This was the kind of post I envisioned doing for my 100th entry over here a couple weeks ago, but my amateur photo shoot with a squirrel on my birdbath proved to be a big hit for the milestone post, so no regrets there.  But I wanted to take some time to kinda talk to myself about how my presence on this blog has changed in the nine months now I’ve been contributing to it… and of course by now, I’m more than used to talking to myself here!

The internet was made for crazy people like me.

I started this blog on Christmas Eve last year with two basic intentions that were both essentially striving for the same goal.  First of all, I wanted to introduce this cast of wacky characters I’d created through several years of inspiration over on my longtime message board home to the public at large.  Not an easy task given the tons of backstory behind each one of them, and many of those old intro posts that litter the first couple months of my blog were somewhat awkward and probably confusing to those outside of my circle.  The reason for this was that I had just opened up my own shop on CafePress where I hoped there may be enough interest in poorly drawn, but cute animal characters that folks might be interested in paying outrageous prices to buy cool stuff with my designs.

The response was overwhelming!

While I have made about $150 thus far from this little venture, almost all of that came from people I already knew would be interested.  I’ve made two sales totaling a $1.51 profit to the world at large, and neither of those folks ever laid eyes on this blog.  Going solely on what my primary purpose for creating this blog was, it has been a massive failure and a complete waste of time.

Go cry in the corner you big baby!

Ah, but as it turns out, I am having so much fun throwing out my warped artwork and even more warped views out here for the world to see that I rarely even think about what this blog’s primary mission was anymore.  More and more, my posts are just random events in my life, thoughts, squirrel pictures I take when I’m bored… kind of like what a normal blogger would post on their site.  I can share my demented take on life while at the same time share images from my vast archive of past digital crapola I’ve created over the last…. wow, almost 5 years now!

Lucky you!

And of course, there is my comic series, now in its 22nd week!  I have notebooks and notebooks full of old, crappily drawn comics from when I was a kid, and I am really enjoying sharing my warped sense of humor with everyone else on the web, even if only a handful of people actually see it.  I’ve even picked up a few positive comments on my last few comics.  If I can make just one person laugh, it was worth the three to four hours it takes to create one of my strips…

You can bet we’ll be seeing more of these two!

And it’s no surprise to me that my main source of cheap laughs isn’t coming from the star of my series or his red and white co-stars…. but from this little guy:

Possums are born comedians.

To think that Buster’s only been in my stable for a little over a year now, and he’s quickly taking Evil Squirrel’s place as merry mischief maker.  Having created many past series of characters in all those old comics I spoke about, I figured this would eventually happen, as the main attraction (ES) often eventually becomes the overseer and observer of the batshit insane cast of idiots that end up surrounding him.  Buster’s now the go-to guy possum when I need a rabble-rouser.

And a hit with the ladies, I might add…

And now, for the past three weeks or so, I have taken the additional step of trying to draw some traffic to my blog.  By taking advantage of WordPress’ “Like” feature and even throwing out a comment or two on other people’s blogs if I am so inclined, I have been paid back with an influx of visitors, a spike in hits, and have doubled my number of followers!  I’ve even followed a handful of blogs of those who have stuck with me in an attempt to forge a few friendships in the blogosphere.  Maybe I’ll find my way over here in this brave new world after all….

Come and play with us!

Ah, but even this isn’t coming as easy for me as it should.  You see, those lovers of Spongebob porn out there who constantly find their way to my blog only to be disappointed I have no nude photos of Sandy Cheeks have managed to screw me over in a way I never expected.  When I “Like” another blogger’s post, they get an email from WordPress inviting them to check out my blog, and then it provides links to my three most popular posts rather than just give a direct link to my homepage.

Wanna take a guess what my #1 most popular blog post is?

OH MY GOD!!!! I’m not clicking on THAT!!!

A few people who have dared to visit me anyway have even commented they were initially hesitant because they saw the title of that blog post and thought I was some porn spammer.  Perish the thought!  I certainly cuss, draw stuff that is sometimes a bit questionable, and have a taste for the freakier side of the art world… but I do try to run as clean a blog as possible, and it frustrates me that more often than not, a commentary on cartoon porn is the first thing people see when they visit my blog.  It’s a good piece if you know what I’m all about beforehand, but that’s like being introduced to Chuck Berry’s music by listening to “My Ding-a-Ling”

Now The Lonely Island is a different story….

Well, if you’ve made it this far, congratulations!  I can’t sell you four dollar Viagra or naked pictures of Princess Kate, but I do hope I can provide you with more entertainment, insight, and cheap laughs with the art and words that ooze out of my brain.  No purchase necessary, and this offer is valid in all 50 states and both hemispheres….

Even in Ithaca, NY….

I’ll admit it, I’m pretty hard on new technology.  That isn’t really a surprise to anyone who’s an avid reader of my blog (all four of you!).  I think we can live without the vast wasteland of creepiness that is Facebook and Tweeter, we don’t need cell phones that are so advanced they can do pretty much everything…. except make a damn phone call.  I don’t think we need cars that have more gadgets and buttons and gauges and pretty lights than Kitt from Knight Rider had.

Nothing wrong with using a little elbow grease to roll down the windows…

But yes, I admit that most people consider these things to be great technological advances for the good of our society.  Who am I to argue with them…. like I could argue with a cell phone zombie anyway….

Baaaaaaa!!!

But there is one place that computer technology has completely invaded during my lifetime where it not only was not needed, but has actually succeeded in being more of a hindrance than a help.  That place would be your local bowling alley….

Public Enemy Number One:

Do… you… want… to… play… a… game?

I’ve mentioned before I come from a bowling family, and we were started off young.  I bowled in my first league back in the mid 80′s, and back then, you had to keep score yourself on an overhead projector.  For those of you under the age of 20 who didn’t get to experience the magic of the overhead projector during your school days, here is what you missed out on….

The second best classroom educational format only to the filmstrip (BEEP!)

For some odd reason, in the late 80′s, bowling centers decided that bowlers didn’t want to keep their own damn scores anymore.  We once had two bowling alleys in town.  One, the one I didn’t bowl at, laid out the big bucks to get these early automatic scoring machines, and used them as a gimmick to get people to come there.  That worked just the opposite for me… keeping score was part of the fun of bowling to me!  Eventually, my bowling center caved as well, and in 1994, we got the stupid machines… and they still had those same scoring machines when the alley was shut down last year.

This image just screams 2012, doesn’t it?

So now I have to bowl several miles away… and at a bowling alley whose automatic scorers make these early 90′s models look like an iPad…

Team 7 hath died from dysentry

As bad as it is that I have to put up with Pac Man era technology tallying up my league’s scores, what really irritates me about these things is how much more complicated they make bowling!  Almost every time, you can count on at least one if not several delays in the action due to the 5 minutes it takes to fix something on the automatic scorer when it fucks up.  If someone throws a ball in the gutter and gets credit for a strike, to change that on the machine (I am not making this up!) requires going through THREE different menus and NINE button pushes in all.  You know what’s slightly easier than that…. the almighty pencil!

Sniff! Ah, the good old days!

Just like digital clocks have given us a whole generation of kids who can’t tell time, automatic scorers have given us a whole generation of kids who don’t even know how to keep a bowling score…. or care about bowling for that matter.  Keeping score forced you to be involved in what was going on, and made the whole bowling experience so much more enjoyable, and definitely a lot less stressful over what to do when the machine forgot how to count pins.  Unfortunately, these things have pretty much invaded every bowling alley out there now… and the sport has definitely suffered because of it.

There are so many things about the golden age of bowling alleys that could inspire a wealth of Flashback Friday moments… the 70′s-like atmosphere that carried on in most centers through the new millennium, those funky colored team bowling shirts, the Jackson Pollackesque designs of the house balls, the quarter munching arcades, the (cough hack) smoke so thick you couldn’t see the ball washer in front of you.  So many great memories!  But it’s the old overhead projector scorers that I will miss the most.  The feel of the acetane scoresheets, the first degree burns on the side of my right hand, the naughty shadow puppets, craning my neck to check for sleepers….

A simpler and much more sensible time.

You belong in our bowling alleys and not the Smithsonian, oh glorious overhead projector!  Perhaps it was staring at your 500 watt bulb too long that made us so blind as to accept newer, but more inferior scoring technology…

I could honestly go on and on about classic TV ads forever.  While most people were taking potty breaks during the commercial breaks, I was taking in the delightful entertainment and often-times unintentional genius of the paid advertisements that were carefully selected for my demographic.  I was thinking of some of my favorite campaigns from the late 80′s and early 90′s, and realized that a lot of them were for some sort of foodstuff you added to another comestible to make it better.  Since a lot of these brands weren’t well known at the time, they had to rely on quirky ad gimmicks to make a name for themselves, and they succeeded.  I’ve come up with four condiment ad campaigns from that time that were quite memorable, made me laugh, or both… and I’ve included them all in today’s Flashback Friday post….

Grey Poupon Mustard:

Don’t pretend you can’t remember this commercial (or one of its many spinoffs)…..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itHhhYxqSSE

Only the little people use French’s.

This scenario was so absurd that it inspired countless pop culture references and parodies for years to come.  Even the Grey Poupon ad execs realized their own idea was just begging to be roasted, that they even began mocking it in later commercials like this memorable ad!  It’s incredibly ironic that despite the snobbishness behind the entire image of Grey Poupon’s product, they managed to sell it to the unwashed masses by poking some unintentional fun at the very people who were most likely to indulge in this high class condiment…

Pace Picante Sauce:

I would hope you remember the classic set up of this campaign just from hearing the brand name… but if not, you’re in for a treat, as I found a You Tube video that contains not one, but TWO of the classic Pace commercials!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSxnieYctVM

This nut’s made in NEW YORK CITY!!!!

Pace Picante Sauce prided itself on being made in San Antonio, Texas, by real Texans who knew was picante sauce should taste like.  I’m not sure if there were ever any picante sauce factories in New York City, but it doesn’t matter…. that payoff line in each Pace ad cracked my ass up every time!  In 1995, not long after those ads aired, and perhaps due to its now rising popularity through the “This stuff’s made in New York City!” ads, Campbell’s Soup bought up the Pace brand.  I’ve been unable to determine if Pace is still made in San Antonio or not….

Polaner All Fruit:

Definitely the forgotten stepchild of great condiment commercials of my youth, but this may be the funniest of them all….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xBydH93eDY

Would you please pass the joint?

Another fancy schmancy brand name trying to mock its hoity toity clientele, just like Grey Poupon successfully did…. but in a perfectly brilliant way!  And I don’t think they could have found a better actor to utter the “Would you please pass the jelly?” line than the guy they found.  I can’t imagine this 30 second farce working with anyone else…

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!:

This butter substitute brand was well on its way to establishing itself thanks to some quirky romantic parody ads in the 80′s.  But in the mid 90′s, ICBINB really hit small screen gold when they began using romance novel coverboy Fabio in their ads.  I’ve chosen this one for demonstration purposes, because the way Fabio adds in “Spray” after I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter was so funny, it’s still the go-to line this day anytime me or my youngest sister hear of Fabio….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg52V_bOIuY

Nice try ES, but MBRS seems preoccupied with someone off camera…

Being a manly squirrel, I obviously am not attracted to Fabio for his supposed looks, but I do like the guy because he knows he’s a campy pop culture icon and isn’t afraid to mock himself for a few bucks.  At least there is a reason Fabio is famous, unlike these Kardashians and Lohans and all these reality show pseudo-celebrities who seem to exist solely because the paparazzi got tired of chasing around the real celebs and OJ Simpson hasn’t murdered anybody lately….

Parrrrrrkaaaaay!!!!

I think I just lost my appetite.  Would you please pass the Rolaids?

Now showing on Channel 33…. scrambled porn!!!

Oh my… for the second straight week, I’ve started out my Flashback Friday post with some archaic looking device that anyone born since Ronnie Reagan left office has most likely never seen before, and is probably frightened of.  Relax, kiddies… back in my day, this was one of several old relics that we used to tune in cable TV.  Yes, we had cable TV back in the 80′s… and a number of those stations are still with us today and at some point in the recent past have likely celebrated 30th anniversaries.

Back when MTV’s acronym actually had some meaning!

I scoured and scoured the vast openness of Google to find an old cable channel lineup from the 1980′s, but came up empty… which is too bad, because it would have pointed to one of the first oddities a youngster might notice about that old cable box.  Why does it only seem to have 37 channels?  Heck, these days, most basic cable packages come with around 100 channels.  Well, even though cable TV was first getting a strong foothold on the country back in the early 80′s, there still weren’t very many channels of national prominence.  When you factor in that about 10 of the spots on that box were reserved for local network and local access (not to mention three set aside for FAA access, which my 9 year old mind couldn’t comprehend at the time), there were only about 20-25 actual cable channels back then.

