So I know it seems like I'm continuously going back to this same Fall 1984 issue of Muppet magazine this month, but in my defense there is a lot of neat stuff packed between those covers.  At first I had intended to just post tidbits from that issue while I was on vacation and out of the state, but there was so much neat content I couldn't help but stretch it out a bit for fear of there being too much radness for one post!  Seriously…

This is the last tidbit though, I swear.  So we all know that Breakdancing really broke through to the mainstream in 1984 what with the release of Beat Street and Breakin', not to mention classic episodes of sitcoms like Gimme a Break (where I first leaned of the phenomena back in the day.)  So, as a bastion of pop culture news for kids, it comes as no surprise that Muppet magazine was there at ground zero to cover it for the children of America.  This article features a couple of formative breaking crews, The Dynamic Breakers and their all-female spin-off the Dynamic Dolls.  The DB's are themselves the more acrobatic members of a larger crew called the Dynamic Rockers, who were certainly a formative part of the hip hop scene at the outset.  The Breakers (Airborn, Duce, Kano, Flip and Spider), saw an opportunity to market their crew and ended up going on a media blitz in 1984 including talk and variety show appearances (even teaching Penny Marshall to do a headspin), and eventually ending up in this photoshoot/interview with the one and only Gonzo from the Muppets…

I can't even summon the words for how cool it is to see Gonzo in his own Dynamic branded track pants.  Anyway, there's plenty of advice for aspiring breakers in this piece including how to create your own outfit without going broke, building your crew around a variety of styles, and even a lexicon to Freshen up your lingo…

I'll be the first to admit that I was a class-A, uncoordinated dork as a kid, and I have some very distinct memories of watching the Breakdance episode of Gimmie a Break or catching a bit of Breakin' on HBO and then rushing out to the dining room where there was some space and trying my best to do a kick or backspin and then falling flat on my face.  I think all I ever managed to eek out was a sad moonwalk or two, but I suppose at least I gave it a shot.  Thank god none of that is on video…

Seeing as I shared the Weird Al/Michael Jackson congratulatory advertisement earlier in the week, I thought it would be fun to follow that up with this Al Yankovic fluff piece (and not just because he's interviewed by Fozzie Bear) from the Fall 1984 issue of Muppet Magazine.  There's not really that much to dig into as far as revelations, or any trivia that isn't pretty common knowledge, but it is fun to see the duo in similar Hawaiian shirts…

I found it rather interesting that these articles from Muppet are attributed to both a muppet character and to the actual author (in this case Katy Dobbs.)  I mean if you're going to try and keep the fantasy of the Muppets alive by having them "interview" the celebrities, why then go so far as to list the actual writers with an "as told by" credit?  I get crediting for the work, but I think it could be handled on the contents page or something.  Just think it's a little weird.  Anyway, I thought it was neat that Yankovic also brought up the fact that he always asks for permission when doing a parody, and to connect it to last week, Fozzie's favorite song is "Eat It" by Michael Jackson…

Also included in the 4-page spread was the lyrics to "Eat It" and "I Love Rocky Road", which is a nice touch.  Not sure if the lyrics were in the liner notes of Yankovic's albums back then, but as a kid I would have totally loved being able to see them transcribed like that…

So I finally had the opportunity to catch up with the insane sci-fi musical extravaganza that is Captain EO, and it was only 25 years after it's initial release!  I grew up in and around Orlando, FL during the 80s and I took my fair share of trips "to the World", but my family only ever visited Epcot once which was closer to the time the park initially opened in the early half of the decade.  Since EO debuted in 1986, I completely missed it, and truthfully it's always bummed me out.  I was a pretty big fan of Michael Jackson at the time, in particular of his short film videos like Thriller and (dare I say it) Smooth Criminal/Moonwalker (even though I didn't care for Jackson at that point I still dug the videos.)  I've written before about how Thriller had a huge impact on my musical tastes as a kid, and how there seemed to be this three-year magical period where Jackson dominated my musical world.  Captain EO is the one aspect of this period that I never got a chance to experience.  Add to this the fact that George Lucas produced it with effects by ILM, and it becomes a missing link in the 80s era Lucasfilm cannon as well.  The 3-D film was pulled from the parks in the 90s, and was pretty much buried in the Disney Vault for what I thought would be eternity.  After Jackson's death a few years ago, the House of Mouse decided to return EO to the parks for a limited engagement…

…so you can imagine that when my wife and I recently traveled back down to Disney World, Epcot and Captain EO were at the top of my "to-do" list.

Outside of the facts that the flick starred Jackson, that it was in the sci-fi genre, and was in 3-D, I went into the screening completely fresh and spoiler free hoping to get a chance to experience what it was like to see it 25 years ago.  I can honestly say that it was well worth the wait even if it was horribly dated and quite frankly kind-of all over the place…

I'm not sure what I was expecting exactly, but it was not what we got.  That said, I think this short film has some truly amazing stuff in it, and everything else borders on the insane so it's anything but boring.  You can get the story synopsis on the wiki page (and you can even watch it on youtube, part 1 and part 2), so I won't bore you with that, but I will say that ILM was completely on their game when doing the set design and production.  Between the sail-barge influenced design of EO's ship to the utterly creepy spider-like make-up and costuming of Anjelica Houston's Supreme Leader character, everything in the film looks like something out of the Star Wars universe without feeling like it's been done before.  What really sold the film for me was how the Disney Imagineers worked in not only the 3-D, but also air effects and seat movement in the theater synchronized with the action onscreen.  So when Michael Jackson's Captain karate kicks towards the audience in one of the dance numbers, it feels like the entire theater is knocked back.  I've always felt the passion in MJ's dance-Ninjitsu, but I'd never actually felt it before!

I've been hearing rumors that EO's engagement at the parks it pretty close to its end, so if you get a chance to hit up Epcot soon, I highly suggest taking in one of the shows. 

Coincidentally, while flipping through some back issues of Billboard magazine recently I also came across a 1984 issue that was filled to the brim with congratulatory hoopla over the success of Jackson's Thriller.  This sort of trade advertisement publicity love sort of took me aback at first.  I mean I know that a lot of people made a lot of money off of the success of Thriller, but to take out ad space to personally thank Michael Jackson for the album is a little weird.  Speaking of weird, Weird Al Yankovic and Scotti Brother's Records were one of the groups who participated in this MJ love fest.  It's actually kind of touching and yet another example of how nice Al is when it comes to his song parodies (though he doesn't have to he always asks permission from the artists as a gesture of respect.)  Considering Eat It was such a big hit for Weird Al it is pretty neat to see an advertisement like this…

On the other hand you have Alfonzo Ribeiro whose management seems to be making an opportunity to try and sell their client's first single, "Dance Baby", with their ad…

Ribeiro was a kid, so the blatant attempt to capitalize on the festivities seems more like a ploy from his label or manager, but it's still a little icky anyway.  Regardless, I do have to admit that Ribeiro was a pretty damn good stand-in for the King of Pop when it came to 80s sitcoms (like his time spent on Silver Spoons) and pop culture fads (like his instructional breakdancing books.)  He's also arguably the first real child-star acolyte of Jackson (being followed closely by Emmanuel Lewis, Corey Feldman and Macaulay Culkin.)

For a truthful heartfelt thanks I have to say that the Weird Al ad beats them all, but design and subject-wise, these next two (above and below) are my favorites.  If there's one thing that I really can't get enough of, it's the imagery from the Thriller video-film so I was glad to see Vestron and John Landis both step up and give MJ some creepy werewolf and zombie love…

Most of the rest of the thankful advertisements were kind of boring or weird (like Paul McCartney's which featured him and Jackson in the sad clown make-up from their duet video), but there were a couple other's that caught my eye for being sort of fugly.  The below MTV ad is kind of neat (what with working Jackson into the MTV logo and all), but there is a hideous amount of negative space for no good reason.  The worst offender though, is Warner Bothers and their "clapping" gloved hand.  Um, is Jackson supposed to be congratulating himself in the artwork (a word I use loosely here)?  Couldn't they have at least hired the photographer and tiger (from the album cover) again for a second photoshoot?

     

So last week I discovered an 80s kid's flick that I’d never heard of before (The Quest), and I decided to try and document the process of finding some new nostalgia so to speak.  It's rare that I stumble upon kids flicks that I haven't seen from my youth as I was a voracious movie watcher with access to huge video stores and HBO.  I obviously haven't seen every film from 1979-1989, but even the ones I've missed I'm typically aware of them (for example D.A.R.Y.L. or Mac and Me.)  The Quest was completely under my radar though, and as I loved Henry Thomas in both E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and Cloak & Dagger, I couldn't wait to catch up with this obscure flick.

Unfortunately the film isn't available on DVD, but there are a couple of copies floating around on Youtube, so this past weekend I sat down and took it in.  Before I dig into the flick, there are a couple things I'd like to mention.  First, for those interested in watching this movie who don't want anything spoiled (I know I didn't), then you might want to skip this review until you've gotten a chance to see the flick.  One of my goals with watching this flick was to come at it completely fresh with the exception of the image on the VHS cover (which led me to the film in the first place) so that I could do my best to recreate what it would have been like watching the flick for the first time as a kid.  But I do want to talk about the various plot points in the film, so you've been warned.

Second, I wanted to bring up the confusion over the title to this flick.  It was originally titled Frog Dreaming for its 1986 Australian theatrical release, but when it made it's way to Britain and America it was re-titled The Go-Kids and The Quest respectively.  I haven't done a ton of research on the reasoning behind the change, though I can infer it was because the original title is potentially a little too metaphorical for kids.  Similarly, the original one-sheet poster was a rather tame waist-up painting of Henry Thomas' character Cody with little adornment.  This was also changed for the international releases.  I've already shared the American artwork, which features Cody, battle-ready complete with shotgun, underwater camera and a giant sea monster in the background.  Awesome right?  Well the British poster is similarly awesome, but it takes the imagery in an entirely different direction that I think also had a drastic effect on the re-titling of the film to The Go-Kids…

This poster is a weird amalgamation of The Goonies, Conan, Star Wars, and National Lampoon's Vacation (itself a parody of Boris Vallejo's barbarian artwork done by Boris himself) theatrical posters complete with raised light saber, clingy girls, and skeletons.  Watching the film I did get a heavy Goonies vibe, so this is sort of a no-brainer, but I do have to say that adding the light saber was stretching it a bit (though it is a reference to a scene in the film.)  Anyway, here’s a couple of the other posters to illustrate my point…

    

As for the film itself, I will say that I loved it.  It's right up there with other childhood adventure flicks like The Goonies, The Monster Squad, Flight of the Navigator and The Explorers, though it has very little of the pop and polish of any of those flicks.  The flick is sort of low key and a slow burn, but it has all the important ingredients that make it as cool as the other flicks mentioned.  So first things first, it didn't disappoint.

The flick was written by Everett DeRoche and directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, a name that might be familiar with 80s kids for his flick BMX Bandits, or to horror fans for his Ozsploitation flick Dead-End Drive-In.  I have seen BMX Bandits, though it's been 25 years or so, so I need to reacquaint myself with it.

  

The first thing I noticed while watching the film was that Trenchard-Smith was layering in the foreshadowing from the opening frames.  The opening titles are flicking across the screen while the camera is underwater in a murky lake which sets an ominous and slightly creepy tone.  From here it pulls out of the water and centers on various frogs around this watering hole lake.  The frogs switch to large lizards, which eventually give way to our opening set piece with involves a slightly drunk man lazily fishing on the lake.  Something is going on, the wind is picking up, the fisherman gets a bite on his line and bubbles start rising out of the middle of the lake.  Something big is in that water…

By the end of the sequence we get a glimpse at something rising out of the water in a very Loch Ness sort of fashion, but then before it can lift up completely it's back into the murky depths…

  

Next we're introduced to Henry Thomas as Cody, who is for all intents and purposes the idealized version of who I wanted to be as a kid.  There will always be a part of me that wishes I was as clever as Data, as courageous as Mikey, or as flippant and "cool" as Mouth from The Goonies, but I was always a little more in the realm of Chunk (though not quite as much as a spaz.)  I always saw the better version of myself as being cool, quiet, in control and smart enough to build all sorts of gizmos and machines; a sort of young MacGuyver, but totally willing to carry weapons larger than penknives.  Cody is that kid.  Between his jean jacket, camo vest, fingerless gloves, and his penchant for welding and contraption building he has a lot of the "cool kid" bases covered.  Add to this the fact that he's an orphan growing up in the Australian Outback with a disdain for authority and a flare for daredevil antics and you have one of the cooler 80s kid heroes ever on screen.  Sure, I might be playing him up a bit much, but again, I identified with the character heavily, so I can't really help it.  Thomas's Cody is the logical extension of his Elliott from E.T. and Davey from Cloak & Dagger, and The Quest is surely the third in his trilogy of kid's adventure films.

As I mentioned, Cody is a tinkerer supreme, and the next sequence in the film involves him putting the finishing touches on a retractable attachment to his BMX bike that will allow him to ride smoothly on railroad tracks…

  

This is also a pretty cool scene as it sets up Cody's role in the town as a bad boy daredevil.  He's planning on riding the rails from the town to school in under three minutes, but considering it's over three miles away, that's kind of fast on a bike.  On his way to the tracks people from all over see him on his way and know exactly what he's about to take on and a crowd starts to follow like a bunch of dogs following a fire engine.  This sequence also sets up his relationship with a local girl, Wendy, who obviously has a crush on him, which is one aspect of this flick that tends to differ from other similar 80s kid's flicks.  Typically there is no romance for the main kid characters (with the exception of flicks like The Wizard or SpaceCamp), and even when there is it's usually regulated to the more teenaged characters like The Karate Kid's Daniel or Bran & Andi from The Goonies.

