What Would You Do?

If you ever really need to know the answer to a question, here's a little tip from Nickelodeon circa 1991: lead in with a question word remixed on repeat. You may not find out what you would do, but you certainly have a better chance of ascertaining what what what you would do. You know. If faced with some sort of slime/pie type situation. The usual.

Yes, early 90s-era Nickelodeon was full of these handy tidbits of unconventional wisdom. Like their penchant for placing a germ-phobic obsessive-compulsive as host in not just one but two television shows whose underlying purposes were to cause disgusting uncontainable messes. Perhaps it was to Nickelodeon's credit that a hosting gig on their network was so highly coveted that even those with a disordered need for extreme constancy and cleanliness were willing to overlook their most basic anti-mess instincts. Not just any network held the power to persuade Marc Summers at the height of his inner OCD torment to host a show with the words "Super Sloppy" in the title.

Fortunately for Marc Summers, What Would You Do? was somewhat toned-downed in the super sloppy department in comparison to its sister show, Double Dare. I'm not sure this granted him any reprieve, but at least he was allowed a few brief moments of filming during which he was not coated head-to-toe in gooey green slime.



What Would You Do? was another of those magical Nickelodeon shows for which there was no reasonable explanation or justification. Children of the 90s, specifically those who grew up in a house with a cable TV hookup, were generally passionate about nonsensical programming. Nickelodeon demonstrated time and time again that they truly understood what kids were about; they managed to strike the perfect balance between recognizing the simplicity of entertaining children and not insulting their intelligence.

They also had a serious fixation on pies.

For some reason as of yet to be publicly declared and documented, the show included innumerable pie-themed features. While possibly derived from the original pie-in-the-face slapstick gag, What Would You Do? was determined to take this gimmick as far as whipped cream could possibly be flung. No pie stunt was too farfetched for this game show/interactive audience/wacky stunt television mash-up. Usually these pie shenanigans were tied to some sort of competition, but the reasoning was loose at most. There was no shortage of pie-centric hijinks, including but not limited to:

The Pie Slide
Sometimes, a straightforward name is best. The pie slide was, well, a pie slide. Contestants braved a regulation playground slide that culminated in an enormous vat of pie. Thankfully, they had the option of a head-first or feet-first dive. Full pie immersion ensued.



The Pie Pod
There's nothing like sitting in a chair, being covered with an enormous saran wrap-style tarp, and pelted directly with multiple pies, the number of which was based upon helpful audience input. Also popular was the Crowning Glory feature, which dropped additional pie on the participant's head.



The Pie Coaster
See Pie Slide. Replace "slide" with "coaster." Proceed.



The Pie Wash
Imagine if you will a car wash featuring an all-pie cast of cleaning supplies. Now remove the frame of the car and its mobile abilities. Congratulations! You've got a pie wash.



You've got to love that maniacal laughter by Marc Summers while issuing this pie sentence.

Clearly (or perhaps through pie-coated goggles) What Would You Do? could not be characterized by any conventional TV standards in its zany undertakings. The show frequently pitted adults and children against one another (in sometimes Double Dare-esque fashion), with the winning team holding the pie pronouncement power. Pie punishments could also be conveyed by means of the all powerful Wall o' Stuff. While the Wall o' Stuff had its benevolent side in which it dispensed freely the crappy What Would You Do? licensed merchandise to so-called lucky winners, it more often sent the contestant straight to meet their cream pie fates. The show also inexplicably had a "roving camera" segment featuring Candid Camera-style tomfoolery. As I said, the links between any of these segments were fairly difficult to ascertain; pie seemed to be the only element tying these things together.

Regardless of the lack of adherence to television norms, this show was beloved by children everywhere. Its sheer creativity was enough to captivate our young impressionable minds and forever instill within us a deep-seated love/fear relationship with a certain satisfyingly messy cloying confection. As What Would You Do? only filmed new episodes from 1991 to 1993, there is a lot to say for a show that can thrive through an oddly skewed rerun-to-new-show ratio. Because there were only 90 episodes produced, chances are all of us out there in 90s TV-land saw each of these pie-flinging episodes countless times during which we could ponder what indeed we would do in the place of these contestants. Whether you'd choose to brave the pie slide or take your chances on the Wall o' Stuff, What Would You Do? had a little something for everyone.

Everyone without whipped cream allergies, that is.


Check it out:
Pies on the Web: Dedicated to Pictures of People Getting Pies to the Face

Nickelodeon Gak

If there's one thing we know, it's that nothing entices a child like mysterious scientific compounds. If it's been whipped up in a beaker or heated over a Bunsen burner, I assure you, they would like a part of it. In fact, if you could just package any potentially toxic experimental remnants in your lab and ship them to Mattel and TYCO distribution centers nationwide, that would probably be easiest.

Gak was one of those inexplicable phenomenons that only children could understand. It served no direct purpose outside of our general distractability and bemusement. Gak was a perfect blend of slime and silly putty with whoopie-cushion-style talents. Suddenly, you had in your possession a messy, slimy, hyper-colored, fart-producing goo. As a child, what's not to love?

