I SPY Books

It's a parents dream: for the low low price of $9.95, you can guarantee your attention span-less child will stay put in a single spot for an uncharacteristically extended period of time. Heck, parents would probably pay upwards of $100 for results like these, so those Scholastic people are really cutting them a deal on this one. Writer Jean Marzollo and photographer Walter Wick are probably laughing all the way to their interestingly cluttered homes full of cleverly arranged tough-to-spot ornamental and thematic objects.

Following in the well-hidden footsteps of Where's Waldo, Scholastic's series of I SPY books offered a handily portable search game certain to provide children with endless hours of contemplation and entertainment. Each page was its own magical little world of plentiful well-placed objects, usually within some sort of thematic framework. The pages themselves were visually impressive enough to enthrall children of any age, while the clever written riddlers were at times enough to stump any parents reading along.



These books were full of imagination and wonder, which generally translated into them being simultaneously mesmerizing and frustrating. Sure, the pictures were hypnotizing in their high level of visual interest, but they also gave our poor little eyes stare-at-an-eclipse level strain. It's a wonder we weren't all marveling over these books stooped over with Quasimodo-esque posture donning granny glasses dangling from a chain. If anything had the power to age us prematurely, it was these damn visual puzzlers.

We all started off pretty cocky. They'd throw a few easy search assignments at you to build your confidence in typical 90s rah-rah self-esteem style. Some of the clues were completely straightforward, as least in theory. In practice, we were required to actually locate these objects amidst a sea of unimportant junk. Just when we thought we'd finally conquered these perplexing puzzles, we'd get to one that had some sort of riddle. Oh, great, so now we have to think, too? What is this, The Eleventh Hour? And no secret solution in the back? For shame.

The pictures themselves were an impressive feat alone. Where exactly were they getting all of this stuff? I've been to plenty of garage sales and swap meets, but I've never managed to accumulate this volume of junk. How could they possibly track down so many button, marbles, manacala beads, and checkers to artfully arrange in a chaotically ordered manner?

And what sort of mixed messages were these sending children? Our parents say "Clean your room," and then offer us a book full of vast quantities of object in complete disarray? I tried writing a poem to go with my messy room, but my parents weren't taken in by my I SPY-like effort. If only they'd solved that riddle, I'd perhaps have had the confidence to pursue my then-chosen career as a search picture book stanza composer. Plus, they could have found my stuffed manatee.

Despite these personal setbacks, I can still admire these books' intricacies. While most parents tired of reading the same books to their children over and over, the I SPY series provided both parents and their offspring with hundreds of new items to discover with each read. You even have the opportunity at some healthy competition in your race to locate all the listed objects. Just be prepared for the inevitable resultant tears when your overly competitive father shouts, "In your face!" repeatedly to celebrate his obviously unfair victory. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Parents also had the advantage of softening the blow of defeat on their younger, more fragile children (read: the illiterate. Well, they can't. But you get the point.) Many of them quickly realized that especially in a family where multiple ages of children played with this book, you could, ahem, adapt it for younger non-reading kids. In other words: lie. Lie, lie, lie. "Oh, what does all that writing say? It says, look for the big happy clown in the middle of the page! What's that? Found it already! What a smart little boy!"

Try as I might, I was never able to recreate this scene with my own Tinker Toys. Perhaps it's because I didn't have a proper protractor and rainbow xylophone on hand.

In Scholastic's infinite wisdom (evidenced by their glorious, glorious book orders), they fashioned these books to be lightweight and highly portable. Translation: bring it in the car and maybe your children will shut the hell up on a long road trip. Without this type of legitimate distraction, who knows what dire lengths you'd have to go to to satiate your restless and irritable children. In my family, we were reduced to stopping off at a cemetery so us kids could run around. Unfortunately for my parents, from then on whenever my sister and I spotted a cemetery from the car, we would eagerly implore, "Play, play!" Honestly, we wouldv'e been much better off with an I SPY book. After all, it's far more difficult to disrespect the dead with one of those babies.

So for those of you with children who prefer not to engage in any type of sacrilege sure to anger someone upstairs, I'd highly recommend investing in one of these. And for those of you without children, my advice stands. Alright, so you may get some questionable looks when you whip out I SPY: Spooky Night on your subway trip home from your hours of enslavement to the man, but just imagine how excited you'll be when you finally locate that cross-eyed jack-o-latern.

