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!

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!”

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….

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?

We didn’t need cellphones in the 80′s, just more quarters.

Video games weren’t just a fad in the 80′s, they WERE the 80′s.  If one were to create a Mount Rushmore of the decade, Pac Man’s face would have to be there in between Ronald Reagan and Weird Al Yankovic.  We played video games at home on our Ataris and Commodore 64′s, and Colecos, and eventually the greatest piece of electronics ever created in human history, the Nintendo Entertainment System.  Our parents would have to get the crowbar to pry us out of the house so that we could get some exercise and they could get their Pitfall fix.  So what did we do once we were outdoors…. we hit up the arcade of course, where the video game revolution all started.  Let’s relive some of those video game utopia memories in this week’s Flashback Friday.

The ghost parents ran out of names when they got to Clyde, which is why he became a fucked up mess… leading to a life of dressing up in drag and calling himself Sue.

OK, I was able to beg my Dad for five bucks. Time to hit the arcade!!!

No cash value? Non negotiable? Non refundable? Oh, why don’t you sit on a joystick?

First up, I gotta find a change machine.  Dollar bills don’t do you any good in the 80′s, no self-respecting machine took anything but coins back then.  Oh, there’s one over there!

Ch-ching!

OK, now I have a fistfull of quarters!  What game to play first?  Perhaps I’ll give those ghosts in Pac Man a run for their money… or get a blister on my finger moving the dude around in Centipede… or see how many signs I can take out in Pole Position.  Hmmm, wait, what game is this?  What’s that on the screen?

It was the Just Say No era, after all…

Thanks for the reminder, Mr. Sessions.  I’ll stay away from the mushrooms when I play Super Mario Brothers.

Oh, yes!!!  There’s a Donkey Kong machine!  Man, I love this game!  Come on, Mario, let’s kick some monkey ass!  Hey, wait… what’s up with that screen!?!?

Well, that’s distracting…. pretty, but distracting.

Well, it is the 80′s after all, and the screen saver hasn’t been invented yet.  This meant that after months and years worth of showing the same screens over and over, the primary game grid of these old arcade classics always wound up getting burned into the screen.  This wasn’t an issue normally, but quite often, especially towards the latter years of the golden age of arcades, an old module was reused for a different game… and it’s hard to guide your poor frogs across that dangerous street when you’ve got the Pac Man grid ever-present in the background.

Oh well, time to go for that High Score!

I’m gonna have to help that bitch a lot if I want my score up there!

Yes, we weren’t just competing against the pixelated enemies of the games we were playing, we were also competing against everyone else who ever played the game… or at least everyone who had played it since the last time someone shut it off.  Getting the high score was big time bragging rights back in the day, and the makers of these games knew how to fuel our egos.  Getting a high score got you the ultimate badge of video game fame… your name on the list of top players!

WTJ is such a showoff.

Of course, the arcade version of a Hall of Fame plaque was limited to just three letters, so you had to choose wisely when you recorded your deeds on the scroll of honor.  I usually used BIL for my first name since I wanted my accomplishments duly noted, but many other adolescent gamers just saw the opportunity to be rebellious and entered names like ASS, FUK, SEX, or DIK.

Well, let’s put another quarter in the slot and try this again.  I’m pretty sure this time… wait, what’s this?

Hurry up and die, loser!

Someone’s just stood a quarter up on the console of the game I’m trying to play!  You know, that might get you shot nowadays, but back in the 80′s, we knew it was the arcade gamer’s way of saying “I got next!”  You know, we could always play two players.  The machine will let us take turns, and you won’t even have to be Luigi since he doesn’t exist yet.  Can’t you just….. oh shit!

Thanks a lot, dude, I hope you get burned by a fireball!

Well, I still have a few quarters to spend, what else is there to play?  Of course, Ms. Pac Man.  The male dominated world of gaming may still worship at the altar of your husband, but you, my round little butterball, are still alive and kicking in many arcades across the land while Pac Man is busy composting in a landfill with Jimmy Hoffa.  What is it about you that made you the one retro game in every modern arcade?

Blinky’s gonna be poking through that sheet before long…

Hmmm, let’s try my luck at pinball.  Pinball machines aren’t just quarter chomping chambers of fun, they’re also genuine arcade works of art.  Let’s see, clowns, aliens, monsters…. ah, here we go!

I only play this game for the high scores.

Beautiful women on the scoreboard were a must on any pinball game worth its salt, a trend which has now spilled over to slot machines.  Targeted at the young males who were pinball’s primary demographic, they were distracting enough to keep us feeding coins into the slot.  Now you know why Tommy’s blindness helped make him a world class pinball wizard.

Well, that game didn’t take long… maybe I can match the last two digits of my final score so I can get a replay!

DAMMIT!!!!

Well, it looks like I’m out of quarters.  I’m not ready to go home yet, I better check all the return slots for forgotten quarters.  Nope, just somebody’s used gum they left in there.  Maybe on top of the machines there’s some lost change…. ah, nope.  Oh well, that five bucks was fun while it lasted.  I got to play for several hours, as opposed to the kids nowadays who can run through a five spot in an arcade in about 20 seconds since most games now cost anywhere from 50 cents to a whole dollar to play, and don’t play nearly as long as the classics did.  I’ll be back next week with some more quarters and a better grip on the joystick.  The soothing red glow of the arcade coin slots is beckoning me again!

Not this slot… that’s just so wrong…

You may recall back in June I devoted a Saturday Squirrel post to pictures of some majestically beautiful squirrels from the Eastern Hemisphere.  Since all of the featured squirrels were from countries in the old Communist Bloc, I made several Cold War references in the post.  I was surprised when two weeks ago, I received a comment on that post that turned out to not just be some Spam that slipped through WordPress’ filter.  I was taken to task by “Amber”, who read my playing off old Cold War themes as misinformed political garbage that was blatantly anti-Russian and factually incorrect.

I should be ashamed of myself!

Amber, bless her heart, was only looking for pictures of beautiful squirrels and ran into a sentiment that obviously came from a time before she was born, and one that she thus can not understand and therefore must think is invalid and incorrect.  To bring anyone born after the fall of the Berlin Wall up to speed, from around the end of World War II through the 1980′s, there was a clear cut “cold war” between the US and the USSR, democracy vs. communism, that (Korea and Vietnam notwithstanding) never actually escalated into a direct active war.  Thank God, or we likely wouldn’t be here today.

Because of THIS.

The “Us vs. Them” propaganda was big on both sides, but there was no doubt what the consequences of an attack by either side would have resulted in.  Many TV shows and movies played off the potential nuclear doomsday scenario that loomed over the earth like a thick black cloud for four decades.  Both sides took precautions to not only prepare itself for a potential counterattack, but to prepare its citizens for the impending horror an atomic bomb would wreak should one be dropped in a populated area.  The US did this by releasing one of the cheesiest children’s educational films in history…

While “Duck and Cover” has been skewered and parodied in about every way imaginable since it was released in 1951, trust me, I will devote a post to breaking it down in my own hilarious way sometime in the future!

Cover and Duck.

But our vigilant Civil Defense team did more than just entertain us with talking turtles and teaching us to put our head between our knees and kiss our asses goodbye, they also encouraged people to create a lot of these…

It’s a bowling ball…. no, a jack o’ lantern!

If you were alive in the 80′s, you’ve very likely seen one of these signs before in real life.  We had one at my elementary school, along the stairs leading into the basement.  I also remember one at our YMCA.  These were places you were supposed to be able to go to in the event of a nuclear attack and stay safe while everything else around you was melting.

NOOOOOOOO!!!! You forgot to duck and cover, Frosty!!!

While there were many fallout shelters built during the 50′s and 60′s that were actually constructed to provide safe haven from atomic fallout, in reality, most fallout shelters were just glorified basements that not only weren’t gonna stop those dangerous gamma rays that would turn your liver into charbroiled steak, but probably didn’t even have a stash of Spam and Tang for all of the survivors.  I’m pretty sure there was nothing in our school’s basement that was edible…

Especially since that’s where the cafeteria was…

But it probably didn’t take much to merit a building getting one of the infamous black and yellow signs.  After all, sometimes just the feeling of safety is good enough to satisfy the people… and when people noticed all of the fallout shelter signs as they went about town doing their business, it made them feel better knowing there was a place they could quickly run into and hunker down so they could get fried from the inside out in the company of total strangers.  It’s kind of like how people feel so much safer driving a car with an airbag even though it’s probably going to rip their head off of their shoulders when it inflates.

Winning!

Alas, my younger readers like Amber will never realize the blissful simplicity of knowing exactly WHO the enemy was, and WHAT they were going to wipe us out with like we had back in the Cold War days.  When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90′s and the threat of atomic warfare subsided, the Fallout Shelter became a relic and most went back to their old purpose of serving up school lunches and hiding dead bodies.  Sadly, the old reliable threat has now been replaced by the much more unpredictable attacks of modern terrorism, and there isn’t much diving into a Fallout Shelter or curling up like a turtle is going to do to save us from those unconventional kinds of assaults.

If only all attacks could be this predictable.

So The Nest gives a big Flashback Friday salute to the Fallout Shelter and its promise of safe haven from The Big One should it happen to be dropped on our hometown.  While we no longer have the old Soviet bear to kick around anymore and make us tremble a bit in our boots, at least there is one bold lunatic out there to keep us on our ducking and covering toes, scrambling for the nearest triple triangle placard of sanctuary.  And I hear he even likes Rainbow Donkeys….

You go with your bad self, Kim Jong!

Is this almost over? I’m hungry.

