MONSTER DAD

Bigfoots or Bigfeet?

2012-03-03T02:21:00.002-05:00

I've been a big fan (for lack of a better word) of Bigfoot almost as long as I can remember. I was a kid during the 1970s, which I always consider to be the "Golden Age" of Bigfoot. For whatever reason it seems like more movies, documentaries, books and magazine articles about Bigfoot came out during the 70s than at any other time. Someone could point out the recent glut of terrible Bigfoot and Yeti horror movies that have inexplicably popped up in the past decade or so, but I can't really take all that stuff seriously. There has also been an uptick in more "serious" documentaries too, but I still think the 1970s really can't be beat for a time when Bigfoot was in the public eye and a part of pop culture.

The book BIGFOOT from 1976

My poster for "The Mysterious Monsters" (1976)

One of my early Bigfoot experiences came when my mother brought me to a retirement home where she went regularly to visit a friend. I stayed in the car (Volkswagen Beetle) while she went in (this was back in the days when kids sat in the front seats of cars without car seats, booster seats or even seat belts and no one blinked an eye. It was also a time when those unrestrained kids could be left in the car while parents went into stores and other places without those parents having their kids taken away for them by the state. Anyway, I was sitting in the car reading an issue of Boy's Life. This issue had an article about Bigfoot in it that I was very excited to read. Of course it also terrified me. It was a story about a big, burly trucker who went to sleep in his rig, only to be awoken by noises outside. A Bigfoot creature pulled him out of his truck "like a rag doll". I always remember that description. It seemed to make the story all the more scary to think that this big tough guy could be thrown around like a rag doll. To top it off, I had my Chewbacca Star Wars action figure with me. I had never really thought of it before, but in that moment Chewbacca reminded me a LOT of Bigfoot and I was even a little scared of my little 3 3/4" toy while sitting alone in the car.

I've been meaning to write a big blog about Bigfoot for a long time. But (like the piece I want to write about the show Creature Double Feature) it just seems like too daunting a task to undertake. There's simply too much to say on the subject. I have touched on Bigfoot, The Abominable Snowman and similar cryptid creatures a number of times in blogs like The Horror that is "Rudolph: The Red-Nosed Reindeer", Separated at Birth 2: Tim Tebow and Bigfoot, The Berenstain Bears Meet Bigpaw and Isaac Asimov and "Monsters! Mysteries or Myths?" (from my other blog The TV Guide Time Machine). Eventually I'll get around to seriously writing about the big guy here. But until then I do have to ask one thing.

Despite the fact that I've been a follower of all things Bigfoot for nearly as long as I can remember (see story above) and have seen many movies and read many books on the subject, there's one thing that I've never really been sure of. When talking about more than one Bigfoot is it correct to call them Bigfeet? Or is it Bigfoots? Or maybe it's just plain Bigfoot (in a plural sense)? I don't know if it shares the same rules as Deer (pluralized as Deer), or if it's a case like Fish (which is pluralized as Fishes--at least I believe it does). Perhaps it's a case like Moose (are more than one moose called Moose, Mooses or Meese?). Octopus becomes Octopi (or possibly Octopuses--which brings to mind the old Roger Moore James Bond flick "Octopussy"). An Ox becomes Oxen. It would seem that a lot of animals in nature share a similar pluralization confusion. There are plenty of other examples of course. A Crisis pluralizes to Crises rather than Crisises. A Chassis remains Chassis when there are more than one of them present. Roof seems to be able to become either Roofs or Rooves. An Analysis becomes Analyses. This could go on for a while...

The point is that, despite having read and watched so much about Bigfoot and similar creatures, I still don't have a clear idea what the "correct" way to pluralize the word is. Does anyone out there have a definitive answer? I'd appreciate being enlightened. The knowledge might come in handy when I finally get around to writing my big Bigfoot blog!

Photo borrowed from the site North American Bigfoot

Now those are some big feet in that photo! But were these prints made by a bunch of Bigfeet, Bigfoots or Bigfoot? Hmmm...

Thank You

Separated at Birth 3: Reese Witherspoon and Sister Bear

2012-03-01T00:46:00.005-05:00

I wasn't planning on this whole Separated at Birth thing becoming a series or anything. For whatever reason ridiculous examples of the phenomenon keep popping up when I least expect them to. For the first two Separated at Birth blogs please click on these links:

Part 1: Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Stiles

Part 2: Tim Tebow and Bigfoot

The Wife and I were lucky enough to have a date night recently. We decided to go see a movie together. There wasn't anything playing at our local cinema that either of us was crazy about, but we'd heard some good things about the new Reese Witherspoon movie "This Means War" and figured it was worth a shot. It turned out to be pretty entertaining and funny. But seeing Reese Witherspoon reminded me of something that had been in the back of my mind for some time.

