Salute Your Shorts

Does the name "Zeke the Plumber" send chills of terror down your spine? Do you still wonder what happened to the buried treasure of ex-counselor Sarah Madre? Do you continue to lose sleep wondering about the appearance and whereabouts of mysterious camp owner, Dr. Kahn? Does the seemingly innocuous phrase "awful waffle" make you wince in pain?

Well, you may be a Salute Your Shorts junkie.

Don't worry, though, you're not alone. Many of us children of the 90s suffer a similar affliction. There was a wonderfully effective cure available briefly in the 90s that aired Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. Unfortunately, the treatment is no longer available and those of us still suffering withdrawal are forced to self-medicate with YouTube clips. You can put yourself on the waiting list for long-term treatment, but the outlook isn't good.

In a way, we all grew up at Camp Anwanna. We had all of our favorite standard 90s characters: The hero, the princess, the bully, the new-age oddball, the jock, the nerd, and the butt-of-the-jokes chubby one. They were all under the semi-tyrannical rule of Kevin "Ug" Lee, (get it? Ug...Lee? Ugly? Witty, yes?) their authoritarian counselor charged with keeping this wacky mismatched group of campers in line.

I went to various summer camps for 14 years, and I don't know a single one of my old camp songs by heart. I do, however, have the uncanny ability to remember all of the lyrics and produce mental screenshots of the Camp Anawanna song:

"We run, we jump, we swim and plaaaay. We row and go on trips
But the things that last foreveeeeeer are our dear friendships.

Camp Anawanna, we hold you in our hearts
And when we think about you--it makes me wanna fart!
--"It's 'I hope we never part'
Now get it right or pay the price!"

Now we will share a lifetime of the fondest memories
By the lake of Anawanna...set in the old pine trees!

Camp Anawanna, we hold you in our hearts
And when we think about you --this thing came apart!

Think Anawannawanna, Speak Anawannawanna, Live Anawannawanna. Ug!"

Here is a clip of the season 2 version of the theme song, which differs from the original in one initially undetectable but extremely significant way:



Seems normal enough, right? You're probably thinking to yourself, why that's exactly how I remember it! Let's do a character run-down and I think you'll see the slight discrepancy to which I was referring:



Bobby Budnick, our charming resident bully. You may say, how can a guy with a flaming red mullet be a bully? In most other settings, wouldn't he be relentlessly mocked for merely existing with such an unfortunate aesthetic? Yes, but this was summer camp. This was also the nineties, where a mullet and cut-off t-shirts is more than enough to declare your bad-ass status. Budnick was forever playing tricks on his unsuspecting and less antisocial peers, most notably when he told the nightmare-inducing Zeke the Plumber ghost story to the other campers and set up scare traps across Anawanna. Well, he got what was coming to him when they saw him screaming like a girl when he ran into those spider webs. Eh? Am I right? Also, Budnick seemed to have a virtual fountain of contraband available for sale to his fellow campers. He was a big fan of the empty threat "...or I'll pound you," in which his mullet and cut-off t-shirt bad-assedness it emphasized by forever unrealized bluff of pounding (which I am going to hope for all of our sakes is a euphemism for beating someone up.)



Donkeylips, the unfortunately monikered hapless fat kid. He was generally relegated to the role of thankless lackey and sidekick to the aforementioned Mr. Budnick. Donkeylips represented those feelings of insecurity and inadequacy in all of us; his premature cynical outlook and unquenchable desire to be liked was certainly recognizable. Oh, and did I mention he was fat? Boy, was he fat! Despite all of those deep character traits, his deplorable chubbiness was more often than not the major Donkeylips punchline.



Sponge, the smart nerdy one. Like any good 90s show, his intelligence and social ineptitude is characterized by his character's need for glasses. Apparently, popularity was reserved for those of us with superior eyesight. This nebbish little bowl-cutted pipsqueak sometimes veered dangerously close to the Screech zone, but was generally more brainy than irritating. You can also see in the intro that he enjoys science based on his penchant for dressing skeleton models in his own clothing and examining them with a magnifying glass (obviously the correlation between vision-enhancers and nerdiness is deeper-set than we'd originally thought.) They call him Sponge because he absorbs things. Get it? Like a Sponge! Oh, Salute Your Shorts. What zany nicknames will you think of next?



Telly, the girl jock. Yes, a girl jock. How progressive is that? Telly was relatively bright and normal, by Camp Anawanna standards. She was largely unexceptional when cast against her madcap caricatures of camper peers. If anything, the most unusual thing about our friend Telly (aside from her sharing a name with a certain contemporary Sesame Street monster) shows up in the opening credits. Telly's real name is Venus DeMilo. I kid you not. Her parents actually named her that. Whenever I pop out a child I too usually think to myself, geez, this thing really looks like an ancient Greek sculpture. I can only assume she was born with broken-off arms, or else there's really no explanation.

(the other Venus DeMilo)

Dina, our little Princess. What camp would be complete without one? Her range of hysteria generally ranged from the inability to select the appropriate outfits to the crushing disappointment of chipping a nail. Who says they don't write good parts for women on TV? My favorite-ever Dina storyline was when she went out with Budnick and required him to dress like a preppy square to meet her country-club standards. Oh, Dina! When will you learn? She did, however, accidentally ask Donkeylips to a dance once but ended up enjoying herself, so I'll let her accrue a few niceness points for that one.



ZZ, the requisite eccentric Kumbaya-er. I suppose you could blame her blondeness for her flightiness, but her ocean of oddness ran a bit deeper than ditziness. ZZ was into the environment, and frequently conversed with inanimate objects to illustrate her love and compassion for them. That sounds normal, right? She sometimes went a little off the deep end, and I'm not just talking about during Instructional Swim. A very loud audio version of ZZ playing one of her save-the-world songs on guitar can be found here, but I caution you that her anger brings forth a lot of unwarranted microphone feedback.




Ug, O great god of precautionary zinc oxide nose application. We all sometimes worry that we're going to get an awful sunburn not so much here or here, but right here. He was your basic authority figure standing in the way of general fun and mayhem, but occasionally he let them get away with a fun thing or two. Also, in the intro we learn that he plays a mean piano.


So, that brings us to Michael. What's that you say? Michael's not in the intro? How odd. Why ever could that be?


Surprisingly blond for someone named Michael Stein, Michael was the show's obligatory everyman. His main identifiable quality is that he's an all around nice, normal guy in a sea of insanity. It is for Michael's unfortunate experience that the show was named, as the first episode featured a sequence in which Budnick and Donkeylips stole his boxer shorts, ran them up the flagpole, and spiritedly saluted them.

They change that sequence in the second (and last) season intro. Why, you may ask. What could they possibly be trying to cover up?