"Playing with" Gak could potentially pose an issue. There was nothing you could really do with Gak. It wouldn't maintain a shape like play-doh or silly putty, and it dried out easily if not tended to properly. Not to mention it made your hands smell terrible. Really, just awful. I don't know what they made that stuff out of, but it was remarkably potent. And God forbid you played with Gak within a 10 mile radius of carpeting. The consistency of Gak was rather drizzly and hence prone to all sorts of droppage. Many of us child Gak enthusiasts were forced to incur the wrath of livid parents upon the realization that we had just smushed a tubful of purple mystery goo into their padded berber.


The Nickelodeon/Mattel team was smart enough to realize that despite the obvious mesmerizing qualities of Gak, it would only hold a child's attention for so long on its own. Sure, the clever transparent plastic star-shaped containers (known as "Gak Splats") made it entertaining to re-squish the Gak back into its packaging, but squishy fart sounds alone can only take a toy so far. Luckily, they had conceived of a few other brilliant Gak-related devices from which to accelerate the franchise:

Observe, a commercial for the original Nickelodeon Gak:



As a service to all of you, I will forgo my limited sense of propriety and just come right out with it: I owned an inordinate number of these Gak splatting devices. They were incredibly simplistic in their design, and despite their giving use to the Gak substance, they still served no practical purpose. Let us explore, if you will, a few of the marvelous Gak tools by which we were endlessly entertained:

The Gak Inflator
This was an incredibly mechanical-looking device for its absolutely unnecessary existence. The major aim behind inflating Gak was to shove air into a thin pocker of Gak to produce a chewing-gum style bubble. You would simply insert the Gak, pump the device, and inflate a Gak bubble until it burst. This product deftly circumvented the question of "Why?" and went directly to the "Why not?" Why not inflate a bubble of flatulent goo? In fact, why not create a colorful plastic device with the specific intention of bubbling Gak? As an adult, you may see through this faulty (read: lack of) logic, but as a child it all made perfect, satifyingly-poppable sense.

The Gak Vac
A sort of inverse to the Gak inflator, this piece of toy equipment served the sole purpose of vacuuming up Gak into a chamber and subsequently spitting it back out with the press of a button. The more sadistic amon us would employ action figures on which to splat the aforementioned Gak. This was sort of an at-home version of Nickelodeon's classic sliming action. As a result, my Barbie's hair has yet to recover from it's green Gak deep-conditioning treatment.

The Gak Copier
Whenever I'm scribbling away on an etch-a-sketch or a Magnadoodle, I often think to myself, "You know what would be really super? If I could imprint this image temporarily onto a sticky rubbery substance." Luckily Mattel's telepathy department was hard at work that day and devised a device, so it seemed, to meet my specific doodling needs. The Gak copier allowed children to draw an image, close the device with a fresh coating of Gak on one side and the drawing on the other, and transfer the image onto the Gak. While the device was more of a glorified heavy-book-to-close-it-in, I would not recommend using a book from your own home by which to complete this copying. I know my parents certainly would not, after I ruined the M volume of our Encyclopedia Britannica. I just wanted to see if I could transfer the image of a manatee onto a wad of Gak. FYI, you can not.

Gak came in all sorts of other varieties; glow-in-the-dark, scented, multi-packs...the possibilities were truly endless. One key thing these Gak products all shared was the ubiquitous Gak-specific warning label:


I don't know if you were aware, but Gak is a trademarked product. I probably shouldn't even be using the word Gak, considering the amount of mini-TMs they have plastered on this thing. I can only imagine I'm infringing on their copyright by thinking about the product at all.

They certainly made good use of their bold, all-caps lettering capabilities. GAK IS NOT A FOOD PRODUCT. You have to sort of respect the way they put this directly after the phrase "Gak is non-toxic." It's like telling Gak-crazed childen, "Sure, this stuff may not kill you on contact, but please refrain from eating an entire Splat of it."

It's also very kind of them to include directions for how to re-moisturize your disgusting, stringy, dried-up cornhusk-esque Gak. Simply "work in" some water! Perhaps it's just me, but the phrase "work in" seems unnecessarily gross and potentially graphic. Why can't we just add a teaspoon of water? Mix with a teaspoon of water? No, that will not do; it's preferable to massage in that water gently and tenderly.

Oh, and by the way, don't even THINK about playing with Gak on, well, anything. I can understand the carpeting part, but varnished and unvarnished surfaces? Isn't that, um, everything? I may be mistaken here, but I assume that if it's not varnished, it's unvarnished. In what sort of an environment is it safe to play with Gak? An anti-gravity simulator? I suppose the cleanup would be simple. Just use the Gak Vac!

Also, dry cleaning will not remove Gak. Don't even try it, buster. All hope is lost. We warned you about playing with Gak on surfaces, didn't we?

