Goldeneye 007

I played a surprisingly small amount of videogames in the '90s. My brother and I got an NES one Christmas early in the decade (which led to lots of hitting and kicking, an irrational accusations of cheating in 2-player mode on Super Mario Bros. 3), but we only ever had three games for it. The other two were The Simpsons game and Yoshi, an egg-stacking game. I still have the NES sitting in my closet, but it no longer works. Like all kids, we intuitively blew into the cartridges and the system itself whenever it bugged out, which actually destroys it, ultimately. It seemed to work (the line above explains why), and was discovered purely through trial and error.

A helpful diagram

But this post is not about my happy memories of dying a thousand deaths as Mario (which I never finished, though I got to the final world), but about the N64 and specifically Goldeneye 007. I got this game and Gex: Enter The Gecko with my Nintendo 64. Strangely enough, I never played Mario 64. And the system operated on cartridges rather than discs, with slightly curvier and smoother looking cartridges. The cartridge blowing still worked, and so it continued.

Goldeneye 007 was based on the James Bond movie. It was a first-person shooter where you had to blast your way through around 24 levels, accomplishing objectives along the way. It had four levels of difficulty that added extra objectives. Often you had to do spy things like escaping detection. I actually finished this game and unlocked everything, which I was proud of at the time.

But where the game really shone was in multiplayer mode. Unlike today's mostly online multiplayer play, this game used a split screen for up to four players in a room. This led to hours and hours of entertainment in four-way deathmatches with customizable weapons settings and every location in the game available as the battleground, plus a few secret levels, as well as all the characters and enemy guards and stuff. The matches could be set up with all sorts of rules - one of my favorites was "the man with the golden gun," where there would be one golden gun available in the level that could fire a single, lethal shot  Players would team up against that player to get the golden gun, but once they did, they would turn on each other. Throwing knives and mines were also a blast.

Why golden bullets kill people more than regular bullets, I don't know.

Playing split screen multiplayer games was much more fun than online gaming because it's like a party (rather than a bunch of anonymous strangers yelling racial slurs at each other). You'd bring snacks and drinks. It was competitive, but friendly, and that's what made it fun.

The game was pretty limited in graphics, but we didn't mind. The graphics were good for their time, but they are hilariously bad in retrospect. One of the funniest things was the way characters carried their guns and knives in multiplayer mode. Way out at arm's length, like their arms were just steel rods jutting out from them. When they aimed up or down, the would swivel their torso in a very silly way.

Careful, Bond. They're pointy!

The N64 also happened to have the best controller of any console I've ever played. It was ergonomic perfection, it fit in your hands perfectly without ever causing any strain, no matter how long you played. I'm surprised other companies didn't just copy that design. Compare it to the Gambecube controller, which is really weird.

N64 controller is top right, Gamecube controller is right below it.

Anyway, that's it for this week. I'll have to dig the N64 out of the closet and see if I can still get it to work.

Disney's Aladdin

The first Disney movie I saw that I really loved as a kid was Aladdin. I saw this when I was nine years old. I saw Beauty and The Beast the year before, but I liked Aladdin better - largely due, I'm sure, to the Genie, and also the fact that the love story was a little bit less important in Aladdin. I'll be doing something special with this entry, attempting to draw scenes and characters from the movie in Paintbrush, starting with Genie.

The Genie

The Genie was totally crazy. He could turn into anything, like a plane, a sheep, a scary dead guy (who I later learned was an impression of Peter Lorre). He was funny loud, and hyperactive, and he sang some catchy songs. Most of the pop culture references he made flew over my head, but he was still my favorite character in the movie.

Aladdin was a thief living in Agrabah, which is a stand-in for Saudi Arabia. He is in love with the princess, Princess Jasmine, who escapes her overbearing father be posing as a street urchin and stealing things. Aladdin rescues her, and that's how he gets to know her.

Aladdin has a pet monkey named Apu, who is especially quick and good at stealing. He can't really talk, but he can mock people by imitating their voices.

Apu stealing an apple and shaking his fist.

Aladdin winds up in the Cave of Wonders after a disguised Jafar (the villain, a powerful wizard) lures him there to try and get the lamp out. Jafar fails to get the lamp at the beginning of the movie, narrowly escaping the cave slamming shut on him as well as the poor sap he lured there. Here's my Paintbrush rendition of that scene:

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Aladdin gets out with the help of Genie, and from that point in the plot onwards he uses Genie's magic to pose as a prince and woo Princess Jasmine. Jafar tries to manipulate this to his own gain when he finds that Aladdin has the lamp, aided by his obnoxious parrot Iago, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.