Oh, right. That Michael has been swiftly and quietly replaced by this guy:




Michael mysteriously comes down with the chicken pox, and as is wont to happen in these types of situations, his parents decide to take him hiking in Switzerland for the remainder of the summer. Don't fight it, it makes perfect sense. Obviously the camp's waiting list is spectacularly full, as Ronnie Pinsky (above) replaces Michael just a few hours after his departure. Ronnie goes on to fill the Michael void, essentially assuming all of the major Michael plotlines and serving as a sort-of stand-in Michael for the remainder of the series.

It should also be noted that the actor who played Ronnie Pinsky, Blake Sennett (though credited as Blake Soper in the series) is now the lead guitarist for indie rock band Rilo Kiley. Wait, what? Really? For those of you unfamiliar with the indie music scene, you may recognize their song "Portions for Foxes" from the Grey's Anatomy pilot (which, let's be honest, anyone unfamiliar with the indie scene is pretty likely to watch Grey's Anatomy).



So there you have it. Despite the Michael/Ronnie switcharoo, the show maintained its quality and wit throughout its two season run. Thank you, Salute Your Shorts, for bringing us hours of childhood diversion and entertainment with your wacky storylines and gloriously likable one-dimensional characters.

For that, we salute you.

Check it out:
Join the cause: petition to get Salute Your Shorts out on DVD
Watch the full first episode online

The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery

(I will admit up front that I may be cheating a tiny bit on this one. The Eleventh Hour was technically published in 1989, but it was such an integral part of my 90s childhood that I'm going to let that formality slide)

The Eleventh Hour was so much more than just a pleasantly rhyming children's story. It was an intricate mystery that grew increasingly complicated with each turn of a page, and as children we were absolutely determined to solve the complex series of riddles. More importantly, we were determined to decode the puzzles without breaking the unspeakably cool sealed section in the back. The book actually had the solution to the puzzle right there, in a tightly sealed envelope-like contraption following the story. I mean, it was right there. Oh, the temptation! The shame associated with breaking the seal was more often than not too great to go ahead and sell out to the solutions section. Sure, we would finally have the answer to the mystery we had spent the last 347 days pondering, but it would be a hollow victory.

Whenever you went over to a friend's house and saw that they had broken the seal, you could feel that unmistakable rush of superiority. You may have been fruitlessly working on the mystery for months and had only a Five Star notebook full of mistaken leads to show for it, but you had Eleventh Hour integrity, dammit. They would always try to blame it on an older brother or younger sister less ambitious than they who had gotten into the secret section first, but we knew better than to believe their shoddy Eleventh Hour justifications. We were absolutely steadfast in our commitment to solve the mystery of Horace's missing birthday lunch if it was the last thing we did. At the rate we were going, this seemed a likely possibility.



We can only imagine that somewhere out there, there is a support group for people who caved prematurely and opened the hidden world of information in the sealed Super Secret Section. Burnt-out, dead-eyed video store clerks and fry cooks clutch their styrofoam coffee cups with a slight tremor as they share with the group the tragic story of how their lives took an unfortunate but inevitable Eleventh Hour-imposed turn for the worst.

"My name is Alan, and I opened the Super Secret Section."
"Hi, Alan."
"I opened the SSS when I was 9 years old. I couldn't take it anymore. I was pretty sure I had it down to the giraffe and the zebra, but who could be sure? That pool table scene always threw me off. And that swan! What was I supposed to do? I tore through that baby, and look at me today. If I just could have held out a little longer on that envelope..."

The puzzle was admittedly overcomplicated for a child, and feasibly added to any feelings of inadequacy accrued during our formative years. Parents and babysitters would pore over the book, convinced that with age came puzzle-deciphering wisdom. However, they too were thrown by the fraudulent clues leading them in all manner of imprudent directions. Even once the initial mystery was solved, the book offered additional challenges certain to thwart even the most adept cryptographer. What was an amateur decoder to do?


Perhaps I should backtrack a bit. For those of you without an immediate recall of this gloriously illustrated children's book, let me give you the short version sans full spectacular visual accompaniment. The book's breakout star, Horace the Elephant, is celebrating his eleventh birthday. As is customary with eleventh birthday parties, he wishes to carry this ever-so-creative "eleven" theme way too far and force all of his animal friends to suffer through a whopping eleven games before they finally get to eat at (you guessed it!) eleven o'clock. Seems simple enough. But wait! Before the group reaches the coveted lunching Eleventh Hour, we discover that one of the guests, supposedly friends of our dear friend Horace, is actually a thief. Somebody has made off with all the delicious goodies Horace had painstakingly prepared for his party. Luckily, our friend Horace is quick on his feet in a distinctly un-elephant-like way and salvages the day by coming through with sandwiches. Hooray! Sandwiches!


It seems like a fairly happy ending, but Base sort of left us hanging with this one. There was a gaping hole in the story--who had eaten Horace's prized birthday meal? And thus the fun began. Well, depending on your idea of fun, that is.

I personally received this book as a gift at an age when I could barely read, let alone solve a complex series of cryptographs, but Base's beauteous illustrations alone were enough to draw me in (yes, I said "draw", and I realize that's an embarrassingly cheap pun, but let's just move on. Thank you for your cooperation.) The visuals on these books were spectacular and appealed to me at a time in my life when my major ambition was to become an artist. I fancied myself as the next Graeme Base, which clearly illustrated (I swear, that's got to be the last one) that I had an overactive imagination. After several misguided pencil tracings of The Eleventh Hour on waxed paper swiped from my kitchen drawer, I realized I would never amount to anything as an illustrator and quickly vowed to learn to read so at least I could revel in solving the puzzle to avenge my brief failed career as an artiste.

For those of you who never got around to solving the mystery, there is hope for you yet. The book is still available at fine retailers everywhere (including online). The window of opportunity to redeem yourself is open.

Just don't wait until the Eleventh Hour to do so.


Check it out:
Want to own a Graeme Base Original? Be prepared to spend a pretty penny.

Zubaz

Some fashion trends are enigmatic. They are not particularly attractive or flattering, nor do they serve out their calculated functionality in any reasonable capacity. In fact, these trends conceivably exist with the sole goal of making the wearer a walking target of unmericful mockery and public shaming.

Zubaz were one of these trends. Was one of these trends? What's the grammatical status of Zubaz? I assume by sound alone that the word Zubaz is plural, but I could be wrong. The mere thought that anyone would want to refer to this god-awful alleged fashion statement in the plural is beyond me. Owning one pair was bad enough.

