Girly Board Games

Male readers, you may just have to bear with me on this one. Actually, maybe you should use this as a welcome opportunity to bask in the notion that board games targeted at your demographic did not limit your life goals to princessery and shopping. You guys got to be ninjas and surgeons and we got to worry about getting a zit before our dates. And you wonder why we don't have a woman president yet. She'd probably get a zit before the big inaugural ball and concede. Damn you, Girl Talk, and your powerfully brain-dead life lessons.

I'd like to say this was an isolated phenomenon of archaic norms, and it was what I was planning on saying until I took a stroll down the toy aisle today at Target. Lo and behold, High School Musical Dream Date. That's So Raven Girl Talk. Hannah Montana Mall Madness. As if the frighteningly stereotypical girly game offerings weren't morally void enough, we've added new corporate sponsors and Disney tie-ins. Ah, the sweet scent of moral apathy. Now that's progress.

This genre were certainly not exclusive to the 80s and 90s, though it is more surprising that we upheld such outmoded norms this late in the game (some pun intended). With an increasing focus on gender equality, it seems that game producers chose to ignore any feminist progress and steer us straight toward the mall where they felt we belonged. All we needed was a fake credit card and some plastic crowns and we'd be back on track in no time.

Here is a light (pastel, if you will) selection of the games that kept girls beneath the plastic ceiling* of legitimate board game accomplishment:


Girl Talk



Girl Talk was a sort of innocent-ish truth or dare game that came with preset questions in board game format. It was also a teeny bit like MASH, as our accumulated points won us "fortune cards" that told of our future. Of course, according to Girl Talk, the future we yearned for was focused on marriage, career, children, and so-called "special moments". I'd like to give them some credit for including career, but if the game saddled you with a deadbeat husband and 12 kids, you were pretty stuck.

It being a parent-sanctioned game, the questions and dares were pretty tame. Dares included tasks like "Call a local radio station and dedicate a song to a boy you like!" "Make a prank phone call and hang up!" or "Lap water out of a bowl like a dog!" If you failed to perform the dares, you had to don a bright red zit sticker. On the plus side, if you agreed to be scorekeeper you were to be addressed as "Point Princess". Overall, not a bad deal.


Mall Madness



I know I've ranted on this one before, but it's so truly deserving of relentless bashing. Very few games are so shameless in their complete disregard of all things morally grounded. Mall Madness not only takes the cake on that one, it teaches us to put it on our credit card. We raced around chasing sales and scrambling back to the ATM for cash, which is just what 9-year old girls should be learning about.

The electronic version gave us an eerily disembodied voice, cheerily delivering commands to us. My all-time favorite is "You left your lights on! Go to the parking lot!" Now we're not only frenzied consumers, but vapid ones at that. It's only a few notches up from Teen Talk Barbie's "Math is hard!" and that's being generous.l


For the full post on Mall Madness, click here


Pretty Pretty Princess



This was amongst the most coveted of little girl games, teaching us at a young age that it's okay to play games as long as you end up with some jewelry. Many of us went on to build romantic relationships on that very notion.

The object of the game was to be the first player to collect our designated color of ring, earring, bracelet, and necklace plus the almighty crown. That damn black ring would always thwart our well-intentioned efforts, so we'd have to pawn it off on someone else in order to win. I'm not sure if there was any actual educational value to this game, but it did teach us how to cunningly set up our friends for failure.


Girl Talk: Date Line


I will admit that this game had me totally fooled. I thought that they'd come up with some fantastic technology that somehow converted my boombox cassette player into a predictor of romantic matches. You'd put a boy card and a girl card into this mysterious contraption and a conversation would play from the tape to see if it was a match or not. Only later did I discover that if I played the tape without plugging in that stupid little pink box, it had the exact same conversations. Obviously Milton Bradley doesn't think very highly of young girls if they thought we'd play this over and over again without growing suspicious. Then again, they had me fooled, so maybe they were right on.


Electric Dream Phone



In an age before all 8-year olds had cell phones, this game was awesome, if only because we briefly got to pretend we had our very own phones. It was kind of like Guess Who, only for squealing boy-crazy little girls eager to call up some totally buff hotties. We all went out in search of our secret admirers, though sometimes our hints were not so secret if someone pulled that speakerphone card. We all crossed our fingers to hear the magic words, "You're right! I really like you." We'd spend the better part of our teen years trying to replicate that thrill.