I think I captured the essence of Iago here.

This all leads up to an exciting final showdown where Jafar uses his sorcery to transform into a giant snake, and it eventually defeated when is tricked into taking the powers of a Genie (and thus having to live in a lamp and be a slave).

As far as Disney villains go, Jafar is pretty evil. He has no problem with killing people to get what he wants, tries to freeze Aladdin to death be sending him to Siberia, and tries to kill Jasmine. He's a sadistic villain, and he's also a pretty powerful one in the scale of Disney villains. Here's my masterpiece depiction of Jafar turning into a snake:

I think I made him scarier than in the movie.

A final reason I loved the movie Aladdin was the music. I got the soundtrack as a present and played it at least all day on Christmas day, and probably much more often than that, too. Consequently, I still know most of the songs. My favorites were "One Step Ahead" and "Friend Like Me."

As a final note, although this is a nostalgia blog, Aladdin was a little racist towards Arabs. I was too young to realize it at the time. The way they portray evil characters with more exaggerated and stereotypical ethnic features while making Jasmine and Aladdin have lighter skin could easily be considered racist. It's not as racist as many other Disney movies, but it is there, unfortunately.

Batman: The Animated Series

Hold onto your batarangs, ladies and gentlemen, because tonight's very special entry spotlights one of the best TV shows of all time. It's Batman: The Animated Series, the king of the '90s after-school block. This darkly gleaming gem of a "kids show" was well-written enough to win three Emmys (and be nominated for five more) and gritty enough that it was almost out of place at around 4 PM. It's easily the best adaptation of Batman, as well as quite possibly the best cartoon ever.

Batman has always been my favorite superhero.He has a cooler costume than probably 99% of them. He has all kinds of hi-tech gadgets, has trained himself in the martial arts, resisting poisons, and all kinds of other ninja-like abilities. His personality is also more interesting; he's flawed to the core. The whole reason he fights crime is because his parents were murdered. And unlike other superheroes, he has no powers. His life is always on the line.

But the show isn't just the best because of Batman. It also features all of his crazy enemies, plus tons of minor villains and even one-time villains. It has the best Joker that's ever been done, voiced by Mark Hamill. There's also a great Mr. Freeze, Two-Face, Scarecrow, Catwoman, and yes, even this show's version of The Penguin is better than the others, which is a hard task with such a goofy villain.

Then there are minor villains like Manbat, Killer Croc, Clayface, The Mad Hatter, and really strange one-shot characters like The Sewer King, Tigris, and Temple Fugate, who wants to kill the mayor of Gotham because he made him late to a court appointment. And many of them almost kill Batman.

The show is kid-friendly enough that I don't remember anyone dying (at least in any way other than an explosion), but they come pretty darn close sometimes. Batman also uses psychological torture by threatening to drop people off buildings.

Clayface transforming out of control.

I love the aesthetic of the show, which has been termed "dark deco" by critics. It's influenced by film noir, and as one YouTube comment I read said, "the dominant color in every scene is black." The show's setting in time is unclear; Batman has lots of futuristic weapons, but the gangsters all use old Tommy guns, and as a kid, Bruce Wayne watched an old black and white serial called The Gray Ghost that looks like it's from the 1920s.

And who can forget the excellent score of the show, which is used to great effect in a lot of the best episodes? It was composed by Danny Elfman on the opening credits. I've read that the company that released it has completely sold out of copies of this score.

Cartoon Network

Well, as promised in the last post, this week's blog update will be about Cartoon Network. But on further reflection (one might say sober reflection), I realized that there actually wasn't a whole lot that I found memorable about Cartoon Network. Most of the cartoons that I watched on it were later in the '90s, and other shows I like that have been featured on Adult Swim (such as Cowboy Bebop and Full Metal Alchemist), were not aired until the '00s.

To clarify,  when I did visit my grandma and grandpa as a kid, I did watch a lot of the old cartoons that they ran during the daytime- Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, and so on. But they weren't very memorable. They also showed really old cartoons after midnight.

There was only one show I watched for at least half of the decade, Space Ghost Coast to Coast. This was a talk show that was on at 11 PM, hosted by a washed-up superhero named Space Ghost, and evil aliens he was holding prisoner on the phantom planet and forcing to work on his talk show - the main ones being Zorak, Moltar, and Brak. Most of the humor was based on sarcasm. Brak, the incredibly loud-mouthed and stupid cat alien, was my favorite. He later got his own show, The Brak Show, but that was in the year 2000. Here's Brak at his finest.

