Magic Eye

It's a well-known fact that all children enjoy staring at a two dimensional image for so long that their eyes begin to glaze over and water uncontrollably. Their heads may ache, their eyes may lose focus, and their patience may wear paper thin, but nothing will impede them from their ultimate visual goal. Though usually it is near impossible to force a child to stay still, set one in front of a Magic Eye book or poster and prepare to be amazed: not by the Magic we were promised, but rather by the level of maddening concentration associated with capturing it.

There was nothing worse than being the one kid who couldn't see the hidden image. If you were ocularly challenged in a manner that hindered your useless ability to view a supposedly three dimensional image amongst a repetitive sea of two-dimensional images, you were relegated to endless ridicule and social alienation. God help you if you suffered from the curse of poor binocular disparity, as you were likely headed for a sad and lonely existence devoid of exciting jump-from-the-page imagery. A seemingly pointless skill of blank staring suddenly set apart the Haves from the Have Nots.

In bookstores and classrooms across the nation, the same conversation was taking place between increasingly frustrated pairs of children:

Kid #1: Look at the picture.
Kid #2: Okay, I'm looking. (long pause) So, what's supposed to happen here?
Kid #1: You'll see something.
Kid #2: I'll see what?
Kid #1: Just look at it!
Kid #2: I am looking.
Kid #1: No, look past it.
Kid #2: Oh, I think I kind of...
Kid #1: Do you see it now?
Kid #2: Um, yeah, I think so.
Kid #1: So what is it?
Kid #2: A...whale?
Kid #1: Ugh, it's the Statue of Liberty. Man, you suck at these things.

(Kid #2 walks off with pounding eye strain-based headache and wounded pride)

And...scene.

Nobody really seemed to know how these things worked, and no one really seemed to care. The real test of 90s childhood street credibility was an uncanny capacity to descramble austereogramatic images. I know, it makes perfect sense. How else are we supposed to prioritize our social structure? Brains? Looks? Give me a break. It was Magic Eye or nothing.


The burning shame of not being one of the Chosen Ones was both crippling and inescapable. Living with the constant fear that our mothers' old adages of our crossed eyes forever sticking that way was not enough to deter us from staring intently until our brains were set to burst. We were determined that this would be the time that we would finally see what everyone was raving about. Those who were skilled in the ways of the Magic Eye were constantly coaching us, insisting that we were doing it wrong. Despite our protests of poor depth perception or an inability to visually construct convergent images, the Seers were neverendingly giving us all sorts of well-meaning contradictory viewing tips:

"Cross your eyes a little!"
"Eyeballs further apart!"

"Look to the left of it!"
"The other left!"

"Try to focus on one spot!"
"Don't focus your eyes on anything at all!"
"Try to look past it!"

That last one was always my favorite. Oh, you want me to look past it? I was foolishly looking at it. Alrighty, no problem. I knew this x-ray vision would eventually come in handy. I'll just gaze straight through the paper to the next page and I'll be set.

Unfortunately, this brand sarcasm was lost on our persistent Magic Eye instructors. After all, who cares about attitude when you've got magical pictures? Hopeful that their Magic Eye proteges may have finally blossomed into fully evolved viewers capable of perceiving 3D imagery, the Seers would eagerly ask, "Can you see it now?" Horribly embarrassed by our ineptitude, we would have to grudgingly admit time and time again that we still lacked the basic ogling skills necessary to deconstruct a series of seemingly meaningless colored dots. Try as we might, we would never be content to simply accept it as a moderately attractive example of pointilistic art. We knew it was so much more, and we wanted in.

