Super Soakers

Kids today have it too easy. Forget the value of dedication and hard work that so defined our generation. Their need for instant gratification continuously pushes aside their pioneering spirit of industry and diligence.

That's right, I'm talking about water guns. In our day, we knew the meaning of painstaking commitment to getting the job done. There was none of this "press the trigger and water sprays" nonsense. We would pump those Super Soaker air-pressure chambers until our fingers blistered, but it would all be worth it to spray our friends standing fifty yards away.

Originally christened the "PowerDrencher", Super Soakers burst onto the scene at the tail end of the 1980s. Approaching the 90s, toy water gun producers had fallen upon hard times, garnering flack from all sides on their regrettably realistic renderings of actual weaponry:

(image of Larami Uzi via iSoaker.com)

With parents and lawmakers increasingly conscious of how violent toys and media impacted the impressionable youth of America, these troublingly accurate imposters were on the way out. Water guns needed a new, updated image to distance themselves from their connotations of violence and war. What they needed was a light-hearted, neon-colored remastered water gun prototype with a distinctly non-military name.

At the prime meeting of timing and technology, inventor Lonnie Johnson and toy-maker Larami teamed up to produce a new water gun that fully diverted from the warlike water weapons of the past:



Super Soakers had a distinctly different tone from preceding water guns, and the ad conveys the odd sense of whimsy associated with their product. Though the commercial prominently features the theme of revenge, we can only assume that stereotypical 90's rich girl Buffy really had it coming. Also, who could resist the throwback to the Blues Brothers in their execution of their masterminded pool party-ruining scheme? This is 90s advertising as its finest.

Revolutionary in design, Super Soakers required their wielders to pump pressurized air into a separate chamber on the water gun that would build up the power to shoot water at great distances. While updated models abandoned this arm-exhausting mechanism, a great deal of the fun was contingent on that re-arming period. You felt that you had really earned that shot. You worked hard for it, and the results were spetacular. Plus, there was that awesome water bottle chamber with super-accesible fillability.

Unfortunately, while Super Soakers of today may possess greater power and precision, their R&D department's insistence on churning out novel products have led them to...well, new lows. In an effort to keep this blog in the PG range, I am not going to comment on the following video. Rather, I leave it to you to deduce from it what you will. Let's just say it stirred up quite a bit of controversy among children's advocate groups for its...provacative implications. I'm going to leave it at that.




Check it out:
Super Soaker Evolutionary Family Tree
AV Club Spoof of Hasboro Oozinator Marketing Meeting

Ghostwriter

Ah, the joys of good, clean multicultural middle-school student supernatural detective work. The television series Ghostwriter, which ran 3 seasons from 1992-1995, was a thinly veiled effort by public television to encourage the development of basic reading , writing, and problem-solving skills among elementary school children. We may have had no idea at the time, but watch an episode now and you will find the educational components are blindingly obvious. The show was remarkably good at tricking us into learning, as well as providing all sorts of feel-good moral lessons along the way.

The show's characters were the live-action equivalent of the names and pictures textbook publishers use to vociferously and repeatedly tout their commitment to racial and ethnic diversity. Though I can recognize this show aired during the blooming of the age of political correctness, they laid it on pretty thick. We couldn't just have a group of relatable middle-class white kids running around solving mysteries. Instead, it was necessary to produce some variation of "We are the World," the children's television series:



That intro shines so brightly with quintessentially nineties special effects, it makes you want to reach for the Vanilla Ice Gautier shades. The cast all seem remarkably surprised to see their names, though I assume they were told by the crew that they were filming the intro.

The premise of the show involves a mysterious unseen "ghost" (represented by a jumpy glowing light) who communicates with the Ghostwriter team by manipulating words and letters in the kids' everyday settings. The team quickly learns that a mysterious spirit has opted to communicate with them through the handily educational use of their reading and writing skills. While this ghost could likely have chosen all sorts of qualified, highly educated people to do his bidding, he insists on using elementary and middle-school aged children to solve his inoffensive and conveniently child-friendly brand of mysteries.

The "team" members, united by their common ability to communicate with the mysterious Ghostwriter, denoted their membership by wearing a special pen on a cord around their necks. That's right, as if they could not shove the educational component down viewer's throats any further, the team's all-powerful ability lay in their ability to write. I wouldn't call it a subtle metaphor, but hey, it worked.

