Children of the 90s is at a Work Conference...In the Meantime, Please Enjoy this Classic Post: Ghostwriter

Children of the 90s is at a work conference this week with tragically limited internet and computer access. Take my word for it, it's totally tragic. I didn't want to leave my loyal readers in a bind, so I am pleased to present you from a classic Children of the 90s' post from way back when I was getting a whopping 14 hits a day.

I trust few enough of you have trudged through the extensive backlogs that this is almost like new. Almost. I should be back in full force by next week. Until then, enjoy the reruns! Hey, it's summertime. I've got to save the good stuff for sweeps. Thanks for your understanding--see you next week!



Ah, the joys of good, clean multicultural middle-school student supernatural detective work. The television series Ghostwriter, which ran 3 seasons from 1992-1995, was a thinly veiled effort by public television to encourage the development of basic reading , writing, and problem-solving skills among elementary school children. We may have had no idea at the time, but watch an episode now and you will find the educational components are blindingly obvious. The show was remarkably good at tricking us into learning, as well as providing all sorts of feel-good moral lessons along the way.

The show's characters were the live-action equivalent of the names and pictures textbook publishers use to vociferously and repeatedly tout their commitment to racial and ethnic diversity. Though I can recognize this show aired during the blooming of the age of political correctness, they laid it on pretty thick. We couldn't just have a group of relatable middle-class white kids running around solving mysteries. Instead, it was necessary to produce some variation of "We are the World," the children's television series:



That intro shines so brightly with quintessentially nineties special effects, it makes you want to reach for the Vanilla Ice Gautier shades. The cast all seem remarkably surprised to see their names, though I assume they were told by the crew that they were filming the intro.

The premise of the show involves a mysterious unseen "ghost" (represented by a jumpy glowing light) who communicates with the Ghostwriter team by manipulating words and letters in the kids' everyday settings. The team quickly learns that a mysterious spirit has opted to communicate with them through the handily educational use of their reading and writing skills. While this ghost could likely have chosen all sorts of qualified, highly educated people to do his bidding, he insists on using elementary and middle-school aged children to solve his inoffensive and conveniently child-friendly brand of mysteries.

The "team" members, united by their common ability to communicate with the mysterious Ghostwriter, denoted their membership by wearing a special pen on a cord around their necks. That's right, as if they could not shove the educational component down viewer's throats any further, the team's all-powerful ability lay in their ability to write. I wouldn't call it a subtle metaphor, but hey, it worked.

Of course, just like real-life children, they had freakishly neat typewriter-grade penmanship and wrote at the slowest possible pace to ensure that their young viewers could actually grasp what was happening. Fortunately for those with limited literary prowess, each story arc took a remarkable four or five half-hour episodes to solve. Especially in a time before rampant over-prescribing of attention-deficit medications, it's nearly inconceivable children actually mustered the attention spans to follow a single mystery storyline over a weeks-long run. Ghostwriter clearly had some form of hypnotic power over its viewers, as the show was spectacularly popular throughout it three seasons.

Ghostwriter was not merely a television series; it was an educational franchising powerhouse boasting CD-ROMs, books, VHS releases, classroom curricula, and of course, replica Ghostwriter pens so viewers at home could "play along". I never had any luck solving the mysteries, but I do have a mini Lisa Frank notebook somewhere full of all of the clues tirelessly scribbled in admittedly poorer-than-Ghostwriter-team penmanship.

There are hundreds of Ghostwriter episodes floating around on the internet today, but I leave you with the original. As if you were not already convinced that Samuel L. Jackson is in every piece of motion-picture media every produced, he also plays Jamal's father in Ghostwriter. I present to you the first episode of Ghost writer, "Ghost Story:"





Link to exhausting log of Ghostwriter episode synopses:
TV.com guide

Children of the 90s is at a Work Conference...In the Meantime, Please Enjoy this Classic Post: Scholastic Book Orders

Children of the 90s is at a work conference this week with tragically limited internet and computer access. Take my word for it, it's totally tragic. I didn't want to leave my loyal readers in a bind, so I am pleased to present you from a classic Children of the 90s' post from way back when I was getting a whopping 14 hits a day.

I trust few enough of you have trudged through the extensive backlogs that this is almost like new. Almost. I should be back in full force by next week. Until then, enjoy the reruns! Hey, it's summertime. I've got to save the good stuff for sweeps. Thanks for your understanding--see you next week!


There was no day like book-order day. It's crazy to imagine that book-order forms really drove the kids wild, but the love of these flimsy little pamphlets was irrepressible. Despite the fact that these books were available at local retailers everywhere, the idea that something would come to us in the mail at school and we could spend weeks anticipating it was almost too much to bear.

The best thing about book orders was not the order forms themselves, but rather the accompanying excitement of the purchase. Imagine, as a child, being able to select and buy something all on your own! Sure, your parents would have to fill out the form, write the check, and seal the envelope, but you brought it to school. The books arrived with a post-it with your name on it! Let's face it, as children we weren't big decision makers. We couldn't choose what we were going to eat for dinner or what time we would go to bed, but dammit we could pick our books and that was that.

