Handi-Snacks

Some mysteries are better left unsolved. For example, it baffles my mind to ponder exactly what part of the cheese becomes the semi-gelatinous room-temperature no-refrigeration-required goo in the Handi-Snacks conveniently compartmentalized tub. The more I think about it, the more my brain yearns to burst from its enskullment and lay twitching on the floor, exhausted and defeated. Luckily, I've never given it that much thought.

Dunkable snacks were all the rage in the 90s. Dunkaroos cornered the sweet sector of the market, but the savory had yet to be conquered in a snack dunking tour de force. Luckily, Nabisco (later Kraft) was there to step in and show us the way to salty dunkable goodness. With mystery cheese. Really, just incredibly mysterious. I'm starting to get a headache again contemplating its very existence, so I think I'll just go on pretending that's a natural state of cheese. Okay, good, good. I'm back at cheese-pondering baseline again. Whew. Close one there.

Handi-Snacks were a pretty ingenious concept. Parents were increasingly busy and demanding more and more of food manufacturers to produce the type of lunchbox fillers that required little to no preparation. The morning rush and ensuing time crunch forced working parents to reconsider their nutritional standards and opt for easy available prepackaged options.

Things like nutritional content and edibility quickly took a backseat to the incredible ease of taking a few ready-sealed packages, throwing them in a bag, and declaring it a fully assembled lunch made with a parent's loving albeit neglectful touch. When it came to lunch time, instead of finding a sweet note and a well-filled sandwich, we were usually left with a moderately sized pile of plastic packaging that held mysterious and delicious contents within its airtight plastic. We're talking the kind of stuff that could survive some serious nuclear fallout. This food may not have had much to do with anything edible found in nature, but it certainly had the power of perseverance.



Handi-Snacks were streamlined for ease of accessibility. The concept was brilliantly simple. Each individually wrapped packaged housed two compartments: a cracker den and a cheese hangout. Somewhere in the vicinity of our crackers lay the one necessary implement to cheese spreadage: the little red plastic stick. I like to think of the little red plastic stick as a sort of magic soft cheese spreading wand. Or, you know. Just a little red plastic stick. Whatever.

As a child I craved these things with a zealousness that would make proselytizing missionaries pause and say, "Now, really. Don't you think that's a bit much?" These things were like a snack time drug to me. I needed my fix, and I would stop at nothing to get it. Whether it was a frenzied cafeteria trade for some off-flavor Snack Packs or discreetly tossing them into the supermarket cart when my mom's head was turned, one thing was for sure: I was going to get my Handi-Snacks.

The brand later expanded to include other delicious flavors and varieties. We had our breadstick version, though I use the term breadstick lightly. Er, heavily. These things were rock solid. They in no way resembled a breadstick and any insinuation of a relationship between the two would certainly infuriate any legitimate Italian gourmet. Whatever the case, these little breadstick-shaped crackers were nothing short of a dunking revelation. Or at least, that's the way my 7-year old self perceived their greatness.


The brand also came in a pretzel variety, satiating our salt cravings and prematurely clogging our virile young arteries. These too were packaged alongside the mystery cheese that for the above described reasons shall be investigated no further. Let's just say it may not have been cheese cheese, but they were probably related in some way. Somehow, though, I doubt a dairy cow would have recognized it as her byproduct. Just sayin'.


There was also a peanut butter cracker combination, which to its credit was a bit easier to stomach when considering its appropriately tepid temperature. This formulation was fairly short-lived, however, as it was not as well-received. The people had spoken and they wanted their disgusting cheese, dammit. Far be it from Kraft to deny them the spreadable cheese fix they so sorely need.

Handi-Snacks dropped the ball a bit when they attempted to break the Dunkaroo empire and offer sweet dunkable snack products. The cookies and cream variety was less than appetizing, though that of course did little in the way of stopping me from begging my parents to purchase it for me at every supermarket turn. Pretty much anything sweet that showed up on my snack radar was fair game for grocery store begging. I didn't even have to like the product, it just needed to contain a proportion of sugar that far exceeded the recommended daily dosage. It was a simple system, actually, though I can't imagine my teeth have written me any heartfelt thank you notes since.