Suggested public transit reading to ward off unwanted conversation. I'm warning you though, finding that jack-o-latern is a real bitch.

Billy Madison

As much as I want to believe my sense of humor mature along with my progression in chronological age, I always always find myself laughing with equal fervor when confronted with a movie that so entertained in my youth. While I wish I could say that I can no longer recite by heart those movies that cracked me up in my childhood, that is simply not the case. If anything, the quotations get further ingrained into my brain with each passing year. I think it's some sort of late-developing side effect from the original branding process.

Such is the case with Billy Madison, which I happened to catch a 30-minute chunk of on TV this weekend while waiting for some friends to arrive. When I selected the film from the innumerable channel offerings on my boyfriend's digital cable listing, I assumed I'd have outgrown the movie's juvenile humor that so delighted my fifth-grade self. Unfortunately for my ego's sense of wisdom and sophistication, I was dead wrong. Within minutes, I was laughing out loud and had completely abandoned any previous pretension about maturity and humor. How could I uphold such a standard when confronted with an image of Miss Lippy eating paste? How, I ask you?

Oh, and speaking of Miss Lippy, her car is green. Did you know? You can buy this nostalgia-rich tee shirt at Look at Me Shirts

It would take a man of steel with a heart of lead to avoid snorting with laughter at a scene like that. Or at least a far less childish sense of humor. I haven't decided which one. For the sake of what's left of my so-called adult pride, I'm going to go with the first one.

Sure, it's a stupid movie. That's probably why it appealed to so many of us as children. As an alleged grown-up, I'm often shocked at the tepid or even straight-up poor critical reception that greeted some of my favorite childhood films. Than again, critics have a habit of being self-important snobs, so it makes all the more sense that whatever they pan would be greedily consumed by unquestioning children. Right? I'm glad you're coming with me on that one.

For those of us who grew up during Sandler's Saturday Night Live days, we had come to expect a certain level of child-friendly humor from him. That's not to say it was appropriate, but more that he was, let's say, in touch with his inner child and it frequently manifested itself in his outwardly childish portrayals of his characters. It was this quality that made him so well-matched to the role of the eponymous overgrown spoiled-rotten under-educated child in Billy Madison.

Billy Madison is certainly not for everyone, I'll give you that. The plot is not only far-fetched but teeters on the edge of completely ridiculous. It's not really meant to make any sort of sense, though; it's meant to be fun. You certainly can't deny that everyone involved in this film seems to be having a grand old time. If you still have yet to comprehend the juvenile nature of the film, here's the theatrical trailer to help you out. Hint: it begins with a loud farting noise. Classy, no?



Like I said, it's not for everyone, but it certainly still makes me laugh. It was the perfect film for children and teens largely on the basis of its incredible quotability. Nearly everything out of everyone's mouth is so ridiculous most of us were certain it bore repeating. Our parents may not have cracked a smile after the first or second time, but you could bet our buddies on the playground would still be rolling in the sandbox after our forty-second go.

At the beginning of the movie, we meet Billy Madison, the errant son of a wealthy hotel chain owner. He spends his reckless yet undeniably enjoyable days wreaking havoc with his deadbeat friends all over the sprawling Madison estate. We get a good sense of his intellectual capacity in this little bath time exchange, during which he contemplates the relative merits of shampoo versus conditioner. No doubt a highly taxing debate:

I can't even begin to count how many times I heard my classmates say, "Stop looking at me, SWAN!" I'm willing to bet it registers in the quadruple digits, far outstripping the counting abilities of Mr. Madison himself. Either way, I still think the answer to this age-old debate is conditioner.

Billy's father has decided he can tolerate no more after Billy's ridiculously inappropriate outburst of gibberish at a critical business dinner. It's no wonder he opts not to make Billy the future proprietor of his business after these certifiable antics:



Needless to say, Billy is pissed. His dad's choice is Eric, a conniving, weaselish little man who is admittedly less than virtuous. Billy swears he handle the responsibility, but his dear old dad lets it slip that he bribed Billy's teachers into passing him, thus making his whole education a sham. After some questionable compromising, they agree that if Billy can pass every grade from kindergarten to 12th in two weeks apiece, he can earn his birthright.