In short (or long, both versions were pretty bad), Zubaz were ridiculous. In their inception, they were potentially in some way tied to a plausibly justifiable function. A group of steroid-crazed (I have no evidence, but this must be the only explanation) Minnesota bodybuilders got together and pondered to one another about the stretchability and breathability of the current athletic shorts on the market. Nothing quite seemed to give them that certain something that they were looking for. "These seem rather quiet," They thought. "They need to make more of a statement. Something that says, I drink a pallet of Mountain Dew 2-liters a day and take my old lady to monster truck shows for our anniversary. Oh yeah, and that my excessive commitment to weight training has made me and my anterior thigh muscles too physically robust to keep from bursting from any available sports pant."

These were, of course, semi-legitimate concerns. The weight lifting one, at least. The original intention of Zubaz was to capture a niche market of bodybuilders whose propensity for squat thrusts led to innumerable pants-splitting incidents. I will cede this point to the Zubaz guys and give them at least a marginal window of light in the dark shadow of doubt that these pants were originally produced with good intentions.

Little did they know what was to come.

Have I gotten to the part yet about how these pants were designed in outlandish patterns and flamboyant colors? I should probably have mentioned that earlier on, but I was distracted from the acidic ocular reaction from viewing the above photo. Yes, Zubaz wearers weren't content with their clothes merely being comfortable; they had to be resplendent in neon green zebra print as well. The shape of the pants was sort of a toned-down Hammer Pant, but what they lost in volume they compensated for in pattern and color selection. In the likely case that your mental picture remains hazy from damage done to your brain's visual receptors in trying to recapture the image of these pants, here is a little refresher in the form of a Zubaz fashion show:



That's right, nothing says manly like strutting your stuff to a Suzanne Vega song while wearing a purple windbreaker. For some reason beyond probable explanation, these pants caught on in a big way. This ostentatious legwear still held its athletic appeal, however, and mainly catered to a sports crowd. The sadists at Zubaz manufactured licensed sports team merchandise complete with wild patterns and flashy logos:



The brand even had a brief stint in the professional athletic team uniform arena, though it was thankfully short-lived. Teams like the Tampa Bay Storm were forced to go out onto the field looking a little something like this:


Or worse, this:

(Okay, so maybe that last one isn't an actual professional sports team, but it was a 90s Zubaz ad)

Embarrassing, yes. But that's not all! The Zubaz brand story does not die with the crest and fall of a great (though questionably zebra-striped fashioned) decade. Just when we thought it was safe to leave the house without running into someone dressed suspiciously identical to a stick of Fruit Stripe gum, things took a turn. I'm not quite sure how to break it to you, so I guess I should just come out with it.

I regret to inform you that I bring you this blog in the wake of a terrible tragedy. An announcement has been made, and nothing we can do can stop these people. They're unrelenting in their quest for global zebra-striped pant domination. They are clearly out of their minds, and they are on an inexplicable mission to refill the world with loud, clamoring neon patterns and unflattering tapered elastic-banded legs. Yes, that's right. I said refill.

Zubaz are back.




For a company whose slogan was once "Dare to be Different", this new line seems suspiciously familiar. I think I speak for the majority when I say that we wish the people at Zubaz were a bit better at taking their own advice for this second go-round. Their new slogan may be one of the more frightening and untimely statements I've heard in a long time.

"We're Back."



Venture if you dare:
The new Zubaz website

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters

You can't help but love a television show whose title includes both a horrified reaction and accurate description of its cast. The more exclamatory, the better. What's that you say? It takes place in a landfill? I am so there.

It was the Golden Age of Nicktoons. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters was one of those shows for which you can both appreciate its creativity and wonder how they let a kooky idea spiral so quickly into something so absurdly intricate. Remarkably, the good people at Klasky-Csupo managed to make our monster friends both wildly idiosyncratic and relatable all at the same time. The key was that, like us children of the 90s, these monsters were kids. They went to school, they had homework, they sought to rebel, and they feared punishment from adult authority. Sure, they were always popping out of toilets and their major aim in life was to frighten the daylights and/or nightlights out of innocent children like ourselves, but they possessed a certain quirky underlying quality which made us root for them the whole way.


The matter-of-factness with which the Monster Academy and its zany cast of characters was presented to us as children made these ridiculous beings seem almost plausible. We had no reason not to believe that a red bunny rabbit, a black and white candy cane wearing wax lips, and an amorphous smelly blob of play-dough holding eyeballs roomed together at boarding school at the dump and get themselves into all sorts of wacky comedic situations. The main characters possessed a more-than-adequate amount of human-like charm in their personality traits and behaviors; one was a neurotic worrywart, one a laid-back slacker, and the last an uptight wealthy perfectionist. They were 90s TV standards incarnate, made over into so-ugly-they're-cute preteen monsters.

For a children's cartoon, it was fairly dark. In fact, some children found parts of it downright frightening. The show was completely unapologetic about its premise and refused to "tone down" any characters who may have been perceived as, well, terrifying. The Monster Academy's headmaster, the Gromble, had a tough-love approach that involved a great deal of yelling, threatening, and eating students in a way not usually conducive to positive adult role models. Similarly, if our young monster friends misbehaved, they faced being subject to the dreaded Snorch's torturous punishments and incoherent ramblings. These punishments included such terrifying fare as group square dancing, and for any child forced to do-si-do in elementary school gym class, we understood the graveness of their concern.

Behold, the wondrous intro:

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

The monsters were so sweet and well-intentioned, we often forgot that their livelihood was frightening human children. Ickis, Krumm, and Oblina were a ragtag trio of preteen monsters trying to make it through their semester at Monster Academy unscathed.

Let's meet our heroes:

Ickis, neurotic crimson pipsqueak constantly mistaken for an adorable and distinctly unscary bunny rabbit. His scaring technique involved some form of self-inflation that ballooned him to several times his usual nonthreatening stature.


Krumm, resident slacker and all-around smelly cream-puff. His uncanny ability to frighten people with body odor alone iwas both remarkable and a bit disgusting. He also had the odd fortune of having to hold his eyeballs in hand as he was generally socketless.


Oblina, candy cane extraordinaire and token rich snob. Her supposedly cultured taste veered more toward the bacterial than the highbrow, consistent with her monster upbringing. She possessed enormous red lips and the ability to extract her internal organs from them en masse for the general gross-out scare factor.

Our squalid principals ran about wreaking havoc in a Monsters INC prequel-type fashion. Deep down, we knew them to be good, but they still had the power to scare the bejeezus out of us with their formidable antics. At the end of the day, however, we understood their motives and were willing to forget their propensity for apprehending unsuspecting children. After being taken in by a few good episodes, we too could picture ourselves rolling around in the trash after a long day of scaring, dodging Simon the Monster Hunter, and desperately trying to make ourselves look more repulsive to potential mates we were currently "squishing" on.

Aaah!!! Real Monsters took 90s sitcom conventions and turned them on their head; the cleverness of it was not lost on us, even as children. Not to mention that the innumerable tongue-in-cheek cultural references satiated any adult in the room, allowing them to chuckle and briefly forget the potentially dire psychological effects this gross-out humor was probably unleashing on their young, impressionable children.