Despite all of these warnings, we still craved Gak splats with a near-religious fervor. Sure, those warnings could be a bit ominous to adults, but hey, we were kids. All we cared about was sliming GI Joes and producing endlessly hilarious Gak flatulence.

But never, ever on the carpet.


Check it out:
How to make your own Gak

Salute Your Shorts

Does the name "Zeke the Plumber" send chills of terror down your spine? Do you still wonder what happened to the buried treasure of ex-counselor Sarah Madre? Do you continue to lose sleep wondering about the appearance and whereabouts of mysterious camp owner, Dr. Kahn? Does the seemingly innocuous phrase "awful waffle" make you wince in pain?

Well, you may be a Salute Your Shorts junkie.

Don't worry, though, you're not alone. Many of us children of the 90s suffer a similar affliction. There was a wonderfully effective cure available briefly in the 90s that aired Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. Unfortunately, the treatment is no longer available and those of us still suffering withdrawal are forced to self-medicate with YouTube clips. You can put yourself on the waiting list for long-term treatment, but the outlook isn't good.

In a way, we all grew up at Camp Anwanna. We had all of our favorite standard 90s characters: The hero, the princess, the bully, the new-age oddball, the jock, the nerd, and the butt-of-the-jokes chubby one. They were all under the semi-tyrannical rule of Kevin "Ug" Lee, (get it? Ug...Lee? Ugly? Witty, yes?) their authoritarian counselor charged with keeping this wacky mismatched group of campers in line.

I went to various summer camps for 14 years, and I don't know a single one of my old camp songs by heart. I do, however, have the uncanny ability to remember all of the lyrics and produce mental screenshots of the Camp Anawanna song:

"We run, we jump, we swim and plaaaay. We row and go on trips
But the things that last foreveeeeeer are our dear friendships.

Camp Anawanna, we hold you in our hearts
And when we think about you--it makes me wanna fart!
--"It's 'I hope we never part'
Now get it right or pay the price!"

Now we will share a lifetime of the fondest memories
By the lake of Anawanna...set in the old pine trees!

Camp Anawanna, we hold you in our hearts
And when we think about you --this thing came apart!

Think Anawannawanna, Speak Anawannawanna, Live Anawannawanna. Ug!"

Here is a clip of the season 2 version of the theme song, which differs from the original in one initially undetectable but extremely significant way:



Seems normal enough, right? You're probably thinking to yourself, why that's exactly how I remember it! Let's do a character run-down and I think you'll see the slight discrepancy to which I was referring:



Bobby Budnick, our charming resident bully. You may say, how can a guy with a flaming red mullet be a bully? In most other settings, wouldn't he be relentlessly mocked for merely existing with such an unfortunate aesthetic? Yes, but this was summer camp. This was also the nineties, where a mullet and cut-off t-shirts is more than enough to declare your bad-ass status. Budnick was forever playing tricks on his unsuspecting and less antisocial peers, most notably when he told the nightmare-inducing Zeke the Plumber ghost story to the other campers and set up scare traps across Anawanna. Well, he got what was coming to him when they saw him screaming like a girl when he ran into those spider webs. Eh? Am I right? Also, Budnick seemed to have a virtual fountain of contraband available for sale to his fellow campers. He was a big fan of the empty threat "...or I'll pound you," in which his mullet and cut-off t-shirt bad-assedness it emphasized by forever unrealized bluff of pounding (which I am going to hope for all of our sakes is a euphemism for beating someone up.)



Donkeylips, the unfortunately monikered hapless fat kid. He was generally relegated to the role of thankless lackey and sidekick to the aforementioned Mr. Budnick. Donkeylips represented those feelings of insecurity and inadequacy in all of us; his premature cynical outlook and unquenchable desire to be liked was certainly recognizable. Oh, and did I mention he was fat? Boy, was he fat! Despite all of those deep character traits, his deplorable chubbiness was more often than not the major Donkeylips punchline.



Sponge, the smart nerdy one. Like any good 90s show, his intelligence and social ineptitude is characterized by his character's need for glasses. Apparently, popularity was reserved for those of us with superior eyesight. This nebbish little bowl-cutted pipsqueak sometimes veered dangerously close to the Screech zone, but was generally more brainy than irritating. You can also see in the intro that he enjoys science based on his penchant for dressing skeleton models in his own clothing and examining them with a magnifying glass (obviously the correlation between vision-enhancers and nerdiness is deeper-set than we'd originally thought.) They call him Sponge because he absorbs things. Get it? Like a Sponge! Oh, Salute Your Shorts. What zany nicknames will you think of next?



Telly, the girl jock. Yes, a girl jock. How progressive is that? Telly was relatively bright and normal, by Camp Anawanna standards. She was largely unexceptional when cast against her madcap caricatures of camper peers. If anything, the most unusual thing about our friend Telly (aside from her sharing a name with a certain contemporary Sesame Street monster) shows up in the opening credits. Telly's real name is Venus DeMilo. I kid you not. Her parents actually named her that. Whenever I pop out a child I too usually think to myself, geez, this thing really looks like an ancient Greek sculpture. I can only assume she was born with broken-off arms, or else there's really no explanation.