 

Anyway, after a near miss and last second bail-out, Cody proves himself by making it to the school in under three minutes.  Of course the local sheriff gets wind of the stunt and ends up giving our hero some grief.  To celebrate Cody and Wendy (with her little sister Jane in tow) decide to hike into the woods for a picnic.  Being a born adventurer Cody leads them a bit deeper into the bush than expected and they end up at Devil's Knob and the lake known as Donkegin Hole (from the opening scene in the flick.)  Though he's never been to this lake, Cody does know the guy from the opening of the film as a dentist from Sydney that camps out at the watering hole during the summer.  While searching for the dentist, they group split up and before they know it, the two girls find themselves stranded on a raft in the middle of the lake.  Of course the bubbles and wind start up again as well.  Cody comes to the rescue by jumping off of a five story cliff into the lake so that he can pull the girls to shore.  This is sort of a fun set piece in the flick that again displays the careless gusto of Cody…

  

Back on shore they finally discover the dentist, and well, lets just say that's one dead dentist…

Cody soon discovers the legend of Donkegin Hole, which is thought to have a Bunyip (or large rat-like swamp creature) in it.  Starting to obsess over the whole thing, Cody takes a two-day trip alone out to the Aboriginal country to try and track down any information he can get on Donkegin and bunyips.  He's pointed to a mystic named Charlie Pride, who he encounters one night on a foggy dock.  Pride gives Cody a test to stand up to a demon at the end of the dock, a test that will reveal whether he's a boy or a man.  Of course he isn't afraid, and he walks right up to the apparition and discovers that it's nothing more than a scarecrow with a florescent light behind it.  Though it's not really a pivotal scene, this is where the "light saber" on the poster artwork comes from.  In a fun 80s era reference Cody picks up the light and pretends it's a light saber.  Looking back at the characters Henry Thomas portrayed in the 80s, this type of real-life kid play is a reoccurring motif.  Again, it's also something you don't always see in 80s kid's flicks either.

  

This is also part of a weird thread in the film that involves a bit more mysticism.  One of the really cool aspects of this flick is how real to life it feels.  Because there isn't a loud pop rock soundtrack and because everything plays out so slowly it feels very real.  So when Cody encounters Charlie Pride it goes into another place tonally.  Luckily though, Pride disappears and leaves Cody only with the experience of the scarecrow meet-up.  This only strengthens his resolve to solve the mystery of the Donkegin bunyip though, and when he gets back home from his research journey he devises a plan to try and snare the bunyip.  Of course this involves the construction of a homemade cannon, like any sane kid-plan would.  Cody baits a shark hook with a leg of lamb and then waits by the lake for the bunyip to surface, which it does, so he can shoot it with the cannon, which he also does.  Unfortunately it's not enough and the bunyip re-submerges much like the previous times it's shown up.  Plan A failed, but like any good mini-Macguyver Cody has a plan B in mind as well which involves a makeshift scuba helmet, a spear gun (mistakenly painted as a shotgun on the American poster), and a waterproof camera.  This time Cody is going to get a picture of this creature!

  

Again, it's this devil-may-care sense of adventure that really draws me into the film, and the fact that the main character has to devise all sorts of ways to accomplish his insane feats just cements it as a cool flick.  Take the opening sequences of The Explorers movie where the boys are building the spacecraft, or when Rudy is pulling together all the needed weapons in The Monster Squad for examples of what I'm trying to get across.  It's just pure wish-fulfillment.

Long story short, Cody, with the help of Wendy on the air pump contraption, dives into the lake hell bent on finding the Donkegin bunyip.  He never resurfaces though, which sends Wendy crying back into town alerting everyone that Cody is dead.  Or is he?

  

Later that night Cody's guardian and the sheriff decide to try and drain the lake to find the body, while Wendy takes one last look around Cody’s workshop trying to come to terms with his passing.  What she finds though is that Cody had figured out what the bunyip actually is, and there's a chance that he might still be alive.  She leads the town folk back up to the lake, which has been half drained by this point, and thus begins a mad rush to try and find out if Cody is still alive somewhere under the water.  It's at this point that we get the full reveal of the bunyip creature and it's not at all what the viewer expects!

In reality the creature is an old piece of mining equipment called a Donkey Engine.  It's basically an huge excavation crane that has had air trapped under it causing it to life to release some of the pressure from time to time.  Cody managed to find his way into the air pocket underwater, and as the "creature" lift’s its head out of the water he finally manages to escape to freedom.

All in all this was a really interesting flick that manages to pull together so many of the things that I loved when I was a kid.  If I'd seen this back in the day I probably would have been head over heels for it.  The only thing that doesn't sit well with me is the weird mystical subplot with Charlie Pride.  He reappears one more time at the end of the film.  Cody, after surviving the whole ordeal, makes his way alone back to Donkegin Hole to survey the area.  On a separate cliff, Pride appears, though this time he's covered in tribal garb and made up to look like a Kurdaitcha (aboriginal boogeyman).  Pride proceeds to sweep his arms about making all sorts of junk (including the Donkey Engine) to magically crawl back into the leftover water.  The film ends with Cody realizing there is magic involved, which totally negates what the rest of the film was building up through the whole running time.  I can understand if Trenchard-Smith and DeRoche wanted to keep from stripping all of the magic from the film, but to blatantly throw this sort of mystical endcap onto the film really does it a disservice.

Here's to hoping this flick eventually makes it onto DVD.  I'm also crossing my fingers that I can run across another hidden gem of a flick like this in the future…

One of my favorite pastimes since creating this site is seeking out old magazines from the 80s looking for hidden gems from the decade that I think are worth talking about.  Be it old advertisements for forgotten food like the Frankenstein's monster-influenced, chili-stuffed hot dogs (Frank'n Stuffs), or insane ads for Back to the Future-themed Power Wheel DeLoreans, there's always something fun to uncover.  Recently while flipping through some old issues of Billboard magazine I stumbled upon an advertisement for a kid's movie that I'd never heard of before.  Now I'm not the end-all be-all encyclopedia of everything 80s, but I did experience my fair share of what the decade had to offer kids, in particular film-wise.  With the exception of a handful of made-for-TV flicks here and there, I think I've seen most of the kid’s flicks from the decade.  Or I thought I had, until I saw this awesome advertisement for The Quest…

Why did I never stumble across this VHS cover while combing though the various video rental joints of my youth and teenage years?  The flick star's E.T. and Cloak & Dagger's Henry Thomas as an orphan living in the Outback with relatives after his parents pass.  Emboldened by the local legends of a lake monster named Donkegin, Thomas gears up and goes on the hunt for the creature.  Right now that's about all I know about this flick (well, that and that The Quest is the American title for this Aussie flick which was originally known as Frog Dreaming.)  I've found this flick in various forms on Youtube and I'm super excited to watch it asap.

I've never really done this on the site before, but I thought it would be fun to try and share the process I go through while looking for content to write about.  In this instance, I've found a badass advertisement for an unseen flick from the 80s, and I've tracked down a copy to watch.  I wanted to share this portion of the excitement, which is mostly the unknown and potential for finding another awesome kid's flick from my youth.  Will the movie live up to the potential and hype of this ad, or will it be an utter let down?  Some of you have probably already seen this flick and know that answer.  But I'm about to find out, and hopefully I'll be able to share my thoughts next week after watching The Quest.

I mean come on, it's Elliott with a shotgun hunting the down-under equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster!  How can this not be awesome?

Since I'm so enthralled with the pop culture of my youth, it can get kind of dicey when navigating today's modern boom of 80s and 90s nostalgia with any sort of cost-conscious mindset.  10 years ago, when I first started reaching back into my childhood, there weren't many options as far satiating my need for 80s stuff.  Either I hit up eBay and tried to buy back some of my memories, or I could scour the internet looking for tiny image files of cartoon screen captures or poorly recorded mp3s of sitcom theme songs.  It's partly because of this that I started Branded in the 80s.  If I was going to drop 15 bucks on a sticker-themed magazine from 1985, I wanted to make sure it was readily available for others as well.

Over the past decade the options for nostalgia addicts has exploded like an atom bomb.  Actually, more like an Adam Bomb.  Released by Topps back in 2003, The All New Garbage Pail Kids sticker cards were one of the first big product lines cashing in on the fondness for the 80s.  Like the re-launch of the Masters of the Universe line the previous year, these GPKs featured new artwork and concepts (though yes, some were taken from the original 16th series that never saw print back in the day) and provided more than just fresh stickers to procure, it provided fans a second chance to experience the heady feeling of procuring this stuff.  I've written about this before, but half of the fondness we have for this pop culture stuff was in the experience of discovering it.  Finding it, buying it, and collecting it.  It's not just the artwork on the stickers, it's the wax wrappers and gum they were packaged in.  The shared cultural experience of chewing hard stale sticks of gum, of walking into a gas station or pharmacy and finding your first packs by the register; it's the memories of begging your parents for money to buy them and then the idle time spent day-dreaming about the future where you'd spend all your money as an adult on Garbage Pail Kids and junk like it.

When I first walked into my local gas station back in 2003 and I saw a full, fresh box of the new GPK stickers I had to do a double take.  I had no idea these were coming out, and I couldn't believe they were sitting there on the counter.  I actually got giddy as I scooped up the entire box and had to sit and wait while the cashier scanned each individual pack.  I was finally getting a chance to be that "adult" that I day-dreamed about becoming as a kid.  In the grand scheme of things, this isn't all that important, but at the same time, these experiences don't come all that often so it's best to relish them when given the opportunity.

Again, fast forward a few years and the opportunity to buy 80s era nostalgic pop culture junk has exploded, and these days you really have to be picky where you plop down your 30 bucks to try and relive your childhood.  I'm definitely not complaining about the glut of stuff that seems marketed directly to me, but I've also kind of become numb to the new breed of 80s branded incarnations that surround us on a daily basis.  Do I really need that box of Smurf Cereal just because one side of the box has a passing resemblance to the Smurfberry cereal of my youth?  Do I really need that snap-back billed ball cap that looks like an extreme close-up of Kermit the Frog's face?  How about that ironic T-shirt with the cast of Sesame Street that says "Raised on the Street"?  Monster Cereal or He-Man branded Hot Wheels?  Back to the Future Mini Mates?  Hyper-realistic Beetlejuice action figures?  G.I. Joe Resolute DVDs?  Probably not.  But there are some things that catch my eye that I can't pass up, and 9 times out of 10 it has to do with the packaging and presentation of the product.  Case in point, and going back to Topps and the Garbage Pail Kids, there's these new GPK magnet and candy sets…

While out at my local Toys 'R Us the other day I spotted these on a kiosk at the front of the store.  John Pound's Acne Amy artwork is super iconic to me because it was a card that I saw a lot when I first got into GPKs back in the 80s.  Though I entered around the time the 3rd series was on store shelves, there were rack packs (holding the equivalent of three packs of cards, two 3rd series and one 2nd series) on the shelves that seemed to always have an Acne Amy (or Ghastly Ashley) on top viewable through the clear cellophane.  This new set of magnet cards is available in 4 different packages ($4 each), with either Ghastly Ashley, Potty Scotty, Beastly Boyd, or Adam Bomb on the front.  I'm kind of surprised the designers didn't go with Dead Ted or Evil Eddie, but they're all still iconic images that immediately evoke the GPK branding, specifically images that would relate to the adult collector.  The packaging is even cut I such a way that it resembles one of the original die-cut stickers peeled off of the backing.  As soon as I saw them I knew I wasn't leaving the store without one of each package.

I thought it was interesting that I recently read that Michael Eisner had procured Topps, and looking at projects like these magnet cards, I can kind of see the sort of thing he was doing with Disney back in the 90s.  Can't say for sure he was involved obviously, but love him or hate him, he did revitalize Disney's branding.  Back to these magnet cards, I thought it was interesting that nostalgia was the ploy used to get the prospective buyer to snag a bag of these.  Of the 16 cards in the set, only four are from the original vintage sets, the same four that are on the packages.  In a smart sorting decision, each pack comes with one of these vintage magnets (matching the packaging.)  So this was a nice way of satiating the nostalgia bug with keeping up the collectability of the set to keep you buying more.  Out of four packages I am still missing three of the new designs for instance. 

On a final note, if you pick any of these up, don't bother unwrapping and eating the included gummy candy.  Much like the hard sticks of dried out gum that came with the original sticker cards, these body part-shaped gummies are just about inedible.  I guess it's almost better that way.

Did you know that Nickelodeon, based on fan outcry, was planning to bring back a chunk of their early 90s original programming back to the network?  Starting Monday night TeenNick will begin airing a block called "The 90s Were All That", which will feature episodes of Doug, All That, Kenan and Kel, and Clarissa Explains It All.  They're also launching a new Facebook page that'll let viewers vote on 90s era programming for possible inclusion in the block (hoping to see Pete & Pete, Rocko's Modern Life, Nick Arcade, and Double Dare.)  If it wasn't already evident, I tend to find nostalgia fascinating, and now that we're breaking into a new decade it seems like the kids who grew up in the 90s are starting to get the same pangs to revisit the wistful days of their childhoods that I was suffering from back in 2001.  I've already noticed a bunch of 90s era ephemera and branding popping up on websites and in stores, most notably with the initial crop of DVD sets of cartoons and teen shows from the era.  Through Amazon's MOD DVD program we've already seen a bunch Nickelodeon shows like Doug, Rugrats, and Ahhhhh! Real Monsters, but just recently Shout! Factory announced they were going to start distributing these along with some new to DVD content like my personal favorite Hey Dude.