In a sort of gross turn of events, Kraft morphed the Handi-Snacks brand name into a catchall for all sorts of their newer products: run-of-the-mill pudding cups, gelatin snacks, and even a Baskin-Robbins crossover pudding brand. Perhaps the rebranding was warranted in some way I've failed to comprehend, but let me be the first to say that when I think Baskin Robbins, I tend not to think lumpy, unidentifiable and unsourceable cheese. But then again, maybe that's just me.

A League of Their Own

All my life, I always sort of wanted some sort of personified or anthropomorphic moral compass. You know, like a little devil or angel on the shoulder type of deal. Someone who would show me right from wrong and would tell it like it was. The problem was, I never really wanted a Jiminy Cricket.

I wanted a Jimmy Dugan.

After seeing A League of Their Own at a retro-standby drive-in movie theater in 1992, I was pretty certain that I needed someone around to tell me whether or not there was going to be any crying in baseball of if someone looked like a penis with that little hat on. Although, to be honest, even more than that I just yearned with all my being to be a Rockford Peach.

I've never played baseball, but this movie was more than enough to convince me that it could very well be my calling. Or, at least that it could have been my calling had I been a tough-talking short-skirt donning tomboy-type coming of age during the World War II era.



I've got to say, I'm not always a John Lovitz fan, but that trailer really makes it work. When he offers Kit and Dottie 75 dollars a week and they tell him they only make 30 at the dairy and he goes, "Well, then, this would be more, wouldn't it?" Brilliant. And when he asks, "Are you coming? See, how it works is, the train moves, not the station." Pure sarcastic genius. See? This film has magical powers to make everything sweet and funny and family-friendly. Aww.

But, hey, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. The movie certainly had its fair share of great one-liners, but it was more importantly an all around sweet and generally wholesome film that was fun for the whole family. A League of Their Own is a fictionalized version of the formation and run of the real-life war-era All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Following the American entry into the second World War, baseball executives feared that a lack of eligible ball-playing men would crush the immense popularity of the sport. To circumvent the anticipated windfall, they theorized that the creation of an all-women's league would be enough to sufficiently bolster their earnings in the absence of a strong male league.

They also had a pretty kick-ass victory song, which I imagine in real life featured about 100% less Madonna standing around the locker room in her bra. Oh well, sometimes we have to stretch history a bit to make it more interesting. And to enjoy Madonna's figure before it morphed into the Incredible Hulkhood of current fame, of course.



While the premise is based on the actual league, any truth-telling in this movie pretty much ends there. All of our characters are fictional (read: more interesting than real people) and unfortunately for the real Peaches, they never got to play under the coaching expertise of one Jimmy Dugan. Too bad, too, as I'm sure the real Rockford Peaches would have been far more successful if they were forced to come face to face daily with his humorous tirades.

The movie opens with the decision to form the AAGPBL and the appointment of a PR professional and talent scout to get things off the ground. Scout Ernie Capadino (John Lovitz) heads out to recruit and encounters "doll" Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), whose good looks he's certain the league can manipulate for publicity and male fanship. She's less than thrilled at the prospect of leaving her serene married farm life, but her sister Kit's enthusiasm eventually leads to Ernie persuading them to sign on as a package deal.



With the two recruits in tow, Ernie stops to check out an outstandingly talented but less-than-comely prospect in Marla Hooch. Kit and Dottie demonstrate a good show of pre-bra burning era women solidarity by refusing to play unless Ernie picks up Marla, as well. See how heartwarming this is already? They're even taking the ugly girls. How precious.