Whether you viewed yourself more as an Ickis, an Oblina, or a Krumm, we all saw a little piece of ourselves in these allegedly real monsters. Maybe we weren't surfing the sewers or using toenails as currency, but we were experiencing the same pre-adolescent pitfalls as our monstrous counterparts. Being sentenced to detention may not have been quite as afflictive as a Snorching session, but we recognized the general idea.

If you have somehow lost your childhood sense of whimsy and imagination, fear not. Well, maybe fear a little bit, but there's still hope for you to enjoy this classic Nicktoon in all its first season glory on Itunes.

So cue up the old episodes and stay awhile. You too will be Hooked on Phobics in no time.


Check it out:
Aaahh!!! Real Monsters episode guide

Crystal Pepsi

Are you sick of delicious, well-known sodas? Do you find the comforting and familiar to be generally repugnant? Do you need a new soda Right Now, and would prefer to drink it accompanied by the Van Halen song of the same name?

Well, you're in luck! Or at least, you would have been had you expressed these concerns somewhere between 1992 and 1993.

In 1992, Pepsi executives sat down and thought, "Sure, our product is delicious and thirst-quenching...but is it pure?" You may have thought they had learned a key and important lesson in not-tampering-with-a-successful-formula from the 1985 "New Coke" debacle, but you would be wrong. In an ever-ongoing battle for one-upmanship between Pepsico and the Coca Cola Company, no product launch was too ridiculous.

Thankfully, they had an equally absurd ad campaign to accompany the product. Although Crystal Pepsi was indeed clear in color, it tasted pretty much like original Pepsi. I may be going out on a limb here, but I assume that if it tastes the same, there were not major recipe changes for the beverage outside of altering the color of the syrup. This did not stop our friends over at Pepsi from making the supposed "clarity=purity" concept the major cornerstone of their advertising campaigns. The concept in itself was ridiculous; no one was claiming Sprite or 7UP to be particularly pure in comparison to its darker-syruped soda peers. Regardless of the obvious fallibility of this advertising claim, PepsiCo pushed ahead with quintessential 90s commercials like this:



So, what did you learn? Nothing? What? You mean to tell me that despite all of those definitive statements splashed across my screen, not a single one of them tells us anything at all about the product itself aside from its clear color? Well, at least the music drops some heavy hints on when I can expect to find this beverages in stores. I'll give you a hint: it's not later.

Clearly (sorry, I had to), Pepsi was piggybacking on other marketing trends at the time and aiming to portray a product that was simultaneously familiar and improved. Researchers at the time were uncovering some mildly convincing evidence that people's perception of taste or quality is heavily impacted by its color. However, what the Pepsi R&D people failed to take into account was that people's expectations for taste also change significantly with a color shift. While people were expecting Crystal Pepsi to have a lighter taste and lower caloric content (after all, it's not a huge leap from how they market it in the above ad), their tastebuds were in uproar over the eye-to-brain miscommunication.

While Crystal Pepsi had done well in initial test markets, the actual substance of the product failed to live up to the hype. People tasted the cola and were generally unimpressed from its near indistinguishability from the original. In an effort to counterbalance popular public opinion, PepsiCo released the following commercial:


So, what did they think? They claimed it have a "nice lemony-zing taste!" and a "clear" flavor. None of those things were particularly true about the initial Crystal Pepsi formula, but the folks over at Pepsi were desperate to convince us they were so. Confronted with a backlash from loyal Pepsi drinkers, Pepsi continued backpedaling in an effort to extricate themselves from this sticky (though supposedly "less syrupy!") situation.

Suddenly, it was like the Clinton impeachment hearing of soda marketing as the Pepsi people really took it down to semantics. "What do you mean we called it Crystal Pepsi? It's called Crystal from Pepsi!" That's right. Pepsi realized that their staunch classic soda adherents were in a huff over the fact that they tried to pass off this colorless impostor as their old favorite Pepsi. Why, this wasn't Pepsi at all! It's as if their fanbase got together and put out a statement saying, "We don't care if you make it. We don't even care if people know it's from Pepsi. But for God's sake, we can't have people thinking this is Pepsi! Blasphemy!"

And so it was:



At least this ad shows the corporation is able to poke some fun at itself. Pepsi recognized how ridiculous the addition of this meaningless preposition was to the name of their product. They also knew it was absurd that they were forced to add a citrus flavor based on people's perceptions of how a clear soda should taste.

After all of that, I think we can all agree: no more messing with the original. Is that clear?

Crystal.

Number/Word Munchers

There were two words every 90s child eagerly anticipated in their elementary school classrooms. No, they weren't "No Homework" or even "Snow Day".

They were "Computer Lab".

Hearken back to a day when computer use was a novelty and not a supposedly integral part of our day-to-day existence. In the 90s, elementary schools began installing state-of-the-art computer labs bursting with educational games galore. It was the ultimate educational experience, as both kids and teachers felt like they were getting away with something illicit; as kids, we couldn't believe we were out there playing games during the middle of our school day with no one vetoing our enjoyment, and teachers couldn't believe that we were actually buying into this emphatically educational experience. Everyone was a winner at computer lab time.

That is, unless you were bad with prime numbers.

Enter a little game that went by the name of "Number Munchers". It sounded innocent enough, but it was enough to boil your blood with rage when those pesky Troggles came to gobble up answers and stymie our most earnest of munching efforts. For those of you unfamiliar with the Troggle genus and/or phylum, they came in a variety of kooky colors, shapes, and sizes. Our friends at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (the company that produced the software) used their ultimate computer nerdiness to develop complex scientific names and traits for the respective Troggles. Our software designer (dorkius maximus) provided us with a virtual rainbow of Troggolicious nemeses.

My favorite were the fuschia Reggies, or Trogglus Normalus. Sure, they tried to eat me and scramble my equations, but by God were they adorable. The most irritating Troggle had to be the game-foiling Helpers, Trogglus Assistus. They would appear innocently enough, looking like an adorable clone of my green munching self. "Oh!" I thought to myself. "Another little Math Muncher incarnate here to partner amicably with me and win me truckloads of munch-earned points!" Not so, childhood self. These malevolent munchers were up to no good, stealing my correct answers and taking my potential high-scoring points with them. How was I supposed to immortalize myself in the game's Hall of Fame? What good was this game unless kids who had Computer Lab time later in the day could bask in the radiating glow of my newly canonized position amongst the greats?

