Wild and Crazy Kids

Sometimes you're watching a show and you can almost imagine what the network producers were thinking when they conceived of the inane idea. In the case of Wild and Crazy kids, I'm willing to venture that they were thinking, "What would be the easiest program to produce with universal appeal to children that costs us next to nothing?" The idea was marginally brilliant. A game show-esque format with a messiness factor guaranteed to lure in young viewers while concurrently forgoing any sort of prize or reward for the victors. It was more or less a case of take-everything-in-the-Nickelodeon-back-room-and-office-fridge-leftovers, arrange them haphazardly in a field, release a slew of cheaply t-shirted children, and let the games begin.

Wild and Crazy Kids seems like one of those one-in-the-morning ideas, the sort of which were particularly common to Nickelodeon during the 1990s. They simply planned some inconsequential events that were simultaneously sloppy and required little to no innate skill, handed out some t-shirts, and then completely snub the winners by offering no tangible goods in the means of congratulations. In days of consolatory Carmen Sandiego Gumshoe prize packs and all-expenses paid trips to Universal Studios, this was in somewhat bad form.They could have at least sent the winners packing with a Gak pack.

I always had a thing for Donny. Didn't you? Seriously. Look at him.

Luckily, the show was not particularly self-referential or self-examing. It never once alluded to the fact that hordes of children were covered in chocolate pudding and shaving cream with no foreseeable purpose or aim. It was, simply put, a chance for kids to be both Wild and Crazy. Oh, and they also got a free t-shirt, though inevitably they left the show with their trademark shirts covered in slime or pie.

Nickelodeon in the 90s was huge on slime and pie. There's no real discernible evidence as to why these were the prevailing super sloppy weapons of choice, but we just accepted that any misstep would lead to someone being doused in green slime or cream pied in the face. It was just sort of a given. Miss the baton pass in a relay? Slime and pie. Strike out at Dizzy Bat Home Run Derby? Slime and pie. Wipe out slip n' sliding? Well, you get the idea.

Each half-hour show featured three games of relatively equal insanity and inanity. The games usually went a little something like this:




As you can see, the production values on these shows were somewhat less than cinematic. The show looked more like a home movie of kids doing relay races at a school picnic than an actual show airing on a reputable children's network. As I said, it obviously wasn't costing them the big bucks, unless we're seriously underestimating the cost of spaghetti and tarps here.

Wild and Crazy Kids had three young hosts, with Omar Gooding and Donnie Jeffcoat emceeing both seasons and Annette Chavez and Jessica Gaynes each putting in one season. The hosts usually put on some sort of skit or teaser at the beginning of each show, which I once found hilarious but now believe to be potentially a bit grating. They also provided the commentary, taking very seriously elements like instant replays and play-by-plays. This sounds much more serious until you realize they were instantly replaying ketchup and mustard jousting.

The show was not without its gimmicks. They indulged in the occasional cheap cross-over inter-show challenge, such as in this episode with Marc Summers of Double Dare fame. Since the shows had a lot of shared underlying themes (read: slime and pie), it was not quite a stretch to envision the union of their Physical Challenge courses.



They also had a prime opportunity to hawk their very own Nickelodeon products, such as the oft-coveted Moon Shoes. After all, what's a cheaply produced aimless game show without a product placement thrown in now and again?



These guys were also sort of partial to making people spin around on a bat for dizzying impact. For some reason, all of these wild and/or crazy stunts seemed at least somewhat more humorous when the element of nausea and vertigo were in the picture. I doubt I'd make it through this segment without a Dramamine or one of those sea-band bracelets*.

Wild and Crazy Kids played it to the point. There was no moral of the story nor was there any remote educational value. The kids did not come away better people** by popping shaving cream-filled balloons while wearing moon-shoes. It was pure, guilty fun that never made any subtle attempt to market itself as anything other than just that. It may not have been the most affective shows of its time, but it's certainly a contender for one of the messiest***.




*I do not official endorse these products, but they do keep me from vomiting while deep-sea fishing or on glass bottom boats. I imagine a similar effect would have been had as a Wild and Crazy kid **To my knowledge. If you participated as a contestant, feel free to contradict this allegation ***Did I mention the slime and pie?

Warheads

The 90s were the age of extreme. Extreme sports, extreme caffeinated beverages, and even extreme candy. That's right, extreme candy. Though it may seem counter-intuitive to assume a candy can possess daring, risk-takable qualities, the 90s made it happen. Sure, you had to endure a great deal of pain and discomfort, tooth enamel loss, and burned off taste buds...wait a minute. Where was I going with this?

Ah, yes. Extreme. The simple qualifier that made children and teenagers delight in torturing their taste buds, no questions asked. Children are a wonderfully flexible market demographic. If through marketing you can somehow manage to convince children that intentionally putting themselves in a great deal of tear-inducing pain is a means of proving themselves on the playground, then by all means do so. After all, convincing children that something is cool is a hell of a lot easier than adults, and takes far less logical explanations.