The Little Monster still enjoys being read to at bedtime (and I still enjoy reading to her). One of our favorite series of books to read is The Berenstain Bears. I never really read these books much as a kid myself, but have found them to be some of the best stories to read to The Little Monster. I think I enjoy them nearly as much as she does! I've written about The Berenstain Bears once before in The Berenstain Bears Meet Bigpaw.

It would be difficult to pick a favorite Berenstain Bears book, but some of the ones we've read regularly in the past have included The Berenstain Bears' Trouble at School, The Berenstain Bears Don't Pollute (any More), The Berenstain Bears Trick or Treat, and The Berenstain Bears and the Trouble with Grown-ups. And a definite favorite of ours is The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Dream. And this is the one that caused two seemingly unrelated events (a date night with The Wife and reading bedtime stories to The Little Monster) to become forever intertwined.

There are a few reasons why I personally like The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Dream. They do a good job of explaining what a nightmare is, and like usual, it's just a good story. The best thing about the book for me though is that a big part of the story revolves around Brother Bear and his love for a line of action figures and accessories called Space Grizzlies.

It reminds me a lot of he toys I'd play with as a boy growing up in the 1970s and 80s--especially my Star Wars action figures and toys. Here's one of my actual Storm Troopers from way back then:

And here's an Imperial Scout from "Return of the Jedi" holding this very same Storm Trooper last year during Star Wars Day at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, MA:

Anyway, back to the story. So Brother Bear is smitten with these Space Grizzlies, but Sister Bear doesn't like them because she finds them scary. Brother convinces her to play with him and his Space Grizzlies after some negotiations, and later he goes to see the new Space Grizzlies movie (while Sister opts for a movie about a ballerina called "The Magic Toeshoes" instead). Eventually Sister has a nightmare that involves the Space Grizzlies and many other things she'd recently been doing. She runs into Mama and Papa Bear's room and while they are comforting her Brother has his own Space Grizzlies nightmare.

It's during the part where Mama and Papa are consoling Sister that I noticed a certain resemblance between her and Reese Witherspoon. Now, we've read a lot of Berenstain Bears books, and I've never thought that Sister Bear looked like Reese Witherspoon (or any other celebrity for that matter) before. It's just in this one picture where she's making a pensive face that I see it. The very first time we read this book a few years back I saw the resemblance And now I can't NOT see it whenever we read the story. I don't know if it's her eyes, her hair, her mouth, her chin or just her expression, but I do see it. I may be crazy, or I just may be onto something. Here's a closer look:

Here are some examples of Reese and Sister side-by-side. Judge for yourself:

The expression is different,
but the look is there

This is a little closer

Not too bad

And, finally, here's a look at Reese in "This Means War" (from the photo above), to kind of tie the whole thing together.

Epilogue:

In a strange bit of timing, I just found out that Jan Berenstain (who authored the Berenstain Bears books with her husband Stan) just recently died on February 25, 2012. I didn't even know she was still alive, but now am saddened to hear she died. Here's her obituary:

Jan Berenstain Dies at 88 (Los Angeles Times)

The Q*Bert Quilt

2012-02-29T01:35:00.005-05:00

Back in the early 1980s I was a big fan of video games--not unlike tens of thousands of other kids around the country. I was lucky enough to get a ColecoVision system for Christmas in 1982 (see Resurrecting The Past: ColecoVision for more details on that). While I loved ColecoVision and other home video game systems I do have to say that in those days nothing compared to playing the actual video games on those big stand up machines in an arcade. My little hometown had a small arcade for a couple years during the height of the arcade age, and I was sometimes able to get to the nearby city of Worcester, MA to spend quarters (and tokens) on games at larger arcades. But when an arcade wasn't convenient I would play video games where and when I could find them--and that sometimes meant going to a pizza parlor (or some other establishment) to play the one or two games they had set up near the windows to lure kids in to spend quarters and buy food and drink. One such pizza place within walking distance of my house became a regular after school stop for me. It was great to get a slice of pizza and a can of soda and then spend all my hard earned paper route money one quarter at a time on the resident video game that they had. This particular place only had one game, but they regularly changed it. After getting pretty good at a game like Frogger I would then have to start all over and learn how to clear screens on Donkey Kong Jr. or Centipede. For a while this pizza place had Q*Bert, and it became one of my favorites. Q*Bert was the video game that had the little orange guy with the long nose jumping around on a pyramid of cube shaped steps. It's amazing to think that it's been almost thirty years since I last played that game!

