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26 March 2007
Things I am pointlessly nostalgic for:→[More:]Staring into soda cans to see if I won a prize.
Choosing cereal each week based solely on the prize included inside. See, my brother really wanted this one toy, so he promised I could have every single cereal box toy we got afterwards.
I remember when cereal companies started shifting to mail-in rebate offers, etc, instead of honest-to-goodness toys.
Watching Battle of the Planets and thinking it was awesome. Some childhood highlights should not be revisited, as I found out when I tried to watch the show as an adult and was caused great pain. Yes, I tried watching it properly subbed as Gatchaman too. Still sucked.Ultraman is still tons of fun though, as I've mentioned before.
Oooh, Halonine, me too, me too. I actually worked at a McDonalds and we would try to win with cups that were dropped on the floor, or extra hash brown wrappers.
Wow, yeah, cereal toys. I remember ones that came as plastic flat kits that you had to press out and put together. I don't remember what any of them actually were, but I do remember the excitement of rummaging to the bottom of a new box of Coco Crispies (which they were called before they were Coco Pops, and they were advertised by Sooty & Sweep) to find the toy.
Trying to explain the pre-vcr, pre-cable world to someone born after 1980 is hopeless. I even miss those snowy, staticy UHF stations that almost seemed like hallucinations when I was a kid.
The way the old pop-tops from beer and soda cans, back when they detached entirely from the can, would get embedded in the tar of city streets, and you could see constellations of flattened metal rings and tongues while you waited for the light to change.
WCBS-FM ('We play your favoite ooooldies') and WNEW-FM ('My musical education began there') in New York. Both are now defunct. Thanks a lot, Clear Channel.
My parents loved country music so their station was 1050-WHN* which is now a sports station I believe. My sister was into disco so she was a WBLS girl.
*was actually listening to patsey cline on WHN when the girl-DJ broke in to tell us John Lennon had been just been shot.
You know, the sticker books where you had to buy a pack of stickers that came with a stick of crappy gum - book sold seperately of course. Each pack came with random stickers in the series and you had to collect all the stickers to complete the book? I had the Snow White one...I'm sure there were others...I don't think I ever did complete the book though.
And good cartoons! Smurfs. Jem and the Holograms (Jem is excitement! hehe) Voltron. Transformers. SilverHawks. TigerCats. Care Bears. They just don't make cartoons like the did back in the day.
Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact. Telephone hotlines. Anything that you put a cartridge in. Action figures, or as we all called them due to intense familiarity: "Figures."
Those credit card chachunk chachunk machines. Butterfly knives. Bazooka Gum. Subway tokens. Fucking Nintendo Duckhunt, oh lord I'm not nostalgic for that, I miss it like a phantom limb.
Sports cards that were less than a buck a pack and came with gum. Video games that didn't require an engineering degree to play. Drinking outdoors in New York. 45's.
Heh. Before I moved to New York, when I was in management at a Discovery Channel Store, there was a kid, I dunno, maybe sixteen years old, how old do you have to be to get a credit card? Kid musta been at the low limit. So his credit card magnetic strip wasn't working, or maybe our reader was on the fritz, so I pulled out the cachunk cachunk machine to make an imprint.
When I set the card in and put the slip over it, the kid said, "Hey, waitaminnit, what are you doing to my card?"
I said, "This machine will make carbon copies of your card so we have a record of this sale and can prove the transaction occured if the card company asks. It's for your protection as well as ours."
Hugh, I watched Pips' pre-pubescent niece be utterly baffled by her grandparents' rotary phone (my landlady has one, too, which I find somehow comforting).
Wrist bands. Wearing Puma Clydes or Addidas shell toes because that was what kind of sneakers you could get, not because they were "Old School."
Ricardo Montalban. A slice and a fountain soda and you still had 75 cents out of your two dollars to play Spy Hunter.
Spaldeen balls. Those blue bouncy dudes for playing one bounce handball. The smell of cheap, shitty reefer being smoked on the street.
Puerto Rican dudes who bought one can of Bud and then wrapped it perfectly (like Japanese gift wrap, no tape work of art style) in a paper bag with a perfectly cuffed edge and then drank their beer with a straw on the subway, calmly and with no fanfare.