Girl Talk Secret Diary:

I know, I know. How many versions of this game were they going to release? The correct answer was "as many as naive young girls will blindly consume", translating to quite a few. Each one more brainless and boy-crazy than the last, many of us nevertheless adored these games. This version was sort of a cop out, as it was admittedly less involved. It came with a massive diary of some girls secrets. We were supposed to care about them for some reason or other, plus it forced us to divulge our own. It was basically like a confessional with less priest or Real World staff, depending on how you look at it. That is, whether you were raised Catholic or by TV. Just in case you needed clarification on that one.


These may not have been the most enlightened toys on the market, but that didn't stop us from going after them like a pack of shopping-crazed jewelery-adorned date-seeking wolves**. We might not have come out from them smarter or better or stronger or...what was I saying? Oh yeah, these games were pretty worthless, but we loved them all the same. We're all probably a bit more superficial and vapid for it, but at least we've got the balls to cluck like a chicken when Girl Talk tells us to. If nothing more, our subconscious avoidance of zit stickers will serve us well in life. I know it keeps me on my toes.


*I was going to say glass ceiling, but no toy company would have included glass in any of their products. Their lawyers would never go for it.
**In other words, not like wolves at all

Rugrats

As we all know, talking babies are unwaveringly adorable. No matter what they're saying or doing, it's pretty much inevitable that it's going to be heart-string tuggingly cute . If you can throw in some subtle humor for the parents then all the better, but we're pretty much good to go on talking babies alone.

Nickelodeon's Rugrats took the simple question "What do babies do and think when parents aren't around?" and turned it into a cleverly crafted series of humorous episodes. It was heavy on imagination and light on realism, opening for kids a world of make-believe fun. With talking babies. Did I mention the talking babies?

The show premiered in 1991 as part of the Nicktoons cartoon programming block. The premise hinged on the notion that the babies could understand one another whereas the adults could not, which in itself is a pretty attractive notion to child viewers. It was essentially the underpinning of 80s and 90s Nickelodeon programming: kids have their own world that adults can't even begin to understand.This theme gave us both an inflated sense of importance and a satisying denigration of adults, making us feel for once as if we were the ones running the show and the adults were simply there to drive us around.

Rugrats from Matt on Vimeo.

Adults were fans of the show, as well, as it featured a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor that undoubtedly went over the heads of juvenile viewers. While the later reworked version of the show relied more on toilet humor and other similarly juvenile gags, the original used cultural references and irony to poke fun at phenomena in the adult world. We laughed at the adults, adults laughed at themselves, and everyone was happy.

As in many children's shows the young characters were largely two dimensional, owing to the fact that children's black and white view of the world left little room for subtelty and character development. While the stereotypes may have gotten a little out of control in later seasons, they were believable enough during the show's golden years. Sure, all of the characters had a "type", but they were good foils for
one another and gave us a spectrum of infant temperaments at which to laugh:



Tommy Pickles, our fearless leader. Tommy was the unofficial chief of the tribe of playpen-dwelling infants, leading his baby pals on all sorts of Muppet Baby-style imaginary adventures. Resplendent in a blue t shirt and diaper ensemble, Tommy looked the picture of baby naivete.




Chuckie Finster, our resident coward. Chuckie has it rough enough with the red hair and square glasses, you'd think they could have gone easy on him personality wise but apparently his loserishness is a package deal. For God's sake, his dad dresses him in a shirt picturing the planet Saturn. You don't get less hip than that. Chuckie's afraid of everything from the potty to The Guy on the Oatmeal Box. To his credit, though, that Quaker guy is a little off.




Phil and Lil Deville, our cutesily rhyming named set of boy/girl twins. Their parents dress them in matching clothes and their personalities verge on deja vu. Lil's got a bow for differentiation purposes, but other than that, they're pretty much the same person.




Angelica Pickles, Tommy's spoiled brat of a first cousin. It's probably wrong to admit that Angelica was my favorite as a child, as she was completely insufferable with a personality akin to nails on a chalkboard. I'm not going to put all of the blame on her, though. Her wealthy parents were less than attentive and even lighter on the discipline front. I'm not going to say I didn't learn a thing or two the remarkably consistent results she got from putting on the waterworks, though.