Q*Bert cabinet (from the site bossyman15.com)

Which brings us to the present. A few weeks back The Wife, The Little Monsters and I took a road trip to visit The Wife's grandmother in Buffalo, NY. It's about an eight-hour trip for us, and can be quite trying with two Little Monsters in the back seat.

Anyway, The Wife's grandmother is currently residing at an assisted living complex. She has been there for a few years. It's a pretty nice place. I could certainly see myself living somewhere like that in my golden years (not that I'm in any rush to reach those golden years or anything). On this trip I noticed that there were a number of quilts lining some of the walls. The quilts were made by residents of the place, and some of them were quite impressive and interesting.

There was even a very impressive quilt that depicted the famous painting "The Child's Bath" by Mary Cassatt:

While many of these quilts were very nice indeed, one of them above all the others really caught my eye--and it wasn't too difficult to figure out why. It featured a pattern of colorful cube-shaped designs that looked strikingly similar to a certain video game that I played in my youth. It's the one on the left below:

I have no idea if it was pure coincidence, or if the creator of the quilt was inspired (consciously or unconsciously) by the look of Q*Bert. Cubes are certainly a common geometric pattern used in artwork, but the resemblance between this quilt's cubes and those of Q-Bert are very plain to see. Check it out:

Image from makefive.com

Image from Wikipedia

Finally, as if finding a random (and apparently unintentional) video game reference in a quilt at an assisted living home weren't odd enough, check out this strange coincidence. I thought that the idea of writing a story about a "Q*Bert Quilt" would be pretty unique. ...But I was wrong. While searching online for screen shots of Q*Bert and photos of the game's cabinet I was stunned to find a blog about...yes, an actual Q*Bert Quilt! I kid you not. It just goes to show that you really can find pretty much anything on the internet.

This quilt is obviously actually intended to be Q*Bert and is not simply made up of a random geometric pattern which just happens to look like the game. The photo of the quilt comes from the blog evilmadscientist.com. Read all about the "real" Q*Bert Quilt here:

Quiltbert: a Q*Bert Quilt

Resurrecting The Past: January 21, 1983 (Part 2: The Present)

2012-02-23T15:11:00.001-05:00

See part one here: THE PAST

Well, it's taken a whole month, but I'm finally going to write about my experience trying to resurrect an entire day from my past. Okay, it would be impossible to recreate an entire day, but for this experiment I was concerned with just one past of the day January 21, 1983 from my viewpoint.

January 21, 1983 fell on a Friday. For a thirteen year old boy that in itself was something to get excited about (the beginning of a weekend and two straight days with no school). To add to the revelry, my parents were leaving me home alone for one of the first times (if not the very first time). Up until then there was always at least a sibling or two at home when they went out. Not only that, but Boston's WLVI channel 56 was showing the 1962 Steve McQueen World War II movie "Hell is for Heroes" that night.

And finally, we had recently gotten our first microwave oven in our house. A microwave is a pretty standard and bland sort of kitchen appliance these days, but back in 1983 it was still a relatively new and exciting technology to add to the stove and oven.

Our first microwave--the actual one used on January 21, 1983!

On this night I planned on microwaving (all by myself mind you) my very first bag of microwave popcorn! Before we had the microwave if we had popcorn in our house it meant my father would be popping it on the stove with one of those old-fashioned popcorn poppers.

All the elements were in place for a very satisfying night. Still, it probably wouldn't have stuck in my mind as such a memorable event if it weren't for a couple of factors that went horribly wrong. First, I read the directions on the bag of popcorn and saw that it said to set the cooking time for five minutes. Not realizing that you're supposed to watch the bag because it can take a lot less than the full five minutes to fully pop the bag (it was my first time after all), I set the time, turned on the microwave and went into the living room to watch the movie. With thoughts of sitting in front of the TV with a bag of popcorn popped by ME running through my head I was alarmed to suddenly smell something burning. I opened the smoky microwave and was confronted with a charred, smoldering bag of burnt popcorn. Yes, not only had the popcorn stayed in there long enough to burn, but the paper bag itself was even burning! In a panic I grabbed the bag and ran downstairs to our back porch to throw the charred bag into the snow and then under the porch, hoping it would not be found by my parents. Then I returned upstairs to open some windows and attempt to get rid of the smell of burning popcorn and paper. That's when the second unfortunate event happened...

