Children of the 90s is Still Out of Town: Enjoy this Classic Post--Dunkaroos

Sorry for freaking out my loyal readers earlier this week--some anonymously evil spambot hacked into my account and Google, in their infinite if mildly misguided wisdom, temporarily suspended it. Luckily, I was able to convince them that I was not the spambot but rather its innocent blog-writing victim, so the site is back in all of its original glory. Thanks, Google!

I am still out of town, but with the site back up and running I will return in full force with new posts next week. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy this delicious frosting-accompanied post on Dunkaroos. It's the second post that appeared on the site back in March 2009, so the likelihood of you having already read it is relatively slim. Enjoy, and thanks to all for your patience and concern during the blog removal scare. I promise I wouldn't abandon you without warning like that --you need your daily dose of 90s, and Children of the 90s is here to deliver.



Ah, Dunkaroos. That is, a dual-chamber compartmentalized plastic snack container housing kangaroo-shaped cookies and sweet, sweet frosting. The marketing department at Betty Crocker clearly took a pretty literal approach with their concise yet didactic slogan: "You Don't Just Eat...You Dunk-a-Roo!" And Roos we did dunk. In fact, we dunked to with such zeal and fervor that a web search for "Dunkaroos" leads you to forum after forum where passionate Dunkaroo devotees discuss and debate the various black-market methods of procuring bootleg snacks from their 90s childhoods.

Yes, those were simpler times. These days, the current fanaticism surrounding this simple cookie-and-frosting snacktime combo impels Dunkaroo enthusiasts to scour amazon.com and discount stores to locate these discountinued delights. Whether chocolate, vanilla, or the late-era cookies and cream flavor struck your fancy, these were a kid's dream. Imagine, a conveniently packaged snack featuring absolutely no natural ingredients and negligible nutritional value.

For some inexplicable reason, this cookie-and-frosting combo was paired with a sharp-dressed and surprisingly formal Australian Kangaroo mascot sporting a hat, vest, and tie. You have to wonder what that marketing meeting was like:

"Alright team, we've got these cookies with a frosting dip. What's the logical leap for our big ad campaign launch? I say we go the Australian angle, you know how those Aussies love their prepackaged frosting-laden snacks. Better yet, let's make it a kangaroo with an Australian accent. That's more appropriate, really. And can we dress him up a bit? Let's be real here people, a kangaroo wouldn't just go about eating sweets bareheaded sporting shirtsleeves. That's it, a hat and tie will really emphasize the deliciousness."

Exhibit A:



Ahh...there's nothing like a half-sung, half-spoken painfully literal description of a snack food to get the hunger juices flowing.

Mascot aside (because let's be real, most of our childhood foods were actively promoted by randomly generated anthropormorphic cartoon rabbits, cavemen, leprechauns, and their ilk), Dunkaroos were a phenomenon. These were the food to pull out at snack time. Your cheap handi-snack knockoff cookies-and-cream pack were essentially an affront to the valid cookie and frosting snack community.

The most bizarre part was, at the height of their popularity, the Dunkaroos people launched a contest to replace their loveable if oddly matched mascot, Sydney, with...wait for it...another kangaroo. I know they're called Dunkaroos, but really. The parameters of this contest, endearingly titled the "Dunk-a-Roos Kangaroo Kanga-Who Search," essentially requested from their loyal fans the most incremental image change possible. I present to you, Duncan, the dunkin' daredevil. Like all other cartoon food mascots, the majority of his life is devoted to being thwarted by obstacles in an attempt to eat a food that the rest of us can just pick up in our neighborhood grocery store.



So there you have it...Dunkaroos. As their then new bad-boy mascot (as denoted by presence of backwards cap) rides into the abyss on a roaring motorcycle, so too must we leave behind this delicious snack from days of yore in a cloud of cookie dust. That is, unless you're willing to risk life and limb by ordering discontinued snack food on amazon.com for purely nostalgic reasons.

According to my google search, most of you are willing to take that risk. Dunk safely, children of the 90s. Dunk safely.

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

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!




That's right, we're talking Nickelodeon original-Nicktoon era, not the shoddy subpar imitation churned out by ABC/Disney after 1996. To embarrass themselves further, Disney awkwardly renamed the series Brand Spanking New! Doug, despite the fact that the show had already been airing on Nickelodeon 5 years. Their new title reeked of desperation, a sort of "look at us! We got that show you liked! Now watch us make it terrible."

