Daniel85

How awesome were these in primary school?

I got a three pack of them in grade 5, which was cool ’cause I never had good stationery.

Oh, speaking of primary school, has anyone seen that Four ‘n’ Twenty ad with the guys on the building site, and that one guy is like ‘Oh, that’s Johnno. I’ve known him simce primary school.’ The guy can’t even say ’since’. It’s pretty funny.

Shit like this:

It’s so pathetically bad that it’s awesome. I pity the kids who are into the current, serious TMNT. No cheesy cabaret acts for them!

I remember going to see a similar Turtles appearance in the Bourke St Mall back in like 1991. No singing April, but it was still pretty cool. It really seemed like every kid in Victoria had flocked to the city that day to see the Turtles; it was nuts. 

TMNT, man… it’s our Woodstock.

This thing scares the absolute shit out of me.

Ever since I saw a newsbyte about it a couple of years ago, I’ve been intrigued. If you don’t know about Asimo (and the little bugger’s been all over the news lately, so I don’t know why you wouldn’t…) it’s this little humanoid robot that Honda’s been developing to take over the world. Just look at Koizumi-san there, clapping in delight at the antics of his electronic homunculus. Yeah, they say there are only 20 Asimos in existence, but I bet it’s more like 20,000.

Now, I love robots. I grew up with Transformers, Short Circuit, Batteries Not Included, and the droids from Star Wars, but actually seeing one knocking about is a whole ‘nother thing. The feeling I get seeing Asimo walking around, kicking a soccer ball and shit is pretty much the definition of Freud’s uncanny.

Asimo actually reminds me a bit of this little fella:

My friend Adam had a My Pal 2 when we were kids, and I used to dread sleepovers at his house, cos I knew that scary fuck would be standing on the other side of the room looking at me.

I always wondered why there was never a My Pal 1. Maybe the prototype developed a homicidal programming glitch and they had to start again. Maybe they thought putting a random number in there would help sales/marketing. I know which explanation I believe.

Robots, man. They’ll be the end of us.

Op shops. This morning. Old junk. Here.

Board games and Richie Rich. It’s as if Milton Bradley had a list of my fifty guiltiest pleasures, chose #7 and #33 on that list, and then combined them. You’d think the fact that this game came out in 1982 (three years before I was born) would make this idea less plausible, but it doesn’t.

I don’t quite understand the box art. Are Richie, Gloria, and Freckles stealing those jewels, or what? It’s bad enough that ‘The Poor Little Rich Boy’ has to go slum it with the kids from Skid Row, but now he’s dragging them into his little cry-for-help games? Daddy Warbucks may be able to pull strings when you  get caught, Richie, but Freckles is going away for a long time. And they looove freckled redheads in the State Penitentiary.

We all love making fun of yesterday’s impressions of today and tomorrow, don’t we? The shiny pictures on the cover enticed me to flip through this book, and when I saw an illustration of a man sitting on a psychoanalyst’s couch talking to a computer with the caption ‘One day, computers will be able to respond to your verbal commands’, I knew I had to own it.

‘Covers history, gear needed, professional play’ - from what I saw in my quick flick through, it also covers exercise, diet, and all manner of other things. I think it’s not so much a guide to table tennis as it is a manifesto for a new way of living. I’ll be sure to review it at length when time permits.

And I didn’t know Uncle Jesse from Full House was a ping-pong champ! A man of many talents.

Awww yeah. Trolls rock. But you know that.

For a brief period in 1991, my class went through TROLL FEVER. Trolls on desks, trolls on pencils, trolls on… parade? I remember being absolutely amazed that my mum not only knew what trolls were, but she also had them as a kid. She might as well have told me she got the Technodrome for her tenth birthday. The troll phenomenon is kinda like the yo-yo phenomenon, with each generation falling prey to the madness. It’s just wunna doze tings.

I always preferred these little trolls to the medium and big (teddy bear sized) ones. I guess it’s because the smaller they are, the more you can do with them play-wise. A bath is an ocean, and so on. It’s also nice to reduce their hideous features to a negligible size.

I didn’t want anything to do with those larger trolls, because it would have led to problems with the suspension of disbelief if I tried to incorporate them into my little troll world. I guess I could have taken the easy way out and allowed that they’d been enlarged by some enchantment, but that never occurred to me. And that’s a damn shame, when you consider the possibilities for a King Kong-sized troll running amok in Trolltown.

Anyway, that little guy pictured above is now my mascot for Christmas 2006. I’m going to carry him in my pocket all December, show him the Christmas lights down the street, give him a nibble of the chocolate from my advent calendar each night, build him a little house in the Christmas tree… NO I’M NOT. I SWEAR.

My family is pretty aware of my nostalgia addiction. If they didn’t figure it out when I came home from the Sunday market with unopened cans of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soft drink (circa 1991), then they probably cottoned on when I bought the gigantic Electronic T-Rex from the Jurassic Park action figure line that I wanted so badly as a kid, then wrapped it in Christmas paper and gave it to myself*.

It’s a pleasant surprise (because it lets me know that they’re not gathering in whatever room I’m not in and censuring my retrobsession in hushed tones) when my loved ones help me feed my habit. It’s usually mum, but my little sister has been known to come home from op-shops with an old Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers book or an Uncle Scrooge Happy Meal toy for me. (Usually stuff I already have, or have no interest in, but bless her little heart just the same.)