When the group reaches tryouts in Chicago, they're lumped in with all the other recruits and are eventually picked as Peaches. Picked, get it? Okay, okay, I can see where my punniness is underappreciated, I'll move on. The three meet up with their new teammates, including wisecracking Brooklyn natives Mae Morbadito (Madonna) and Doris Murphy (Rosie O'Donnell). The girls are forced into learning proper manners and other matters of deportment to prepare for their new role as public figures. Oh, and they also are assigned some butt-baringly skimpy (well, for the time) skirts in which to play baseball. Go figure.

Here we meet the great Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) a washed up alcoholic former baseball star who is less than ecstatic about his new gig coaching a gaggle of giggling girls. Things are going too stellarly at first, making the executives question their decision to form the women's league. A cutesy photo shoot with Life Magazine earns the girls some publicity, though, and they're well on their way to minor female athletic stardom. It's quite a dream come true, I imagine, to be kind of famous but totally disrespected and discredited by your fans. Really, we can only hope for such a sense of fulfillment in our own lives.

We get a peek into Jimmy's tough love coaching style and some of his personal theories on coaching, namely that there is absolutely no crying in baseball. Never. Don't you forget it.



We get some light character development around these parts, which I'll leave to your own research. The girls are working hard, building skills and working as team, though they do still seem to have quite the flair for taking advantage of their leisure time at swing bars:



Suffice it to say at this point Kit and Dottie aren't getting along too well, and they push to make Hottie Dottie a real star and trade Kit to some third-rate team. As you can imagine, she's not quite thrilled with this development. They finally meet again face to face in the final game of the women's World Series, and let's just say it ain't all that pretty. I'll try to leave out the spoilers as best I can, so just leave that final game to your wildest imaginations, hopefully supplemented with some vague recollection of the film.

The movie closes with a reunion of our girls many, many years later, sometime around the present (well, then-present) day. The Baseball Hall of Fame is opening a wing dedicated to its female players and the whole gang's back together for a brief but memorable reunion. We even get to see some of the real players (now elderly) in this scene. They're adorable, by the way.

Animaniacs

For years, every time I saw that glimmering Warner Brothers logo at the beginning of a TV show or movie, I was certain that the brothers Warner in question were none other than Animaniacs stars Yakko and Wakko. I was fairly positive. I mean, they came out the logo-emblazoned tower in the intro, right? Obviously they were the masterminds behind this multimillion dollar corporation. Really, who else would it be?

How was I to know of Polish immigrants Harry, Jack, Sam, and Albert Warner (nee Hirz, Itzhak, Szmul, and Aaron Winskolaser) whose pioneering exhibition work in the early 20th century earned them a rightful place in movie-making history? The only Warner Brothers I'd ever heard of were Yakko and Wakko, and of course the Warner sister, Dot. TV wouldn't lie to me. Would it? After all, these guys claimed to be animaney, totally insaney, in a show that's maney. Sounded pretty credible to me.



Animaniacs provided 90s children with an endless array of slapstick humor and sight gags sure to encourage all sorts of danger imitative behavior. Immediately on the heels of the success of Tiny Toon Adventures and character cameos in the full-length feature film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the studio released this animated variety show intended to pay homage to many of the early animated greats. Not unlike Tiny Toons, the characters were crafted after the classic animated stars from the genre's earliest era. Wakko, Yakko, and Dot were ambiguous in species and resembled the stars of bygone black and white cartoons.

The premise of Animaniacs was undoubtedly complex for a cartoon, not too mention confusing for even the savviest of seven-year olds. Either way, I'll do my best to recount it as I recall, with a fair bit of research filling in the admittedly vast mental blanks. The title Warner brothers and sister were supposedly created in the 1930s to add a bit of spice to the traditional Looney Tunes fare. They managed to become veritable cartoon all-stars despite the fact that their show was both unconventional and completely insane. '

The trio was so crazy and wreaked so much havoc on the studio that the Warner Bros studio authorities eventually locked them in a studio water tower. In the 90s, however, the three managed to escape and continually sneak back into their hidden home. The studio unleashed upon them a Dr. Otto Scratchansniff to allegedly dezanitize the crazy group. A Warner Bros Studio security guard, Ralph, was also charged with reconfining the siblings after each subsequent escape. Pretty complex for a kid's cartoon, I'd say. I still don't totally understand it, though it was rather entertaining.

