Daniel85

The Milky Way Banana Whip has been out for a while, but I never got around to reviewing it because, let’s face it, when you buy a Milky Way there’s no way that fucker gets home alive. Hell, if I ever impulse-buy one I usually inhale it before I even get back to the car.

But anyway, through some awesome feat of will power I managed to bring one home today for review. Here ’tis: 

I haven’t seen any advertising for the Milky Way Banana Whip, so it must be one of those things that the foodglomerates just throw into the marketplace and hope for the best. Another lost opportunity for monkey marketing…

The ‘Banana Whip’ inside the chocolate is strikingly reminiscent of yellow snow, which isn’t too appetising…

Still, it tastes pretty good. Almost like a mixed-up mouthful of those banana lollies that you’d NEVER get enough of in your 50c bag of mixed lollies, and those little ‘chocolate buddies’ that you’d always get TOO MANY of. Oh, how I hated those chocolate buddies.

Kinda.

Reader Vic alerted me to a sighting of Bandana Kid in the latest Go-Lo catalogue. I was skeptical at first, seeing as Bandana Kid has heretofore only appeared in catalogues for that other great discount chain, The Warehouse, but it turns out ol’ Vic was right: 

The image used is actually the ‘zactly the same as one from a previous Warehouse catalogue, which is kinda weird. I dunno if The Warehouse and Go-Lo are owned by the same parent company, or if maybe The Warehouse traded Bandana Kid to Go-Lo like some albino Muggsy Bogues. Maybe next season Bandana Kid will be traded to The Reject Shop! With that big ‘Thumbs Down’ logo and Bandana Kid, Team Reject Shop will be UNSTOPPABLE!

And the Kid’s also back in the latest Warehouse catalogue, which makes me unsure where his loyalties lie. I’m pretty sure the shield/axe pic is a reprint, but the cutlass one is all-new and all-gold. What a dashing swashbuckler our boy makes!

Why would they randomly capitalise the word ‘knight’? They’re either illiterate, or this is a reference to Bandana Kid’s Daniel85-led superstardom. Be a Knight… B.. K… Bandana Kid? You decide.

So Bandana Kid is now in two national catalogues. I guess it won’t be long before we see him on TV, billboards, perhaps even… the silver screen?

So I got a couple of emails today informing me that two subjects I’d selected for next year have been cancelled. I was really looking forward to them, too. One was entitled “Television And Australian Culture”, the other “The Victorian Supernatural”. Now I have to find some replacement 3rd year Cinema and Literary Studies subjects, all the while avoiding the dreaded ‘tutorial presentation’ requirement.

It’s kind of annoying to have subjects cancelled this late in the year. I don’t know if there weren’t enough students enrolled, or the subject coordinators just decided to bugger off to Europe next year, or what. They’d better not cancel the William Blake lovefest subject (entitled simply “Blake”) on me, cos then I’ll really be pissed. I’ve been looking forward to that subject ever since first year.

I was at uni yesterday to return some books and pick up some holiday reading, but the self-checkout machine wouldn’t let me do my thang because there were ‘unresolved issues with my account’. Turns out I owe $24 in fines for overdue books. I just dumped the books I wanted at the nearest ‘recent returns’ trolley and got the hell out of there.

I could’ve just gone to the loans desk and paid the fine, but I was feeling like a bit of a dickhead and didn’t want to have some librarian tsk-tsking at my infringement. That’s the good thing about machines; they don’t judge you.

I’ll probably go back tomorrow morning and pay the fine so that I can drink deep of the font of all knowledge. I have a lot of reading to catch up on over the holidays, some of it academic, but most of it just taking advantage of the library’s many splendid hardcover comics collections. Will Eisner’s The Spirit, the classic E.C. titles, pretty much all of Marvel’s Masterworks and Essentials collections, and the handful of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman works I’ve yet to read… so much comicky goodness. Alternatively, I could just refuse to pay the fines and go sit in the library reading all day for FREE, but that’d be kinda tight-assed.