The 1980′s saw an explosion in celebrity activism, and most of these charitable efforts focused on one lingering issue in the world…. people were starving.  In the days before Calvin Klein ads and supermodel mania, lack of food was actually considered to be a problem worth tackling.  Most of the initial efforts focused on the mass starvation that was going in in Africa, particularly in the country of Ethiopia.  Admit it, if you’re over the age of 30, even to this day when someone mentions the word “starvation”, the first image that comes to your mind is some poor Ethiopian kid with sticks for arms and legs, and huge flies circling around his head.

So we had the Bob Geldof organized Band Aid…

Who’s up for some roasted Boomtown Rat?

Not to be outdone by their British counterparts, American musicians put together USA for Africa…

Michael Jackson looks really weird in this picture, and yes, I realize that’s really saying something…

And on my 10th birthday, the two sides joined forces for Live Aid…

Feed the world, one continent at a time…

These three events all took place within less than a year from the Fall of 1984 through the Summer of 1985, and they were a huge success.  People felt better about themselves, celebrities got some much needed exposure, and plenty of money was raised to ship food to Africa for the evil dictators there to hoard from the people who really needed it.  But there was just one problem, Africa didn’t have a monopoly on this whole starvation thing.

Feed me.

There were plenty of people starving right here in the good old U. S. of A., and they had to be pretty pissed off to see all of the efforts the rich and famous were making to feed those who were living on the other side of the world while they had to resort to digging through Lionel Ritchie’s garbage can.  Would anyone step up and raise money and awareness for those mouths that needed more nutrition than a than a half eaten Big Mac from a dumpster could provide?

I’ll sell my mane for a five dollar foot long!

Yes they would.  And they would do it with one of the most ridiculous nationwide charity events in the history of philanthropy….

No way…. seriously???

Since it’s a no-brainer that the best way to raise awareness for starving Americans was to get together enough people to form a human line of Red Rover from coast to coast, the idea for Hands Across America was born.  On Sunday May 26, 1986, event organizers were going to string together a human chain of hungerbusters from New York City to Los Angeles and have them sing kumbaya songs.  Could you imagine millions of people holding hands with total strangers these days with all of the germophobes we have out there?

Eeeeew, why are your hands so sticky, kid?

As ridiculous as the idea sounds of trying to gather up enough people to stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic, the Hands organizers made things even harder for themselves by ignoring one of the basic rules of math.  Had they planned the route for the chain more like in their logo I posted above, it would have made more sense, but here’s the actual route that was used for Hands Across America….

Sorry, but an earthquake hit while we were drawing the line through the Midwest…

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to crisscross the Mississippi River three times.  Wouldn’t it have worked a little better to have the route be as close to a straight line as possible?  of course, even a straight line isn’t going to solve the problem of American geography that is the vast expanse of mountains and deserts that make up the western third of the country.  Try finding enough people to form a 500 mile chain through the sparsely populated Southwest desert.  Yeah, they didn’t, so in the many places where there were going to be huge breaks in the human chain, long ribbons were substituted to link up Hands holders.  This event wound up using more police tape than during the entire run of Law & Order.

Or by Lady Gaga’s fashion designer.

Then there was the problem of those who felt “Left Outt”…

Nobody wants to hold paws with me? (sniff!)

Politicians and public figures from New England, the South, the Northern Plains, the Northwest, and even Alaska and Hawaii were miffed at being excluded from the Hands Across America fun, and instead of embracing the spirit of the event decided to boycott it instead.  Yes, it has to be a huge ego blow to big cities like Boston, Miami and Seattle to have to sit on the sidelines while the likes of Little Rock, Amarillo, and Bumfuck Arizona got to enjoy all the hand holding fun.  It’s an important lesson that no matter how noble and inclusive your intentions are, somebody out there is going to still feel like you’re screwing them over.

We’ll just shake our hips while you mainlanders all hold hands..

If you really want to be entertained, check out the list of cities with some of the notable participants that appears on the Wikipedia page for Hands Across America.  Yes, Cincinnati managed to bring out Chewbacca from Star Wars, because who else would anyone ever associate with the Queen City but the world’s most famous Wookiee?

Little known fact: Chewy’s first job was working at WKRP in Cincinnati.

So in the end, was this ambitious yet ludicrous event actually a success?  Well, as far as how much money it raised, most estimates I have found state that Hands Across America really didn’t raise much more money than it spent organizing and promoting the event.  But Hands did bring to light the issue that we needn’t look any further than our own backyards when it came to helping out the hungry, and that has generated countless indirect donations of time and money in the effort to feed our own people in the years since the mass hand holding.  Yet while Live Aid and We Are The World have lived on in our collective memories over the past 25+ years, Hands Across America has largely slipped from the public consciousness… mostly remembered only for the absurdity of the whole gimmick behind it.

Do you mind? I can’t see the game!

But that’s fine and dandy enough to get a Flashback Friday salute from The Nest, and we cheerfully extend our paws to our fellow critters today in honor of one of this country’s forgotten spectacles.  While it may tug at our hearts more to see a poor kid in Africa be exploited by an overweight actress from the 70′s, let us never forget that charity always starts in the home….

I have always been a hoarder, I can’t and won’t deny that.  Since I was a kid, I always attached strange sentimental value to the stupidest shit and kept random crap from around the house, or even stuff I found on the street tucked away in a drawer.  Naturally, all this crap I have collected over the past three decades is still with me, and while brainstorming ideas for this week’s Flashback Friday this morning, I thought I might try something a bit different that I may do from time to time.  For this week’s installment, I’ll showcase a few of the odds and ends I’ve pulled from my own private Smithsonian.

One critter’s trash is another critter’s treasure.

It occurred to me as I came across two different blog posts this past week that referenced My Little Pony that despite my unnatural knowledge of 1980′s girls toys, I have yet to actually dedicate a Flashback Friday post to any of the things my sisters played with yet. (Note to Alice:  No, this obviously isn’t my entry in the Sparklepony contest, just consider this another free plug for my pal Sparky!)  So with that theme in mind, I went searching through my treasure trove of junk relics and found some things that used to belong to my sisters that made it into the official Evil Squirrel Collection….

At least Buster steals stuff worth stealing…

First up, most children of the 80′s should recognize what this is…

I was once in The Village Little People.

Fisher Price’s Little People toys have been around since most of our parents were kids, and like all toys with that kind of longevity, have changed quite drastically over the years.  Back in the 80′s when this little round workman was busy building plastic houses and repairing cracks in backyard sidewalks, Little People were still actually little.  This was a day and age when Darwinism was still all the rage, and nobody cared that a lot of our toys we were given to play with were choking hazards.  The Little People you can buy in stores today are big enough to crack your little sister’s skull with, and require two or more kids to lift to prevent back problems.

Maybe it’s time to start blaming Fisher Price for our child obesity epidemic and not McDonalds…

________________________________________

Continuing on through the vault, we come across this relic from one of the greatest cartoon series of the late 80′s…

I’m a duck named Webby… yeah, my parents were complete jackasses…

If you were a fan of the cartoon series Duck Tales, you probably remember Webby as one of the show’s second-tier characters.  She was no doubt introduced to the series to break up the largely male-dominated universe of Donald Duck that existed long before it ever spawned the Duck Tales cartoon. (Fun fact: Disney’s most famous pantsless duck not only wasn’t a star of Duck Tales, he very rarely ever appeared).  I have no idea where she came from or how she came into my possession, but looking at the inscription under the figurine shows both “DISNEY” and “KELLOGGS”, so I’m guessing this was a toy freebie from a cereal box.

Speaking of freebies…. enjoy the nostalgia trip with one of the greatest cartoon theme intros ever…

____________________________

Next stop, the 80′s music wing!  Here’s a guitar that’s truly outrageous….

It also has five strings, so it’s either a broken guitar or a mutated bass…

MTV got kids of the 80′s dreaming of becoming rock stars, and at the same time bands like Bananarama and The Bangles were becoming popular, Hasbro decided to cater to little girls dreams by creating Jem and the Holograms.  Jem and friends not only became a rocking set of dolls, but they even spawned a reasonably successful cartoon series.  And the commercials were unavoidable during kids programming in the mid 80′s…

If you have an eagle eye that can withstand glittery, sparkly girls stuff, you may have noticed our guitar in the picture above belongs to one of the members of the Holograms, Shana…

Hair that was only physically possible in the 80′s.

Jem was so popular and truly outrageous in the 80′s, that it had the executives at Mattel squirming in the plush sofas of their pink Malibu dream houses, so they had to turn that ditz Barbie into a rock star to compete with this brazen newcomer.  So we got the line that most Barbie fans probably wish was purged from the doll’s history, Barbie and the Rockers.  As it was, when more serious hair metal and hip hop took a baseball bat to the glamour boys and girls of the stage in the late 80′s, both the Holograms and the Rockers wound up confined to dusty attics never to be seen again…

As for The Misfits, they went on to a lucrative career in prostitution…

_________________

The music of the 80′s not only sounded good, but it also smelled like shit good!

Who wouldn’t want to smell like Debbie Gibson?

Yes, among my stash of crap is this perfume bottle that once belonged to my oldest sister.  Debbie Gibson hit the scene in the late 80′s as a teenage musical prodigy who actually wrote her own songs rather than just singing stuff she heard on the radio like her contemporary Tiffany.  Alas, Debbie could never shake the association with the fake mallbrat Tiffany, and despite putting out a number of great hits that were actually original creations, she was quickly tossed into the ashcan of musical history and her songs don’t make the playlists of nostalgia radio stations to this day.  This shows she was at one time popular enough to have her own scent, named after her 1989 sophomore album “Electric Youth” and distributed by Revlon along with other assorted makeup essentials.