(the other Venus DeMilo)

Dina, our little Princess. What camp would be complete without one? Her range of hysteria generally ranged from the inability to select the appropriate outfits to the crushing disappointment of chipping a nail. Who says they don't write good parts for women on TV? My favorite-ever Dina storyline was when she went out with Budnick and required him to dress like a preppy square to meet her country-club standards. Oh, Dina! When will you learn? She did, however, accidentally ask Donkeylips to a dance once but ended up enjoying herself, so I'll let her accrue a few niceness points for that one.



ZZ, the requisite eccentric Kumbaya-er. I suppose you could blame her blondeness for her flightiness, but her ocean of oddness ran a bit deeper than ditziness. ZZ was into the environment, and frequently conversed with inanimate objects to illustrate her love and compassion for them. That sounds normal, right? She sometimes went a little off the deep end, and I'm not just talking about during Instructional Swim. A very loud audio version of ZZ playing one of her save-the-world songs on guitar can be found here, but I caution you that her anger brings forth a lot of unwarranted microphone feedback.




Ug, O great god of precautionary zinc oxide nose application. We all sometimes worry that we're going to get an awful sunburn not so much here or here, but right here. He was your basic authority figure standing in the way of general fun and mayhem, but occasionally he let them get away with a fun thing or two. Also, in the intro we learn that he plays a mean piano.


So, that brings us to Michael. What's that you say? Michael's not in the intro? How odd. Why ever could that be?


Surprisingly blond for someone named Michael Stein, Michael was the show's obligatory everyman. His main identifiable quality is that he's an all around nice, normal guy in a sea of insanity. It is for Michael's unfortunate experience that the show was named, as the first episode featured a sequence in which Budnick and Donkeylips stole his boxer shorts, ran them up the flagpole, and spiritedly saluted them.

They change that sequence in the second (and last) season intro. Why, you may ask. What could they possibly be trying to cover up?

Oh, right. That Michael has been swiftly and quietly replaced by this guy:




Michael mysteriously comes down with the chicken pox, and as is wont to happen in these types of situations, his parents decide to take him hiking in Switzerland for the remainder of the summer. Don't fight it, it makes perfect sense. Obviously the camp's waiting list is spectacularly full, as Ronnie Pinsky (above) replaces Michael just a few hours after his departure. Ronnie goes on to fill the Michael void, essentially assuming all of the major Michael plotlines and serving as a sort-of stand-in Michael for the remainder of the series.

It should also be noted that the actor who played Ronnie Pinsky, Blake Sennett (though credited as Blake Soper in the series) is now the lead guitarist for indie rock band Rilo Kiley. Wait, what? Really? For those of you unfamiliar with the indie music scene, you may recognize their song "Portions for Foxes" from the Grey's Anatomy pilot (which, let's be honest, anyone unfamiliar with the indie scene is pretty likely to watch Grey's Anatomy).



So there you have it. Despite the Michael/Ronnie switcharoo, the show maintained its quality and wit throughout its two season run. Thank you, Salute Your Shorts, for bringing us hours of childhood diversion and entertainment with your wacky storylines and gloriously likable one-dimensional characters.

For that, we salute you.

Check it out:
Join the cause: petition to get Salute Your Shorts out on DVD
Watch the full first episode online

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters

You can't help but love a television show whose title includes both a horrified reaction and accurate description of its cast. The more exclamatory, the better. What's that you say? It takes place in a landfill? I am so there.

It was the Golden Age of Nicktoons. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters was one of those shows for which you can both appreciate its creativity and wonder how they let a kooky idea spiral so quickly into something so absurdly intricate. Remarkably, the good people at Klasky-Csupo managed to make our monster friends both wildly idiosyncratic and relatable all at the same time. The key was that, like us children of the 90s, these monsters were kids. They went to school, they had homework, they sought to rebel, and they feared punishment from adult authority. Sure, they were always popping out of toilets and their major aim in life was to frighten the daylights and/or nightlights out of innocent children like ourselves, but they possessed a certain quirky underlying quality which made us root for them the whole way.


The matter-of-factness with which the Monster Academy and its zany cast of characters was presented to us as children made these ridiculous beings seem almost plausible. We had no reason not to believe that a red bunny rabbit, a black and white candy cane wearing wax lips, and an amorphous smelly blob of play-dough holding eyeballs roomed together at boarding school at the dump and get themselves into all sorts of wacky comedic situations. The main characters possessed a more-than-adequate amount of human-like charm in their personality traits and behaviors; one was a neurotic worrywart, one a laid-back slacker, and the last an uptight wealthy perfectionist. They were 90s TV standards incarnate, made over into so-ugly-they're-cute preteen monsters.

