Captain Planet and the Planeteers

For some reason, magic rings are pretty common cartoon motif. I suppose the appeal is pretty universal: you wear on your hand not only the irrepressible power to do your magic bidding but also your membership card to an exclusive superhero club. Unfortunately there's got to be some sort of superhero hierarchy out there, meaning not all superheroes are created equal. Magic ring or not, it's pretty safe to say that Protector of the Environment doesn't quite rank up there with the coolness factor of Batman or Superman. Hell, even Mighty Mouse may have had something on these guys.

Captain Planet was the animated response to an increasing push for social relevance and educational programming in children's television programming. This brand of thinly-veiled cartoon education, dubbed "edutainment", was pretty forthcoming in its attempts to teach us all sorts of pertinent facts and figures regarding the environment and our role as informed citizens of Earth. Think of it as an animated superhero version of An Inconvenient Truth, but with fewer powerpoint presentations and more mystical Earth spirits.

In the true spirit of the 90s, Captain Planet and the Planeteers were painfully multicultural. As emphasis of the inherent value of diversity grew in the American cultural marketplace, TV producers became more and more eager to appear politically correct in their entertainment undertakings. It was no longer enough to abide by the time-honored principle of tokenness. No, children today needed not just a vaguely ethnic friend here and there but rather a full gang of worldly companions. In an painstaking effort to make it even more realistic, the American one is by far the most ignorant and least informed. Who says cartoons aren't a mirror to society?

It all starts when the spirit embodiment of the Earth, Gaia, wakes up and is pissed to see the horrible squandering of resources and pollutive tendencies of contemporary man. There's pretty much only one thing she can do: conjure up a slew of magic rings, send them to some kids around the world, and hope for the best. Gaia's convenient Planet Vision alerts these youths as to the most devastating pollutants and disasters cropping up around the world, to which they must mobilize and act. Each Planeteer controls an element: Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, and...Heart?

These kids, while marginally powerful, are not altogether qualified to confront the worlds' mounting environmental crisis. Just as the Mouseketeers could always call on Mickey for reinforcement, so too could the Planeteers summon their more powerful and well-known pal. With the power of their rings combined and and a rousing cheer of "Go Planet!", the meager Planeteers could conjure up their leader, Captain Planet.



If you think I come up with some groan-inducing puns, you should go back and take a gander at some of the god-awful punnery that Captain Planet emits. Perhaps it's smog related, but something is clearly clouding his judgment with these cheesy jokes (Clouding? Smog? Come on, throw me a line here.) Captain Planet is pretty powerful, as far as superheroes go, but he's got his limitations. Just as Superman had Kryptonite, our man CP has pollution. Scary, isn't it?

The Planeteers, while less powerful, had a few tricks up their respective natural-fibered sleeves. In the intro, we find that we too can be Planeteers. As a child, this was so exciting for me I practically tripped over own burgeoning compost heap in a maniacally frantic effort to sort my recycling or purchase a sweatshirt made out of used water bottles. Just imagine, me, a Planeteer! It's almost too much to bear. As my role as a Planeteer was not sufficiently well-documented in the series (I blame my lack of multicultural qualities for this obvious snub for camera time), our more prominent ring-bearing Planeteers got quite a bit of airtime:

Kwame

Played by Lavar Burton, host of Reading Rainbow and star of the Roots miniseries. Talk about socially conscious, Burton was edutaining us from all fronts. Kwame possesses the power of Earth, which allowed him to create earthquakes, mountains, and other not-so-exciting plate-tectonic and topographic landforms. From Africa, Kwame came across his magic ring while planting trees in the Savannah. He acts as sort of an unofficial leader to the group, and always gets to be the one who shouts, "With our powers combined...!" Which when you think about it, was probably one of the best jobs on the show.

Linka


Voiced by Kath Soucie, another 90s voice actor extraordinaire. With voice acting credits like Phil and Lil of Rugrats, Lola Bunny from Space Jam, and Futurama's Cubert Farnsworth, Soucie was a veritable voice chameleon. In this case, she voiced Linka, our communist Soviet Planeteer, later replaced by the vaguer "Eastern European" Planeteer following the USSR's demise. She is incredibly stereotyped to the early-90s mounting fear of Soviet education surpassing that of the US, with superior math and computer hacking skills. Cute, no? Linka has the power of Wind, allowing her to create gusty breezes, tornadoes, and to some extent, offers her the power to levitate.

Ma-Ti


Our South American Planeteer did not boast quite as well-known voice acting credentials, but Scott Menville did play Kimmy Gibbler's boyfriend Duane on Full House which certainly gives him points in my book. Ma-Ti lives in the rainforest with his grandfather, a local Shaman. In case you had yet to notice, the Planeteers' creator took great pains in making the diversity as painstakingly obvious as possible. It was never acceptable for a South American to live in a major city, or an Asian to be scientifically non-inclined. These Planeteers took their embodied stereotypes highly seriously. Ma-Ti had the power of Heart, which was clearly the crappiest element. It wasn't an element at all, if you want to get technical. He could converse with animals, occasionally read minds, and affect others emotionally, but you have to admit that when compared to the other Planetary (Planeteery?) powers this one seemed a bit consolatory.

Wheeler


Voiced by Joey Dedio, who earns my seal of 90s credibility for voicing the over-the-top drug dealer in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue! Wheeler was our American friend, and in typical typecasting fashion he is a salty, short-tempered Brooklynite. He wielded the power of Fire, which was admittedly cooler and more useful than many of the other elements. In retrospect Wheeler's role as an American was a bit insulting to actual Americans, though not altogether untrue. He came across as overly privileged and ignorant, and was forced to serve as comic relief to his smarter, more able global counterpars.

Gi



The Southeast Asian member of the group, Gi was voiced by Janice Kawaye. Proving my American ignorance in a manner not unlike that of my Planeteer pal Wheeler, I must admit I'm pretty clueless about Kawaye's other voice credits, which include such
shows as Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi. Gi is an aspiring marine biologist, and hence posesses the power of Water. She can control water to do her bidding, unless of course it is (gasp!) polluted. Gi is also unsurprisingly highly knowledgeable in science, which is not so shocking in this realm of absolute, unerring stereotyping.

With their powers combined, they could summon the reliable Captain Planet, a blue-faced, green-mulleted muscular superhero.



His intentionally hazy powers mean that he can pretty much perform whatever sort of magic necessary to fit the situation. Convenient, indeed. I always sort of thought he had something going on with Gaia, too.

Captain Planet's tagline, "The Power is Yours!" emphasized a worthwhile if cheesy take on personal responsibility to global environmental issues. Things certainly got a little (read: overtly) PSA, and by a little, I mean a lot. Observe, a call against joining gangs, vandalism, graffiti, littering, and pretty much anything else you can think of:



Obviously, the intentions were good but the edutainment factor often came off as more skewed toward the educational than the entertainment. Regardless, it was entertaining, if a bit corny. In his constant reminders that the Power is indeed ours, at least we got to feel marginally powerful, albeit in an environmentally conscious, distinctly unsuperhero type of way. At least we got to hear his never-ending pollution puns. For however ignorant the Planeteers assumed us to be, they worked tirelessly with Captain Planet to clear the air for us on all things environmental.