Exhibit A, the more wisely re-renamed Disney's Doug:



Note the presence of unmatchable Disney inoffensive blandness, replacing the original lovability of the a-cappella theme song. Whistling? Really? And everyone standing there waving cheerily? A travesty indeed.

And before we move on, let us briefly discuss the mutual ridiculosity of fanatical fan Wikipedia updaters and absurdly miniscule visual changes made by the Disney animators to classify the show as "brand-spanking new!":

Character changes on Disney's Doug:

• Doug's sleeves were longer and had a pair of black and white shoes instead of red and white.
• Skeeter's shirt was altered from a yellow lightning bolt to a yellow "O".
• Roger's leather jacket was sleeveless along with his hair combed down instead of his straight up hairdo on "Nick's".
• Patti's hair was cut. Her shirt stayed the same, except she is wearing blue jeans instead of her blue skirt.

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug)

You have to think to yourself, was there some sort of copyright sensitivity from the original series to the knockoff Disney version? What would possibly motivate them to sit around the boardroom, poring over storyboards, and heatedly debating the merits of cartoon haircuts and leather sleeves?

But anyway.


The real Doug was Nickelodeon's Doug, running from 1991-1995. The original series wasn't about long, complicated plotlines; each show was divided into two 11 minute "episodes" conducive to our limited childhood attention spans. It took all of our favorite cartoon cliches (lovable awkward protagonist, cute pet sidekick, quirky best friend, wacky family and neighbors, love interest, school bully) and made them into a virtual rainbow of bizarre multiculturalism. Sure, Doug was white, but his mother is inexplicably purple. And let's not even get started on how his best friend's name is "Skeeter". Clearly this was of an era before that term was imbued with inappropriate rap-song innuendo. We can only hope.

The originally show was both vividly and ridiculously imaginative in a way that was deeply resonant with our not-yet cynical preadolescence. Case in point, Doug's self-imagined alter-ego "Quail Man":



Yes! Amazing. An amazing way to add flashier nonsensical, nonsequitor plots. But we ate it up nonetheless, for its sincerity and resonance. My personal favorite foray into Doug's imagination was his fantasy music video of his "band":



I'm torn on which part is my favorite; the initial exclamation-in-unison accompanied by star-producing high-fives, or maybe the Doug-as-Michael-Jackson-with-ethnic-backup-dancers sequence. Either way, it was pure, unadulterated genius. To this day people acutally do live-action covers of this song on YouTube, if that speaks at all to its posterity.

In short, Doug did not insult our intelligence as children. There were all sorts of clever minor aspects of the show we can now appreciate as (theoretical) grown-ups. The "Beets" as a facsimile of the Beatles, his beatnik sister Judy's "Moody's school for the gifted," or Porkchop's igloo in the backyard.

So, to Disney: we will not accept your cheap, shark-jumping imitation. Giving Patti Mayonaise a butch haircut and naming Doug's new baby sister "Cleopatra" (really?) will never win us over. The original quirkiness of the show was what made it so endearing and enduring. It's what separated the authentic Doug from the later inferior imitation.

After all, how many of you can recall the lyrics from the Nickelodeon-era Beets' hit songs "I Need More Allowance" and "Killer Tofu"? Or Doug's fear of exposing his distaste for liver and onions to Patti? Or that Doug was horribly embarrassed of his middle name, Yancey?

On the other hand, how many of you can recall...well, anything from the Disney version?

I rest my case.

Children of the 90s is at a Work Conference...In the Meantime, Please Enjoy this Classic Post: I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up!

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!


Looking for a surefire way to guarantee that no one will respect the precarious health of the elderly and to diminish the legitimacy of their tenuous medical state? Well, you're in luck! The Life Call corporation has already done it for you and has made it available in convenient late 80s/early 90s daytime television commercial slots. As the Life Call people sat around musing what was the possibly the way to least seriously depict the grave dangers associated with solo-dwelling senior citizens, they stumbled upon a foolproof formula for endless mockery and derision. How could we make light of such a tragic and serious risk? Well, I'll tell you how.