Number Munchers was essentially a school-sanctioned version of beloved classic Pacman game, but with an underlying element of solving math problems to avoid sudden death. Sure, every once in awhile a "safety square" would appear, but they were pretty fickle. It was all about finding the correct answers and dodging the ever quickening omnipresent Troggles and collecting a great bounty of points along the way. However, it wasn't all just fun and games; there were periods of passive entertainment as well! Imagine, Troggles and Munchers alike would gather round the screen to entertain you with their crudely animated antics. During these short scenes, our mainstay muncher would somehow elude the colassal but dim-witted Troggle's plan for our demise. Think you can light my muncher mansion on fire? Think again, Trogglus Smarticus. My muncher's got a fire extinguisher.



If this account has yet to jog your memory, perhaps this illustrative video will put it in running gear. Though it depicts a slightly earlier version than the one I played at school and eventually begged my way to owning at home, you will probably get the general idea:




We loved this game with a near religious fervor. The only problem was, I was terrible at math. I still am. In fact, I was dabbling in the free online version of the game here and I just realized I don't even know what a prime number is. How am I supposed to confound Troggles without a basic grounding in elementary math? Fortunately, the good people at MECC software came up with an alternative perfect for those of us dorky enough to adore playing Number Munchers, but not smart enough to derive multiples of 16 without consulting some sort of a chart.

All hail the mighty Word Munchers, redeemer of self esteem for right-brained children everywhere. Word Munchers was essentially the same concept and game construct, but addressing English class standards such as phonics, grammar, and parts of speech. Do I know what part of speech "she" is? You bet I do! Can I identify rhyming words? Absolutely! Recognize antonyms? Piece of cake! Whew, for a second there I thought I was doomed to Apple II excommunication for lack of math ability.

Number Munchers or Word, one thing was for certain. In the ultimate battle of Muncher vs. Troggle, you would give anything for Muncher to be the triumphant victor. Just to see that venerable animated sequence of me, the once lowly Muncher, beating the once all-powerful reigning Troggle to the top of the Math or Word mountain to plan my victory flag (conveniently marked "M" for Muncher). We put that flag in, it's a done deal.

Hall of fame, here we come.




Oh how the mighty have fallen:
View the world's most frightening computer game illustration on the cover the current version of the renamed "Math Munchers" It appears that our old friend Muncher has morphed into a frenzied math addict, eager to get his hands on a quick division-sign fix.

Magic Eye

It's a well-known fact that all children enjoy staring at a two dimensional image for so long that their eyes begin to glaze over and water uncontrollably. Their heads may ache, their eyes may lose focus, and their patience may wear paper thin, but nothing will impede them from their ultimate visual goal. Though usually it is near impossible to force a child to stay still, set one in front of a Magic Eye book or poster and prepare to be amazed: not by the Magic we were promised, but rather by the level of maddening concentration associated with capturing it.

There was nothing worse than being the one kid who couldn't see the hidden image. If you were ocularly challenged in a manner that hindered your useless ability to view a supposedly three dimensional image amongst a repetitive sea of two-dimensional images, you were relegated to endless ridicule and social alienation. God help you if you suffered from the curse of poor binocular disparity, as you were likely headed for a sad and lonely existence devoid of exciting jump-from-the-page imagery. A seemingly pointless skill of blank staring suddenly set apart the Haves from the Have Nots.

In bookstores and classrooms across the nation, the same conversation was taking place between increasingly frustrated pairs of children:

Kid #1: Look at the picture.
Kid #2: Okay, I'm looking. (long pause) So, what's supposed to happen here?
Kid #1: You'll see something.
Kid #2: I'll see what?
Kid #1: Just look at it!
Kid #2: I am looking.
Kid #1: No, look past it.
Kid #2: Oh, I think I kind of...
Kid #1: Do you see it now?
Kid #2: Um, yeah, I think so.
Kid #1: So what is it?
Kid #2: A...whale?
Kid #1: Ugh, it's the Statue of Liberty. Man, you suck at these things.

(Kid #2 walks off with pounding eye strain-based headache and wounded pride)

And...scene.

Nobody really seemed to know how these things worked, and no one really seemed to care. The real test of 90s childhood street credibility was an uncanny capacity to descramble austereogramatic images. I know, it makes perfect sense. How else are we supposed to prioritize our social structure? Brains? Looks? Give me a break. It was Magic Eye or nothing.


The burning shame of not being one of the Chosen Ones was both crippling and inescapable. Living with the constant fear that our mothers' old adages of our crossed eyes forever sticking that way was not enough to deter us from staring intently until our brains were set to burst. We were determined that this would be the time that we would finally see what everyone was raving about. Those who were skilled in the ways of the Magic Eye were constantly coaching us, insisting that we were doing it wrong. Despite our protests of poor depth perception or an inability to visually construct convergent images, the Seers were neverendingly giving us all sorts of well-meaning contradictory viewing tips:

"Cross your eyes a little!"
"Eyeballs further apart!"

"Look to the left of it!"
"The other left!"

"Try to focus on one spot!"
"Don't focus your eyes on anything at all!"
"Try to look past it!"

That last one was always my favorite. Oh, you want me to look past it? I was foolishly looking at it. Alrighty, no problem. I knew this x-ray vision would eventually come in handy. I'll just gaze straight through the paper to the next page and I'll be set.

Unfortunately, this brand sarcasm was lost on our persistent Magic Eye instructors. After all, who cares about attitude when you've got magical pictures? Hopeful that their Magic Eye proteges may have finally blossomed into fully evolved viewers capable of perceiving 3D imagery, the Seers would eagerly ask, "Can you see it now?" Horribly embarrassed by our ineptitude, we would have to grudgingly admit time and time again that we still lacked the basic ogling skills necessary to deconstruct a series of seemingly meaningless colored dots. Try as we might, we would never be content to simply accept it as a moderately attractive example of pointilistic art. We knew it was so much more, and we wanted in.

Thankfully, our dear uploading friends over at YouTube have put together an instructional video of sorts. Don't let the soothing music and whimsical font fool you. This thing is serious. I followed the instructions to a T, but somewhere along the way my plan to see a glorious hidden three-dimensional image took a turn for the worst. It brought me right back to 1995, with all my Seeing friends telling me, "You're thinking about it too much. Just stare at it. Don't think about it at all." Right. Because telling me not to think too much about it leads me to think about it prominently and intently. Why don't you give it a try and see what you see:



Isn't that nice? They offer that little consolatory image at the end to offset the continued wrenching humiliation of those of us unable to see the 3D picture. If you can see it, congratulations. Your ocular capacity clearly exceeds mine, and I respect your visual superiority. However, if you failed to see the image, you are not alone; in fact, many of our celebrated television personalities faced the same issue, sometimes as a minor offshoot plotline!