For a children's cartoon, it was fairly dark. In fact, some children found parts of it downright frightening. The show was completely unapologetic about its premise and refused to "tone down" any characters who may have been perceived as, well, terrifying. The Monster Academy's headmaster, the Gromble, had a tough-love approach that involved a great deal of yelling, threatening, and eating students in a way not usually conducive to positive adult role models. Similarly, if our young monster friends misbehaved, they faced being subject to the dreaded Snorch's torturous punishments and incoherent ramblings. These punishments included such terrifying fare as group square dancing, and for any child forced to do-si-do in elementary school gym class, we understood the graveness of their concern.

Behold, the wondrous intro:

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

The monsters were so sweet and well-intentioned, we often forgot that their livelihood was frightening human children. Ickis, Krumm, and Oblina were a ragtag trio of preteen monsters trying to make it through their semester at Monster Academy unscathed.

Let's meet our heroes:

Ickis, neurotic crimson pipsqueak constantly mistaken for an adorable and distinctly unscary bunny rabbit. His scaring technique involved some form of self-inflation that ballooned him to several times his usual nonthreatening stature.


Krumm, resident slacker and all-around smelly cream-puff. His uncanny ability to frighten people with body odor alone iwas both remarkable and a bit disgusting. He also had the odd fortune of having to hold his eyeballs in hand as he was generally socketless.


Oblina, candy cane extraordinaire and token rich snob. Her supposedly cultured taste veered more toward the bacterial than the highbrow, consistent with her monster upbringing. She possessed enormous red lips and the ability to extract her internal organs from them en masse for the general gross-out scare factor.

Our squalid principals ran about wreaking havoc in a Monsters INC prequel-type fashion. Deep down, we knew them to be good, but they still had the power to scare the bejeezus out of us with their formidable antics. At the end of the day, however, we understood their motives and were willing to forget their propensity for apprehending unsuspecting children. After being taken in by a few good episodes, we too could picture ourselves rolling around in the trash after a long day of scaring, dodging Simon the Monster Hunter, and desperately trying to make ourselves look more repulsive to potential mates we were currently "squishing" on.

Aaah!!! Real Monsters took 90s sitcom conventions and turned them on their head; the cleverness of it was not lost on us, even as children. Not to mention that the innumerable tongue-in-cheek cultural references satiated any adult in the room, allowing them to chuckle and briefly forget the potentially dire psychological effects this gross-out humor was probably unleashing on their young, impressionable children.

Whether you viewed yourself more as an Ickis, an Oblina, or a Krumm, we all saw a little piece of ourselves in these allegedly real monsters. Maybe we weren't surfing the sewers or using toenails as currency, but we were experiencing the same pre-adolescent pitfalls as our monstrous counterparts. Being sentenced to detention may not have been quite as afflictive as a Snorching session, but we recognized the general idea.

If you have somehow lost your childhood sense of whimsy and imagination, fear not. Well, maybe fear a little bit, but there's still hope for you to enjoy this classic Nicktoon in all its first season glory on Itunes.

So cue up the old episodes and stay awhile. You too will be Hooked on Phobics in no time.


Check it out:
Aaahh!!! Real Monsters episode guide

Eureeka's Castle

I'm going to be straight with you on this one and let you in on a little secret: kids love puppets. The muppetier, the better. It's a tried-and-true formula, and it works. The best thing about puppets is that they can do things that make absolutely no sense and have no groundings in real behavior of human beings, but we accept it as puppet doctrine due to their hypnotizingly vacant googly eyes. The puppets in Eureeka's castle were particularly adept at allowing children to be "in" on their jokes, hence allowing children to bask in their perceived percipience at preemptively predicting the punchline.

Our cast of characters was small but lively. Unlike other puppet shows like the Muppets, Eureeka's Castle was a distinctly enclosed environment with little to no contact to outside puppets. The show was based in a wind-up music box maintained by a genial giant and featured an unlikely gang of magical and mythical pals.

Eureeka's Castle's quirky characters each possessed some oddity or foible that was both completely insane and instantly recognizable by child viewers. The show was smart enough to present its characters in single dimensions, giving each puppet an apparent schtick from which to extrapolate wacky plot lines. Let's take a closer look at our castle players:



Eureeka, our show's beloved heroine and namesake. Notice the adorable My Little Pony-hued hair. Don't you just want to brush it with a tiny pearlescent pony mane brush? Also, she seems to have pastel croissants sprouting from either side of her head. I like to imagine that she got into some sort of a scuffle with an angry pâtissier. Anyway, Eureeka is a student sorceress with hilarious incantations-gone-awry a la Elizabeth Stevens. Despite her notably amateurish attempts at sorcery, she has a certain charm only found in someone who grows up in a wind-up music box.

Magellan, our lovably clueless dragon friend. It only makes sense that he was named after a Portugese maritime navigator, because it has absolutely nothing to do with who he is as a character. Magellan (again, the dragon, not nautical explorer) tends to get overexcited and lose control of his unwieldy tail, as one is wont to do with highly dangerous appendages. His single-toothed smile is undeniably lovable, if a bit unfortunate. Magellan seems to have some sort of music box allergy, causing him to sneeze with such fervor that their entire encapsulated wind-up world shakes violently.