The only possible explanation for how Mother Angelica became one of the biggest cable TV stars of the 80′s.

That simple, but clunky box sat atop many televisions three decades ago.  Here’s an even older version of a cable box that was the kind I saw the first time I laid eyes on this curiosity that gave us more than 7 channels…

Is that AM or FM?

Notice that neither of these boxes had an eyehole to make them compatible with a remote control.  So even if you did have the luxury of changing channels on your TV without leaving the couch, you still had to wriggle your ass out of the seat to switch from The Nashville Network to The Christian Broadcasting Network.  That was one of the small prices to pay to have access to music videos any time, any day instead of just on Friday nights, or to get the weather whenever you wanted it from trusted names like Dale Dockus and John Hope.

John Hope practically invented hurricanes!

Today, cable TV is a vast wasteland of hundreds of channels with a ridiculous amount of content.  What’s truly sad about the state of CATV is the way many classic niche channels have allowed their very identities to be stripped so that now there is very little actual variety on anymore, and the programs offered are essentially just heavily edited “reality shows” involving almost any theme you can imagine.  MTV is the most infamous example of this devolution, but so many other stations have followed suit.  Does anyone out there really believe that TLC stands for The Learning Channel in these days of pageants and Honey Boo Boo?  What could possibly be Artsy and Entertainmentlike about a bunch of hillbillies or bounty hunters?  Since when are modern dramas considered to be American Movie Classics?

Just try and hock this, Pawn Stars!

The early days of cable bring back so many memories for me… and I’ll be sure to share some more of those in detail in future Flashback Friday posts.  But until then, I need to get up and press a new button after the umpteenth night of some silly reality marathon.  I can only pray my shiny 21st century cable box can become a time machine, and allow me to stumble across some semblance of coaxial sanity.  This looks like a job for the greatest secret agent in the world…..

Oh, crumbs!

Everything’s A-OK, punk!

We were all young once, even those of you out there who actually grew up.  Most people alive today grew up in the era of television, and undoubtedly have memories of the children’s shows that were all the rage at that time.  One of the kiddie shows that has stood the test of time and been there for many a generation of youngsters is Sesame Street.  Created in 1969, it is still on the air and as commercially $ucce$$ful popular as ever today.  Of course, I only really recall the show from the 80′s, where thanks to having a seemingly endless parade of younger sisters, I got to know the furry monsters of The Street throughout most of the decade.  If you can remember when Mr. Hooper was still alive, Mr. Snuffleuppagus was still a “figment” of Big Bird’s imagination, and there wasn’t any evil, red, annoying as fuck, snotnosed punk of an Elmo around to ruin everything… then you came from my generation of Sesame Street children!

We all know the main denizens of PBS’s most famous avenue…. Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, Count von Count, and Elmo’s mentor Grover.  But for this week’s Flashback Friday, I’d like to reminisce a bit about some of my favorite not-so-famous Sesame Street characters from back in the day.  While I had a working list of B and C list muppets already lined out for this post, doing some research I came across a few more I had totally forgotten about… so hopefully you too will find a lot of pleasant memories in today’s post!

I have no idea what is wrong with that bear, but I think he needs emergency medical attention…

Telly Monster!  He was kind of a hot mess, but I found out where he got his name from.  His original purpose was to be obsessed with television.  I guess someone decided that wouldn’t make him a good influence on young children, so someone picked up the T encyclopedia and decided he would now be obsessed with triangles.  Hey, we know you didn’t choose that life for yourself, Telly, so we forgive you!

This child was never seen again…

Herry Monster!  Wait… “Herry”!?!?  really?  What kind of stupid spelling is that?  Were Herry’s parents merely ahead of their time in the fucked up baby name craze, or was there just a typo on his birth certificate?  Either way, we kids loved his badassedness, and if he were still a big star on the show today, our children would be much better off than they are now learning pussified lessons from a discarded red sock…

The wild girls of Sesame Street.

Prairie Dawn (left) and Betty Lou (right) were just the same muppet with a different wig.  Come on, girl, just because you were entertaining a group of 5 year olds, did you really think we were that stupid not to see through your charade?  I guess it’s a good thing your viewers were all well before the age of puberty, because we all know how hot noseless pink chicks can be.  You little tease…

Mr. Perkitude!

Guy Smiley was Sesame Street’s favorite game show host back when game shows were actually cool.  In googling up a picture of ol’ Guy, I see that he apparently got a resurgence in popularity last year because a lot of people thought Mitt Romney resembled him.  Ohhhhkay, maybe a little, but I’m pretty sure Guy didn’t carry around a binder full of muppettes…

I’ll never get my hair right!!! Never!!!

I remembered the character Don Music, but had no idea what his name was!  Given his appearance and tendency for overreaction, he has to be some kin to Guy Smiley, but unlike the bubbly Guy, Don had some of the shittiest self esteem on the show.  He never got the lyrics right to his songs and used to take it out on his piano with his forehead.  The Sex Pistols may get the credit for starting the punk rage, but Don Music was the one who had everyone banging their heads long before Quiet Riot ever hit the charts…

And I will wait, I will wait for you!

Long before the name Mumford became associated with terrible music, The Amazing Mumford was wowing us kids with his incredible ability to fuck up a simple magic trick.  But at least he had the greatest magic words in the business with “a la peanut butter sandwiches!”  He really should be doing commercials for State Farm and not David Copperfield…

A-HA!!! I have deduced that it was the evil Bert who put a hocker in your sandwich!

Sherlock Hemlock, a clueless detective whose dog solved all the crimes.  Sound familiar?  Yeah, Inspector Gadget wasn’t just copying off of Maxwell Smart…

What blog am I on again?

I was going to do a little paragraph on the dementia-plagued cowboy Forgetful Jones….. but, well, I forgot what I was going to say about him.

This is where purple people come from!

Long before In Living Color came along, Sesame Street had its own character that was as black as he wanted to be.  Roosevelt Franklin was a mainstay of the show in the 70′s and 80′s, but eventually became a victim of the PC police who thought he was a purveyor of negative racial stereotypes.  Perhaps had he made his album “My Name Is Roosevelt Franklin” a hip hop piece and not been all educational, he’d be viewed as a role model and not as the pariah he became.  Sorry Rosie, but The Man really was out to get you…

Walking, talking noise complaints.

The Honkers were essentially a one note act, but they amused our early childhood brains without making us want to choke the life out of them like the newer ADHD muppets.

And to finally wrap up this walk down the memory lane of Sesame Street, the absolute most awesomest creatures to ever land at the Children’s Television Workshop…..

Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip!!!!!!

The past decade and a half have seen the television airwaves so inundated with reality TV shows, that it’s hard to remember a time when they were the exception to the rule.  Even harder still is to recall a time when the proceedings of reality TV were actually real enough to be called Reality.  While we all know that Honey Boo Boo’s family is being amped up behind the scenes the same way Jerry Springer dysfunctional guests were, those Storage Wars guys aren’t blindly finding billion dollar valuables, and there are no real housewives on any show that says Real Housewives in the title… if there’s one reality format we should be able to boldly award the Real Seal to, it’s the judge shows.

You know what we’re talking about…. there’s about 42389933 of them currently on daytime TV.  If we had the number of judges in our actual courtrooms that we had on TV, court dockets wouldn’t be so backed up as they are now…

Isn’t there an important child custody case you could be presiding over right about now?

While Judge Judy is currently the gold standard of the TV courtroom format, and the one who inspired so many other TV judge wannabes in the 21st century, for my generation there was and still is only one TV magistrate that made sure the scales of justice were being fairly balanced in small claims court….

ALL RISE!!!

YOU, Ms. Merbear, are out of order!!!

Judge Joseph A. Wapner presided over The People’s Court during its entire 12 year original run from 1981-1993.  The People’s Court was one of the first and definitely most popular television courtroom shows to “try” actual cases involving actual litigants.  I put the word “try” in quotes because Judge Wapner’s domain was not actually a courtroom with any authority to rule on a motion for anything other than taking a lunch break.  It was actually a televised case of binding arbitration, where both parties agreed to waive their right to a real trial to appear on TV and have Judge Wapner decide their fates.  It was a win/win situation for both parties since they split a pool of appearance money from which any judgment was also taken from… something that does not happen when you get your ass sued off in real small claims court…

I’ve just been scarred for life! That’s going to cost Juan Valdez a pretty peso or two…

You can take all of the daytime judge shows on TV right now and put them all together and not approach the amount of 80′s awesomeness that was the original People’s Court.  Judge Wapner ran a tight ship that rarely led to outbursts, insults, or any of the other cheesy dramatics that pervade the current shows of the genre.  I’ll admit it, the show would probably be considered boring by today’s entertainment standards… but since when is a courtroom supposed to be entertaining?

Unless, of course, it involves two yutes…

One of the most kickass features about The People’s Court was the theme song.  It struck up as soon as the plaintiff walked through the doors.  We’d hear announcer Jack Harrell give the reason they were seeking justice while “Ba Boom-Boom Boom Boom” was playing in the background.  Then the vitals of the complaint would appear on the screen in teletype fashion.  Repeat for the defendant.  Then, while 108 year old Rusty the Bailiff swears the two parties in, we hear Harrell get very serious about how what we are witnessing is REAL.  The cases are REAL.  The litigants are NOT ACTORS.  They’ve agreed to settle their dispute in our forum…… THE PEOPLE’S COURT!  OK, maybe there was a little cheesy dramatization in the show.  But damned, if that didn’t get you fired up for Judge Wapner’s appearance!

10 seconds to Wapner!!!

And of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the show’s crack reporter Doug Llewelyn, who got the fun job of interviewing the two litigants as they exited the courtroom after Judge Wapner decided whether or not their appearance money was going to get raided or not.  He managed to handle the job very professionally without displacing a single hair on that horrific 80′s do he was sporting, and still had it in him to advise us before the credits rolled that if we had a dispute with someone we couldn’t work out, we should take it to court!

That hair…. good lord!

Let’s put it all together, and watch this real People’s Court case from 1986 in which a man who thought a stun gun would be a cool thing to have and nearly zapped his own balls off when he broke it decided to sue the store he bought it from when they wouldn’t offer him a refund for it:

I was so waiting for Rusty to turn to Judge Wapner and scream, “Don’t tase me, bro!!!”

How all drunk sports fans should be treated.

After a short hiatus, The People’s Court was rebooted back in the late 90′s and has aired in syndication ever since with such honorable judges as former New York mayor Ed Koch, Judge Judy’s less popular husband, and some chick named Marilyn Milian who has now presided over the show for the same length of time as Judge Wapner, 12 seasons.  While I have never seen a single episode of the new People’s Court, I have to ask the question any keeper of nostalgia would ask in such a situation… regardless of whether I’ve been exposed to the new show, can it really top the well-celebrated original?  We don’t need Judge Wapner to rule on that for us, now do we?

Let the record state that the defendants are fucked.

Judgment for the original People’s Court in the amount of one million awesome 80′s points.

As a parting gift for reading today’s post, you’ll all receive a copy of The People’s Court home game! This really existed and I unexpectedly got it for Christmas one year. I wish I was kidding about that…

Admit it, back in the day, you’d have paid good money to talk to a recording of Sting…

As hard as it is for kids under the age of 20 to believe, there was once a time in this world when the internet did not exist, or at least didn’t exist in any practical manner yet… and that prehistoric time wasn’t all that long ago.  That left all of the forward thinkers out there scratching their heads for a way to shamelessly self-promote themselves in a world where social media consisted of spinning a rotary dial around seven times.  Luckily for everyone who was relevant around 1990 (or still thought they were relevant), a new avenue opened up that allowed pseudo-celebrities and mega-billion dollar corporations alike to make a lot of money off of people who were too stupid to understand their phone bill.  The same time period that brought us MC Hammer and Saved by the Bell also ushered in the 1-900 number craze…. and boy, was it impossible to avoid at the time…

Hello! Is this the Dial-a-Skunkette hotline?

From around 1989 until the time when home internet started taking hold in the mid 90′s, it seemed like anyone and everyone had their own 900 number.  The only thing more insane than the fact that MC Hammer, Freddy Krueger, and even Santa Claus had their own 900 numbers is the fact that anyone would want to waste $2.00 the first minute and 95 cents each additional minute to listen to their pre-recorded tripe.  Hell, even Grandpa Munster had his own 900 number…. yes, Grandpa Fucking Munster was stealing nickels and dimes from kids’ parents back in the day!  Juliette, you may want to shield your eyes from this….

