"I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up!"

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

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

Here is the ad, in all its glory:




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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

After all, they were the ones who had fallen.

Legends of the Hidden Temple

They just don't make Maya and Aztec-based semi-historical adventure children's trivia game shows like they used to. I know what you're thinking, "I could name dozens!" Well, I admire your commitment to progress, but unfortunately none of them hold a temple torch to the original. And when I say original, I mean original. Well, except for that whole Indiana Jones thing, but hey, this show had a big talking stone head. Totally different.

These days, so many forms of children's entertainment are all too grounded in some realm of reality. Children's television network executives just aren't going out on a limb any more for completely nonsensical show premises. This show was not only immensely complex in its structure and execution, but was also featured incredible details in is design. Sure, its educational value was convoluted at best, but where else where we supposed to learn about such pertinent artifacts as The Mysterious Manuscript of Mary Shelley or The Jewel-Encrusted Egg of Catherine the Great?

Legends of the Hidden Temple featured six boy-girl teams with names that are instantly recognizable to any former enthusiast: Red Jaguars, Orange Iguanas, Purple Parrots, Green Monkeys, Blue Barracudas, and Silver Snakes. Sure, the animals and the colors didn't necessarily match up, but we needed to identify these kids at a distance by colored t-shirt alone. Looking enviably cool in their bright yellow helmets and mouthguards, the teams began their challenge by crossing the mighty Moat. Alright, so it was a long narrow swimming pool with lane dividers, but they used cool things like rafts and swinging ropes. Plus, they got to bang a big gong at the end. We were mixing cultures a bit, but that's nothing in comparison to the legends that were to come.

The four teams who were first to finish the Moat challenge went on to the Steps of Knowledge. Finally, they get to hang with Olmec! Olmec was...well, an Olmec, but as kids we didn't know too much about the cultures of Precolumbian Mesoamerica, so it was all good. Our revered Olmec was a giant animatronic talking stone head who shared with us the wisdom of legends that we can only assume were somehow associated with this Hidden Temple we kept hearing about. The legends were generally historically based, but almost never were tied to the general Aztec/Mayan theme the show had going. For years I thought The Golden Pepperoni of Catherine de' Medici and The Levitating Dog Leash of Nostradamus were in some way associated with preclassical Central American cultures.


Olmec would share the legend, always with a catchy all-caps title generally verging on the ridiculous and irrelevant. His stone-faced (sorry, I had to) seriousness made us all believe in the power of The Golden Cricket Cage of Khan or The Very Tall Turban of Ahmed Baba. Following the brief storytelling, Olmec would ask questions from the preceding tale and teams would buzz in to respond and subsequently progress down the Steps of Knowledge with each correct answer. The first two teams to the bottom were the winners! Hooray! Onto the Temple Games!

The Temple Games were played for the coveted Pendants of Life. Obviously whoever was on the LoHT naming committee deserves several gold stars for both creativity and liberal use of capitalization. The Temple Games were sort of like GUTS physical challenges, only temple-themed. The team with the most Pendants of Life advanced to the ultimate and indubitably coolest round, the Temple Run.

Distinctly less cool for the contestants who did not reach the final round was the truly deplorable state of the consolation prizes. If you thought the Carmen Sandiego parting gifts were mildly questionable, you would be begging for a basketball globe once you realized the best thing a non-final round LoHT contestant could take home was a pair of Skechers sneakers, a Looney Tunes Watch (valued at $9.99!), or a VHS copy of a made-for-television movie. Yes, really.

Only slightly less lamentable were the prizes available for those who actually made it to the Temple. For those who made it through the first Temple round, they could win something in the range of a tennis racket or skateboard. There was usually some form of decently desirable electronic prize for second-rounders; we're talking something like a Casio My Magic Secret Diary here. For those who made it out of the temple unscathed, artifact in hand, they could win a trip to New York City or NASA Space Camp. However, it should be noted that kids who willingly participate in this type of thing would probably love NASA Space Camp, so it's probably not a bad deal.

The Temple Run was by far the most impressive and tension-filled portion of the show. Would they encounter a flamboyantly dressed sentinel temple guard? Those guys always scared the bejeezus out of me. What sort of desperate out-of-work actor brings his headshots to a casting call with the description, "Tall, dark, frightening; experience with child-grabbing preferred"? If you were lucky enough to still have some Pendants of Life, you could buy them off and escape unharmed; there's nothing like teaching children the values of bribery to get their way.

The Temple was a fairly complicated labyrinth composed of a dozen or so rooms, some locked, many of which included some task for the contestant to complete to continue on. The contestants would dodge temple guards, whiz through The Shrine of the Silver Monkey, haphazardly assemble the monkey statue to open the Temple doors, grab the artifact from Olmec's legend and find their way to freedom/space camp.



The show was immensely popular in its heyday and continues to maintain a 90s cult following. We appreciated the show in its quirkiness; where as children we accepted at face value that this was just the way the show worked, as adults we have the perspective to see that this show was outlandishly complicated in design and creativity.

So for those of us still yearning for our run at Space Camp or at least a Skechers-sponsored savings bond, strap on those helmets, bite down on those mouthguards, cue up the youtube, and let yourself be swept up in the mystery of why locating The Walking Stick of Harriet Tubman is your ticket to the NASA non-gravity simulator.

