13 Dead End Drive

Do you enjoy the murder mystery of Clue but yearn for the impossible assembly of Mousetrap? Have you ever said to yourself, why, I really enjoy this board game but I find the simple construction a bit lacking? Perhaps you fancy yourself the type who enjoys poring over 248-step instruction manuals, wishing for more detailed descriptions?

For some people, the journey is more important than the destination. These are the people you see out there now as adults scouring Ikea for the most complicated Splorgerfläts and Hoüfengloubers they can find, if only for the extensive diagrammed wordless instruction packets. They are still out there, looking for their next cheap assembly-induced thrill.

Who says children's games need to be simple? I say sucks to your Hi-Ho Cherry-O and Candyland. I'm talking about something here for our die-hard fans of never-ending, plot-twisting, perpetual board games like Monopoly or Risk. Something that comes with an instructional manual so long that it will make your eyes cross and your brain go numb. Now, if only there was a board game somewhere out there that was equally complicated to the aforementioned interminable bemusement but could be completed in full in roughly a quarter of the time.

13 Dead End Drive was one of these games, and it was gloriously, inimitably complex. In fact, it often required a set-up time nearly as long as the average gameplay. For patient children, however, there was great payoff. For those of us persistent enough to make it through the instruction novella, there was a hefty reward of secret passageways, booby traps, and the aspiration of hanging your character's portrait over the coveted mansion mantelplace.




There's nothing like a children's game with honesty. Kids have all sorts of day-to-day educational exposure from which to garner important if somewhat inapplicable moral lessons. Sometimes, what kids really need is the brutal truth about the way our world works. 13 Dead End Drive was able to fill that void of cynical realism for the under-12 set. The premise of the game centered around a wealthy heirless woman named Agatha whose death had prompted all those who knew her to emerge from the woodwork in hopes of getting their money-grubbing paws on her fortune. Why sugarcoat it? Kids should know it's a cold, cruel world out there, and if they can just obtain the good favor of a wealthy recluse they can undeservedly inherit her hard-earned cash. Nothing wrong with that, right?


For those of you who do not remember the game in all its complexities, I seek to remind you of its intricacies with the following board set-up diagram:



Still not convinced? Here are a couple of close-ups:



If you can't deduce the major aims of the game from those diagrams alone, here's a brief rundown. I'll try to keep it short to keep your head from spinning. At the start of the game, each player picks several cards featuring their assumed character identities. In a large gilt frame above the mansion's fireplace hangs an ever-changing painting featuring the likeness of one of Aunt Agatha's favorites to inherit her millions. While escaping the mansion with one of your characters' portraits displayed in the frame was a way to win and end the game, during the regular course of play it generally meant that everyone else was trying to kill you. Each player could move the game piece of his or her choosing on a given turn, regardless of to whom that character actually belonged. While there are numerous ways in which to emerge victorious, in its most simplified version you were trying to get your character out of this deathtrap safely while displayed as the favorite, end as the sole living potential heir, or go the more honest route and let the detective sort it out while your picture was in the top spot.

Sound confusing? Certainly! Did your eyes glaze over as you found yourself skimming and scrolling down past even that most concise of explanations of the game's rules? Of course! Now, imagine instructions five times as long and twelve times as complex as the preceding paragraph. Also, it was directed at children 8-12. We can only assume that as children, we had far more perseverance and commitment to finish the job than as lazy, web-browsing adults.

It was certainly cool (if a tad cruel) to beam your opponent's game piece on the head with a falling chandelier or a faultily-assembled suit of armor, but these intricate apparatuses don't build themselves. I dare you to check out the assembly instructions and emerge from your reading confident that you when where to attach pieces A-V. The instruction booklet is slightly contradictory in describing its "easy assembly" just briefly before the phrase "Then snap-fit the trigger (J) onto the beam. also in­serting its V-shaped tab into the rod’s slot. See Figure 6B. Hook the small rubber band over the trigger and rod in the notches as shown in figure 6C." Simple, yes?

At least once it was put together, you got to lure your unsuspecting fellow players into well-set mansion traps and bludgeon them to death with all sorts of dangerous fare. There were also innumerable ways in which to be utterly and unapologetically deceitful. You could make use of the secret passageways to push other players into the line of fire. You could also mislead your playmates by strategically choosing to move your own characters into a dangerous area, only to divert their attention from the wicked trap you were springing on one of their guys. In short, the game was endless fun but taught a series of skills more at home in a seedy poker hall than a basement rec room.

Summarily, the game was undoubtedly entertaining but morally bankrupt. At least we could possibly learn a thing or two about construction from putting the thing together. Kids these days would never be that patient and painstaking in their quest for board gaming fun. Right?

Wrong. There was actually a follow-up game entitled "1313 Dead End Drive" released in 2002. I assume their creative department was on break when that name got passed. Instead of 12 potential heirs, the new version includes a frightening 16. In this version, you also get to straight up steal bags of money, cleverly referred to as "moneybags". Reviews of this new version on boardgamegeek.com have such colorful titles as "Light, Fun, Brutal Game" and "Kill, Kill, Kill!", if that gives settles any doubts you may have had about the new game's nature.