In the spirit of preceding cartoon variety shows, Animaniacs featured a number of recurring sketches and characters. While the series had a host of minor and lesser stars, let's explore our major animaniacal players:


Hello Nurse!

Not so much a skit but a running gag, "Hello Nurse!" was not only a well-worn Animaniacs catchphrase but also specifically denoted the presence of the vixen blonde studio nurse. Typically when in her presence, the boys would shout, "Helllllllloooo Nurse!" and jump into her arms. The gag was also used with a variety of other characters, such as in the presence of a hefty muumuu-ed lady to which Yakko exclaims, "Hellllloooo large nurse!" See, it works so many ways. How versatile.





Pinky and the Brain

This sketch gained such popularity and such an intensely loyal following that it was later spun off into its own animated show. The Brain is aptly named for his smarts, whereas his sidekick Pinky is not much more than a moronic lackey kept around to do the grunt work involved in taking over the world. The Brain would usually ask Pinky, "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" only to be subjected to an utterly imbecilic and muddled response. Needless to say, their attempts to take over the world were less than fruitful, though they did provide a good deal of satire and entertainment.


See, it's educational!



Rita and Runt

These two put on a whole lot of show-stopping musical numbers through a veritable array of historical settings. Rita was a street savvy New York-accented cat and Runt was a dim-witted Rain Man-esque dog. The catch was that Runt hated cats with a deep fervor but was generally too slow to realize that his best friend Rita was indeed of a feline persuasion. The musical numbers were fairly impressive, largely due to the fact that Rita was voiced by Bernadette Peters. Due to the financial strain of maintaining Peters on cast and the mounting issues surrounding creating original musical numbers for each episodes, the two faded from the Animaniacs repertoire somewhere around mid-run.






The Goodfeathers

Goodfeathers...Goodfellas. Pure comedic parody gold, right? Okay, so the pun is a tad groan-inducing, but the shorts were pretty cute. A takeoff of the movie Goodfellas, the Goodfeathers were a gang of New York pigeons just trying to make it. Oh, and fighting their rival sparrow gang. And courting Girlfeathers. All in all, not awful satire. Kids weren't all that likely to get it, but at least it gave their parents something to chuckle over.





Buttons and Mindy

The premise of Buttons and Mindy was incredibly simple and formulaic. Mindy's anonymous parents ("Lady" and "Mr. Man") would leave dog Buttons to care for their daughter. Sounds responsible, right? Mindy (voiced by Nancy Cartwright of Bart Simpson fame) was forever wandering off and causing trouble, to which Buttons would rush to her rescue and bear the brunt of the responsibility. I really just loved Mindy for her coinage of the phrase, "Okay, I love you, buh-bye!" She gave kids everywhere the verbal ammunition necessary to forever irritate their parents.





Slappy Squirrel

Uncommon for a kid's cartoon, this short's star featured an elderly star. Slappy was a anthropomorphic octogenarian squirrel living with her chipper nephew Skippy. Slappy skits utilized a lot of well-worn comedic territory such as the Vaudeville-esque skit below, thus introducing an entirely new generation of children to some very old but still funny bits.




Animaniacs ran a couple of seasons on FOX and finished off the remainder of its seasons on the burgeoning but now-defunct WB network. The show was not-only long-running but also aired in syndication for quite awhile following the end of the show, meaning a serious cache of kids grew up on this stuff.

There was also one direct-to-video movie release, Wakko's Wish, which can still occasionally be seen playing on TV sometime around Christmas time. While you can catch the first two and a half seasons on TV (with the remaining episodes pending release to DVD), feel free to use up all that pent up 90s childhood energy to campaign for DVD release of the full-length film.

That's all I got for you today, folks. In the ever-wise words of one Mindy Sadlier, "Okay, I love you, buh-bye!"