Speaking of comics, there’s an interesting-looking exhibition on at the State Library of Victoria from RIGHT NOW until February; Heroes & Villains: Australian Comics and their Creators. The title is a mild example of the ‘Biff! Pow! Zap!’ attitude towards comics from non-comics-type-people, but that’s okay. It’s nice to see the funnybooks getting some recognition in an institution like the State Library. I’ll definitely be checking it out, but there’s strength in numbers, so let me know if any of y’all wanna go.

If the first Secret Wars series was notable for just one thing (the debut of Spidey’s black costume), then Secret Wars II should have its own big drawcard, right? Some might say that it’s the fact the series spawned one of the worst covers in the history of comics, but for me it’s the debut of the world’s only CCCP-approved superhero, Thundersword! 

For those who came in late, the story of Secret Wars II is basically that this all-powerful entity from beyond our universe (The Beyonder) has manifested himself in a human avatar on Earth to learn all about our quaint little ways. In his innocence/stupidity, he gets into all manner of hijinks, and one of his first acts is to bestow superpowers upon a hack writer of Saturday morning superhero cartoons who, like all Hollywood writers, is secretly a dirty commie.

With his newfound powers, Thundersword goes on a rampage at a McDonald’s Family Restaurant (or its Marvel doppelganger, McBurger, which appeared in a few issues in the 80s but has unfortunately fallen out of use) spewing all kinds of anti-Ronald rhetoric:

(From Secret Wars II #1, July 1985, Jim Shooter & Al Milgrom)

 I must admit to laughing out loud at the ‘you deserve a break today’ line. Way to appropriate bourgeois tools like advertising jingles for the use of the Proletariat!

Of course, if this were published today, Thundersword would have to shout “I’m lovin’ it!” as he tore apart a McDonald’s restaurant. Still wouldn’t be as funny as Spider-Man stealing a guy’s Mcdonald’s, though.

I should probably make a joke about Thundersword’s being a superhero and the title of Super Size Me, but I can’t be bothered. Just pretend I did.

P.S. Secret Wars was notable for more than Spidey’s costume, being a milestone in mainstream comics publishing history and all. I was just being flippant.

On the drugs… 

(From Uncanny X-Men #196, Aug 1985, Chris Claremont & John Romita, Jr.)

Engaging in hate speech…

(From Uncanny X-Men #196)

Wow that’s harsh. It’s a good thing Priest was editor on the Spidey books rather than the X-books, cos he probably woulda broken Claremont’s face for that.

Not the cute Jewish princess we all thought, huh? (To be fair, that’s one of Wolverine’s cigars, not a fatty-boom-batty joint, and the racial slur is there to Make You Think.)

I’ve always liked Gala Day more than the flashier Geelong Show, for some reason. It could be the fact that there was none of that boring equestrian and farm animal crap (my grandad always made me go look at the cows) to detract from the two most important aspects of any Show: showbags and rides. (By the way, for those Americans on the blog, a “show” is kind of like the Australian version of a county fair.)

It could also be that the Gala Day fair used to be held in the coolest of places, like down by the waterfront (giving it a boardwalky feel) or right in the centre of town (giving it an uncanny, “this shouldn’t be here” feel, like a zombie movie set in a mall).

I’ve thought about this way too much, but another reason may be simply that it was a day off school (my tight-ass primary school only gave us Geelong Show Day or Gala Day; not both in the same year), and also marked the beginning of the end of the school year. Once Gala hit you knew it was just gonna be games of tee-ball and ‘projects’ until school let out before Christmas.

Like most things that were cool when we wuz kids, Gala Day has really been watered down in recent years. It’s been moved to the big pit that is Johnstone Park (don’t say “Johnsons’s Park”, or I will mock you till the day I die), and renamed the “Gala Christmas Fair”.