Billy was unsurprisingly at ease in kindergarten with the aforementioned Miss Lippy, finally feeling at home with his intellectual equals. Unfortunately for them, he's a tad profane for their milk-cookies-and-naptime lifestyles.



Billy scoots through his first few grades, naturally throwing a huge unwarranted party after each grade advancement. It's in second grade that we meet our heroine, the lovely Miss Veronica Vaughn played by Brigitte Wilson. She also totally played bimbo Ginger in Saved by the Bell. Neat, right?:



At least Billy finally makes a friend, nerdy third grader Ernie. On a field trip to some sort of colonial farm, Ernie pees his pants. In Billy's first real moment of good-heartedness, he pretends he too peed his pants, passing it off as cool. It's all pretty sweet until the elderly colonial field trip guide says, "If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis!" Yech. Oh, this scene also features an overblown Chris Farley with a sweet comb-over. Can you beat that?

Billy's progressing nicely, much to the chagrin of the villainous Eric. Unfortunately, he's not quite as popular in high school as he was in elementary school. While his lame jokes easily earned him the respect of third graders, they failed to have the same effect on his teenage peers. His crack during biology, "Chlorophyll? More like borophyll!" didn't do much to bolster his status. He even fails to escape the long line of O'Doyle family bullies, who seem to have enough kids to opress Billy every step of the way. Observe, a montage:



Eric conveniently knows some blackmail-worthy dirt on the elementary school principal and forces him to publicly state that Billy bribed him into passing him. Unnerved and outraged by this serious setback, Billy eventually gives in and reverts to his former slacker self. Despite numerous pleas from those who have seen him better himself through his educational exploits, Billy remains unmoved. Veronica eventually throws his drunk ass in the pool and tries to literally knock some sense into him via physical violence. This seems to jar Billy back to his motivation, and they all do a lovely little musical number. Sandler gets to showcase his Operaman chops and Wilson (Veronica) gets to dress like the St. Pauli Girl. Hey, everyone wins!



Billy keeps studying and agrees to face off with Eric in an academic decathlon. In a moment of pure ridiculousness, Billy offers an answer to a question about the Industrial Revolution by citing his kindergarten story of the puppy who lost his way. This tongue-in-cheek allusion to a convenient full circle feel-good ending is met with a big fat zero points, and a pretty serious verbal chastisement from the distressed host.

Billy Madison - Industrial Revolution Puppy


Eric is just about to clinch the whole thing when he flips out and brandishes a gun at the crowd. Fortunately for Billy, an unexpected guest arrives also wiedling a gun: his ex-classmate (played by Steve Buscemi) whom Billy had called earlier in the film to apologize to for his teasing. Everyone loves a movie with Steve Buscemi, right? It means you get to like a whole lot of movies. Stevie shoots a non-fatal shot at Eric, and we can all rejoice. Hooray!

At his graduation, Billy decides not to take over the company after all but to hand over the reins to his father's more subdued and ethical colleague Carl. Billy announces that inspired by his experience, he will now be heading to college to become a teacher. All together now: awww.

Okay, okay, I'll concede it's not the most brilliant comedic masterpiece to ever pass through theaters. Sure, it's not earth-shattering in any way. It didn't create peace in the middle east or bring high-speed internet connections to the shantytowns of undeveloped countries. But hey, you have to admit, you'd rather watch this than Click or Bedtime Stories any day. Am I right?

Tamagotchi

There's nothing quite like letting sadistic young children play God. When virtual pets burst onto the scene in the mid-nineties, toy manufacturers put the fragile lives of these pixelated playmates into the sometimes malevolent hands of careless children. Sure, most of these kids meant to feed and care for these miniature en-egged virtual beings, but things just sort of came up. You know.

Also, it probably doesn't send the most serious life-or-death message about caring for a pet to attach it to a handy keychain. I don't see any household kittens or puppies conveniently hanging from the zipper of a kids' backpack. Then again, real pets don't have a reset button, so perhaps it's not the most fair comparison.