A few weeks ago there was a secondhand toy sale at the sis’s school, and, knowing my love for all things Gumby, she picked this jigsaw puzzle up,:

Pretty nice, chilled-out summer tableau, right? Almost makes you want to start singing ‘Holiday Road’ from the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies. But I’ve always been suspicious of Gumby, and this has led me to question the image of fun and frivolity that he goes to such great lengths to project.

(At this stage I’ll suggest you click-to-enlarge to get a better look at it, cos some finer details may not show in the smaller pic.)

Now, it’s not like I study Art History or anything, but I’ve read enough comic books (fifty thousand, if I had to guess…) to develop an eye for perspective and constancy of size/shape, and all that other stuff that I am probably misusing the terms for (’Tut, tut!’ cry the art aficionados!). So the first thing that hit me about this puzzle is the fact that Gumby appears to be about three point five times the size of Pokey. I had the toys as a kid, man. I know the Gumby-to-Pokey ratio is about the same as man-to-pony.

That incongruity tipped me off that not all is quite right on Gumbigan’s Island, pulling me deeper still through this bizarre window on a deranged world. Salvador Dali got nothin’ on this shit.

Through my many years spent in Star Wars nerddom, I’ve developed a finely honed ability to  explain away even the biggest inconsistency, a necessity when you take fictional worlds too seriously. My explanation is this: Gumby stole a quantity of Pokey’s clay (or plasticine, or whatever those fucks are made out of) and added it to his own body mass. This would also explain the uncharacteristic lightness of the green hue of Gumby’s ’skin’. See what I mean about taking fictional worlds too seriously?

My interpretation of Gumby as a total prick goes right back to watching the show as a kid. I think my perception of Gumby’s show may have been coloured by the conditions in which I watched it. It was always on the ABC after-school schedule in that last 10 minutes of kids’ programming before the news and shit started, when twilight was falling and I was half asleep after a day of chasee (no idea how to spell that) and tee-ball at school, which kind of leant a disturbing air to the show. The inherent bizareness of a bunch of claymation people running around fighting innumerable foes and getting into various Kafkaesque situations probably helped, too.

I was also aghast at the injustice with which the so-called villains of the show, the Blockheads, were treated. They were just a pair of happy-go-lucky scamps out for a totally innocuous good time, but as soon as their heads popped out from behind an inkwell or a book or something, Gumby would be like ‘Let’s get, em, guys!’ in his uncanny Mickey-Mouse-on-helium voice, and the claymated carnage would begin.

Back to the puzzle, though. Notice how Pokey lies on his towel, legs splayed uncomfortably, tail between his legs. What does that suggest to you? I think we may be dealing with a case of sexual abuse here. Pokey’s smiling, sure, but that’s the way of these Svengaliesque bastards; forcing the victim, under threat of violence (and we know Gumby’s penchant for savagery) to project a facade of serene domesticity.

There are other questions raised in this picture of course, like ‘why is that fish such a camera whore?’ and ‘how did Gumby and Pokey get to that geographically implausible island?’ but we shouldn’t allow such peripheral inquiries to divert us from the real issue.

Looking at Gumby’s smile and the nonchalance with which he raises his ‘lemonade’ (straight Jack Daniels) makes me sick to the stomach. This cycle of physical, mental, and sexual abuse cannot be allowed to continue.

* Note: I didn’t really wrap up the T-Rex and give it to myself, but I did spend too much time and WAAAAAY too much money tracking it down over eBay. 

… I submit the greatest picture in human artistic history, since the first caveman drew a dick and some boobs on a cave wall for kicks:

The only way that could be any more 80s is if Eddie Murphy was to E.T’s left, and Mr. T was standing behind them with his hands on his hips, looking all menacing.

That’s from The E.T. Storybook, by the way, a fabled collector’s item which comes with a record (those big, black things that look like CDs) of Michael Jackson reading the story. I’ve yet to get my hands on a copy, but I just have to believe that the signal to turn a page is not a chime or a twinkle like other books-on-tape, but one of Michael’s trademark ‘hoooo’ cries.

Seriously, though- that twinkly chime sound is the stuff childhoods are made of.

My mum was in one of her twice-or-thrice-annual nostalgic moods tonight, so she had all our old photo albums spread out across the lounge room. This poring over photos may have something to do with my impending 21st birthday, and the threat that she's been making since I was about ten years old to print a picture of my naked tush in the bath in the birthdays section of the newspaper on my 21st. I don't really care; I don't even want a party for my 21st. Not a big deal to me.

Embarassing child nudity pics aside, though, I was pretty excited to see this happy snap that mum turned up:

Looks like I was having fun there. It's strange- I have never seen that photo before. I remember the Superfriends pyjamas, and that guitar (it only played an electronic rendition of "You Are My Sunshine"), but not together. I guess it's in about '88 or '89. That's pre-Turtles for me. A year later and I would've been wearing a Donatello costume to bed.

I'm a bit freaked out about the Superfriends thing, actually, in light of the terrible loss of Alex Toth on Saturday morning. I was just watching some episodes of Space Ghost on the Friday before his death, and now this picture of me in my Superfriends jammies shows up. Scary.