Camp Nowhere

Were you forced to attend summer camp against your will? Have access to your parents' designated camp fees? Know a burned-out ex-hippie drama teacher known for evading his financial obligations? Enjoy reckless scheming?

Well, have I got the movie for you.

Camp Nowhere was every preteen's dream in the 90s. It was like Home Alone, except...well, it was a lot like Home Alone. It seems they even used the same freelance movie-title selection company as each title follows a simple formula; (Location) (Word Describing Isolated Situation). Regardless of the obvious comparison, Camp Nowhere had a slightly different, older appeal. Sure, it had an equal amount of screen time devoted to showcasing frenzied adult-free debauchery, but the kids of Camp Nowhere had multifaceted teen-style relationships and were fond of fooling their next-of-kin in lieu anonymously evil robbers.

As evidenced in the DVD cover pictured above, it got some pretty detailed rave reviews. Everyone loves a good one-word summary. When I'm at the video store, I usually only have one-tenth of a second to make a decision, so I appreciate them helping me out with the telling "Funny!" review on the front. In actuality, the reviewer could have hidden "Not Funny!" somewhere in their 500+ word review and the quote could have been clipped in the same way. Intrigued by the seemingly intentional vagueness of the pulled quote, I felt I had to do it justice and look up the original NY times review (found here). The word "Funny!" does indeed appear, but minus the exclamatory punctuation and 112 words into the cleverly titled "Suppose We Rent Some Cabins and Run Our Own Camp?" review. But hey, it's in there.

The movie begins with our winsome protagonist, Morris "Mud" Himmel. See, can't you already tell the movie is going to be hilarious? I mean, they call him Mud. Mud! Like dirt, but with water. Pure comedy gold. So anyway, Mud's parents are some class of evil villain and want to send him to the dreaded computer-learning summer destination Camp Micro-chippewa. Get it? Micro-chippewa. Microchip? Computers? I hope you're still following, this is pretty complicated stuff we're dealing with here. Lucky for our friend Mud, all of his convenient movie-character-cliché friends are in the exact same situation. Each of them is inauspiciously fated for some random, unlikely summer camp and can't stand the thought of it. What's a gang of improbable pals to do?




It's pretty clear that there is only one answer to this question, and no, it is not the real-life just-suck-it-up-and-deal-with-it solution. What these kids really need is to start their own camp! Infuriated at their parents' propensity to send them to such loathsome summer getaways as Fat Camp, Drama Camp, and Military Camp, the kids forge ahead to found a summer camp of their own. But, wait, you ask. What of the location? The food? The financial backing?

Totally taken care of. These are smart kids here; after all, the Himmels wouldn't be sending Mud to computer camp if he weren't destined for academic greatness. Enter Dennis Van Welker, high school drama teacher extraordinaire and adult co-conspirator in Operation Camp Nowhere. The Camp was indeed somewhere, so maybe the name was just to throw off suspicious onlookers. Finding a handily available abandoned summer camp site, the kids get to work on the aforementioned reckless scheming. They realize that if they brought in other kids and somehow sold the concept to parents as a real camp, they could get those sweet, sweet camp entry fees and let some pretty wild high-jinks ensue.

Like any good 90s movie, this film is ripe with cheesy montages. Watch the kids throw pies at one another and propel themselves off the cabin roof onto a pile of mattresses to a background beat of rockin', fun-loving music! Despite the abundance of semi-standard 90s montage sequences, the film is actually relatively witty, if a bit tired in its premise. Not to mention that with dreamboats like Jonathan Jackson and Andrew Keegan at the helm, there was certainly no shortage of tween eye candy. It also debuted a young Jessica Alba, for those of you who are into that kind of thing. All in all, the film really covered its BOP! magazine fan base.

To attest to the funniness of this film, here is the theatrical trailer. I apologize for the atrocious quality of the clip, but the preview sums up the film neatly and hilariously:



Of course, no kid movie would be complete without some sort of ridiculous come-to-a-head situation and eventual unraveling of the master plan. If you're not one for spoilers, you may want to scroll down now. The kids' plan appears to miraculously be working; the campers are happy, the lied-to parents are satisfied with their thin explanations, and Dennis is acting as a loosely-defined adult. That is, until the parents insist that they have a visiting day. As you saw in the clip above, the kids and Dennis go to great lengths to continuously reform and rearrange their camp on a single day to satiate the different parents coming expecting to see a military base, a diet haven, a theater forum, or a computer class. Rather than explaining it in great detail, let me illustrate with a clip from the movie complete with amazing redecorating montage:



As expected, this euphoric sense of accomplishment and getting-away-with-it style glee can't last. These kids can't keep up the facade forever, and cracks begin to show on parents' day. As things eventually crash and burn, many lessons are learned and tough decisions are made, but as in all of these movies things turn out okay for everyone in the end and both the kids and Dennis are all the wiser for the experience. Sure, the movie conventions can be a little trite, but this film defined an emergent independent generation of 90s kids and gave them the power to dream of a world where they ran the show. Although the premise was exaggerated, we could all relate to their innocent-intentioned acts of rebellion in favor of standing up for being themselves.

