the other characters seem to have aged at all, including Wiley Kit and Kat who were roughly the same age as Lion-O.  Again, I have a feeling the writers and/or producers wanted the character to be like a child in a man's body who has to learn to lead the ThunderCats, but their choice to age him up with no real reason was just weird.  How hard would it have been to write a quick segment that showed his capsule being damaged somehow?  I mentioned above that one of the cool aspects to 80s era cartoons was that they were usually set up in such a way that nothing was off the table.  The guys and gals who put this show together really took that to heart though, and these sorts of decisions, to age Lion-O, etc., really point to that freedom to try anything (even if it doesn't make sense.)

I completely forgot that Wiley Kit and Kat were just as likely to shred some waves as the Autobots and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

One of the first things that Panthro creates for Wiley Kit & Kat are surf/hover boards to give them a little bit more mobility and something to do.  Growing up in Florida it was really hard to not be inundated with the surf and skate culture of the 80s, but I'm not sure how other areas of the country reacted to it.  After moving up to New Hampshire at the end of 1989 I was shocked by the lack of T&C, Billabong, and Maui surf and skate T-shirts at school, and I even ran into some kids that didn't know what surfing was.  Watching these cartoons though, it's really weird to see the surfing trend popping up so often.  It makes me wonder how many of the other series feature it?

Sometimes, life REQUIRES arm wrestling!

In Episode 15, The Time Capsule, Lion-O is getting a bit depressed and home sick for Thundera.  At the same time he doesn't remember all that much about it and Jaga appears to him and mentions that part of their ship's cargo was a Time Capsule that contained the collective knowledge of Thundera.  The ThunderCats go on a quest to seek out the capsule and Lion-O eventually finds it in a cave, though it's now apparently been claimed by a caveman that isn't going to give it up without a fight.  Actually, he won't give it up unless Lion-O beats him in the most macho of all manly contests, the arm wrestling match!  It's like watch an animated version of Over the Top, just with no estranged children in military academy, eating cigars and drinking motor oil, or big rig trucks.

The last thing I wanted to bring up today is an aspect of the series that's very close to my heart, the amazing amount of branding in the cartoon!

Not that long ago I met a guy though my day job that used to play with the Misfits back when the band was still coming together for the first time.  I have a Misfits messenger bag, and he noticed the Crimson Ghost Skull logo and we got to talking about how amazing it is that over thirty years later there are still kids picking up stuff stamped with that image.  Heck, though Jerry Only has been trying his damnedest to keep the band going, most people really only dig the original stuff when Danzig was a part of the band, and that's been over for about 25 years.  Yet still, that iconic skull has power.  If there's one thing that came out of the commercial design of the 70s and 80s, this type of powerfully iconic branding was it.  The Autobot and Decpticon symbols, the Ghostbusters logo, Pac-Man, the Atari Logo, the Nike Swoosh, and the ThunderCats logo are just a few of the hundreds of popular logos that are still around to this day.  This show really took this banding to heart and you can see it in almost every aspect of the design from the vehicles…

…to the castles…

…and even the villains. Mumm-Ra's logo, though almost as iconic as the cat's head logo, is actually the one aspect of this sort of branding in the show that was really underused.  I'm surprised, seeing as how Mumm-Ra is basically the leader of the Mutants, that they weren’t all sporting the entwined snakes on their outfits, vehicles and gear.  This is actually something addressed in the new series that I really loved.

In particular I love how the ThunderCats logo is worked into the stories of the various episodes because of the Sword of Omens.  Whenever Lion-O is in trouble he can call upon the other ThunderCats by reciting a chant ("Thunder, Thunder, Thunder, ThunderCats HOOOOOOO!") and then holding the sword aloft.  It then projects the ThunderCats logo into the sky so that any member of the team within sight of the symbol will feel the call and come running…

So not only is the logo plastered on every building, vehicle, article of clothing, etc, it's even an integral part of the narrative.  In my opinion this is hands down the most brilliant use of branding in a cartoon during the 80s.

Well, come back next week for part 2 of this article where I'll be talking a look at some of the ThunderCats characters, the crazy designs, and more.

We're just down the street from Halloween town with August almost upon us, and it's getting close the time to start thinking about this year's ghoulish costume designs.  Well, the Strange Kids Club, is starting up an Annual Halloween Costume Contest to run in conjunction with a special Samhain edition of the SKC Comix Anthology!

But the SKC needs YOUR help to make it happen.  SKC is putting the call out to dress up like your favorite monster, ghoul, creep, or superhero for a chance to win some awesome prizes!

One Grand Prize Winner will even walk away with $125 in Halloween-related merchandise including a Nail Mouth Halloween Mask sculpted by Justin Mabry (based on original artwork by David Hartman), Limited Edition Strange Kid T-Shirt illustrated by Glen Brogan, FREE copy of their Halloween Comix Anthology and more!

I've had a chance to flip through the first SKC Anthology and it was awesome, so I really excited to see what's in store for the next issue.

Anyway, head on over to the Strange Kids Club and learn more about your chance to win some awesome Halloween-y swag!

It's been a little while, but the Post Card Project is back with a new reader to highlight.  Today I'd like to point to international (Montreal, Canada) reader Sarah, who you might know as Ladyjaye in the comments here at Branded.  She's been with the site for awhile and has always been a source of great conversation!

