The Sandlot

No matter how tough we claim to be, most of us are suckers for a heartwarming sports movie. It's just embedded somewhere deep within our sentimental DNA. We want to resist the urge to tear up involuntarily at hackneyed plot twists and deliberately corny character triumphs, but resistance is generally in vain. It's best to just give in and enjoy the tearful ride.

In The Sandlot, it doesn't matter that the story meanders all over the place and that major chunks plot hinge on rescuing a valuable autographed baseball from the drooly jaws of a giant anonymously evil dog. Wether or not you as an individual enjoy the sport of baseball, you can't deny the charm of a warmhearted baseball movie. There's something sort of old-fashioned and timeless about a ragtag group of perpetual losers who grow together as a team and eventually excel against all odds at their chosen sport. Yes, it's just like Bad News Bears, or The Mighty Ducks (If The Mighty Ducks was about baseball, I mean), or any other number of coming-of-age sports movies, but the underdog story seems to get us every time.



The movie opens on our less-than-heroic child protagonist Scotty Smalls moving to his new home in Los Angeles in the early 60s. Smalls is a hopeless ball player and a self-described egghead, which doesn't seem to bode to well for him socially as the new kid. Though his stepfather Bill is a big enough fan to own a baseball signed by Babe Ruth, he seems generally uninterested in helping Scotty improve his game.

Smalls stumbles upon a junkyard sandlot and meets up with a motley crew of neighborhood boys playing baseball. Smalls joins in and is, of course, terrible, and faces mocking from his fellow players until star player admirable Benny comes to his defense. Under Benny's tutelage, he quickly becomes one of the gang in a way that's only possible in movies. Five minutes later, it seems that the sandlot crew couldn't function without Scotty's significant contributions to the team. Your heart feels warmer already, doesn't it?


In typical coming-of-age movie fashion, we get to see all sorts of humorous anecdotal firsts for our sandlot boys. The Sandlot shows us the world through the eyes of childish wonder and mischief in a time when summer was a time of freedom and playfulness. Our gang engages in first crushes, lusting after the red-suited teenage lifeguard at their municipal pool. In typical movie magic more, Michael "Squints" Palledorous fakes drowning to receive mouth to mouth from the object of the affection, Wendy Peffercorn. As the adult Scotty's voice-over describes it, Squints' action was simultaneously sneaky, rotten, and low...and cool:



Our heroes also manage to scare an entire generation of 90s kids out of using chewing tobacco in what is possibly one of the grossest and most memorable puking scenes of our collective childhoods. If you, like our sandlot friends, ever entertained the idea of chewing tobacco to be like your baseball heroes, simply subject yourself to the sordid scene in which the boys celebrate by hopping on some fast-moving carnival rides. The image of this incessant vomiting all over the ride, the passerby, and the boys themselves was enough to ensure I'd never touch the stuff. Lucky for all of you innocent bystanders, I couldn't actually find a clip online of the kids throwing up all over everything. Perhaps people found it to be in bad taste, though I can't imagine why. Regardless, here's the precursor to their stomach-turning shenanigans:




The boys' lighthearted antics are offset by a darker force lurking behind the boys' beloved baseball diamond. As the new friends bond, the regulars clue Smalls into the legends of the sandlot. They explain that he should never hit a home run past the fence for fear of encountering The Beast, a vicious mastiff who purportedly eats both baseballs and people on a recreational basis:



After Benny maims the group's last baseball with a strong hit, Scotty saves the day by replacing the ball with one from his own house. He fails to realize that the ball is a prized collectors' item, his stepfather's ball signed by Babe Ruth. Scotty hits the ball into Beast territory and is stricken to learn that he jeopardized the fate of such a valuable item. It's pretty priceless when his teammates berate him for losing a ball signed by Babe Ruth, and Scotty muses, "Who's she?"



After a number of elaborate schemes to retrieve the valuable keepsake, the Great Bambino comes to Smalls in a dream, the kids regroup and manage to snatch the ball of The Beast. But, as this is a coming-of-age movie, they can't do it without learning a bunch of lessons, making a new wise friend, and getting a new, better signed ball to replace the mangled one. As we see what becomes of our pals as they grow into adulthood, we just can't help but be moved by the naked sentimentality of it all.