If you watched any of those YouTube links I provided (and you know you did, because if you didn’t love nostalgia so much, you’d be reading a better blog right now), you’ll notice how they all mentioned “Kids!  Be sure to get your parents’ permission before calling!”  You know why that is, don’t you?

Because only a kid with no responsibilities and common sense would be dumb enough to call one of these 900 numbers!!!

Hey! We can make adult decisions too (hic!)

Seriously, everyone went after Joe Camel, claiming he was a marketing tool to get kids to smoke, which was always pretty nitpicky to me.  But almost all of the cheesy celebrity 900 number commercials from the early 90′s were undoubtedly marketed at kids… and they had to know going in that kids were going to be their main source of income!  And how many of those kids got their parents’ permission before dialing?  Yeah, right…

Hey Mom! Is it OK if I call the Pamela Anderson hotline again?

My parents had to get 900 numbers blocked on our phone because one of my sisters kept calling the Kid N Play hotline (I really wish I could find that commercial, because the damn jingle is still stuck in my head all these years later).  I would imagine 900 number blocks became quite common since they were the only way to get out of paying the unexpected charges, and pretty soon the prospective customer base for these hotlines dried up and they were essentially gone by the time grunge came on the scene in 1993.

Kids, be sure to get your parents’ permission before trying cocaine.

But while the C-F list celebrities wound up on the outside looking in of the latter days of the 1-900 number fad, a couple of the more seedy industries who knew how to take advantage of the adults who should know better kept right on bringing in the loose change!  By the mid 90′s, if you saw a 1-900 number commercial on TV, you could rest assured it was either going to be for a psychic hotline…

I foresee me getting very rich off of you!

Or an adult “chat” line….

Come on baby! Give me my money’s worth!

Most of these sleazy operations enjoyed a brisk initial profit, only to eventually cave under as more and more charges became disputed and the sirens and seers were unable to collect revenues for many of the calls that were made to them.  The porn industry of course shifted focus to booming internet, while the psychics….. well….

You never saw that Chapter 11 coming, did you Dionne?

Today, the 1-900 number business is dead… literally.  Verizon (nee MCI) was the last carrier in the US that supported pay-per-call 900 numbers, and they put the axe to the service at the end of last year.  I was honestly surprised to see that the industry lasted even this long, especially since cell phones have become so dominant and they have never allowed calls to 900 numbers.  Besides being a tool for cheesy entertainers to make a quick buck, or sleazy profiteers to milk the wallets of the gullible, 900 numbers also had a more responsible role back in their heyday as source of quick information 24/7.  News, weather, sports, gossip… there was a hotline for it all 20 years ago.  Of course, the internet made the need to pay a nominal fee for information one would not have had access to back then totally obsolete by the turn of the millennium.  TV networks often used 900 numbers to allow viewers to interact with the shows in the form of polls, but that too was rendered moot by the web.  So if you miss the days of the 1-900 number, blame this guy…

Yeah, I invented the internet, baby!!! And global warming! And the all you can eat buffet!

We here at The Nest miss hearing the pathetic pleas for money and attention by those who were immersing themselves in their 15 minutes of fame in the early 90′s.  That would have never been possible without the 20th century miracle of telecommunications technology that was the 1-900 number.  A big thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, Watson, Ma Bell, Grandpa Munster, Al Gore, and everyone else who made this small, but totally unforgettable era in dialing history possible.  In fact, we’d like to extend our gratitude via recorded message on our new hotline we set up 1-900-THE-NEST.  Al, be sure to get your parents’ permission before calling….

You’re looking a little inconveniently ill there, Mr. Gore. How about we melt your icecap?

NOTE: Yes, I know it’s only Monday, but I spent all morning composing this post instead of catching up on my sleep, so I might want to do that tomorrow.  Enjoy your weekly trip down the memory lane of advertising a day early!

NOBODY’S HOOOOOOME!!!!

Back in the prehistoric era known as the 1980′s, people were much harder to get a hold of than they are now.  These days, almost everyone carries a cell phone with them wherever they go… making it much easier to contact people regardless of whether they are home or not, while making it a hell of a lot harder for sitcom writers since the unreachable character was a common plot device.  Since common everyday cell technology was still a decade off, the 80′s tried to solve this problem with the answering machine, the ancestor of today’s electronic voicemail.  If you weren’t at home, you could turn on your answering machine and let it answer your phone for you, greeting the caller with whatever recorded message you left asking them to leave their name and number, or perhaps just to FOAD…

Quit trying to sell me insurance!!!!

Were you ever afraid your message might be too mundane or boring for your prospective callers to hear?  Did you ever wish you could liven up your message so that people would actually wait until you left the house to call you just so they could listen to your recording?  Well, the 80′s had the answer to those prayers too, and if you were one of the cool households who blew a couple hundred bucks on an answering machine back in the post-Bell breakup days, you could really spice up your answering machine message with a little help from a 3 and a half minute cassette tape called “Crazy Calls”.

Seriously, aren’t you glad you were alive for the 80′s?  For only about $19.99 plus some standard shipping and handling charge, you could have any one of those side splitting tunes greeting all of the lucky people who rang your number while you were out buying your friends Chia Pets.

Or getting arrested for being too awesome.

But maybe you were too poor to afford an answering machine, or to pay $20 for a 3:30 second cassette tape that wasn’t from Twisted Sister.  Well, if you always wondered what those clever little ditties sounded like in all of their glory, then I’ve got a huge treat for you today!  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and squirrels, I present to you the complete Crazy Calls cassette for your listening pleasure!

I’ll give you a minute or two to quit dancing to that kickass track….

OMG! Like totally tubular!

Let’s break down the Crazy Calls debut album, shall we?

Introduction (:35)

To use Crazy Calls, simply employ the same technique all of us 80′s children had to use to record a song off the radio.  Play the tape in your breakdance era boombox next to your answering machine, and be sure to hit both “record” and “play” at the same time, because it’s the 80′s and we haven’t figured out how to do one touch recording technology yet.  I have to admit, this intro shattered a myth I had about Crazy Calls that it was something you popped into an answering machine and it rotated messages as the calls came in.  No, you have to pick your favorite of the seven crazy calls and have your machine record it playing off of your radio.  Something tells me downloading music off of Napster wasn’t this difficult…

How about we just record our own crazy call?

Track 1 – Boogie Woogie (:20)

Ah yes, who doesn’t love The Andrews Sisters?  And back in the 80′s, there were still people who were alive when they were last relevant.  I gotta admit, this is one of the best 20 second parodies of “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” I have ever heard, and this would absolutely be the crazy call your grandparents would have picked back in 1985 to put on their machine, assuming they had a grandchild available to help them put the crazy call on their answering machine….

Yes son, little Timmy helped us hook up our laptop and it’s working just swell! Your father has already found some naked pictures of our daughter in law on the internets!

Track 2 – Call Me If You Can Can (:20)

Well, if the Boogie Woogie ditty was a little too modern for you, there’s always this relic from the days of Vaudeville that sounds like it was ripped from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.  Just in case you want to plead youth and don’t know what can can dancing is, this should give you an idea…

Vodka always brings out the coochies…

I didn’t think that sounded anything like cancan dancing music, but when I went to YouTube and typed “cancan music” into the search box, this is what came up.  Offenbach’s piece if clearly what this crazy call was inspired by, they just didn’t use the more familiar part that appeared in all those cartoons we watched as kids.

Track 3 – The Answering Machine Zone (:28)

While Rod Serling and singing do not go together, his famous introduction to The Twilight Zone has been parodied in just about every way imaginable, so why not for an answering machine message as well?  I can think of two episodes of The Twilight Zone that centered around telephones, and both of them are as creepy as hell since they involved speaking to dead people.

Yeah Gramma, I just sent Daddy out to the cornfield!

Track 4 – 50′s (:29)

The Crazy Calls naming department worked overtime on coming up with a title for this doo wop ditty.  This was the one that would play over the ordering information at the end of the commercial, and that ending was one of the tunes that stuck in my head for over 25 years.  It’s such a wonderful flashback to the early days of rock and roll, that you’d swear it was being crooned by Marvin Berry and the Starlighters.

Chuck! It’s your cousin Marvin! Hey, you gotta listen to this kid…. oh shit! The cancan song’s playing! He isn’t home!!!!

Track 5 – Bogie (:20)

Also known as the lost track of the Crazy Calls cassette!  Yes, this was the only recording that they didn’t play during the commercial, and nobody who didn’t order the damn thing would have had any idea it even existed!  Kind of like none of the kids from today even know Humphrey Bogart ever existed.  Hearing this rarely played cut makes me want to break out the old Bertie Higgins 45….

Don’t swoon over Bertie’s sparkling eyes or sexy tan lines…

Track 6 – The Rap (:25)

Also known as…. the best fucking recording of anything that ever created sound waves.  Seriously, who doesn’t like old school rap?  Especially compared to some of that garbage that passes as hip hop these days.  Kanye, Ludicrous Speed, Lil Wayne, Lil Jon, Lil Dick…. none of them can touch the def boyz from with the chainz from the 80′s!

They don’t make ‘em like The Fat Boys anymore…

Track 7 – Beethoven’s Fifth (:25)

When Chuck Berry first advised Beethoven to roll over, you can rest assured ol’ Ludwig hadn’t heard the greatest atrocity ever to occur to his music yet.  And keep in mind, just a decade earlier, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony had been turned into a freaking disco song!  So Crazy Calls really upped the ante on how to desecrate a musical classic (and hey, I love disco!)

And really, people who hate disco just don’t have taste…

So if you liked what you heard today, be sure to hit those thrift stores, rummage sales or your parents’ attic, and maybe you too could own your very own copy of that 80′s classic Crazy Calls!  We here at The Nest salute its contribution to the cheesy earworm Hall of Fame, and for coming up with the greatest short feature rap song in the history of beatboxes and gold chains.

Damn!  I gotta hear that one again.  Hit it, boys!

Now that’s what I call hip hop!

Internationally recognized acting superstar, or funeral director? You decide.

Do you recognize the man in the picture above?  He doesn’t exactly look like someone who belongs on my blog, let alone a Flashback Friday post.

Well, if you grew up in the 80′s like I did, you are almost certainly familiar with him.  What if I told you his name was Les Lye?  Does that ring any bells?

No?  Still stumped?  What could this rather stuffy looking guy possibly have to do with our childhood?

Here’s a little hint….

Duh’I got to get that recipe for Reese’s Pieces from the last comic.

If your parents had cable TV in the 1980′s, there is no way you weren’t raised on a heavy dose of Les Lye.  He was the actor who played all of the adult male roles on Nickelodeon’s flagship show of the decade, “You Can’t Do That On Television” (The female adult roles were all played by Abby Hagyard).  While the appeal of Nick’s legendary sketch comedy show was that it was for kids, by kids… there is no doubt that the show’s star was not one of its endless stream of child actors (Note from Buster the Mythbusting Possum: Alanis Morissette was barely a blip on YCDToTV’s radar, only appearing in a small handful of episodes).  She’s only remembered because of what she became), but the man who played all of the adult characters who constantly tormented them.

Lye created a whole slew of offbeat characters that were featured in most of the show’s sketches.  Above you see one of his most famous… restauranteur extraordinaire Barth.  Barth was slow and dimwitted, but an evil genius of culinary tastelessness nonetheless.  The Barthie Burger was legendary in its ability to make the kids sick, and you never quite knew what was going into it…

Whaddaya think’s in the burgers?

Digging further into Les Lye’s closet of quick change disguises, we find other such memorable characters as….

Don’t encourage your mother!

Senator Lance Prevert, the world’s worst and slobbiest father.

Here Lisa, stuff this in your mouth…

Ross Ewich, the show’s “producer” who could often be seen barging in on the set and trying to boss the kids around.

Only in the 80′s could you get away with a Hitler and naughty word reference on children’s television. Man, I miss the good old days!

The kids’ strict teacher Mr. Shidler, whose name was often pronounced with an emphasis on the T…

It’s the 80′s, I can still spank your ass, young man!

The school principal, who would run the detention and have the bad boys and girls of YCDToTV copy some obscene amount of pages from the huge, dusty dictionary on the desk.  I had a fourth grade teacher who loved assigning writing sentences (“I will not be an asshole in class” 200 times) as punishment, so these sketches always resonated with me…

Even Blip never dreamed of the day it would cost a dollar to play a damn arcade game…

Greedy owner of the arcade, Blip.  I don’t need to remind anyone in their 30′s and 40′s how popular the video game arcades were in the 80′s…

You’re not going to trick me into saying “fire” (BANG! BANG! BANG!)