(insert groan here)



Check it out:
Captain Planet's TV Tropes

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead

It's a tale as old as time, at least according to 90s juvenile movie tropes: for some reason or other (usually either some parental oversight or colossal change of plans) leaves one or many children utterly alone to do as they please and wreak havoc on their once-stable environment. While to anyone remotely grounded in reality can easily assess that this situation would inevitably end in starving, general run-amokery, and eventual outing to authorities, in movies it always seems like such a gas. What's that, the kids are completely unsupervised and without money or other necessary resources? Classic!

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead is probably one of the most explanatory and descriptive movie titles to date. While other studios were issuing more subtle, nuanced movie titles, execs at Warner Brothers knew kids and teenagers had a short attention span. "Kids are pretty slow, so let's see if we can explain this entire plot in a single sentence and then assign that as the film's title. Deal?" The title managed to encapsulate the entire plot in six simple words. No ticket purchaser could claim they didn't know what they were getting into. It was right there on the stub.

The movie itself was yet another manifestation of the ultimate kid fantasy of autonomy based on the false notion that being an adult is carefree, easy, and cheap. We certainly get a sense of this from the preview, when two of the male Crandall children deviously announce, "Dishes are done!" after shooting them in the air clay-pigeon style. No one would alert the authorities on that one, right? Just a couple of kids sniping on a neighbor's roof. Kids will be kids.



Contrary to the happy-go-luckiness of the preview, Don't tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead actually explored some of the potential monetary woes that a group of unruly, unemployed teenagers would potentially encounter. Namely, that they can't afford food. Sure, it's all fun and games when your babysitter dies (or at least so this movie would lead us to believe), but how do you intend to stay under the radar of child services when you don't have the means to keep yourself fed? How, I ask you?

But perhaps we're getting a tad ahead of ourselves here. Let's start at the very beginning (as an incessant childhood viewer of The Sound of Music, I can pretty safely verify that that's a very good place to start). The plot was relatively simple: prior to the start of the movie, Mrs. Crandall announced to her brood of zany and sometimes incorrigible children that she's planning to spend her entire summer in Australia, sans her five lovable little hellions. Naturally the kids are psyched, particularly teenage Sue Ellen (played by Christina Applegate), or at least we're led to believe this on the basis of her being the main character. The older kids are making all sorts of ruckus-rousing plans for the summer, while the younger ones grumble about their mom's abandonment.

What Mrs. Crandall conveniently fails to tell them was that they were not, as assumed, to be staying alone for two months. Right before their mother is set to leave, Sue Ellen answers a knock on the door to find a little old lady who introduces herself as "Mrs. Sturak, the babysitter." Even though all of us with ticket stubs or blurb-splattered VHS cases in our possession know the eventual fate of Mrs. Sturak, Sue Ellen is pissed. When confronted, Mrs. Crandall offers, "She has a lot of experience." Sue Ellen huffs, "Of course she does. She's 200 years old." Burn! Oh, Sue Ellen, you brassy, sassy 90s teen fashion magnate. What will you say next?

Image via moviescreenshots.blogspot.com

Of course, the minute Mrs. Crandall exits stage left, supposedly kindly Mrs. Sturak turns into a terrorizing tyrant. It looks like it's going to be a long, hellish summer. Until the prophecy of the movie title is fulfilled, of course.

As I child, I found Mrs. Sturak's death scene to be pretty dark. I say this mainly because even though I loved this movie and watched it endlessly (literally, until the tape began unraveling) the title seen in which the crazy Mrs. Sturak kicks the bucket always scared the bejeezus out of me. Now, of course, I realize that Sue Ellen's brother's pothead paraphernalia and pseudo-pornographic images giving Mrs. Sturak a heart attack make the scene pretty funny, but at the time I thought he was some sort of satanic worshipper. Ah, the pangs of innocence. I was all riled up because Mrs. Sturak smelled some not-so-fresh bongwater.

Naturally, everything that happens from this point on is intensely and completely ridiculous. For some reason (read: no reason) they can't just call their mother and tell her what happened. No, it would be best to act criminally insane and purge the body. So they do what any logically thinking, level-headed kids would do in this situation: stash the body in a trunk and quietly drop it off at a local morgue. Thankfully, they had the good sense to attach a note: "Nice old lady inside. Died of natural causes." Of course, it's not till after all this body-ditching is over that they realize Mrs. Sturak was in possession in all of the money their mother left for the summer. Very smooth indeed, Crandalls. Very smooth indeed.

While everyone still has high hopes for their summer sans authority, this pennilessness puts a bit of a damper on their plans. As the oldest, Sue Ellen grudgingly accepts an admittedly crappy fast food job. This is clearly an ill-fated plan, and prissy Sue Ellen quits soon thereafter. Luckily for Sue Ellen as the ingenue, she manages to form a relationship with remarkably hot coworker Bryan during her short tenure as a hot dog jockey.



Seeking cushier employment, Sue Ellen applies for a receptionist position at a local fashion firm. Though in retrospect Sue Ellen's wardrobe choices are highly suspect, at the time she was quite the fashion plate and this seemed like a logical fit. Of course, Sue Ellen is a mere high school grad, so she lifts some buzzwords from a resume-tip book and forges the resume of an accomplished 28-year old. In a whirlwind of increasingly unlikely events, Sue Ellen's resume garners so much positive attention that the Senior VP offers her the Executive Administrative Assistant job she'd promised to her old receptionist (who is conveniently Sue Ellen's new boyfriend's sister. Obviously). I smell some inner workplace tension brewing.



Of course, Sue Ellen doesn't know how to do anything except steal from the petty cash supply. In fact, that's pretty much all she does. Her brood is getting hungry, so she pilfers some petty cash for groceries. Unfortunately, her increasingly selfish siblings each squander the salary in some silly sense. They've still got not money, and Sue Ellen is on the verge of being in huge trouble for totally depleting the petty cash fund.

Meanwhile the company is hovering on bankruptcy. The clothes are hideous and in turn, no one wants to purchase them. Her problems compounded by trouble in romantic paradise, Sue Ellen is feeling pretty SOL. What happens next is pure cheesy 90s movie moments at its best. Our girl SE has an epiphany, and singlehandedly undertakes the task of redesigning the fashions to save the company:

Sue Ellen saves us all!

All the Crandall kids clean up the house and agree to pitch in to throw a huge fashion show launch at their house. Everything is going swimmingly, until of course in typical 90s movie fashion incredibly obvious things go awry. SE's heartthrob Bryan shows up. Mrs. Crandall is home from Australia. Sue Ellen's forced to own up to the fact that she's a huge liar, and thief, and oh yeah, only 17. While in real life, all sorts of horrifying pending legal action would ensue, everything here works out perfectly. The fashion company is pleased, Mrs. Crandell calms down and is impressed by Sue Ellen's hard work, Bryan and Sue Ellen have a romantic reunion. Sue Ellen's boss even offers her a real full-time job, but Sue Ellen maturely decides to (wait for it...wait for it...) go to college instead. All together now: awwww.