Thankfully, our dear uploading friends over at YouTube have put together an instructional video of sorts. Don't let the soothing music and whimsical font fool you. This thing is serious. I followed the instructions to a T, but somewhere along the way my plan to see a glorious hidden three-dimensional image took a turn for the worst. It brought me right back to 1995, with all my Seeing friends telling me, "You're thinking about it too much. Just stare at it. Don't think about it at all." Right. Because telling me not to think too much about it leads me to think about it prominently and intently. Why don't you give it a try and see what you see:



Isn't that nice? They offer that little consolatory image at the end to offset the continued wrenching humiliation of those of us unable to see the 3D picture. If you can see it, congratulations. Your ocular capacity clearly exceeds mine, and I respect your visual superiority. However, if you failed to see the image, you are not alone; in fact, many of our celebrated television personalities faced the same issue, sometimes as a minor offshoot plotline!

On the original Ellen show, Ellen Degeneres desperately tried to hide her secret inability to Magic Eye. An episode of Seinfeld left George and others so transfixed by the Magic Eye task at hand that they were unable to complete the rudimentary functions of their everyday lives. And of course, we can't forget out beloved Friend Ross Gellar, who was chastised by the whole group for his incompetence at drawing out the 3D Statue of Liberty in one of the most popular Magic Eye pictures. US magazine has been right all along, they really are just like us! And they say there are no relatable characters in sitcoms.

Thus if you're feeling down about your lack of Magical Eyes, rest your weary sockets. You're among good company. For those of you who can see the mythical images, well, continue to bask in your transcendent ability. A skill you thought had been laid to rest years ago has briefly returned just long enough for you to reassert your superiority over the Blind. By tomorrow your so-called skill will reclaim its rightful place in obsolescence and your gloating rights will dissolve like the two dimensional dots from the three dimensional Statue of Liberty.

Enjoy it while it lasts, you lucky bastards.

Goosebumps Books

If you thought some of these other delightful 90's commodities were franchising machines, you've yet to meet the monster of all monopolies. That's right, I used "monster" as a shockingly low-grade horror book pun. Just deal with it.

Children growing up in the 90s had a fascination with all things spooky. Shows like Are you Afraid of the Dark? and all sorts of novelized ghost stories cast a spell over young consumers and instilled in them an unquenchable hunger for all varieties of horror media. The king cresting this horror wave was R.L. Stine, a virtual book-miller churning out book after book laced with a satisfying mix of satire, humor, ripped-off story lines, suprise endings, and fright.

R.L. Stine wrote innumerable pieces of young adult fiction, but most memorable and exhaustive were those in his Goosebumps series. In an age where book series dominated the youth literature marketplace, Stine was among the few series creators who actually authored all of his own books without the use of ghostwriters. I guess you could call R.L. Stine the leading ghostwriter. Okay, even I can't handle that one. Moving on.

Goosebumps books were a gratifying balance of things of that our parents did and did not approve. On one hand, we were reading chapter books and unquestionably though unintentionally gaining some sort of literary adroitness. On the other, we were scaring ourselves silly with undiluted, unwholesome trash that was prime fodder to give us bad dreams and night terrors. It was like tricking your parents into thinking you were learning something, while deep down you knew you were up to no good.

R.L. Stine openly acknowledged that many of his Goosebumps plot lines were lifted from old-school horror exploits such as the Twilight Zone. Thankfully, as children in the mid-90s had limited or no knowledge of the existence of 1960s sci-fi television series , they eagerly absorbed
these plot lines as fresh and new. Regardless of the story origins, the books were fairly un-put-downable. Stine was the master of plot twists, particularly at the end of a story. Even once we had read enough books in the series to recognize when we were being tricked or misled, we always took the bait and were outraged to find all of our supposedly sacrosanct suppositions had been for naught.

The best (and let's be honest, worst) example of this is Goosebumps #26: My Hairiest Adventure:


While of course the major underlying premise of these books are their absurdity, this one ostensibly reigns supreme and unleashes some fairly ridiculous plot meandering (if you haven't read the book or simply can't yet recall, that "unleash" is another marvelous pun. Really, I swear.) In short, a group of kids find an expired bottle of self-tanner and naturally decide to engage in a group lather session. Soon thereafter, they discover that they are sprouting hair all over their bodies and (mistakenly) believe the tanning solvent is to blame.