Never mind that these books were educational. We usually found ways around that. There were always special "just for fun" books with no educational value whatsoever, and we hungrily devoured them. I specifically remember ordering a Full House Uncle Jesse's personal photo album. Just imagine! I, a mere third grader, could own Uncle Jesse's personal collection of photographs! In the days before I possessed the mental capacity to realize these "albums" were mass-produced, I actually believed that I owned a piece of history. Through my own good luck, book orders had allowed me to stumble upon a collection of pictures that Uncle Jesse had decided to mail to me and me alone! Take that, third grade peers!

Now of course we can look past our childhood frenzied enthusiasm to realize that at its core, Scholastic was really just a master of marketing to children. By distributing these in schools allowing the children to see these forms first, they put the kids in control. It was like programming children to pester and torment their parents until they finally gave in and wrote the check.

But in those days, we didn't see it that way. Aside from the obvious gratification of Christmas-morning-esque book-order deliveries, bringing in your book-order with all the right books checked off was a measure of your playground street cred. These book orders were ours, and we called the shots. As children, our level of autonomy was pretty limited, so we took it where we could get it.

And if where we could get it also threw in a boxed-set of Judy Blume books, it just made it all the sweeter.


Book-Orders in the news:
Book Orders Under Fire

Browse online Scholastic book-orders:
Book Orders Online

Duck Hunt

It's official: today's video games are way too realistic. The other day I foolishly opted to play some Big Buck Hunter at a local bar, leading to my inevitable cowering at the prospect of repeatedly killing deer that bore ab eerie resemblance to Bambi's mom. What happened to the days of blurrily pixelated hunting? I don't think I could ever shoot a real live deer in the face, yet I'm more than gleeful for a shot (pun intended) at some Duck Hunt mallards or lethargic bison in Oregon Trail. What? I don't want that dog to mock my haul, nor do I want to face the embarrassment of having caught so few pounds of meat that it actually fits in my covered wagon. It's a legitimate justification.

With a sufficient proportion of pixelated non-realism coupled with a totally fake looking red plastic gun, even the most squeamish shooters among us were wont to take out an entire flock in a single round. Old school Nintendo knew a thing or two (in retrospect, I'd say two) about the notion of less is more. The game was incredibly repetitive, requiring us only to shoot at a duck or two per round and to avoid shooting the dog. It may not have held the attention of today's overstimulated child, but many children of the 80s and 90s lost great stretches of time--not to mention the ability to focus our eyes--to this simple electronic endeavor.

In comparison to the shooting games available on today's video game market, Duck Hunt was incredibly tame. Our duck victims never bled profusely from their gaping wounds nor did they ever shake a mangled wing at us while accusing us of poultricide. In fact, we had almost no interaction with them at all. They simply flew overhead to the mesmerizingly hypnotic music, we shot at them, and our loyal canine companion retrieved their abandoned carcasses. No fuss, no muss.


Of course, it wasn't all invisible off-screen blood and guts as we appraised our killing streak. We also had a chance to shoot skeet, which thankfully had no R-rated double meaning to us at the time. The eruptions of clay pigeons in the air was not especially differentiated from the hunting of live ducks, thanks to the primitive mid-80s gaming graphics technology. Whether the bullet contact induced an exploding gray circle or an exploding purple and white circle with wings, it all sort of blended into a generally gore-free exercise.

That dog, though, could have used some serious etiquette training. In fact, many bootleg versions of the game enable the player to shoot and kill the dog, fulfilling the fantasy many of us constructed after enduring his endless merciless taunts at our shoddy aim. You shoot, you miss, the dog mocks you profusely. It was more than enough to grate on our fragile young egos. Plus, he was incredibly annoying. I admit to aiming the gun at him once or twice, but unfortunately in the official game, there's just no getting rid of him.


No matter how easily amused we claim we may have been as children, there's no true justification for having played this game for more than 20 minutes at a time. It is so utterly mindless, prolonged playing may begin melting the softer areas of your brain. There is, indeed, an object to the game: shoot anything that moves; however, that's not quite enough of a motivating premise to keep us engaged for hours a la Super Mario Brothers or Tetris.

Duck Hunt's popularity can be credited to its bundling with the Super Mario Brothers game, both of which came with the classic Nintendo Entertainment System. While Duck Hunt probably couldn't stand alone as a bestselling game, it enjoyed widespread de facto popularity for one reason: because it was there. The plastic gun was still a bit of a novelty for an at-home gaming system, so it didn't matter much to us that the game was a simple exercise in point and shoot. We point, we shot, we outsmarted that damn dog.

It certainly didn't attain the same cult following as its bundle-mate Super Mario Brothers, but Duck Hunt achieved a quiet iconic status by default. Whether or not you were a fan of the game, if you owned an NES, you probably owned Duck Hunt. I still can't see that little red plastic gun without itching to take out some 8-bit fowl. I may not have ever developed the killer instinct, but this family friendly take on a shooting game made the genre palatable to even the wussiest of young gamers. See, sensitive kids can kill things, too! Thanks, Nintendo.