Other shows on cartoon network that I enjoyed were Johnny Bravo and Dexter's Laboratory. The first was about a narcissistic but vapid greaser guy who was always chasing after women. One episode I remember involved a parody of The Twilight Zone, where he had to babysit a kid who could send him to the cornfield with his mind. Dexter's Laboratory was about a boy genius with a secret mad scientist lab and his hyperactive and stupid sister Dee Dee, who was always ruining his experiments. An episode I remember from this series was about Dexter always getting pushed into the pool by his dad. Here's that Johnny Bravo episode.

Later in the '90s, there was Toonami. I really only remember this because I would watch Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing. It was probably the first Japanese animation I'd ever seen, but looking at this clip, I'm surprised I didn't think Dragonball Z was stupid.

Moral of the story; it seems that nostalgia sometimes fades away on closer inspection.

Summer With Nick

Almost every summer when me and my little brother were kids, around this time of year - about the middle of summer - we would go visit my grandma and grandpa in Indiana for about a week or two, sometimes staying with them while our parents went on trips (they went to Arizona one year and generally out West another - Oregon and California). These weeks would be spent fishing with my grandpa and cousin Brandon, climbing their pine trees, shooting at Diet Rite cans with BB guns, watching hummingbirds at the feeders, and visiting the A & W to get cheese fries and root beer floats. It was always a fun time. But we spent a lot of the days down in the basement, watching Nickelodeon on TV.

My brother and I were deprived as kids (insert sarcasm tag here). We never had cable growing up, except for one brief summer in high school where we had Direct TV. We still don't have cable in my house, and don't really feel a need for it. Now that the stations have switched to digital, we have five channels of PBS, where I can watch all the Nova, Nature, Frontline, and Ohio's government at work that I need to be content. During that time we had cable, it sucked so many hours away from each day. But I'm not posting to bash cable and admonish people to value simplicity; I'm actually remembering how great it was for those few weeks every year to veg out in front of the TV from around two in the afternoon to midnight, and I'm starting with Nick. The next post will be about Cartoon Network.

Nickelodeon had some awesome programming in the '90s, but the very best show they ran was The Adventures of Pete & Pete. This is a story about two brothers, both named Pete, and their adventures, if you will, in a weird suburban neighborhood. The show is very funny, as I can confirm from having watched season one again recently.

Big Pete, the older brother, is the overly-dramatic and philosophical narrator, and most of the episodes are told from his perspective. Little Pete is his weird and obnoxious younger brother. He has a tattoo of a lady named Petunia, and calls people "blowholes."

Each episode is well-written and has a different feel to it, and one of the things I found most interesting on watching it again was that the episodes narrated by Little Pete have different themes and express a very different worldview - a more cynical, practical, self-interested worldview. The show is so well-written that I'm certain most of the humor went over my head when I was ten years old, and is much funnier now. And who can forget the catchy and memorable theme song?

Perhaps my favorite show when I was a kid was All That, a kids' comedy-sketch show. As a testament to how limited its appeal is, though, I can't remember much of anything from it, except the in-your-face attitude that typified TV kids in the '90s. I was certainly never like that, but I thought the show was very funny. Here's a sketch the illustrates the contrast between the now-cringe-inducing kids' humor to the brilliance of Chris Farley's delivery. Kenan Thompson is an SNL, now, and he is doing basically the same act.

The whole joke is just Chris Farley squirting ketchup everywhere, but he makes it hilarious even though he's just doing the same Matt Foley voice he did on Saturday Night Live. Notice how he also works in his "Bulls fan" sketch by faking a heart attack.

Another favorite was Aaahh!! Real Monsters! This was a show about three monsters attending a school to learn how to scare people - basically the same plot as Monsters, Inc.. It was right up my alley, because I like anything with dark themes or that has main characters who would typically be considered villains or anti-heroes.

Crumb, Ickis, and Oblina

Another Klasky Csupo cartoon that I enjoyed was Rugrats, a cartoon about a group of talking babies. Chuckie was my favorite. It's a lot like Bobby's World, a show I liked better, and Muppet Babies, a show I didn't like, but which Nickelodeon aired during the day. Most of the humor comes from the way the babies talk, similar to Bobby's World, where the humor is based on Bobby's misunderstandings of what older people say. Rugrats has too many gross diaper jokes.

