I've been having a lot of fun with these League assignments, and this week's topic is no exception.  Brian over at Cool & Collected posed the question, what 80s kids/teen flick would you like to see get a present day sequel with the same cast now grown up.  This one required a bit more in the pondering department if for no other reasons than so many of the kid/teen flicks I grew up loving either had sequels (Karate Kid, Lost Boys, and Back to the Future came to mind) or had stories that were tied up very nicely and didn't really need to be delved back into (E.T., The Goonies, or Flight of the Navigator.)  Though I wanted to go with something like The Monster Squad, I don't really want to see the cast grown up as much as I'd like to see the concept of kids vs. monsters explored again, so that didn't seem to be the way to go.  I also thought about Teen Wolf, as it's a film series that was far from perfect and could be improved upon, it just wouldn't be the same without Michael J. Fox who probably isn't up to the make-up effects the flick would require.  Let's be honest though, seeing Fox and Jason Bateman team up for a double dose of van surfing would be pretty badass, right?  At the end of the day, I love so many of the flicks from the 80s for what they are, that dusting them off and continuing the story just doesn't tend to appeal to me.  Most recent ventures into that territory have really left me wanting (with the exceptions of The Muppets and Tron: Legacy), so I was stumped.

After wracking my brain for a couple of days I finally landed on something that I think could really be interesting though.  There are a handful of obscure flicks that I used to watch a lot on HBO back in the day that I was never fully gung ho about, but were still decent or interesting enough to keep my attention (flicks like the Meatballs sequels or Teen Witch.)  Of these, there was one film that always sort of weirded me out and felt a bit like it was shooting for something much deeper than I could appreciate at the time.  That movie is The Peanut Butter Solution.

It's a film that I've begun to appreciate much more as an adult, and one that I think is just weird and insane enough that it would be really easy to dip back into that world and create something truly magical.  For those who haven't seen it, TPBS is a Canadian flick from 1986 about a boy named Michael who wanders into an abandoned mansion and ends up seeing something so frightening that he loses all of his hair.

Ashamed of his sudden baldness and having to wear some truly terrible wigs, Michael is confronted by the ghosts of a deceased homeless couple that he had met and helped out once.  The ghosts tell Michael about the Peanut Butter Solution (in the vein of Freckle Juice, except it actually works), and by the next morning Michael's hair growth is out of control.  He's then kidnapped by a mad aertist who uses Michael’s continuously-growing hair to make designer paintbrushes that can paint pictures so real you can walk into them (as well as a really creepy hair jacket.)  Oh, and Michael's friend uses the Peanut Butter Solution to grow hair in a very nsfw kind of place.  You still with me?

The worst kind of rattail is snaking out of those pants!

Anyway, the flick is surreal and over the top, though the production value is sadly lacking as it feels a lot like a made-for-TV movie.  The world and the concepts are great though and I can fully imagine folks like Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillermo Del Toro, or Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze diving into this material and making something truly insane and delightful with the original cast included.  This is the kind of thing that I think would make the best 20-30-year-gap sequel, one where it's not important what decade it is, or that the actors have to try and recapture any magic that might be long gone.  For me, this would be a real treat.

Anyway, if you've never seen the flick, you can check out the trailer here.  Unfortunately this is a pretty obscure movie and it's never seen a North American DVD release.  There are some bootlegs floating around that are pretty decent watchable ports of the old VHS tapes.  It's also up in its entirety on youtube (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, and Part 10.)

Some of the other League members are also chiming in with their picks:

Christopher Tupa, Tupa's Treasures, talks about Labyrinth

TL, Flashlights are Something to Eat, talks about the Breakfast Club

Reis, The Dork Horde, talks about The Last Starfighter

Iok, That Figures, talks about a different sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark

Michael, Adventureblog!, talks about Legend

Dex, AEIOU and sometimes Why, also talks about Labyrinth

As a kid I completely missed out on the whole M.U.S.C.L.E. men craze as I was concentrating all my playtime and allowance money on Garbage Pail Kids stickers and G.I. Joe & Transformers figures.  It's not that I wasn't aware of them, or how cool the little rubber guys looked packaged in their clear trashcans and bright blue blister cards; it's just that I was spread a bit thin collecting-wise.  "A kid can’t have everything…", is a statement I heard my mom say a lot at the time.  So I satiated my young mini-figure cravings with Transformers Decoys, Smurfs, figural erasers, and the old Blackstar demon or Trobit.