Wave your flag proudly, Debbie! We still love you, even if your perfume did make us gag…

_______________________

Our last stop takes us to this relic of the same musical era, only this time we’re gonna hang tough with Marky Mark’s brother!

He’s either asking some groupie to call him maybe, or palming his pot stash.

Donnie Wahlberg hit it big as a member of New Kids on the Block before anyone had any clue who his soon-to-be superstar brother even was.  This NKOTB trading card somehow wound up in my possession, and even through all of the creases and terrible fashion choices, we can still see the badass Wahlberg attitude in full display.  Since it’s only possible to stare at Donnie for so long before wanting to take an SOS pad to your eyeballs, let’s see what fun stuff is on the back of this card….

Information that might win you big bucks on some horrible future game show…

Ooh, the NKOTB quiz!  Count me in!  What qualities could Donnie possibly want in a girlfriend that would make her the Right Stuff?  Given Mr. Wahlberg’s tastes, I’d take a guess that the first two qualities are a right boob and a left boob.  Quality three is an orifice somewhere on the body…. any will do, Donnie’s not picky.  Maybe a willingness to play with matches would be a plus as well.  Of course, we’ll never find out since the assholes who made up this sadistic card put the answers to the quizzes on different cards in a blatant attempt to force tween girls to spend all their allowance money buying more packs.  At least we’ve learned that Danny Wood’s nickname is Puff McCloud, so I can kind of sleep at night now…

Apparently one of Danny’s friends had already taken the nickname Dork McDouchebag.

I’ll be sure to do another Flashback Friday post in the future featuring more crap from my impromptu museum of the random and ridiculous.  What other deep dark pop culture secrets society wanted to keep hidden lie deep within my secret vault?  Join us next time, when we’ll bring along an expert to help us dig through the hidden ruins that lie buried in my junk boxes….

All we’ve found so far is a half eaten McDLT and Stretch Armstrong’s severed head!

Pictured above: NOT Menudo.

Ah, the late 80′s.  Everything was so colorful and rad.  Looking at the picture above, you’d swear it was inspired by a scene from “Full House” or “Saved By The Bell”.  But no, what you’re looking at is probably the most forgotten popular music group in the history of rock and roll…

I was blessed to have satellite radio in the car I drove to and from Texas on my trip this week, which is good since the drive was 12 hours one way, and rural Arkansas (yes, that’s redundant) is not known for its quality of radio stations.  So instead of listening to Preacher Jimmy Bob tell me about how I’m going to hell, I was able to listen to 12 hour blocks of 80′s music on Sirius XM’s Channel 8.  Believe me, I heard pretty much every song associated with the decade at some point on the way there or back, as well as a few surprises…

Alas, they did not play Mr. Lekakis’ classy hit single…

The 80′s on 8 has a feature at around quarter till the hour where they play a “Lost Hit of the 80′s”.  Oftentimes, the song really is one that you hardly hear anymore, though some of them are not songs I’d really consider to be lost hits (like Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop”, for instance).  Then there are lost hits that make me wonder how in the hell we can have such short memories of the songs of the era that were popular.  And it was maybe 50 miles into Arkansas on an early Tuesday morning that Sirius XM played this as their lost hit of the hour…

Before I start ranting about how much this pissed me off, here are the facts.  “Crush On You” was the first single by a group called The Jets to become a hit, and it wasn’t some minor success… it made it all the way to #3 on the charts.  That’s a position a lot of better known 80′s songs never touched…

And also a nice day for a song that peaked at #36…

The Jets didn’t just release that one song and fade away like an old Polaroid picture.  They had six Top 40 hits in all spanning just three years from 1986-1988, five of which landed in the Top 10!!!  They were staples of Nickelodeon’s video show “Nick Rocks” at the time, and were even popular enough to get to perform the National Anthem at Game 7 of the 1987 World Series!  That’s a gig even fellow Minnesotan Prince couldn’t pull off..

Prince was too busy singing at The World Series of Love.

Yet by the 1990′s, not even 5 years after these modern day Osmonds set the pop music scene on fire, they were quickly stashed into the repressed memory file in our brains so that we could get all angsty with Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder.  Along with the eye-stinging fashion and the fun loving wholesome attitudes the band projected in its videos, their music also did a major disappearing act.  To this day, The Jets and their five Top 10 hits have been reduced to spinning in the Lost Hit bargain bin.  How did this travesty happen!?!?

It’s a conspiracy against people who wear colored socks!!!

Well, first of all, The Jets were like an 80′s version of The Osmonds, only without the variety show every celebrity who lived through the 70′s used to have.  The eight original members of the band were literally not even half of the Wolfgramm family, which comprised of 15 biological children.  Not surprisingly, they were also Mormon.  Oh, and they were of Tongan descent.  Yep, the 80′s were a weird place and time.

Native Tongans doing the happy dance for my new character Wiki.

The Jets did themselves no favors on the fame endurance scale when they decided they’d rather do other stuff than just spit out Top 10 hit after Top 10 hit.  One by one, the older Wolfgramms left the band, and the remaining members replaced them with even younger siblings and made the huge mistake of converting over to a gospel group.  Elvis Presley got away with performing gospel songs because he was Elvis Fucking Presley, and he knew no matter what crap he barfed out and put on a record, he’d still be adorning velvet art on street corners long after he faked his death.  The Jets were not in Elvis territory.  America took Janet Jackson’s advice, and asked what had The Jets done for them lately, and quickly flushed them down the toilet with the rest of the late 80′s pop movement…

Mommy! Why is the toilet full of hair?

You see, as I alluded to in last week’s Flashback Friday when mentioning Debbie Gibson, it seems like most pop acts from the late 80′s got shipped off to Siberia, particularly the divas.  Tiffany, Jody Watley, Expose, Karyn White and Martika are all on sprawled out on the skid row of memory lane along with D-D-D-Debbie and The Jets, and they’d likely have been joined by Paula Abdul had she not had a resurgence in popularity a decade ago after her success as an American Idol judge.  Why?  Disco, which came a decade earlier, became so reviled by the music loving population that they literally blew the entire genre up.  Yet disco survives to this day on most retro and variety radio formats.  What was it about the 80′s pop sensations that left them out in the cold?  I don’t have a good answer for this…

Apparently, the future isn’t Electric Youth….

So despite the fact that they recorded Grammy nominated songs, released several Top 3 Billboard hits, and even recorded the song that was the slow dance at every late 80′s prom (and if that song doesn’t tug at your heartstrings, you need to turn in your card to the human race), do The Jets get any love for the joy they brought to us in the 80′s?  Heck no.  Arnold from Green Acres probably still has a bigger fan club than The Jets do.  But for being such a memorable part of my 80′s experience, and giving us music that still never fails to make me happy during the rare times I get to hear it, today The Nest would like to salute the Mighty Mormon Power Singers!  We did then, and we still do now have a crush on you, and thanks for keeping it real unlike this generation’s class of “pop” singers…

No, I wouldn’t want to wear a nudie suit and sneakers and shake my booty for you in front of millions of people… why would you even ask?

As those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know, I do not have kids.  I never plan to have any kids.  I do not even really like kids.  They annoy the everloving fuck out of me, and I wish they’d get off of my lawn.  That being said, I am also on record as being a big proponent of letting kids be kids.  We seriously baby the absolute shit out of them these days, and it really serves the kids no good to have them growing up believing that both nature and the manmade world aren’t actually conspiring to kill them.

People my age were the second generation of fans to be drawn to comedian George Carlin thanks to the comedy specials he did for HBO back in the 80′s and 90′s.  Here is what George has to say about the way we treat kids, and while a lot of it is harsh, shocking, and a bit overexaggerated for comedic effect, there’s a lot here I actually agree with…

The segment of that routine that applies to today’s Flashback Friday post starts at about the 2:20 mark, because today we’re going to look back on a glorious time when kids were constantly put in harm’s way every time they tried to go somewhere, and nobody gave a rat’s ass!

Bunch of sissies!

Back in my day, kids weren’t bundled up like a piece of fine china being shipped across the country just to head down to the grocery store.  In fact, I’m old enough to have never even had to sit in a car seat before.  Car seats weren’t mandatory in the state of Illinois until the early 80′s, and by then I had already outgrown them.  I always buckle up when I’m in the car these days, but when I was 5?  Yeah, right.  The windshield was just begging for me to experience the sheer joy of catapulting through its thick layer of safety glass, but I got the last laugh on it!  Most other kids from my time did as well.

I took out the glass for your safety, kid.

Being part of a family with 5 kids in the 80′s, it was a no-brainer that we had a couple of station wagons.  Remember the cool seating arrangements in those rustbucket beasts?

Cool! We get to flip off all of the truckers we pass!

The rear facing back seats in the station wagon of the 70′s and 80′s did not exactly have child safety in mind when it was developed.  They’d be a total nightmare in this modern world where our fascination with texting has made rear-ending the car in front of you popular again.  Some really cool station wagons even had the rear seats facing each other on the sides of the car, like this:

All the better for the kids to fight with each other while on that looooooooong road trip. Are we there yet?

Yep, these station wagons were rolling death traps that some how didn’t manage to thin out the population of Generation X.  Why?  Because not only were we built tough, but so were the cars in that day and age.  In the interest of saving a few billion gallons of gas, about two decades ago, they decided to start making cars out of tinfoil and pixie dust.  There’s a reason modern cars need to have a couple hundred airbags in them.