Cut to the last scene, where the guys from the morgue are chilling at Mrs. Sturak's tombstone, musing over how sweet it was for her to leave them all that cash. See how everything worked out for everyone and no one was ever angry or suspicious in the countless situations that warranted it? That's the beauty of 90s movie idealism. Anything can, and inevitably will, happen.

Image via moviescreenshots.blogspot.com

Sure it's glossy and unrealistic, but it was actually a fun movie. Everyone even managed to learn a lesson, so movie-going parents didn't mind so much all of the rest of the initial conflicting bad messages their impressionable kids were being exposed to. The magic of these types of 90s movies was the convenient, simplified ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. Sure, it's not realistic, but it is entertaining. After all, no one wants to see Sue Ellen's ass dragged to court or the kids convicted for disposing of poor old Mrs. Sturak's body. No, no, all's well that ends well, and that's just the end.

Check it out:

Watch the whole movie on YouTube! (in 10 parts)

Chicken Soup for the Soul

Regardless of how soul-savingly wonderful or retina-burstingly abhorrent you find the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series to be, we can all agree on one thing: Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen were probably laughing all the way to the bank in the face of the 140 publishers who initially refused the manuscript. 16 years and 100+ books later, people are eager as ever to lap up every last drop of sentimentality with a spoon. These feel-good heart-tugging tales were meant to induce feelings and inspire, though for some the only feelings inspired was an unrelenting nausea.

The 90s had a surprisingly high market quotient for touchy-feeliness, considering all the angsty cynicism (a la Nirvana) and vapid materialism (a la Clueless) people attribute to 90s culture. Perhaps there was some mysterious point of contact which allowed the angsty to express their wealth of feelings and the superficial to pat themselves on the back for their insincere sentimentalism. Whatever the reason, there was a pretty serious market for all things high-faloutin' and pseudo-spiritual.

This impulse for inspiration manifested itself in several forms: Touched by an Angel, the rise of televangelism, Lurlene McDaniel young adult novels. Perhaps the most lucrative exploitative franchise capitalizing on this trend was The Chicken Soup for the Soul series. The series' name implies that we are somehow naturally sick, and the only soothing remedy is to buy this book. That's a sound marketing strategy if I ever heard one (Get it? Sound? Heard? Okay, think I'm alone on this one). I'm going to come out with a new line of books next year entitled, "Buy this book or you will inevitably get an incurable mutation of swine flu ." It seems pretty straightforward, and I bet I could make a bundle on it.

Sarcasm aside (briefly), the books arguably had some inherent merit beneath their drecky facade. The stories were indeed positive and uplifting and made good on the title's promise of a soothing read. However, it was less about the value of the stories themselves than the ensuing warm fuzzy feeling many of us got from reading this book. See, the book had that sort of incredibly-easy-read-to-make-you-feel-good-about-yourself quality to it. By feeling touched by the stories, we could all personally feel as if we were good, moral, spiritual people who were eager to be inspired and called to action in a quest for positivity. Despite the passivity of our actions (sitting and reading an overrated bestseller) we could all breathe a sigh of relief that we were indeed, as we had always suspected, good people.

The Chicken Soup for the Soul Condolence Sympathy Basket from www.recover-from-grief.com. Yes, this exists.

Before you go on the offensive and defend these books (or would that be the defensive?), let me be the first to admit that I ate these up as a kid. I absolutely could not get enough. For some reason, I was unwaveringly certain that these books possessed the tidbits of timeless wisdom that were the secrets to unlocking a life of happiness. When I turned 12, someone gave me a copy of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul as a gift. I remember earmarking chapters I thought to be particularly poignant, such as "Things Girls Love about Boys" and stories about kids with (insert life obstacle here) overcoming adversity.

After devouring volume after volume, I had that wonderful unearned feeling of being a better person without ever having to leave my room. Why, in the span of two hours, I had been empathetic, altruistic, sympathetic, and accepting. The tears in my eyes were evidence that I was indeed a living, feeling person who cared about others deeply. Right?


Maybe. One of the strongest selling points of these books was that inspiration is an incredibly vague term. I doubt most readers immediately mobilized and began rescuing helpless sick puppies or volunteering at the local soup kitchen (for the stomach, that is, not soul) directly after reading any of these books. The best part was that it allowed you to be completely undeservedly self-congratulatory. Bravo, me. Bravo!

Of course, I'm clearly devilishly advocating the situation. The original book was overwhelmingly well-received by readers and critics. Most people were willing and able to look past the corniness and feel truly touched by these moving (albeit cliched) stories. There was something comforting in the predictable heartwarming-ness of each story. Sure, we knew it was sappy and possibly some of these miracles were a tad on the contrived side, but our willingness to briefly suspend our disbelief could allow us to embrace a story's happy ending.

Hansen and Canfield were brilliantly entrepreneurial in their approach and saw the potential in the not-yet fully tapped market of sappy sentimentalism. Lucky for them, all they had to do was think up countless topics and corresponding subtitles (including but not limited to Chicken Soup for the Chiropractic Soul, Chicken Soup for the Fisherman's Soul, and even Chicken Soup for the Soul Celebrates Cats and the People Who Love Them.) The editors obviously subscribed to a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" ideology. Using basically the same essential formula, they managed to crank out book after book in the style of the original but catered to specifically market to a particular demographic.

Then came the kookier side. Books weren't enough. No, we needed Chicken Soup for the Soul calendars, Chicken Soup for the Soul Pet food, and Chicken Soup for the Soul vitamin supplements. There's nothing quite like manipulating your audience into buying a bunch of worthless crap to send a positive message of spirituality and inspiration.

Chicken Soup for the Soul Trimworks Supplements. Please note the package featuring a woman hugging a scale. It's likely she has OD'ed on the lovey-dovey feel-goodness of CSftS

Over time, the initial bowl of soup has evolved into a fully functional factory churning out can and can of the same product. This model was fitting as this was exactly what Hansen and Canfield were peddling: canned spirituality. Love it or hate it, the Chicken Soup Series was a formidable franchise from 1993 stretching through the better part of this decade. Ultimately, whether you're a firefighter, doctor, or French-African widowed quadriplegic philosopher with a taste for five-alarm chili, there is inevitably a Chicken Soup for the Soul book made just for you. Go forth and be soothed.


Some newer, odder incarnations:

Disturbing, indeed

Two of my favorite bloggers (Al from My Life in a Blog and Nic from PinkNic) alerted me via Twitter (see? I learned how to use it!) of a horrible phenomenon affecting the contemporary cartoon character doll market.

If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, it's likely you knew about Rainbow Brite and Strawberry Shortcake. Even if you're a guy, you probably at least had a kid sister with a Rainbow Brite doll or Strawberry Shortcake tea party set. These were wholesome, innocent childlike characters.