Hence was the case with Warheads. If measured on a quality scale devoid of context, these hard candies would have relatively little value. They were eye-poppingly sour, made possible by all sorts of unnatural acidic ingredients created in labs. Warheads contained very little in the way of anything found in nature. The experience of eating a Warhead in itself was not innately pleasurable. Rather, advertisers had managed to convince us that our endurance of their sour taste was in some way to scale with our general coolness reputation.


In retrospect the notion is completely ridiculous, but as children we swore by it. Playground peer pressure quickly swept the nation as kids inexplicably agreed that the ability to consume an unbearably sour candy was the hallmark of coolness. Never mind that these babies were named for a form of nuclear weaponry. Never mind that the packaging pictured a mushroom cloud erupting behind a struggling, miserable looking mascot with bulgy eyes and puckered lips. We wanted our sour candies and that was that.

Indeed, these suckers required a warning label. Though not found on original packaging, current Warhead wrappers sport the following caveat:

"Eating multiple pieces within a short time period may cause a temporary irritation to sensitive tongues and mouths."

Right. So what you're telling me is right there on the package, it indicates that this will be a horrifying unpleasurable experience certain to disrupt the normal balance of my natural mouth environment. Sounds like something I'd like to eat!

Warheads came in numerous varieties such as Mega and Atomic. In early days, the company even had the bright idea to manufacture a "hot" version of the candy. This experiment proved intensely disgusting, but remarkably did nothing to detract from the strength of the Warhead brand. You're telling me you're willing to continually put your trust in the people who arbitrarily believed that you as a child consumer would delight over "Hot Grape?" Give me a break. I've got a bottle of Dimetapp and a microwave at home, buddy. Nice try.

In the spirit of cough syrup, Warheads are now available in liquid form. There's nothing quite like eye-dropping some painfully sour substance onto your tongue, droplet by droplet. Yum!

The underlying principle behind the explosive popularity of Warheads lay largely in children's inherently competitive nature. A bitter and sour candy alone is not particularly desirable, but a bitter and sour candy that allows you to go head-to-head (well, Warhead to Warhead) with cocky classmates? Sign me up. It was peer pressure at its very finest. Warhead-eating contests became a common phenomenon, even boasting a widely-accepted list of universal rules for sour endurance.

The candies were also prime targets for absurd urban legends based on the questionably chemical candy components and tongue-burning taste. We heard rumors that children had burned off all of their taste buds or lost all sense of taste from overexposure to Warheads. You have to admit if you've ever managed to get through the sour coating of a Warhead that that seems vaguely plausible. These legends fell somewhere on the believability spectrum between pop-rocks-and-coke and sitting-too-close-to-the-tv-will-make-you-blind. It seemed possible. The idea that the mere passive act of eating a candy could be daring and dangerous and could cement your reputation was too good to pass up. Hey, I'd be willing to sacrifice a few taste buds if I could be Four Square King every day at recess. Just sayin'.



In reality, the only thing you were proving was that you were gullible enough to believe that enduring a disgusting sour coating for 30 seconds was in some way correlated to your social standing. Sure, it came with the added bonus of your overenthusiastic classmates cheering you on and the almighty title of Warhead conqueror, but it wasn't exactly a marketable skill. I have yet to go on a job interview where the boss has said, "Your resume looks great, everything seems to be in order. Oh, just one more thing--how are you with mega atomic Warheads?"

Regardless of its lack of application, this level of pain threshold was bound to make you at the very least a minor classroom celebrity. So embrace the lip-puckering sourness. It may not be particularly palatable, but it's still better than the alternative.

Memorable Late 80s and Early 90s Board Games

All images via boardgamegeek.com

In the 80s and 90s, a funny thing happened. While classic boardgames and their reformulations still reigned supreme, things got a little experimental down at the ol' toy production offices. It seemed as if any and every idea that anyone had ever conceived in a bout of confusion or insanity could be swiftly and cleanly (sort of) translated into a game soon available for purchase at your local toy store.

Some of these ideas were more innovative than others, implementing newfound technologies and novelties into a board game concept. Others erred slightly on this side of lazy. Either way, children consumed them with relatively equal enthusiasm and zeal. Put it in a commercial during Saturday morning cartoons or a block of solid Nickelodeon programming and it's nearly inevitable that kids will go begging for it.

Here are just a few of the crazy ideas that inexplicably came to fruition from the late 80s to early 90s. Don't say I didn't warn you--some of these commercial jingles can lodge themselves pretty firmly in your brains.


Thin Ice



Not to be confused by its 1968 ice-breaking board game predecessor Don't Break the Ice, Thin Ice used indefinitely cheaper materials. For one, instead of solid, sturdy ice blocks, we were dealing with a flimsy piece of Kleenex. That's right, every box of Thin Ice came complete with a little pocket pack of facial tissues.