I was recently interviewed by Jessica Goldstein of The Washington Post about why there's so much interest in these 20 year old Nickelodeon series, as well as why those shows in particular tend to hold up so well.  You can read the article here, or click on the image below.

Personally, one of the reasons that I think Nickelodeon shows were so cool, especially back in the early 90s when the channel started producing a ton of original content for the first time, is that the network had a very interesting viewpoint dating back to its inception in the late 70s.  First, most likely in an effort to save money when it first launched, Nickelodeon ignored the typical American programming standards and sought to distribute mainly international programming (mainly from Canada, but also from France, Japan, the U.K and other countries) that had a vastly different and less hindered take on children's programming. Coming off of this broad worldly influence and bolstered by the ideal to provide shows that felt like they were made for kids, by kids, the network concentrated on creating content that felt like nothing was off the table.  The shows catered to the idea that anything was possible, which is a viewpoint that most adults lose along the way, but it's something that kids never forget.

I'm really curious to see where this fan initiated change in programming will lead, as it's a step away from the older network standards of relying on outdated ratings structures that don't represent the audience's viewing habits like they did 40 years ago.  These days people want their content on their own terms (DVR, DVD, streaming, etc.) and it's kind of cool to see Nickelodeon going outside the comfort zone to see what their audience really wants to watch…

Over the past couple of weeks I've been sharing some fun stuff from the pages of the obscure Scholastic publication Maniac Magazine.  This week I thought I'd go ahead and give an overview of what this periodical was like.  If I had to pin it down I'd say that Maniac was the high school variation of magazines like Hot Dog and Dynamite, centering a bit more on music and the MTV-influenced pop culture of the 80s…

Who was the magazine aimed at specifically?  Well, take a gander at this page from the 1st issue to get an idea of who the publishers deemed a Maniac...

Sigh, if only the writers had a little bit more foresight this list would have been slightly different.  Mr. Rogers is indeed a maniac in my book, and Eddie Murphy?   Well, lets just say that back in 1984 when this was published, no one would have seen the Post-Beverly-Hill-Copacalyptic career path of the once Golden Child comedian.  Even so, I think it's kind of interesting how the guys behind the magazine were trying to point teens towards some cool folks that might be beyond their radar (with a mention thrown towards Abbott & Costello, and in a later bit towards Monty Python, Rocky Horror, and Chuck Berry.)

The magazine was overseen by R. L. Stine, who was apparently one of the lead creative guys at Scholastic back in the day…

Maniac was basically a teen-i-fied amalgamation between Saturday Night live, National Lampoon & MAD magazines, as well as stuff like Topps Wacky Packages.  In fact you can really get a feel for their influence in the various product parodies peppered throughout each issue.  My favorite is the ad for Coco-Birds.  There's just something so deadpan about the model in that first photo that it reminds me of the nonsensical humor of shows like Home Movies or Dr. Katz…

  

   

There were also TV and film spoofs in the tradition of Cracked and MAD magazine.   The below Splash parody was done by the awesome Sam Vivano and R. L. Stine.  Vivano's Eugene Levy drawings are so spot on...

  

   

There were also interviews, like the below piece with Molly Ringwald…

   

…and articles about stuff that’s really important to teens, like hair make-overs.  In this case, I'm voting for the before pictures personally...

  

Each issue also had a couple pages of gag classified ads, a space for a Dear Abby like column, some strip comics, stickers, and even some continuing teen fiction.  I've managed to track down five issues (out of six I know that exist)…

  

  

I'm not sure how many teens would get into a magazine like this today seeing as how kids seems to grow up so fast these days (jesus, did I just type that?!?), but I'd like to think that there's still a place for in the world for a magazine like Maniac.  I'm going to close this out with another set of caricatures by the wonderful Sam Vivano…

Getting a chance to look at all these old book club flyers reminded me that I have a stack of some of the more obscure Scholastic branded magazines from the 80s called Maniac.  I plan on scanning the best of those issues for next week, but today I have a really cool advertising parody from the back of issue five called the Crabbage Patch Teenagers!

There are metric tons of parodies of the Cabbage Patch Kids phenomena from the 80s, Garbage Pail Kids being my favorite, but the above ad is kind of cool because it was one of the earliest that I've been able to track down.  In the timeline of insanity we have the CPK craze really kicking into high gear around the Christmas season of 1983, then sometime in early 1985 John Pound painted Mark Newgarden's CPK parody concept called a Garbage Pail Kid for the 1985 Topps Wacky Packages re-launch (though it never made it into the final set), next John Pound, Mark Newgarden, Tom Bunk and Art Speigleman launched Topps full-on Garbage Pail Kids parody stickers in June of '85, and last but not least, Mad magazine premiered its Cabbage Patch Kids parody in their December 1985 issue (consequently I couldn't find any mention of CPK in Cracked through the end of 1986.)

So the above Crabbage Patch Teenagers is one of the earliest parodies, sliding in right behind the initial doll insanity.  Though I think I can safely say that this ad wasn't an inspiration for the Garbage Pail Kids, it's none-the-less a GPK precursor that looks a whole heck of a lot like the artwork John Pound would be producing just months later.  Especially when you look at the painting he did for the Wacky Packages piece, which bears little resemblance doll-wise to what he ended up doing in the 1st GPK series set, this Maniac ad really is the 1st time the public saw something resembling a Garbage Pail Kid.

I don't know,  I find this parody fascinating…

This post was supposed to consider and defend why I choose to more or less stick to covering 80s era stuff here at Branded.  Sure, 80s is in the title, but the concept of being branded in the 80s is more about defining the time period of when I grew up (which had a big part in shaping my adult outlook.)  It's not like I didn't live through other eras of pop culture, a lot of which I like (I'm looking at you early 90s era skit comedy cartoons.)  I do however enjoy the general climate of the 80s more so than the 90s, though when it comes to decades and pop culture it's never as clear cut as the numbers make it seem.  1987-89 feel like a completely different decade than say 82-86, and 1980 and 81 might as well be tacked on to the 70s.  Hell just looking at how I dressed in 83 (ringer T-shirt with an iron-on, shorts with stripes down the sides, knee-high socks and Roos on my feet) versus 1987 (T&C Surf T-shirt, loud neon green and pink shorts with a tiki pattern, ankle socks and Airwalk skate shoes) there was a world of difference.  It might sound similar at first glance, but it really does look and feel different.  And the 90s, don't even get me started on that.

So even though we're crossing over into a new decade and the 90s are diminishing from sight in the metaphorical rear-view mirror, I'm still not ready to start thinking about that era yet.  Again, this post was supposed to be an example of why.  While flipping through some late 80s and early 90s issues of Boy's Life I stumbled upon some Levis advertisements that seemed to epitomize the early half of that decade, illustrating a mind-numbing proclivity for what we'll deem The Extreme.   Anyone who was collecting comics at the time will no doubt remember an almost uniform shift in the tone of artwork which inflated what were once "normal" body types to gargantuan proportions.  Remember when Scott Summers, aka Cyclops of the X-Men, was referred to as Slim by his teammates and friends?   Well after Walt Simonson's tenure on X-Factor was up, all bets were off and Scott got pumped.  The same happened to the Punisher (if ever a character didn't need to look like a Schwarzenegger clone), and practically every other character in both the Marvel and DC Universes, not to mention most of the independent super hero books from companies like Valiant, Malibu, or Image.

Stuff wasn't cool unless it was pumped, in your face, and most importantly, Extreme.  Our tennis shoes were pumped (literally), pop music had to be hard or edgy to be considered cool, and advertising went through a period of sharp angles, neon, and mixed incongruent fonts that made everything seem loud and obnoxious.

So when I stumbled upon the below ad for Levis (circa 1990) I thought I had the kernel for a 90s era Extreme rant…

I mean Ho-ly crap!  This ad has some off-the-chart air brushing, insane fish-eye "camera angle" perspectives, an insane sense of movement, and fiercer than fierce facial expressions!  The only things missing from this ad are a few more fonts and neon pink.  Just looking at it makes me feel like four body builders are surrounding me and screaming in unison that I need to buy some Levis, like right NOW!  This is in-your-face advertising taken to the proverbial extreme.  So lets step back a second and take a look at what I'd consider your run of the mill bad 90s era ad design…

See what I mean about the neon and the six million fonts?  Also there are weird clashes between curved simplistic landscapes, sharp wavy lines, dot patterns, and way too many overlapping and slanted pictures.  Looking at this thing makes me think that all this loot is about to fall off the magazine page.  So when I saw the above karate-inspired jeans ad, it was like taking this second ad and turning up the volume to eleven.

I was already to start typing up a critique of 90s design philosophy when I realized that there were more examples of this 1990 Levis ad campaign…

 

For a second I was awestruck, but the more I examined these insane images, the more and more I was being sucked into their aesthetic.  In some ways I think these pieces are so over the top that they've come back around to brilliant.   They function as a sign of the times (in terms of tone and attitude), while simultaneously lampooning that very attitude and tone.  They're incredibly intricate and realistic in their rendering while also being insanely over-exaggerated cartoon-y caricatures.  These pieces are like the visual representation of irony, and I think that's amazing.

My favorite in the series cranks this up to another level by ditching the extreme sports and lifestyle elements and wrapping this boy's-jean-ad-campaign around a mad scientist theme!

What in the hell do jeans have to do with crazy kids building robots?   I love it.

I've become so won-over by this artist and these ads that I feel like I've completely lost that original idea for a rant on 90s design.  In mid-draft I've gone from complaining to loving 90s extreme ad design.  Not only that, but after stumbling upon a couple more ads from 1991 (which I believe have to be the work of the same artist or production studio), I almost want to create a whole section of Branded dedicated to examples of awesome extreme 90s advertising.  I think I've managed to regain enough of my composure to brush off that idea, but I will share the other ads that I found. 

The next example is an ad for Mead "No! Rules" branded Trapper Keepers from 1991…

Pitting kids, sports, and really pissed off and violent animals against eash other is crazy.  I totally missed out on these binders back in the day as I think at this point I was just entering high school and I'd adopted a no-bookbag, no-organized folders mentality only carrying around the bare essentials to classes.  I kind of wish I was still into Trapper Keepers at that time though, because I'm sure I would have had some of these.

The last example of this unknown artist's work I found is from a 1991 Donruss baseball cards ad…

I would love to find out who did all these ads, and if it is indeed the work on one artist as I believe. 

Overall though, I guess that old adage is true.  If you just stop and walk in someone else's shoes (or stare at a bunch of ads from a specific era in time), you'll develop an appreciation for that journey.  I still hate mixed and messy fonts, not to mention extreme tonality for its own sake though…

I know it's a little late for Christmas missives, but I was away from Branded during the holidays and I had totally intended to share this rad 1980 advertisement for the Schwinn Phantom Scrambler…

This came out of an issue of Boy's Life which I've heard tell also featured an even rad-er image of Santa on a Tron light cycle.  Now that I want to see!  Anyway, a belated Merry BMX-Mas everyone…

I'm a bit late in getting to this before Christmas, but I wanted to take a second and point to one of the coolest things I received during this past holiday season.  I've been reading Roger Barr's I-Mockery site for years, in particular during Halloween because he always has a plethora of hilarious thoughtful and in-depth commentary on the season and its swag.  The site also has a bunch of swell games and articles.

In addition to the fact that I-Mockery is an interesting read, Roger & the resident artist Pox have been putting together some super awesome pixel art posters in the past couple years.  Basically they're 8-Bit style art jams featuring 6.2 million pop culture, gamer, comics, and cartoon icons culled from the 80s through today, and both of them are a real treat for the eyes.  Honestly, I spent a couple hours pouring over every square inch of these prints picking out characters I knew and trying to figure out the rest…

The best way I can describe these prints is they're like when you were a kid in the doctor's office painstakingly looking for all the wrong stuff on the back of an issue of Highlights, except everything on these prints is right!

The prints are very attractively priced as well and the quality is pretty top notch.  The wife and I are getting ours framed for our home office as I type this.

If you dig pop culture as much as I do and have spent any amount of time playing any old school NES games, I suggest heading on over to I-Mockery and taking a gander at these fine pieces of art…

**Update** You can see a pretty cool interview with Roger and a bunch of other artists from the Gallery 88 show that these pieces were created for over at Coin-Op TV!

1977 is such an interesting year, and sometimes I feel lucky that I came into the world that hot summer in July.  Not only did I arrive just in time for the original Star Wars flick, but alongside were all sorts of crazy and groundbreaking events like the introduction to the world's first personal computers (the Commodore PET and the Apple II), Fleetwood Mac released Rumors, The Clash released their first album, women of the Navy and Marines sub-units were officially welcomed in as part of the Navy and Marine Corps, Elvis Presley, William Castle, Marc Bolan, Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx all passed away, the Atari 2600 was released, smallpox was eradicated, and the television channel Pinwheel (that would come to be known as Nickelodeon) was launched.  But in all the hubbub, a very important breakthrough was lost in the chaos; assuredly the most unrecognized advancement in men's trouser technology makes its stunning debut in August of 1977, Century Martial Arts' Kickin' Jeans!

Way back in 2006, during my first year in blogging, I shared an ad for these ferocious fighting jeans, and I thought that it was high time that I did a more in-depth examination into the wonder of the modern no-tear assault jeans made famous by the one and only Chuck Norris.  Though the Century brand Action Jeans are probably the most popular, they were certainly not the first jeans to make the “Action Jeans” claim.  That officious proclamation would probably have been made by Lee Jeans back in 1957 with their Rider branded trousers.  Fit for rugged cowboys, these Lee jeans were endorsed by none other than legendary rodeo star Guy Weeks.  Proclaiming strong stitching, these jeans were possibly more intense because of their patented U-shaped crotch, which is really the feature where all the action really comes together as we'll see in a moment.