Completely unlike their new manifestations. That is to say, they took a Bratz doll and a Hannah Montana action figure, stuck it in a blender, and set it to "extra slutty".


Strawberry Shortcake

image via babyblogblog.com

This is more than a little disturbing.They took what was essentially some form of Precious Moments figurine and morphed it into a coquettish teen giving come-hither eyes while perched suggestively on a flower. I can understand the desire to update her look (though to be honest, she wasn't exactly a beacon of coolness upon her original inception) but this borders on ridiculous.

Rainbow Brite:

images via rainbowbrite.net

Geez, even her magical horse looks more suggestive. I can understand the color upgrade, but they've pretty much zapped all of the childlike wonder out of her. While she used to be an adorable round-faced donut-sleeved child, the relaunch has pegged her as a slender cheerleader-type with waist-emphasizing belt and rainbow bangles.


Just what sort of messsage are these redesigns aiming to send to children today? People are constantly remarking on how children grow up faster these days, but you have to wonder if marketers are expediating the process a bit. Toy companies have vetoed baby fat and childlike innocence and replaced it with bedroom eyes and a snappy outift.

It's probably no coincidence that Strawberry Shortcake (and Rainbow Brite, until rights were recently sold to Hasbro) is owned by a company called Playmates toys. If that's not suggestive, well, then I'm not sure what is.

Flannel

Image via Hellocomein.com

Ah, lumberjacks. Is there any trend you can't start? First you had everyone wielding tree-demolishing axes. Then it was the log rolling. You were such a beacon of trend setting. Thankfully, your fashion forwardness did not disappoint.

Okay, so maybe lumberjacks weren't necessarily in on the whole ironic grunge wave of fashion, but they certainly did provide a wealth of inspiration. The early-to-mid 90s were an interesting era, fashion-wise. Highly influenced by the mainstream rise of grunge music and subsequent subculture, the 90s saw an inexplicable rise in woodsy, outdoorsy styles. As Seattle was the generally-agreed-upon birthplace of grunge, it was no wonder they had the whole fashion world dressing like Pacific Northwesterners. Minus the functionality, that is.

Flannel became a ubiquitous staple of youth culture identity in the 90s, flaunting a sense of moody, brooding anti-authority that so defined young people in the grunge era. Plaid, functionally warm button-down shirts provided the necessary anti-fashion vibe embodied by the irreverent point of contact between Generation X and Generation Y. Before Generation Y grew up and got all civic-minded and mainstream (and probably considerably less cool), they were still riding the crest of unshakable cynicism with their 70s-born hippie-parent-backlash peers of Generation X.

Before the days of hipster chic, the level of irony in one's clothing was not quite as well-selected. While now you can walk down a trendy urban street and see the exhaustively planned outfits of a bunch of American Apparel catalog rejects, ("See, if I pair this pinstriped fedora with these neon yellow 1970s high school gym shorts...") back in the 90s the anti-fashion was not quite so preconceived. Rather, while the 80s had provided us with ridiculous poppy, mainstream, shiny bright-colored trends, the 90s' answer was to spit in the face of these bubblegum trends and say, "Screw it all. We're wearing flannel."

General unkemptness was a popular side effect of the grunge culture. True to the movement's name, grunge followers were, well, grungy. They had dirty, stringy long hair and tended to have that pleasant unwashed look (and we can only assume, corresponding smell.) Lucky for society the actual grunge movement was pretty centralized, meaning the flannel-clad sullen-faced teens you saw in your own hometowns were likely some class of poseur. Sure, they had the flannel shirts and ripped up jeans, but they were buying the shirts 3 for 1 at Kohl's and purchasing their jeans pre-ripped. Their authenticity and intention was at best questionable. It's probably more that they just really, really liked the Smells Like Teen Spirit video than that they subscribed to any particular brand of anti-authority ideology.

Lucky for the flannel industry (there's a whole flannel commercial infrastructure, right? I assume) it it a highly functional fabric that certainly has its share of constructive uses. Though I'm sure the usefulness of flannel is far more wide-ranging, here are some of the basic functionalities of 1990s flannel-wearing:

1. It kept the heroin chic among us warm

Image via yenmag.net

Forget Twiggy, the 90s brought a whole new wave of painfully thin, strung-out-looking models. Kate Moss was an unsmiling, non-eating supposed inspiration for us all. You have to realize, though, that it gets cold being that skinny. These uninsulated waifs were lucky to have a big burly flannel on hand to fight off the 0% body fat woes.

Still true today:Flannel...now with 100% less pants!

2. The butt-less still reeling from Sir Mix-a-Lot's slurs could use it handily as padding

As seen in Bill and Ted--and yes, I'm aware the original came out in 1989

No one in the 90s would ever wear a flannel shirt on its own. No, it was necessary to pile on as many other cynical concert tees as you could muster in order to fully achieve your 90s grunginess. Sometimes, though, you just needed a break from your heat-producing flannel. Don't have a place to put it down? Use your body as a temporary hanger and tie it around your waist! A foolproof plan. Good for hiding bodily imperfections and stains, too.


3. You are so tired you couldn't possibly wait until you got home and climbed into bed.

Image via amazon.com

Luckily, your flannel doubled as pajamas. Or better yet, you could simply grab your handy seam-ripper and before you know it, you've got a new pair of winter sheets. Talk about multipurpose!


4. You would make a stellar extra on Nickelodeon's Pete and Pete or ABC's My So-Called Life


Both Petes were famous for their signature flannel looks. You'd be hard-pressed to find an episode of MSCL where neither Angela nor Jordan was wearing some manifestation of flannel somewhere on their person. These fine specimens of 90s television were spreading the good word of flannel, one episode at a time.

5. In a frequently temperature-shifting setting, it offered top-notch ventilation


Perfecting your flannel-based outfit was contingent on layering. Luckily, the open-flannel-over-t-shirt-or-thermal look allowed for intermittent breezes and important underarm and back ventilation.

6. Great for absorbing greasy hair!

How else would the members of Nirvana or Pearl Jam lay down to sleep at night without sliding off the pillow? Chalk it up to the ever-absorbent power of flannel. Go days without washing with full grease-drip protection!

7. You can pose as a Brawny Paper Towels spokesimage model, no problem

Again, that lumberjack image. When paired with your work jeans and some Doc Martens or Timberlands, you were pretty much ready for whatever challenge (or spill) nature threw at you.


To all you former Niravana-wannabes, embrace your once-burgeoning early 90s grunginess. You don't even need too be overly nostalgic to begin this inner hug, as flannel has (for better or worse) made a comeback in a big way. So go out there and wear it proudly. Just please don't tie it around your waist this time around.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

I know, I know, LOLcatz is probably the lowest form of humor, but when I saw this picture I couldn't resist.

Often when I watch movies with other people, they tend to grumble over an admittedly irritating habit of mine. My movie-mates beg and plead with me, "Can you please stop talking and making fun of this movie? You're completely ruining it for me." I pity these people, of course, because obviously they were not Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans as kids. If they had been, they would be well aware that this so-called annoying constant verbal mockery of mine was actually making it better.