The Sandlot draws us in because it truly gets what it means to be a 12-year old kid in the middle of the summer where all that matters is making friends, getting girls, and playing sports. It's completely devoid of any adult-driven moralizing and worrying. Instead, it gives us the kid-centric world in which imagination runs wild and all that matters is the here and now. The movie doesn't present kids as superheroes or extraordinary individuals; it just allows them to be kids. Oh, and it also gives us a great opening to quote "You're killing me, Smalls!" if any of our friends appear clueless in the art of chocolate/graham cracker/marshmallow artistry. Seriously, you should use it sometime:



Or, better yet, you could just get this t-shirt:

Poorly Reviewed 90s Movies

As children, we don't always possess the discerning and refined taste of adults. We may grow up believing a film we saw as a child to be a cinematic masterpiece, only to find as a grown up that it's a truly dark chapter in moviemaking history. In other cases, though, even kids know it's utter crap. That's when you know we're in trouble.

Considering how many laborious, time-consuming steps it takes to write, cast, produce, release, and promote a movie, it's impressive that some of these films even made it to theaters. You'd think at some point in the production process the hundreds of people employed by the movie studio would look at each other and ask, "What are we doing here? This is terrible." Yet somehow, these movies persevered. Poor judgment prevailed, and these movies made their ways to our local cinematic facilities and, more recently, to our dollar stores 5-for-a-buck bins.

While there were many truly awful widely released movies in the 90s, these are among most painfully unwatchable:


Kazaam



If you excel in one area, your skills must automatically extend to all other arenas, right? So goes the reasoning in crossover features like 1996's Kazaam, starring basketball star and all-around sellout Shaquille O'Neal. In the film, Shaquille plays a genie that fell out of his enlampment into a nearby boombox and chose to establish it his new wish-granting headquarters. A young boy stumbles upon the boombox, unleashes the genie, and is granted three wishes.

It's not a terrible premise, but the screenwriters manage to turn it into both something totally unappealing to children and a shameless unsuccessful vehicle to launch O'Neal's doomed rap career. The movie's villains are music piraters, which is sure to confuse any child remotely interested in following the film's plot. Oh, and did I mention that the story is almost exactly like Aladdin, the Disney version of which was released just a month following Kazaam? Tough break.



Baby Geniuses



It's almost difficult to make a movie this bad. You'd think the inherent cuteness of babies could let this project coast for a little on its charm, but it's so awful that it damns any of its potentially redeeming qualities. The movie stars Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd as evil scientist types who set out to unlock the code to babies' speech. It hinges on the ancient notion that babies possess innate knowledge and wisdom until they learn to talk, which could be sort of interesting if they hadn't made the movie so terribly creepy with bad computer animation. Babies perform complex martial arts moves on adults, engage in disco dancing, and have oddly miscued lips timed to the dubbed adult voice-overs. A gimmick done right can help set up a movie, but it can't uphold the entire thing when it's entirely devoid of plot, common sense, and humor.



Bio-Dome



Casting Pauly Shore as one of your male leads doesn't generally bode well for your film's eventual earning potential. Aside from the ever-nauseating Pauly Shore performance, Bio Dome is also prime evidence that Stephen Baldwin is the far inferior of the Baldwin clan. The two play a pair of dimwits who stumbled upon an ecological enclosure after mistaking it for a mall. The rest of the plot is so inane and nonsensical it's probably not even worth using valuable cyberspace real estate describing our stars' antics, but suffice it to say this movie would make an efficient torture tool. After a few repeat viewings, I'd talk.



Mr. Nanny



Speaking of terrible sports crossovers. I get that the joke is suppose to be the discrepancy between being a badass wrestler and holding a stereotypically female child-tending job, but it's really not working for me. If you've seen the more recent Vin Diesel vehicle The Pacifier, it's pretty much exactly the same thing. Save yourself the pain and just watch neither.