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

I spent 5 good years of my life wondering in fact where in the world was Carmen Sandiego. She certainly was a tricky one. To think that there existed a jewel thief manager who could outwit three red-vested 10-to-14-year-old contestants with limited geographic knowledge is absolutely staggering. Even though Carmen and her cohorts were non-threateningly cartoon-animated, we knew of her malevolent misdoings and were eager to locate her and her dim-witted agents. Plus, the victor won an all-expenses paid trip to anywhere in the 48 contiguous United States. I mean, imagine! A chance to fly Delta Airlines coach and stay in a Holiday Inn down in downtown Boise or inner Salt Lake City? Sign me up!

If you grew up in the 1990s and had a head, the Carmen Sandiego game show theme song was likely stuck in it and playing on repeat. Performed by Rockapella, the leading Folger's coffee commercial-starring a capella quartet of the era, the song was possibly the most captivating and recognizable game-show theme of the decade. Just hearing the opening, "do it, Rockapella!" is enough to mobilize me to doo-wop uncontrollably. In case you've ever managed to expunge this catchy chorus from your brain, here is a handy sing-along video of the song:



The show itself was developed as a response to the alarmingly low level of geographic knowledge amongst America's television-polluted youth. They were already watching TV, so why not throw in some desperately-needed geography lessons? Oldest trick in the PBS play book, presented by Viewers Like You. After all, we couldn't have the Soviets out-knowledging us in the field of maps and atlases--especially considering that when the show first aired, a disturbing number of American-educated children could not even locate the as-of-yet-undefunct Soviet Union on a map.

Once they'd hooked you with the rockin' theme song, they capitalized on your love for Rockapella by featuring them as the "house vocal band and comedy troupe". Really, that's how they were billed. Admittedly, this is probably the highest level to which a moderately humorous a capella group could aspire, but its music scene street credibility is definitely questionable. Rockapella's zany madcap skits paired with Carmen and the gang's animated hijinks were enough to make all of us yearn to be game show gumshoes.

Most episodes began a little something like this, minus the special celebrity teammates:



All hail the late great Lynn Thigpen, chief of the ACME detective agency and our hearts. Along with co-host Greg Lee ("The ACME Special Agent in charge of training new recruits,") they somehow made these off-the-wall tasks and missions seem appreciably plausible. Why shouldn't we believe that all great detectives are given detailed briefings chock-full of historically and geographically relevant educational information with little to no information on the case or suspects themselves? Who were we to question the notion that gumshoes typically solve their crimes in three well-defined rounds culminating in a light-speed map identification quest? We could only assume that all failed detectives usually walk away from their task at hand dejected but sporting a t-shirt with the head crook's name and face plastered across the front. You know, in case they run into them somewhere and need the pictorial evidence to make a legitimate citizen's arrest.

Makes sense to me.

Of course we all knew the premise was thin and the musical comedy sketches unnecessary, but we loved this show with undying fervor nonetheless. At the time, the prizes seemed outstandingly desirable, but in retrospect it becomes pretty clear we were working with a public broadcasting budget. Sure, the winner got to keep their Crime Bucks (conveniently converted to legal tender cash!) but the other consolatory prizes seemed a little "let's clean out the ol' PBS donation closet." Though the nature and value of the consolation prizes remained relatively stagnant, the show did a spectacular job of repackaging the prize pack with a new name each season. Originally the ACME Crimenet Travel Kit, it also went by the aliases of the Travel Pack and ACME Gumshoe Gear. Clearly, it was not only our jewel thieves who were duplicitous.

No matter what you called it, if you failed to win the coveted round-trip ticket to a Holiday Inn anywhere in the lower 48 states you were still going home with...well, something. Just think, you too could win a Rand McNally World Atlas, Official Carmen Sandiego t-shirt, watch, sweatshirt, backpack, a one year full-paid subscription to National Geographic, a BASKETBALL GLOBE (!), ACME crime net cap, ACME stealth pen recorder, and even maybe the ACME Voice Identification Badge and Leave-a-Message Wallet! That's a lot of loot right there. To think we thought the jewel-heisters were thieves!

Carmen Sandiego was a phenomenon in a way that few children's shows are today. We all knew that it was educational; the secret was out. Yet somehow, we got so caught up in the catchy Rockapella-ness of it all and were willing to accept this opportunity to actively learn something about world geography. Exceptionally timely in an era of ever-changing geo-political boundaries, we could always count on Carmen Sandiego to go to somewhere particularly relevant to present conflict and shifts.

At the end of the day, whether or not our postcard records of that episode's loots and locations were chosen for the at-home viewer T-shirt winner, at least the show had given us the attention span necessary to follow Carmen from Chicago to Czechoslovakia and back*.

(*All geographical data is current as of the date this program was recorded)

Lamb Chop's Play Along

For children of the 90s, a lamb chop was more than just a tasty cut of meat. It (well, she) was also a fluffy little sheep puppet who, along with an afro-ed Shari Lewis and her delightful puppet barnyard peers, entertained us through the magic of once-worthwhile public television.

A brief (read: lazy) investigation into Lamb Chop's history reveals a frightening amount of spare time amongst pop-culture Wikipedia updaters. The "Lamb Chop's Play-Along" entry actually links to a categorical page entitled "fictional sheep". Yes, really. Fictional sheep. Our esteemed lamb puppet pal was obviously in good company. In case you were wondering (which no doubt you were!), the Wikipedia entry opens with the compelling phrase,"this is a list of fictional sheep". It then goes on to list more than thirty fictional sheep.