But riding in the backs of station wagons wasn’t the only way we thumbed our noses at child safety in that more innocent time.  Nope, for a while we had a pickup truck as well, and this was the ONLY way to ride in style in one of those babies….

This was the photo that was framed next to their caskets at the mass funeral.

Yes, me and my sisters rode in the back of a pickup truck for several years and are still here today to tell about it.  Whether on the mean streets of town, or burning down the highway, it was still the most fun I’ve ever had in a moving vehicle.  And being the oldest and the only boy, of course I always got to sit on one of the “humps” over the wheel well.  I feel for the kids today who don’t get to experience the joy of the wind in their face, the openness of the air, the certain death rolling just a few feet under you.  Now only the dog is legally allowed to ride in the back of a pickup truck, and that’s only because everyone on earth hates PETA.

Look Ma! No cavities!

Of course, we could only ride in these dangerous contraptions when our parents needed to go somewhere, and quite often we’d want to go along just for the fun of the experience.  These days, kids are dragged out to the unfun minivan by Mom and forced to go on boring errands since you are not allowed to leave kids under the age of 24 at home alone anymore.  Uh oh, Mom needs to run down to the organic food store and buy some spinach for the veggie taco dinner she’s making tonight!  Better hop on your bike and get away while you can!

Hi ho Rainbow Donkey away!!!

Nowadays, adults even want to take the fun out of riding your damn bike!  No self-respecting kid over 20 years ago would have even considered wearing a helmet while cruising around town causing trouble.  Heck, bicycle helmets weren’t even as readily available then as they are now.  When I started working at Mecca 15 years ago, we sold plenty of bicycles, but had a very small selection of helmets to go with them.  Now there’s a whole damn counter full of head condoms to choose from.  Boy have we gotten to be soft and weak.

Sorry dear, but it’s obviously too late to save your brain from any damaging trauma…

Like all kids, I had numerous falls and mishaps with my bike.  Most of them involved skinning knees and elbows, and maybe ripping a hole in my perfectly good holey jeans.  None of that was going to be curtailed by a damn helmet.  Like with all ridiculous safety laws these days, this one started when some stupid kid rode his bike out in front of a bus and got squished.  Life never was fair, and we had to accept the fact that one loser could screw everything up for the rest of us, but that didn’t make us like it any more…

Way to fuck things up for all of us, douchebag!

Yes, I would make a bad parent.  That’s why I’m not one, and don’t think others who would make bad parents should procreate either.  But it gives me the advantage of relishing a day and age when we didn’t have to wrap our bundles of joy up in a plastic bubble when they left the house.  Here’s to all the daredevil fun my generation had risking our lives just to get from Point A to Point B!  We came, we saw, and we lived to tell!  And now, we must spread the warning for all to take heed of!

Don’t make Uncle Sam have to go get a switch off of the willow tree…

I expect to be spoiled lavishly by this….

Back in the 80′s, network game shows were a staple of our television watching experience.  The mornings were plum full of zany prize winning fun like Press Your Luck, The Price Is Right, Let’s Make A Deal, and the Whatever Dollar Amount We’re Giving Away This Season Pyramid.  The prizes were modest… getting a five figure jackpot was a reason to go bananas.  The consolation prizes were cheesy freebies from the sponsors… Rice a Roni, Turtle Wax, Lee Press On Nails.  And while they were fun to watch for most of us, the people who sponsors really cater to were not around to actually watch them.  This wackiness would never cut it in prime time…

Must see TV.

Also going against airing game shows in prime time were the reverberations from the quiz show scandals of the 1950′s, where producers essentially turned the game shows they oversaw into the WWE, pre-ordaining who would win and lose… coaching some contestants to take dives and providing answers for those they wanted to win.  For the better part of 40 years, the major TV networks prime time schedule was mostly free of game shows… relegating them to the morning hours when only your grandparents were watching…

It’s TAFT!!! The answer’s Taft, ya whippersnapper!!!

However in 1999, four decades since the scandal involving the show Twenty One which had just been rehashed for the current generation in the 1994 movie “Quiz Show”, the fledging ABC network was ready to test the idea of putting a game show in prime time again.  The Michael Davies produced game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, which offered a top prize of one million dollars that could be won on any show, was picked up by the network for a weeklong run in August of that year.  The ratings and buzz generated by Millionaire were so off the charts, that ABC brought it back for a second run in November before making it a permanent part of their prime time schedule in January 2000.

What made Millionaire so successful?

MEEEEE, dammit! I saved the ABC network!!! Seriously, Regis is probably still telling people to this day how he bailed out the troubled network….

Well, host Regis Philbin was certainly a factor.  The likeable longtime host of a morning talk show with then co-host Kathy Lee Gifford was the perfect emcee for this big money extravaganza with his ability to get the most out of even the most moribund contestant…

Come on down! Gelman, will you drag that corpse up on stage for me!

And Regis needed these skills, because one of the other big draws of Millionaire was the fact that literally anyone had a chance to be on the show, and you could try out to be a contestant in your very own home.  For the first full year of its life, the only way to become a contestant on the show was to call the Millionaire hotline on designated evenings and play a quick “Fastest Finger” quiz with your phone keypad.  Whether you advanced to the next round was first determined by speed of answers, and later just random draw of everyone who answered all three questions correctly.  This was seriously a blast to play, and I enjoyed all 37 times I waited by the phone the next afternoon for the call that never came to go on to Round 2.  Oh well.

No, he’s in the bathroom right now. Sorry, but we don’t want to buy anything from you, Regis. Buh bye… (click)

The fact that anyone in America could suddenly find themselves swooped up and brought to New York to play for one million dollars on a prime time stage was a huge draw for Millionaire’s popularity.  It also led to a seemingly endless string of, as my internet brethren on my home board like to call them, MAWGS, or Middle Aged White Guys, occupying the show’s Hot Seat.  Despite the fact that ratings were still booming for the show in all demographics, the producers were very nervous about the lack of diversity in its contestants, and the perceptions that would draw in an increasingly politically correct culture.  Television executives have never been one to believe in the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, so the Millionaire brain trust set the wheels in motion for the show to convert from a phone game try out process to the more common audition method.

We loved your dance on the police car, Ms. Hope! You’ve made it through!

Here is an interesting fact that you can make of what you will… of the nine contestants who won Millionaire’s top prize during its original prime time run from 1999-2002, eight of those players got on the show via the phone game.  Only one was an audition pick.  There is no doubt from anyone who watched the show from its beginning to the bitter end that the game-playing quality of the contestants from the audition phase of Millionaire was nowhere near as high as it was during the show’s phone game phase.  The contestants were more livelier and telegenic and of course, diverse, but overall they didn’t know shit from shinola when it came to trivia.

You big meanie!!! Don’t hate on the beautiful people!!!

And I can say that without sounding like too much of an asshole, because I WAS one of those audition players.  No, that opening picture I put leading off this post is not some clever Photoshop or cheap prop I picked up… it was a souvenir I got from my day as a contestant on the show back on January 31, 2001.  I was one of 130 people who were chosen from tryouts held in seven cities back in the Fall of 2000 to fill a block of shows that aired from mid January through early February 2001, which were the first non-gimmick episodes of Millionaire to feature audition-picked players.  You can make me out sitting behind Regis awaiting a chance to play during the part of this video that begins at about the 2:30 mark…

And yes, here is a screenshot of my four seconds of fame… the first and almost certainly only actual picture of me you will ever see on this blog….

Not ready for prime time….

I have so many stories about my Millionaire experience that I promise to someday share in its own post, but before you all start calling me up for loans or autographs, let’s make it clear right now that I didn’t win a dime.  Ten finalists were chosen for each show, and those ten competed in Fastest Finger questions to earn a chance to sit in the Hot Seat.  I botched both of my FF questions, and thus, two chances to leave with what almost certainly would have been at least $32,000…

Douchebag!

Where were we?  Oh yes, ABC seemed intent on killing off its golden goose.. filling Millionaire’s final season of 2001-02 with more celebrity episodes than regular contestant shows, making it inevitable that the show would be cancelled not even three full years after it had captivated the nation.  The franchise lives on through the syndicated version of the show that was hosted by Meredith Vieira for 11 seasons, and now Cedric the Entertainer… however so many changes have been made to the game’s format over the last decade that it would be barely recognized as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire by anyone who had been in a coma since 2000.

Hey, where’s the Hot Seat at?

And so it goes in the entertainment business… you are built up just to be torn down.  Millionaire and its host Regis Philbin picked ABC up off the mat and brought the network back to respectability, and not needing the demographically unpleasing, but immensely popular Millionaire anymore, executives quickly ran a stake through its savior’s heart.  But we here at The Nest will always be grateful for the few years this masterpiece of simple televised trivia was the talk of the nation, and gave this squirrel an experience he will never forget.

Who Wants To Be A Huge Dumbass?

And even more, had there been no Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, there would be no Evil Squirrel, no MBRS, no Buster or Rainbow Donkey, no comic, and even no blog.  That’s because I cut my cyberspace teeth on the official ABC message board for Millionaire 13 years ago, and it was there that ES and the gang came to life over the past 5 plus years.  So thank you Regis, not only for saving ABC, but for bringing the joy of squirrels, skunks, possums, and rainbow donkeys into the lives of literally hundreds of people out there!

THANK YOU MILLIONAIRE!!!

There was an undeniable “golden age” of television programs that spanned three decades from the 1960′s through the 1980′s that just seems so different from the early television fare that came before it, and the more modern small screen shows that have come since.  Remember when TV shows had real theme songs, and a real opening montage?  Who can forget laughing every time Dick Van Dyke tripped over the ottoman, smiling when Mary Tyler Moore tossed her beret into the air, or holding our ears in agony while Jean Stapleton tried to sing?

