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.

Gargoyles

Gargoyles was one of the coolest kids' shows of the '90s. It was a show about living gargoyles, creatures that would turn to stone by day and come to life at night. Rather than describing the story, though, I can simply show it with the opening theme.

The main characters of the show were a clan of gargoyles who hail from medieval Scotland. They were turned to stone for a thousand years by a wicked sorcerer. Now they've come back to life in modern-day New York City, and they act somewhat like superheroes, defending the city from the machinations of Xanatos, an evil tycoon trying to take it over. He is somewhat like an evil version of Batman, able to afford all kinds of neat gadgets.

The main clan of gargoyles are all interesting characters with unique personalities, although the show features hundreds of side characters as well. Goliath is the leader; he's the strongest, but he has a strict moral code and can sometimes be preachy. Hudson is the elder of the clan, and is mostly an adviser. Lexington is the smallest gargoyle, intelligent and fascinated by technology. Brooklyn is the second-in-command, sarcastic and sort of a wiseguy. Broadway is friendly, naive, and enjoys old movies. Finally, Bronx is the clan's guard dog. He behaves like a dog rather than having anthropomorphic qualities. They help the human police officer Elisa Maza solve crimes, usually committed by Xanatos and his henchmen, The Pack.

From left: Bronx, Hudson, Goliath, Lexington, Brooklyn, Broadway

Just as varied as the gargoyles are the wide cast of villains in the show. Xanatos, the main villain, uses a gang of mercenaries called The Pack that in public are celebrities (similar to pro-wrestlers), but in private hunt the gargoyles. 

From left: Hyena, Jackal, Fox, Wolf, Dingo

Another arch villain is Demona, a gargoyle poisoned by hatred for the human species stemming from what she perceives as a betrayal. She wants to kill all humans, and will destroy anyone who gets in her way. She used to be Goliath's betrothed, but she now views him as weak and foolish for protecting the humans. In one episode, she faces another villain known as the Hunter, who has the opposite agenda - he wants to destroy all the gargoyles.

Demona, appearing slightly older than usual

The show had the same spirit of a lot of media and toys I admired as a child, of monsters and mutants as the heroes. It had some dark themes running through it, and intelligent writing that was heavily inspired by Shakespeare. The voice acting was also top notch for most of the characters, particularly Keith David, who plays Goliath

I had Gargoyles sneakers when I was a kid. I remember going to Burger King several times to get the toys. I had seen Disney's Fantasia, and I think that may have been part of the reason I loved this show. The chernabog, the demon portrayed in "A Night On Bald Mountain," has to curl up and seems to become part of the mountain at the break of dawn.Gargoyles are like him, but they're good guys.

Chernabog shrinking away from the disgusting sunlight.

Trash Bag Bunch

Something shorter this week - the Trash Bag Bunch.

These toys carried on the "monsters and mutants" themes of toys in the '90s, as well as having a slightly ecological message like Captain Planet and The Planeteers. They came in two varieties - Disposors and Trashors. The Trashors were the bad guys, mutant freaks that spread pollution and slime all over the planet. The Disposors were the good guys, who took care of the environment the only way they knew how - with guns!

Sgt. Wastenot doesn't mess around.

It was often hard to tell who was a good guy and who was bad. Both sides have killer robots, and almost all of the good guys are cyborgs with glowing red eyes. They also all wear black and carry guns, which is usually a sign of villainy. This is because, as you can learn here, the original series was just going to be called Robots, Aliens, and Monsters (at least by Galoob).

The complete set

The toys weren't very fun to play with. Much like Monster In My Pocket, they didn't have joints, although they did have good neon colors and detail. The fun was in the packaging. They came in opaque "garbage bags" that would dissolve when you dropped them into water. Not only would the bag dissolve, but the water would fizz because of a tablet that was included in the bag. Only then would you know which ones you ended up with. This element of mystery made buying the toys exciting.

A Trash Bag Bunch package

My brother and I had about half of the collection between us. I can't remember playing with them, but I do remember which ones were my favorites. Their names were Garbeast and Muckoid, and they were both villains. I especially like the extra row of teeth on Muckoid.

Muckoid

So that's that, another of the coolest toy series of the '90s. If you liked reading about the history of the series, I'd suggest looking at the sketches for later toys - some of them were really weird.