Years later, after the majority of my toy collecting cravings have more or less subsided, I find that the one thing that I can't bring myself to stop collecting are little mini-figures.  Whether it's Hasbro’s mini Heroes lines (aka the Star Wars, Transformers, and G.I. Joe chub figures), vending machine toys (like Little Homies), or Lego Minifigs, I just can't help myself if I find something particularly cool.  This past June I stumbled across the October Toys OMFG! (Outlandish Mini Figure Guys) project on Kickstarter and I was immediately hooked on the idea.  A bunch of artists and sculptors in the October Toys forum came together to hash out some ideas for a line of mini-figures riffing off of the nostalgia for old toy lines like Battle Beasts, M.U.S.C.L.E.s, and Monster In My Pocket.  Enough folks backed the project for it to be successfully funded, which was cool, but then began the wait for the figures to actually be produced...

I finally received my two initial sets from the Kickstarter project last month, and I couldn't be happier with the outcome!

There are five figures in this first series, Multiskull, King Castor, The Phantom Shithouse, Crawdad Kid, and Stroll, all of which have some excellent sculpting and detail work.  Again, though I never had any M.U.S.C.L.E.s growing up, I've seen enough of them to know that they weren't rendered in this much detail.  The main set comes in a "flesh" colored PVC, but there was also a Kickstarter exclusive black set that I picked up as well.  The wife called dibs on King Castor and Stroll, but she doesn't have any of the nostalgia or fondness for the pink fleshy figures, so black seemed the way to go.

Part of the Kickstarter campaign was the ability to help fund at a high level to secure a thousand minifigs in your very own color-way.  This was a great idea to get other small toy companies and stores in on the fun with the ability to sell exclusive color variants of the figures as an incentive for investing in the project.  There were four groups that chose this option resulting in a few exclusive colors including a mustard yellow (University of Muscle), a lime green (Little Rubber Guys), a true blue (Rotofugi), and a lighter "Glyos" blue (Onell Design).  There was also a sixth exclusive color-way/artist-proof, hot pink, that was split between the artists and sculptors that worked on the project.

Before Christmas, while waiting for the base and Kickstarter sets to be shipped, I noticed that the Onell Design light blue color-way was available for purchase.  Since I was champing at the bit to get my hands on these, I went ahead and splurged on this variant set.  Besides, I thought it would be fun to give a couple of the figures to my nephews for the holiday.  The Onell variants were my first taste of OMFG!, and I had a sneaking suspicion that even after I received the pink and black that it wouldn't be my last.

Ripping open the light blue set I realized that the variant color-ways that the various companies chose didn't seem to have too much thought behind them at first blush.  Granted, no one color would easily represent the figures, so this is hardly a complaint, just an observation.  Onell chose the light blue as it's the first color they used when creating their own toys a while back, but for this set it really doesn't fit with the design of the actual figures.  King Castor looks the best, as it has a cold icy feel that works decently with stones that make up the figure, and an argument can be made for Stroll being a "yeti" variation, but it's a little off.  The flesh being an homage to M.U.S.C.L.E.s makes sense, but again it doesn't really fit any of the figures.  The black exclusives, though cool, are almost too dark to really fully appreciate the detailed sculpting, and I began to wonder why each variant color was chosen.

After receiving the two additional sets from October Toys, it occurred to me that there might be some thought behind these choices after all.  The logo design of the series, the Rolling Stones-esque open mouth and tongue design is comprised of five colors (green teeth, pink tongue, yellow lettering, blue lips, and black outlines and fill in the mouth.)  Could it be that the colors were chosen to reflect the overall scheme of the packaging?  What with the two blues (the lips being offset by the blue of the background) and the two pinks (the tongue and the OMFG banner below the title), all of these colors were present and accounted for.  Could be a coincidence, but I thought it was interesting to point out.