Edith! Will you stifle yourself?

Networks have blown up the traditional beginnings of today’s prime time shows because they want one show to segue straight into the other, giving the viewer less of a chance to flip over to something else before they become entrapped in the storyline of the next program.  But what’s really taken the hit is what comes at the end of the show.  Rolling the credits, as we once knew it, practically doesn’t exist anymore.  Now programming executives redo the original credits from a show, squash them into a corner of the screen, and roll them so fast that you can’t even find out who the damn guest star was, let alone who was manning the best boy grip.

A real, honest-to-God best boy grip, in case you ever wondered what one looked like…

One of the many great things about the older shows from the golden age wasn’t just the show’s unique credit roll, it was those little production company idents that would appear at the very end.  Sure, they’re still around nowadays, but they usually play before the faux-credits roll, which takes away a lot of their appeal.  And besides, they’re just not as good as the old production company logos.  Back in the day, every production company worth their salt got together with someone who was on the cutting edge of cheesy TV animation at the time to craft their 5 second business card they tacked on to the end of all of their shows.  And that wasn’t even good enough, because they were also scouting out terrible orchestras and out of work prog rockers to come up with some of the most annoying short jingles in history.

This has been a Filmways Presentation, Dahlink!

Take shitty animation, horrifically bad music, horrendous seventies fonts, and throw in the element of surprise these little masterpieces of “LOOK AT ME!” theater could often render if you didn’t know they were coming, and you get a very weird phenomenon.  Go on YouTube and start looking up videos of some of the classic production company identifiers out there, and you’ll see most of the uploaders and commenters have the same strange adjective they use to describe them…. scary!

BWAHAHAHA!!!! I’ve come to eat your chileh!!!

I’m not so sure scary is the right word to describe most of these short bits of nostalgia.  But creepy?  Fuck yeah.  Especially if it was at the end of a rerun you were watching late at night and you were already half asleep.  Just watch this compilation and see for yourself that these were creep overkill…

It’s not hard to see how a small child might be frightened by some of these, and even an adult can still get goosebumps watching that Viacom V of destruction headed our way like a giant tornado while the overly loud synthesized music plays to a crescendo.  What in the world were the creators of these old animated logos taking that made them think this was the best way to promote their studio?

Ehhh, nevermind.

But even if some of them did come off like they should be put at the end of a horror film, The Nest still gets a warm fuzzy feeling every time we get a chance to flashback to a day and age when we actually used to watch TV because it was worth watching.  Thanks for all of the chills, thrills, bad synth riffs, and strangely shaped letters moving all over the freaking place.  And to wrap up this piece, I’d like to show off some of the artwork I was inspired to draw while I was doing the research for this week’s Flashback Friday… where I added my own unique characters to some of these classic idents.  Enjoy!

I don’t think this is gonna be no Three Stooges flick…

Squirrels make early 80′s PBS seem so much less creepy…

Meow!

Sit, Skanki, Sit! Good dog!

And because you knew I couldn’t possibly leave him out…..

Benny Hill, Danger Mouse, and Rainbow Donkey! Cheerio!

By the end of this week, you’re going to overdose on cute here at The Nest…

Every good 80′s child whose parents had cable and didn’t lock them in the basement until they were 18 watched a ton of Nickelodeon back in the decade.  Television’s first network just for kids became insanely popular in its first years of existence, and is still chugging right along at over 30 years of age to this day… even though the programming is much shittier different now than it was during Nick’s “golden age” in the 1980′s.

Ummmm, didn’t we used to know you guys when you didn’t look like doucheturtles?

The shows of the past 20 years or so on Nick all have a slightly different flavor to them than the classic fare… probably largely due to the fact that the network had a huge role in creating and producing most of the series that have come and gone from the channel since about 1990.  Prior to the Doug/Rugrats/Ren & Stimpy era (aka the “Snick” era) of the early 90′s, almost all of what Nickelodeon aired was syndicated programming they merely paid for the rights to air.  Much of it was imported from other countries, and some had to be dubbed into English, which in a way, added to the appeal for us kiddies.

Nice try, Bob Esponga…

I could go on and on about Classic Nickelodeon until you wanted to slam an orange blimp through your screen you are reading this on, but for the purposes of today’s Flashback Friday, I’m going to limit this post to looking at some of my favorite cartoons that made classic Nick so enjoyable to watch, even if we were seeing the same episodes over and over and over again due to the fact that it usually only took a few weeks to run through an entire series of some of those early cartoons…

YAY! Bananaman’s on again!

I’m going to concentrate this post on the classic Nick toons from the anime family, as my original idea ran too long, and I promise to profile more 80′s Nick cartoons in a future Flashback Friday post.  Anyway, let’s get started with one of the true cartoon classics…

Belle and Sebastian:

Is that a pooch in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

If there was one thing Nick loved to show back in the 80′s, it was serialized anime.  Belle and Sebastian was one of at least three such cartoons the networked aired in the 80′s, and probably the most heartwarming of the bunch.  Sebastian is a 7 year old boy from a French village near the Pyrenees Mountains who is the laughingstock of his town simply because he doesn’t have a mother.  As could only happen in fucked up Japanese cartoons, Sebastian decides to run away at this tender age and crosses the border into Spain to find his real mother, where he befriends a big white dog named Belle.  Belle is a gentle pooch who suffers from the same stereotyping most huge dogs get, the nearby villagers believe she is a vicious child-eating beast who probably also shits on their lawns, and the local police spend a lot of time trying to capture and kill the poor thing since there is apparently no real crime taking place in Spain at the time…

I’d be wearing that White Monster as a coat were I not still dead.

The Little Prince:

Yeah, you can already tell this is going to end up being a fucked up mess of a cartoon…

The Little Prince from outer space can catch a shooting star and sail away.  Perhaps one day he’ll come your way.  Those two sentences seriously made up the entire introduction to this Japanese import that was originally made in the late 70′s, and sadly, they pretty much sum up what this cartoon was about.  This boy, who lives on a planet by himself, gets bored dealing with his rose girl and his annoying bird friend Swifty every single day, so for excitement, he rides comets using a butterfly net.  These comets usually end up crashing into earth, somehow not burning up our Little Prince upon his entry into our atmosphere.

It’s probably safer than taking the bus…

I would doubt 26 comets have even crashed into earth in the whole history of the universe, but somehow that’s how many episodes were made of this series.  And TLP ran on Nickelodeon for 4 whole years.  Yeah, with just 26 episodes, Nick still managed to squeeze four years of airtime out of it.  That would be unthinkable in these modern times, but the only network for kids was a master at milking a cheap show for all it was worth.  The Nick show Out of Control had even fewer original episodes, yet was run on the network for an amazing 7 years!

Hey Dave! There’s this chick on You Can’t Do That On Television I think you should meet…

The Adventures of The Little Koala:

Which way to Barwon Heads?

Anime is supposed to look diabetes-inducingly cute, but The Little Koala set the bar when it came to entertaining kids without creeping them the fuck out like most shows geared towards the young set…

Yeah, I’m referring to creatures of your ilk…

The Little Koala wasn’t just eye candy for kids, it also featured wholesome storylines that told a lesson.  Seriously, I don’t care how old you were when Nickelodeon aired this in the late 80′s, it was impossible to dislike it.  If you’re having a horrible case of The Sadz, just watch the intro to the show.  I dare you to go the whole 53 seconds without smiling…

The Mysterious Cities of Gold:

Now we’re getting somewhere!

Towards the end of Nick’s golden era in the late 80′s, the network introduced two new Japanese anime series that were picked up by the French and then redubbed for English audiences.  The first of these was The Mysterious Cities of Gold, which follows the adventures of children Esteban (no, not the dude with the guitar), Zia and Tao, along with their Spaniard company of Mendoza and his two flunkies Sancho and Pedro.  Along the way they meet even greedier and bloodthirstier Spanish assholes, a solar powered airplane in the form of a condor, and even some aliens!  Learning South American history around the time of the conquistadors was never so much fun!

“What does it say, Tao?”
“It’s ancient Hivan for ‘YOU ARE HERE.’”

Spartakus and the Sun Beneath The Sea:

It looks like Bac got captured by the Pirates…

The absolute gold standard of Nickelodeon’s 80′s cartoons was also one of the last it introduced during its 80′s heyday.  Spartakus was kind of a sister show to Cities of Gold, though it told a much different and much zanier story.  See if you can follow this….

There was a great cataclysm that destroyed most civilization on the earth.  A group of survivors set up a city deep beneath the earth called Arkadia that relies on a shitty artificial sun called the Terra (It was originally the Shagma in the pre-dubbed version, but we can’t go using terms with such blatant sexual innuendo in kids programming now, can we?) that’s about to go out on them.  Wanting to save their city, the children of Arkadia learn that there are people still living on the earth and build a messenger to recruit help from them… a woman named Arkana.  Arkana sets out to the surface of the earth, and finds the best help she can find to save a damaged sun…. two fucking kids.

We’re in so much trouble when we get home…

She also runs into Spartakus, who saves the kids from an attack by the undersea Pirates, who prove to be the major nemesis of our heroes during the entire show’s run.  The four of them come back to Arkana, then go out in search of the mysterious “auracite” that will save their flickering sun.  Naturally, being an anime where there is no such thing as logic, they go searching throughout the many underground “strata” under the earth.  You know, it seems like a lot of people are living just fine and dandy under the earth without that stupid sun, but if the Arakadians just moved instead of being stubborn asses like people living along the coastline during a hurricane, we wouldn’t have had this totally fucked up yet brilliant series!