On the original Ellen show, Ellen Degeneres desperately tried to hide her secret inability to Magic Eye. An episode of Seinfeld left George and others so transfixed by the Magic Eye task at hand that they were unable to complete the rudimentary functions of their everyday lives. And of course, we can't forget out beloved Friend Ross Gellar, who was chastised by the whole group for his incompetence at drawing out the 3D Statue of Liberty in one of the most popular Magic Eye pictures. US magazine has been right all along, they really are just like us! And they say there are no relatable characters in sitcoms.

Thus if you're feeling down about your lack of Magical Eyes, rest your weary sockets. You're among good company. For those of you who can see the mythical images, well, continue to bask in your transcendent ability. A skill you thought had been laid to rest years ago has briefly returned just long enough for you to reassert your superiority over the Blind. By tomorrow your so-called skill will reclaim its rightful place in obsolescence and your gloating rights will dissolve like the two dimensional dots from the three dimensional Statue of Liberty.

Enjoy it while it lasts, you lucky bastards.

Camp Nowhere

Were you forced to attend summer camp against your will? Have access to your parents' designated camp fees? Know a burned-out ex-hippie drama teacher known for evading his financial obligations? Enjoy reckless scheming?

Well, have I got the movie for you.

Camp Nowhere was every preteen's dream in the 90s. It was like Home Alone, except...well, it was a lot like Home Alone. It seems they even used the same freelance movie-title selection company as each title follows a simple formula; (Location) (Word Describing Isolated Situation). Regardless of the obvious comparison, Camp Nowhere had a slightly different, older appeal. Sure, it had an equal amount of screen time devoted to showcasing frenzied adult-free debauchery, but the kids of Camp Nowhere had multifaceted teen-style relationships and were fond of fooling their next-of-kin in lieu anonymously evil robbers.

As evidenced in the DVD cover pictured above, it got some pretty detailed rave reviews. Everyone loves a good one-word summary. When I'm at the video store, I usually only have one-tenth of a second to make a decision, so I appreciate them helping me out with the telling "Funny!" review on the front. In actuality, the reviewer could have hidden "Not Funny!" somewhere in their 500+ word review and the quote could have been clipped in the same way. Intrigued by the seemingly intentional vagueness of the pulled quote, I felt I had to do it justice and look up the original NY times review (found here). The word "Funny!" does indeed appear, but minus the exclamatory punctuation and 112 words into the cleverly titled "Suppose We Rent Some Cabins and Run Our Own Camp?" review. But hey, it's in there.

The movie begins with our winsome protagonist, Morris "Mud" Himmel. See, can't you already tell the movie is going to be hilarious? I mean, they call him Mud. Mud! Like dirt, but with water. Pure comedy gold. So anyway, Mud's parents are some class of evil villain and want to send him to the dreaded computer-learning summer destination Camp Micro-chippewa. Get it? Micro-chippewa. Microchip? Computers? I hope you're still following, this is pretty complicated stuff we're dealing with here. Lucky for our friend Mud, all of his convenient movie-character-cliché friends are in the exact same situation. Each of them is inauspiciously fated for some random, unlikely summer camp and can't stand the thought of it. What's a gang of improbable pals to do?




It's pretty clear that there is only one answer to this question, and no, it is not the real-life just-suck-it-up-and-deal-with-it solution. What these kids really need is to start their own camp! Infuriated at their parents' propensity to send them to such loathsome summer getaways as Fat Camp, Drama Camp, and Military Camp, the kids forge ahead to found a summer camp of their own. But, wait, you ask. What of the location? The food? The financial backing?

Totally taken care of. These are smart kids here; after all, the Himmels wouldn't be sending Mud to computer camp if he weren't destined for academic greatness. Enter Dennis Van Welker, high school drama teacher extraordinaire and adult co-conspirator in Operation Camp Nowhere. The Camp was indeed somewhere, so maybe the name was just to throw off suspicious onlookers. Finding a handily available abandoned summer camp site, the kids get to work on the aforementioned reckless scheming. They realize that if they brought in other kids and somehow sold the concept to parents as a real camp, they could get those sweet, sweet camp entry fees and let some pretty wild high-jinks ensue.

Like any good 90s movie, this film is ripe with cheesy montages. Watch the kids throw pies at one another and propel themselves off the cabin roof onto a pile of mattresses to a background beat of rockin', fun-loving music! Despite the abundance of semi-standard 90s montage sequences, the film is actually relatively witty, if a bit tired in its premise. Not to mention that with dreamboats like Jonathan Jackson and Andrew Keegan at the helm, there was certainly no shortage of tween eye candy. It also debuted a young Jessica Alba, for those of you who are into that kind of thing. All in all, the film really covered its BOP! magazine fan base.

To attest to the funniness of this film, here is the theatrical trailer. I apologize for the atrocious quality of the clip, but the preview sums up the film neatly and hilariously:



Of course, no kid movie would be complete without some sort of ridiculous come-to-a-head situation and eventual unraveling of the master plan. If you're not one for spoilers, you may want to scroll down now. The kids' plan appears to miraculously be working; the campers are happy, the lied-to parents are satisfied with their thin explanations, and Dennis is acting as a loosely-defined adult. That is, until the parents insist that they have a visiting day. As you saw in the clip above, the kids and Dennis go to great lengths to continuously reform and rearrange their camp on a single day to satiate the different parents coming expecting to see a military base, a diet haven, a theater forum, or a computer class. Rather than explaining it in great detail, let me illustrate with a clip from the movie complete with amazing redecorating montage:



As expected, this euphoric sense of accomplishment and getting-away-with-it style glee can't last. These kids can't keep up the facade forever, and cracks begin to show on parents' day. As things eventually crash and burn, many lessons are learned and tough decisions are made, but as in all of these movies things turn out okay for everyone in the end and both the kids and Dennis are all the wiser for the experience. Sure, the movie conventions can be a little trite, but this film defined an emergent independent generation of 90s kids and gave them the power to dream of a world where they ran the show. Although the premise was exaggerated, we could all relate to their innocent-intentioned acts of rebellion in favor of standing up for being themselves.

If all of that isn't enough for you, the movie repositions Christopher Lloyd and Tom Wilson (Biff from the Back to the Future trilogy) as hippie vs. cop nemeses. If pitting them head to head once again fails to tickle your 90s fancy, then I don't know what will.

So next time someone tries to bring you down by saying you're going Nowhere, think of your beloved childhood camp based there and smile. Happy camping, children of the 90s.

Eureeka's Castle

I'm going to be straight with you on this one and let you in on a little secret: kids love puppets. The muppetier, the better. It's a tried-and-true formula, and it works. The best thing about puppets is that they can do things that make absolutely no sense and have no groundings in real behavior of human beings, but we accept it as puppet doctrine due to their hypnotizingly vacant googly eyes. The puppets in Eureeka's castle were particularly adept at allowing children to be "in" on their jokes, hence allowing children to bask in their perceived percipience at preemptively predicting the punchline.