As you can see in the original ad for what, at the time, Century was calling Kickin' Jeans, the secret is in the gusseting.  So what is gusseting you ask?  Well, it involves sewing in a diamond-shaped piece of fabric into the seams of clothing to create a more comfortable fitting garment.  I first learned about gusseting from the film, The Silence of the Lambs.  In the scene in which Jodie Foster makes the connection between Buffalo Bill and one of his first suspected victims, she notices a dress that has the triangular gusseting patterns that clearly match the diamond-shaped patches of missing skin from some of his other victims (since he was making a woman suit and all.)  Gruesome to be sure, but interesting none the less.  It's this give in the fabric that lets the wearer of Kickin' Jeans get the range of motion required to round kick a goon in the head while also looking stylish and fetching in jeans that aren't ripped and torn from all the aforementioned kickery.

In doing some research into these warrior jeans, I believe I have managed to bring together most, if not all, of the known pieces of Kickin' Jeans advertising.  I'd like to share them with you now…

First off, most of these ads come from back issues of Black Belt magazine, a staunch supporter of the remarkable jeans between 1977 and March 1991 when the miracle product seems to fall off the face of the earth.  The original black and white ad at the top ran in Black Belt from August 1977 throughout 1978.  But in January 1979 we got our first look at Kickin' Jeans in astounding full color (above.)  This is probably my favorite ad for the product, mostly because of its obvious dated cheesiness.  But I also have to hand it to the designer as he felt it was a good idea to have the main jean-model both strutting his stuff all posed up front, while simultaneously getting the crap kicked out of him in the background.  I think that's what these jeans promise in a nutshell, great fashion and ass-kickery.

Then in 1980 Kickin' Jeans got a huge proverbial kick in the ass by scoring a promotional deal with Bill "Superfoot" Wallace, a recognized athlete and kickboxing champ.  In my humble opinion, Superfoot brought these wonder pants out of obscurity and into the lime light.  Well, at least the lime light in the niche world of martial arts enthusiasts, which was a pretty burgeoning crowd in the late 70s, early 80s.

If Superfoot was a boon to the benefit of conformability while performing a roundhouse on someone's all-too-deserving head (all while wearing stylish jeans), then in 1981 Ernie Reyes Sr. and his 9 year-old martial arts prodigy son Ernie Jr. must have been an explosion of epic proportions (though not an explosion strong enough to rip the Kickin' Jeans mind you.)  Is it just me or does Reyes Jr. look like he's 4 years-old in that ad (and able to kick the living hell out of anyone's butt at the same time?)  Ernie Reyes Jr. was sort of a big deal in my circle of friends during the 80s and early 90s as he starred in one of my favorite childhood television shows Sidekicks, and would go on to do all of the in-suit martial arts for Donatello in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live action film (and its sequel, Secret of the Ooze.)  If you don't remember Sidekicks (also starring Gil Gerard of Buck Rogers fame), here is a horrible copy of the intro on youtube, as well as the pilot episode (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, & part 5.)

But it was in 1982 the pants really hit the fan (to mix my metaphors) when film legend Chuck Norris endorsed the slacks.  Not only did he endorse them, but the company renamed them for the first time, this time to Karate Jeans…

This was a short-lived change though, as later in 1982 the jeans would go through their second and final branding change, this time to the less exciting, but much more hilarious Action Jeans!  If you'll notice, the difference is all in the mustache apparently, as that's the only difference I can see in the two ads.  But a Chuck Norris mustache is unlike all other lip hair.  It's got 300% more action than any other mustache, and 10% more appeal than the second most popular lip hair, the mustache of one Rollie Fingers.

The genesis for this whole article comes with this next ad from 1983.  Featured in the back of Boy's Life magazine, we again get a chance to see Ernie Reyes Jr. wearing the amazing jeans, though this time they're Chuck Norris branded.  I'm glad to see Norris sharing the lime light here.  I was kind of shocked to see an ad for these jeans outside of Black Belt magazine, and it's really what drove me to compile all these ads.  Also, it's strange to see that Norris was selling these jeans under his own company and not through Century...

Between 1983 and 1984 we got a much more friendly and toned down Action Jeans ad featuring Norris, who is much more at ease than his first advertisement.  I think he was really enjoying his mustache at this point in his career.

In 1985 though, things get ferocious again, as Norris sprouts a beard and brings back the kicking to Action jeans (going by conventional Norris philosophies, I believe he grew the beard on command five minutes before this photo was taken.)  This is the ad I'm most familiar with, and it was representing potentially his most successful years endorsing the jeans as it's the one that ran the longest (from 1985 to early 1989.)  If you were wearing Action Jeans in the 80s, chances are this is the advertisement that got you to slip on your first pair.

Awesome doesn't last forever though, and there would only be one more Action Jeans ad produced, appearing in 1989.  By the 90s Norris was really taking charge of his merchandising empire though.  Well at least he was taking charge of these branded jeans, as this is the one instance where you can see that they have his official signature stitched onto the ass pocket.  Hopefully this is the last thing criminals and evil doers saw before your leg whipped around and kicked their head clean off their shoulders.  At least that's what I imagine wearing these pants was like.

This final ad ran in Black Belt magazine until March of 1991 when the Norris empire was starting to crumble.  The world was moving on to Steven Segal and Jean Claude Van Damme, and so was Black Belt magazine.  Sure it still featured Norris, but not to the extent where he was in every single advertisement.  And there was no room in the world for Action Jeans.   But this isn't the end of the story.  Kicking jeans would get a second life in 2002 thanks to the good people at Diamond Gusset Clothing.   It was a return to basics with the emphasis back on crotch comfort and style…

Though Century Martial Arts is still in business today, they no longer carry the coveted fighting jeans.  Your only option for comfortable ass-kicking jeans lies with Diamond Gusset, but at least these aren't completely forgotten relics of a bygone era.  People can still believe in high kicking without embarrassing rips and tears.  The legend lives on.

To bookend the release of Filmation's Original Ghostbusters cartoon from a few weeks ago, BCI Eclipse has slated the release of the original live action Ghost Busters series for April 17th, 2007. The series starred Larry Storch, Forrest Tucker, and Bob Burns (as Tracy the Gorilla) playing three paranormal investigators who face off against phantoms, vampires, werewolves, the Frankenstein monster, mobsters, Vikings, and magicians, while taking their orders from the mysterious agent Zero.

The set will contain all 15 episodes of the series, which originally ran on CBS Saturday mornings in 1975, and will include plenty of Andy Mangels special features like a cast and crew documentary, behind the scenes footage, as well as a bonus episode of the later cartoon series,"I'll be a son of a Ghost Buster". It's retailing for $29.98, though you can preorder it from outlets such as Amazon.com for around $26. Actually a quick note about the Amazon listing, they have all the plot and cast & crew information incorrectly listed as that for the Real Ghostbusters cartoon instead of the Filmation live action show, so ignore the Arsenio Hall mention.

Esteban over at Please Save Me Robots has gone and collected a bunch of the old toy ads that he's photocopied off of various public library system's microfiche catalogs from the 70's and 80's. He's put up an awesome site called the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. It's a pretty awesome way to get a look at branded toys from 20-30 years ago, so go take a look.

Also, while you're at it, check out this recent entry on the full circle quest he inadvertenty went on which bridges the original R2-D2 action figure with the sensorscope upgade that was released later.  It's a nice commentary on the obsession we call collecting.

It's kind of weird, in posting all these Trend scratch & sniff stickers I've sort of been freaked out by some of the sticker designs. I don't think I get freaked out immediately by Anthropomorphization, but there's something about certain designs that just sets me ill at ease. For instance in the stickers I've posted so far...


...these six really kind of freak me out. A stack of pancakes with eyes, that weird goblin-like Spearmint sticker, a football with eyes and a mouth made of laces, the all singing and dancing corn and toothpaste, the hamburger licking it's bun and patty lips, these are all kind of weird and unsettling images. When I uploaded these I was trying to think of similar stuff that I've seen in this vein. What came immediately to mind were two scenes from 80's movies, Better Off Dead and Young Sherlock Holmes, where claymation, anthropomorphized food sings, dances, and even attacks a hallucinating young Dr. Watson.

Here's the scene from Better Off Dead...


John Cusack's character has succumbed and gotten a job at a horrible burger joint where he's left to clean and lock up for the night. In his crazed boredom he daydreams a sequence where he goes all Dr. Frankenstein on a huge patty of beef, bringing it to life, which we get to see ala the magic of Claymation to the Van Halen tune Everybody Wants Some.


The burger hops up and sports a Eddie Van Halen-esque red and white striped guitar and starts singing and, um, well, dancing and stuff. It's creepy.


In the Young Sherlock Holmes scene, which is way more disturbing than the Better Off Dead hamburger, we get a young Dr. Watson who has been infected with a hallucinogenic drug and is face to face with a bunch of pastries in a graveyard that spring to life, I believe also made possible though the miracle of Claymation, though since the film is widely known for its (of the time) amazing ILM CGI sequences, it might as well be blamed on that.


At first it's pretty innocuous as the pastries come to life like so many half chopped up broom shards in Fantasia...


...but then we're treated to the amazingly disturbing barrage of "Twinkie the Kid" looking pastries committing pastry-iside in Dr. Watson's mouth.


Then it gets even worse when two larger pastries grab a third and shove it down Watson's throat, shudder, it's making me squeamish as I write this.


It's kind of funny actually, because in thinking about it, I really do think this YSH scene is to blame for my aversion to some anthropomorphized food items. My fiancee Carrie also has this aversion, though I don't know why since she hasn't seen YSH, at least I don't think so. There's a pattern of Bounty paper towels out right now that I mercilessly buy when she's not doing the shopping just to bug the piss out of her...




For some reason, I guess maybe since I'm doing this to someone else, I don't find the paper towels as disturbing.

There were these bottles of some weird fruit drink that I picked up in Florida a year ago that had some amazingly disturbing imagery on them. They were super sized fruit with these weird eyes and mouths. I couldn't find a picture of them, but I believe the artist that was responsible for them was Saxton Freymann who has a series of children's books with anthropomorphized fruit images that I have to believe is seriously fucking up the minds of today's youth. Here's an example of his work...


I mean, jesus, what the hell did the that sweet little apple do to that orange to piss him off so much. C-reepy. Now imagine drinking a fruit smoothie drink with this on the bottle, zoinks.

On the other hand, I do tend to find some anthropomorphized food items kind of cool, like the California Raisins for instance...


...not to mention the Branded in the 80's mascots, Clumpy and Jr. Salty(squared).

But then there's stuff like this weird cereal box (via Grickily at A Sampler of Things)


...that just really messes with my head.

All in all the whole thing is just kind of weird and goes to show how narcissistic humans can be. I mean why are most of out creations so human like? Robots, aliens, the front of cars, etc. Of course I think there is also a term for this, seeing the human form everywhere. Just weird...

Well, since I've more or less ignored the holiday for most of the month I decided I should throw up a little bit of Christmas cheer. I've really got mixed feelings on the holiday. On the one hand it's a great time for family to get together, have some good food, and buy each other some fun swag, but on the other the swag buying can get so out of hand. I've got a pretty small family and for as long as I can remember we've pretty much stuck to buying for our immediate family and then for a few friends and stuff.

But then I got engaged and my fiancee has a monster-sized amount of extended family and stuff and all of a sudden Christmas is expensive. Crazy expensive. Luckily this year we got to split up the festivities, half at the beginning of the month, and now the other half this week. So it didn't feel like we needed to find an amount of money that was equivalent to a couple extra rent payments all at once. It has been a little weird since I had Christmas with my side of the family already, so everything else this month has felt like the day after Christmas that just won't end.

Anyway, in honor of a simpler to time, a time when waking up and rushing out at top speed to see the spread under the tree was the culmination of an entire year of trying one's best to be good, I present some pictures of childhood Christmas past.


This is my first Christmas. That's my older sister testing out her sweet new Operation game while I rolled around the wrapping paper barely able to get my head up. In the BG you can see an awesome pair of blue lace-up roller skates that my sister also got, and would be handed down to me later.


Somewhere in the shuffle a few Christmas mornings went by un-photographed, so I present to you Christmas 1980 in the Robare household. That's me striking a pose in a superhero T-shirt and my underwear, which was basically my uniform for half of the pictures taken of me. Fake snow from a can on the windows and my mom hiding from view in the bottom left corner.


This was the year that I received my first badass bigwheel as well as my first electric racetrack...


Now on the tour of Christmas past we skip forward to 1981, and a very posed bit of happiness. Once again, me in my undies and a Flash Underoos top.


Apparently the one picture was too casual, so we got dressed up and was handed some booze to liven things up, also apparently to my sister's dismay!  Man does she look pissed.


This year brought an awesome Christmas spread including a Tonka airplane with a sweet handgun-like handle that operated the propellers as well as a bunch of Star Wars swag. This was also the year that I scored my awesome Dukes of Hazzard bigwheel...






This is one of the last images I have of me at Christmas, I'm thinking it's from around 1985 or so. I guess after that my parents just felt it was getting to be old hat to take pictures. Oh well.

So this is some 20-odd year-old Christmas cheer from me to all of you, who ever you are.