Though I thought I would stop at the three sets, I soon found that I was really loving all the color choices (whether they made design sense or not), and I ended up picking up the green set, as well as the yellow and artist proof exclusive hot pink of the Multiskull figure (which is my favorite of the bunch.)  I even snagged a custom painted version of Multiskull that the artist (Charles Marsh) put up for sale a couple of weeks ago.  I had really wanted a version of the figure in white or grey, the traditional skull colors, and managed to score the NightFright custom which fills this gap in my collection quite nicely.  He even glows in the dark!

All in all I really love these figures and I can't even being to put into words would cool it's been to watch this project from design to fruition.  Seeing an independent artistic community come together for a project like this is rare, and seeing it come out so well done is even rarer.  October Toys and their forum are doing the initial prep work on a second series, and submissions for figures ideas are still open until the 29th of this month.  I have a few designs submitted (Boombox, Miss Pucker, and Killscreen), but there are all sorts of cool figures in the forum thread that would make an awesome second series for the OMFG! line.  Can't wait to see how far the community will take this thing!

Coming back off of a hiatus always feels a little herky-jerky, what with trying to dig up some inspiration and cleaning off the cobwebs of my practically non-existent HTML skills.  This year was a little different in that over the last few months I've been bombarded with all sorts of cool things to write about.  One thing that I've been meaning to write about for awhile is the new book by Kirk Demarais, Mail Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads!  For those who don't know, Kirk runs the Secret Fun Spot (as well as its weblog the Secret fun Blog) and is a freelance artist and designer who has been doing some amazing colored pencil portraits of some very familiar families of late.  He's a regular contributor to the Gallery 88 shows and an all around swell guy.  Though I've never gotten the chance to meet him, he's had a pretty big impact on Branded from the get-go, so when I saw that he was having his second book published I was pretty excited.

Mail Order Mysteries is the logical progression of nostalgic blogs, talking a niche topic and really digging into all the nitty gritty (sometimes literally into the Grit of gritty.)  Do you remember all those tempting ads in the backs of comics and magazines like Famous Monsters?  You know, the ones for the $2 Topstone rubber monster masks, the life-size Frankenstein's Monster, or the footlocker full of 100 toy soldiers for only $1.25.  Well Kirk sure does, and he's spent years tracking all of this stuff down, finding out what all this stuff was really like and cataloging his findings in this beautifully written and designed tome.

The book is divided up into 8 sections including superhero related stuff, war junk, monster merchandise, monkey making schemes, mail-order miscellanea, secret stuff, jokes & gags, and all kinds of oddities.  From the facts behind the fabled X-Ray Spex to what that $7 Polaris Nuclear Sub was really like, every single page of this volume is filled with the highs and lows of the mail-order products of the 50s through to the 80s.  Kirk lovingly photographed over a hundred pieces (most from his own collection), as well as including scans of the original advertisements so you can judge for yourself whether or not that allowance was or would have been well spent.  The icing on the cake is Kirk's keen eye for design, both modern and retro, which can be felt all over the book, from the yellowing, newsprint color-scheme of the pages, to the hidden glow-in-the-dark embellishments on the covers and spine.

For those of us who never got a chance to be lucky enough to order our own cardboard Polaris Sub (or to feel swindled by said sub), to join one of those intoxicating selling for prizes clubs like the Olympic Sales Club, or for those who just want to know how those darn X-Ray Spex work, Mail Order Mysteries is the perfect book.  You can see some more preview pages at Kirk's site.

So last week I participated in the inaugural week of "The League", a themed writing assignment that is the brainchild of Brian over at Cool & Collected.  It was really fun to tackle a topic, and then to see what all the other participants had to say about the subject.  Surprisingly, there was very little cross-over in terms of content, much like the Countdown to Halloween participants, which I thought was pretty darn awesome.  Lots of different perspectives weighing in on some shared pop culture.  The second question/assignment is now live, which asks the question, what one piece of Hollywood memorabilia would you acquire if budget and space were not an issue.