Our cast of characters was small but lively. Unlike other puppet shows like the Muppets, Eureeka's Castle was a distinctly enclosed environment with little to no contact to outside puppets. The show was based in a wind-up music box maintained by a genial giant and featured an unlikely gang of magical and mythical pals.

Eureeka's Castle's quirky characters each possessed some oddity or foible that was both completely insane and instantly recognizable by child viewers. The show was smart enough to present its characters in single dimensions, giving each puppet an apparent schtick from which to extrapolate wacky plot lines. Let's take a closer look at our castle players:



Eureeka, our show's beloved heroine and namesake. Notice the adorable My Little Pony-hued hair. Don't you just want to brush it with a tiny pearlescent pony mane brush? Also, she seems to have pastel croissants sprouting from either side of her head. I like to imagine that she got into some sort of a scuffle with an angry pâtissier. Anyway, Eureeka is a student sorceress with hilarious incantations-gone-awry a la Elizabeth Stevens. Despite her notably amateurish attempts at sorcery, she has a certain charm only found in someone who grows up in a wind-up music box.

Magellan, our lovably clueless dragon friend. It only makes sense that he was named after a Portugese maritime navigator, because it has absolutely nothing to do with who he is as a character. Magellan (again, the dragon, not nautical explorer) tends to get overexcited and lose control of his unwieldy tail, as one is wont to do with highly dangerous appendages. His single-toothed smile is undeniably lovable, if a bit unfortunate. Magellan seems to have some sort of music box allergy, causing him to sneeze with such fervor that their entire encapsulated wind-up world shakes violently.

Batly, our near-blind bespectacled bat friend, known for his hilarious and unsuccessful flying attempts. As children, we could endlessly annoy our parents by jumping from high, precarious pieces of furniture and recovering with Batly's witty catchphrase, "I meant to do that!" Oh, how we loved that catchphrase! Obviously, he had not meant to do that, yet he had done it regardless. Batly, you jokester. We forgive your klutziness, if only for your good humor and quotability.



Bog and Quagmire, our Moat Twins, who in the above photos had to be tragically and sloppily cropped from a VHS cover group photo as they seem not to exist on the internet. They look sort of like uglier, messier, hyper-colored Elmos. They live in some unexplained banished habitat beneath the castle. Most of their time is spent ravenously consuming peanut butter sandwiches and playing rousing games of tag.



Mr. Knack, who has met a similar internet fate of virtual (forgive the pun) anonymity. Mr. Knack was some undisclosed class of foreigner and ran (as foreigners tend to do) a pushcart selling assorted goods.

For all you non-visual learners out there (read: the length of search for these images exceeds my allotted blogging timeslot) we also have Magellan's pets: Cooey, who was possibly some form of wild undomesticated Furby, and the Slurms, who were claymation dots. As a child terrified of all things claymated, even I could sit through the blobbish Slurms' mesmerizing recombinations of interesting colorful shapes and representations.

The aspect of the show that I remember most was the singing stone fish on the facade of the castle. I tirelessly searched for a visual of these gilled serenaders because I am determined to jog your memory, no matter to what lengths the internet goes to thwart my well-intentioned efforts. It appears that these fish have been since expunged from our collective memory as 90s children, so I wish to refresh it with the following image. I apologize for their Christmas hats--those aren't a standard singing fish feature, but is likely the only known Eureeka's Castle Fish photo on the entire interweb.


So there you have it: Eureeka's Castle. Sure, it was arguably a rip-off of the immediately preceding Nickelodeon show Pinwheel, but we loved it with equal and abundant vehemence nonetheless. Eureeka's Castle executive producer Kit Laybourne summed it up best when he explained their three hypothesized ingredients to effective humorous children's programming: wordplay, sight gags and/or physical comedy, and running jokes. With these simple elements, Eureeka's Castle created kid's programming that kids could not only understand but could simultaneously feel "in the loop" on the character's private jokes. Though Laybourne never directly addressed the question of his intentions, we as children in the 90s can easily speculate his answer.

He meant to do that.



Listen to the theme song to revive Eureeka's Castle memories

Fruit Gushers

The entire concept that there is a suspicious liquid-filled fruit snack vacuum-sealed for posterity (expiration date: January 3012) called "Gushers" concerns me as someone now old enough to read ingredient labels with a critical eye. Despite the inclusion of such delicious additives as Maltodextrin and Distilled Monoglycerides, Gushers continues to be a bestselling snackfood. Did you know that these seemingly innocent fruit snacks contain a squirt of an unknown mystery substance? Of course you did, you sicko, you're probably gushing on one right now. Remember the good old days, when the verb "gush" referred to something, I don't know, completely disgusting?

Good Example: "Did you see Joel's leg after he got it stuck in the wood-chipper, Fargo-style? It was gushing blood, man."

Current Example: "Did you try these fruit snacks? Dude, they are, like, gushing with flavor."

I'm not sure anyone can even begin to comprehend how disgusting that is, because so many children of the 90s continue to purchase this tragically bodily-fluid referencing named snack. The worst part is, it's not even a misnomer. You bite into one of those babies, and they literally gush in a way conducive with the Good Example. As if their naming department's creative juices hadn't already been fully drained into these fruit snacks, they actually had the audacity and unoriginality to name of of their flavors "Gushing Grape". What exactly is with the use of flesh-wound originating adjectives to describe the bursting flavor of sugary. nutritionally unsound junk food? If that wasn't enough, there was actually a movement to save the now-retired "Gushing Grape" variety. And they say our generation doesn't take up any worthwhile political causes.


Gushers were the epitome of the anti-natural foods movement espoused by so many children of the 90s. We had learned a trick from food processing companies, and were determined not to pass along this information to our parents for fear of revocation of sweet delicious valueless snacks. During the 90s, food producers were famous for adding the word "fruit" before all of their gel-based snacks to give them the illusion of having some nutritional components in some way related to the fruit family. Never mind that not a single one of these supposed fruit relatives came in a color even remotely reminiscent of one that occurs in nature. There was Fruit by the Foot, Fruit Roll-Ups, Fruit Gushers, Fruit Snacks. Even though they all tasted exactly like one thing and one thing only (read: pure sugar), they claimed to come in a variety of fruit-based flavors.

As children, of course, we could taste the difference between blue and green gushers. If they were billed as blue raspberry (note: this fruit doesn't exist) or green apple (additional note: this fruit is in no way sweet), then we assumed them to be as such. Gushers appealed to our sense of adventure and fun in a manner that still allowed us to be passive snacking coach potatoes; they had outrageously extreme names that in some way implied a sort of accompanying physical activity. However, like the alleged fruit flavor, the mere suggestion of their extremeness was a major component of their marketing campaign.