You may be saying to yourself, what is a person who diligently maintains a blog devoted to frivolous 90s novelties doing mocking a harmless list composed by loving devotees? Certainly even she recognizes her hypocrisy.

You would be wrong.

Other fictional sheep aside, the true star was Lamb Chop. The pure cuteness of her very being was almost overwhelming. She was adorable incarnate. She was sassy and fun. She was an innocent little sock puppet we could all look up to. And her name was Lamb Chop. Come on. What sort of stone-hearted scrooge could deny the inherent cuteness?

Lamb Chop's Play-Along featured a puppet-packed roster of barnyard friends, all voiced by Shari Lewis. I present to you our painfully adorable cast of characters:

1. Charlie Horse--sometime trouble-maker, full time horse. Stirs stuff up a lot. Goofy bucktoothed expression. Pictured above wearing unecessary puppet visor.

2. Hush Puppy--all-around good guy. Floppy ears. Pictured above in superhero style t-shirt handy for moments when he forgets his initials.

3. Lambchop--feisty, adventurous, child-like. Pictured above in trendsetting Blossom-style hat.

So there you have it. There was, however, one more aspect of Lamb Chop's Play-Along that really spoke to me as a child.

Let me set up a moment for you here: as a child, I had no puppets to look up to, or at least not as religious role models. I know what you're thinking, "but all children deserve religious puppet role models!" I wholeheartedly agree. It's essentially a basic human right. The television puppets I knew and loved were always putting on low-budget remakes of "A Christmas Carol" and reveling in their non-inclusive brand of seasonal cheer. Sure, the Muppets were nice, but where was I in their puppet Christmas merrymaking? My house had no wreaths, no tree, no mistletoe. No one ever seemed to ventriloquilize anything for children like me.

Enter Shari Lewis, oh great Semitic puppetmistress. For God's sake, her father was a founding member of Yeshiva University. Did I mention he was a magician? Shari's magical Jewish upbringing set the stage for high-quality yid-centric children's entertainment. Finally, a sock-puppet horse playing Dreidel! A fuzzy-dummy dog throwing a surprise Passover Seder for the whole gang! A lamb-likeness waxing poetic on the virtues of crispy potato latkes! If nothing else, Shari Lewis and Co made me feel, if only for a few episodes, as if I belonged. No longer was I an outsider to puppet holiday celebrations! A great children's television show injustice had been overturned, or at least in the eyes of me and my Jewish day school peers.

Jewish Holiday specials or not, Lamb Chop was beloved by children worldwide. Her sweet innocence and fluffy exterior captured our hearts and planted us firmly in front of our television sets for 3 enchanting seasons. Even after Lewis's untimely and tragic death, her impact on children of the 90s lives on. After all, she taught us how to endlessly (really, endlessly) irritate our parents with a catchy little ditty entitled "This is the Song that Never Ends."

It goes a little something like this:

This is the song that never ends,
it just goes on and on my friends
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was,
and they'll continue singing it forever just because...

This is the song that never ends...

Oh, how parents hated this song! It was right up there with "I Know a Song that Gets on Everybody's Nerves". To Lewis's credit, however, the song was quite memorable and played at the end of every episode. She even made a big show about trying to get them to stop, prescient of our parent's subsequent woeful attempts to end our insistent singing.

Even once we had outwitted the lyrics and could start singing it once we actually knew what it was, we would always continue singing it forever.

You know, just because.

Bop It

Bop it!




Twist it!





Pull it!




Bop it!

Twist it!

Pull it!


Bop it!
Twist it!
Pull it!

Bopit!Twistit!Pullit!

Bop it was endless hours of fun. Well, endless hours of preoccupation. Okay, maybe just endless hours sacrificed to almighty commander, Bop it.

In the 1990s, parents, teachers, and toy-makers must have sat down and had a meeting. "Kids just aren't obedient enough," the adults probably lamented. "They're always going outside to play and they refuse to sit still and obey our persistent two-word-followed-by-exclamation-point commands."

How could we solve this conundrum of noncompliance?

Bop it.

The notion that the original toy, featuring only three functions, could hold the attention span of an eight-year old is a somewhat baffling one. The toy was essentially the at-home version of the doctor's office knee-jerk reflex test. A small audio system embedded within an oblong piece of plastic would issue forceful, pleasantry-free commands instructing the player on which function to manipulate.

"Bop it!" the machine would urge. And we would comply, locating the bop-centric button and bopping accordingly.

"Twist it!" the contraption would prompt. And so we diligently twisted, maneuvering the crank.

"Pull it!" the device would insist. And so we pulled, slightly dislocating the handle on the opposite side.

That was it. I mean, that was it. The entire toy. Sure, it started slow and gradually built speed in its commands, but that was the whole shebang. If nothing else, Bop it taught the wrenching pains of stress and mounting pressure to perform onto young, unsuspecting children. Our hearts would beat quickly, our blood pressure would soar; to examine our physiological response you would think that we were experiencing extreme anxiety over a big boardroom presentation or an impending job promotion.