The Capitan, who was in charge of executions.  These sketches would always start off with Lye using his sword as a baton as he said, “Ready….. Aim….” before the doomed kid would interrupt asking to stop the execution.  Most of these sketches wound up with The Capitan, who had the most dysfunctional firing squad (amigos!) in the history of executions, walking in front of the target area as he uttered the magic word “Fire!”, and he’d go down in a hail of gunfire.  “That is one sneaky kid!”

I can’t drive 95!

Snake Eyes, the renegade driver of the kids’ school bus, who was always violating every rule of the road and running the bus off the road and into peril for the sheer thrill of it.

Now assigned to Guantanamo Bay.

The dungeonmaster, whose job was to torment the chained up kids (why they were there in the first place was never explained).  The further I get into this post, the more I realize just how fucked-up awesome this show really was!

Evil Squirrel’s Nest has been a mangy rodent production.

The show’s announcer, who would only be seen at the end of the show, usually saying something he shouldn’t be saying and not realizing he’s still on the air.  At the beginning of each episode, you would hear him give the fake show that You Can’t Do That On Television was pre-empting (“Mr. Rogers Bullies the Neighborhood”, “Reading Rambo”, “Hulk Hogan vs. Punky Brewster”, etc.) as well as what kind of humorous production the show was after the credits rolled.

And Les had many other recurring characters on the show, including a Groucho Marx inspired doctor, a goofy looking high school coach, and a pain inflicting dentist.  What’s truly amazing other than the fact that this man literally carried the show with his endless parade of zany personalities is the fact that he was born in 1924, so he was in his 60′s during most of the show’s run!  When most people would be thinking about retiring, Les Lye was just beginning to make a name for himself… and working awful damn hard to do it!

Just another day at the office.

Sadly, Les Lye passed away back in 2009 at the ripe old age of 84.  He will forever be remembered for entertaining and entire generation of kids who grew up in an era when kids shows were more worried about being funny and interesting and not just about selling licensed merchandise.  We here at The Nest salute Mr. Lye’s contributions to the children of the 80′s, and recognize one of the most underrated talents to ever hit the small screen.  We would also like to assure everyone that Mr. Lye’s remains haven’t been put into the burgers….

Duh’I heard that!

Promises, promises….

Note: This is a pretty long post, but hang in there!  I have plenty of pictures and my humorous insights to share!

For as long as man has had an imagination, he has tried to predict the future.  If you make enough psychic predictions, the chances are that at least one of them will actually manifest itself.  People in the technology industry are notorious for their predictions, trying to sell the public on all these far-fetched futuristic gizmos and gadgets we’ll have that will make life better and their grandkids richer.  Alas, these people at the forefront of science and technology have about the same success rate as the corner prophet and the TV weatherman.  If you don’t believe me, look at the picture I included above.  Just how long have we been promised flying cars now?  The concept has been around for almost as long as automobiles and airplanes have… and even Back To The Future was predicting their widespread use by 2015.

Now flying squirrels, we can do!

Let’s face it, we will never have flying cars… at least not in common use.  Flying cars are a good example of what happens when engineers get too big of a woody thinking about ways to combine examples of current technology into something totally awesome but absolutely impractical.  Another typical roadblock that hampers the Popular Mechanics seer is the inability to foresee new technology that will render their future vision to be obsolete before it ever gets off the drawing board.

For a good lesson in how corny and ironically hilarious some predictions can look when viewed from the future time that was being envisioned, for today’s Retro Ad Tuesday we’re going to take a gander at a commercial campaign AT&T was running 20 years ago in which they made the long term blunder of trying to predict the future.  While many of the futuristic advances we saw in these spots wowed us back in 1993 when they originally aired, from a 2013 point of view, we can obviously look back and laugh at how silly the world’s foremost telecommunications company that was supposed to be on the cutting edge of new technology looked trying to gaze into the crystal ball.

I see hundreds of zombies walking this way and that with some strange object in their hands…

The ad campaign was called “You Will…”, and here is a video featuring all seven commercials in the series….

First impression… doesn’t it seem odd that a company like AT&T couldn’t anticipate the impending rise of the communications advancement that they would come to be a big part of?

Yeah, I’m telling you Watson! These bulky cell phones will soon be a thing of the past! Telegraph is where it’s at in the 21st century!

Just for shits and giggles (shoutout to Merby and C.K. Hope!), let’s take a look at the 20 futuristic visions AT&T laid out in this series…

1. Have you ever borrowed a book…. from thousands of miles away?

Now on video microfiche!

Boy, they blew this one.  Thanks to the invention of ebooks on such devices as the Nook and Kindle, “borrowing” books from thousands of miles away is no longer necessary… particularly on that dated microfilm-looking technology that person in the ad is using…

2. Crossed the country…. without stopping for directions?

Turn left at the next oil puddle

Ding Ding Ding!  Score one for AT&T who saw the coming of the modern GPS device!  I don’t know when GPS’s readily became available, but the first, and I think to this day only time I was ever in a car with a GPS was waaaaaaay back in 2000 in a rental car.  It really did nothing but list directions on a screen, and didn’t talk or show cool 3-D streetviews like the gadgets nowadays do, or at least I’d assume they do.  Like I said, GPS’s are something I know little about because I still get where I’m going the old fashioned way…. by looking for the North Star.

3. Sent someone a fax….. from the beach?

This is going to end up on the internet in 5 seconds thanks to AT&T!

This is going to become a common theme in this breakdown, but this is the first case of AT&T not taking into account that a certain technology was about to become obsolete.  While faxes haven’t quite become dinosaurs yet, alternate technology to send written documents almost anywhere has existed for a while now.  The guy in the ad essentially wrote an email, and I know email was around in 1993, because that was the year I was introduced to it in college.  I guess you could give AT&T credit for conceptualizing what essentially became the iPad, but the whole fax machine routine it goes through is so quaintly funny…

4. Have you ever paid a toll…. without slowing down?

I hope they see me while they’re digging out their credit card and swiping their stereo…

I’m fortunate to live in an area without any toll roads, but I have to pass through two tollways every year when I go to Oklahoma.  Oklahoma has a pass you can buy that allows you to go around the tollgates via a sensor with verifies that you have a pass and it is valid.  I’d imagine most other tollway systems also have this technology.  So while the concept of not having to stop to pay a toll was accurate, their cumbersome method for doing so was way off.  Texting while driving is bad enough… but can you imagine driving through the narrow tollgates while you fiddle around trying to pay the toll on your in-car credit card system?  The International Brotherhood of Possums is happy this vision did not come to pass.

5. Bought concert tickets…. from a cash machine?

My ATM got me tickets close enough to touch Gene Simmons’ tongue!!!

Right church, wrong pew on this prediction, but given how poorly overall AT&T did on these, we’ll generously award them this one.  You can certainly buy tickets for events at little video kiosks, but the future of selling tickets was over the internet.  These days, almost all first day sales of tickets for concerts and sporting events are limited to internet sales.

6. Tucked your baby in…. from a phone booth?

Wahhhhhh!!! Mommy can’t tuck me in because there are no more phone booths!!!

Any prediction of the future that includes the phrase “phone booth” is obviously declared immediately null and void.  We have Skype, and I’m sure video technology exists for cell phones as well (not that I’d know with my vintage 2006 model), but no babies are ever going to be tucked in again from a damn phone booth.  Proof that even AT&T didn’t foresee the fact that cell phones would very soon take over the world… and that is proof that they were brought to this planet by evil aliens looking to take over the world.  Fun Fact:  This was the only one of their “You Will” predictions that AT&T repeated in a later commercial… which makes them missing the boat on this one even funnier!

7. Have you ever opened doors…. with the sound of your voice?

Quit voice activating my door, you stalker!

There are many modern technologies out there I don’t partake in, but I’m pretty sure most everyone else doesn’t have voice recognition replacing deadbolts.  While this technology would come to pass for use in new cars and evil automated phone systems (although not specific to a certain person’s voice), it was kind of silly for AT&T to envision a bad spy movie use for it.

8. Carried your medical history…. in your wallet?

Sorry, your insurance was rejected.

Another whiff for AT&T, who didn’t envision the penny pinching of the insurance industry nor the enacting of HIPAA laws.

9. Attended a meeting…. in your bare feet?

The guys from Brazil aren’t wearing pants.

If there’s one futuristic idea that has been around almost as long as flying cars that actually did manifest itself, it’s video conferencing.  Even Back To The Future II threw it in to their 2015 world just 4 years before this ad aired.  Maybe this is why video conferencing seems like it’s been around forever… because it was anticipated by almost everyone for decades.  Hell, it’s the one thing from the Jetsons’ future world that we did get.  Since I am not, nor have ever been in the corporate world, I have no idea how long this technology has existed, but color me surprised AT&T still thought it to be a novel concept 20 years ago…

10. Have you ever watched a movie you wanted to…. the minute you wanted to?

Dammit! I want to watch “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure”…. NOW!!!!

Kudos to AT&T for predicting on-demand technology!  Thanks to cable, satellite, and Netflix, and hell, even Hulu and YouTube, we can indeed watch movies and shows whenever we wish.  AT&T conveniently skipped the part about not having to put up with commercials…

11. Learned special things…. from far away places?

Live from the rainforest, today we learn how to cook a squirrel!

I’ve been out of school now for 16 years, so I really have no idea if the classroom version of video conferencing actually became an everyday reality… but I doubt it.  These days, if you want to learn about where jazz came from, you don’t ask some professor living across the country who probably wouldn’t know Dizzy Gillespie from Dizzy Dean, you go to Wikipedia like everyone else does.

12. Have you ever checked out of a supermarket… a whole cart at a time?

Price check on squirrel pups!

While I don’t recall this particular version of the future of shopping, I do remember a similar ad from the late 90′s that shows a shady looking teen pocketing merchandise while bring followed by store security… and when he gets to the exit, the system scans all of his items and credit card automatically and the guard stops him…. to give him his receipt.  I thought that was a bunch of bullshit back then, and whaddaya know, it’s still far from being a reality.  Even self-checkout machines (i.e. Satan reincarnate) are logistically flawed, and large stores only put up with them due to perceived customer “convenience” and of course to save payroll on real, live cashiers.  The idea of a cart full of merchandise automatically being scanned at a checkout is ludicrous, take it from someone who’s worked at Mecca and dealt with their thousands and thousands of individual bar codes for 15 years.

13. Put your heads together… when you’re not together?

Help me girls!

Just a dressed up version of the video conferencing prediction.  Not only are cell phones mysteriously absent from AT&T’s future, but apparently the internet is as well.  How did these guys ever beat out MCI?

14. Gotten a phone call…. on your wrist?

PREPOSTEROUS!!!

Really, do I need to say more?  You can come up with the gag answer for this one…

15. Have you ever had a classmate… who’s thousands of miles away?

Cool! I’m sitting next to a vixen in my virtual classroom!

Public schools may be increasing class sizes due to budget cuts and a lack of qualified teachers, but those extra students won’t be coming from Bumfuck, Mississippi or Japan anytime soon.  Just another novelty concept with no real practical value.

16. Conducted business… in a language you don’t understand?

Greetings! Do you speak possum?

Sure, we have online translators now… but have you noticed something that’s apparent in most of these predictions.  While AT&T missed out on cell phone and internet booms, they apparently knew touchscreen technology was going to be all the rage.  Most of the futile premonitions that have been trotted out in these ads involved a lot of touchscreen usage.  Touching my computer monitor here in 2013 just makes the colors look funny where my finger is…

17. Kept an eye on your home…. when you’re not at home?

I wonder what my girlfriend’s doing while I’m at the game?

Just when I was giving AT&T a little credit for pushing touchscreen technology, now they whip out the old stylus on us.  And while that device the woman is holding kinda looks like a modern smartphone, it’s a pretty safe bet that whatever it is couldn’t receive a call since AT&T’s future consists of payphones and wristphones…

18. Have you ever renewed your drivers license…. at a cash machine?

The photo would probably look better from a “cash machine”

We can forgive AT&T for not envisioning 9/11 and the way it would turn us into a paranoid, militaristic state.  I’ve only had three drivers licenses in my life thanks to Illinois’ sticker renewal program, and each license has gotten more and more crammed full of security features.  AT&T seems to have a fascination with “cash machines”, which in the forward thinking 2010′s we simply call ATM’s, but I doubt the same device that can’t read my debit card on first swipe and spit out rat-eaten currency is going to be able to issue a modern drivers license… or that the states would ever allow us to skip the pleasant DMV wait.

19. Fixed a car… with your television?

No repairs required.