Susie Carmichael, adorable neighbor. She mainly served to show how awful Angelica was by contrast. She made me want to have a cat named Chowder, too. I mean, seriously. Chowder! How cute is that?


The parents, on the other hand, were a bit better developed as characters. Looking back, they were far more neglectful than I'd initially perceived them to be. Back then it was like, sure, they abandon their children unsupervised for hours at a time, whatever. Now that I'm older and actually know people who have children, it's a tad less believable that any right-minded parent would accidentally leave their children in a cavernous toy store overnight or not notice their 1-year old toting a screwdriver in his diaper. Well, I guess that's why it's just a cartoon.




Stu and Didi Pickles, Tommy's parents, were a well-meaning pair of absentminded grownups. Stu was an idealistic toy inventor, Didi a teacher. Let me just say that Didi should win some sort of best cartoon hair award for that trisected red nest erupting from all sides of her head. That thing is truly awesome.





Betty and Howie Deville, Phil and Lil's parents. Betty was a strong feminist and Howie was well, nothing.




Chas Finster, Chuckie's dad, equally nebbishy to Chuckie. Let's move on.





Drew and Charlotte Pickles, Angelica's yuppie parents. Charlotte had a cell phone permanently glued to her ear before it was the norm, and Drew was basically the anti-Stu. Charlotte is just like Lindsey Nagle from The Simpsons which is convenient because they're both voiced by Tress MacNeille.




Randy and Lucy Carmichael, Susie's parents. She makes jello molds of the Eiffel Tower, he writes for the Dummi Bears. Not too shabby.




Grandpa Lou, Stu and Dru's dad and resident of Didi and Stu's house for the first few seasons. See how all the Pickles' men have rhyming names, too? Is there no end to their cleverness?




And of course, my favorites, Boris and Minka, Didi's parents. For those of us members of the tribe, we didn't find ourselves especially well represented on TV. Okay, behind the scenes, sure, but I'm talking kid's holiday specials. That's what mattered to me as a kid; I didn't care who produced it.

My love affair with these Old Country standbys began when Boris and Minka came to tell the story of Passover and ran well through their Chanukah special. Let's just say it blew Lambchop's Chanukah out of the water.


Like most long-running shows, Rugrats ran out of steam after awhile, running on empty as it shamelessly introduced new characters, released feature films, and then essentially abandoned the premise altogether by aging the kids ten years. As we all know the main draw of Rugrats was that we were dealing with naive babies, so turning them into surly teenagers was probably not a wise move.

We wanted to see these kids eating dog food, participating in beauty contests, staging mini-Westerns at the teeter-totter, or fearing the bathtub drain. We didn't care if they failed algebra or thought that guy from the malt shop was cute. Thus, we can remember them as they were, before the cheap ratings ploys and desperate last-ditch salvage attempts. Back when Reptar reigned the land and Angelica belted out "My Country Tis of Thee" and babies could freely roam about the dangerous adult-free terrain as they pleased.

TLC

The 90s gave us a lot of music genre crossover, one of the more major being the infusion of R&B music into the pop scene. TLC was amongst these groups to recognize the endless opportunity in the teenybopper-filled pop music world and catered their music and public personas accordingly. They suffered no shortage of media attention with their pop- friendly gimmicks. The trio wore ridiculously over-the-top ensembles and sported condoms as fashion accessories. You have to admit, they were effective in their quest to get noticed. A condom eye patch will do that for you.

TLC became wildly popular throughout the 90s, as much for their music as the ever-mounting public peeks into their personal lives. The headlines on these girls became increasingly dramatic, but they seemed to have a type of public resilience that allowed them to maintain their popularity through adversity. Anyone who can burn down her boyfriend's house and keep her pop icon image intact is probably deserving of some kind of best bounce-backability award.

The group was made up of Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, and Rozanda "Chili" Thomas, proving that people are willing to overlook stupid stage names if your music is catchy enough. They found some modest success with their first CD, but by the time of their sophomore release CrazySexyCool in 1994, they were on their way to legitimate musical stardom. The album performed extremely well, skyrocketing the girls from CD bargain bin dwellers to proud new owners of a slew of screaming manic TRL fans.