Two of the shows that stood out from the afternoon lineup were :Legends of The Hidden Temple and Are You Afraid of the Dark? Legends was a game show where kids had to run an obstacle course themed as an Indiana Jones-style ancient temple. Teams competed against each other to find keys and artifacts that would allow them to move onto the next round. It's especially interesting because there are six teams rather than the standard four or two. Best of all was the giant talking stone head Olmec (who sounds nothing like what a giant stone head should sound like). I never watched GUTS, Double Dare, or What Would You Do?, but I did watch this every chance I got.

Are You Afraid Of The Dark? was a horror show. It was like the Goosebumps TV series. It had good atmosphere (just check out the opening) and some pretty scary stories. The most memorable and disturbing episode is the one where some kind of disease is causing everyone to die of laughter. It was called "The Tale of The Ghastly Grinner, and is a perfect example of nightmare fuel.

This is still pretty creepy.

I've left out a lot here, most notably Ren & Stimpy (which I didn't like), Rocko's Modern Life (which I only watched once or twice, but which sounds like a funny show), and Doug (which was okay). But that's a pretty good summary of what I liked about Nickelodeon.

Next week, Cartoon Network. See ya then.

Captain Planet and The Planeteers

When I was five or six years old, I loved the show Captain Planet and The Planeteers. This is probably one of the most well-known '90s pop culture icons. The show displays many of the things that made '90s shows successful, and many of the values they tried to teach us in the '90s. It's also got a very catchy theme song. This video contains the intro to the show and the theme song at the end.

Captain Planet's mission is "to take pollution down to zero." He is an Earth elemental, a mullet-wearing mythological being summoned by the power rings of the team of five Planeteers, who come from all over the world. He was appointed by Gaia, the spirit of Earth, to protect the planet from the pollution of a team of polluting evildoers that are each representative of a problem in society, mostly related to environmental issues.

The villains are a colorful crew. There are poachers, unethical and greedy business people, evil scientists. There's Hoggish Greedly, Looten Plunder, Sly Sludge and his sidekick Ooze, Duke Nukem (not the videogame character), and Dr. Blight, the mad scientist. I used to think they were exaggerated. For instance, I didn't get why Sly Sludge was always dumping stuff into the ocean. Now I know that corporations do stuff like that all the time. Here's a clip that shows Sly Sludge dumping waste into the ocean.

The Planeteers represent some of the values and themes that were frequently in '90s TV shows. They are a team, and that teaches the value of teamwork and cooperation. They are racially diverse, which teaches acceptance. They come from all over the world, which represents the message that protecting the environment is a global issue, and all nations need to do their part. Captain Planet tells them "the power is yours," meaning everyone has the power to protect the environment.

It's also similar to the Power Rangers, as you could have a favorite Planeteer. When I was a kid, I would have most wanted the power of fire, so he was my favorite. However, judging from his personality, he was the most obnoxious jerk on the team.

I mentioned that Captain Planet has a mullet haircut. So did I.

No comment.

PBS After School

More often than not, instead of watching cartoons after school, my brother and I would watch educational PBS shows. The station had a great lineup in the 1990's.

The afternoon would start off with Wishbone, a show about a highly intelligent and literate Jack Russel Terrier who has many daydreams about classic literature. He could talk and be heard by humans in his imagination, but not in real life. He would imagine himself as these characters from stories, and it was educational because it explained the plot of the stories. It had a catchy, pun-heavy theme song, and the dog was cute in the hundreds of little costumes they dressed him in..

The next show on was Ghostwriter, a show about a group of kids that solve mysteries with the help of a ghost that can write. The kids can read his messages, but no one else can. Although it is all about a ghost that reads, it seems like the show is more designed to teach critical thinking and problem solving.

Bill Nye The Science Guy was the third show on after school. This was an awesome show that taught science and made it fun. We were lucky when they showed Bill Nye in school. The show had a lot of wacky humor to make the concepts understandable to kids, and each show ended with a music video that was a parody of a song with scientific lyrics. Enjoy this clip from the show:

Finally, there was Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, a geography game show about catching the criminal Carmen Sandiego and her many henchmen. The show was exciting because of the detective agency theme, but also because of the band Rockapella, who created a very catchy theme song.

That wrapped up the afternoon kids programming on PBS. There was a show about math, but I never watched it. It was never my strong subject, and it was always dinnertime by the time that show came on.

I've been watching PBS since I was four or five, starting with Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. I still watch History Detectives, Nova, Frontline, Nature, and Antiques Roadshow all the time. It makes me a little grateful that we never had cable when I was a kid, or I might have overlooked it.