Airfix model kits. Riding my BMX all day during the summer holidays. The X-Files back when I first watched it (revisiting that was really painful). Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands on my Atari ST (although I've recently downloaded STeem, a great emulator, so don't have to be nostalgic about that any more. Thankfully they are still great).
The feeling I got when I first read OMNI magazine, or National Geographic, or Tolkien novels - like there's a whole great big world out there, and it could be mine if I was only brave enough to step out my front door. Now the world seems very small indeed.
I remember Dynamite and Bananas! R.L. Stine was Jovial Bob before he started writing kiddie horror.
The metal ridge inside the desk at school where you could stash your pencil. The jungle gym at that looked like Saturn--I called it the satellite. Friday afternoon riding lessons.
Colorforms. And yes, ZOOM. And Romper Room, Mighty Mouse, Quisp, Freakies, Pop Rocks, Bottle Cap candy. And finding porn stashed in my older brother's room.
Scholastic book paper catalogs you got at school. The Vegetable Soup show on PBS. Creature Feature on Saturday afternoon tv, along with the odd old old Johnny Weissmuller black and white Tarzan movie. Black and white checked Vans. Tiger Beat magazine with Scott Baio centerfolds.
Colorforms! OMG! I actually still have an acorn colorform somewhere. My sister and I found it on a flight to FL.
And 3-2-1 Contact!! That was the first magazine I had a subscription to.
Does anyone else miss REAL Cracker Jack toys? My mom had a whole collection from the 50's - miniature dogs and tin things. They were so cool. Even when I was a kid we got little plastic toys... all they give out now are stickers and crappy jokes.
Those soda machines that dispensed cold, cold glass bottles of soda. You could open the door and touch all the bottles (and get cooled off) but they wouldn't release until you put your 50 cents in (or whatever it was).
Radio Hauraki. Can you imagine anything like that now?
The jungle gym that was in the primary school down the road from where I lived, which was in the form of a huge globe made of a number of curved steel pipes to form the outside of the globe, filled with pipes welded at random angles through the interior of it - we used to see who could get in the most awkward positions. This thing was an absolute hazard in today's terms - it was easy to climb up the outside of it and end up about four metres above the bitumen-covered ground with nothing to hang onto. Good times, good times.
Points style distributors and carburetors on V-8 engines, 'cause you could actually tune an engine, with some wrenches, a couple of screwdrivers, and a set of feeler guages. It was skill worth having. Now, it's not.
Sugar sweetened Coke. I hardly ever (maybe once or twice a year, in the summer, if I'm parched) drink a Coke anymore, and when I do, they taste like corn syrup crap.
Schoenling "Little Kings" Cream Ale in the little 7 oz. green bottles, sold as an 8 pack. They made the perfect black 'n tan, with 1/2 a 12 oz Guiness.
Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, in the 10 piece flat tins, or the 50 piece cans. The ones with the real Yenidje and Latakia tobaccos. 7 - 10x the nicotine of an unfiltered Camel, burned a 1/2 hour each, left indelible yellow-brown stains on all your fingers, teeth and lips. Sooooo good. Soooo bad for me.
the things, I've forgotten what they were called, that you put on your bicycle spokes and that made a clacky sound falling down the spokes if you biked slow enough. Of course they were fluorescent colours, like it seemed most of the 80s were.
Points style distributors and carburetors on V-8 engines ...
Yeah, I hear ya. I have finally given up even trying to make sense of the mechanicals of any car I own and now hand it over to the mechanic every six months or so and say "just fix whatever is wrong", which pains me somewhat, but I have more important things to do and learn these days. On a brighter note, I am seriously considering a new boat purchase and it has a good, old-fashioned, pushrod-two-valve-per-cylinder-single-carb-non-electronic-anything-V-fucking-eight in it.
Dynamite magazine
Bananas magazine
Sassy magazine
Cereal toys Remote Control
Carnation Breakfast Bars
Taco pizza and peanut butter crunch bars in the school cafeteria
Sticker collections
Kaboom! (awesome dance club in Chicago)
Troll/Arrow/Scholastic book club (I LIVED for the day our book club orders would come in!)
Coke in tall glass bottles
The Muppet Show (yay, Specklet!)
TigerBeat Magazine
Looney Tunes (uncut/unedited)
The Little Rascals
Fat Albert
Electric Company and Zoom
Davey and Goliath on Sunday mornings
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