Yes, the Life Call people decided against working the "this is a serious life-saving product and should be presented as such" angle and instead opted to hire the campiest, chintziest elderly actors to produce embarrassingly low-budget dramatizations for their television advertisement. At least at the beginning, the fine print in the lower right-hand corner reads "dramatization". Whew, that was a close one. I was concerned that that woman had actually fallen and couldn't get up, and we were all just sitting around casually observing her in her dire state. At best, it was as if Life Call had raided a retirement home community theater troupe. Obviously, they had already blown their whole legitimate actor budget to hire concerned-looking family members and friends of the injured party. Thankfully, those characters had no lines or maybe we would have taken this thing less lightly.

Here is the ad, in all its glory:




Less widely mocked was the first guy, Mr. Miller, who acts his heart out (possibly, literally, considering his supposed ailment) describing his chest pains. However, our real heroine was Mrs. Fletcher, oh great utterer of redundant and unintentionally humorous phrases. The fictional Mrs. Fletcher croaked out a line that exceeds nearly any quote out of Bartlett's in immediate recognizability.

"I've fallen...and I can't get up!"

It was probably that second part that did in poor Mrs. Fletcher. Laying on the floor of her questionably empty room, walker askew, we could all clearly deduce that she had indeed fallen. Her apparent need for the Life Call system suggested to us that she was also likely unable to get up. Otherwise, she probably would have called up and said, "I've fallen! ...Oh, no, I'm fine, I'll get myself up in a jiffy. I just wanted someone to talk to because I'm lonely and live alone and can only communicate with my children, neighbors, and doctors through third party Life Call employees." But no, Mrs. Fletcher knew better than that. She had to do more than just explain that she had fallen, that part was clearly evident to any impartial observer. She needed to fully elucidate her situation by pointing out that not only had she fallen, but that she was at the same time unable to get up. Well, bless her heart, she certainly sold that line. Unfortunately, to children growing up in the 90s, it was probably the funniest thing that they had ever seen and/or heard.

We had all been told dozens of time to respect our elders. Parents and teaches explained to us that most senior citizens are viable and capable and deserve to be treated as human beings. We all bought that for about ten minutes, or at least the time elapsed between receiving that explanation and our initial viewing of the Life Call commercial. Though the commercial was marketed toward seniors as a tool to encourage their independence, to us it only cemented their status in our eyes as highly dramatic, accident-prone victims.

As if Life Call hadn't hammered the point home enough already with their melodramatic dramatizations, they also relied on the cheery host of the commercial to explain to us what we had just seen. "See?" She prompted condescendingly. "Protect yourself with Life Call and you're never alone!" For those of us unable to understand the complex plot twists and the nuanced acting of her preceding ad castmates, we could always rely on our Life Call pendant-sporting pal to restate the thesis of the commercial. And wasn't she recently "deathly ill"? Why, she looks great! We can only imagine that if it hadn't been for been those dashing pseudo-cop outfitted Life Call operators, her deathly illness would have led to, well, death.

Obviously at some point, Life Call realized their gaffe and sought a new direction with their advertising campaigns. No longer were they going to be victims of endless mockery. They were going to take a hard line with customers and depict true stories of Life Alert's life-saving capabilities:



Wait a minute. Didn't she just say she wasn't an actress? Well, then why is she being played by one in the dramatization? We thought you had seen the error of your ways, Life Call, but this dramatization of supposedly real-life events featured the same catchphrase as the original. Are we really to believe that this real live woman had seen the Life Call commercial so many times that she instinctively uttered their trademarked line to operators? Also, are to we to buy that someone with the foresight to purchase a Life Call Emergency Alert System was engaging in such irresponsible fall-prone behavior as reading a book and walking? At the same time? And another thing! Aren't those the doctor and telephone operator from the first commercial? Are you telling me we're using stock footage because we couldn't even afford to hire some new actors? You can even hear the choppy way they cut off the "Mrs. Fletcher" part of the operator's line to accomodate this allegedly new true story. Way to go, Life Call. You really caught yourself with that one.

Then again, their intention was not to catch themselves; it was to catch poor clumsy Mrs. Fletcher, or this new supposedly real-life non-actress knockoff of Mrs. Fletcher.

After all, they were the ones who had fallen.