So I was thinking about how weird it is that some things are "collected", things that by all rights should have been used, torn up, lost, crumpled, discarded, or just plain thrown away.  Things like old food packaging, for instance, these dog food cans.  Now I don't think it's weird to be collecting them now, decades after they were originally meant for the trash or recycling bin.  I mean the cans are the very definition of Pop Art, disposable, banal, products consumed by the mass public (or their dogs hopefully.)  But where have these been all these years? 

I guess they could've been washed and then used to store nuts, blots, and nails on some handyman's work bench.  But I bet there was someone out there ready to collect it, as it was when it was new, and this is what I find weird.  Now don't get me wrong, I fully support this behavior, and am currently benefiting from it via eBay and six million sticker collections worldwide. 

But where does that first impulse come from, to collect something non-traditional or disposable?  With the stickers I'm looking at on eBay right now.  Who, in 1982-4, bought a package of Trend Scratch 'n' Sniff stickers and decided, "No, I am not going to open that package.  No I am not going to open it, peel a sticker off of the sheet, place it on my notebook and scratch and/or sniff it."  I mean why buy stickers you don't intend to stick someplace?  I'm not taking trading card stickers like Garbage Pail Kids or Topps Sticker Trading Cards, but plain old 12-up on a sheet jelly bean scented stickers.  Are people thinking of money?  Are they saying in their deep voiced internal monologue: "No, I am going to save this, keep it in safe keeping because one day in the future these stickers are going to be worth approx. 15 times what I paid for them.  Yes, in about 20 years these stickers, which I invested in at $1 a package, will be worth upwards of $15 dollars a package."  I mean it's not like they were rare.

Maybe that's it.  People recognize that items like dog food cans and scratch and sniff stickers are disposable, and because of this they realize that if they keep them, then in the future they will be rare, because honestly who keeps them?

Once again, don't get me wrong, I applaud this behavior.  I want scratch and sniff stickers damnit and it's to these people that I turn.  I got to thinking about this awhile back when I was trying to remember the proper name of a book club from my elementary and middle school days.  Every few weeks the teacher would hand out this little catalog (or newsletter, order form, pamphlet, what-have-you) with a bunch of books, some magazines and stickers that we could take home to our parents to get them to order them through the school.  I don't remember much besides the fact that it was printed on news print in color, was one or two pages folded, and I think had a butterfly on it somewhere.  I've pretty much guessed it as being the Scholastic Book Club from reading various blogs and stuff.

Well, here's the thing.  I want one of those catalogs from the 80's.  Where in the hell do you find something like that?  I'd settle for a jpeg, but I haven't found any on the internet.  What are the odds that some kid used to neatly refold his order forms when he was done looking through them and neatly setting it on a pile in the back of his closet?  Normally, I'd say zero, but there are those dog food cans to think about...

Sometime last year when I was shopping around for He-Man busts on Amazon.com I stumbled upon a book that looked pretty interesting, Mastering the Universe: He-Man and the Rise and Fall of a Billion Dollar Idea by Roger Sweet and David Wecker.  The blurb on the back of the book said that the book deals with the conception of the character and figure, including the office politics that influenced the development of the Masters of the Universe toy line, as well as the downfall of the line.  Cool.  I'd never really had the curtain pulled back on a toy line before.  I put it on my wish list and promptly forgot it was there until my parents picked it up for me on my birthday.



I just finished it and I'm not sure what I think.  Mainly Roger Sweet, a designer who put in 19 years at Mattel through the 70s and 80s mostly, and who claims to have created He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, wrote it.  I say claims because the entire book reads like a deposition in a court case where the creative rights to He-Man are in dispute.  And they aren't, which made reading this book very painful and the facts presented suspect when I don't even doubt that he created the toy line.  See the book is written in a very deceptive manner where the idea that there is a dispute as to whether or not Sweet is He-Man's creator is taken for granted.  It's not on either cover, and in the forward there is a brief bit that might foreshadow the dispute, but it's certainly not clear.  In fact it's not until the epilogue that Sweet makes this clear (well there is the preceding 200 pages of "he said, she said" that makes it abundantly clear, though it's the why am I reading this that I am waiting for) where he states, "As I look back on the Masters of the Universe, and my relation to all of it, one point strikes me: No one at Mattel ever thanked me for originating the concept..."  This needed to be the fist line in the book, hands down, bar none, and all those other cliched phrases of emphasis.

Underneath all of the bitterness derived from that one idea, that he wasn't thanked, there is a good story here, one that would make a great article, but not a great book, which is my other major beef with Mastering the Universe.  It's a fairly short read that manages both omit a lot of what should be in the book like pictures, sketches and other people's points of view (quotes, etc.) and yet be filled with a ton of redundant or off topic information.  For instance Sweet makes it a point to describe the physique of almost everyone he mentions in the book, including height, weight and build.  I mean does it matter if a woman working in his design group is 5'5" with a slender build?  He also repeats the description every single occurrence in this book at least once but sometimes two or three times.  I think he mentions the fact that in 1986 the MOTU toy line brought in 400 million dollars and then only 7 million the flowing year like four or five times and each time it's written like it was the first.  The entire first chapter, which deals with Sweet mocking up three He-Man prototypes for a presentation, is almost repeated verbatim in chapter four.  At the end of the day the book feels like it was padded a bit too much.

As far as Sweet's physical descriptions go, it's actually one of the more revealing things in the book.  Both his co-author, David Wecker (Sweet's nephew) and Sweet himself make it a point to illustrate how important a strong and healthy physique was to Sweet growing up.  He was a scrawny boy who was picked on by other boys and girls alike which prompted him to start a rigorous exercise routine that he's kept with to this day.  Every time he mentions the development of He-Man, particularly the first three prototypes he goes to great pains to mention that he felt giant muscles and a "ready for action stance" are what were lacking in the field of boy's action toys.  It gets to a point where it's pretty clear that Sweet is semi-obsessed with muscles and apparently has little or no respect for weak or frail people.

Another thing that bugs me is how Sweet comes off very smug while arguing his creative rights.  Twice in illustrating how successful his designs were to Mattel he quotes the exact amount of a bonus he received for his work.  There are also numerous instances where he relates all the praise that was lavished on him by quoting memos or in what he remembers overhearing when others would speak of him.  I can completely understand where he's coming from, in particular in an office environment where praise is often given by co-workers but never related to managers prompting that whole defensive "give credit where credit is due" mentality, but this doesn't belong in a book that is only in his voice, it just comes off very smug.  He's also fond of self-congratulatory boasts and remarks.  Here are two of my favorite examples: "...I came up with an unheard of innovation in model making..." and "In any case, It's my humble opinion that the Dragon Walker is the most creative powered toy vehicle ever created."

Sweet also gets a lot of facts wrong in the book which doesn't help support his cause all that much.  He repeatedly states that the 3.75 inch G.I. Joe figures were already on the market (and influencing his design) when he was developing He-Man, which is off by about two years with He-Man debuting first.  He also sites the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a factor in the downfall of He-Man during 1987, which is also a year or two off and not a factor in that years drop in profits.  The thing that hits home the most is the factual errors in the actual MOTU line.  He takes the time to describe a bunch of the figures in detail citing how creative the design was, yet gets a couple wrong.  He describes Webstor as having a string going through his head and coming out his hind quarters when he simply had a back pack with a string running through it, while he describes Kobra Kahn as having a detachable head that you filled with water that would act as a squirt gun, when in fact you filled his body with water and the head only detached to allow the body to be filled.  I know these are minor fanboy quibbles, but when he's trying to win over an audience of readers to the facts that his designs were so clever he should probably get them right.  It also doesn't help that he dedicates an entire chapter to the very crib notes version of the development of boys figural toys over the last two hundred years, that in the end just makes him seem like he's trying to be more knowledgeable on a subject than he really is.

I also found that as a whole the entire book was very manipulative in the way it described events.  In one paragraph Sweet would mention how during the first year He-Man was in production is was projected to make only 7 million dollars in profit, but ended up making 38 million and it seems that he is attributing this success to himself and his initial creative design.  Then in another paragraph he mentions how he wasn't involved past the initial inception of the design, that another team took over the work on the first year run (which he repetitively says was uninspired) and that, that first year's profits (the same 38 million mind you) was pretty darn weak.  This goes on all throughout the book.  In one paragraph he talks about how uninspired the first wave was, then in the next he's talking about how creative it was to repaint a basic He-Man figure blue and orange, slap on Skeletor's armor, and then to call the figure a robot.  That is pretty darn lame and isn't creative at all (though it is genius from a corporate "get 'em to buy the same figure twice" standpoint.)

He also pretty much lambastes the Filmation cartoon, going so far as to site them for creating new characters for the show, then charging Mattel a licensing fees to make action figures of them (when they are paying licensing fees in the beginning to make the cartoon at all.)  He states how he detests the concept of "Prince Adam", that it demeans the character of He-Man (though he goes to pains to make sure that everyone knows that before the cartoon came out he originated the idea of a character magically transforming from scrawny to muscled hero in a numbered internal Mattel document.)  He also gives the show little credit for monumentally affecting the profits of the toys after it began airing.  Well, he does mention it, though he makes sure to state that it's was his designs that made the toys so profitable, when it's clearly the show being broadcast into millions of homes on a daily basis that makes more sense.

The last nail in the coffin for me is that in the epilogue he repeatedly states that though He-Man was a "wild roller coaster ride", it's certainly not the most satisfying or memorable moment is his career or life (those honors go to working on both the Boeing 747 cabin and Downey fabric softener bottle designs), yet he put forth the effort to write this bitter memoir dedicated to making sure everyone knows who created He-Man.  I think it might be safer next time if I refrain from pulling back the curtain on a beloved childhood memory.

I was kind of early going over to a friend’s house the other day, so I decided to drop in on an Eckerd’s and check out their “Halloween Headquarters? fare, which was pretty darn dismal to say the least. While walking down the toy isle though, I stumbled upon a cool item that I haven’t seen in years, but was a staple of family vacations and trips up north to visit relatives, the Lee Publications Yes & Know Invisible Ink Game & Quiz Book.


These invisible ink books are right up there in memory land with golf tee jump-a-peg games and Rubik’s Cube as my pre-Game Boy source of entertainment on trips through most of the 80’s. If you’ve never owned one of these booklets, they’re basically just a bunch of various games that you play by using the enclosed pen to reveal hidden information.


The included pens have been the exact same since they were first manufactured, white markers with orange caps and a slightly yellow “invisible? ink that always seems to be just this side of running out of said ink. The games can vary, but are pretty much some combination of Hangman, Bingo, Tic Tac Toe, Black Jack, sports games, and my personal favorite Fleet, a knock-off of Battleship you play by yourself. In fact one of the selling points of these books is the fact that you can play all the games by yourself boasting “Hours and Hours of By-Yourself Enjoyment? (which is of course a registered trademark.) Since there are typically at least two of the same game per page you can play “against? a friend, but the greedy little bastard in me wants to keep all the “Enjoyment? to myself.




Above you can see how a typical game is played. In Fleet for example, you have two sections, a graph board with four hidden ships and a series of dots to record the number of shots made on the board. Basically you take a shot at a square on the grid by uncovering it with the marker. If it’s an “X? you missed, and if it’s an “S?, “D?, “C?, or “B? you’ve hit one of those types of ship. You get 32 shots to try and uncover the 4 ships, each of which is a different length ranging from 2 to 5 spaces. Lets just say that I rarely win at Fleet. The above picture is one of the fulfilling times when I’ve beat the game. You’ll notice that I’m one shot away from filling in the last “B?.


When I was a kid the obvious draw of these books was the magic of the “invisible ink?, but now that I’m a little older and my bar for amazement has been risen a bit, I’m a lot more intrigued by the fact that these books haven’t changed a bit since they were first published in 1976. In fact the books still bear the 1976 copyright notice with no other dates listed, and if it weren’t for the Choking Hazard warning on the back cover (a fairly recent change in toy products, I assume referring to the pen cap) I might even believe that these haven’t been made in the last thirty years. The pens sure seem dry enough for that. One of the cool things about this though is the fun 70’s cartoon-y style to all of the interior art. Take for instance the Donnie and Marie cartoon styling in the above-pictured game of image match.


I’m not sure, but I believe there are only like 10 permutations of the basic Yes & Know Invisible Ink Game and Quiz book in existence. I picked up the one with the Blue and White cover, but there were also Yellow, Red, Green, Orange ones available, all of which had a different silly age requirement gag on the cover. I picked the blue because it had it at 7-77, and 7 is like my favorite number ever. Though I don’t think this particular copy has 48 more years of “By-Yourself Enjoyment? left in it, I do hope that there will still be invisible ink game books available when I’m 77.

I just looked them up and yes, they do have a website and online store, so if you remember these from when you were young and don’t have them in your area, you can pick them up for just about the same price you’d pay in a Stuckey’s off some backwater highway in middle America.

So here’s another bit of nostalgia goodness that’s partially in a Halloween-y kind of vein (all puns intended.) So a weird interest I had as a kid was the ability to flip through catalogs for hours on end picking out phantom purchases that I’d never be able to afford in a million years. The Sears catalog was my favorite, but I’d take a gander at anything as long as there were pages upon pages of well laid out pictures and order numbers.

Well sort of an offshoot of this pastime was an obsession with the full pages ads in comics and magazines that had products for sale. In particular I had a soft spot for Fangoria magazine and the latex mask ads they’d run in every issue. Here’s an example of one of my favorite mask ads from the Creature Flesh & Blood company:


This ad is from a 1988 issue of Fangoria. Though I remember this one, my favorite version was a two-page spread that had a lot more of the bloody limbs and body parts (like the most realistic eye in a pool of blood I’ve ever seen.) This was back when my initial interest in horror was just beginning to bloom and I couldn’t get enough of the gory stuff. I always wanted to dress up super gory for Halloween, with these masks in mind, but it never happened. In fact I’ve never really worn a latex mask for Halloween. One year I got the whole Freddy Kruger get up including the cloth glove with the plastic finger knives and a really shitty rubber mask and foam fedora, but I didn’t wear it out as we never found a convincing sweater.