What is that? Why should be bother with a hard C when adding a K to everything looks so much kooler?

But the true star of this series was its composer Vladimir Cosma.  There were two little “music videos” that would air at random times over the course of the 52 episodes of Spartakus, one dedicated to the Pirates and the other to the odd creatures who accompanied our heroes, Bic and Bac.  The tunes are epic, and probably ingrained in the heads of anyone who even casually watched the series do to their constant replay…

If you can’t get up and dance to those songs, I pity you!

And thus ends The Nest’s look back at some of the best cartoons from Nickelodeon’s golden age of the 80′s.  We’ll revisit this theme at a later time since I’m sure you were all wondering how I could possibly forget great cartoons like Inspector Gadget and Danger Mouse.  But for now, we’d like to thank Nick for digging up some of the most obscure Japanese cartoons out there on the cheap and turning them into classic stories that kept us 80′s kids out of trouble.  Just because there was no run on Belle and Sebastian toys at Christmastime or a line of Little Koala shirts to make money off of doesn’t mean the quality of these toons was just as good, if not better than the licensed garbage you’ve been trotting out for over a decade now…

Shudder!

When the M stood for “music” instead of “moronic”.

There is no denying that MTV was the cable television channel that most defined the awesome decade of the 1980′s.  What started out as a network to play those awesome promotional videos for pop songs 24 hours a day back in 1981 quickly became the source for a ton of 80′s culture through its wide variety of music videos, and became so popular that it got entirely too big for its britches and killed off the very medium that made the channel what it was.  While MTV wouldn’t know a music video from a teen mom these days, the videos that once populated the station’s airwaves continue to entertain those of us who are nostalgic for the cheesy comfort of the decade, while making this generation wonder just what in the hell we were smoking back then to have raved over them.

SCIENCE!!!!

Sure, you know about “Money for Nothing”, “Sledgehammer”, “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”, and are probably shouting out that “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video ever played on MTV.  But as you know, I have more of an appreciation for the lost classics of pop culture history, so for today’s Flashback Friday, we’re going to look back at some of the odder, more forgotten videos of the era.  Here are five picks I came up with just off the top of my head, and I promise you I will revisit this theme in a future FF segment!

“I Do’ Wanna Know” – REO Speedwagon

Old rockers never die. They just get scarier looking…

REO Speedwagon was no flash in the pan act, and they were very well established as rock stars long before MTV turned rock stars into celebrities.  There was a lot of gnashing of the teeth from the established acts in rock and roll when MTV made it almost mandatory that every hit song had to have a cool video to play along with it.  Some acts shunned MTV, and some embraced it… and REO did just that.  Their 1984 album “Wheels Are Turnin” produced their biggest hit, “I Can’t Fight This Feeling”, but it also featured this very minor hit “I Do’ Wanna Know”, which was also turned into the greatest music video of all time.

No, I’m not exaggerating.  This is epic.  Check it out…

The bratty kid gone berserk in this video, played by REO’s manager, plays the youth gone wild role to overexaggerated perfection.  There are so many cheap and clever laughs in this 4 minute masterpiece, and the gags are nonstop.  The moral lesson of this video… punk kids were doomed to Hell!  A+++++

And the taxidermy was pretty cool as well.

“I Love Rocky Road” – Weird Al Yankovic

Weird Al went from an amusing regular on the Dr. Demento Show to the greatest song parodist who ever fucking lived.  Can somebody please explain to me why this man is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame discussion?  If you think parody writing is so easy, try writing one parody of anything that it brilliant, let alone an entire career’s worth of excellent ones.  Here’s some early Weird Al (before he learned how to sing) that is a take off of Joan Jett’s #1 song from 1982…

This isn’t my favorite Weird Al song, but it’s probably my favorite Weird Al video, because as usual, he does such a wonderful job of mocking the style of not only the song, but of the video that accompanied it.  The biker bar turned ice cream shop, the cheesily leatherclad singer, the angrily disinterested faces on everyone in the crowd… the only thing he didn’t copy was the original video’s black and white, which I think was a good move given that a handful of the gags would have fallen flat if not viewed in color.

And just to show you how much this blog has warped my mind, while re-watching this video for my post today, I noticed something in it I had never noticed before!

Cutter want a taste?

The two totally 80′s chicks that Weird Al walks in the ice cream shop with… are those early My Little Pony designs on their shirts!?!?  I’m not sure they are, especially since the Ponies were in their infancy when this video was made, but damned if they couldn’t pass for MLP!  Any Bronies want to weigh in on this?

“Tarzan Boy” – Baltimora

I remember back in the mid 90′s, my family got yearly passes to the local Six Flags park, and I remember one day back in 1996 or 97, I wandered by the booth where you could make your own music video, complete with every cheap special effects gimmick ever to appear in a 80′s videos.  You know the kind of place I’m talking about, right?  Anyway, I they had a TV outside of the booth that was streaming past videos park patrons had made, and I stood there and started watching it….. and watching it….. and watching it.  I must have been there for hours, hooked by the absolute amateur cheesiness before me!  I am such a fan of shitty, yet epic.

And I mention this, because tell me this video doesn’t look like it was created in one of those damn make-your-own-video booth….

I will admit the song is likeable and catchy…. but ugh!  The video is downright horrible!  I expect stuff like this from people paying $20 to act like a video star for half an hour, but not from someone good enough to get on MTV.  This video has all of those crappy visual gimmicks… wipes, picture in picture, frames moving within the screen, and backgrounds that look like they were pulled off of one of the first personal websites ever.

Ug! Me TarzanBoy! You Janexoxo!

And this video came out in 1986.  Someone should inform Mr. Baltimora that glam was long dead at that point, and trying to look like David Bowie is about as unTarzanny as you can get…

“I Eat Cannibals” – Total Coleo

The official wardrobe choice of the MTV era.

If you were a video vixen back in the 80′s, there’s a good chance at some point in your career, you had to ditch the dresses from Saks Fifth Avenue for a frock made out of Hefty Cinch Saks.  Trash bag outfits were all the rage for the stylish 80′s lady, and the British quintet Total Coleo totally rocked them…

How this group didn’t become as big as The Spice Girls, I’ll never know.  I guess it wasn’t a good sign when they tried to hit it big in America and were forced to change their name so as not to be confused with the band whose biggest hit was one of the lamest songs of the 80′s, “Africa”.  Toto Coleo, as they were known in their homeland, does their best to make the video for their quite racy little ditty as upbeat, quirky, and radical as only something in the 80′s could have possibly achieved.

If you had an 80′s Bingo card right now, you’d probably win a coverall on just this image.

But it’s definitely a fun song, has rather cool and unconventional dance choreography, and is a visual treat compared to many other drab videos.  It’s also pretty damn conventional compared to the last video I’m going to show you…. and you better be prepared for what you’re about to see!

“Dog Police” – Dog Police

One of the cool things about the first few years of MTV was that because they played music videos all day and all night, and there weren’t a huge plethora of music videos out there at the time, they wound up playing a lot of stuff that couldn’t be heard on mainstream radio.  While MTV was instrumental in helping to kill off the old phenomenon of regional radio hits, its eclectic selection of music videos it played also gave 15 minutes of fame to some pretty weird bands and songs.

The band Dog Police was so irrelevant, they don’t even have their own page on Wikipedia.  Yet, they got exposure on MTV with a song and video that are so horrible, you can’t help but possibly love it.  Sit back and enjoy this masterpiece of epic shittiness!

I have no idea what the hell I just watched!!!

I’m not sure I can sum up this song and video any better than the person who introduced me to it.  Here are the words of one of my message board friends who went by the handle ToLiveIsToFly:

SO MANY THINGS WRONG WITH THIS SONG.
1. IT’S TERRIBLE
2. THIS WAS CLOSE ENOUGH AFTER THE FONZ USING “DOG” TO REFER TO “UGLY WOMAN”, SO THE SUBTEXT OF “UGLY WOMEN SHOULD BE ROUNDED UP”
3. IF SO, DID YOU GET A LOOK AT THAT LEAD SINGER? WHO THE HELL IS HE TO CRITICIZE ANYONE ELSE FOR BEING UGLY?
4. OR MAYBE THEY REALLY MEANT TO REFER TO SENTIENT HUMAN-DOG HYBRID WOMEN. IF SO, IF THEY’RE SENTIENT, WHY THE HELL DO THEY DESERVE TO BE ROUNDED UP?
5. THE ACTUAL POLICE ARE HUMAN-DOG HYBRIDS, TOO. ROUNDING UP THEIR OWN KIND, JUST FOR A LITTLE BIT OF POWER AND ACCEPTANCE. THEY THINK WE SEE THEM AS ONE OF US. WE DON’T. ONCE ALL THE DOG WOMEN ARE ROUNDED UP, THEY’RE NEXT. WHO ARE THEY FOOLING?
6. THE CHORUS IS TOTALLY RIPPED OFF FROM THE ELECTRIC COMPANY SPIDER-MAN SKITS.

Any chance the Dog Police can round up this chick?

And there you have a taste at the stranger side of MTV.  We’ll definitely do this again, as I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of all of the utter weirdness that pervaded our beloved MTV back in the days when it was the coolest fucking station on earth….

DUN, da DUN, da DUN, da DUN!

Credit to C.K. Hope for the quote inspiration! Jar Jar was too slow to come up with it on his own…

Haters gonna hate.

We use that line a lot, because while we all have things we dislike, when it comes right down to it, nobody likes a hater.  One person’s douchebag is another person’s awesomesauce, and nothing quenches the thirst of our fragile egos more than pouring a little Haterade on someone’s parade.  It’s a negative tactic that is generally frowned upon and discouraged… you know, outside of the internet, of course.