After sitting back to ponder the question for a bit, there were a couple of ideas swimming around in my head that were kind of hard to choose between.  On the one hand I've always had an obsession with helmets, hats and masks in pop culture, and I'd love to have the same sort of helmet-dispensing contraption that was in the M.A.S.K. team headquarters in Boulder Hill, except instead of just the M.A.S.K. helmets it would have a varied assortment of headgear that I love.  I'm sure there'd be helmets and masks from Airwolf, Star Wars (a Stormtrooper and Leia's Boushh disguise in particular), that Charlie Sheen movie The Wraith, General Kael's mask/helmet from Willow, Captain Power's helmet, and probably even that really weird one from Videodrome (I did say it was and obsession.)  Thinking about it though, it seemed to skirt around the framework of the question with way too many items, not just one.

My other thought seems to be more in line with the parameters of the question, which would be a full-size replica of an AT-ST Scout Walker from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  The idea is that this chicken walker would make for a perfect backyard "tree fort".  Something I always wanted as a kid but never managed to really make work was some sort of clubhouse/fort for my friends and I to hang out in and plan our daily neighborhood gallivanting.  I'm sure it stems from loving flicks like The Monster Squad and the Goonies (I mean Mikey's house might as well have been a clubhouse.)  There were a couple of attempts, but nothing ever got past the elaborate illustrations in our school notebooks.

It also reminds me of the Return of the Jedi Jungle Gym playset advertisement I shared a couple years ago.  Now that I'm looking at it I'm wondering if that was the intention of the designers that worked on it, as it kind of resembles an AT-ST in a way…

In doing a little bit of research on the internets, I see that there are some enterprising fathers out there that have had this same idea and have tried to give their children the ultimate tree forts.  Bravo!

(Attribution on the above picture was very hard to nail down, apologies to the original poster.)

Makes me wonder what ever became of some of the full-scale sets that were built for the ROTJ film.  Did anyone get to take those home I wonder?  Anyway, a man can dream (about 40-odd-foot-tall, two-legged, mechanical walkers equipted with dual watergun cannons, and a flip-top hatch!)

Here are some of the other League members talking about their dream acquisitions:

Christopher Tupa, Tupa's Treasures, talks about the One-Eyed Willie's Pirate Ship

Nat, Nat - Not Nate - Dot Net, talks about the Thunder Road from The Explorers

TL, Flashlights are Something to Eat, talks about the Trolley from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood

Gina, MercanStyle, talks about Ms.-Piggy-on-a-bike from The Great Muppet Caper

Matt, Matt-Can-Draw, talks about the Supreme Being's map from Time Bandits

Dex, AEIOU and Sometimes Why, talks about Flynn's lightcycle 2.0

Reis, The Lair of the Dork Horde, talks about his 5 favorite pop culture rides

Though I haven't recorded an episode of the Branded podcast in awhile, I was lucky enough to be asked back to guest star on another episode of the Nerd Lunch podcast this week.  I'm not sure, but I think I might be on the road to eventually becoming the Charo of the nerdy/pop culture podcasting set.  Crossing my fingers.

Anyway, back to the Nerd Lunch episode, this week's theme was all about introducing the guys to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, in particular the film Spirited Away. T hough Jeeg, CT, and Paxton have all experienced some level of anime in the past, none of them have really become fans of the genre perse, so I thought Studio Ghibli might be the way to ease them back in and could very well get them into watching some more Japanese animation.  Did it work?  Well you'll have to listen to the discussion to see.  You can find episode 24 of the Nerd Lunch Podcast on iTunes, or you can download the episode directly!

Recently Brian over at Cool and Collected posed the idea that a bunch of us like-minded writers, toy-fanatics, bloggers, and collectors should come together once a week or so and all write separate articles with a singular topic.  This way we can all get some inspiration to write and to be inspired by the collective's output.  A League of Extraordinary Bloggers as Brian put it.  I can't promise I'll be hitting this up every week, but I've had a lot of fun doing this sort of thing in the past with helping to run and contributing to the Countdown to Halloween, and Zartan Zaturday was a blast a while back too.