There’s only a handful of rather lacklustre rides (what you see in the picture above is the entire ride section), when once there used to be the Cha-Cha and the Ghost House and all manner of awesome amusements. There wasn’t even a set of those rotating clown heads. Hardly a fair/show/carnival without being able to pop balls in a clown’s mouth. That sounds so dirty.

The renaming to ’Christmas Fair’ accompanies the pushing back of Gala Day to early December rather than mid/late November. So now the centrepiece of the fair is a dodgy pageant show with annoying kids dancing and singing to Christmas carols. It’s not even cute like a school pageant, where the kids are charmingly out of their depth. These are those ‘professional’ kids from the acting schools and dance classes whose precociousness makes you want to go all Maddox on them.

But onto the most important thing, showbags. I used to love getting the pull-out in the newspaper the week before the Geelong Show and going through the showbag guide, circling and asterisking in order of preference. I’d never end up getting any of the showbags I wanted, but dare to dream, right? (”No, Dan, you don’t want that Ninja Turtles showbag. Here, get this Samurai Sam one instead.”)

I like this showbag stand. That’s retro characters 3, modern characters 1. Take that, children of today!

I wasn’t really too impressed by any of the showbags. There was a Pirates of the Caribbean one that looked kinda cool, but even I wouldn’t pay $21 for a bandana and a plastic musket. I got this Casper one instead:

I like how Casper gets second-billing to cousin Spooky. It’s cos he’s Tuff. He’s The Tuff Little Ghost. Casper’s afraid he’s gonna get whaled on if he tries to assert his place as Harvey’s leading ghost.

It feels good, owning a plastic bag adorned with Casper imagery. It’d make a cool trick-or-treat sack. 

Along ’showbag lane’ there was this little marquee full of inflatable cartoon/comic/movie characters. It’s funny how the Hulk and Wolverine have their backs turned on Venom. Poor Eddie Brock, he just wants a friend.

My sister got this random NBA t-shirt in her showbag. Love how the carnies just throw in whatever they have lying around their magical carnie village warehouse. I didn’t know there was just a general ‘NBA Fan Club’, either. For those indecisive basketball fans who couldn’t pick a team. “I’m gonna root for the whole league! Go teams!”

I could use the fact that it was like a million degrees yesterday to justify my purchase of a Mr. Whippee ice cream, but the truth is that I always check every ice cream van I come across, hoping I’ll find one that still has the ‘Agro Cone’ on the menu.

I picked the Choc Sherbert, cos it looked really cool on the display…

It didn’t look so cool in reality, though:

I want my neon pink glowing outline! It does look kinda like a volcano, however, which is cool. Volcanos are cool. They’re mother nature’s rock concert.

I disparaged the fair’s rides earlier in this entry, but there was one that was kinda mildly awesome. It was a humongous inflatable slide that loomed over the entire park like a licorice all-sort castle:

How majestic is that?! Pretty majestic, if you ask me.

The guy would let in 10-15 kids at a time, and they’d all clamber up a rope ladder (straight out of ”The Eliminator” on Gladiators) to the right of the slide. It truly was a sight to see. It looked like a diminutive band of Skeletor’s minions scaling the walls of Castle Grayskull.

Hmm.. there’s a plan I don’t think Skeletor ever hit on; recruiting children in his fight to rule Eternia. “Meet my diminutive minions, He-Man. My… Diminuminions!”

It was pretty crazy. I saw this one kid get kicked in the face so hard that he just rolled to the bottom of the slide limp, blood gushing from his nose. He was so messed up that his dad had to put him in a pram and carry the baby on his hip.

So that was Gala Day for another year. I copped out of blogging the Geelong Show, so I figured doing Gala Day would make up for it. Maybe I’ll do Pako Festa next February, too.

Note: I’m aware that I didn’t cover the parade, which is the original raison d’etre of Gala Day. I just can’t be bothered going to the parade anymore. Besides, it’s kinda hard to top a bunch of kids rollerblade dancing to “I Like To Move It” as featured back in ‘94.