Super Mario Bros



It was a pretty novel concept at the time: a movie based on a popular video game franchise. Kids everywhere loved the game and its quirky characters, so it seemed a logical leap to further capitalize on its earning power by releasing a live action film version. Unfortunately, moviemakers managed to create a film that lacked appeal to any of the target demographics. While the game itself was light and fun, the movie version was far darker, failing to capture the attention of children while being too cheesy to appeal to teenagers. The movie also failed to adhere to the major tenets of the video game's plot and characters, infuriating loyal fans everywhere. You just don't mess with video game enthusiasts. They know their stuff.



It's Pat



Not every comedy sketch has the qualities to stretch itself into a full length film. It may be funny for a few minutes at a time, but at 80+ minutes it may fail to elicit more than a couple of chuckles. Such was the case with It's Pat, a Saturday Night Live sketch turned feature film about a mysteriously androgynous person. After an hour or so, I don't care whether Pat is a man or a woman--I just want out.



Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot



I love the late Estelle Getty, but I still can't excuse her from appearing in this Sylvester Stallone action/comedy that fails to deliver both action and comedy. The entire plot of the movie is encapsulated in its title, but they could have done without the "Stop!" caveat; most of us would rather be shot by Sly's movie mom than have to sit through this movie.



Striptease



Talk about a shameless premise for a movie: Demi Moore gets naked. It may be exploitative, only in the sense that Demi and Co. were exploiting us; Moore received a record $12.5 million for her performance in the film. Moore stars as Erin, a former FBI employee engaged in a custody battle with her ex-husband. Tapped out financially from legal costs, Erin turns to stripping to cover the costs of an appeal to win back her daughter. A congressman gets involved, there's some sort of drama/mystery element, but it's all just pretty bad and never establishes itself in any watchable genre of film.

Leonard Maltin actually gave the film no stars. I just watched an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 featuring the film Laserblast, which was possibly the most terrible movie I've ever seen but to which Maltin had awarded two and a half stars. By deductive reasoning, Striptease must be the worst movie ever made.



Showgirls



See above. Replace "Demi Moore" with "Elizabeth Berkeley". Disregard plot. It's not really important, anyway.


So 'fess up, children of the 90s, if any of these movies appeal to you for any other reason than the main characters appearing naked in them. Own the shame. It's okay. Let it out. We can accept if you have a soft spot for talking babies or Pauly Shore. We all have our differences. Your difference may just be poor taste in movies.

90s Internet Phenomenons

Here's a helpful hint in garnering attention for your silly, senseless ideas: simply jump on the bandwagon as early as possible in the technological timeline. If you can somehow finagle yourself a little corner of that virtual marketplace when the competition is light, people will probably find their way to your inane website. Nowadays the internet is over-saturated with all kinds of drivel but in the web's earlier days, these useless pages made up a far more significant proportions of websites. When you only have so many websites to visit, you're far more likely to check out a singing hamster or a dancing baby. That's just simple statistical analysis. So, sorry self, you've entered the world of novelty websites a decade too late. I'll give me some time to grieve.

We've all grown increasingly more difficult to entertain over the years. We have constant access to multiple forms of entertainment, many of which we choose to employ simultaneously. Have you ever noticed that you get bored just putzing around on the computer if there's no TV on in the background? This constant buzz of entertainment has dulled our reactions to internet stimuli. In the 90s, though, if a site offered us some sort of animation with accompanying irritating soundtrack, we were enthralled and immediately forwarded the link to all of our friends. While today when I get a forwarded email my major reaction is disdain to the sender for clogging my inbox, in the early internet days I would cross my fingers that my inbox contained a chain letter or a link to one of the following early meme gems:


Hampster Dance


In 1996, all it took was a couple of GIFs and some captivatingly irritating music playing on loop to lure us to a pointless website. The site featured four different types of hamsters arranged in rows, with each type feverishly perpetuating its signature dance move as a sped-up version of a song from Disney's Robin Hood played in the background. Hampsterdance exploded onto the meme scene overnight, jumping from just a couple of pageviews to a shocking 15,000 visits daily. It was sort of cute, yes, but not exactly the stuff groundbreaking internet phenomenons are made of.



Dancing Baby


This animated three dimensional rendering of a dancing babies made its rounds on the internet before ascending to television fame on Fox's Ally McBeal. It was, as the straightforwardness of the name suggests, a dancing baby. Really, that was it. A baby. Who danced. Like I said, it didn't take all that much to impress us in these early days of the internet; most of us were generally enthralled by the ever-growing capabilities of the internet. Sure, the dancing baby site probably froze every couple of minutes on your dial-up internet or shut down when someone picked up the modem's phone extension, but it amused us all the same.