If all of that isn't enough for you, the movie repositions Christopher Lloyd and Tom Wilson (Biff from the Back to the Future trilogy) as hippie vs. cop nemeses. If pitting them head to head once again fails to tickle your 90s fancy, then I don't know what will.

So next time someone tries to bring you down by saying you're going Nowhere, think of your beloved childhood camp based there and smile. Happy camping, children of the 90s.

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

Fruit Gushers

The entire concept that there is a suspicious liquid-filled fruit snack vacuum-sealed for posterity (expiration date: January 3012) called "Gushers" concerns me as someone now old enough to read ingredient labels with a critical eye. Despite the inclusion of such delicious additives as Maltodextrin and Distilled Monoglycerides, Gushers continues to be a bestselling snackfood. Did you know that these seemingly innocent fruit snacks contain a squirt of an unknown mystery substance? Of course you did, you sicko, you're probably gushing on one right now. Remember the good old days, when the verb "gush" referred to something, I don't know, completely disgusting?

Good Example: "Did you see Joel's leg after he got it stuck in the wood-chipper, Fargo-style? It was gushing blood, man."

Current Example: "Did you try these fruit snacks? Dude, they are, like, gushing with flavor."

I'm not sure anyone can even begin to comprehend how disgusting that is, because so many children of the 90s continue to purchase this tragically bodily-fluid referencing named snack. The worst part is, it's not even a misnomer. You bite into one of those babies, and they literally gush in a way conducive with the Good Example. As if their naming department's creative juices hadn't already been fully drained into these fruit snacks, they actually had the audacity and unoriginality to name of of their flavors "Gushing Grape". What exactly is with the use of flesh-wound originating adjectives to describe the bursting flavor of sugary. nutritionally unsound junk food? If that wasn't enough, there was actually a movement to save the now-retired "Gushing Grape" variety. And they say our generation doesn't take up any worthwhile political causes.


Gushers were the epitome of the anti-natural foods movement espoused by so many children of the 90s. We had learned a trick from food processing companies, and were determined not to pass along this information to our parents for fear of revocation of sweet delicious valueless snacks. During the 90s, food producers were famous for adding the word "fruit" before all of their gel-based snacks to give them the illusion of having some nutritional components in some way related to the fruit family. Never mind that not a single one of these supposed fruit relatives came in a color even remotely reminiscent of one that occurs in nature. There was Fruit by the Foot, Fruit Roll-Ups, Fruit Gushers, Fruit Snacks. Even though they all tasted exactly like one thing and one thing only (read: pure sugar), they claimed to come in a variety of fruit-based flavors.

As children, of course, we could taste the difference between blue and green gushers. If they were billed as blue raspberry (note: this fruit doesn't exist) or green apple (additional note: this fruit is in no way sweet), then we assumed them to be as such. Gushers appealed to our sense of adventure and fun in a manner that still allowed us to be passive snacking coach potatoes; they had outrageously extreme names that in some way implied a sort of accompanying physical activity. However, like the alleged fruit flavor, the mere suggestion of their extremeness was a major component of their marketing campaign.




Really, General Mills? Obviously, someone over at their corporate offices had the X-games announcer on speed dial. Were we really to believe that sitting quietly and eating a liquid-filled fruit snack would be an unforgettably X-TREME experience? It seems that they did, based on the rather questionable names of their flavors; there was Screamin' Green Apple, Triple Berry Shock, G Force Berry Radical, Roboberry Ultra Blast, Fruitomic Punch, and so many other naming atrocities that I prefer to protect the reader from exposure to such out of control fruit snack titles. G Force? What, are they in their food development labs, measuring their Berry Radical flavor with a accelerometer? We can only assume that Fruitomic Punch was developed at their Los Alamos lab. As for Roboberry, are we to believe that this Ultra-Blasting hexagonal treat has some sort of artificial intelligent robotic function? And let's not omit the fact that Triple Berry Shock sounds like a form of cardiac arrest for those with multiple fruit allergies.

Gushers' nonsensical approach to advertising appealed to our desire to enjoy things that were concurrently despised by our parents. However, it's possible that Gushers took it a tad too far in another 90s campaign with their deliberate depiction of a painful and uncomfortable snacking experience:



While bearing in mind that this was in the era of Warheads and Tearjerkers, this commercial in no way represents the product in an appealing manner. If nothing else, it emphasizes the disgust of the children upon consumption.

Gushers were that food that your mother wouldn't buy for you as you begged and threw yourself on the floor of the grocery store, claiming that Susie's mom always lets her have Gushers. The fact that many 90s health-conscious parents deigned to purchase such non-nutritional snacks made them immensely appealing in a want-what-you-can't-have sort of way. Sure, they were by nature repulsive and filled with a mysterious wetness, but they represented so much more. We could care less what our parents had to say about these; we valued them for their out-of-control sweetness quotient and candy-like appeal.

That is, until we went into Triple Berry Shock.