Okay, so maybe I'm no Joel Robinson, but I swear, give me a couple of Bots and a space-based movie theater that exclusively plays B-movies and I'll hit it out of the park.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K to uber nerdy die-hards like, ahem, myself) was an ingenious low-budget project that made its premiere on a local cable access channel in my hometown of Minneapolis. The concept was brilliant, innovative, and dirt-cheap to produce. The show's creators simply sought out the most terrible, unwatchable, most retina-burning feature films they could find, superimposed a couple of silhouettes across the bottom of the screen to give the illiusion of a movie theater environment, and spent the entire duration of the film mocking every conceivable element.

It had an intentionally shaky premise that made it incredibly easy for Joel and the Bots to poke fun not only at the movies, but at their own environment and circumstances as well. In one of the most literal, lengthy, and informative theme songs ever, we get the incredibly detailed and implausible series of events that led up to this B-movie imprisonment scenario:



The creators aimed for a low-budget look, at first for necessity on public access and later to stay true to their roots. The intro exemplified the tongue-in-cheek attitude of the show, particularly with the line:

"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes
And other science facts,
Just repeat to yourself 'It's just a show,
I should really just relax.'"

The theme also introduces us to Joel's robot friends (who he assembled out of the "start" and "stop" functions for the Satellite of Love movie theater, of course). The Bot gang was comprised of Cambot (allegedly recording these events and thus unseen), Gypsy, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo. They, along with Joel (and later, Mike) provided us with countless hours (really, countless, each show was incredibly lengthy) of ridiculous riffs and jabs.

Our lovable metalheads from left to right: Gypsy, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo. Image via CollegeCandy.com

The show never took itself too seriously, as the underlying concept of the show was to mock everything and anything both mercilessly and relentlessly. In the case that you were never a fan in your youth (and may I just say, for shame!), I am about to launch into my MST3K proselytizing. You've been warned.

The true genius of the show was its commitment to utmost simplicity and maximizing humor. They did very little in the way of continuity or character development in ways that watered down the full-speed-ahead-ness of its comedic contemporaries. The closest they came to any sort of plot development was in the form of brief preliminary, closing, and pre-commercial break skits like the following:



The above clip is from my all-time favorite episode, The Final Sacrifice,for which I have such a strong and fervent love that I feel the compelling need to post the entire 90 minute episode right here on my blog. Yep, I totally just did that. Please watch at your leisure.



If you've never watched the show, this is a prime specimen with which to pop your proverbial MST3k cherry. Seriously. Go ahead. Watch it. I'll wait.

Okay, presumably it's an hour and a half later, and you're now a full MST3K believer, so you'll probably far more interested in what I have to tell you. Good, good. I'm glad we could make to this point together.

The show went through many incarnations as it's network home and time slots changed over the years. Though it began on public access, it was soon thereafter picked up by Comedy Central, the show's home for five seasons of glorious unfettered riffing and due mockery. Joel Hodgson, the original trap-ee aboard the SOL (Satellite of Love) left during the 5th season and was swiftly replaced with Mike Nelson. Lucky for the show, the premise was so thin it was incredibly easy to pull off such a major switcharoo. While to other shows this may have been a critical shark-jumping moment of disaster, MST3K was able to emerge from the change generally unscathed.

Two years later, the show was picked up by the Sci Fi network (after much begging and pleading from fans) presumably based on its vaguely sci-fi Satellite of Love premise and robot sidekicks. The show's producers had to re-tailor the movies' themes in new epsiodes to better fit the Sci Fi cannon, but generally the show continued on its planned trajectory for another good few years until its unfortunate cancellation in 1999. Lucky for all of you, the geeks and nerds who adored this show are technically savvy enough to make most episodes available to all of us right here on the interweb.

The show now has a formidable cult following, which is unsurprising as it has a distinct appeal to the incredibly nerdy people who tend to be in charge of rounding up cult followings. I suppose after this brief foray into MST3K missionary work, I too can add myself to that list. The real appeal of the show is the bam-bam-bam flow of constant jokes. Sure, some of the references are thinly-veiled obscure inside jokes and others may not be as culturally relevant now as they once were, but for the most part, their mocking is timeless. Though trends and references may come and go over the years, there is one thing we can all agree on: making fun of everything.

In case you're not a full-fledged MST3K fan by now, I leave you with a few of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 shorts:

Are You Ready for Marriage?



Cheating


Body Care and Grooming


Posture Pals

Children of the 90s is now on Twitter!

Yep, it's true. Children of the 90s is on Twitter, though I have yet to learn the intricate workings of this stalker-centric world of 140-character minutiae. Suggestions and advice are not only welcome, but probably necessary.

I'm not really sure what the verbage is...Tweet me? Does that sound right? Let's go with that. So, tweet Children of the 90s: http://twitter.com/Childrenof90s. The "the" wouldn't fit, so I hope none of you are offended by being classified as "Children of 90s".

1990s Product Flops

Now and then, a product comes along that for some reason is forever remembered as a bona fide flop. Sure, 80% of new product launches fail, but sometimes things fail so publicly and so embarrassingly that we have no choice other than to mock it profusely with the added and unfair hindsight retrovision of 20/20.

In some cases, these were actual viable inventions and ideas that for some reason or another either failed to take off or suffered misguided marketing strategies. Whatever the reason, these flops were the original Fail (yes, with a capital F.)

This handy example of incredibly adorable failure brought to you by the ever-reliable failblog.org

Minidiscs


Technology is a funny thing. You never really know toward which direction the tides of public opinion will gravitate. At one moment, your new technological innovation seems poised for greatness and the next, well, they're using your product to line litter boxes and horse corrals. Something that seemed like such a great idea at the moment of conception can fail to ever pick up real speed with consumers.

The Sony Minidisc is the perfect example. Looking at one now, it appears semi-ridiculously to resemble a shrinky-dinked (shrinky dunk?) compact disc. In 1992, Sony had confidence that the minidisc was the technology to overtake the scratchy quality audiocassette market. Sony was all hyped up on residual gloating from their success in their Walkman venture, and was certain that their expensive technology (around $550 for a player, $750 for one with recording capabilities) would immediately fill the void of The Next Big Thing.

While the product itself certainly had its technological brag points, Sony failed to consider that the young musically-minded generation they were targeting did not generally posess the necessary capital means to buy it. In short: it was way out of the reach of young people's budgets, and its unfortunate release timing collided poorly with the rise of CDs. Then again, now that the CD market is nearly obsolete itself, it's not looking too sunny on that front either, so no one really wins. Okay, except maybe Apple and their 200 million iPods sold. Touche, Apple.



McDonald's Arch Deluxe

Please allow me to point out the numerous ways in which this diagram is riddled with contradictions. 1. How can a bun be defined both homestyle and bakery? How, I ask you? 2. If the sauce is so secret, how come you just told me what was in it? 3. How exactly does ketchup become "extra fancy?" Does each packet come with a miniature bowtie and monocle?

