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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


Book-Orders in the news:
Book Orders Under Fire

Browse online Scholastic book-orders:
Book Orders Online

Duck Hunt

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

All of the screaming teenagers out there today who think Twilight is a pioneer in the adolescent vampire genre should really brush up on their 90s TV trivia. Of course, in our day, high school girls weren't quite so impressionable; it was pretty rare for one of them to even entertain a flirtatious relationship with one of these bloodsucking demons, let alone embark on a full-scale whirlwind romance. No, we kept it simple in the 90s. You find a vampire, you slay it. It was just that easy.

Call me a purist, but as someone who has yet to actually give any of the Twilight series a try (for fear of spiraling back into screaming tweenish obsession), I prefer a clearer good versus evil divide. I like to know who is on which side. In Buffy world, vampires are bad, slayers are good, and there's not a lot of room for gray area. Well, okay, except for Buffy's tryst with Angel. Oh, and then it turns out he's a good guy and gets his own spin-off. You know what? I retract my previous statement. It's pretty darn similar. Apparently the appeal of predominant supernatural teen themes stretches across generations. Who knew?

In Buffyland, though, vampires the only bad guys. In her television incarnation, Buffy and the gang had plenty of evil nemeses to battle throughout the series, including but not limited to demons, sorcerers, witches, mutants, and bad-guy little league coaches. That's what you get for building a high school on top of a portal to hell. For many of us, high school was a hell without all of the escaped demons and crazed wizards, so we can only begin to imagine the horror of actual dark forces at play in the midst of our search for the perfect prom date.

The television series was not the first step in the Buffy enterprise; The franchise was born in 1992 as the eponymous comedy horror film starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. In the considerably lighter movie, Buffy is introduced as a traditional popular blond cheerleader stock character--also known as a stereotypical horror movie victim. Creator Joss Whedon subverted the blond-girl-screams-in-dark-alley-and-is-torn-to-shreds horror trope, though, by making Buffy into a strong-willed, self-sufficient warrior. Or at least that was his intention. In the film version, some things did get a bit lost in translation through the editing process, but luckily Whedon got a second crack at the story.



Buffy's TV incarnation transferred her to Sunnydale, California, home of the aforementioned hell portal high school. Charming, no? The show held true to the basic premise of its preceding film, but the tone changed significantly with the shift to the small screen. While the film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a tongue-in-cheek lightness to it, the television adaptation had a distinctly darker feel.

While the show maintained the same general premise as the movie, many details were altered to better suit the new format. Creator Joss Whedon had been less than pleased with the re-tweaking of his original script, lamenting the transformation of his horror movie into a fluffier comic film. When presented with an opportunity to adapt the concept for a television series, Whedon retooled the show to more closely match his original vision. In turn, the show ended up picking up at a slightly different point than the movie left off, but it was a shift that brought in a broader fan base.



The TV series saw our heroine and her friends through the gamut of typical teenage problems with a major twist: the demons they battled weren't only their identity and social stature, but actual live demons. Talk about hammering a metaphor to death. It's certainly a device that could have come across to viewers as trite and hackneyed. In practice, though, Buffy's emotional struggles were handled skillfully in their translation to external battles.

Lucky for TV Buffy, she didn't have to slay alone. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) had a crack team of teen sidekicks called "The Scooby Gang." The Scoobies include Willow (Alyson Hannigan), Xander (Nicholas Brendon), and occasionally Buffy's benevolent "Watcher" Rupert Giles. The gang expands significantly over the show's run, growing to include character's like Buffy's younger sister Dawn (Michelle Tratchenberg) and former high school nemesis Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter.) While Buffy is the only true "Slayer", her gang of sidekicks help her considerably in her mission to take out evil, whether through their own powers, their knowledge of their former lives as demons or bad guys, or some other generally awesome qualifying factor.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer gradually acquired a rabidly devoted fan base, beginning the show's run with meager ratings and snowballing into a teen phenomenon. Buffy made a major ratings contribution to the then-fledgling WB network, bringing in hordes of adolescents viewers. The show remained successful throughout its run on the WB, but negotiation disputes landed Buffy on UPN in its sixth season. While the series retained a good deal of its initial popularity and had acquired an extremely loyal group of fans, by its seventh season it seemed to have run its course.

True to Whedon's original vision, it was refreshing to see the young blonde protagonist as a strong proactive force instead of as a meek helpless damsel in distress. It's nice to see a horror film where the adolescent girl finally gets to kick some supernatural butt. Unlike many other superheroes, Buffy was largely just a normal girl who fell into the role of protector of the universe. Hey, it's a tough job, but someone had to do it. If you're still hungry for your Buffy fix, don't worry; Joss Whedon was kind enough to expand the official canon to include a "Season 8" comic book. It's not quite the same as watching the live action unfold onscreen, but it will do in a pinch.