Summer Reading - Calvin and Hobbes

Today's post is about Calvin & Hobbes, which I consider to be a pillar of my experience of the '90s. That's why it's so late - I had to take extra time to summon up the words to do it justice. And I probably still can't do it, but I can't wait forever, either, so here goes.

Perhaps no artistic work has had as great an impact on my mind and worldview as Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson's magnificent comic strip about an imaginative six-year-old boy and his pet tiger. As soon as school was out and water fight season began, it was once again time to go to the library and check out every Calvin and Hobbes anthology I could get my hands on.

And now I have it all.

The basic plot of Calvin and Hobbes covers the daily life of Calvin and his imaginary tiger, Hobbes, who only he sees as a real tiger and not a stuffed animal. Calvin has a very active imagination that often lands him in trouble, whether he is daydreaming instead of paying attention or turning it towards mischief. Hobbes is a foil to Calvin, often advising him against his more foolish adventures, providing a counterpoint or another perspective to Calvin's philosophical musings, and frequently fighting with him. Both characters are extremely well-developed and have many different sides.

The strip started in 1985 and ran until 1995. I actually never read it in the comic section of the newspapers, and I don't know how I even became aware of it. But for the ten years it ran, it was consistently excellent. It features wonderful, intelligent writing that is usually hilarious, but at other times can be profound and have a lot of emotional depth, such as when Calvin finds a dead bird and muses on the fragility of life, or when he loses Hobbes and can't find him. The deep, cerebral writing is complimented by the incredible illustration. Calvin's world is seldom limited to a few talking heads - it's full of surreal landscapes and styles. It's very detailed, and there are many full page color strips.

I love the duplicator story.

 These styles frequently surface when Calvin imagines he is one of his alter-egos. As the intrepid explorer Spaceman Spiff, he is often captured by aliens when he crash lands on rocky desert planets, to be tortured with homework, math problems, or bath time. Then there's Tracer Bullet, a hard-boiled detective who only trusts his .38 special and his hip flask. His world is inspired by the shadowed back alleys of film noir. But Calvin can just as easily imagine himself as a dinosaur (or my favorite, a tyrannosaurus in an F-14), an ant, a living skeleton, or a two-dimensional boy as flat as a sheet of paper. Possibly the boldest, most unique strip features Calvin imagining himself as a malevolent god of the underworld.

I credit Calvin and Hobbes with introducing me to philosophy, for better or worse. This has been the most significant impact the strip had on me - after all, I went on to major in it. Calvin and Hobbes talk about such philosophically rich topics as ethics, meaning and purpose, mortality, humanity's place in nature, and whether or not a god exists. It was Calvin and Hobbes that first showed me that these were open questions worth pondering.

The thing about Calvin and Hobbes that sets it above and beyond all other comic strips is that there is not a single panel or storyline where Bill Watterson is phoning it in. It remains consistently wonderful for all ten glorious years. There are new ideas in every panel. It never becomes stale or repetitious, and unlike many long-running series, the quality never deteriorates. It's the project of one devoted artist, given the freedom to create, and pour out his good soul on the page. Humanity is richer for it.

Attack Pack

This week, I'll be reminiscing about a series of toys that I enjoyed quite a bit in my childhood - Attack Pack.

These strange toys combined three things I loved - vicious animals, transforming, and monster trucks. Created by Mattel, the corporation also responsible for Hot Wheels, it's pretty clear where Attack Pack came from. Someone on a marketing team said "Hey, the kids really like this Beast Wars thing, right? So why don't we make them into cars?" And they did, and it was awesome.

There was no TV show that Attack Pack was inspired by, but the packaging did come with a convoluted and confusing story with environmentalist themes like Captain Planet. The toys were also divided into good guys and bad guys as in Beast Wars and Transformers before it. It's a time-tested formula.

The Attack Pack toys came in many different models, some of which were sold at McDonald's. The first series were all based on monster trucks and rather normal animals, but later the series branched out to include flying vehicles like planes and dinosaurs. There was also a series of space-themed vehicles like rockets and UFO's, which were merged with weirder, grosser animals like leeches and maggots.