In 1996, fast food giant McDonald's felt they needed a makeover. No, they weren't seeking to cut back on use of fatty oils and unhealthy ingredients; rather, they wanted to better target an "adult" audience (I'm not exactly sure why those quotation marks are there, I assume they indicate McD's was suffering from too many cash-toting toddlers stopping in for burgers or they felt they weren't reaching their selling potential with adult film stars.) Its tagline was "Arch Deluxe: The Burger with the Grown-Up Taste."

In this case, this vague age demographic failed to recognize any value in differentiating their burgers from those that came in a colorful cardboard Happy Meals carton. There was a major commercial push to corner this so-called grown-up market, but the critical level of demand was not necessarily present. As if pouring buckets of ill-fated cash into an irrelevant and unnecessary product weren't enough, McDonald's also felt that their adult consumer base wanted (again, where they got this data, I do not know) a more sophisticated ad campaign. No more Grimace and Hamburglers for these high-class burger buyers.

These ads, however, were misguided attempts to distinguish the AD as catered to a mature palate. The TV spots featured children poking at the supposedly premier ingredients, commenting with bewilderment, "I don't get it," and referring to the burger in question as "yucky." Well played, McDonalds. Everyone knows a sophisticated adult loves for their food to be publicly declared inedible. Well played indeed.




OK Soda



Another tragic victim of unconventional advertising techniques and hazy target demographics, OK soda was a short-lived beverage experiment executed by the Coca-Cola company in 1994. The best part of the whole thing is that they went with the ad guy from the New Coke campaign. I guess they really, really, really liked this guy, because he already cost them millions of dollars in failed marketing. I imagine the Coke execs seated around the conference room table and musing, "Well, he's a good guy, let's give him another shot. Financial and publicity disaster aside, I always thought he did something pretty special for us here at the Coca-Cola company."

OK Soda was a sort of existential experiment into youth marketing. Youth Culture--particularly in the moody, grungy mid 90s--was by design inherently opposed to mainstream attempts to lure them in via hackneyed advertising strategies. The Coke marketers thought that since irony was so in at the moment, they would just overtly court the teen market in a completely unsubtle, overstated way. They even had an 800-number to which angsty teens could call in and leave deadpan, disillusioned messages which could someday be mainstreamed into a national commercial, virtually cancelling out any Generation X-style irreverent credibility of the caller.




Unfortunately for Coca-Cola, young people are usually smarter than adults give them credit for. I suppose only the coolest of the cool teenagers would have liked OK Soda on the multi-layered levels of irony that your average teen poseur failed to comprehend. That is, it's ironic to actually like the thing that adults are trying so hard to make into something ironic, which is ironic in itself. Then again, 90s teens were generally misinformed on the actual meaning of irony, as Alanis Morrisette had given them zero examples of it in her song "Ironic". Which is also ironic. Don't you think?



Microsoft WebTV



Not as well-remembered as the others, WebTV was once on the verge of being the next major entertainment technology leap. Don't let the name fool you based on your current knowledge and context of the internet: Web TV was not TV on your computer. Instead, it was computer (well, internet) on your TV.

In the late 90s, some tech giants (namely Microsoft, who acquired WebTV in a $425 million deal) believed that all that people really wanted was to check emails and browse online on their living room TV sets. The theory behind WebTV was partially derived from the same dumbed-down message you see today in those Jitterbug-brand cell phone service commercials. It's based on the notion that certain (read: old) people are frightened of new and unfamiliar technology and it has to be somehow brought down to their technologically-illiterate level.

This is, in theory, a viable marketing concept with a real, defined demographic. However, the tiny aspect Microsoft overlooked is that these people were not suddenly going to flourish on internet-shopping, banner ad-clicking, viable members of the web community. Instead, they actually became a tedious burden of call-center nightmares who failed to comprehend even the most basic of troubleshooting strategies. Then again, what did they expect? These people were used to their TVs being TVs, not computers.



So to these formerly flopping companies, we salute you for your misguidedness. Despite the relatively low long-term economic impact, these flops speak loudly to the unsavory expectations that these corporations had of us as consumers of the 90s as needlessly spending, sophisticated-burger craving, quadruply ironic, technologically deficient simpletons.

Lucky for us, most of these expectations turned out to be false, but it never hurts to get retrospectively outraged and insulted from time to time. If only Coca-Cola had maintained their 1-800-IFEELOK hotline so we'd all have a place to express it.


In case you thought I had somehow forgotten the epic failure of Crystal Pepsi, fear not: I have already devoted a full-length rant-filled post to it. Peruse at your leisure.

Breaking 90s News: Saved by the Bell Reunion on the Horizon?

Image via break.com

On Monday evening, Mark-Paul Gosselaar (my favorite dual-apostle named 90s star) appeared on Jimmy Fallon's late night talk show in full Zach Morris get-up, blond wig and all. You have to admire his ability to stay in character when that character was retired a decade and a half earlier. Despite a few easily botox-able forehead lines, you would swear we were back in 1992 watching Zach address the audience by speaking directly into the camera, calling a time-out and freezing his surroundings, and belting out Zach Attack's "Friends Forever" with the Roots.

Gosselaar even pulled out his trademark oversized first-generation cell phone to confirm Jessie Spano wanted to get in on the action. Just when it seemed this franchise had been milked for all it was worth, it seems possible a reunion could be in store.

So the question is, will his castmates set aside their undeserved pride and so-called artistic integrity? It's tough to follow up presitigious roles like EXTRA host and being completely unlikeable on Celebrity Fit Club. Hell, Ed Alonzo (magician Max of The Max) was a performer on my cruise ship a few years back, so I can't imagine these former Baysiders' agents' phones are ringing off their respective hooks.

While I'm not much of a Fallon fan, I certainly admire his commitment to restoring early 90s excellence in cheesy television programming. As long as I don't have to watch Gosselaar's new TNT lawyer drama (I'm generally opposed any MPG brunet roles on principle), we should be golden.





Check it out:
MTV article about MPG's appearance
Starpulse's follow-up interview with MPG

My So-Called Life

My So-Called Life was the antithesis of the "Very Special Episode". From this show's vantage point, the teenage years were a vast wasteland of politically pertinent social issues and grungy, flannel angst. It was the polar opposite of most other teen shows sprouting up during the early-to-mid 90s, according to which it seemed that high school was just one long lighthearted romp with issuettes that could be solved neatly within a period of 30 minutes. My So-Called Life epitomized the youth culture pre-Clueless-era 90s teens aspired to be in a flannel-wearing, adult questioning, angst-brimming way. In short, it was brutally honest.

Unfortunately, this brutal honesty quickly morphed into ratings disaster for ABC. It seemed people weren't interested in a real, well-rounded look at actual ongoing issues facing teens. If anything, perhaps it was too real; the show failed to create a sense of idealized fantasy like 90210 or Saved by the Bell. The characters had visible, deep-seated flaws (you know, like real people) and veered sharply from the brain-dead bubblegum pop themes of its contemporary teen programs (Zach and the Gang join the glee club!) . If anything, it was the adeptness with which the show presented characters as real multifaceted people that seemed to alienated potential viewers who were used to more one-dimensional characters.