Like its similarly (though slightly more enthusiastically) titled 90s toy cousin, the Skip it!, the main objective that kept us sadistically coming back for more was the personal best scoring function. On an aside, it seems that at this time, Hasbro's marketing team was padded with semi-literate foreigners with a limited vocabulary and a penchant for profuse punctuation. Let us briefly envision a marketing meeting at Hasbro in the 1990s:

Marketing Director: Alright people, we've got two new toys to name.
Team Member: What do they do?"
MD: Well, one you have to bop and the other you have to skip.
TM: Great, we've got our first words. Could we possibly identify them by definitive, meaningful pronouns?
MD: No, no, I think we should go with "it". Gender neutral, flexible meaning. The feminists will go wild for it.
TM: Okay, so can we leave it at that? Bop it and Skip it?
MD: It seems to lack a certain pizazz...it needs some punctuation to punch it up a bit.
TM 1: Question Mark?
TM 2: Semi Colon?
TM 3: Ellipse?
MD: We're not quite there...
TM 4: Exclamation Mark? But only for the Skip it, let's not push our luck.
MD: Bingo! Team member 4, you've been promoted to head of the Hasbro toy naming department. Ingenious!

But again, I digress. Bop it may have been simple and exclamation-point-free, but it did have a certain charm. It was endlessly frustrating in an encouraging, self-improving way. Bop it (at least the early, non-sellout model) was refreshingly simple and required a great deal of concentration. This was Simon for the colorblind, whack-a-mole for the vegetarians. For every 10 points a player earned, Bop it would give you a congratulatory burst of audio and bragging rights to lightning-quick albeit unnecessary reflexes. The Bop it knew better than to let us become big-headed from our victories, though. For every mistake, the Bop it would cackle maniacally at your general ineptness. It was certainly humbling, if a little cruel.

Of course, as our generation evolved into miniature multi-taskers, so too did the Bop it evolve and betray its original design and develop into a more mature "extreme" version of itself.





Though not completely true to tradition, the Bop it Extreme had its high points. Just imagine, now you could also spin it! And flick it! How did they ever achieve this brilliant feat of engineering?

In a crazy twist of toy-naming fate, Hasbro's latest rendering of the Bop it toy (scheduled for a 2009 release) is a throwback to the Hasbro of the 90s and their distinct brand of earnestness and zeal that so defined their work. The new 2009 version of the Bop it will be called...

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

BOP IT!

With an exclamation point.

Sorry Marketing Team Member 4.

You're fired.

Goosebumps Books

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:
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Where's Waldo?

Oh, Waldo, how you continue to thwart our valiant search efforts. Despite your obvious penchant for flamboyantly candy cane striped red and white sweater/hat combos and your tendency to take along every possible piece of travel equipment on your obscenely crowded vacations, you still manage to boggle our minds with your mysterious whereabouts. In the original book, Waldo lugs along a walking stick, sleeping bag, mallet, drinking cup, binoculars, kettle, backpack, camera, snorkel, belt, another bag, and a shovel. Clearly, if he's going get lost in a crowd, he's got every imaginable amenity to walk, sleep, pound, drink, see, boil, carry, document photographically, dive, remain in pants, store more items, or dig his way out. That's right, it makes perfect sense.



Where's Waldo? originated as a British franchise under the name "Where's Wally?" Apparently, "Wally" is some sort of a British slang term that publishers feared would drive away eager young American Waldo-searchers with its distinctively red-coat recalling familiarity, so the only logical leap was to change the title to an equally unknown and unpopular name that in no way resonated with American youth. In our typical domineering American fashion, we pulled the rug from under the British Wally and U.S. Waldo sales quickly and consistently outstripped sales of the original. If that's not a legitimate way to assert our undeserved sense of national superiority, I don't know what is.

With "Waldo-mania" sweeping the country throughout the 1990s, there seemed to be no one without vested stake or interest in finding this bespectacled excursionist. There was something oddly if inexplicably satisfying about curling up with a big hardcover picture book and focusing on crowded, chaotic scenes until your eyes crossed. It wasn't just Waldo we were after, either; he brought with him a gang of of absurd cronies and/or nemeses. There was Wanda, Waldo's pal. Woof, his faithful canine companion. After that is where things got a bit weird.

There was Wizard Whitebeard, some sort of life coach/guru who was occasionally responsible for sending Waldo on his wacky expeditions. Then of course we had Odlaw, Waldo's bizarrely evil nemesis formulated from an inverted anagram of Waldo's name. He was nearly identical to the original Waldo only his clothing and glasses were of different colors, and he has a mustache. Even as children, we were aware that mustaches signified pure, unfettered evil (there was Hitler, Stalin, and Odlaw, and we were onto their mustachioed madness). We the readers were forced to infer that Odlaw was evil by his distinctive un-Waldoness, despite the fact that we never actually caught him doing anything more than lurking in the background.


And of course, there were the Waldo Watchers, because what bumbling vacationer would travel anywhere without their 25-member posse of lookalike devotees? That's right, Waldo had an entourage. These are clearly a cheap attempt by the authors to divert our eyes with Waldo-esque color patterns and hat-stylings, but were we really to believe that by the mid-90s Waldo had 100 faithful followers who joined him on every venture?

Silly characters aside, there were reasons that Waldo books held the top spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for a composite nearly-100 weeks. If nothing else, the books placated our parents with their hypnotizing ability to keep us unmovingly focused in a single spot for an extended period of time. Waldo had it all: books, comic books, cereal boxes, a short-lived magazine (with an impressive 2 issue run!), video games, and even a TV show. However, the plot-rich TV shows with only brief frozen-screen finding games interludes were never quite enough to hold our attention in the same way.