She was cool enough to make the trek out to the Eidos, Square Enix Montreal office with the TMNT postcard I sent a while back. Now I can say that at least my penmanship has made it out to Square!  Sarah runs a fun Tumblr site called Dancin' with my Mirror that features a ton of cool geeky stuff, and if you've got a second, head on over and introduce yourself to her site.  You'll be glad you did!

As I've mentioned numerous times over the past year, there are really only three or four outlets left for find 80s animation released on DVD.  Of those companies, Millcreek has really been making strides to pick up titles that have fallen out of print or to produce low cost releases for some cartoons that have never seen the light of day on DVD.  In addition to picking up a number of titles from the now defunct BCI Eclipse (Bravestarr, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Defenders of the Universe, and Dungeons and Dragons), they've also struck up a distribution deal with Shout! Factory to release some of their catalog that was previously released or only available from their MOD program (namely C.O.P.S., and Best Of releases of Transformers and G.I. Joe.)  They also have a partnership with Cookie Jar which gives them access to a very large library of titles.

Well, a couple weeks ago they started shipping a trio of releases that I'm pretty excited about.  First up, they've released an updated version of the Littles, the Complete series in a three disc set which for the first time features all 29 episodes, the feature film (Here Come the Littles), and their one television special (Liberty & the Littles.)  Though the series have been released on DVD in the past (by Cookie Jar themselves), you could never get all the 80s era content in one package…

The best part?  This set is only $13, and can be found online as cheap as $9!  Like most Millcreek television releases, the discs come sheathed in individual paper sleeves which are housed in a snap-in section of the DVD clamshell cases, but at only three dics this is hardly an issue.  The video/audio quality of the discs is also the Millcreek norm, which is decent, but not quite as good as past releases.

Millcreek also released a 10-episode Best Of disc for those of us they don't need the full series and just want to get a taste of nostalgia on the cheap.  Basically a repackaged version of Disc 1 from the Complete series release, this set includes the episodes: Beware the Hunter, Lost City of the Littles, The Big Scare, Lights-Cameras-Littles, Spirits of the Night, The Little Winner, A Big Cure For a Little Illness, The Rats are Coming-The Rats are Coming, A Little Fairy Tale, and Prescription For Disaster.

Though it's cool that Millcreek is keeping the Littles in print on DVD, the release that I am really excited about is the Best Of the Get Along Gang!

I made a pledge to myself 10 years ago that I'd try and track down at least one episode of every cartoon I watched as a kid (and considering I grew up in the 80s, that's a tall order), so I always get floored when a series is released on DVD for the first time ever.  The Get Along Gang is truly one of the staples of Saturday Morning Cartoons from the 1980s, and it bridged the gap between action fare (like Dungeons & Dragons or Mr. T) and the more "good for you" content of PBS (like Mr. Rodgers or Sesame Street.)  Originally created for a series of greeting cards (much like another anthropomorphic set of critters, the Shirt Tales) and stationary, these characters made their first jump to the small screen on Nickelodeon back in 1984 in a single pilot episode created by the Nelvana company (which you can catch on youtube, part 1, part 2, and part 3.)  When the show was picked up for a series it was brought over to DiC Animation and then aired on CBS for three seasons consisting of a total of 13 episodes (each with two 11 minute segments.)

The series centers around 6 main characters, Monty (the moose), Dotty (the dog), Woolma (a sheep), Zipper (a cat), Bingo (a beaver), and Portia (a porcupine) who hang out in a train caboose clubhouse and have adventures around their town.  Each episode typically features a moral of good behavior, as well as a run-in with the town bully Catchum (an aligator) and his toady Leland (a lizard.)  Going back and watching some of the episodes for the first time in almost 30 years I was surprised at how well they hold up.  Sure, they're a bit hokey and stress the "goof for you" aspects of children's programming, but there was much more adventure than I was expecting/remembered.

The one thing that really bugs me about this release though is that Cookie Jar/Millcreek decided to only put out 10 of the 13 total episodes.  I'm having a hard time getting my head around the logic behind holding back three episodes.  Generally the price of production would pop up as a reason why, but when you compare this release with that of the two Littles DVDs, money really doesn't seem to be a factor.  Even if they would have included a second disc I doubt it would have inflated the price point much, I mean the difference between the Complete and Best of Littles sets are only $3 (and that represents 19 additional episodes and 2 feature films.)  Though they might release a second disc in the future, I have a feeling we're never going to see it.  I'm not sure if there was an issue with the master tapes on these cartoons, or if there is some other reason why they chose not to release these three episodes.  Personally I really think they dropped the ball on this release.

On a positive note, I have copies of the Littles DVDs to give away this week.  To enter for a chance to win a copy of either the Complete Littles DVD set (1st place winner) or the Best Of disc (2nd place winner), head on over to the Branded in the 80s Facebook page (like it, if you haven't) and leave a comment/response on the discussion board under the Littles DVD Contest thread with the name of your favorite Littles character. I'll be picking a winner at random on Monday, August 8th at 2:00pm est.  Remember, these are region 1 DVDs, so if you're an international reader take note. Good luck!