The first assignment has been sent out and it concerns a go-to, Saturday afternoon comfort movie from our childhood that we watched a bunch on TV or VHS.  I took in a metric ton of movies on Saturday afternoons, both on cable and on our local Fox affiliate back in the 80s, and at first I wanted to pick something really obscure that might be a hidden gem for those who missed it back in the day.  Something like The Million Dollar Mystery with Tom Bosley, Eddie Deezen, and Rick Overton, or The Heist with Pierce Brosnan and Tom Skerritt.  I also considered talking about Near Dark as it's one of my favorite films as both a kid and an adult.  But no matter how many times I find myself browsing my nostalgia DVD shelf, I always come back to the same film.  It was something I watched countless times on HBO, and was one of four films (including Rad, The Monster Squad and Transformers the Movie) that I religiously rented from video stores every weekend.  Most importantly, it's a film that I never tire of and one that I've never discussed on Branded before. That film is Red Dawn.

I'm sure there were a lot of folks back in the day that dismissed the flick as just another one of those Brat Pack films filled with young stunt-casting, but as an impressionable 8 year-old who was really into G.I. Joe and spent the better part of his childhood daydreaming about defending my backyard from terrorists and megalomaniacal warmongers, Red Dawn is the perfect escapist fantasy.  Set in the then modern day, the film plays off of the palatable fear of a World War III due to all of the nuclear weapons grandstanding during the waning days of the cold war.  Communism was still the number one threat to our borders (it seemed), and the idea of a war whose main front was being fought on our own domestic soil was pretty darn scary.  In fact, the image of the Communist paratroopers all of a sudden floating out of the sky still kind of haunts me to this day.

For those who haven't seen it, the film centers on a group of teenaged kids who manage to survive a paratrooper assault on their high school and town.  Led by brothers Jed (a young Patrick Swayze) and Matt (Charlie Sheen), this rag tag group starts off as 6 friends (including C. Thomas Howell, Darren Dalton, Brad Savage and Doug Toby), but by the middle of the film it grows to include a couple girls (played by Jennifer Grey and Lea Thompson) and a grizzled veteran fighter pilot played austerely by Powers Boothe.  This band of young patriots brand themselves the Wolverines (their high school mascot), and they proceed to strategically attack the communists, engaging in guerilla warfare tactics in an effort to save townsfolk from being executed and to try and make a dent in their forces in the hopes that the U.S. military will eventually come to their aid.

Again, the dizzying high I got from this flick as a kid was equal parts awe and horror as it acted as a sort of wish-fulfillment for my playtime daydreams.  It sounds a little weird to say that I sat around hoping we'd be attacked by Commies so that I could "play" G.I. Joe for real, but I'd be willing to bet that in the climate I grew up in a lot of kids probably had similar thoughts.  Another aspect that I loved about this flick was the dead-serious tone that director John Milius brought to the production.  He managed a similar feat with the first Conan film, both of which had scripts that could easily have gone way too over the top to stay believable and engaging.  Don't get me wrong, I love films like Commando and Rocky IV as much as the next red-blooded American, but even in the day it was clear how much they came across as campy, patriotic propaganda.  Red Dawn is grounded in the story of the eight kids, their bonds of friendship and loyalty, and it's heart-wrenching when some of them get killed in action.

For a crazy conceptual 80s war flick, Red Dawn still holds up pretty darn well.  Even crazier, it manages to provide an opportunity for C. Thomas Howell to play a geek turned into a sawed-off-shotgun-toting badass with absolutely no irony whatsoever.  That is not a feat to be dismissed lightly.  Also, as everything from the 80s is apparently rebootable these days, there is also a new Red Dawn film destined to hopefully frighten and inspire a whole new generation almost 30 years after the original.  I'm pretty curious to see if the writers/producers/director can nail the same serious tone of the original or if it'll just deflate into yet another crappy remake that has barely a 10th of the heart of the original.  Time and an invasion from some strange evil nation can only tell…

You can find some of the other participants of the League below:

TL, Flashlights are Something to Eat, talks about Poison Ivy

Christopher Tupa, Tupa's Treasures, talks about The Goonies

Fiji Mermaid, Sideshow Cinema, talks about Fright Night

Jeff, Siftin', talks about Superman II

Justin, General Joes, talks about the 70s Live Action Spiderman

Paxton, Cavalcade of Awesome, talks about Back to the Future and the Star Wars Trilogy