The game set-up involved two stacked rings, one a water-filled marble chamber and the other the home of the tightly-stretched tissue. Using comically oversized tweezers (designed to look like Eskimos, if that makes any sense to you), the players would take turns taking a water soaked marble from the lower chamber and gently placing the dripping sphere onto the tissue layer. The player for whom the tissue breaks is the loser, meaning winning really only takes place by default. It was sort of like Jenga, only completely different and involving a soggy Kleenex cleanup component.

The commercial jingle was pretty baffling as it featured an incompatible surf-themed tune. There was no attempt to connect or cover for the disparity between the jingle and the premise of the game. We were left to ponder it along with our parents, who wondered why they could have saved their fifteen bucks and simply given us their old marbles and a pack of soggy tissues.




Monster Mash



You can't rag on these games for lack of creativity. Lack of common sense and grounding in reality, perhaps, but creativity and innovation was certainly present. Monster Mash was actually a fairly clever game, complete with a newfangled "monster maker" apparatus. Simply depress the button on the top of the monster maker, and the eye, mouth, and body images would shuffle quickly, producing numerous varieties of cuddly purple monster.



Each of these monster formulations had an image on a corresponding playing card, laid out on the floor in front of the players. Each player had a hand shaped suction cup-tipped "thwacker" (yep, a thwacker) with which to slap (well, thwack) cards. In each turn, a player would press the button on the monster maker and it would jumble the images to produce a novel monster. The first player to secure the appropriately matching monster card with their thwacker wins the round. The player with the most cards at the end of the game wins! Crazy, no?

I was able to finagle the original 1987 ad but as usual with these late-80s games, the quality is admittedly poor. Very poor. You can definitely gather the overall memory-jogging idea of it, though:




Shark Attack



Mm, nothing like terrifying children with crazy-eyed, enormously toothed killing machines. Actually, the automated shark was pretty slow-moving, but the suspense was definitely there. Back that baby up with some of that Jaws theme music and prepare to see some serious shark-induced tears.

The game was fairly simple. At the outset, each player selected an adorable little fishy that more likely than not would end up as cruelly chomped shark grub by the end of the gameplay. The game included dice with colored dots on each face representing a colored fish. When your color came up, you were allowed to move your fish a measly one spot out of the reach of the hungry, laboriously circling shark. The last fish left uneaten wins. I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture that this game ended in tears for many of its youngest players.

The commercial features a predictably annoying jingle with prime cheesy 90s lyrics:




Pizza Party



Introduced in 1987, Pizza Party was a new spin on the classic Memory game. The concept seemed to rest on two simple but undeniable truths about children: they have an undying love for both delicious pizza and goofy anthropomorphic characters. Slap a face on that mushroom, a sly grin for your pepperoni, and kids will eat it up. Hopefully not literally as the pieces were made of cardboard, but I'm not going to say I haven't seen it tried.

The object of the game was to be the first player to successfully fill your entire slice with a single topping by selecting by memory from upside-down toppings in the center of the gameplay. Ah, to teach children the joy of monotony and...what's the opposite of diversity? University? That doesn't seem right. I may have to get back to you on that one.

In the above picture, the full pizza is assembled in all of its delicious board game glory. I personally always thought the pepperoni and the mushroom sort of had something going on, what, with all those flirtatious sidelong glances. Regardless of inter-topping romances, the game was probably best remembered for having an incredibly irritating, repetitive jingle. Though YouTube and its retrocentric users have failed to provide me with any high quality footage, someone did helpfully upload the video taped off of their TV. Please excuse the quality. Of the picture, that is, that jingle comes through loud and clear and is certainly inexcusable.





Grape Escape



You have to love the tagline: "The squish 'em, squash 'em, squoosh 'em game!" Perhaps somehow vaguely linked to the wine-making experience, Grape Escape features pliable clay grapes attempting to make it through the game without meeting certain grape fate at any number of grape torture stations. The game came complete with different colors of clay to denote different players and adorable chubby grape molds with which to form your game piece. If your grape was smushed, you had to form a new grape and start from the beginning.

The object and premise of the game are pretty shaky, but it wisely banks on the notion that children garner pleasure from destruction and mayhem. It probably didn't do a whole lot for conscience-building, but then again they were only play-doh grapes. A little overzealous masochism never hurt anyone. Right?

The over-the-top reactions of the children of the commercial are truly priceless:



The game is also admittedly; similar in concept and materials to its fellow 90s morbid clay-squashing game, Splat!:




So there you have it. While the late 80s and early 90s board game producers were not necessarily churning out the most educational and thought-provoking of board games, they certainly demonstrated that they had a knack for understanding children. Mayhem, destruction, being eaten, slapping things, eating oily foods...they had our number all right. Perhaps it's not the most flattering reflection of our generation, but we certainly had a good time.