CrazySexyCool sold over 11 million copies, cementing the girls' status as pop stars giving us hits like:


Creep



As a kid, I had no idea that "Creep" had anything to do with a woman's cheating on her her unfaithful boyfriend to garner the attention she so sorely needed. In all truth, I just loved the silky pajamas they wore in the video. I didn't quite understand the lyrics, but I knew one thing for sure: I would sit pretty in silk pajamas on a color-coordinated backdrop if it was the last thing I did.


Waterfalls



"Waterfalls" was TLC's biggest hit, quickly ascending to iconic 90s song status. Again, as children it's more than likely we misunderstood the references to drug dealing and HIV, but boy did we love that video where they stood on the water.

The CD spurned two other singles, "Diggin' On You" and "Red Light Special" that enjoyed a fair amount of success. I'm the first to admit I didn't understand one word of "Red Light Special" till I heard it playing in the background in The 40 Year Old Virgin. You would think the brothel-based music video would have given me some clues, but I just thought they had a really dirty house.


Right around the time of CrazySexyCool's impending release, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes's personal life essentially imploded. Though she'd been forthcoming with details about her rough childhood and struggle with alcohol, I doubt anyone saw coming what happened next. Lopes had a turbulent relationship with Atlanta Falcon's player Andre Rison, so she set his house on fire. You know, like the rest of us do when we have squabbles with our loved ones.

Lopes claimed she had been trying to burn his shoes in the bathtub as retribution for his poor treatment of her and his alleged infidelity. Clearly not armed with an astute understanding of flammability, Lopes contended she had not intended to set the entire mansion aflame. A pioneer in the young celebrity circuit, Lopes opted to enter rehab, which at that point was still considered a legitimate celebrity action rather than the cheap cop-out we know it to be today.

Despite the drama, TLC had a hit record on their hands. They took home two shiny Grammys in 1996, looking to all the world like an incredibly successful enterprise. Soon thereafter, however, the girls filed for bankruptcy, adding more fuel to the fire (no Left Eye reference intended) of their very public personal problems. They'd gotten suckered into an unfair contract that left them with a take-home pay on par with my own. In case you were unaware, that means they were living in near-poverty, or at least an incredibly skewed financial reality to their lifestyles of fame and fortune.



T-Boz had been battling Sickle Cell Anemia for several years, and the weight of her medical bills compounded with Left Eye's insurance and legal fees were effectively a monetary death sentence. They eventually managed to renogotiate their contracts and settle their legal issues, but not before seriously tarnishing their pop star images.

The girls moved on to pursue various respective solo projects, none of which were on par with TLC level fame. In 1999, the girls broke their career hiatus and released FanMail. The album was again impressively successful, especially considering all the negative media buzz they'd been brewing over the past few years. The album produced two number one hits:


No Scrubs



"No Scrubs" described deadbeat guys, emphasizing their unemployment, lack of interest in upward mobility, and most importantly, lack of car. As I was in middle school at the time, this meant very little to me as I had little concern of an ambitionless seventh grader sponging off me for milk money. Instead, I just really liked that part when they went, "Noooooooooo. Scruuuuuuuuubs (no no)".


Unpretty



"Unpretty" was far more of a message song, giving us the equivalent of modern-day Dove Soap commercials. The song emphasized our need to love ourselves. Unfortunately, I was way more interested in their suggestion of buying all the makeup that MAC could make, thus saving up my allowance for an extended period of time.

Around this point, the tension between Watkins/Thomas and Lopes came to a head, stirring a feud amongst the band members. All sorts of threats were made, with few carried out. Tragically, amidst the dispute Lopes was killed in a car crash prior ot the release of their album 3D. Though the band had been on the brink of demise, her death shook the group adn the pop scene dramatically.

This wasn't the end of TLC per se, but it did mark the end of an era. The surviving members released a greatest hits album and starred in a reality show cut from American Idol cloth entitled R U the Girl, selecting a girl to record a song with them for their upcoming album. The effort was pretty underwhelming, though. With Lopes gone, the group was incomplete.

Though they've announced plans for a new album, I prefer to remember TLC for what they were: a pioneering R&B pop act that gave us catchy hit after catchy hit. It didn't matter that as children much of the lyrical content went over our heads. We loved it all the same.