Despite the dozens of poorly-conceived franchising paths, the Where's Waldo? books were nothing less than a phenomenon. So long as we could continue our relentless searches for our beloved hero, all was right in the world. Like most 90s trends for children, the allure was not in the flashy effects or superfluous characters, but rather in the simplicity and forthrightness of the task at hand. There was no recapturing the magic of the moment of actually locating Waldo himself amidst a sea of impostors and villains.

So whether you grew up searching for Wally (UK) or Waldo (US), Valli (Iceland) or Walter (Germany), Effie (Israel) or Charlie (France), we were united in our common goal. No matter what you called him or where you lived in the world, we all knew Waldo as the greatest hidden holidayer of them all.

JNCO Jeans

What could possibly be more flattering than looking like you were standing in two giant logo-emblazoned, hem-dragging overturned denim buckets? No one seemed to bat an eye over the fact that each pant leg could easily house a family of four. JNCO jeans epitomized the rise of the pseudo-"street" poseur movement so beloved by 1990s middle class white kids. Their idea of the mean streets may have been a lemonade stand that refused to accept credit cards, but they could rock a mean pair of ultra wide-leg jeans.

With charming style names like "Mammoth" and "Fatboy," who could resist these grotesquely wide dungarees? The most offending specimens featured a whopping 50'' leg opening measurement, compared to the average 20-some inch leg openings on men's pants today. JNCO jeans also featured mutantly large back pockets that engulfed nearly the entire length of the pants:

JNCO jeans were a prime example of middle-aged marketing teams capitalizing on the 1990s-era growth of youth consumer buying power. With (oversized) pocket money to spare, kids of the 90s were a rapidly growing demographic over whose newfound purchasing power hungry marketers fought viciously. Ad executives spent a great deal of money convincing young people that JNCO jeans were emblematic of their unique sense of youth countercultural rebellion. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the JNCO brand claimed to "deliver[...] the hippest denim jeans and phat styles to satisfy the demands of even the most hardcore hip-hop, skater and music oriented sub-cultures." What, are you trying to telling me this wasn't written by real, live 1990s youths? But they spelled phat with a p-h! And they know of our desire to be "hardcore!" How did the JNCO ad team ever crack our cryptic youth slang code?

The brand epitomized the rising awareness amongst marketers of poseur skater culture. Suddenly, all it took was a pair of obscenely wide-leg jeans to brand oneself to a supposed teen subculture. Parents hated the tacky embroidered logos and the inevitable ratty,ragged hems resultant of the pant legs constantly dragging on the ground; their insistent disapproval encouraged young people that these pants were indeed an affront to the Man, despite the fact that He was the one producing them. The JNCO brand struck a chord with young clothing consumers, particularly with the company's comic-book magazine ad spreads featuring real-life JNCO jeans-wearing models in cartoon settings. Though the brand was originally formulated as a men's and boy's line, JNCO later added a women's line featuring similarly unfortunate wide-legged styles. These were equal opportunity jeans: determined to unflatter any and every type of figure, male or female.

The immense popularity of JNCOs proves that the 1990s were less about looking good and more about fitting in. Never before had an alleged subculture been so carefully calculated by the Man. No longer were our counter-culture trends originating from idealistic hippies or bitter Generation-X musicians. Rather, children of the 1990s unknowingly began to increasingly rely on grown-ups to dictate their trends. The definition of "cool" was more and more frequently prescribed by a group of adult business professionals sitting around a boardroom table. Young people seemed oblivious to the fact that badges of counterculture by definition should not cost $60 a pop. The tide of trend-setting was changing, and the Man was at the helm.

Nevertheless, JNCO jeans represented a paradigmatic shift in the way young people defined themselves. Suddenly, you did not have to believe in or even particularly care about anything particular to associate yourself with alternative youth culture. You could actually buy your way into tween-age rebellion in a way that was antithetical to all past counter-cultural norms. All it took was a willingness to be engulfed by enormous pants.

Super Soakers

Kids today have it too easy. Forget the value of dedication and hard work that so defined our generation. Their need for instant gratification continuously pushes aside their pioneering spirit of industry and diligence.

That's right, I'm talking about water guns. In our day, we knew the meaning of painstaking commitment to getting the job done. There was none of this "press the trigger and water sprays" nonsense. We would pump those Super Soaker air-pressure chambers until our fingers blistered, but it would all be worth it to spray our friends standing fifty yards away.

Originally christened the "PowerDrencher", Super Soakers burst onto the scene at the tail end of the 1980s. Approaching the 90s, toy water gun producers had fallen upon hard times, garnering flack from all sides on their regrettably realistic renderings of actual weaponry:

(image of Larami Uzi via iSoaker.com)

With parents and lawmakers increasingly conscious of how violent toys and media impacted the impressionable youth of America, these troublingly accurate imposters were on the way out. Water guns needed a new, updated image to distance themselves from their connotations of violence and war. What they needed was a light-hearted, neon-colored remastered water gun prototype with a distinctly non-military name.

At the prime meeting of timing and technology, inventor Lonnie Johnson and toy-maker Larami teamed up to produce a new water gun that fully diverted from the warlike water weapons of the past:



Super Soakers had a distinctly different tone from preceding water guns, and the ad conveys the odd sense of whimsy associated with their product. Though the commercial prominently features the theme of revenge, we can only assume that stereotypical 90's rich girl Buffy really had it coming. Also, who could resist the throwback to the Blues Brothers in their execution of their masterminded pool party-ruining scheme? This is 90s advertising as its finest.

