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!