Batly, our near-blind bespectacled bat friend, known for his hilarious and unsuccessful flying attempts. As children, we could endlessly annoy our parents by jumping from high, precarious pieces of furniture and recovering with Batly's witty catchphrase, "I meant to do that!" Oh, how we loved that catchphrase! Obviously, he had not meant to do that, yet he had done it regardless. Batly, you jokester. We forgive your klutziness, if only for your good humor and quotability.



Bog and Quagmire, our Moat Twins, who in the above photos had to be tragically and sloppily cropped from a VHS cover group photo as they seem not to exist on the internet. They look sort of like uglier, messier, hyper-colored Elmos. They live in some unexplained banished habitat beneath the castle. Most of their time is spent ravenously consuming peanut butter sandwiches and playing rousing games of tag.



Mr. Knack, who has met a similar internet fate of virtual (forgive the pun) anonymity. Mr. Knack was some undisclosed class of foreigner and ran (as foreigners tend to do) a pushcart selling assorted goods.

For all you non-visual learners out there (read: the length of search for these images exceeds my allotted blogging timeslot) we also have Magellan's pets: Cooey, who was possibly some form of wild undomesticated Furby, and the Slurms, who were claymation dots. As a child terrified of all things claymated, even I could sit through the blobbish Slurms' mesmerizing recombinations of interesting colorful shapes and representations.

The aspect of the show that I remember most was the singing stone fish on the facade of the castle. I tirelessly searched for a visual of these gilled serenaders because I am determined to jog your memory, no matter to what lengths the internet goes to thwart my well-intentioned efforts. It appears that these fish have been since expunged from our collective memory as 90s children, so I wish to refresh it with the following image. I apologize for their Christmas hats--those aren't a standard singing fish feature, but is likely the only known Eureeka's Castle Fish photo on the entire interweb.


So there you have it: Eureeka's Castle. Sure, it was arguably a rip-off of the immediately preceding Nickelodeon show Pinwheel, but we loved it with equal and abundant vehemence nonetheless. Eureeka's Castle executive producer Kit Laybourne summed it up best when he explained their three hypothesized ingredients to effective humorous children's programming: wordplay, sight gags and/or physical comedy, and running jokes. With these simple elements, Eureeka's Castle created kid's programming that kids could not only understand but could simultaneously feel "in the loop" on the character's private jokes. Though Laybourne never directly addressed the question of his intentions, we as children in the 90s can easily speculate his answer.

He meant to do that.



Listen to the theme song to revive Eureeka's Castle memories

Legends of the Hidden Temple

They just don't make Maya and Aztec-based semi-historical adventure children's trivia game shows like they used to. I know what you're thinking, "I could name dozens!" Well, I admire your commitment to progress, but unfortunately none of them hold a temple torch to the original. And when I say original, I mean original. Well, except for that whole Indiana Jones thing, but hey, this show had a big talking stone head. Totally different.

These days, so many forms of children's entertainment are all too grounded in some realm of reality. Children's television network executives just aren't going out on a limb any more for completely nonsensical show premises. This show was not only immensely complex in its structure and execution, but was also featured incredible details in is design. Sure, its educational value was convoluted at best, but where else where we supposed to learn about such pertinent artifacts as The Mysterious Manuscript of Mary Shelley or The Jewel-Encrusted Egg of Catherine the Great?

Legends of the Hidden Temple featured six boy-girl teams with names that are instantly recognizable to any former enthusiast: Red Jaguars, Orange Iguanas, Purple Parrots, Green Monkeys, Blue Barracudas, and Silver Snakes. Sure, the animals and the colors didn't necessarily match up, but we needed to identify these kids at a distance by colored t-shirt alone. Looking enviably cool in their bright yellow helmets and mouthguards, the teams began their challenge by crossing the mighty Moat. Alright, so it was a long narrow swimming pool with lane dividers, but they used cool things like rafts and swinging ropes. Plus, they got to bang a big gong at the end. We were mixing cultures a bit, but that's nothing in comparison to the legends that were to come.

The four teams who were first to finish the Moat challenge went on to the Steps of Knowledge. Finally, they get to hang with Olmec! Olmec was...well, an Olmec, but as kids we didn't know too much about the cultures of Precolumbian Mesoamerica, so it was all good. Our revered Olmec was a giant animatronic talking stone head who shared with us the wisdom of legends that we can only assume were somehow associated with this Hidden Temple we kept hearing about. The legends were generally historically based, but almost never were tied to the general Aztec/Mayan theme the show had going. For years I thought The Golden Pepperoni of Catherine de' Medici and The Levitating Dog Leash of Nostradamus were in some way associated with preclassical Central American cultures.