In particular I love that Gusher mask.  Hey what the heck is up with the super realistic monkey mask?

Another magazine that I loved to flip through was Black Belt monthly because all boys loved ninjas and karate action in the 80’s. Seriously. Every frickin’ single one of ‘em. I’d be willing to be that most boys who grew up in the 80’s would know exactly what you meant if you jumped up and shouted “Sweep the leg Johnny!? I’d be willing to double that bet that at least half of those boys would then say something in the vein of “Put ‘em in a body bag, yeah…!? Well I only ever bought one Black Belt magazine actually but I cherished it and loved it literally to pieces. See that magazine is practically filled with ads for ninja weapons. From batons to samurai swords and grappling gear to nun chucks you were bound to find something you liked in the grand ninja weapon selection. I couldn’t find my old issue of Black Belt, so I broke down and purchased one on Ebay just so I could scan and post these lovely ads for your perusal. Here’s the best of what was in the issue I got from 1985:


My favorites were always the full color ads like this one for Cobra Imports Ltd. In particular I coveted the ninja star belt buckle. Many days I imagined walking home from school and getting ambushed by ninja, only to be saved by my trusty ninja belt buckle (of course in my day dreams the ninja star would come back to my hand magically like a homing boomerang.)


This ad is pretty darn cool if only for the insane amount of styles you could get your ninja stars in. Of course this ad also feature the awesome Ninja Board game, because we all know that aspiring ninja are all tabletop gaming nerds at heart. This ad also gets points for offering butterfly knives.


This ad wins for the most pointless silly purchase a parent could make ever. What infant this young can even hold their head up let alone do a pint sized roundhouse. So silly.


I couldn’t finish this post without including at least one Chuck Norris approved ad. Mr. Norris was like on every other page of this magazine, so I’m assuming 1985 was a prime year for Chuck. This is also the coolest product endorsement ever, hands down. Argue with me and Chuck Norris will punch you with his beard.

I am so working on another podcast. Seriously. No really I am. This next one will be all about my childhood memories of school and such related nonsense. Jerzy over at Make Like a Tree Comics had mentioned talking about 80's school supplies like erasers and stuff awhile ago, so I thought about it and culled together everything I've got and I think there's enough to make a decent podcast so that's what I'm gonna do. Yup.

So as sort of a teaser to that, here's a bunch of neat 80's erasers that I've accumulated.


It's not a super huge collection, but it pretty much encompasses what I had when I was a kid more or less. Now for the record, I pretty much don't have anything that's original from when I was young. Too many trades, deals, long distance moves, and parents who don't like clutter have destroyed pretty much everything that I once held dear and for the most part I have no interest (read, "the money to procure") in trying to get them back. On the one hand there's the thought of buying someone else's toys that seems kind of depressing and on the other it's just too freaking expensive to be justified. I mean I can't imagine spending more than $10 on a Transformer figure when it's just going to sit on a shelf or in a box. Luckily a lot of the stuff that I was into as a kid has popped back up in recent years as both the original He-Man and G1 Transformers lines were reissued in commemorative packaging so I've managed to pick a few of those up. So pretty much, that's where I stand on buying back my childhood.

There are some items though that are a little more obscure and tend to wax and wane as far as their secondary market value is concerned. 80's school supplies fall into this category. Lunch boxes for instance can sometimes fetch over $40, but I've also seen them as low as $5, so if you're patient chances are you can get that sweet Knightrider box and thermos for about as much as you'd spend on one lunch these days. Erasers also fit squarely here, though the branding seems to make a lot more of a difference. Over the last year I've broken down and started watching the auctions on Ebay and I've noticed that pretty much if they have any type of Transformers branding the erasers won't sell cheap. But there are some other brands that don't seem as coveted and therefore can often be picked up for pretty darn cheap. Take for instance these Thundercats flat picture erasers:


I picked these up for $2 still in the package. Now why someone kept these in the package for 20 years is beyond me, but there they are. I also managed to get this Admiral Ackbar figural eraser for $1.50.


So if you watch long enough you're bound to find this stuff cheap. So over the last year I've scraped together this modest collection of erasers that I really dig. When I was in the third grade, back in 1985, I had just started to become aware that there was a world of school supplies beyond your standard yellow #2 pencils and basic red or green triangular pencil topper erasers. It was around this time that my elementary school opened it's little school store window by the principal's office where they sold ruled paper in packets of 25 sheets, wooden rulers, all kinds of seasonal and branded wooden pencils (like the Atari series), and cool (though non-branded) figural erasers. It was at this school store that I bought my first rubber dinosaur, light bulb:


...skull:


...and space ship shaped erasers. What's funny is that no one I knew used these as erasers because they were too cool and fun to mess around with while the teacher was blabbering away about multiplication and the science behind windmills. Who cared about how to spell "Couch" when you could have anachronistic prehistoric battles with T-Rex's and UFO's.

Of course, the really cool erasers were the ones based on toy lines and cool TV shows, and for these you had to go to places like Eckerd's and Woolworth's. It seemed pretty rare, if I'm remembering correctly, to have more than a couple of these more upscale erasers. I only remember my mom buying me one, which I got in my stocking for Christmas, a He-Man Merman eraser. My mom was under the impression that he was my favorite even though I would constantly stick my Stratos and Trap-Jaw figures in her face. The only other one I managed to get as a kid was the Admiral Ackbar pictured above that I had to trade a whole mess of dinosaurs to get.


What I've found kind of interesting is that for the more basic figural erasers like the space ships and stuff I've had to bid on British Ebay auctions. It seems like all of these now reside on that small island in Europe. I've also noticed that collectors apparently really like their dinosaur erasers as those are the most expensive.

All in all I'm pretty happy with this assortment, though I would like to add a few transformers to the bunch. Who knows maybe after this new Michael Bay movie comes out next summer collectors will be so disgusted by the re-designs that it'll put them off fighting over figural erasers shaped like prowl for a little while. One can only hope.

So one of the things I’ve been scouring the city for recently are some decent flea markets or antique shops. Pretty much I’m looking for places that sell misc. stuff like records, used books and odds and ends from the last few decades. I haven’t had all that much luck though I did find a little place in an out of the way decaying strip mall that was pretty neat. It was pretty much set up like a mini flea market, but instead of having a bunch of manned booths, there was just one guy and his daughter selling a bunch of other people’s stuff that was all marked by the sellers. It was the best place of the kind I’ve found so far and there were some pretty cool treasures there, though most of it was all dishes and every record album ever that no one ever wanted.

There was an entire section devoted to toys which was pretty weak, but I found a couple choice items like a pissed off smurf PVC figure, a very wobbly Hannibal Smith A-Team figure and this pretty cool E.T. pin that was still in the package.


In fact there was an entire display case of them, all marked $1. There were a few different styles, one of the E.T. logo, an E.T. with the wig and bowler cap on, and one of just his hand pointing up with the tip all yellow and glow-y, but I thought this one was the best and cutest. Here’s a better look:


If that isn’t just the cutest thing in the world, I don’t know what is.

I had a pretty big E.T. obsession as a kid though I never really had any of the merchandise related to the flick. I had a plush ET, but not the cool faux leather one that all my friends had, mine was all fuzzy and seemed a bit too girly for my tastes. Faux leather seems more of a man’s stride I guess.

I remember one Christmas in particular where my next store neighbor Matthew pretty much got every imaginable piece of E.T. merchandising know to man including the board game, and Awesome mother ship replica, a little Elliot and rubber E.T on a bike, the faux leather doll, and an entire box of E.T. trading cards. I was so jealous, and about four months later when he had lost total interest in the franchise I managed to trade the little plastic Elliot and E.T. on the bike from him for like one useless Star Wars figure, Pruneface I believe. A couple years later when we got our first VHS player, that was also one of the first movies my family bought, and it’s pretty much been a staple of my video library every since.

Even now, years later, I still love that movie. Even the Jesus like resurrection scene that really makes no sense other than Speilberg pummeling the pubic with the crying tear club. Good stuff.

Like I said, tons of Christmas photos. The two things I love about this picture are my kick ass Knightrider pajamas and the red ninja sash that was part of a Halloween costume that year. For a two-year period I was always wearing some part of that ninja costume…

Can you pick me out of this motley crew? I hated my first grade teacher. She used to confiscate all of my Star Wars figures and she never gave them back. Not even when my mom went down and had a conference with her.


I don’t remember much about this class except that I had a huge crush on the girl in the second row on the left. Man oh man. And what about that kid in the last row third from the right? Holy crap! Future serial killer or what. I kid, I kid.

Actually this does bring back a kind of disturbing memory. Timmie’s (the kid in the first row with the beaming smile, third from the left) mom used to baby-sit me every once in awhile and one of the times I was over there I cut my finger. To this day I can’t stand the sight of my own blood and I went crying to her for help. Well she took one look at my finger and told me to suck off the blood before she put a band-aid on it, and I vehemently refused at which she sighed and did it for me. Gro-SSSSSSS!

Here’s another fun picture of me, a little racy in my undies and junk, but oh well. This is Christmas morning 1981 I believe, with my brand new Roaring Hot Cycle Big Wheel and a great shot of my parent’s 8-Track player in the background.


Once again, I’m wearing my washed-to-death Superman Underoos shirt and I’m also sporting a pretty long Eight Is Enough hairdo. It’s funny, my dad always broke the camera out during Christmas mornings, but I have absolutely no pictures from any of my Halloween outings. Maybe there’s a hidden stash in a safety deposit box or something that’ll get willed to me when my parents pass on in the far distant future…

Man it’s shaping up to be a crazy week. I’m sick with my second sinus infection this year after going three or four years without one (that’s all I tend to get, Strep Throat as a kid, and Sinus Infections as a teen/adult.) My cat has decided to regain her thrown as the cat with the noisiest most annoying meow this side of a tiger with a bladder infection and I’m pulling a double at work this Friday. Yeah yeah, I know, woe is me.

I’m the upside I’ve been drawing more in the last two weeks than I have in the last three years which has been very fun. So anyway…

As promised (to whomever I don’t know) here is another picture I dug up of me in the early 80’s. Now I don’t remember my wardrobe all that much as a kid (except for this bitchin’ Michael Jackson Thriller cut-off sweatshirt that was white and has the monster from the video ripping through the front) but I always thought that I remembered me wearing a bunch of super hero Underoos shirts all the time. Well I’ve found the proof and I couldn’t be happier (as I wasn’t really into comic stuff until later in the 80’s.) Exhibit A). is the following:


I want to say that growing up I was a superman fanatic, mostly because of the movies, though I do remember loving the Super-Friends cartoon. Here you can see me in a shirt that I wore to death, as it looks like it’s been washed a million times, roller skating up our driveway in my sister’s hand-me-down blue skates.

As much as I coveted my Big Wheels, I really loved those skates because I really looked up to my big sister and it provided a freer means of travel around the neighborhood. I never quite picked up on the art of using the front brake skids, so I seem to remember holding out a skate sideways behind me to stop which resulted in the most beat-up wheels known to man. What is the significance of this you ask? I meant that I couldn’t wear them inside any of the town’s roller rinks and I do believe that was the first time I ever damned the “Man?. I didn’t quite get to a point where I rebelled and wore them anyways, but I sure as hell day dreamed about lengthy chases around the rink with management and guards all fumbling to keep up with me as I sped around doing figure eights and skating backwards. It’s a wonder I didn’t get into the Roller Derby more when it resurfaced in the early 90’s…

Two years ago I excavated the above picture out of a briefcase full of weird paper odds and ends that my parents wanted me to go though after they moved back down to Florida. I was filled with wonder and joy as the picture both provided a long forgotten face to a name and connected me a little closer to an earlier time in a decade that I really only remember the tail end of.

The picture is of my best friend Anthony and me, who lived down the street at the other end of the neighborhood. I sometimes get lost in the chronology of friends that I had at that age, not that I’m boasting that I had a ton of friends, but because I consider myself pretty shy most of the time and for a short period of time it seemed like I had a lot of “best? friends. I think a lot of this has to do with the amount of time allotted to a kid that hasn’t really started going to school, so when it feels like there was twice as many years worth of memories there probably really are.

My one great regret is that I didn’t have a picture of Anthony because some of my more crazy memories are stuff that we did together like digging up a bunch of creek clay to make sun-baked pottery out of (which we then sold at an amazing mark-up to the neighborhood) or the fact that his father kept a peacock that he found on the golf course in a cage in their garage. But now I found one and that makes me very happy.

The other thing that I love is that this picture, at least to me and compared to the rest of the photos I have of the time, is very early 80’s, which is a time period that I have fond memories for but feel very disconnected to at the same time. Most of the pictures that we have are from the time we spent in Orlando and that was a world away from Tampa. This picture though is awesome for me because of the Empire Strikes Back T-shirt, Anthony’s stripped polo, the brown slacks and longish-ruffed hair (which would be seriously gelled and moussed in years to come.) This picture feels like 1982 to me, and I’m so glad I stumbled upon it. I found a couple others that I’ll write about this week when I get a minute.