AT&T couldn’t see the advances that cell phones and the internet would bring us, so why should they have also predicted that cars (spurred by the profit margins of having work done only at dealer shops) would become so computerized and equipped with such specialized parts that your local mechanic wouldn’t even be able to do a simple repair on it, let alone some Mr. Goodwrench from who-knows-where that would appear on your TV?  We can forgive you that, AT&T, but really… television?  Did you seriously not think the computer would take off in 1993?

20. Had an assistant…. who lived in your computer?

Evil Squirrel, your personalized computer assistant!

The last, and fittingly the most far-reaching of all of these “You Will…” predictions was the computerized “assistant”, here shown as a digitized dog.  “Smart computers” have certainly been in the works, but so far, the only real smart technology computers seem to have is the damn internet cookie that tracks the websites you visit and searches you’ve made, and then makes the ads you see on websites just a little to personal and creepy.  Thanks for bringing up singles who want to date me in my hometown, Fido!  Now can you fetch me the one simple trick people in my state can use that will help me save a ton of money on my car insurance?  Good boy!

If you’ve made it this far through this long post, there’s no need to keep you any longer with a verbose conclusion.  I’ll just end this post with yet another frequent vision of the future that sadly has yet to become a reality….

This isn’t a nest…. it’s a pigsty!!!

We are the eggmen!

I get knocked down
But I get up again
You’re never gonna keep me down
Chumbawamba – “Tubthumping”

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, we had toys that were actually awesome.  Toys that appealed to both boys and girls.  Toys that were true originals.  Toys that left an impact on our childhood, and can still make us smile when we see them as adults today.  If you were a child 30 years ago and came to my blog today and saw that picture above, and didn’t immediately have the catchphrase “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down!” going through your head, then I only hope you and your alien race actually came to this planet in peace….

Take me to your Weebles!

Yes, this week’s Flashback Friday post is a tribute to those roly poly little toys of three decades ago that always got back up and smiled now matter how much we little monsters abused them during playtime.  Hasbro introduced Weebles to the toy market back in 1971, and continued to produce the ovoid shaped little people until 1983, which was just long enough for them to make it into my childhood memories.  I still remember we had three different Weebles playsets when me and my sisters were still little rugrats….

The Tumblin’ Funhouse!

It’s all fun and games until someone rolls down the chimney.

The Treehouse

Complete with sunroof!

And the Haunted House!

Fear no Weeble.

Oddly enough, I always think we had four different Weebles domiciles, but that’s because me and my sisters were good at breaking every toy we ever had, and managed to have the Haunted House broke apart at the hinges in no time… so it was like getting two playsets in one!

Like many of the toys we played with back in the day, the science behind the toys would have blown our little heads right off our shoulders.  The Wikipedia article on Weebles has a paragraph devoted to the laws of physics that allow a Weeble to have its amazing resistance to gravity….

A Weeble is shaped like an egg—in order for the physics principles to work as intended, the shape must have a bottom which is a more or less smooth (unfaceted) hemisphere (to allow the Weeble to roll) and from the central vertical axis the shape must be nearly cylindrically symmetrical (that is, any plane cut through the vertical axis line must produce close to the same profile). Next, the shape must be filled with two basic types of unmixed solids, and the volume of the lighter solid must be greater than that of the heavier solid. Next, the overall shape must have constant positive curvature. Next, the relationship between the heavy solid and the light solid must be such that any orientation of the object off of the vertical axis line must cause the object’s centroid to raise and to become offset. Lastly, the object must have only one position in which it can achieve stable mechanical equilibrium.

Combining these characteristics produces a basic Weeble.

Sorry, marblebutt, but you’re just a Weeble in name only.

Weebles were too popular not to reintroduce to the world, and a few years ago, Hasbro duly modernized the Weeble for the youth of today…

New and unimproved!

Since toys buck the trend of most other industries in the notion that smaller is better, the Weebles of today exploded in size.  Since a scientific study conducted sometime in the 2000′s concluded that toys from the 20th century were so unsafe that nobody who ever touched one should still be alive, Weebles followed in the footsteps of other children’s playthings and became too big for some adventurous little tyke to shove in their mouth.  Either that, or Weebles have also succumbed to the obesity craze that is sweeping the nation…

Let’s hit the drive thru for Fourth Meal again!

We here at The Nest would like to salute the Weeble for bringing us countless hours of weeble wobbling joy, as well as providing a nice round projectile to throw at our little sisters.   While it would be cruel to give Weebles a round of applause or a high five, we instead offer them a congratulatory chest bump… and then watch as they bob back and forth trying to regain their equilibrium.  And if you’ve always wondered what could possibly be more fun than a box full of possums….

A bowl full of Weebles!

Now this chart here shows the delclinin’ popularity of Evil Squirrel’s Nest after yesterday’s comic.

I very rarely make political posts on my blog, and there are some good reasons for that besides the fact that talking politics is one of the best ways to piss people off.  First, I don’t really give a steaming heap about politics, and am pathetic with a capital A.  Second, I have great disdain for the whole concept of the two-party system, which does a good job of taking millions of people with vastly different and unique viewpoints and forces them to pigeonhole themselves into one of two camps if they even want to think they can have a voice in government.  It may also have something to do with the fact that my choice for President has lost every election in my lifetime…. who knows?

Funny, hanging around with undesirable women didn’t hurt Clinton’s chances.

I also get a perverse pleasure when something comes along that throws a big ol’ monkey wrench into the gears of the political machinery.  Two decades ago, a man did the unthinkable and without any support from either of the two major parties in America, or any other political party for that matter, he actually became a viable, electable candidate for President of the United States… and as an added bonus, provided us with a lot more entertainment than you’d get from a normal election year.  H. Ross Perot’s surreal run for President of the United States in 1992 is the subject of this week’s Flashback Friday.

America has spoken! But I can’t seem to hear ya’ at the moment!

Perot didn’t really have any of the traditional credentials one would look for in their ideal Presidential candidate.  He had never held a single public office before, and the only reason people even knew the name H. Ross Perot before is because he was a billionaire business tycoon who actually had charisma, and he had plenty of money to throw away on a run for the biggest elected office in the land.  Perot’s decision to run for President wasn’t any long thought out, carefully planned notion…. it essentially sprung from an interview he did on CNN’s popular Larry King Live show just 9 months before the election, where the king of suspenders asked the opinionated tycoon he often had as a guest on his show if there was any situation under which he’d make a run for President.

I’ll bet I could even get Merby to make a run for the White House!

In a year where there was a perfect storm of a lingering recession, frustration over George H.W. Bush’s policies, and a hot mess of candidates on the Democratic side that spit out the surprising choice of Bill Clinton, the country seemed ready to listen to some guy they most likely had never heard of before.  Perot’s volunteer army managed to secure his name on the ballot in all fifty states with one of the largest petition drives this country’s ever seen.  Perot drew interest from Democrats and Republicans alike, who wrote his name in during the later primary elections that year at a noticeable clip.  By May, some polls even had Perot as the leader, having more support than both Bush and Clinton… and talk of a potential situation where no candidate would get a majority of the electoral votes was starting to look like a real possibility.

Which, of course, would let these overpaid idiots decide who gets to be President.

Oh, but just as quickly as the hot air was inflating the Perot for President balloon, our man who could have stuck the middle finger to politics as usual was letting his inexperience in the political ring take a pin to it.  After a couple months of having his stands on the issues run through the wringer, and his character damaged by the campaign experts of Clinton and especially Bush, Perot was back in third in the polls by the end of July… and just as suddenly as he tossed his cowboy hat into the race, he bowed out and said he would not run.

No!!!! Get your butt back in the race!

Our boy Ross wasn’t done toying with the political process just yet, though.  After sitting out for two months, he would valiantly return to the ring on October 1st, just one month before Election Day.  Despite being damaged goods by this time, Perot still had a couple tricks up his sleeve… perhaps most famous were his infomercial-like spots he purchased on national TV where he pointed out the benefits of his economic plan featuring more charts and graphs than were in every math book you ever had in school combined.  These modern day Fireside Chats with a southern drawl got a lot of attention, and even drew higher ratings than some of the regular primetime fare on TV.  Perot’s newfound popularity forced a podium for him to be set up at the first Presidential debate on October 11… a debate which the polls showed he was the clear winner of.

But just when it seemed Perot might be a relevant candidate again, he sent in the clown…

Why am I on this blog?

Early on in his campaign, since it was necessary for his inclusion on the ballot in a number of states, Perot chose good friend Admiral James Stockdale as his interim running mate.  Stockdale was a Vietnam war hero with an absolutely fascinating and courageous story, but like Perot, he wasn’t much of a politician.  When Perot got back into the race in early October, he still hadn’t replaced Stockdale with a bonafide running mate… so the poor Admiral was sent off into the fire of the first Vice Presidential debate with little more than a week’s notice and preparation.  The debate was held in Atlanta on October 13, 1992, and the only thing that went right for Admiral Stockdale that night was that in his opening remarks, he delivered one of the greatest quotes in the history of the known universe.

The absolutely most fucking brilliant thing to ever come out of the mouth of any candidate at any debate ever.  “Who am I, why am I here?” was golden enough that you can almost forgive the old sailor for deteriorating into a rambling, incoherent mess after that opening statement, and further damaging the legitimacy of Perot’s campaign in the process.  Hopefully Stockdale also had his hearing aid off when the comics came out to roast his performance.

Oh well, we tried!

In the end, Perot put up a big goose egg on the electoral front… but he garnered a rather sound 19% of the popular vote.  Not bad for someone who most people hadn’t even heard of ten months prior and who quit the race mid campaign, later claiming he only did so because the Bush campaign threatened to sabotage his daughter’s wedding.  Perot’s showing even qualified him for federal campaign money in the 1996 election, which he chose to run in.   It was an even bigger disaster, likely because it lacked the drama of the 1992 campaign.

We here at The Nest would like to thank Ross Perot and the good Admiral for all the laughs and hijinks they provided us 20 years ago, that turned what could have been just another boring election into a fun filled circus that even us non-political types could enjoy.  In our everlasting gratitude for all of your graphs and gaffes, we promise to never allow any of our jobs here at this blog to be sucked down to Mexico…

¡Viva la ardilla!

Would you like fries with that?

There are many technological advances that I loathe and frequently whine complain about on this blog, but if there is one that has been a blessing for me, it has been the development of digital photography.  The number of photographs I have taken over the past four years using and reusing one single memory card would have taken hundreds of rolls of standard film at several bucks a pop.  I got a 35 mm camera for Christmas back in 1988, and I had a lot of fun taking pictures with it on the rare occasions I was allowed to have a roll of film.  The only bad thing was the knowledge that as that little number on the back of the camera that tracked how many shots I had taken began to creep up towards the limit for that roll (usually 24 or 36), the more I had to decide if something was really worth taking a picture of or not.  There were no do-overs in real film photography, no button you could press to erase a image… once it was burned onto the film, it was there until the photo developer you took your pictures to could laugh at your shitty photography.

A lot of my photos from that camera looked something like this.

In the early days of amateur photography, you had to take your film to specialized photo processing studios to turn your negatives into positives.  As time marched on into the 1970′s and 80′s, photo processing became much more convenient, as many retail and grocery stores allowed their customers to drop off their film while they were shopping for processing at some business they contracted out to… although it usually took several days before your photos came back.

48 hours is worth it for the lifetime of embarrassment opportunities!

At the same time, the one hour photo processing market was just beginning to heat up.  These were little shops that would process your film while you waited, and didn’t allow their employees time to marvel at those nude shots you took of yourself for more than a few minutes.  Working on a tight budget, the geniuses that brought us access to this almost instant photo gratification decided that the best place to set up shop would be on mall parking lots.  If you’re old enough to recall the days of flash cubes, you definitely remember these little parking lot warriors because they were almost everywhere!  While Fotomat, which I led off this post with, was the most popular… as a true child of the 80′s, the photo kiosk company that will always be nearest and dearest to my heart was the legendary Fox Photo.

Greyhound only wishes their logo were this cool.

The most famous photo kiosk in pop culture history was a Fox Photo booth.  It’s what the Libyans crashed into after Marty McFly vanished into 1955 in the movie Back To The Future.  Forward to around the 1:00 mark of this video….