Olmec would share the legend, always with a catchy all-caps title generally verging on the ridiculous and irrelevant. His stone-faced (sorry, I had to) seriousness made us all believe in the power of The Golden Cricket Cage of Khan or The Very Tall Turban of Ahmed Baba. Following the brief storytelling, Olmec would ask questions from the preceding tale and teams would buzz in to respond and subsequently progress down the Steps of Knowledge with each correct answer. The first two teams to the bottom were the winners! Hooray! Onto the Temple Games!

The Temple Games were played for the coveted Pendants of Life. Obviously whoever was on the LoHT naming committee deserves several gold stars for both creativity and liberal use of capitalization. The Temple Games were sort of like GUTS physical challenges, only temple-themed. The team with the most Pendants of Life advanced to the ultimate and indubitably coolest round, the Temple Run.

Distinctly less cool for the contestants who did not reach the final round was the truly deplorable state of the consolation prizes. If you thought the Carmen Sandiego parting gifts were mildly questionable, you would be begging for a basketball globe once you realized the best thing a non-final round LoHT contestant could take home was a pair of Skechers sneakers, a Looney Tunes Watch (valued at $9.99!), or a VHS copy of a made-for-television movie. Yes, really.

Only slightly less lamentable were the prizes available for those who actually made it to the Temple. For those who made it through the first Temple round, they could win something in the range of a tennis racket or skateboard. There was usually some form of decently desirable electronic prize for second-rounders; we're talking something like a Casio My Magic Secret Diary here. For those who made it out of the temple unscathed, artifact in hand, they could win a trip to New York City or NASA Space Camp. However, it should be noted that kids who willingly participate in this type of thing would probably love NASA Space Camp, so it's probably not a bad deal.

The Temple Run was by far the most impressive and tension-filled portion of the show. Would they encounter a flamboyantly dressed sentinel temple guard? Those guys always scared the bejeezus out of me. What sort of desperate out-of-work actor brings his headshots to a casting call with the description, "Tall, dark, frightening; experience with child-grabbing preferred"? If you were lucky enough to still have some Pendants of Life, you could buy them off and escape unharmed; there's nothing like teaching children the values of bribery to get their way.

The Temple was a fairly complicated labyrinth composed of a dozen or so rooms, some locked, many of which included some task for the contestant to complete to continue on. The contestants would dodge temple guards, whiz through The Shrine of the Silver Monkey, haphazardly assemble the monkey statue to open the Temple doors, grab the artifact from Olmec's legend and find their way to freedom/space camp.



The show was immensely popular in its heyday and continues to maintain a 90s cult following. We appreciated the show in its quirkiness; where as children we accepted at face value that this was just the way the show worked, as adults we have the perspective to see that this show was outlandishly complicated in design and creativity.

So for those of us still yearning for our run at Space Camp or at least a Skechers-sponsored savings bond, strap on those helmets, bite down on those mouthguards, cue up the youtube, and let yourself be swept up in the mystery of why locating The Walking Stick of Harriet Tubman is your ticket to the NASA non-gravity simulator.

Nick in the Afternoon

From 1993 to 1998, there was one name that kids recognized as the leading children's television host of the era. He wasn't particularly handsome or suave. He wasn't even human.

He was a popsicle stick.



Stick Stickly, the iconic host of Nickelodeon's summertime "Nick in the Afternoon" programming block, was emblematic of a generation of latchkey kids whose parents left them to be raised by hypnotically engaging television personalities. Not only were our favorite shows on all afternoon, but we could actually write to celebrated TV personality Stick Stickly himself with feedback. Stick's jingle is forever burned in the 8-year-old region of my cerebral cortex:

"Write to me, Stick Stickly, PO Box 963. New York City, New York state, 10108!"

Sure, he was just a popsicle stick, but he provided us with endless hours of inter-show programming that was at least as entertaining as the programs themselves. Stick Stickly brought with him a cast of lovable anthropomorphic popsicle stick peers: love interest Holly B. Wood, high-flying alter-ego SuperStick, bizarro-esque aptly named Evil Stick, and long-lost identical twin stick Woodknot Stickly. The best part about using unconventional forms (i.e. popsicle sticks) was that these characters needed not be believable or relatable. They were pure, noneducational entertainment, which we blindly consumed with gusto.

Stick Stickly lived in his own popsicle stick universe, "Stickopolis", a miniature neighboring subsidiary of the legendary Nickelodeon studios. In their Stickopolis-based studio, Stick and his gang participated in a variety of segments. Holly B. Wood became a celebrity interviewer and news presenter. Stick was frequently shamed for his lack of obscure trivial knowledge and/or riddle answers and was subsequently forced to wear a miniature dunce cap. Then of course, there was "Dip Stick", a mildly terrifying segment where Stick Stickly was blindfolded and required to guess the disgusting substance in which the puppeteers chose to submerge him.

I so clearly remember watching the segments where Stick was strapped to a giant wheel-of-fortune type contraption and spun to determine which show was up next. Of course, it rarely ever landed on my top picks, but I did occasionally get to watch as-of-then already retired classic episodes of "You Can't Do that on Television." And thanks to that catchy address jingle, I could write Stick Stickly letters letting him know what I'd like to see on Nick in the Afternoon.