Really, General Mills? Obviously, someone over at their corporate offices had the X-games announcer on speed dial. Were we really to believe that sitting quietly and eating a liquid-filled fruit snack would be an unforgettably X-TREME experience? It seems that they did, based on the rather questionable names of their flavors; there was Screamin' Green Apple, Triple Berry Shock, G Force Berry Radical, Roboberry Ultra Blast, Fruitomic Punch, and so many other naming atrocities that I prefer to protect the reader from exposure to such out of control fruit snack titles. G Force? What, are they in their food development labs, measuring their Berry Radical flavor with a accelerometer? We can only assume that Fruitomic Punch was developed at their Los Alamos lab. As for Roboberry, are we to believe that this Ultra-Blasting hexagonal treat has some sort of artificial intelligent robotic function? And let's not omit the fact that Triple Berry Shock sounds like a form of cardiac arrest for those with multiple fruit allergies.

Gushers' nonsensical approach to advertising appealed to our desire to enjoy things that were concurrently despised by our parents. However, it's possible that Gushers took it a tad too far in another 90s campaign with their deliberate depiction of a painful and uncomfortable snacking experience:



While bearing in mind that this was in the era of Warheads and Tearjerkers, this commercial in no way represents the product in an appealing manner. If nothing else, it emphasizes the disgust of the children upon consumption.

Gushers were that food that your mother wouldn't buy for you as you begged and threw yourself on the floor of the grocery store, claiming that Susie's mom always lets her have Gushers. The fact that many 90s health-conscious parents deigned to purchase such non-nutritional snacks made them immensely appealing in a want-what-you-can't-have sort of way. Sure, they were by nature repulsive and filled with a mysterious wetness, but they represented so much more. We could care less what our parents had to say about these; we valued them for their out-of-control sweetness quotient and candy-like appeal.

That is, until we went into Triple Berry Shock.

Nickelodeon Slime

As a (sort of) adult, I have to wonder what on earth our parents were thinking as they watched our inexplicable outpouring of glee and good cheer at the sight of one of our contemporaries being doused in a sticky green semi-viscous compound on national television. To us, it made perfect sense. Speak out of turn? Get slimed! Perform poorly on a game show challenge? Get slimed! Fail to Figure it Out? Get slimed! Happen to be standing outside Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando, Florida during the filming of a filler intermission commercial segment?

You get the idea.

As children, we had no questions about the nature, existence, or purpose of slime. The act of sliming was, plain and simple, probably the image we were most frequently exposed to from ages 5-12, and we saw nothing wrong with that. We consumed Nickelodeon like water--only we preferred it greener and oozier. Slime was a fact of our reality and was to be taken at absolute face value as a legitimate icon of our favorite (though at the time, only) children's television network.

The notion of slime originated with the late 80s children's sketch comedy classic, You Can't Do That on Television! Every time an actor on the show uttered the otherwise inocuous phrase, "I don't know," suddenly and unaccountably a significant amount of sticky green goo would rain down from the heavens onto the unsuspecting victim. YCDToT cast members lovingly recalled that the original formulation of slime was deemed highly toxic and that it may have been a poor idea to risk lives for the sake of children's sketch comedy, even if it did star a young Alanis Morisette.

The proposal of the mysterious green glop was apparently so well-received by show producers and executives that it was soon redeveloped to be at best minimally non-lethal. Concocted from an original secret formula of flour and lime-green Jello, slime burst onto the scene, nontoxic and slimy as initially envisioned. God forbid the slime hypothesizer compromise his holy green vision. It should also be noted that it is a well-known fact that everyone thinks green Jello is disgusting, so the blame for its continued and persistent existence on grocery store shelves can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the slime theorists.

As we can deduce from the following clip that we can only assume to be completely serious, it seems that at the time of its inception in the mid-80s slime was highly controversial topic amongst children. As you watch the following Nick Special Report, please take notice that the proportion of feathered hair to head is inversely related to one's support for slime action.



What started as a one-shot gag soon spread (as slimes tend to do) to an ongoing element of the show. After the show's cancellation, Nickelodeon was determined not to let this otherwise non-sequitor lame-excuse-for-a-lack-of-punchline die out quietly. Plus, they had already bought all of that lime Jello. Thankfully they had the foresight to add both oatmeal and shampoo to the slime, apparently adhering to the 1990s Sassy magazine school of food-as-hair-product recipes in their quest to make the slime more wash-outable. The ominpresence of slime tied in nicely to the inherent messiness of pretty much every game show Nick churned out in the mid-90s. Shows like Double Dare, What Would You Do?, and Super Sloppy Double Dare capitalized on the audience's existing emotional ties with slime to capture their hearts and soil their smocks. Did I say yet that the aforementioned mess-based game shows were hosted by a germ-phobic obsessive compulsive? Obviously the slime people weren't the only ones at Nickelodeon with a sadistic sense of humor.

At some point, the demand for slime grew so high that Nick Studios actually erected a green-spewing slime geyser outside their Orlando-based studios. While of course we can only imagine that as a non-naturally occurring substance this geyser was simply for show, what it stood for made up for its lack of purpose.





Imagine for a moment that there were indeed dozens of people employed by the slime industry in the mid-90s; there were scientists and formula-testers, the guys that hung the roof buckets, engineers to build the pouring mechanisms, someone to flip the slime-dumping switch. This had obviously gotten out of hand. Instead of reigning it in, however, Nickelodeon just kept on milking it. Slime was featured heavily in the late-90s Nickelodeon game show Figure It Out, was used liberally and continuously at the Kid's Choice Awards, and squelched into the 2000s with a commercial break feature aptly titled "Slime Time Live." Yes, slime was here to stay, and there was nothing we could have or would possible have wanted to do about it.

See, we all embraced slime (well, as much as is physically executable with a mucilaginous goo) as emblematic of all that we knew and loved of our magical Nickelodeon network. It was idiosyncratic and spoke to us in a way that separated us from our parents; we understood it, they did not. For a magical moment in time, slime represented us, our collective childhood tied together by the universal experience of growing up watching the realization of this running green gag. To our parents it was simply a mess to clean up, but we knew it was our mess and hence deemed it worthy. Nickelodeon slime, if nothing else, stood for a turning point in children's entertainment when kids were (in our eyes) in control to run wild in their self-created world and revel in its distinct non-adultness. Kids had formed a secret club, and the repeated viewing Nickelodeon slimings made you a card-carrying member. Nickelodeon created a world where it was both fun and safe to be a kid, and we welcomed that wholeheartedly. It was the most kid-friendly neon-hued sludge we had ever seen, and we adored it. Well, that is until Gak flatulated onto the scene.

But that, my friends, is a story for another time.

*thanks to Aly S for the topic idea

Check it out:
Nick's Slime Across America