Can you feel the hate?

However, there seem to be a few target exceptions to the “don’t hate” rule.  Some of them are justifiable like members of Congress, Elmo, and anyone with a last name of Kardashian.  Then there is the curious case of Mr. Jar Jar Binks….

Thass Messa Jar Jar Binks!

In 1999, Star Wars creator George Lucas released the first movie of the long awaited prequel trilogy to his popular sci fi series, “The Phantom Menace”.  The movie took place several decades before the action in the original trilogy, and we get to see the events that took place that set the wheels in motion for the rise of Darth Vader.  Sixteen years had passed since Return of the Jedi closed out the original Star Wars saga, so Lucas got a chance to freshen up his universe he had created to make an impression on a new generation of Star Wars fans.  One element Lucas thought was missing from the classic movies was a comic sidekick to keep things lighthearted between the frequent fast paced and violent action scenes.  This obviously called for a tall, clumsy Gungan who spoke like a preschooler and mocked every racial stereotype in the book….

We love blasphemy here at The Nest.

What started out as a well-intended character to add some humor to an outer space fantasy world instead blew up in Lucas’ face like Luke Skywalker had just made a direct hit on the reactor core.  Thanks to the immense amount of pre-release publicity “Menace” got, Jar Jar was already getting jeered and mocked before The Phantom Menace even hit the theaters!  Nobody gave the poor dipshit a chance, and his presence in the subsequent two films of the new trilogy was nearly non-existent due to the fan backlash.  To this day the quickest way to get a Star Wars fan to whip out their photon blaster is to even recognize that Messa Binks ever existed.

You are hereby sentenced to be digested in the Sarlacc Pit for even posting pictures of that blubbering dumbass who won’t be named!

A few days ago, I made a comment on one of Twindaddy’s Stuphblog posts that wound up spawning more subsequent replies itself than any one of my posts over here has gotten total comments!  I’ve watched this Jar Jar Binks hate parade march by for fourteen years now, and now that I have a forum here on the internets where people all around the world can now ignore me, it is time to give Jar Jar something he hasn’t gotten in a long time.  No, not a bath… but some love.

Awwwwww, you wuv me!!!

I have to admit, even though I have only seen “Menace” once, the fact is I’m quite partial to the movie.  It was released in the Spring of 1999, about one year after I started working at Mecca, and it was the first huge…. no, make that OVERLY FUCKING HUUUUUGE event that the Mecca brass got a woody over and flooded our stores with merchandise for.  I remember looking on in awe as I watched an entire 20 foot counter in a main aisle of the store converted over to nothing but Phantom Menace toys and collectibles… and it stayed there all summer.  People went absolutely nuts over this movie when it came out, and between Mecca and my Pepsi fetish, I pretty much knew who all the players were in it long before I finally got to actually watch the film itself after it came out on DVD the following year.

There’s our hero on the left, right between the Sith clown and the Jedi gangsta.

Looking at Jar Jar through the eyes of someone who is not a Star Wars geek and did not go into the movie already wanting to rip out his tongue through his space dust clogged belly button, I see a character who does exactly what Mr. Lucas created him to do… make a movie that otherwise seems to take itself too seriously and inject some fun and hijinks into it.  Sure Jar Jar was put there to appeal to the kids… earth to adults out there: nobody under the age of 12 really gives a shit about Star Wars intricate storyline of good vs. evil and intergalactic incest.  Why not give the kiddies something to enjoy in an otherwise grown up movie?  This is the same mass appeal formula that made so many cartoon shows such a success since the days of Bugs Bunny…

Made to entertain kids and adults alike… and nobody complained about what a dick the road runner was…

And of course, another brick holding up the wall of hate Jar Jar has to endure is the fact that his outrageous and juvenile character was nothing more than a blatant attempt to sell Star Wars merchandise.  I got some news for you…

Your Star Wars universe has ALWAYS been about selling licensed merchandise!!!

It’s Jar Jar’s on-screen personality that seems to wear on fans the most, however.  Apparently the fandom finds walrus-looking Buddhas lying with chained up scantily clad female slaves and damn dirty apes who can fly a ship at warp speed through the skies but can’t utter a fucking coherent word to be more pleasing and engaging than an endearingly dimwitted but good-hearted outcast from an alien race who speaks like the lovechild of Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd on helium.  It’s a strange world…

RAWWWR AWWR RAWWER RAWWRRR!

And then there is this.  You know what I think about possums…

Weesa so cute!!

These poor misunderstood animals share something in common with our Gungan of the day.  Despite all the faults and underneath the blanket of hate that has been cast over him, Jar Jar is…. well…. cute.

There…. I said it.

So here’s a much needed salute to one of the most unmercilessly picked on characters to walk down the junior high school halls of life since Urkel got his last wedgie.  Here at The Nest, we love you Jar Jar, and no matter what anyone out there chooses to think about your personality, your speech impediment, your social commentary, or your ulterior motives to merely make Lucasfilms rich… we will always have your back!  Well, we probably wouldn’t want to actually touch it, but we’ll have your back nonetheless!

Wealwy!!!

Do I have a choice?

If you are under the age of 30, and you’ve seen that dire warning printed somewhere on most cars, “UNLEADED FUEL ONLY”, you’re probably wondering why it’s there in the first place.  I mean, unless someone’s stupid enough to pull up to the kerosene pump and start filling up ol’ Betsy, you really don’t have much of a choice but to use unleaded gas, do you?  Well, that’s because you’re one of the lucky ones who will live a smarter and healthier life thanks to one of the greatest innovations in petroleum history getting replaced since it was turning our children into a bunch of dumbasses…

Bobby! Have you been huffing the gasoline again?

In the 1920′s, a chemical engineer named Thomas Midgley found commercial uses for two chemical compounds that changed the world and made life better for all of us…. until we later found out that both of them were totally destroying our environment.  The inventor of the infamous ozone-destroying CFC’s, Midgley was also the father of leaded gasoline.  Tetraethyllead was added to gasoline in the 20′s to reduce engine knocking, which helped engines and cars last longer.

Still around in 1983 thanks to leaded gasoline!

For five decades, leaded gasoline was all the rage and most Americans were none the wiser as to the damage it was doing to the soil and the collective IQ.  Ethyl Corp., the makers of the TEL additive used in gasoline, had a nice pipeline into Washington to ensure that their mind poison continued to be lauded as being just as safe as smoking was back then.  But in 1972, the EPA finally set the stage for the phaseout of leaded gasoline… though it wouldn’t be until 1996 that you could no longer see this sight in the United States of America…

I couldn’t really find a good leaded gas sign picture, but as you can see here, that “Regular” being sold is clearly not unleaded…

I remember my family always filled up on regular leaded gas in the 80′s.  Since I cut a lot of grass back then, it also went good in the lawnmower.  Those “Unleaded Fuel Only” tags on cars were still something of a novelty just three decades ago, and almost every gas station in town still had leaded gas at the top of their signs as the cheapest option.  Like everything else I remember from my youth, I kinda miss leaded gas.  It took a while for me to get adjusted to Regular Unleaded moving from the middle spot on the gas price signs up to top billing.  Of course, maybe it was just how messed up my mind was from the lead exposure…

Mmmmm, yummy!

The main health hazard from exposure to lead to neurological damage.  To put it bluntly, consuming lead can turn you into a blithering dumbass, especially if you are a kid.  When the results of lead poisoning research started getting out and accepted in the 1970′s, our government did what it does best, and after many decades of ignoring the problem started banning the shit out of lead.  Lead paint was outlawed outright in the late 70′s since too many little imps were peeling it off the wall and eating it, since you think nothing tastes better than a little Dutch Boy when your mind is already being destroyed by lead emissions…

Groovy man, groovy!

The Dragnet imagery in the above photo is even more fitting given how Friday and Gannon spent so much time dealing with incorrigible youths on the 60′s revival shows (Only one of the best fucking series in TV history).  Lead exposure is widely blamed for the increase in crime among juveniles during the middle to late decades of the 20th century.  There are even charts demonstrating the correlation between leaded gasoline use and violent crime rates given an appropriate one generation lag for the effects to take hold.  So if you thought kids were particularly violent and rebellious these days, imagine how much worse it would be had the lead not been dramatically decreased from our environment over the past 30 years…

Damn delinquent little juvies! Put down that beer and go find a job!

Mother Nature likes to surprise us in wicked ways every time we think we have found a panacea to one of our civilization’s problems.  While lead additives had their practical benefits that were revolutionary at the time, it really wasn’t considered at the time how much the automobile would take off and spread its lead emitted pollution far and wide, nor were the consequences of the exposure from that lead really studied or considered.  If you have ever read the Stephen King short story “The End of the Whole Mess”, it’s quite reminiscent of the leaded gas story… only leaded gas didn’t manage to quite kill us all through it’s slow mental deterioration.  It just made us a little bit stupider overall…

It’s no coincidence “Forrest Gump” took place during the lead exposure spike…

Since I grew up in an era when the air and likely the house I grew up in was completely full of lead, I think I can safely say that without this miracle element, I would not be the totally fucked up person I am today.  So we here at The Nest would like to offer up a salute to the people out there who put a little lead in our life, without which we would not have had Rainbow Donkeys, Blue Boy, Ritalin, the government shutting down, and probably the Woodstock festival.  We may be glad that our environment will be a cleaner and healthier place now, but we will still long for the heavy metal poisoning we got from your sweet smelling fumes that warped the minds of an entire generation.