This was the height of democratic television for children of the era. Not only did we get to write in our requests (hey, they could get our shows on in 2-3 business days standard US mail!) but we also got to see a sturdy mix of live action and cartoon programming. Hey Dude strikes your fancy? Love watching Clarissa explain it all? Nick in the Afternoon had it. Enjoy the talking babies of Rugrats? Able to endure the frightening claymation stylings of Gumby and his pals? All in an afternoon's time.

Stick Stickly represented everything quirky and fun about the 90s. He would ask us to mail his rubber bands for his birthday, to complete his giant rubber band ball. His catchphrase "Simmer Down," though a bit ironic for a popsicle remnant, was instantly recognizable. And of course, he always gave us invaluable little pieces of Stickly wisdom like "You can pick your friends. You can pick your nose. But you can't pick your friends' nose."

If this isn't enough to jog your memories, the band Lemon Demon has an amazing song devoted to Mr. Stickly himself. I present to you an unauthorized video of Lemon Demon's "Stick Stickly:"






Link to "Bring Back Stick Stickly" Petition

Doug

That's right, we're talking Nickelodeon original-Nicktoon era, not the shoddy subpar imitation churned out by ABC/Disney after 1996. To embarrass themselves further, Disney awkwardly renamed the series Brand Spanking New! Doug, despite the fact that the show had already been airing on Nickelodeon 5 years. Their new title reeked of desperation, a sort of "look at us! We got that show you liked! Now watch us make it terrible."

Exhibit A, the more wisely re-renamed Disney's Doug:



Note the presence of unmatchable Disney inoffensive blandness, replacing the original lovability of the a-cappella theme song. Whistling? Really? And everyone standing there waving cheerily? A travesty indeed.

And before we move on, let us briefly discuss the mutual ridiculosity of fanatical fan Wikipedia updaters and absurdly miniscule visual changes made by the Disney animators to classify the show as "brand-spanking new!":

Character changes on Disney's Doug:

• Doug's sleeves were longer and had a pair of black and white shoes instead of red and white.
• Skeeter's shirt was altered from a yellow lightning bolt to a yellow "O".
• Roger's leather jacket was sleeveless along with his hair combed down instead of his straight up hairdo on "Nick's".
• Patti's hair was cut. Her shirt stayed the same, except she is wearing blue jeans instead of her blue skirt.

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug)

You have to think to yourself, was there some sort of copyright sensitivity from the original series to the knockoff Disney version? What would possibly motivate them to sit around the boardroom, poring over storyboards, and heatedly debating the merits of cartoon haircuts and leather sleeves?

But anyway.

The real Doug was Nickelodeon's Doug, running from 1991-1995. The original series wasn't about long, complicated plotlines; each show was divided into two 11 minute "episodes" conducive to our limited childhood attention spans. It took all of our favorite cartoon cliches (lovable awkward protagonist, cute pet sidekick, quirky best friend, wacky family and neighbors, love interest, school bully) and made them into a virtual rainbow of bizarre multiculturalism. Sure, Doug was white, but his mother is inexplicably purple. And let's not even get started on how his best friend's name is "Skeeter". Clearly this was of an era before that term was imbued with inappropriate rap-song innuendo. We can only hope.

The originally show was both vividly and ridiculously imaginative in a way that was deeply resonant with our not-yet cynical preadolescence. Case in point, Doug's self-imagined alter-ego "Quail Man":



Yes! Amazing. An amazing way to add flashier nonsensical, nonsequitor plots. But we ate it up nonetheless, for its sincerity and resonance. My personal favorite foray into Doug's imagination was his fantasy music video of his "band":



I'm torn on which part is my favorite; the initial exclamation-in-unison accompanied by star-producing high-fives, or maybe the Doug-as-Michael-Jackson-with-ethnic-backup-dancers sequence. Either way, it was pure, unadulterated genius. To this day people acutally do live-action covers of this song on YouTube, if that speaks at all to its posterity.

In short, Doug did not insult our intelligence as children. There were all sorts of clever minor aspects of the show we can now appreciate as (theoretical) grown-ups. The "Beets" as a facsimile of the Beatles, his beatnik sister Judy's "Moody's school for the gifted," or Porkchop's igloo in the backyard.

So, to Disney: we will not accept your cheap, shark-jumping imitation. Giving Patti Mayonaise a butch haircut and naming Doug's new baby sister "Cleopatra" (really?) will never win us over. The original quirkiness of the show was what made it so endearing and enduring. It's what separated the authentic Doug from the later inferior imitation.

After all, how many of you can recall the lyrics from the Nickelodeon-era Beets' hit songs "I Need More Allowance" and "Killer Tofu"? Or Doug's fear of exposing his distaste for liver and onions to Patti? Or that Doug was horribly embarrassed of his middle name, Yancey?

On the other hand, how many of you can recall...well, anything from the Disney version?

I rest my case.