Milton Bradley had it wrong. The game was solid enough in its original form. As too often happens with sequels, flashy gimmicks replace the substance we once reveled in. Then again, who am I to rain on today's kids' bout of light, brutal fun? You can purchase the old or new version and decide for yourself.

And for those of you who have graduated to an Ikea-level of assembly expertise, feel free to use the Swedish version of the rules.

Jock Jams

It only occurs to me now that the Jock Jams music series was in some way related to athletics in a "pump-you-up" sort of way. We all just accepted that the series was called "Jock Jams;" for years I thought it was a legitimate category of music. There was punk, top 40, rock, grunge, adult alternative, and Jock Jams.

Jock Jams was certainly unrelenting in its commitment to providing a singular type of music. Tack listings featured such non-sensically titled classics as "Whoomp! There it is!" "Boom, Boom, Boom" "Da' Dip" and "Tubthumping." Obviously, using words found in the dictionary was not a requirement for admission to Jock Jams stardom. If you could verbalize some sort of grunting sound and write a song about it, you were in. Pump-up themes were also prevalent and pervasive. The first volume featured a staggering 3 songs with the phrase "pump it up!" in their titles. There was no question this franchise was churning out upbeat tunes, as evidenced by a whopping 11 uses of the word "up" in song titles alone in the five Jock Jams albums.


These compliation CDs featured more than just music, though it was their main jock-inspiring focus. Jock Jams also included some spoken and/or chanted tracks full of strangely taunting remarks, often with vengeful undertones. These short tracks were cleverly faded into the next song, with little or no delay between tracks. Assumedly, this was to keep the jocks jamming uninterruptedly. There's nothing a jamming jock despises more than a two second pause between tracks. What sort of a bench press soundtrack would this be if lifters were forced to endure a one-second silence? How would they possibly build up the motivation to increase their muscular capacity if involuntarily subjected to quietude? How, I ask you?


Although the album covers declared the compilations to be presented by the distinctly athletic ESPN, in reality, these supposed "jock" jams were directed more at a teenybopper slash dance club crowd than their eponymous sportsmen demographic. In this sense, the spoken tracks were possibly misdirected with their vindictive themes. A bunch of 12-year olds chanting, "Hey, hey, you! Get out of our way because today is the day we will put you away!" is a tad more disconcerting and less appropriate than say, a football team delivering the same unsportmanlike message. Regardless of their out-of-placedness among the actual consumers, the spoken tracks had a certain charm to them that uniquely characterized the albums.


The most recognizable was of course the classic intro to the original Jock Jams (volume one) was the infamous boxing announcer Michael Buffer's trademarked phrase, "Let's get ready to ruuuuuumble!" Listeners were indeed, ready to rumble, possibly not in a punch-you-out fashion but at the very least in a 90s dance-club rump-shaking manner.

Jock Jams actually had listed tracks attributed to their very own Jock Jams cheerleaders, presumably those pictured on their various album covers. Though it was never made clear exactly what the prerequisites for Jock Jam cheerleaderdom were, we can only assume that the audition process required a yelling/spelling combo exam.

"Alright girls, all 28 of you have passed the shouting test, great work. Unfortunately, only 3 of you passed the spelling portion of the tryout. For those of you who spelled 'action' a-c-k-s-h-u-n, better luck next year trying out for volume 3 when we'll be asking you to incorrectly spell the word 'rowdy' with an 'i-e'." (Note: there is indeed a track on Jock Jams Volume 3 entitled "R.O.W.D.I.E". Check out the track listing for yourself if you have any remaining incredulity about the ridiculousness of these anthologies.)


These CDs included many of our favorite standard 90s upbeat tracks like the Macarena and the Space Jam theme, but also had some odd remixes thrown in for good measure. I'd been meaning to remix the Mexican Hat Dance for awhile now, but the good people at Jock Jams beat me to it. I also played around with the idea of turning "If You're Happy and You Know It" into a rockin' club jam, but again Jock Jams had clearer foresight than I. Did I mention I've always loved when they play the Chicken Dance at classy church-basement weddings...aw, come on, Jock Jams! You've got to be kidding me. That too? What won't you remix? It's obviously back to the drawing board for me.

The 1990s were famous for megamixing everything. We could never be satisfied with just mixing. Even supermixing seemed too tame for our extreme 90s music tastes. No, it was was megamix or nothing. Megamixing was the fine-tuned art of taking approximately one line from every song, in this case from a single compilation album, and mixing them into a something that even the most attention-deficit nineties child could attend to.

"We've tried mixing it...but could we megamix it? Our demographic prefers to listen to their favorite songs in snippets, people!"



I'll admit it is catchy. While the Jock Jams franchise was not creative by any means, you have to admire them for holding out all these years with their initial premise. The CDs were wildly popular and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. No 6th grade basketball tournament would be complete without a pre-game layup show set to some variation of the megamix. Jocks or not, children of the 90s reveled in the eardrum-shattering flavor of these CDs.

So go ahead, children of the 90s. Pop a Jock Jams the boombox, crack open a bottle of Surge, zip up that Starter Jacket, and get ready to rumble.

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