This past weekend the fiancée and I had an extra day off so we decided to take a trip up to a wondrous place, the Pendergrass Flea Market, the largest flea market in Georgia! I hadn’t been to a flea market in like 12 years and even then it wasn’t a proper one, it was inside an actual air-conditioned building and most of the venders were on the level selling outlet style overstock and stuff. What kind of fun is that? In fact I was convinced that I’d never get to relive the amazingly run down, junk, bootleg and garage sale style flea markets of my youth. So my hopes weren’t very high for the Pendergrass market, especially when I read that the main area of booths were constructed to be a replica of a small town’s main street. Seemed a bit too upscale. Oh, was I ever wrong, and much to my personal glee.


When I first walked in I was still not convinced as the booths really were replica buildings and that just sort of felt like too much money was invested in the place to really be bottom of the barrel, and I think at one time this was the fact.


But upon entering the first store my mind began to change as I was surrounded by cheap knock off Asian weaponry in every imaginable permutation. I was instantly transported back in time and space to the kick-ass flea markets of my youth in Florida where I would stand transfixed at booths full of ninja stars, sai and over priced swords that I knew I would never be able to afford. I used to try and convince my parents that it was vital that I get my hands on this stuff so that I could protect the homestead, just like Ralphie’s daydreams in A Christmas Story. Maybe there weren’t any Black Bart’s around anymore, but there sure were giant evil robots, elite members of a terrorist organization known as Cobra, not to mention thousands of faceless ninja waiting to get us at every turn. Then never bought the story, and consequently they never bought me any ninja swag.


So as I perused the cramped shop I marveled at everything from replica Hatroi Hanzo swords to officially licensed Blade swords and throwing stars. They had sai and ninja stars priced at 10 for $10. And what’s that, there, against the wall behind the giant cardboard standee of Bruce Lee, yes are those Nunchaku!?! Called Nun-Chucks back in the day, these wooden sticks bound by a short bit of chain were the pinnacle of cool ass ninja weaponry. Swords were cool, but were heavy and obviously dangerous in a way that made them not very play friendly. Nun-Chucks though were perfect, with just enough pizzazz while swinging them around that you never had to do anything else with them. There was a kid down the block from me that managed to find a pair of yellow plastic ones that had Bruce Lee on the handles and everyone in the neighborhood coveted them.


I made a vow to come back, but I had to see the rest of the place before I blew whatever money I had decided to spend on this place. One other thing that I thought was pretty funny about this place was that besides sharp objects and Bruce Lee memorabilia they sold bongs. There was a whole counter set up for pipes and bongs and rolling papers and junk. I’ve seen this at Dragon Con and sex shops here in Atlanta and stuff, but never out in the open in a setting like this. What made it even weirder and very uncomfortable was these two off duty cops that came in while we were looking around.


The sight of real guns always makes me uncomfortable and having the cops staring at a case of tazers right next to a display of bongs just didn’t seem right.


As we left the ninja store and made our way past the actual indoor buildings my suspicions subsided as we realized that the built up portion of the flea market was very small and pretty much the majority of it was just in this giant trailer like warehouse. Just around the corner we found another flea market staple of my youth, the odd dried food and candy by the pound booth. Unlike the booths from my childhood, all the merchandise had already been weighed and portioned out but it was the same principal. I remember the first time I found a barrel full of just banana runts as a kid and I was in heaven. Most of the candy here was kind of pedestrian, but there was a bunch of rock candy (don’t find it all the often in the city here) and more gummi stuff than you could shake a large gummi stick at. I found an awesome gummi assortment that I’ll talk about in a minute; I want it to be a surprise.


One of the things I found that was awesome though were entire cartons of candy cigarettes, ‘cause in Georgia kids have a two pack a day habit to support.


Now there was a bunch of crap in this place like old appliances, a butt-load of stuff to trick out your car, and clothes (mostly used), and occasionally this stuff would be cool like in the case of the bikini pictured above, but a lot of it was just crap and there was a lot to wade through. But this is the life of flea market shopping, and ever vigilant we pressed on looking for the wonders of the import bootleg market. Which were apparently just around the next corner!




Bootleg toys are the coolest. Well, not really, but damn they make me smile. The above two sets were my favorites being so mismatched and fake that they’d make a bootlegger blush. What kid would be fooled by the Super Hero toy set or the awesome Justice Hero League featuring a weird assortment of knockoff movie versions of figures (Batman and Spiderman with silver webbing?), animated figures (the Incredibles), and a truly rad evil twin gray Batman. Did I mention that they all have sweet golden swords, ‘cause that happened in the comics. Man, I can’t count the number of times Batman and his evil twin Namtab fought each other with golden swords. I so wanted to buy a set of these, and even though I’m convinced they would be cheap, they weren’t marked and I find it hard to haggle when there is no price showing.


The other type of toy that was plaguing the place was amazingly realistic machine guns. That AK-47 in the above shot would fool even the KGB. Most of these guns could be field stripped too, which was crazy funny though kind of creepy too. These were actually expensive (meaning over $20) and I just didn’t have the heart to drop that much on any one item, though there was a replica Robocop pistol that was screaming out to me.




Another awesome item were these two anime themed slot machines. Both played full cartoon episodes on the top screen, so you could zone out to TV while you threw your money away on slots. I hope there are machines like this in Vegas.


By and large though the best moment of the day was running into Peter Porker the amazing Spider-Ham! Not really, but this over the hill electronics salesman was pretty sexy in his teen sized Spiderman get up. He had the thickest Middle Eastern accent I’d ever heard and he wanted me to meet Superman and Catwoman (his son in a Supes T-Shirt and his very depressed looking wife in a Batman T-shirt) inside where they sold jewelry, knives and bongs! Boy, Peter is pretty sad in his later years huh? He happily posed for a few pictures, though I felt real bad when I didn’t buy anything and he let out a sad sigh.

We managed to get though the entire place, though it was sort of downhill after we left Spider-Ham. What kind of bummed me out was that there were two other types of stalls I was hoping to run into, a comic/baseball card shop and a gag/practical joke/magic shop, and though we did find them, both were closed on that day. But we had hit some fun places and I had a ninja store to get back to! Anyway, here’s a few pictures of my haul:














I managed to get all you see before you for a measly $30. I was so stoked when I got to pick out my Nunchaku. It was a hard decision and it ended up between the pair you see above and a pretty cool pair that was clear with images of Bruce Lee painted on them in black line art. The wooden ones above just seemed cooler. I also picked up a handful of ninja stars and a sweet pair of Batarangs that are pretty damn sharp and sturdy.

The other awesome find was a huge package of gummi’s called the Mexican Fiesta Meal. Included were some of the weirdest gummi molds I’ve ever seen including Huevos Rancheros and the crème de la crème Chili Con Carne! Holy crap that’s specific and gross, but cool. Now with the tiny gummi eggs I can pretend to be Pee Wee Herman from Big Top Pee Wee when he eats the meal Midge prepared for him!


I also loved buying this Spiderman figure. See there was this one booth that was all girls under wear at like 6 for $5 or something and under the table was a box of individually packages super hero figures marked 2 for a $1. I rummaged through the box and pretty much all they had were Power Ranger knock offs and like 20 of these Spiderman toys that had two spider symbols on his chest for some weird reason. So I brought one up to the table with my 50 cents ready and the guy started yelling “No! Two for Dollar!? over and over. I kept trying to pay for one, but he kept yelling, so I ended up buying two. I’m guessing he had some kind of OCD with numbers and he couldn’t stand to see one Spiderman sold with out a buddy…

Oh well, it was a fun day all around and now I can finally protect my family from Cobra and the various scattered ninja that are plaguing my small southern city of Duluth!

So have you ever been bored one night, broke into your closet and dug out a bunch of stuff you've had squirreled away for like 10 years and wondered, what the hell was I thinking?  Well I did that last night and found some of the "art" I had done in high school and the following year after I graduated when I still had visions of self-published comic books dancing in my head.

I've always sort of wanted to publish my own comics, but I am not comfortable enough with my drawing ability to take the plunge.  That's why I opened the Deviant Art account and starting putting my drawings up there, to get feedback and sort of publish them online.  It's also probably the driving force behind this blog and my podcasts, as it's they're two of the few creative outlets I have today.

So while I was digging up stuff I compiled a bunch of drawings and other stuff related to this story idea I was working on for a comic book about 10 years ago and I thought I'd share them with the blog.  The basic idea behind the story was that a mega corporation that specialized in a chocolate flavored beverage was secretly trying to take over the world through old B&W TV shows that they had the copyrights to and were placing subliminal messages in.  The crux of the story lay in the idea that to get people to watch old B&W shows they would have to first take color out of the equation.  To do this they implanted tiny transmitters in their chocolate flavored drink bottles that when drunk would travel up to the optic nerves of the people who drank it.  The transmitters emitted a signal that only the population of Lillyput from Gulliver’s Travels could hear, and as the mega corporation had already enslaved this race of people (they're really small and easy to defeat for anyone who isn't Gulliver apparently) they would use them to creep into people's homes at night (following the signal) and using tiny chainsaws they would destroy the color receptors on the optic nerves rendering the victims permanently color blind.  Thus they would have no qualms with watching old B&W TV shows and would be perfectly suited for brain washing.  Confused?  I don't blame you.

This story idea all stemmed from this one day when I was so bored and listless that I just sat on the sofa watching Nick at Night and ended up drinking an entire six pack of Yoo Hoo bottles.  As I finished the last bottle I started to fiddle with the packaging, taking it apart carefully and reading absolutely everything on it when I saw the most disturbing piece of info ever on a six pack of chocolate flavored dink packaging, "Destroy All Colors."  Sure it's probably some sort of manufacturing lingo associated with where the yellow coloring was supposed to stop on the cardboard, but I saw it as a slogan or an intent.  It freaked me out either way.

I hit me that this would make a really wiggy comic book, and since a group of friends and I were planning on starting a comic book company I thought that this would make a great book for my quarter of the output.  First though we have to back track a little bit. See I already had an idea for a comic book revolving around this character named Blast that was every Jim Lee and X-Men character ever rolled up into one neat package, or so I though.  I had a couple of ideas for the character, I envisioned him being stuck inside his outfit like it kept him alive or something and I always wanted him to have his arm cut off in the first issue he was in.  Ohhh, dramatic. 

The above picture is one of the earliest drawings I have of him from like '93 or so, and yes he's getting his arm cut off.  Man was I obsessed with tiger stripes and spikes or what?

Anyway, I did a few more doodles and then sort of stopped for a while as my friends sort of cooled off on the comic company idea.  Well in the interim I revived the character for a contest that Erik Larsen held in the pages of Savage Dragon for featuring a fan created character in the comic.  I revamped his suit and gave him a spear instead of a shield and did my best on coloring him with prismacolors before shipping it off to Mr. Larsen (of course with a SASE included as I didn’t want to lose the beautiful artwork I was submitting.)  Well needless to say I didn't win as Larsen was instead enamored with a giant Popeye-talking lobster character, but then I was so just making an Image character stable clone that I'm not in the least surprised.  Here is that picture.  I was so happy with how the gradient-like color acme out on his energy seepage.

What I think is kind of funny is that when I got the picture back it had this weird brown smudge on the back.  I was so pissed at Larsen for years after that, like he had no respect for my Art or something.  What a weenie I was.

Well sometime after that I came up with my second original character, Justice.  Basically on day while a friend of mine and I were bored we cut out the sleeves of an old T-Shirt to make Luchador like masks for our faces.  I painted a big J on mine and called it my Justice mask.  Well it sort of stuck with me and I morphed the idea into a character who was just a basic Joe everyman who had, had just about enough of the evil that the world had to dish out and decided to become a vigilante.  He donned the T-Shirt sleeve mask and named himself Justice and went out at night to battle injustice on the streets with a baseball bat.  Oh how Casey Jones can I get.  It was around that time that I refined Blast once again and drew both characters with my new and improved prisamacolor and micron pen skills.

It was around then that I also decided to revive my Yoo Hoo Conspiracy story, so I wrote up a manifesto to explain the whole thing, because that's what dorky comic nerds do.

It was at this point that I was sure I would actually publish this in comic form and I agonized over 7 pages of a comic.  I say agonized because I have a seriously hard time with drawing the same character over and over again and having him look the same.  I'm just not that good at sequential art. Here are pages 5-7, all that I could find that’s left of the comic.

I was so influenced by the Tick and Ambush Bug at this point that I was trying to stick humor in where my drawing abilities failed me like the "no background" gag.  What the hell was I thinking?  I also envisioned that at this point Blast would be old and fat and still stuck in his suit to keep him alive so he'd eat and sleep in the costume.

That drunken character is Justice, who I also tweaked just a bit to be a lush.  Why?  I don't know, I guess it just seemed funnier that way.  I also introduced a Max Hedrom-like narrator character at this point to make comments on stuff like the contents of Blast's fridge.

I stopped on the Lillputlian because I didn't know where to go from there and because drawing 7 consecutive pages back then was a ginormous achievement in my eyes.


The picture above is the last time I drew either of the Yoo Hoo Conspiracy characters, all Batman and Robin like even.  It was at this point that the story (of making the comic not the actual comic story) became the most interesting to me because it was around then when I started going to college.  Having full run of the computer lab I put up my first archaic website that was an explanation of the entire Yoo Hoo Conspiracy, though for some odd reason I forgot to add anything about it actually being a comic book.  Well about three months after I had the site up I was contacted by someone very high up in the Yoo Hoo company about the site.  No on the one hand it was kind of scary because some huge company was watching my Yoo Hoo movements.  On the other it was completely flattering because the guy found the premise of Yoo Hoo trying to take over the world through colorblindness funny.  We had a few conversations through letters and even though I never did find out what the "Destroy All Colors" deal was on the packaging, I did receive a bunch of free swag like pencils, a T-Shirt and a butt-load of stickers.

