Daniel85

So, my mum was in the car yesterday when she heard a news item about an attempted child abduction in Leopold earlier this week. It was also in the paper today: http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2008/05/09/13765_news.html

It came as quite a surprise to her, seeing as the school had not seen fit to tell the parents of the 700+ kids who attend Leopold Primary school (my 10-year-old sister among them).

This incident occured on Monday, and only came out in the media yesterday. Even worse, my mum found out that the parents of the child involved did not immediately ring police, instead informing the school the next day, after which the police were contacted.

If you read the news article, there’s a detailed description of the car and suspect involved. Had the school community been informed, parents and children could have been on the lookout for this car if it had returned to the area. But no, these guys had free rein in Leopold on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

I live on Kensington Rd. It’s chaos before and after school. Cars parked 500 metres up the street on both sides, hordes of kids and parents going every which way… quite easy for some psycho to grab a kid without anyone noticing anything amiss.

When my mum, understandably outraged, called the school to inquire as to why parents had not been told about this, the school’s line was that they ‘did not want to cause a panic’. Well, guess what? CHILD ABDUCTION IS SOMETHING TO FUCKING PANIC ABOUT.

The Gremlins are back in this commercial for British telco BT. 

We may not get a Gremlins 3 (and I’m not sure I’d want one), but it’s nice to see the little buggers running rampant again in some form.

Also interesting is this short behind-the-scenes video on the commercial: http://youtube.com/watch?v=PCTlDj0f6go. That’s some classic movie magic going on right there. Lovely to see. Too bad the advent of CG had to go and fuck up puppeteering in film as well as supplant traditional animation.

The back cover of New York World’s Fair Comics (1939; reprinted in DC Comics Rarities Archives Vol 1):

A lovely sentiment.

And here’s a couple of panels from the Zatara story within:

Ah, so…

And some of the sights of the Fair, as detailed in the numerous Sheldon Moldoff info pages scattered amongst the various stories by Siegel/Shuster, FINGER/kane, Fred Schwab, and other early DC luminaries: 

Not even our friends from the Red Planet are safe from negative stereotyping:

What a wonderful world.

Beautiful song. My favourite from George Harrison’s solo career. Billy Preston rocks it hard. 

(Laura, you’re not allowed to watch this. I know you have a crush on Dhani Harrison.)

(Pic from Blog@Newsarama.)

Nice to see that Steven Spielberg can even manage to incorporate product placement into a candid on-set photo. Still got it!

What’s not to love? It’s cheesy, it’s easy… it sounds kinda like Mac And Me. Perfection.

(Too bad it’s only a prop.)

I’m forcing myself to blog, even though I really have nothing of interest to write. So I will provide you with an account of two things I like, and two things I don’t like. I hope you enjoy them.

Two things I don’t like:

- Scalpel jockeys/number crunchers/ambulance chasers who decide to take a Cinema class cos they think it’ll be a lark. Although I do like it when they can’t deal with the waves upon waves of obscure theory that comes to bear on Cinema Studies. Kind of a drag that classes get dumbed down because the day trippers know shit all, though.

- Endless rehashes of public domain fantasy properties (Oz, Wonderland, etc). P.S. Look out for my new series, “Moonface Chronicles”, based on the straight-up coolest character from Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series. Coming Summer ‘09 from Image Comics!*

Two things I like:

- When you try to make conversation with little kids and they just stare at you blankly, offering no response whatsoever.

- I actually can’t think of a second thing I like. I kind of like Lemon Chicken. Anyone had any good Lemon Chicken lately?

* Kidding, obviously. Although I would love to totally be a hypocrite and write a new Faraway Tree series.

DRIFTWOOD SAX!

I always laugh whenever I see this ad. It’s for TSR’s Dungeon game, a board game based on the fantasy tropes of D&D.

There is just something so awkward about the framing of the picture. It looks like the jocks are playing the game just to humour the little geeky kid… like they’re about to kick his ass or something. And the geek knows it, too:

“That’s a twenty, gents. Looks like Kragamor The Destroyer wins the day again, heh, heh.”

“Your ass is grass, Poindexter!”
“Yeah, when we get back from shopping for more geometric-print sweaters, you are DONE!”

BONUS: Clip from the final episode of Freaks and Geeks, where the AV Club invites bad-ass Daniel to join their D&D campaign.

Holy shit, people.

I’ve been searching for this ad for years, and never managed to track it down. Someone’s finally uploaded it to YouTube.

The Wobbies World commercial is a pillar of Victorian childhood. A flagstone! A bulkhead!

No-one I know ever actually went to Wobbies World, but we all saw that commercial about 5 times a day every day of our lives. Did any of you guys ever actually get to go to Wobbies World? Please fill me in if you did.

In hindsight, Wobbies World looks incredibly lame. But how awesome did it seem as a kid?! I would’ve given my Game Boy to go on that frickin’ bubble helicopter.

I don’t understand how Wobbies World assumed the exalted position of desire it did amongst early 90s Aussie kids. Surely we were smart enough to see that the place was a complete shithole? Nevertheless, I can remember harboring an intense need to go to Wobbies World. Maybe it was cos Disneyland seemed impossible, Warner Bros Movie World perhaps a little less so, but still mostly unattainable… but Wobbies World was a definite maybe. Nunawading’s in the Melways, dad could drive there!

Or maybe it was just that incredibly hypnotic music. I love how it finishes at the end of the commercial. Tik-tik-whoo.

Some more points, because I’m not done dissecting this relic of 90s Victorian kidhood: 

What’s the deal with that stupid mannequin dressed as a fireman? They couldn’t even afford real animatronics, so they just pinched a dummy from the bins behind K-Mart. Oh, and that early shot where it zooms in on the dummy’s face is frickin’ terrifying.

“Bring your friends, and mum too!” (But dad can fuckin’ stay home.)

And I’m sorry, but a slide isn’t a ride. It’s playground equipment. Just had to call bullshit on that one.

P.S. I tried to find the clip from The Late Show where they parodied this commercial (with a funpark named Piss Weak World), but it’s not on YouTube. Instead, please accept this equally hilarious Late Show spoof of Channel 9’s old “We’re Still #1″ campaign:

Just kidding!

I like how the kids have Indy and Toht refer to that one figure as “Cairo Swordsman” as if that’s his actual name.

And the shot with the mother setting a picnic table in the background is a nice touch. Very thoughtful for a standard 30-second “these kids are playing with our toys, you should too” 80s toy commercial.