The toys typically could roll on their wheels, and they had a lever in the back you could push down on to make them rear up and transform into their animal mode - their teeth, claws, or wings would come out. Later, Mattel released the "growlers" series that made a roaring sound when you pushed the lever, but these actually weren't as cool as the original series - there was much less diversity in the types of vehicles and animals. They were all either cats or bears, all the models of the same species were in the same mold with a different paint job.

Looking at the pictures of these toys makes me remember how cool they were, and which ones I had and which ones either my brother or my friends had. But the happiest memory I have of Attack Pack toys is of my brother and I getting some really cool ones for Easter. These were in the "Big Ones" series released in 1993. I got Blowtorch, which was styled after what appears to be a bulldog mixed with a fire truck, and Slime-Inator - the ultra-cool huge Attack Pack monster designed after a hornet mixed with a cement truck. He had an ability none of the others did - he could dump a green goo all over them. Unfortunately, the goo was no good after the first use - I played with it outside and got dirt in it. Ain't that always the way?

My brother got Big Bones, a truck with a cage on the back that could hold a smaller Attack Pack vehicle prisoner. The really cool thing about the "Big Ones" series (as opposed to the "Biggest Ones" series that Slime-Inator was from) was that when you pushed down the lever, not only did they rear up and transform to reveal jaws, but their front wheels contained claws. This differentiated them from the smaller ones.

I only have foggy memories of playing with these toys, but I know it must have taken some imagination. I remember rolling them through the grass in my backyard and pretending they were stalking through the jungle. I remember the feel of these toys in my hand. They couldn't move like Hot Wheels, and they had no fancy tracks they could speed along and fly through loops, but they remind me of how I always liked the unusual and unrealistic monster-shaped Hot Wheels cars rather than regular sports cars and F1 racers. These toys tapped into the part of my personality that made me like horror movies better than action movies, anti-heroes better than traditional heroes, and death metal better than hair metal. They are proof that design by committee can actually work. And so it is with great fondness that I thank the soulless corporation Mattel for enriching my childhood.

Summer Reading - Goosebumps

The rising temperatures and siren songs of ice cream truck patrols are signs that summer is here once again, and for me that means memories largely of reading books inside, ironically. Every summer, my parents had me join the library's reading program, which set goals for summer reading that I could keep track of with a card that was stamped whenever I completed a book. Prizes could be won - probably things like Yikes! pencils and bookmarks, because I don't remember them very well. But I do remember where the bulk of my reading came from during the summer - Goosebumps. 

"Why do we keep feeding them Monster Blood?"

Goosebumps was a kids horror series written by Ohio native R.L. Stine. This guy was a machine - there were 64 books in the original series alone. Goosebumps may have played a large role in my enjoyment of horror, because I read and re-read these books until the covers were cracked and frayed.

As far as horror went, Goosebumps was actually the least scary of the horror franchises read. It was written for children, but the books still contained events such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, alternate realities, and possessed dummies. Ghosts of Fear Street was a series R.L. Stine wrote for slightly older children, and Fear Street was written for teenagers. But what gave me nightmares was the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark series - not for the stories, which were rather silly, but for the horrifying ink drawings by Stephen Gammell. But that's a subject for another post.

This was probably the scariest book.

What brings back the nostalgia for Goosebumps more than anything is the artwork on the covers. I sold my collection in a garage sale long ago and can't remember the stories very well, but the front covers are instantly familiar.

Looking over the plot summaries on Wikipedia, though, some of them seem quite interesting. There's an evil house that is turning the town into the undead, a camera that predicts the death of whoever it photographs, a mirror that leads to a parallel universe, and an insane piano teacher who wants to cut off his student's hands.

In addition to the three series Goosebumps, Fear Street, and Ghosts of Fear Street, R.L. Stine also wrote the "Give Yourself Goosebumps" series. These were choose-your-own-adventure books, in which you flipped to different versions of the story depending on what choices you make. These were a lot of fun to read, and finding the ending where the characters make it out alive was pretty tricky.

I could spend all day with one of these books.

There was also a Goosebumps TV show that ran during the late '90s, which I also enjoyed. But one of the coolest things R.L. Stine did was to write a horror story about The Beast roller coaster at King's Island being haunted. I read this book right around the time I first rode The Beast, and when it became my favorite roller coaster ever. It still is.