Of course, just like real-life children, they had freakishly neat typewriter-grade penmanship and wrote at the slowest possible pace to ensure that their young viewers could actually grasp what was happening. Fortunately for those with limited literary prowess, each story arc took a remarkable four or five half-hour episodes to solve. Especially in a time before rampant over-prescribing of attention-deficit medications, it's nearly inconceivable children actually mustered the attention spans to follow a single mystery storyline over a weeks-long run. Ghostwriter clearly had some form of hypnotic power over its viewers, as the show was spectacularly popular throughout it three seasons.

Ghostwriter was not merely a television series; it was an educational franchising powerhouse boasting CD-ROMs, books, VHS releases, classroom curricula, and of course, replica Ghostwriter pens so viewers at home could "play along". I never had any luck solving the mysteries, but I do have a mini Lisa Frank notebook somewhere full of all of the clues tirelessly scribbled in admittedly poorer-than-Ghostwriter-team penmanship.

There are hundreds of Ghostwriter episodes floating around on the internet today, but I leave you with the original. As if you were not already convinced that Samuel L. Jackson is in every piece of motion-picture media every produced, he also plays Jamal's father in Ghostwriter. I present to you the first episode of Ghost writer, "Ghost Story:"





Link to exhausting log of Ghostwriter episode synopses:
TV.com guide

Creepy Crawlers

Although Creepy Crawlers were originally produced by Mattel in the 60s by way of the ambiguously named "Thingmaker" toy oven, the product was revived by the Toymax company in the 90s with a (theoretically) less lethal light-bulb powered heater called the Magic Maker. These kits were a kid's dream; like so many of our other beloved 90s toys, they held no underlying value over pure fun and amusement. With the new safety features in place, ToyMax unleashed the retro phenomenon of plasticized bug-making to a new generation.

In reality, the child's role in creating a tray of Creepy Crawlers from a selection of insect molds was relatively limited. The only real decision-making lay in with which colors of Plasti-Goop you would choose to fill the tray. Yes, that's right, Plasti-Goop. The ToyMax 1990s remake retained the 60s terminology for this unknown chemical compound, continuing to cloak the toxicity of these substances in vagueness.

This was the toy for the little boy who desperately yearned to own an easy-bake oven, but was less keen on the public shaming it would bring from his male peers. It possessed similar light-bulb heating technology and yielded tangible goods without forcing boys to don an apron and frost heart-shaped cupcakes. These bug trays were about as macho as it got for the age 6-10 demographic. The aptly named Creepy Crawlers contained die-cast molds in the shape of millipedes, spiders, beetles, horseflies, worms, and all sorts of other creeping insects with that distinctly male appeal.

The major problem with this male-centric toy marketing was that it left us right back where we started. Little girls were no longer satisfied to be banished to their paltry pastry-packing easy-bake ovens. What ToyMax needed was something with some more feminine appeal that required no new technology and a coat of pink and purple paint on the plastic Magic Maker.

I admit as an unauthentic Creepy Crawler enthusiast, this was actually the model I owned. Yes, that's right. The rubberized Plasti-Goop charms on the blond girl's Blossom-esque hat were far more my speed than the decidedly more icky insect version. No longer did I have to stare wistfully at the television every time a creepy crawlers commercial came on, wishing I too could create useless items out of light-bulb cooked Plasti-Goop. They started making Plasti-Goop in all sorts of colors in the pastel family, and all was well in the world again.

Despite these variations, the real seller was the original (well, second generation original) Creepy Crawlers. It even spawned a television cartoon series under the same name, which ran two seasons from 1994-1996. The cartoon was not just based on insects themselves; rather the plot was premised on the actual features of the toy itself. In the Creepy Crawlers television series, a young boy working in a magic shop creates a version of the ToyMax Magic Maker with unfortunate results: mutant "Goopmondo" bug monsters named Hocus Locust, Volt Jolt and T-3. I know, it makes perfect sense. The best part of the show was despite the fact that it was created through a partnership with the ToyMax corporation and used their trademarked devices and terminology, the show rarely used the toy in a fashion anywhere near consistent with the procedures of its real-life counterpart. For example, characters often poured Plasti-Goop directly into the Magic Maker, which may not have caused any significant cartoon damage but certainly would have tragic light-bulb-burn-related consequences in real life. For a toy relaunched on the foundation of its new and improved safety features, ToyMax certainly gave children of the 90s a lot of ideas of how to circumvent the safety precautions.

Thankfully, kids today are not without their own rubbery oven-cooked insect toys. The Jakks Pacific toy company recently took over production of creepy crawlers, which look to be exactly the same as the 1990s version except they slapped a plastic bug on top of the Magic Maker. Very original. However, we can appreciate the suggested uses for Creepy Crawlers as a means of terrorzing your family and making them regretting ever purchasing this overpriced piece of plastic in the first place. Because isn't that truly what it's all about?