Admittedly virtual pets didn't necessarily lend themselves to teaching responsibility. There was really no consequence for allowing your virtual pet to die, unless you somehow managed to develop a deep emotional bond to this poorly animated blob-with-eyes that lived in your plastic egg keychain. I'm willing to give these alleged highly sympathetic youngsters the benefit of the doubt, but they certainly weren't my Tamagotchi-toting peers.



Tamagotchis were sort of like a highly primitve version of the Sims: as a virtual pet owner, you were expected to feed it, allow it to go to the bathroom, entertain it, making sure it slept, and monitor its general happiness and well-being. In the early models, the "fun" factor was pretty straightforward. The very act of feeding and cleaning up after a blinking pixelated image was supposed to be sufficient entertainment. This was no-frills fun at its bare-bones finest.

A late-90s "Angel" model. For some reason, they thought it wise to make this commercial simultaneously completely terrifying and likely to offend multiple religious sects. Kudos, Tamagatchi. Kudos.

Miraculously, the concept clicked. Children adored these things. They couldn't get enough. They wanted their house key-rings and backpacks to clack with the delightful click-click-click of multiple coexisting virtual pets. Immediately following their release in 1996, the product sold over 40 million units worldwide. Let me repeat that. 40 million. Pretty incredible.

For parents, the decision to purchase a virtual pet over a real living, pooping, money-bleeding animal was a pretty obvious one. Either your child could beg and plead and throw themselves screaming onto the floor swearing that they'll take care of that new puppy, or you can satiate them with a cheap little piece of plastic that does double duty on surreptitiously teaching them the virtue of responsibility. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. If you'd let them take care of that real parakeet, they'd only get to kill one.

Once these babies hatched, their fate was literally in your hands. Though early models were primitive, they were capable to developing personalities. Feed it and care for it and it becomes lovable, content, and well-behaved. Treat it poorly and you get a vicious, angry, monstrous little guy who's just begging you to press that reset button and restart his sad little life. The choice is yours.

There was always that one kid (most likely the same one who kicked bunnies and stomped on cute little field mice) who derived some sick pleasure from making his Tamagatchi's life a virtual hell. Intentionally neglectful, he or she would get a real kick out of watching their precious virtual pet shrivel and die, refusing to respond to its most basic needs. Unfortunately for us concerned virtual pet defenders, the ASPCA had yet to classify Tamagatchi abuse as something worthy of sponsorship. Keep fighting the good fight, friends. We'll get there.

In general, the issue with designating even this virtual responsibility to children was that these things were constantly needy. Never mind the fact that as over-programemd children we had to go to school and soccer practice and piano lessons. Our Tamagotchis required incessant care. Leave the sound on and your mini egg would beep frequently, your little Tami begging for attention and food. Even disabling the sound wasn't enough to quiet the little guy's neediness: the lights would flash again and again until you finally gave in and attended to your virtual charge.


In no time at all, schools took notice of the distracting toys and many instituted classroom bans to prevent children from caring for their pets on school time. While some adults contended that the pets helped kids learn discipline and develop a sense of responsibility, most agreed that these things were pretty damn annoying when they were trying to review times tables or clarify parts of speech. The pets became contraband and grounds for heartbreaking teacher confiscation. Sure, it was unlikely that we'd ever bring a real live hamster or guinea pig to class with us to monitor its well-being, but it was the principle of the thing.

Despite these setbacks, the toy remained wildly popular. Numerous knockoffs emerged, including the successful Gigapets and Nanopets. Before long, the virtual pet marketplace was flooded with a plethora of different types of animal, human, and alien egg keychains. Luckily for the current young population, these things are making a comeback and even feature a pause button to allow them time away from the virtual enslavement of their little charge. Sure, now these kids have Webkinz and all other impressive types of newfangled technologically tied toys, but somehow the simplicity of a Tamagotchi remains an appealing credential for parental purchase.

In case this reminiscence failed to satisfy your inner virtual pet caretaker, fear not. If all this wasn't enough, maybe you could use a little web-based support in the form of a new song by pop duo Looner. They obviously loved their Tamagatchi as much as you did, perhaps more as they've recently released a single detailing said love. Enjoy.



Check it out:
Virtual Pets for iPhones