Suddenly, he starts seeing dogs all over town sporting the same hair/fur and eye colors as his previously human companions. Not only is this a bit spooky, it certainly explains why we had to read page-long description of Lily's clear green eyes and sandy hair. To think I'd erroneously speculated that Stine had developed a crush on his charming 7th grade female character.

Long(ish) story short, our lovable and assumably human protagonists aren't really kids at all...they're (wait for it!)...dogs! Yep, dogs. The details are so ridulous I don't think I'll extrapolate any further and rather just pause that with that Stine-esque chapter-end cliffhanger and leave you to your own book-finishing devices. Suffice it to say, we were surprised, if not a little confused.

Such was the way of Goosebumps. Just when we believed we had it all figured out, Stine would throw in an alien friend or a giant blobular monster to throw us off the trail. The real beauty of these books were their window to escapism; they did not need to be grounded in reality or even make sense. We loved them unconditionally, and were even willing to accept dozens of unwarranted sequels.

Of course, like any profitable 90s franchise, books were never enough. Some of our favorite stories were adapted for TV by the now defunct Fox Kids network:



That's right, because what's more ominous in a series intro than manuscript pages flying dramatically out of an author's briefcase? We all understood that it was based on the book series, but thankfully producers chose to drive the point home with outlandish literality. Not to mention that the dog's glowing eyes look suspiciously like they were sloppily drawn in Microsoft paint. This baby's got Fox written all over it.

Despite the low-budget TV series, board games, and video game adaptations, the tried and true Goosebumps formula was in the books. While as adults we can certainly recognize the chintzy stories and plot twists, we can still appreciate our childhood worship of these books as sacred. Their adeptness at simultaneously entertaining us and scaring us out of our minds always kept us hungry for more.

So lay back, grab your tattered old copy of Night of the Living Dummy III, and take yourself back to a simpler time. A time when you were able to suspend your disbelief at the implausibility of not one, not two, but three families falling for the same dummy-comes-alive trick all over again. So long as each chapter formulaicly ends with someone letting out a bloodcurdling scream for no reason other than to set up a cliffhanger for the following chapter, all is right in the world.

Amazingly comprehensive reviews of Goosebumps books:
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Where's Waldo?

Oh, Waldo, how you continue to thwart our valiant search efforts. Despite your obvious penchant for flamboyantly candy cane striped red and white sweater/hat combos and your tendency to take along every possible piece of travel equipment on your obscenely crowded vacations, you still manage to boggle our minds with your mysterious whereabouts. In the original book, Waldo lugs along a walking stick, sleeping bag, mallet, drinking cup, binoculars, kettle, backpack, camera, snorkel, belt, another bag, and a shovel. Clearly, if he's going get lost in a crowd, he's got every imaginable amenity to walk, sleep, pound, drink, see, boil, carry, document photographically, dive, remain in pants, store more items, or dig his way out. That's right, it makes perfect sense.



Where's Waldo? originated as a British franchise under the name "Where's Wally?" Apparently, "Wally" is some sort of a British slang term that publishers feared would drive away eager young American Waldo-searchers with its distinctively red-coat recalling familiarity, so the only logical leap was to change the title to an equally unknown and unpopular name that in no way resonated with American youth. In our typical domineering American fashion, we pulled the rug from under the British Wally and U.S. Waldo sales quickly and consistently outstripped sales of the original. If that's not a legitimate way to assert our undeserved sense of national superiority, I don't know what is.

With "Waldo-mania" sweeping the country throughout the 1990s, there seemed to be no one without vested stake or interest in finding this bespectacled excursionist. There was something oddly if inexplicably satisfying about curling up with a big hardcover picture book and focusing on crowded, chaotic scenes until your eyes crossed. It wasn't just Waldo we were after, either; he brought with him a gang of of absurd cronies and/or nemeses. There was Wanda, Waldo's pal. Woof, his faithful canine companion. After that is where things got a bit weird.