Seriously, these kiosks were totally ubiquitous during my childhood days.  I think we had two of them in my cowtown alone, and it’s not like we had any really big malls.  Yet while the heyday of these tiny little photo labs was at its peak in the early 80′s, the business would be on life support by the time Ronald Reagan (the actor!?!?) left office.  Both Fotomat and Fox Photo began to shutter their tiny cubicle sized slices of picture making heaven in the latter part of the 80′s, and by the mid 90′s, the one hour photo kiosk had gone the way of the dinosaur.  It wasn’t digital photography that did in these oversized tollbooths, but the fact that by 1990, their one hour photo service had become feasible for set up in larger stores.  These in-store minilabs were much cheaper to operate, and thus, could offer prices the kiosks couldn’t match.  The Fotomats and Fox Photos that were hustling and bustling in the 80′s became the parking lot eyesores of the 90′s.

Someone just hit me with a VW van, please!

We here at The Nest would like to salute these small but powerful little centers of photo developing that came to represent a time when you were totally dependent upon someone else to turn your pictures of the kids taking a bath together into cherished family memories.  While we won’t miss the constant cost of buying and developing film, we will miss the cheesiness of your small fry in a big mall business model that was done in by the very stores whose parking lot you had invaded.  Thank you to Fotomat, Fox Photo, and all of the other wonderful one hour photo stores that operated out of an outhouse… this Kodak Colorwatch approved picture is just for you!

Smile everybody and say “DRIVE THRU!!!”

I’ll admit it right now… I’m not much of a reader.  In a blogosphere full of aspiring authors and bibliophiles, I stand out like a Hustler magazine in a library.  Even if you count collections of short stories (which is about all my attention span has time for), I can probably count on both hands the number of books I’ve read since I hung up my school career 16 years ago.  At least one of those books was about my favorite subject!  The internet is to blame for my lack of attention to the printed word, as I’ve spent the majority of my free and not so free time hanging around the vast timesuck of cyberspace since the turn of the millennium.

Why read when you can spend all day drawing cartoon rodents?

But we’re in Flashback Friday territory now, and with no internet to eat up the plethora of boring hours I had as a kid, I found I did occasionally pick up a book and read it.  Unfortunately, living with four younger sisters, a lot of the reading material around the house was Little Golden Books or My Little Pony style shit (NTTAWWT, of course).  But I was fortunate to be able to get my hands on a few books in one of the more unique, popular, and totally 80′s young adult literature series that was out there.

Behold the awesomeness!

The Choose Your Own Adventure series was debuted by Bantam Books in the late 70′s, and was one of the biggest kiddie lit hits of the 1980′s, with most of the stories being penned by authors Edward Packard (who created the series) and R.A. Montgomery.  While almost all literature since the beginning of time has been written in either the first or the third person, CYOA books were unique in that they were told from the perspective of the second person.  Yes, YOU!  You were the protagonist of these little pocket adventures, not some kid who is so much more awesome than you’ll ever be.  But what truly made these books unlike anything else out there was the fact that the story often came to a fork in the road…. and you got to make all of the critical decisions that affected the plot!

To blast ES’s head off, turn to Page 87.

To boil ES in water, turn to Page 53.

To zap ES with 1.21 gigawatts, turn to Page 152.

At times, the story would give you two or three paths to take, directing you to turn to certain pages to pick up the story.  Because of this, if you got cute and just read the book cover to cover, it was kind of like a time altering psychedelic trip since you’d be weaving in and out of various locations in the story’s timeline.  Because each CYOA story had numerous turning points buried within it that you got to control, there were multiple ways the story could end.  Some of the choices folded upon each other and created the same result or brought you back to an earlier part of the story.  Sometimes your choices ended the story within minutes, and other times your choices would drag on the adventure for an hour.  And there was one undeniable fact that was true of most of the CYOA books…. about half of the endings wound up with you meeting some untimely demise.

Now how do you like being the protagonist, huh?

Of course, we didn’t let those morbid endings phase us one bit back in the day.  We were part of the first video game generation, and knew that death was just a temporary inconvenience towards the goal of attaining the happy ending.  So we tracked back in the book to that fateful decision and chose the other option, which of course generally also led to you getting shot by a gangster, crushed in a collapsing cave, or impaled by a unicorn.  Hey, this was the same decade that gave us all of our favorite campy horror movies, so fictional death was nothing new to us.  The pussified generation, we were not.

Give us CYOA books, or give us death!

Choose Your Own Adventure books pretty much died by the time Two thousand zero zero was upon us, and in this age of Facebook and smartphones, do kids even read anything not online these days?  Yeah, I know, I have room to talk.  But back in the caveman days when we kids needed something to keep up occupied, the CYOA series was there to deliver with its re-re-re-re-re-readability and more gruesome ways to die than the entire Final Destination series.  We here at The Nest would like to thank the creative minds who brought us these twisted tales of self adventure that taught us the importance of making good decisions.

If you want to end today’s Flashback Friday post, click here.

If you can’t get enough of Flashback Friday, click here.

If you just want to see awesome masterpieces of sciurine artwork, click here.

Excellent choice!

Much like today, fitness was all the rage in the 80′s.  Just go down to the local gym and replace all of the yoga pants, sports bras and tramp stamps with bright colored leotards, spandex, and leg warmers… and you’ve got yourself a bonafide 1980′s style workout party!  Partly inspired by the dance craze movies of the early 80′s  such as “Fame”, “Flashdance”, and “Footloose”, aerobic exercise was a fad that spanned the decade, and ushered in the Super Size decade of the 90′s.

I should have gotten hazard pay for growing up with four sisters.

Whether it was Jane Fonda, Denise Austin, or (gulp) Susan Powter, one thing all of these fitness fests had in common was a lot of thin, toned, perky chicks in tight clothing made from genuine rainbows who weren’t afraid to shake their spandex clad buns of steel to the beat.  Not only did these aerobic vixens help inspire women all over America to get off their couch and get in shape, but they also provided plenty of eye candy for the guys to do a little solo exercising of their own.

There was one exception to this rule, however…..

Pictured: Too much man for you to take.

Richard Simmons was already established as a genuine fitness guru even before he tortured our eyes with these commercials for his “Sweating To The Oldies” series in the late 80′s.  As you can see from the commercial, a Richard Simmons workout was a tad different from one you might catch in the morning on ESPN 30 years ago.  While exercise is for all, especially those who are a bit pleasantly plump, no self-respecting celebrity aerobics instructor was going to be bouncing their ponytail within 5 miles of the nearest fat person.

“IIIIIIIIII’m Flyyyyyyyying!!!”

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: The author of the Evil Squirrel’s Nest Blog is certified by the medical community, and mainly his peckerhead doctor, as being 30 pounds overweight for his height.  This therefore makes him a certified fatass, and under Article XXII, Section 69, Part 4.7 of the Political Correctness Code of 1992, does legally allow him to poke fun at other people who share his affliction.

Alas, it does not allow me to make fun of Richard Simmons flaming ways.

Simmons’ trademark annoying overbubbliness is on full display in his ad for “Sweating To The Oldies 2″ for the full 120 seconds of fat burning sock hopping we are subjected to.  Back in the 1980′s, “oldies” consisted of songs from the 50′s and 60′s that rarely ever get played on the radio anymore, and “Sweating” delivers some of the best dance songs of the era, like “Jailhouse Rock”…

Just keep Richard out of my cellblock please!

“The Locomotion”

We love you, Kylie!!!

“Summer in the City”….. wait, “Summer in the City”!?!?  I wouldn’t exactly call that a dance song.  Although I imagine Richard Simmons happily provides the sound effects of the jackhammer during the instrumental break.  Seriously, Elvis Presley gave you his OK from the chalet he’s hiding at in Switzerland to use one of his songs, yet you couldn’t round up some better 60′s dance music from lesser artists like “The Twist” or “Do You Love Me?”  I guess John Sebastian was hard up for money… Lord only knows what else was considered to fill out your little VHS tape….

“You don’t believe… sing it everyone! We’re on the eve of destruction! Oh yeah, feel the burn, ladies!!!”

Today The Nest salutes a true legend of the world of fitness who got more 300 pound people off of their La-Z-Boys and into tight fitting workout clothes than the lure of a late night run to Walmart Mecca.  We vow to be bright eyed and bushy tailed every morning when we pop that “Sweating to the Oldies” cassette into our no-longer-working Sony Walkman and hit the road for a high impact power walk.  Thank you Richard Simmons for giving us the opportunity to feel the burn!

What 6 weeks of exercising to J. Frank Wilson and SSgt. Barry Sadler will do for your body.

We’re totally insaney!

There was once a commercial where a guy walking down the street with a chocolate bar happened to accidentally bump into a girl who was obviously having a bad pregnancy craving that led her to go for a walk and eat peanut butter out of the jar.  This awkward moment didn’t lead to any violence or lawsuits as we might expect, but the creation of Reese’s peanut butter cups.  Who knew two things so different could be so good together?

Like coffee and squirrel pee!

Now let’s take that same scenario, and imagine a Warner Bros. animator walking down the street, probably too busy looking up X-rated images of Petunia Pig on his cellphone to be paying any attention to where he’s going.  And let’s say he turns the corner and bumps into world famous movie director Steven Spielberg.  The typical result might be that the animator would never work in that town again, but that’s not what happened.  Instead, we got two of the finest, highest quality, and most original animated series of our time out of this bizarre combination.

Not counting “The Mysterious Cities of Gold” and “Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea”, of course…

In 1990, Spielberg collaborated with Warner Bros. animation to create the groundbreaking animated series “Tiny Toon Adventures”, which took the classic characters of WB animation and created younger, hipper versions of them with the premise that they were being taught the ways of becoming a cartoon star by those original legends at Acme Looniversity.  Airing on the booming Fox Kids after school cartoon block in the early 90′s, Tiny Toons not only provided plenty of fodder and slapstick to keep the kids entertained, but also culled from the classic WB cartoons the adult themes and pop culture references, which made it one of the first “kids” cartoons that adults also loved.

And especially us teens…

As great as Tiny Toons was, it was basically just the beta run that was used to create what would be the series that would be the crown jewel of the Spielberg/WB collaboration, and that was “Animaniacs”, which debuted on the Fox Kids block in September 1993.  Animaniacs would take the boundaries of what a kids cartoon could be that Tiny Toons established, and absolutely obliterate them… making this a show that could be enjoyed by the naive kids who were entertained by the cuteness and cartoon slapstick, and the teens and adults who could laugh at the more mature humor that was successfully woven into each episode.

Hellllllllllo, Nurse!

For today’s Flashback Friday, I’m going to look back at the wacky characters and skits that comprised this work of cartoon genius, which not only kept me entertained during my college years, but also provided me with a lot of the inspiration that went into creating my own characters you see on this blog…

Nobody ever cared that we were all only half dressed.

The Warner siblings Yakko, Wakko and Dot were the main characters of Animaniacs, and the glue (or perhaps snot)  that tied the show together.  The designs for the brothers (and sister, as Dot would often have to interject) were based on the simple black and white characters of the early days of animation.  Yakko was the eldest, a slick talking comedian who was inspired by the comedy of Groucho Marx.  Wakko was the little brother who had an obsession with the grosser things in life (He’d often be featured in skits belching out entire monologues or songs).  Dot was the cute little sister who was often underestimated by her enemies, and frequently seemed disgusted by the antics of her brothers.  The trio usually starred in the first short skit of each episode, and the most common formula for a Warners sketch featured the trio being wronged by some cold hearted caricature of a figure from pop culture… only to have the kids have a blast getting their just desserts on the offender during the remainder of the skit.  Here is my all time favorite… try to keep a straight face through this 7 and a half minute skit…

“What do you wanna do tonight Brain?” “The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Sing Karaoke.”

Pinky and the Brain are probably the Animaniacs most famous characters due to the fact that their schtik was so successful, it was spun off into its own cartoon series.  Pinky and the Brain were lab rats, with the Brain being the serious, intelligent one who would constantly cook up schemes to not only escape the lab, but take over the world.  Pinky was his dimwitted sidekick, who provided comic relief and usually wound up inadvertently sabotaging the Brain’s ideas.  There was a bit of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton to these two characters, and in no episode did that play out better than in “Win Big”, in which not only does The Honeymooners factor into the outcome of the plot, but the skit itself is actually a great takeoff of a classic Honeymooners episode where Ralph takes a fall on a game show for not knowing a tune that Ed was constantly whistling to his annoyance.

Go away, kid! Ya bother me!

I’ve always considered it a remarkable coincidence that long before squirrels meant a thing in the world to me, that Slappy Squirrel was by far my favorite character on the series.  Slappy was a crusty old squirrel who had been a big cartoon star back in the early days of animation.  Most of Slappy’s episodes featured her butting heads with an old cartoon nemesis, who would still rely on the cheesy old gags of cartoon lore in an attempt to get back at Slappy.  But this old broad knows all the tricks by now, and never falls for any of them.  She lives with her naive young nephew Skippy, who idolizes her aunt Slappy and tries to learn the ways of cartoon street smarts from her.  Slappy would typically end an episode with her trademark phrase which I borrowed as the title of this post.