Apparently it's haunted by...um, Poseidon?

I can remember the first time I rode The Beast, at night, just before the park closed. The Beast has a long track that goes deep into the woods, and that's part of the thrill of it - there are branches all around you as you whip along the track at 60 miles per hour. These branches, the low tunnel coming off the first hill, and chaotically-placed wooden beams in the "spiral of doom" at the end of the ride, all give the illusion that the ride could decapitate you. The ride is genuinely frightening. And whether finding it on roller coasters or in R.L. Stine's books, I was always looking for a good scare.

Pogs

Pogs was (were?) a flash-in-the-pan craze on my elementary school playground that inexplicably took the world by storm in 1994. Originally played in Hawaii with milk caps (in 1927), the game involves stacking up cardboard discs with pictures on them and hitting them with a plastic disc called a "slammer." All the caps that landed face up were added to the player's score, either to be kept or to keep track of the winner of the game. Usually, the people on my playground played for keeps.

Sonic The Hedgehog pogs

These little tokens were mostly collectibles, and they could feature pictures of anything - Taz, The Tick, Animaniacs, or Cadbury Creme Eggs. Anything we liked had a pog version. Aside from collecting them, there was nothing else you could do with them except play the game, which was not very fun. There were a lot of arguments about how to hit the stack because the rules were poorly defined, and most of the time, the stack was simply knocked over with nothing flipping. Often the disputes over the rules led to fights.

I may have only played Pogs for a little while, but I can still remember my favorite slammer. I liked the slammers better than the pogs, because they were shiny and had simpler, bolder designs. I had a purple slammer that depicted an atomic bomb on it. It came with the first pack of pogs I got.

Slammers

 

The teachers and the aides - the playground police -  hated it, and it was ultimately banned in many schools - possibly in mine. Part of the reason it could have been banned was that it was a form of gambling.

Another pog-related memory I have is of receiving some pogs for Easter one year. Instead of a plastic slammer, they came with a spiky metal slammer - which was much heavier and therefore able to flip more pogs. My memory is hazy, but I think the other kids viewed this as cheating and didn't let me play using that one. As far as I know now, that was a legal slammer.

Around that time, the whole Pog thing had just about run its course, as every kid in America (and around the world) realized that Pogs were boring. Like Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Furby, the mindless fad vanished.

Alternative Rock

A number of factors combined to introduce me to alternative rock in the '90s. I have an older sister who was in the target audience (Generation X), who shared such bands with me as Nine Inch Nails, Bush, Garbage, Green Day, and Stone Temple Pilots. My parents also like this music, especially my dad. And then there was 103.9 The Edge, a station that for at least three glorious years before they became The X, played almost nothing but the best in '90s rock.

I was a fan.

103.9 became The Edge in 1995, and that's probably around the same time my musical awareness really took off. I was 10 years old and in 5th grade. I have a lot of jumbled memories of when I received CDs by my favorite artists (although it was mostly Christmas) and quite a few photographs. Here's one now:

Wearing my Insomniac t-shirt at Camp Kern, 1995.

Being only 10 in 1995, Kurt Cobain's suicide didn't have as big an impact on me as it would have had on a slightly older crowd - in fact, I'm not even sure I knew about it until years later. I liked Nirvana and got their CDs from the library all the time, but they weren't my favorite band. During the '90s, my favorite band was The Smashing Pumpkins. My parents took me to a concert when I was 11 years old, a story I'll go into later.

Getting NIN's Broken for my birthday - probably '97

Another favorite band of mine was Nine Inch Nails. Although they played on The Edge, they were not alternative rock. The songs off the album Pretty Hate Machine that played were "Head Like A Hole" and "Down In It." But that album was much less abrasive than Broken and The Downward Spiral, which only spawned one hit single, "Closer." It's funny that I think of myself as having been sheltered, considering that my parents didn't forbid me to listen to any music. The Downward Spiral is very explicit, featuring themes of sex, murder, nihilism, rape, and suicide. I borrowed it from the library regularly from the age of 12, listening to it while blowing monsters away in Doom II, another much maligned bad influence.