Revolutionary in design, Super Soakers required their wielders to pump pressurized air into a separate chamber on the water gun that would build up the power to shoot water at great distances. While updated models abandoned this arm-exhausting mechanism, a great deal of the fun was contingent on that re-arming period. You felt that you had really earned that shot. You worked hard for it, and the results were spetacular. Plus, there was that awesome water bottle chamber with super-accesible fillability.

Unfortunately, while Super Soakers of today may possess greater power and precision, their R&D department's insistence on churning out novel products have led them to...well, new lows. In an effort to keep this blog in the PG range, I am not going to comment on the following video. Rather, I leave it to you to deduce from it what you will. Let's just say it stirred up quite a bit of controversy among children's advocate groups for its...provacative implications. I'm going to leave it at that.




Check it out:
Super Soaker Evolutionary Family Tree
AV Club Spoof of Hasboro Oozinator Marketing Meeting

Ghostwriter

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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





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

Creepy Crawlers

Although Creepy Crawlers were originally produced by Mattel in the 60s by way of the ambiguously named "Thingmaker" toy oven, the product was revived by the Toymax company in the 90s with a (theoretically) less lethal light-bulb powered heater called the Magic Maker. These kits were a kid's dream; like so many of our other beloved 90s toys, they held no underlying value over pure fun and amusement. With the new safety features in place, ToyMax unleashed the retro phenomenon of plasticized bug-making to a new generation.

In reality, the child's role in creating a tray of Creepy Crawlers from a selection of insect molds was relatively limited. The only real decision-making lay in with which colors of Plasti-Goop you would choose to fill the tray. Yes, that's right, Plasti-Goop. The ToyMax 1990s remake retained the 60s terminology for this unknown chemical compound, continuing to cloak the toxicity of these substances in vagueness.

This was the toy for the little boy who desperately yearned to own an easy-bake oven, but was less keen on the public shaming it would bring from his male peers. It possessed similar light-bulb heating technology and yielded tangible goods without forcing boys to don an apron and frost heart-shaped cupcakes. These bug trays were about as macho as it got for the age 6-10 demographic. The aptly named Creepy Crawlers contained die-cast molds in the shape of millipedes, spiders, beetles, horseflies, worms, and all sorts of other creeping insects with that distinctly male appeal.

The major problem with this male-centric toy marketing was that it left us right back where we started. Little girls were no longer satisfied to be banished to their paltry pastry-packing easy-bake ovens. What ToyMax needed was something with some more feminine appeal that required no new technology and a coat of pink and purple paint on the plastic Magic Maker.

I admit as an unauthentic Creepy Crawler enthusiast, this was actually the model I owned. Yes, that's right. The rubberized Plasti-Goop charms on the blond girl's Blossom-esque hat were far more my speed than the decidedly more icky insect version. No longer did I have to stare wistfully at the television every time a creepy crawlers commercial came on, wishing I too could create useless items out of light-bulb cooked Plasti-Goop. They started making Plasti-Goop in all sorts of colors in the pastel family, and all was well in the world again.

Despite these variations, the real seller was the original (well, second generation original) Creepy Crawlers. It even spawned a television cartoon series under the same name, which ran two seasons from 1994-1996. The cartoon was not just based on insects themselves; rather the plot was premised on the actual features of the toy itself. In the Creepy Crawlers television series, a young boy working in a magic shop creates a version of the ToyMax Magic Maker with unfortunate results: mutant "Goopmondo" bug monsters named Hocus Locust, Volt Jolt and T-3. I know, it makes perfect sense. The best part of the show was despite the fact that it was created through a partnership with the ToyMax corporation and used their trademarked devices and terminology, the show rarely used the toy in a fashion anywhere near consistent with the procedures of its real-life counterpart. For example, characters often poured Plasti-Goop directly into the Magic Maker, which may not have caused any significant cartoon damage but certainly would have tragic light-bulb-burn-related consequences in real life. For a toy relaunched on the foundation of its new and improved safety features, ToyMax certainly gave children of the 90s a lot of ideas of how to circumvent the safety precautions.

Thankfully, kids today are not without their own rubbery oven-cooked insect toys. The Jakks Pacific toy company recently took over production of creepy crawlers, which look to be exactly the same as the 1990s version except they slapped a plastic bug on top of the Magic Maker. Very original. However, we can appreciate the suggested uses for Creepy Crawlers as a means of terrorzing your family and making them regretting ever purchasing this overpriced piece of plastic in the first place. Because isn't that truly what it's all about?

Slap Bracelets

Violence as fashion. It's a novel concept, or at least it was in the early nineties. Imagine, never again having to deal with the insurmountable challenges of securing a traditional bracelet to your wrist! Despite the fact that slap bracelets served no practical purpose and actually caused a moderately tragic number of injuries, we consumed them all the same. Slap bracelets were beloved by children and teenagers not just for their fashion credentials but also for the perceived danger we were warned of by parents and teachers. Slap bracelets may have seemed like the most minor type of rebellion, but they possessed the unmatchable allure of the forbidden fruit.

School principals sent strongly-worded letters home with students, urging parents to restrain their children from coming to school armed with these spring-loaded metal-lined deathtraps. The cheap cloth cover often strained under the force of the metal beneath it, poking out in an admittedly dangerous fashion. However, we weren't about to side with The Man and agree to the ban. We were passionate about our right to wear our day-glo green and zebra-striped wrist weapons, regardless of rampant urban legend-based rumors warning of slit wrists and burst arteries.