And there is no better way to end this post than with a video of one of Styx’s best…

You go, Sammy.

If you are following my blog, there’s a good chance you are in the age group that would instantly begin singing the Sammy Hagar hit yourself when you saw the title of this week’s Flashback Friday post.  It’s a pretty cool song that still gets played on classic rock stations to this day.

Here’s something to ponder…. there’s an entire generation of young adults out there today to whom this song really doesn’t have any meaning.  Heck, even for most of us in our thirties, it’s a song that really doesn’t have any meaning… although we understand what it’s about.

Am I confusing you yet?

Make that dazed and confused.

In 1984, when Sammy released his hit song “I Can’t Drive 55″, the speed limit on all US highways was 55 miles per hour.  Period.  No exceptions.  If you wanted to legally drive over 55 mph, you had better find a local racetrack or an empty mall parking lot.  Those of you for whom these Flashback Friday posts are written, we grew up in a world where 55 was the law, and it was preached and reinforced to us in PSA’s, at DMV’s, and probably even by Goofus and Gallant.

Bet you didn’t know there was bestiality porn in those Highlights for Children magazines now, did you?

Doesn’t the days of the 55 mph limit seem so long ago, and such an archaic part of our history?  How did this come about anyway?  Did the Safety Nazis czars grab the government by the balls and force this blatant disregard for states’ rights on us all?

Nope, it had nothing to do with safety or blood on the tracks at all.  It had to do with the fucked up state of the oil industry in the 70′s…

Beano worked for me!

The maximum speed limit provision in the United States was part of 1974′s Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which was a response to the realization that we had become too dependent upon oil as an energy source since we faced chronic gas shortages,  and was passed to encourage Americans to conserve energy…. which of course was a better solution than say… oh, I don’t know, actually encouraging the development of alternative energy resources.  Yeah, even as far back as four decades ago, they knew we’d still be driving cars on old dinosaurs rather than on resources that are actually plentiful like solar power, electricity or chileh….

You could run a car for years on that one pot alone…

The reasoning behind the speed limit provision of the EHECA was a supposed scientific claim that cars operated at maximum fuel efficiency at around 50 mph.  If you think this was some kind of liberal, commie, pinko infiltration of our government back in the dying days of the hippie culture, here’s the man who signed the bill and fully supported the new federal speed limit:

That would be the man on the left. Thankya, thankyaverruhmuch!

Since the first roads were built, states had set their own speed limits on the highways that ran through their domain…. or in the case of some states in the wild west, a lack of speed limits.  The EHECA forced the states to swallow the bitter pill of a much lower federal speed limit by withholding all federal highway funding for any state that did not comply with the strict 55 mph maximum.  So beginning in 1974, every mile of interstate in the country suddenly became a 55 zone.

How much energy was used to make all those new signs?

As the 70′s waned, and the energy crisis abated, there was a renewed call to repeal the federal speed limit.  Ah, but here’s where the safety researchers came in and spoiled the party for everyone!

Our crack automotive safety researchers hard at work!

Studies were released showing that automotive fatalities had decreased sharply during the first year the 55 mph speed limit went into place, a decline which was attributed to less horrific crashes due to the slower driving speeds.  This was extremely impressive given that most people hadn’t bothered slowing down for the new speed limits in the first place, but nevertheless, it was enough for our well-meaning government to keep the federal speed limit provision intact, only now in the name of highway safety!

I’m telling you folks, peanut oil is the energy of the future!

And thus why as the awesome decade of the 1980′s rolled around, we were still stuck in a country filled to the gills with 55 mile per hour speed limit signs, and one pissed off Red Rocker.  Some semblance of sanity would finally come about in 1987, when Congress passed a new highway bill that allowed for speed limits on rural interstates to be raised to 65 mph.  Ultimately, it would be in the aftermath of 1995′s government budget showdown that the National Highway Designation Act would be passed which completely repealed the federal speed limit.  States could once again set their own speed limits on their roads and highways.  Remember how queer odd those higher speed limit signs looked to us when they first went back up in the mid 90′s?

You can blame the nighttime speed limit on the powerful Possum PAC in Washington.

And so to get back to the point I was making at the beginning of this post… to most of the people reading this blog, we remember the 55 mph speed limits, but by the time we started driving, and especially by the time we began to do a lot of interstate driving, the current higher state limits had already been put back in place.  So to many of us, the rage and anger over Sammy Hagar’s classic hit was lost on us, and was just another excuse for us to bang our heads and shake our mullets.

Or maybe this if you were hanging out with C.K. Hope back in the day…

Of course, no matter how high the speed limit is ever set, there will still be those who are not happy and choose to go all Sammy Hagar over some poor highway patrolman who pulled them over for doing 95 in rush hour traffic.  But for most of us, we can live with the more reasonable speed limits that our respective states have now posted thanks to the end of the well-intentioned, but poorly thought out 55 federal maximum.  And we here at The Nest would like to take this time to salute our forward thinking forefathers of the 1970′s, who brought us two decades of highway frustration all for the cost of maybe saving a couple lives and/or a gallon of gas or so.  At least it was a day where we were only worried about how speed was going to kill us, and not technological advances combined with human dumbassery…

You’re an inspiration to us all, asshat.

The one that sadly didn’t get away…

In my fifteen years of working in retail, I have many fond and even some unfond memories of the products we have sold in the past that have come and gone.  I mentioned a few weeks ago about how in awe I was at the shit-ton worth of licensed Star Wars merchandise we received in the Spring of 1999 for the release of the much anticipated movie “The Phantom Menace”, and how it gave me a soft spot for the much maligned character Jar Jar Binks.  Sadly, 1999 would end on a much more sour note, as it became the Christmas of the singing fish.  Yes, you probably already got a case of the shudders as soon as you saw the picture leading off this post…. this week’s Flashback Friday is dedicated to everyone’s favorite evil earworm spouting pisces, Big Mouth Billy Bass.

Stuff your ears full of cotton, and prepare to hit play for some of Big Mouth Billy Bass’ favorite hits!

Now you got to admit, it’s a pretty cool and cute concept.  Mounting a plastic fish on a plaque and having him suddenly start bursting into song and dance when some unlucky person trips his sneaky fisheye motion detector.  It is pretty funny and neat…. for the first 30 seconds or so.  Kinda like Christmas music can make you all happy and cheery, for about the first five minutes you have to listen to it…

DIE, CHRISTMAS MUSIC!!! DIE!!!

Alas, Big Mouth Billy Bass wound up being the hot gag gift of that final Christmas season of the old millennium (Yes, I know the millennium really ended 12/31/2000… shut up!), which meant it was very prominently displayed in the main aisle in front of Sporting Goods, which wound up being the department the brain trust at Mecca decided that a singing plastic fish should be a part of.  It would be like selling a Pound Puppy in the Pet department…

You can also use Big Mouth Billy Bass as a lure…

Because my area I regularly worked at the time was very close to Sporting Goods, guess what I heard over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and…. did I mention over and over again?  This annoying scaly piece of animatronic pond scum going off about every two minutes for the final two months of 1999.  Customers didn’t even have to play with the things and press it’s inviting red button of doom to activate its siren song of aural torture.  Just someone walking past one set Billy Bass off and singing about taking him to the river.  Billy Boy may not have realized it, but there was a very big river not very far from the Mecca I work at, and I’d have loved nothing more than to have tossed the entire school of these evil playthings into the middle of it…

Since Big Mouth Billy Bass is made of plastic, I’m assuming this sign wouldn’t apply to granting his request…

As I demonstrated in the Krazy Glue post, people can be such sheep when it comes to buying consumer goods that totally suck.  Everyone knew darn good and well these wretched singing fish were something you wouldn’t even give to your worst enemy, let alone a gift for your brother-in-law.  But shoppers bought the crap out of Big Mouth Billy Basses anyway… at least during that first year.  Naturally, given the popularity of the original, updated versions and knockoffs began popping up in the ensuing holiday seasons…

Drown him in mercury, and he STILL comes back next year! Damn this fish, anyway!

Have you ever wondered why tacky “As Seen on TV” items like Big Mouth Billy Bass are only sold during the Christmas season?  Because that’s the only time people will get desperate enough to buy something…. anything to give as a gift because our culture has us so wrapped up in the guilt of needing to exchange presents during the holiday season.  Fuck that!  I hate shopping for other people, and I hate getting gifts from people that I don’t even want in the first place.  Alas, I can’t really campaign against the consumerism of the holiday season because it pays my salary… but just for the record, I outgrew the joy of forced gift giving and receiving a long time ago.  You can just wish me a Merry Xmas and be on your way, please…

And take your singing fish and get the hell out of my office, Fred!!!

Luckily in the end, common sense prevailed, and people stopped buying Big Mouth Billy Bass and all of his increasingly annoying cousins within a couple years of the initial singing fish invasion.  By the middle of the aughts, the selling of crooning seafood was relegated to the secret vaults of creepy collectors on eBay.  Chances are, unless you have one of those sadistic relatives who never throws away anything and/or thinks that old gags never go out of style, you have probably not heard the dreaded song of the Big Mouth Billy Bass for a very long time…

This place has been turned into a shooting gallery…

As a wise, rich, and despised man once said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time… and boy did we get taken by Big Mouth Billy Bass fourteen years ago.  The Nest gives a high fin to the men and women behind the production of BMBB, who gave the public exactly what they didn’t want, and still fooled them to buy a ton of them through the oppressive power of the giving season.  It’s too bad Big Mouth Billy had to give singing fish everywhere a bad name, but don’t worry Barnes and Barnes…. we still love your super hit of the 80′s!