The Godpigeon says he needs the toejam cleaned from between his talons.

As proof that the Animaniacs drew plenty of its inspiration from adult references, the Goodfeathers was a pigeonized version of the mob.  The characters Bobby, Pesto and Squit were based on the characters Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Ray Liotta played in the movie “Goodfellas”, with Squit narrating each episode.  The two main running gags in the Goodfeathers cartoons were Pesto getting upset at innocuous remarks made by Squit, which of course was inspired by the well known scene in Goodfellas where Pesci goes off after Liotta says he’s funny.  And then there is the Godpigeon, the don of the boys who often swoops in to save the day, and speak in unintelligible gibberish that Bobby always has to translate.

OK, I love you, bye bye!

The Mindy and Buttons skits literally drove me up the wall.  The overly perky, cute, and thoroughly annoying toddler Mindy tugs at pretty much every single thing I hate about young kids.  And to boot, she was constantly getting the family’s poor dog Buttons into trouble during her frequent escapes from the house (Back in an era where parents weren’t afraid to leave their kids to their own devices for a while), and it’s up to Buttons to keep her out of danger.  The poor mutt ends up taking the brunt of the ills that were intended for Mindy, and then gets busted upside the head with the newspaper upon returning home safely with the little brat when the parents misinterpret the reason Buttons looks like hell after they left them alone for a few minutes.  I always secretly hoped for the imp to get flattened by a steamroller, or shot into space by a stray rocket, but alas….

Can you sing me “Stray Cat Strut” again Rita? Yeah, definitely “Stray Cat Strut…. oh, look! Squirrel!

Even the best cartoon series ever created has its weak points, and the Rita and Runt sketches were my least favorite.  Rita was a singing cat, and Runt a big buffoon of a dog, and the two of them were companions on an adventure looking for a new home.  At some point in every cartoon, Rita would belt out a song, which was usually slow and sappy, and just ruined the whole feel of the show.  These two disappeared entirely after the first season, largely due to the fact that Spielberg hired Bernadette Peters to voice Rita and do her singing, and her salary demands were a strain on the show’s budget.

Were you looking to be wrapped up in a mink coat, dear?

Innuendo that went over the kiddies’ heads wasn’t quite edgy enough to satisfy the creative minds behind Animaniacs, so they created Minerva Mink.  In my infamous early post XXX Marks the Spot (which is still the most popular post EVER on my blog), I discussed the role of sexuality in cartoons, and how artists loved adding as much sex appeal as they could to their female characters to tug at the pent up libido of much of their target audience.  Minerva not only crossed that line, she had it for breakfast and used it to file her claws.  Her skits were so overtly provocative and sexual in nature, that many of them got left on the cutting room floor even before the censors could tell the show’s producers “no”, as they undoubtedly wiped sweat from their brows and refused to get up from behind the table.  Because she was too hot for kids TV, Minerva was barely a blip on the Animaniacs radar, yet she’s still considered to be one of the hottest cartoon vixens in history right up there with Cleo from Heathcliff, Cheetara from Thundercats, and of course Velma from Scooby Doo.  Minerva was also definitely an influence when I created my character MBRS.

So, like, Randy Beaman tried to feed his nuts to a squirrel, and….. um, k, bye!

In between the main shorts that would make up an episode, Animaniacs had a lot of other interesting short features to to bridge the gaps and fill in empty time.  Colin, who is better known as “The Randy Beaman kid”, would come outside and deliver a rambling monologue to the audience about the experiences of this kid he knows named Randy Beaman.  Here’s a link to a YouTube of one of Colin’s finest performances.  God, I loved this show….

Doggie want a bone!

But the best of the short features to appear on the show was the “Good Idea, Bad Idea” series, featuring the poor sap Mr. Skullhead.  Below is a complete collection of all of these skits from the entire five year run of Animaniacs.  My favorite one begins at about the 7:25 mark.  By the way, the narrator’s voice should sound familiar to you…. it’s Tom Bodette, who’s better knows as the spokesman for Motel 6, who leaves the light on for you.

And finally, as a special tribute to my favorite cartoon series of all time, here is a compilation I found on YouTube of some of Animaniacs best adult innuendo scenes they managed to sneak by the censors.  Remember, this was an after school cartoon that was technically aimed at entertaining kids!

And now’s the best time for Yakko’s signature line….. “Good night, everybody!”

That’s gonna leave a mark…

Big Business got to be big business because by and large, the people who were responsible for running the corporations made very smart decisions.  Along with a lot of hard work, a little luck, a little foresight, and maybe even a bribe or two can put you at the top of the Dow Jones in no time.  But these icons of capitalism aren’t quite perfect, and at times, the suits who make the decisions can lay a really huge egg that can bring bad publicity and financial hardship.  Think of the biggest marketing fails in business history…. the Edsel, New Coke, the Betamax, my CafePress Shop.

Doesn’t anyone need a damn shirt!?!?

Here’s one you may have forgotten about that hit a major television network in the pocket for over $50,000,000, as well as in the pride for having to own up to one of the most poorly thought out projects in business history.  Forward to the 3:15 mark to see this one minute commercial….

Yes, the Olympics Triplecast.  A novel idea in utilizing the booming pay-per-view market that was poorly thought out and horrifically executed.

I think I’ll take the quarter…

You know something wasn’t a very good idea when half of its page on Wikipedia is devoted to the reasons it fell flat on its ass.  Anyway, here’s a little background on NBC’s infamous turkey, The Olympics Triplecast….

NBC way outbid its network competitors (it’s speculated by as much as $100,000,000) for the rights to cover the 1992 Summer Olympics from Barcelona, which in turn helped jack up the price they’d have to pay for each ensuing Olympic Games.  To make a baseball reference that will go over the heads of 99% of my readership, that makes the International Olympic Committee Scott Boras, and NBC Dave Dombrowski.  Anyway, to help recoup some of the excess cost, the “jeniuses” at NBC came up with the brilliant idea to create a pay-per-view cable package that Olympics fans just couldn’t refuse.

I can watch three times the boring sports I normally could!?!? Sign me up!!!

So they created three special pay-per-view channels, creatively named the Red, White, and Blue channels.  Each channel would show live, unedited coverage of Olympics events that would either not be seen during the main NBC feed, or would be seen on tape delay.  These live events would occur 24 12 hours a day, and would be ordered by millions of diehard Olympics fans for the relatively inexpensive price of $170.  What a bargain!!!

Considering how many people would pony up $49.99 to watch one of Mike Tyson’s 90 second fights back in the early days of pay-per-view, it is a bit mystifying that more suckers people didn’t splurge for the Triplecast.

But viewers did not race to their phones to order the Olympic Triplecast, and if NBC would have paid attention to its own marketing research, they would have known this gimmick was going to be a tough sell on the public.  For one thing, while there are many rabid Olympics fans out there in the good ol’ U. S. of A., caring about the Games just isn’t our thing.  Our sense of nationalism has never extended to sports, mainly because we’re cocky enough to believe that our team sport athletes are already the best in the world, and we’d rather watch them play in our own leagues rather than in an amateur environment against people we don’t know, and whose names we can’t pronounce.

Ummm, shouldn’t you be #2 instead?

To add insult to injury, those precious few who did order the Triplecast service found that unedited sports in the raw is approximately five billion times better than the overly produced and dramaticized dreck that was offered on the main NBC feed.  It’s just like tuning in a baseball game, and turning the sound down so you don’t have to listen to the annoying announcers.  Many Triplecast viewers were choosing to do their Olympics viewing exclusively on the Red, White, and Blue channels… which wound up hurting the ratings of the primary package NBC was offering up for free!  D’oh!

Exclusive footage from the Olympics Triplecast White Channel. And you thought equestrian couldn’t be anything but boring!

And if NBC didn’t predict that this would happen, the more astute people running their affiliate stations sure did, since a handful of those affiliates boycotted the Triplecast ads and refused to air them, not wanting to advertise something that would take viewers and the advertising dollars they bring out of their pocket.  In the pre-internet days, this was serious lack of exposure in the markets that these rogue affiliates oversaw.

We’ll keep our ratings golden goose to ourselves, thank you.

About the only thing cool about the entire Triplecast package was that remote control they offered with the red, white, and blue buttons on it… which you could only get if you ordered the Gold Package 5 months before the Olympic flame was even lit.  Since literally nobody fell for this, these remotes were all sent to a landfill in New Jersey and buried along with Jimmy Hoffa.  If there’s a picture of one out there on the internet somewhere, Google Images sure can’t find it…

My search did spit out this image of “The Macho Man” Randy Savage, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

To add to NBC’s embarrassment, they were mercilessly mocked and lampooned by everyone out there who had a funny bone.  Even NBC’s own late night comedy star David Letterman let his bosses have it for such an insane idea.

I’d respond to my own viewer mail, if I ever got any….

So today, The Nest would like to give a standing ovation to the head honchos at the National Broadcasting Company, who came up with the worst idea in the history of broadcasting (at least until reality TV came along).  We hope the nine figure loss you split with your partner Cablevision was worth it to bring us all of the water polo and discus throwing we could stand if we were able to afford your tri-channel coverage.  Thanks for bringing a lasting legacy to the pay-per-view craze of the 90′s that didn’t involve trying to watch scrambled porn…

Just add some cheesy porno music, and this is an instant turn on.

The Nest loves political incorrectness.

No, don’t adjust your computer monitors!  My blog isn’t shutting down.  Sorry to make you think I was going to improve the quality of content on the internet by going away.  No, for today’s Flashback Friday, I want to talk about a phenomenon that truly is a dinosaur these days… and one my night owlish self was utterly fascinated with during my younger days.  Television has provided us so much during its seven decades of dominating our entertainment and information needs, broadcasting countless hours of news, movies, sports, sitcoms, dramas, and of course Honey Boo Boo.  But sometimes, television was at its most interesting after the broadcast day had ended…

Not to mention more colorful!

In the olden days of broadcasting, it made little sense for television stations to broadcast during the overnight when few people would be watching since the cost to stay on the air all night exceeded the amount of ad revenue the station could bring in.  So almost every station signed off the air for some period of time during the middle of the night.  The transmitter, however, kept right on humming along… so the station had to broadcast something when it wasn’t showing regular programming.  During television’s golden era in the 50′s and 60′s, that was often a simple test card, which was mounted on an easel in front of a camera in the TV studio and actually filmed for broadcast.  The best known of these test cards is the one I led off this post with… only with Chief Turnoffateevee’s mug in there instead of ES’s.

The tribe is not amused!

More familiar to the generation of readers I typically dedicate these flashback posts to is the pretty colored bars pattern.  This pattern was typically accompanied by an atonal sine wave, and if you woke up at 3:00 in the morning back in the 80′s, this is what you’d probably see and hear when you turned on your TV…

I’ll give you a moment for your eardrums to recuperate from that 60 seconds of pure aural pleasure.

That’ll clean your ears out better than a sanitary napkin.

Now you may be asking yourself what the purpose was behind these test cards and test patterns that would air late at night when literally nothing was on.  It’s hard to remember now that digital and LCD televisions have been commonplace for so long, but back in the days when the boob tube was actually a tube, it contained several different adjustment knobs to allow viewers to fine tune the picture.  While test cards and test patterns were primarily for the operators at the studio to calibrate their equipment, the overnight broadcast of these strange graphics was also a convenience for those at home to help adjust their sets.

Damned vertical hold!!!

Every 20th century television had about six knobs on it that controlled different aspects of the picture, like the contrast, brightness, and of course the vertical hold.  I’m sure there is a good technical reason for why it was necessary to have a knob to turn the vertical hold down low enough for the picture to start jumping every few seconds, but I’m too stupid to figure out why.

Geez, I’m going to have to wait for the station to go off the air to fix this damned thing!

Of course, the reason these crazy off the air shenanigans are being discussed in a Flashback Friday post is because a certain 1990′s innovation completely destroyed the whole concept of television stations going off the air.  Of course, that would be the infomercial.  The overnight hours became filled with these 30 minute advertisements two decades ago, and if sponsors wanted to pay good money for a half hour block of time when nobody but insomniacs and myself were watching, that sounded like a better deal than showing the most annoying rainbow in history.

Thank you Susan Powter for stopping the insanity of strange overnight graphics and dog whistles.