Slap bracelets were so much more than tacky arm candy. They worked as catapults, slingshots, and all-purpose weapons. And how cool to slap on a bracelet with a satisfying smack! There were endless ways to work these babies. Four at a time! Long-distance slapping! We just couldn't resist. Sitting there in class, how could you just leave this mind-bogglingly entertaining device to lay dormant? So it would be crack (flatten), smack! (slap on), over and over again until you'd earned yourself a trip to the time-out corner.

Slap bracelets have made a few minor comebacks in the last decade, but nothing on par with their original popularity. Stripping these delightful devices of their contraband qualities, slap bracelets became plastic-spring laden, pvc coated advertising devices. Sure, we were willing to acquiesce a bit in our day...give us a dinosaur slap bracelet with ruler markings down the side and we'll concede to its minor educational value. These days, slap bracelets are being used as cheap ploys to encourage kids to wear some company's logo around like a walking (gesturing?) wrist billboard. There's even been word of physics teachers using slap bracelets to teach functions of potential energy curves and states of stability, but it's almost too frightening to verify.

So let us remember slap bracelets as they were, before the world insisted on infusing some sort of subliminality to their existence: violent, neon-hued, and pure wrist-smacking fun.

Check it out:
The dark side of a slap-happy fad
US consumer panel warns of injury from slap bracelets

Nick in the Afternoon

From 1993 to 1998, there was one name that kids recognized as the leading children's television host of the era. He wasn't particularly handsome or suave. He wasn't even human.

He was a popsicle stick.



Stick Stickly, the iconic host of Nickelodeon's summertime "Nick in the Afternoon" programming block, was emblematic of a generation of latchkey kids whose parents left them to be raised by hypnotically engaging television personalities. Not only were our favorite shows on all afternoon, but we could actually write to celebrated TV personality Stick Stickly himself with feedback. Stick's jingle is forever burned in the 8-year-old region of my cerebral cortex:

"Write to me, Stick Stickly, PO Box 963. New York City, New York state, 10108!"

Sure, he was just a popsicle stick, but he provided us with endless hours of inter-show programming that was at least as entertaining as the programs themselves. Stick Stickly brought with him a cast of lovable anthropomorphic popsicle stick peers: love interest Holly B. Wood, high-flying alter-ego SuperStick, bizarro-esque aptly named Evil Stick, and long-lost identical twin stick Woodknot Stickly. The best part about using unconventional forms (i.e. popsicle sticks) was that these characters needed not be believable or relatable. They were pure, noneducational entertainment, which we blindly consumed with gusto.

Stick Stickly lived in his own popsicle stick universe, "Stickopolis", a miniature neighboring subsidiary of the legendary Nickelodeon studios. In their Stickopolis-based studio, Stick and his gang participated in a variety of segments. Holly B. Wood became a celebrity interviewer and news presenter. Stick was frequently shamed for his lack of obscure trivial knowledge and/or riddle answers and was subsequently forced to wear a miniature dunce cap. Then of course, there was "Dip Stick", a mildly terrifying segment where Stick Stickly was blindfolded and required to guess the disgusting substance in which the puppeteers chose to submerge him.

I so clearly remember watching the segments where Stick was strapped to a giant wheel-of-fortune type contraption and spun to determine which show was up next. Of course, it rarely ever landed on my top picks, but I did occasionally get to watch as-of-then already retired classic episodes of "You Can't Do that on Television." And thanks to that catchy address jingle, I could write Stick Stickly letters letting him know what I'd like to see on Nick in the Afternoon.

This was the height of democratic television for children of the era. Not only did we get to write in our requests (hey, they could get our shows on in 2-3 business days standard US mail!) but we also got to see a sturdy mix of live action and cartoon programming. Hey Dude strikes your fancy? Love watching Clarissa explain it all? Nick in the Afternoon had it. Enjoy the talking babies of Rugrats? Able to endure the frightening claymation stylings of Gumby and his pals? All in an afternoon's time.

Stick Stickly represented everything quirky and fun about the 90s. He would ask us to mail his rubber bands for his birthday, to complete his giant rubber band ball. His catchphrase "Simmer Down," though a bit ironic for a popsicle remnant, was instantly recognizable. And of course, he always gave us invaluable little pieces of Stickly wisdom like "You can pick your friends. You can pick your nose. But you can't pick your friends' nose."

If this isn't enough to jog your memories, the band Lemon Demon has an amazing song devoted to Mr. Stickly himself. I present to you an unauthorized video of Lemon Demon's "Stick Stickly:"






Link to "Bring Back Stick Stickly" Petition

Scholastic Book Orders

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

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

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

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

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

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


Book-Orders in the news:
Book Orders Under Fire

Browse online Scholastic book-orders:
Book Orders Online

Doug

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

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



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

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

Character changes on Disney's Doug:

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

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

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

But anyway.

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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

I rest my case.

Skip It!

Ever fancied owning a toy that eerily resembled a ball-and-chain? It's fairly plausible parents saw the comparison and immediately swarmed toy stores in droves, begging to own this tedious yet endlessly entertaining device designed to keep their child in one spot for an absurdly extended period of time. The apparatus was mind-blowingly simplistic. A plastic ring that fit around your ankle was attached to a ball that spun 360 degrees as you skipped over it. It was essentially the poor man's jump rope, except that it cost a whole lot more and you couldn't play with a friend. I guess you could call it the lonely man's jump rope.