Bill Gates Chain Letter and others


Over the years, we've become more and more accustomed to monitoring our emails for spam. I no longer jump for joy every time a Nigerian banker tries to share his lucrative fortune with me or when I'm notified of my winning $14 million in a foreign lottery I never entered. I used to experience a brief, gullible thrill at these messages, but they've since lost their luster.

In the 90s, however, we weren't quite so disillusioned with the notion of our inboxes bringing us great luck and free cash. Many chain letters were of the old-fashioned variety, warning that failure to forward it to 12 friends will leave you unlucky in love and life. Some, though, were a bit more enticing, notably the notification that an imminent merger of AOL and Microsoft meant Bill Gates wanted to send you a big fat check. Most of these fraudulent emails claimed the now-merged companies wanted so badly for Internet Explorer to remain the most popular browser that they were putting forth a little cash to cement its status. Who wouldn't press "forward" in hopes of receiving a check for somewhere between $200-$1000? As in most cases, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Bill Gates is a generous guy, but I think his money's a bit more useful in funding clean water supplies for impoverished African villages than ensuring I don't switch to Firefox.



Ate my Balls

Just as the name implies, the site depicted popular characters with thought-bubble overlays detailing their desire to eat balls. Sound stupid? It is.



Mahir Cagri: I Kiss You!!!


Who can deny the charm of a Turkish accordion aficionado with a standing offer for a kiss? Apparently none of us can, or so reveals the incredible amount of traffic to Mahir Cagri's personal web site in the late 90s. His site was full of little tidbits of broken-English self-proclamations, such as "I like music , I have many many music enstrumans my home I can play" and of course, "I Kiss You!!!" Cagri alleged that Sacha Baron Cohen's based the Borat character on his website. There are definitely an assortment of similarities, but Cagri's post-Borat movie lawsuit against Baron Cohen seemed more like a cry for lost attention than a legitimate legal claim.



Bert is Evil


Much to the chagrin of Susame Street producers, this website showed the puppet Bert consorting with all manners of unsavory characters such as Osama bin Laden. The idea was that Bert was actually some form of conniving evil genius and not just the disgruntled foil to the cheerier Ernie. The site's proprietor eventually took down the site, but not before Bert's image began cropping up on the posters of actual bin Laden supporters. Scary stuff. I thought it was bad when he was getting mad about cookies in the bed, but this is taking it to an entirely new level.



Bonsai Kitten


What does a group of rogue MIT students do when they get together to kick back and have some fun? Why, start an elaborate internet hoax, of course. The Bonsai Kitten website claimed that you could raise a Bonsai kitten in the same manner as you would grow a Bonsai tree, complete with photographs and descriptions of the process. Gullible animal lovers worldwide cried out in outrage, forwarding the site to all of their friends in hope of putting an end to this cruel, inhumane kitten-pruning practice. The joke may have been in poor taste, but it was just a joke nonetheless.




Rating Sites (Rate my Face, Hot or Not)

Have you ever wondered whether you were attractive? Do you have a camera and an elevated sense of physical self-esteem? Then we've got a whole slew of websites made just for your own mirror basking self-admiration. You simply uploaded a photo of yourself to the website and people would give you a numeric rating based on your looks. I'm not totally sure why we needed this type of validation from the general internet-roaming public, but the site was admittedly fun to browse. Now many of these sites have added a dating element, which I suppose hinges on the notion of matching individuals of equal attractiveness.



Peanut Butter Jelly Time



The meme featured just a dancing banana emoticon and the song "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" by the Buckwheat Boyz. The frantic banana has had many imitators including Family Guy's Brian, but none can compare to the simplicity of the original.


There's no means of predicting just which of these crazy little corners of the internet will skyrocket to disproportionate fame, but they do seem to have a common thread throughout: complete and total ridiculousness. The internet's bursting at the seams with heaps of viral memes and trends, but in the 90s the novelty was enough to draw us in to watch a dancing banana instruct us in the art of sandwich making.