We here at The Nest always lived for the late night, and have to admit we miss these old, boring, one-note television downtime fillers, and would thus like to give a salute to the people out there who gave us a pretty palette of primary and secondary colors accompanied to a symphony of monotone.  In everlasting tribute to these bygone days, The Nest will be signing off for the next 24 hours, and we hope you enjoyed our broadcast day.  And now, one more tradition of the off the air process here in the good ol’ USA, and one which was referenced in one of the cheesiest but most awesome songs of the 1970′s…. ladies and gentlecritters, our National Anthem.  Good night, and we’ll resume broadcasting with tomorrow’s Saturday Squirrel….

Prior to the 1990′s, if you were curious about reading up on a subject, you had to go look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls… or if you were one of those poor families who couldn’t afford a set of encyclopedias, and you didn’t mind the other kids thinking you were a nerd, there was always the library.  Learning about the world around us wasn’t as instantaneous as it is now thanks to Google and Wikipedia, but if we had the time to do a little digging, we could find out all kinds of interesting things on just about anything.

Check this out, Sully! Did you know librarians are all descended from the witches of Salem?

But if your family was really cool, you had access to the most awesome reference series out there.  No, I’m not talking about Disney’s Wonderful World of Knowledge yearly editions, I’m talking about Time/Life books!  They had a series on the Civil War, a set of Home Repair and Improvement books (shilled by the legendary Bob Vila!  Track lighting!!!), and of course, the crown jewel of them all was the late 80′s series Mysteries of the Unknown!

Twenty volumes in all… just to show you how much shit out there was still unknown to us in the 80′s.

This is the second post in a row that owes a debt of inspiration to Alice at Wonderland, as she mentioned the old series in a post last week.  And now, here is the first of several 120 second spots Time-Life ran for this intriguing series…

Gotta love the fascinating examples they use in this ad…

Chicago.  A man is about to get on a routine flight.  Suddenly he pauses.  He doesn’t know why, but he’s got to walk away.  An hour later, the plane goes down in flames.  It’s dismissed as CHANCE.

I’d walk away from the TSA screenings too.

You can tell this was pre-9/11, because nowadays, that guy’s hunted down by the CIA and sent to Guantanamo Bay for “questioning” before he even has a chance to explain that he only had a psychic vision.  Oh, and thanks for sharing it with all of the other passengers at the gate there.  Their next of kin are eternally grateful that you only saved yourself…

Britain.  A woman has a sudden image of a black mountain that’s moving with children trapped underneath it.  Two hours later, a Welsh schoolhouse is buried under an avalanche of coal slag.  It’s dismissed as COINCIDENCE.

Lucy in the skyyyy with mountains.

I’ve had some weird dreams before, but kiddie crushing mountains in motion?  This should have been dismissed as a bad acid trip…

Northern Texas.  An unidentified flying object is reported by at least a dozen people.  Although there were no storms in the area, it was dismissed as LIGHTNING.

Heat lightning!

Thanks to shows like “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Sightings” that were popular around this time, stories about UFO’s that everyone but the sheriff saw were a dime a dozen.  And the excuse was always something shitty like airplanes, mass hysteria, a weather balloon on fire, or my favorite “ball lightning”.  Ball lightning was the scientist’s equivalent of your mother’s “Because I said so!” or for those of you familiar with internet forums, Godwin’s Law.  It was the end all, stop the discussion, STFU answer.

The Midwest.  A mother feels a sharp pain in her right hand.  Far away at that exact same moment, her daughter screams as she touches a hot pan.  Just chance?

No, Community Chest.

This one was so mundane and unextraordinary that even the experts didn’t bother to dismiss it as anything, so the narrator had to throw in his own rhetorical question at the end.  I’m only 38, but I feel sharp pains in many places quite often for no apparent reason other than I have the spine of a 58 year old.  We’re not going to bother wondering about the exact timing of the alleged shared psychic pain, but I’ll be the expert here and and help make a ruling on this case…

Stonehenge.  A visitor fashions a wire antenna in the shape of an ancient Egyptian symbol.  He points it at the stones, and a surge of power rushes through his arms, knocking him unconscious.  Was it all in his mind, or was it much more than that (Dismissed as IMAGINATION).

Two words for this one…

BALL LIGHTNING!

The only real mystery about this commercial is where in the hell Judy the Time Life Operator was.  Was she abducted by aliens?  Or electrocuted by throwing spare change at Mount Rushmore?  Was she on that flight the selfish bastard let everyone die on?

Well, that explains it…

As great as this commercial was, Time-Life went to a whole new concept when the wonderful year of 1990 rolled around.  They brought in some dude named Ben Randall to push the Mysteries of the Unknown series.  Here’s Ben’s finest work, and the Mysteries of the Unknown commercial I remember best…

Ben Randall is that annoying guy you’ll run into from time to time who is far more intrigued by what’s going on than you’ll ever be… and the last thing you want to do is get him wound up or pretend to be interested in what he’s saying, because he’s going to educate you on his pointless knowledge far more than you ever intended to be.

Let me tell you about ancient squirrel drawings! These were found on the wall of a cave near Lake Titicaca in… what are you doing with that gun, ma’am?

Whether you’re curious about aliens, ancient beliefs, ESP, or why Twinkies aren’t of this earth, there’s a book in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown series just for you!  While you can no longer order it with your major credit card via an 800 number (i.e., the online shopping of the 80′s), if you look around Ebay and such places, you can surely find a set somebody is willing to part with after they experienced one too many scary dream of 50 foot possums stomping on cars along country roads.  While we here at The Nest believe in the power of Rainbow Donkeys and talking squirrels, we do have a firm grip on science and probability, and do hereby render our verdict on all such phenomena….

I’ll bet you knew I was going to say this…

The 1980′s were a wonderful and magical time, when just the very thought of holding something in your hands that would once take large, bulky machinery had us just as hopelessly ecstatic and orgasmic as many people seem to get today over the introduction of the latest iWhatever device.  Remember how the Japanese were going to make all these small, handheld TV’s that would be the everyday essential of the future?  Yeah, that seemed like a great idea until we realized just how shitty the analog signal of the time that looked bad enough on a regular sized TV looked even shittier on a screen as big as your hand.

But hey, we still drooled over the novel concept of the handheld device!  Little did we realize then that the 21st century would turn the handheld device into the antichrist…

Your souls are all mine! The Dark Queen of the Smartphone!!!

Handheld electronic games were all the rage in the decade of excess thirty years ago, and one of the originators of that trend was also one of its most brilliant and coolest creations, and that was the one and only Merlin, the subject of this week’s Flashback Friday!

It looked like what Knight Rider might have made a call from KITT on…

First produced and manufactured by Parker Brothers in 1978, Merlin wound up becoming one of the most popular toys of the early and mid 80′s.  The original Merlin, the one I had as a kid and will sing the praises of today, can be seen above.  Yes, it looked like a prototype for the very first cellphones, and yes, like all handheld electronic devices of the 80′s, you could have used it as a lethal weapon had it become necessary.  The console had eleven numbered buttons (0-10), as well as four additional buttons at the bottom that were used to select games or  for some gameplay.

Panic Button not included.

Despite being an advanced piece of technological wizardry that cost a pretty penny back in the day, there were only six “games” that could be played on the Merlin… and half of them got old faster than a video game that took you 10 minutes and one try to beat.

Or a game that had no ending and the same looping theme music…

Let’s see what the ol’ Merlin could do here…

Game #1 – Tic Tac Toe:

I’ll take Detective Dietrich to block.

You gotta love the human spirit to innovate and do things that were never before possible.  But sometimes we can take that too far, like when we build a sophisticated handheld computer to play a game that requires only a pencil and a piece of paper.  Oh, but wait, you say… the Merlin brought a new element to Tic Tac Toe that couldn’t be replicated with chalk on a sidewalk.  If you were one of those kids everyone hated, you could now play Tic Tac Toe by yourself, with the Mighty Merlin as your opponent!  Here’s a wonky, but sufficient video that shows you how to play Tic Tac Toe by yourself on this red menace…

That button on the bottom right there that says “COMP TURN”.  Yeah, you had to tell Merlin when it was its turn to play… as if there are lesser known rules of Tic Tac Toe that allow for someone to take more than one turn at a time.  This is the kind of brilliant computer AI you were up against when you couldn’t find an O person to your X.  Somewhere out there, a whole bunch of antisocial kids cheated the Merlin again and again in Tic Tac Toe by never allowing it to take its turn, and never felt the least bit guilty about it.  What kind of awful lessons were the children of the 80′s learning anyhow?

Oh…. yeah.

Game #2 – Music Machine:

Not to be outdone with just being a glorified outlet for our Tic Tac Toe cravings, the Merlin could also double as a musical instrument!  Well, a shitty musical instrument that only played 10 different notes, anyway.  You haven’t lived until you’ve heard “Jingle Bells” played on a Merlin.

Beep beep beep! Beep beep beep! BeepBEEP beep beepbeep!

In all seriousness, though, to this day I can still tap out Jingle Bells on a keyboard because I still remember the code to play it on the Merlin!  Since most kids wouldn’t know their FACE from their EGBDF, Merlin came with a few songs included in the instruction manual.  Plugging in 3330333035123044443333335321 into Merlin will greet you with the opening bars of this joyous carol, and when I later figured out that 1=C, 2=D, 3 =E, etc., I could take these mad Merlin music making skills to the piano and really show off my musical genius.

One can only take so much holiday cheer.

Game #3 – Echo:

Let’s see what our guest commentator Simon has to say about this game…

And a whole string of bleeping beeps for good measure!

Echo gave you a sequence of one to nine numbers you had to memorize and enter back into Merlin to win this game.  This was the absolute worst possible game for people like me with very short attention spans.  Of course, those kids who were cheating the game at Tic Tac Toe probably always selected the option to have to memorize only one note… and those bastards probably got into Harvard.  Of course, some of them probably discovered that they didn’t even have the short term memory to recall a single note for 3 seconds, and those kids undoubtedly went on to the prestigious University of Sally Struthers…

Yep, they all got their diploma in firearms repair from ICS. God help us all…

Game #4 – Blackjack:

Long before casinos became omnipresent across the United States, and compulsive gamblers needed pocket handheld slot machines to cure their fever, Merlin was offering us the chance to play a little blackjack.  Awesome!  I’ve got 14, go ahead and hit me….

Wait… what the hell kind of blackjack is this!?!?!?

Note from the Nest:  Yes, I know the ace can count as 1 or 11 in blackjack.  Just go with it, OK? It was the only good image I could find of a 14!

While the rest of the world plays blackjack where the magic number is 21, Merlin can apparently only count up to 13.  Either that, or the choice of 13 could be one more sign this device was created by Satan himself.  This is the only game where the “Hit Me” button in the lower left corner of the Merlin is ever used.  After putting up with these four shitty games so far, Merlin’s “Hit Me” button sounds more like an invitation for sweet revenge than it does a request for another card…

Die Merlin!!! Die!!!

Game #5 – Magic Square:

Just when it seemed like the Merlin’s best function might be as a doorstop, we have finally come to a game that is actually interesting to play.  Magic square used the 1-9 buttons and started out with some random pattern being lit up.  Touching a button caused the lights on the buttons in all four directions to turn from on to off or from off to on.  The object was to figure out how to get all of the lights off, kind of like…. um…..

Is there no originality in the electronic toy market?

Game #6 – Mindbender:

Luckily for the Merlin’s sake, this sixth game was totally worth all the technology and money that went into this oversized telephone receiver.  In this game, Merlin would come up with a secret combination of numbers, the length of which was determined by the player beforehand.  Your job was to try to guess the string, and after each try, Merlin would give you clues as to how many numbers you got right (steady lights) and how many you got in the right place (blinking lights).  This was the game I enjoyed most, and spent the majority of my Merlin playing days partaking in,

Ahem, ahem!!!

Yes, OK.  This was a more involved, electronic version of the game Mastermind.  But at least in this case, the case for recreating the game on the Merlin interface is justified simply because there aren’t five billion marbles and pegs to lose and have your little sister choke on.  So finally we see an instance of gameplay copycatting that was actually a marked improvement on the original!

Well played, Merlin! You spared yourself from the sledgehammer! I might even let you have a turn the next time we play Tic Tac Toe.

A childhood without the internet and cell phones could’ve been real boring, but thanks to the handheld game revolution of the 80′s, we were able to fight off the boredom so we could all be claimed by the smartphone zombie apocalypse.  The Nest would like to thank the makers of these fantastic little gadgets of the 80′s like Merlin, who realized that all a person needed to have a good time was a shapely piece of plastic, some buttons, and a fresh supply of C batteries.  And to those of you out there with dirty minds…. well, you asked for it!

I wonder what this “Hit Me” button does?