Most teen shows at the time could cleanly divide their characters into stereotype molds: the jock, the nerd, the brain. Characters were becoming mere caricatures of actual human traits and sensibilities. In My So-Called Life, characters were, well, somewhat reminiscent of actual teenagers. They were moody, hormonal, and self-questioning. They were teenagers.



If you flipped through the channels during prime teen programming blocks, other channels would be showing unlikely self-actualized and well-adjusted teenagers negotiating through easily remediable situations. If you ever have been or even have met a teenager, you know the chance of coming across those qualities in a real life high schooler was about as likely as finding Zach Morris and Kelly Kapowski shooting up heroin together in the bathroom of a sleazy alleyside bar. In short, the teenage best-years-of-your-life fantasy may have been dominant and all-powerful in the ratings, but My So-Called Life's mirror to society manages to remain relevant and poignant over a decade later.

While most teenage TV shows featured actors well past their high school years (a la the audacity to cast a 29-year old Gabrielle Carteris as 16-year old Andrea Zuckerman on 90210), My So-Called Life cast an actual teenager as its star. At 15, Claire Danes was arguably more qualified to play a teenager than the joke-worthy 20-somethings pretending to be 15 in other teen-focused shows. Danes' character, Angela Chase, was the archetypal teenager. She was constantly questioning her own identity and the phoniness around her in a Holden Caulfield-type manner. If nothing else, she was incredibly, heart-breakingly real.

Watching My So-Called Life episodes now, it's easy to see why it wasn't a huge draw for most teenagers. In the show, Angela is impulsive, moody, rebellious, unreliable, deeply flawed, and suffers from devastatingly unrequited crushes. It's likely it hit a little too close to home for many 90s teenagers who were less than thrilled to be confronted with a reflection of their own inadequacies. Nonetheless, watching the show as an adult offers a whole new lens of perspective:



Is it just me, or did the movie Thirteen completely rip off this initial plot? I suppose the ditch-your-nerdy-goody-goody-best-friend-for-the-more-exciting-wild-and-crazy-friend is a fact of coming of age, but it certainly offers a dark insight about the flakiness and value-fluidity of teenagers seeking to find their place. Angela's completely self-focused attitude epitomizes the me-centric outlook of most teenagers, but it's not exactly an attractive quality. It seems that audiences like their main characters to represent what they are not but wish they could be, whereas My So-Called Life illuminated what they were but wish they were not. A little introspection can be a dangerous thing.

The supporting characters also offered a complex spectrum of issues generally not addressed by prime time programming. Angela's new best friend, Rayanne, is a promiscuous substance abuser with a wealth of emotional problems. Her sidekick Rickie Vasquez is openly gay (virtually unheard of for teen roles) and comes from an abusive household. The object of Angela's affection, Jordan Catalano (played by a hearthob-worthy Jared Leto) is an illiterate songwriter (I know, it makes no sense) who has been held back academically twice. After watching a few episodes, it was clear we weren't exactly dealing with the Brady Bunch here. Obviously these kids had problems that spanned a larger context than an hour-long weekly episode and thus plots were less episodic and more ongoing, making it more difficult for new viewers to jump in midseason.

The show was cut short when it was canceled prematurely in May 1995, leaving its small base of viewers with an as-of-yet unanswered cliffhanger. My So-Called Life was certainly ahead of its time, and perhaps if it had debuted a decade later it could have flourished into its full cliffhanger-answering potential. At the time, ABC executives underestimated the spending power of teenagers, particularly teenage girls) as a viable consumer demographic. Just imagine all of the value-inconsistent franchise product marketing that could have been.

If you were never among the original viewers or didn't pick up on it during the show's syndication on MTV, you are in luck. The show is available on DVD in all its angsty 90s glory. Sure, you may never find out if Angela chose rebel Jordan or brainy Brian, but at least you can know what all of these passionate message board contributors have been heatedly debating for the past 14 years.

Check it out:
Full 2nd Episode of MSCL on YouTube

In the meantime, enjoy this classic post... (part II)

Fear not, Children of the 90s will be back in full force tomorrow. I am out at a work conference, but in an effort to adhere to my regular posting schedule I am proud to present another pre-scheduled installment of classic (read: reposted) CotN for your perusing pleasure:

Goosebumps

If you thought some of these other delightful 90's commodities were franchising machines, you've yet to meet the monster of all monopolies. That's right, I used "monster" as a shockingly low-grade horror book pun. Just deal with it.

Children growing up in the 90s had a fascination with all things spooky. Shows like Are you Afraid of the Dark? and all sorts of novelized ghost stories cast a spell over young consumers and instilled in them an unquenchable hunger for all varieties of horror media. The king cresting this horror wave was R.L. Stine, a virtual book-miller churning out book after book laced with a satisfying mix of satire, humor, ripped-off story lines, suprise endings, and fright.

R.L. Stine wrote innumerable pieces of young adult fiction, but most memorable and exhaustive were those in his Goosebumps series. In an age where book series dominated the youth literature marketplace, Stine was among the few series creators who actually authored all of his own books without the use of ghostwriters. I guess you could call R.L. Stine the leading ghostwriter. Okay, even I can't handle that one. Moving on.

Goosebumps books were a gratifying balance of things of that our parents did and did not approve. On one hand, we were reading chapter books and unquestionably though unintentionally gaining some sort of literary adroitness. On the other, we were scaring ourselves silly with undiluted, unwholesome trash that was prime fodder to give us bad dreams and night terrors. It was like tricking your parents into thinking you were learning something, while deep down you knew you were up to no good.

R.L. Stine openly acknowledged that many of his Goosebumps plot lines were lifted from old-school horror exploits such as the Twilight Zone. Thankfully, as children in the mid-90s had limited or no knowledge of the existence of 1960s sci-fi television series , they eagerly absorbed
these plot lines as fresh and new. Regardless of the story origins, the books were fairly un-put-downable. Stine was the master of plot twists, particularly at the end of a story. Even once we had read enough books in the series to recognize when we were being tricked or misled, we always took the bait and were outraged to find all of our supposedly sacrosanct suppositions had been for naught.

The best (and let's be honest, worst) example of this is Goosebumps #26: My Hairiest Adventure:


While of course the major underlying premise of these books are their absurdity, this one ostensibly reigns supreme and unleashes some fairly ridiculous plot meandering (if you haven't read the book or simply can't yet recall, that "unleash" is another marvelous pun. Really, I swear.) In short, a group of kids find an expired bottle of self-tanner and naturally decide to engage in a group lather session. Soon thereafter, they discover that they are sprouting hair all over their bodies and (mistakenly) believe the tanning solvent is to blame.

Suddenly, he starts seeing dogs all over town sporting the same hair/fur and eye colors as his previously human companions. Not only is this a bit spooky, it certainly explains why we had to read page-long description of Lily's clear green eyes and sandy hair. To think I'd erroneously speculated that Stine had developed a crush on his charming 7th grade female character.