IDDQD

The darkness and aggression of Nine Inch Nails was contrasted by the upbeat and energetic pop punk tunes of Green Day, a band that always puts me in a good mood. The first album I got by them was Dookie, and it's still one of my favorites. I also had Insomniac.I frequently borrowed 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours from the library, and it has some of my favorite songs on it, too. I was dimly aware, having a friend who was into older punk music, that Green Day were not considered "authentic punk." This is just hilarious to me now - they weren't cool enough to join the outsider clique.

And speaking of bands that were considered "posers," there's Bush. They were another of my favorite bands, although telling people that I liked them often brought out some resentment because "they ripped off Nirvana." Listening to them now, they sound no more like Nirvana than Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice In Chains, or other bands in the same genre. Bush sounds more polished, has better guitar playing (and solos), and better singing. I like Sixteen Stone better than any of Nirvana's albums. I also had Razorblade Suitcase.

Me at the bat exhibit, Cincinnati Zoo

So there you have it, a shallow look at my top five favorite bands of the '90s as I would have listed them growing up, all featured on my favorite radio station, 103.9 The Edge. Around 1998, the Edge turned into The X, and alternative rock was gradually pushed out by ska and nu-rock, which ultimately led to my turning off the radio and seeking out new music on my own. But of course I always kept my favorite music with me.

Pizza Lunchables

Unlike many who went through the public school system, I have fond memories of eating cafeteria pizza. This pizza was served in a rectangular slab with rubbery mozzarella cheese on it, usually at about room temperature. The crust was soft enough to roll up. It was the best pizza in the world.

They sound baffled as to why kids like it.

Pizza was a treat, served either once a week or once every two weeks, I'm not sure which. But the big prize was Mexican pizza. That was my favorite. It had spicy sausage, bright orange cheese of unknown origin, and a spicy pizza sauce. It was shaped like a hexagon, which to my young eyes made it look like there was more of it. My best lunch was a slice of this, a small bag of Doritos or Cheetos, and a cardboard carton of chocolate milk.

A rough estimation of a hexagonal slice of Mexican Pizza

But pizza could not be served every day, and on those days, I didn’t have to risk meat loaf. On those days, there were Pizza Lunchables. Oscar Meyer started the Lunchables brand in the late '80s, but Pizza Lunchables were not released until sometime in the '90s. While these were not as nice as the school pizza, they were still a yummy food item.

The Lunchables meal came in a plastic tub, with a compartment for each part of it. The pizza crusts and sauce were in the main compartment, which also held a candy item and a Capri Sun. Lunchables offers pepperoni pizza and cheese. Pepperoni only came with mozzarella, but cheese pizza comes with mozzarella and American or cheddar (something orange, at least). Since I've been a vegetarian since I was 10 years old, I usually had the cheese pizza Lunchables.

The meal is eaten by hand. You open the packet of paste and spread it on the pizza crust, then put as much or as little cheese on it as you want. Rationing is important; I usually ended up putting most of my paste on the first pizza, and the other two would not be as good.

In order to properly remember Lunchables, I had to experience it again myself, and so I bought an extra cheesy Pizza Lunchable from the store. It was almost as good as I remember it being, but I remember the pizzas being larger and having more sauce. More likely it’s just that I’m bigger.

While eating this pizza, I noticed that there was not enough sauce to go around, and the cheese lasted much longer than the sauce. I had about half a compartment of each left over after all my crusts were gone. The cheese does not taste nearly as good by itself as it does on the pizza.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find an Airhead blue raspberry candy in the bottom of the pizza compartment for dessert, and a Capri Sun under the tub. The Capri Sun was fruit punch, and it was delicious. I also managed to puncture it with no problem and no loss of juice, which was always an accomplishment. Pizza Lunchables are still widely available, and they taste just as good as they were in school.

Monster In My Pocket

Monster In My Pocket was a toy series Matchbox introduced in 1990 that I avidly collected when I was a kid. I had tons of them. They are little rubber figurines of monsters from movies and mythology. You couldn't really do a lot with them, as they weren't pose-able, except collect them, trade them, admire them, and learn about monsters. Oh, and carry them around in your pocket to play with at boring places like restaurants. Despite the fact that they didn't do anything special, these toys were still incredibly fun to collect and play with.

From left: Spring-Heeled Jack, The Witch, Ghoul, and Invisible Man

I mostly collected series 1, of which there were 48 figurines, each available in multiple colors. I still have four of them, but the rest I may have sold in a garage sale (regrettably so, as they are no longer manufactured).