Skip-its burst onto the scene with a series of commercials that aired during Saturday morning cartoons and alongside favorite Nickelodeon TV programming. I remember this ad so vividly from my own childhood, but watching it again just makes me want a Skip-it all over again:



While the market was ripe with cheap rubberized imitations, nothing could stand up to the ingenuity of the Tiger Toys original. The most prominent and celebrated feature, as described by the above commercial:

"The very best thing of all! There's a counter on the ball! So try to beat your very best score! See if you can jump a whole lot more!"

Seeing if I could jump a whole lot more became the most important thing in the world, as suggested by the hypnotizing slow motion ad. I would park myself in the front of my driveway, strap that godforsaken flimsy piece of shocking pink plastic to my foot, and skip myself till I could not breathe (or until that pesky ball bruised my ankle so much that it inflated to the size of an overripe eggplant). That counter became the bane of my (and all of my neighborhood friends') existence. There was no worse admission of failure than having to press that "reset" button.

I do, however, appreciate the way that commercial shows ways that you can make this lonely solo exercise in tedium a group effort with one person spinning and one person skipping. This was pretty much never the case. Use of the Skip-it was generally relegated to times at home when your family was desperate to get you out of the house but couldn't find you a playdate.

Watching this quintessentially 90s toy commercial, it makes me wonder what happened with these kids and the singer behind the catchy Skip-it jingle. Do you think these people have this gig buried on their show-biz resumes somewhere? Bringing it up at high-profile auditions?

"Well, I've never done feature films, but I was the vaguely multicultural background kid in a Skip-it commercial back in '91. You may recognize me from that."

But I digress. The genius of Skip-it was not in its brilliant ad campaign or flashy features, but rather in its simplicity. It's hard to imagine the technologically inundated children of today occupied with such a monotonous exercise. Then again, it's probably more difficult to imagine our current multi-tasking blackberrying selves being satisfied with standing alone on a driveway somewhere, jumping with no goal other than to jump. These days, we'd probably be skipping it with a bluetooth wedged in our ear.

Unfortunately, it's too late to revive our beloved childhood toy. Ever since Hasboro Toys sucked in our once beloved Tiger Toys (the original manufacturer's of the Skip-it), things have never been the same. I leave you with these photos of the sad, sad, state of modern-day skipping toys. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Dunkaroos

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

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

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

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

Exhibit A:



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

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

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



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

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

Oregon Trail

For any child growing up in the nineties, Oregon Trail was the number-one selling manifest destiny-themed 19th century Western expansion settler game on the two-color screen computer market. In an era ripe with educational computer games full of thinly disguised learning opportunities, Oregon Trail stood out as the the most exciting thing thing to hit our elementary classroom-based Apple IIs since Pacman.

Though meant to evoke our good old American pioneering spirit, players quickly learned to circumvent the multitude of educational elements in favor of endlessly hunting buffalo. Ah, glorious, slow-moving buffalo. They can creep by slowly, but they can't hide. Imagine, a game endorsed by parents and teachers in which we were allowed to wield rifles, shoot any innocent creature that dared venture across our monitor, and morbidly pile up our "kill" to revel in our own uninhibited bloodthirsty nature. There's nothing like a lighthearted killing spree to memorialize the devastation of the rudiment of Native American existence.

We would round up our ludicrously self-named wagon crew, loaded up my oxen, get tricked into learning some light math as we stopped by those handy local trading posts, and bravely pressed space bar to continue. In the process of fording the river and thus turning my wagon into a shoddy ox-laden raft, we frequently found that three of our five wagoneers had drowned. Clearly, we were just not cut out for fording. Either that or maybe we should not have chosen to buy a yoke of 8 ill-fated and unnecessary oxen. But hey, at least we learned the word yoke.

Thankfully, we could have another buffalo shooting spree to bury our grief at the loss of our wagonmates. We could choose to test my skill at the occasional quick-darting rabbit or deer, but let's not fool ourselves. In our own modern lazy American spirit ironically in contention with the gung-ho pioneer spirit, we all just wanted to kill things that couldn't outwit or outrun us. There was no more irritating pixelated proclamation than that regarding our inability to effectively tote buffalo carcasses from trading post to trading post along the Western plain. Sure, I had killed 14000 pounds of food, but my wagon could only hold 80. Especially if dysentery or smallpox had yet to kill off my sole remaining human companion, there was never nearly enough room to bask in my buffalo bounty. A travesty, indeed.




Along the way, we would pick up some useful tidbits of information about the local landmarks and suspiciously knowledgeable settlers we passed in our wagon travels. No matter how educational this game claimed to be, I challenge you to find a single grown former Oregon Trail junkie who can name a single landmark or historical figure that they encountered out on the trail. Most of what we remember has more to do with the morbid ability to engrave our own tombstones and the frustration of losing yet another pesky wagon axle.

The truth of the matter was that the educational aspects of the game were its fatal flaw. Those of us with a lot of time on our hands and a distinctly impatient attitude toward forced history lessons realized that if you quit stopping by every place to learn something and just pressed "continue", you could both survive your journey and reach your final destination without learning a thing. In those days though, there was still enough fun left in the novelty of colorful graphics and computerized music to keep us coming back for more.

Buffalo, that is.


Check it out:
Hitting the Oregon Trail on the iPhone