There was Wizard Whitebeard, some sort of life coach/guru who was occasionally responsible for sending Waldo on his wacky expeditions. Then of course we had Odlaw, Waldo's bizarrely evil nemesis formulated from an inverted anagram of Waldo's name. He was nearly identical to the original Waldo only his clothing and glasses were of different colors, and he has a mustache. Even as children, we were aware that mustaches signified pure, unfettered evil (there was Hitler, Stalin, and Odlaw, and we were onto their mustachioed madness). We the readers were forced to infer that Odlaw was evil by his distinctive un-Waldoness, despite the fact that we never actually caught him doing anything more than lurking in the background.


And of course, there were the Waldo Watchers, because what bumbling vacationer would travel anywhere without their 25-member posse of lookalike devotees? That's right, Waldo had an entourage. These are clearly a cheap attempt by the authors to divert our eyes with Waldo-esque color patterns and hat-stylings, but were we really to believe that by the mid-90s Waldo had 100 faithful followers who joined him on every venture?

Silly characters aside, there were reasons that Waldo books held the top spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for a composite nearly-100 weeks. If nothing else, the books placated our parents with their hypnotizing ability to keep us unmovingly focused in a single spot for an extended period of time. Waldo had it all: books, comic books, cereal boxes, a short-lived magazine (with an impressive 2 issue run!), video games, and even a TV show. However, the plot-rich TV shows with only brief frozen-screen finding games interludes were never quite enough to hold our attention in the same way.

Despite the dozens of poorly-conceived franchising paths, the Where's Waldo? books were nothing less than a phenomenon. So long as we could continue our relentless searches for our beloved hero, all was right in the world. Like most 90s trends for children, the allure was not in the flashy effects or superfluous characters, but rather in the simplicity and forthrightness of the task at hand. There was no recapturing the magic of the moment of actually locating Waldo himself amidst a sea of impostors and villains.

So whether you grew up searching for Wally (UK) or Waldo (US), Valli (Iceland) or Walter (Germany), Effie (Israel) or Charlie (France), we were united in our common goal. No matter what you called him or where you lived in the world, we all knew Waldo as the greatest hidden holidayer of them all.

Scholastic Book Orders

There was no day like book-order day. It's crazy to imagine that book-order forms really drove the kids wild, but the love of these flimsy little pamphlets was irrepressible. Despite the fact that these books were available at local retailers everywhere, the idea that something would come to us in the mail at school and we could spend weeks anticipating it was almost too much to bear.

The best thing about book orders was not the order forms themselves, but rather the accompanying excitement of the purchase. Imagine, as a child, being able to select and buy something all on your own! Sure, your parents would have to fill out the form, write the check, and seal the envelope, but you brought it to school. The books arrived with a post-it with your name on it! Let's face it, as children we weren't big decision makers. We couldn't choose what we were going to eat for dinner or what time we would go to bed, but dammit we could pick our books and that was that.

Never mind that these books were educational. We usually found ways around that. There were always special "just for fun" books with no educational value whatsoever, and we hungrily devoured them. I specifically remember ordering a Full House Uncle Jesse's personal photo album. Just imagine! I, a mere third grader, could own Uncle Jesse's personal collection of photographs! In the days before I possessed the mental capacity to realize these "albums" were mass-produced, I actually believed that I owned a piece of history. Through my own good luck, book orders had allowed me to stumble upon a collection of pictures that Uncle Jesse had decided to mail to me and me alone! Take that, third grade peers!

Now of course we can look past our childhood frenzied enthusiasm to realize that at its core, Scholastic was really just a master of marketing to children. By distributing these in schools allowing the children to see these forms first, they put the kids in control. It was like programming children to pester and torment their parents until they finally gave in and wrote the check.

But in those days, we didn't see it that way. Aside from the obvious gratification of Christmas-morning-esque book-order deliveries, bringing in your book-order with all the right books checked off was a measure of your playground street cred. These book orders were ours, and we called the shots. As children, our level of autonomy was pretty limited, so we took it where we could get it.

And if where we could get it also threw in a boxed-set of Judy Blume books, it just made it all the sweeter.


Book-Orders in the news:
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