Long(ish) story short, our lovable and assumably human protagonists aren't really kids at all...they're (wait for it!)...dogs! Yep, dogs. The details are so ridulous I don't think I'll extrapolate any further and rather just pause that with that Stine-esque chapter-end cliffhanger and leave you to your own book-finishing devices. Suffice it to say, we were surprised, if not a little confused.

Such was the way of Goosebumps. Just when we believed we had it all figured out, Stine would throw in an alien friend or a giant blobular monster to throw us off the trail. The real beauty of these books were their window to escapism; they did not need to be grounded in reality or even make sense. We loved them unconditionally, and were even willing to accept dozens of unwarranted sequels.

Of course, like any profitable 90s franchise, books were never enough. Some of our favorite stories were adapted for TV by the now defunct Fox Kids network:



That's right, because what's more ominous in a series intro than manuscript pages flying dramatically out of an author's briefcase? We all understood that it was based on the book series, but thankfully producers chose to drive the point home with outlandish literality. Not to mention that the dog's glowing eyes look suspiciously like they were sloppily drawn in Microsoft paint. This baby's got Fox written all over it.

Despite the low-budget TV series, board games, and video game adaptations, the tried and true Goosebumps formula was in the books. While as adults we can certainly recognize the chintzy stories and plot twists, we can still appreciate our childhood worship of these books as sacred. Their adeptness at simultaneously entertaining us and scaring us out of our minds always kept us hungry for more.

So lay back, grab your tattered old copy of Night of the Living Dummy III, and take yourself back to a simpler time. A time when you were able to suspend your disbelief at the implausibility of not one, not two, but three families falling for the same dummy-comes-alive trick all over again. So long as each chapter formulaicly ends with someone letting out a bloodcurdling scream for no reason other than to set up a cliffhanger for the following chapter, all is right in the world.

Amazingly comprehensive reviews of Goosebumps books:
Blogger Beware

In the meantime, enjoy this classic post...

Children of the Nineties is at a work conference, and despite desperate pleas to the contrary is not entitled to personal computer time. In the meantime, please enjoy a pre-scheduled classic CotN repost from earlier this year. As I only had three or four readers at the time, it's probably (okay, almost definitely) new to you.

Enjoy, and I will return to shower all of you bits of with 90s nostalgia goodness on Thursday!

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

Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding

Just think, kids growing up today will think a photo of Michael Phelps with a bong constitutes a legitimate full-blown Olympic athlete scandal.

Amateurs.

In the 90s, Olympic athletes did scandals right. It was an all-or-nothing type of game. They weren't playing around. In fact, it wasn't even necessary to try to sabotage rival athletes, what, with so much prime competition on your home court.


In 1994, the world of US Olympic figure skaters became embroiled in a vicious battle between teammates. I know, I know. Olympic figure skating? Those girls in the sequined spandex? They seem so friendly, their bleached smiles so genuine. Unfortunately, beneath the happy veneer of the US women's team lurked a dark and dangerous tension.

Nancy Kerrigan had quickly become America's golden girl--she was young, pretty, poised and talented. She had all the makings of a perfect All-American Wheatie's box photograph. Americans couldn't seem to get enough of the up-and-coming skater, and she appeared destined for Olympic success.

Not everyone was so happy about the Kerrigan hype, though. Fellow US Olympic skater Tonya Harding was obviously displeased with playing second banana to Nancy. Looking back, it's frightening they let this maniacal fame-crazy sociopath skate around with the equivalent of twp frequently sharpened switchblades affixed to her feet. I'm not sure if you've ever been jumped by someone using an ice skate as a weapon, but they're not kidding around with those toe picks.

Tonya was certainly talented and was not without her admirers. Harding was the first female skater to successfully execute a triple axel during competition. She was, however, a perpetual self-fulfilling prophecy of eternal victimhood. She and her devotees felt that there was a definite favoritism for Kerrigan over Harding, and some Harding-ites went so far as to suggest it was because Harding was from less affluent background. However, as Kerrigan herself came from a blue-collar background, this seemed like a fairly faulty argument. Whatever the reason, a seething rivalry brewed between the two US Olympic teammates.

The tension came to a head just before the 1994 Olympics. Kerrigan was mysteriously attacked by an unknown assailant. The attack was well-honed and deliberate, injuring her knee. The intent was clearly to hinder her skating ability, though few people could fathom why someone would do such a thing.

Of course, the whole thing (conveniently excluding the attack itself) was caught on film and played on continuous loop on news stations worldwide. Kerrigan's cries of "Why me?" were frequently (if perhaps a bit cruelly) mocked in the coming months.



Henceforth referred to as "The Whack Heard Round the World" (or my personal favorite, "The Battle of Wounded Knee II) the incident actually had a secondary impact of majorly boosting the interest and ratings in Olympic figure skating. People were quick to point fingers at Tonya Harding, who seemed notably unshaken by the incident.

Harding's ex husband, along with a few sketchy co-conspirators, were the culprits behind the attack, though it took months to unravel the whole story. This obviously did not bode well for Tonya's already waning image, and though she was (just barely) allowed to compete in the '94 winter Olympics, she finished an embarrassing eighth to Nancy Kerrigan's second.

Luckily, there seemed to be some karma at play. Kerrigan got to keep skating and maintained her place as a national hero (with a few minor scandal blips along the way) and Tonya struggled to live off of milking her notoriety for the next 15 years. She did all sorts of embarrassing things for a quick buck, most ridiculously competing in Celebrity Boxing. Now, you would possibly think that someone trying to adjust their image would play to the crowds and try to lay low and strive for a gracious, demure public image.

You would be wrong.



Better yet, as if her F-list status could not be carved any more deeply in stone, she boxed Paula Jones. Two crazy chicks vying for attention and public sympathy, and here they are duking it out on a terrible reality show.

Harding was also recently a guest on Oprah and opens up about, well, all sorts of crazy. It's hilariously obvious that the Big O doesn't believe a word of Tonya's sob story.



Good one, Tons. You really cleared that up. Because you like to hunt and fish and sit around the bonfire with friends, you...are justifying what, exactly? It's too bad she can't afford a publicist to properly train her for this interview, because she comes across absolutely sociopathic. All this proves is that not only is Tonya a terrible liar, but is also likely dumber than a box of rocks.

As if all that weren't enough, she also made quite a ruckus over Obama referencing her http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/05/tonya-harding-slams-barac_n_172233.html during his campaign, when he remarked "Folks said there's no way Obama has a chance unless he goes and kneecaps the person ahead of us, does a Tonya Harding." Geez, between referencing Tonya Harding's KneeGate and Jessica Simpson's weight gain, Obama certainly is adept at planting seeds of publicity for washed-up celebrities.

But I digress. The moral (immoral, really) of the story is that if you find yourself the second choice for America's love and affection, you can always call out a personal favor for someone to go and bust their kneecaps. It's just that easy! You could pair it with a catchy tagline, like, "Bustin' kneecaps--not just for the mob!"

Hey, that's not half bad. Wasn't I just saying Tonya needs a publicist...?