I pretty much gave up on the idea then as college mixed with a full time job meant that I didn't have time to draw.  So what were you doing a decade ago?

I busted out the baby book this weekend so that I could scan it all in for posterity and I found some interesting stuff.

Apparently I was a freaking math genius in my elementary school days! (I wonder why I failed Trig so badly in high school…)


In the 80’s, one would often be rewarded for the ideals that make us good people as you can see in the below example.


So I guess I was a Math Superstar with a “Good Attitude?, good enough to be rewarded and showered with certificates of achievement! I should staple these to my resume…

Just a quickie. I'm trying to come up with a character to introduce all my food related posts. Nothing to complicated, maybe in the vain of Timer from those 80's Saturday morning PSA's Time for Timer (you know that big blob of cheese with a hat and cane that "Hankered for a hunka, a slab, a slice, a chuncka, hankered for a hunka cheese".) He also showed kids across America how to make a wagon wheel out of cheese and crackers ('cause our brains were obviously too cartoon addled to know how to put a piece of cheese on a cracker) and how to freeze juice in an ice-cube tray with plastic wrap and tooth picks to make Popsicles. Well anyway, I want to have something in that vain for my food reviews and stuff.

Well I was trying to think of odd foodstuffs that I was enamored with as a child that might make good mascots and I thought I'd mention a few since I was thinking about 'em.

First, the preferred cracker in my household growing up were (and still are) Cheez-Its. My mom and I would snack on 'em while watching movies in the wee hours of the morning and both of us coveted the much more tasty burnt Cheez-Its. You were usually guaranteed to get a few per box back in the days when anomalies still happened on the production floor. Nowadays every single Cheez-It is identical and perfectly cooked which sort of takes some of the fun out of 'em.

Next, and about the same rarity, were the fabled double pretzel sticks. You know those two pretzel sticks that were fused together and usually a lot crunchier, sometimes rocklike in density. Finding a double stick always sent me into happy convulsions and I'd be reluctant to eat it for fear of never finding another.

Last we have the rarest of the bunch, the solid clump of Cool Ranch Dorittos flavoring. Every once in a blue moon there would be this ginormous clump of Cool Ranch flavoring at the bottom of the bag that was about an inch in diameter. It was slightly moist and packed a flavor that was so intense that it had the possibility of sending one into a sodium-induced coma. I've only seen one of these buggers twice in my lifetime, one was of the fabled Cool Ranch variety and the other was a concentrated ball of Hot flavoring from the Golden Flakes Hot Chips variety.

Though I'm leaning toward the clump of flavoring as the mascot since it resembles Timer (as he is a weirdly shaped clump of cheese I assume) I'm thinking that it might be hard to convey that idea in simple cartoon animated style. I might just go with the double pretzel because of it being a lot more common and easy to draw. I'm also toying around with using a frozen burrito or that foil flavoring packet found in ramen noodles, though both of those were staples in my teen years and not so much nostalgia for the 80's.

Here is the finished alternative foil pouch drink opening instructions diagram.

Click Here to Enlarge!

Maybe I should put this on a T-Shirt...

So I'm thinking about the direction of this blog in terms of it being interesting to anyone other than me.  I want to provide something of interest besides the podcasts which are infrequent at best.  Here's my first idea.  I have a pebble of artistic talent.  A smidge, a morsel, a gerkin sized bit of talent.  Anyway, I also have an interest in pop art (as you can see in the link to my drawings on the left) but I haven't been in the mood to draw for quite awhile.  So maybe this can all converge.  The above "drawing" (well not really, it's just something I whipped up in photoshop) is the opening panel to...well what ever comes of the idea I just had a couple hours ago.  Hopefully more will come...

Do you remember those hot days in the middle of summer?  When you were running around in circles for two hours for no reason other than to make yourself sickly dizzy?  The sweat pouring down your face, huge pit-stains spreading under your arms and in the middle of your back, and you were so thirsty that you'd grab the nearest hose (didn't matter if it was your own house or not) and even if the opening was stuck in the mud, you'd turn it on full blast and take a big swig?  You were just about to die from heat stroke and you were seeing blurry and in double when you'd hear that faint jingle, that familiar tune that you just couldn't place at first.  Just as you were questing your own sanity and if maybe it was just so hot that your earwax was melting, dripping like molten magma and buring though your ear drums, the jingle solidified into a song.  Here We Go 'round the Mulberrybush, or maybe Pop Goes the Weasel (if you live in the UK or Australia maybe it was Greensleeves), and instantly you knew that the day was about to get a lot brighter.

It was the ice cream man, and he was rushing to your aid just in time to bring you what you needed, what you craved.  Be it a rocket pop or a strawberry shortcake bar, an orange cream pop, or maybe even a frozen lemonade.

For me, those first few bars of Pop Goes the Weasel meant one thing and only one thing, Screwballs.  I'm not the biggest fan of the sweet things in life, I'm more of a salty dog, but if there is one sweet somehting that I'd do backflips, or maybe even kill for, it was a Screwball.  Softish cherry sherbert in a plastic cone with a magical gumball hidden in the bottom of the cup.  There was nothing else like it on this earth.  No sherbert from the store every tasted to perfect, so Screwball like.  And the gum was just the frozen rock hard little bonus at the end of the experience. 

One of the things I really miss about my childhood is the ice cream truck coming 'round on the weekends and all summer long.  I never saw one again after I left Florida in '90, though occassionaly I'd hear the chime while driving somewhere, and it always led to a frantic detour to try and track it down to no avail.  Then one day last year, at a very low moment, when the apartment building my fiancee and I lived in for four years burnt down and we were scared and tired and camped out at her father's house, while we were taking in a stray dog, and had absolutly no comfort at all, a ray of amazing sunshine fell upon us.  As we were going out that next moring after the fire we both heard that too familair jingle and stopped and just looked at each other.  I think we even both said something like "Holy Crap, the Freaking Ice Cream Man!" in unison.

Low and behold, he brought to us the fabled Screwballs, and both of us, against out lust for more, just bought one.  It was the best Screwball I'd even eaten.  At the end it was very bittersweet, because we don't get ice cream men in our apartment complex, and I knew that was the last Screwball I'd have for a very long time.  It's going on a year and two months, and a week doesn't go by that I don't stop for a second and listen for the jingle.

First off, let me just say that another podcast is on the way, so if anyone cares, um...., be awares, and stuff.  Probably won't record it until the weekend after next, and it'll most likely be on horror related nostalgia, per an idea from my first listener to write to me.  Anyways....

So somehting that I've really been into recently is sound recordings that I remember from my childhood.  I didn't have much in the way of music that I was really into, mostly Michael Jackson (the Thriller album in particular), the Beach Boys, the Monkees, and a copy Weird Al's first album on tape that my sister gave me.  But I did have a small collection of records that I would listen to over and over.  The majority of these were read-along record books, most of which were Star Wars related.  My favorites by far were what we'd now call part of the "extended universe", or stories that took place outside of the movies.  The two that I had were Planet of the Hoojibs and Droid World.  I must have listened to these a million times.  I had this weird set up, there was a record player in my closet that was plugged into an outlet out side of the closet, but I'd go in there and shut the door and listen to records in the dark (to sort of help get into the story without having my eyes wander around the room distracting me.)

Well when I began the hunt for all things childish I had no problem finding pictures of the covers to these record books, but I had a hell of a time trying to find the actual sound files themselves.  I haven't had a record player in like 16 years, so I didn't want to buy one just to rebuy and listen to the old vinyl copies that you can no doubt find on ebay (like I've stated before, though I am super obsessed with nostalgia, I have a mighty hard time plunking any money into the hobby.)  So I kept my ears open and didn't have any luck.

That is until last week when I stumbled upon this site.  Oh my freaking gwad.  It was like hitting the Star Wars record book jackpot mega lottery.  Like the dude who runs Scar Stuff, this guy deservices a nobel prize in nostalgia.  So with out further ado, I present much record book goodness.

Star Wars Planet of the Hoojibs

Star Wars Droid World

And for fans of the 12 minute adaptations of the original trilogy, or for those who want to learn about colors and shapes or their ABC's the Star Wars way Here you go: Star Wars, Empire, Jedi, Colors and Shapes, and finally ABC's.

 

A blog entry a day, day the third.  So in searching for a pictoral history of nostalgia for my childhood, as I do more than is probably healthy, I kept hitting a brick wall on one subject.  Clothes.  Now this makes complete and total sense to me, because really, who keeps 20 year old T-Shirts and shorts, and their old worn out Vans shoes?  Well okay some weird people do, but hardly any of them scan in images or take pictures of them and post them on the internet.  In particular I'm looking for a picture of a particular pattern of Vans shoes, they were midnight blue with black bats all over them. 

But I digress, because the point of this post is not to keep the search on, but to shed some light on stuff that I did find.  In particular the one item of clothing that I wanted to find were images of the Town & Country Surf and Skate T-shirts that had the various cartoon characters like good 'ole Thrilla Gorilla as you see to the right.  After a year of looking, I finally stumbled upon the correct phrase in a google search and I found Steven Azar's website which is like the grail of T&C T-shirt designs.  Steven designed and drew the art for a bunch, if not all, of these shirts during this period of the 80's.  I think I had all but two of these growing up and I loved them to pieces.  In fact the first game my parents bought me for my NES game system was T&C Surf and Skate (screen shots here, here, and here) probably because I wore the shirts so much.

So for anyone who had a soft spot for these shirts, here are some more of the designs, here and here.

So I want to start writing in this blog more, and I want to podcast more, and I also want to attain a state of perfect happiness in terms of DVD ownership and the nagging need to buy more damn DVD's.  You can't have everything, unless everthing was sold in one of those toy in a plastic bubble vending machines in the front of most grocery stores, and even then you probably wouldn;t get the super cool everything that looked a lot like a mini rubix cube, a real metal watch, or that tiny transistor radio.  No you'd probably get the everything that looks a whole lot like speckled super ball or a glob of super gloop.  Or possible even a generic Little Homie.  Anyway, what I'm getting at is that out of the three, I'll probably be able to blog the most.

So here is the first of hopefully a full month worth of daily posts that will delve a little deeper into my sad world.  Up first, two prized possessions.  The first of which is to the right and it's probably my mostest favorite thing int he whole wide world (fiancees don't count in this game.)  It's my Movie Monsters paperback book that my friend Darrel gave me sometime in high school for god knows what reason.  Now this alone is a shining example of a prized possession, a gift from a friend, a friend I haven't seen or spoken to in quite a long time.  And it's got tons of cool black and white pictures of monsters in it, which is always a bonus.  But the fun doesn't stop there.  See I was quite broke in high school, so broke in fact that I had a regular lending game going on with another friend to get the money I needed for comics.  See, my friend Steve would loan me $10 (he had an after school job) so that I could get caught up on all the comics I couldn't afford.  Then I'd not eat lunch the whole week and use the loot earned from that to pay him back.  I was always a week behind though.  Anyway I was so broke, broke enough that I couldn't afford a yearbook.  Since I didn't have a picture in it anyway (I ditched that day), I decided to use the Movie Monster book as my yearbook.

Man, people thought I was a idiot, though not quite as much as an idiot as I was in middle school when I stole my algebra book at the end of the year and used that as my yearbook.  Anyway, now there are three damn fine reasons to live me this book.  But my friends, the fun does not end there.  I decided to start bring it with me to the annual comic convention I went to, Dragon Con., and I started having a bunch of artists and such sign it as well.  So all over this littel monster book is the scrawlings of such great people as Bernie Wrightson, David Prowse, Art Adams, and the super cool Ben Edlund, not to mention two high school crushes, one annoying vegan, and all of my bestest friends (or some junk.)  Here's what it looks like, here, here, here, and here.

My second most prized possession is very similar in that it was an item that I've had a whole mess of people sign.  It's also near and dear to me because of what it is, and what it is, is a can of Spam.  See because I was a dork in high school I had complete artistic license to carry around cans of Spam and treat them like pets.  I even made leashes for them.  Well one year at Dragon Con I was awarded a can of Spam from the Con Suite, a room set up with free drinks and shitty snacks, simple because I was the only one who wanted it.  To eat?  No.  To take around the Con floor to get it signed.  I got in all kinds of scraps over it too.  Jim Steranko cursed me out for trying to get him to sign it, while a a dude in a Spawn costume who worked for Todd MacFarlane called me fat while he was signing it, and Glen Danzig?  He was not all that thrilled to sign it, though he did, which is a testament to what he'll put up with for the fans.  All in all it added an amazing level of fun to an otherwise dull Con and years later a lot of the people who signed it remembered me when I came by their booths, so it was surely memorable.  Here is the infamous can, Here and Here.

So anyway, I guess that is a window into my autograph habit, which has almost completely lost interest for me.  Every once in awhile I'll get a book signed, but I pretty much stopped standing in line for people's ink stains years ago.  You know there is only so many times you can have a childhood hero sign something than look up at you as you tell them that they meant so much to you and then not get sad when they ask for their $10.

So I finally got my boxes of the new Garbage Pail Kids in. I spent Friday evening ripping 'em open and putting sets together. As far as the new series go, this is probably the best yet. The quality of the art and concepts has been pretty bad, specifically in ANS2, but it's been getting better with each set and this set is the closest to the original GPK yet. The chase cards were pretty good this time too consisting of 9 Magnets and 15 Alphabet cards (which are alphabet stickers that have garbage pail kids bent around the letters.) I miss the scratch and sniff cards of the last three series, but these are that bad and I managed to put a master set together with just two boxes which isn't that bad at all.