Stacey, Pendragon's Post, talks about Temple of Doom

One aspect of the American pop culture experience that I find endlessly intriguing is how certain portions of it so completely subvert class, race, religion, and creed.  It's hard these days to pin down someone's race or religious beliefs based solely on the music they listen to, or the video games they play. We’re becoming more and more eclectic as a nation, but the foundations of this cultural oneness has been steadily built over the last century with some unlikely materials.  If I had to point to one thing that ties most Americans together it would have to involve food as it's something we all need.  Through the lens of pop culture, it's the brands that stand out, the merchandising, packaging, and promotion that we are attracted to and hold dear.  One product over all else really shines through this lens, and is not only an important part of our shared pop culture experience, but also a very important part of one's daily breakfast, Cereal!  It's sugary, sweet, fruity, colorful, corny, wheaty, full of rice, oats, and the occasional marshmallow marbits.  It provides fiber, iron, whole grains, and most importantly for those seeking to break through the walls of the time-space continuum, high levels of riboflavin.  Through over a century of ad campaigns, commercials, and cool prizes we've all been influenced by breakfast cereal, and now writers Marty Gitlin & Topher Ellis have taken a shot at condensing this shared snap, crackle, and pop culture experience into The Great American Cereal Book.

Published by Abrams (for a February 1st release), this beautiful volume chronicles America's favorite breakfast food with a semi-chronological listing of ready-to-eat cereals from seven of the largest manufacturers of the last century including General Mills, Kellogg's, Nabisco, Nestle, Post, the Quaker Oats Company, and Ralston.  Each product listed features some vital statistics including a description, when it was introduced and/or discontinued, the various popular slogans, characters and endorsements associated with it, as well as various tidbits and trivia.  The book is also heavily illustrated with beautiful color photos of many of the more popular and eclectic varieties.  Breaking up the timeline of sweet crunchy nostalgia are a bevy of lists, essays and mascot profiles including a glimpse into the development of characters such as Cap'n Crunch and the Trix rabbit.

What really struck me when I first cracked the cover on this massive tome was the high level of thought and care put into the presentation.  The design of the book is absolutely gorgeous and has a perfect tongue-in-cheek humor imbedded into every page.  The book resembles a box of cereal, from the hilariously placed nutritional chart and ingredients list on the spine, to the rainbow variety of cereals adorning the inside front and back covers.  This book was envisioned and designed with those that are truly a kid at heart.  I also love that the photos lean more towards the kid's section of the cereal aisle, including so many of the sadly extinct varieties like Smurf-Berry Crunch, Pac-Man, Batman, C3PO's, and the dearly missed Croonchy Stars (the Sweddish Chef's Muppet-themed cereal from the late 80s.)

Abrams really has their finger on the pulse of nostalgia when it comes to their line of books aimed at pop culture fans, whether it's their inventive layout and design of their "vault" editions (like the World of the Smurfs and the Transformers Vault), or their stunning art books (like Wacky Packages, More Wacky Packages, and the upcoming Garbage Pail Kids book.)  The Great American Cereal Book is a fine addition to their lineup and would fit nicely on anyone's shelf or coffee table who grew up glued to the television on Saturday mornings watching cartoons and slurping up a huge bowl of Cap'n Crunch or Fruit Loops.

Just about done with the yearly hiatus, but in the meantime, I was a guest on the The Nerd Lunch podcast again, this time to geek out about the more lunch-y side of nerdom.  The show features NL alums CT and Jeeg, as well as Paxton from Cavalcade of Awesome, and once again a great time was had by all!

We spend the episode discussing the fizzy, syrupy goodness that is soda, a pop culture touchstone that pretty much anyone can relate to.  Whether you call it soda, pop, coke, or whatever, chances are you’ve imbibed a bit of one carbonated elixir or another, and you probably also have a favorite.  Listen to us talk about our favorites, least favorites, and bunch of general soda nerdery.  You can also find their show on iTunes.