The series 1 monsters I still have, with "battle damage" - Hobgoblin, Spring-Heeled Jack, and Winged Panther

Each monster came with information about it in the packaging, as well as a point value between 5 and 25  on the figurine. The point value stood for the rarity of the figurine as well as the power or scariness of the monster - something I never knew when I was a child.

The monster mountain - contains all of series 1

Looking at a collector's website (and thank goodness for those or I wouldn't remember a lot of these figures), I had at least 33 of the monsters from series 1. Hydra was the crown jewel of my collection, and I also really liked Karnak, Ghost, and Skeleton. I think Gremlin was one that I always wanted but never had. It has a very cool pose.

Gremlin

For some reason, I didn't get any monsters from series 2 or 3, but when series 4 was released, I got a few of those. I didn't like the change in the size or coloring of the monsters - they were much larger, and multi-colored, so they didn't blend well with prior series. They also had trouble standing a lot of the time.

The Jersey Devil has been through Hell. I found him in the garden in front of my house. He never could stand up.

The obscurity of some of the monsters is startling, and the monsters get more obscure as the series go on. Matchbox plumbed the depths of monster movies, folklore, and religion for scary creatures - and this got the company in trouble when they released four Hindu gods as monsters - Kali, Ganesha, Hanuman, and Yama were all depicted as monsters rather than gods that people still worshiped. The fact that people still worship these gods was the key to the offensiveness - the series are filled with Egyptian gods that are totally radical. I can't believe I never got Anubis - I would have loved having that after seeing Stargate.

Anubis, from series 3

Seeing these toys again in such detail has made me want to track them down and buy them. If you'll excuse me, I have some bidding to do. To see how deep the folklore goes, you can try looking up some of the monsters. Here's what Wikipedia says about Spring-Heeled Jack. Yikes!

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers

Go, go power rangers!

Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers was a playground sensation when I was a kid. It was a smash hit largely because it merged all of our favorite things - big robots (like in Transformers), big monsters (like in Godzilla), dinosaurs (like in Jurassic Park), martial arts (like in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and teamwork (like in Captain Planet and the Planeteers). It also had a hyperactive theme song that was basically just electric guitars and the name of the show, and a lot of flipping around and explosions that never seemed to really hurt anybody.

Shows where kids or teenagers piloted giant robots and usually merged together into a samurai or knight-shaped robot were nothing new. Giant robots go all the way back to the '50s in Japan. Power Rangers made it special because the giant robots (known as "Zords") were dinosaurs.

Dinozords

Every episode was basically the same. Usually, the villain, Rita Repulsa, would send some kind of monster to destroy the Earth. The Rangers would morph using their Power Morphers - little plastic belt buckle things I think you could get at McDonald's for a limited time (yes, I had one). When they learned of the evil monster Rita had unleashed, they would morph into their ranger costumes (plastic helmets and spandex or nylon suits) and do battle. Often they would fight a small army of "putties" - the easily defeated gray weirdos that Rita sent - or a few of her henchmen, like Goldar. Then they'd call their Dinozords and fight the big monster, and they'd have to merge together into the Megazord to defeat it. Somewhere in there would be a few scenes of their normal high school lives, often with comic relief from the two inept bullies Bulk and Skull.

Before the Green Ranger miniseries was released, I remember that a lot of kids were wondering if there was going to be a Purple Ranger.There never was. The Green Ranger was the new ranger, and he was the coolest. Instead of a dinosaur, he had a Mechagodzilla-like robot that he would call with a flute that was also a dagger. Dragonzord even rises from the ocean like Godzilla does.  The Green Ranger started off as evil because Rita (the evil witch from outer space) had put him under a spell.

The Green Ranger even has better armor than the other rangers

I remember one of my friends pointing out how silly it was that the putties would explode when you hit them in the big Z on their chest - could their weak spot be any more obvious? But they didn't get that "improvement" until Lord Zedd took over as chief villain, and if I remember correctly, he was a much cooler bad guy than Rita.

At recess, playing Power Rangers probably got us into more trouble than anything else we did, since all you had to do to be a Power Ranger was shout out the name of a dinosaur and punch and kick each other.

Good times.