While I was trying to get rid of the odor I saw my parents returning home--much earlier than I had expected. I was sure I would be killed. I was sure that they would rethink the idea of ever leaving me home alone ("We go out for a couple of hours and you start a fire and practically ruin our new microwave?"). But, miraculously they didn't seem to notice anything! An uneasy relief settled over me as I realized that I was most likely going to survive to pop another bag of microwave popcorn.

The memory of that night stuck with me all these years. The funny thing is that I always saw it through my 13-year-old eyes and it never occurred to me that burning a bag of microwave popcorn isn't really all that big of a deal. I could have simply said to my parents "Whoops, I tried to make my own bag of popcorn and left it in too long. Sorry." But instead it had remained a terrible little secret in the back of my mind through the ensuing decades. In fact, for all that time I never told anyone else about this story. Then, while visiting my parents last year I decided to finally "confess" to my ancient transgression. My father was battling cancer and I was trying to spend more time with them while I could. We talked a lot and shared a lot of stories--including a few of mine that I never thought I would tell them about. As it turned out, all of my "confession" stories were just as minor as the popcorn incident. We all got a good laugh out of the ridiculousness of my keeping them secret for so long. ...And, of course now I'm relating this story on the internet, where anyone can read it!

So why try to recreate this somewhat scary (from my youthful perspective) event from my past? First off, I never knew exactly when this event had occurred. I recently recovered a large number of my old cassette tapes that I had recorded when I was a kid (from when I bought my first tape recorder in March 1981 until roughly the middle of 1985 or so). Most of these tapes still work and it's been a blast listening to old pieces of my past. One of these tapes had some audio from "Hell is for Heroes" on it.

The actual tape in question

There were no dates or notations written on the tape (of course), but I was able to cull enough clues from it to determine exactly when most of the stuff on it was recorded. This was done by looking up America's Top 10 lists from the early 1980s online and then going through some of my old TV Guides that I've been collecting recently once I knew approximately when the stuff was taped. Not only was I able to determine when the "Hell is for Heroes" audio came from, but I was also able to determine that it was the very same night that I burned the popcorn! A number of factors led to that confirmation:

I knew that I didn't see the movie more than two or three times as a kid, and channel 56 wouldn't air it very often in its movie rotation--to keep the movie selection fresh.
This airing would have been right around the time when I had no siblings living in my house and when my parents probably would have figured I was old enough to leave home alone.
I knew that the event had to occur in the winter because I remember throwing the burning popcorn bag in the snow. Not only was this airing in January, but I also knew that there had to be snow on the ground because I had taped audio from "Young Frankenstein" on the previous Sunday night (January 16) as well as no-school announcements after it on the 11:00 news because of a big snowstorm that was hitting the area.
Early 1983 would have been around the time we got our first microwave oven. If it had been an earlier airing of "Hell is for Heroes" we wouldn't have had it yet. If it had been a later airing I would have known how to properly pop a bag of popcorn in the machine.

Cover of the January 15-21, 1983 TV Guide

Prime Time programming grid for January 21, 1983

The page with the listing for "Hell is for Heroes"

Close-up of the movie's listing

Armed with this information and the fact that January 21, 2012 was rapidly approaching, I decided it was time to resurrect that fateful night. What better time than on the 29th anniversary of the very night it had happened? I suppose the 30th anniversary would have been even better, but certainly didn't want to wait whole year to try out the experiment. So how would I go about recreating that night? Up until now all my Resurrecting The Past experiences have dealt with concrete objects like a speaker from a drive-in theater, a rotary dial telephone, flying saucer candy and even a Whoopee-Cushion. How would I go about resurrecting such a specific event in time? The answer lied in the pages of a book.

Anyone who has read Jack Finney's book "Time and Again" knows that Mr. Finney utilized a novel method for time travel in his novel. Rather than using an actual time machine--as has been done in countless science-fiction stories and films--the time travelers in "Time and Again" used the power of the mind. Only a small number of people who had a very specific set of physical and mental attributes were able to undertake a journey back in time. The method used was to place these people in an environment that precisely duplicated the environment of the targeted time period. The main character in the book is recruited and trained for an extended time and then placed in a room in the Dakota building in New York City that had a view of Central Park which looked exactly the same as it would have in the 1880s. When he awoke in the morning in these surroundings he found himself actually in New York City in the 1880s. While this method might not be very scientifically sound (though I don't imagine it's any more fanciful than the idea of a mechanical time machine), it certainly made for an interesting and pretty convincing story. A very similar method of time travel was used in the 1980 Christopher Reeve movie "Somewhere in Time".

I decided to employ a similar technique in my resurrection attempt. While I certainly wouldn't be precisely recreating every detail of the night of January 21, 1983, I figured I could at least approximate enough of them to hopefully make for a successful experiment. The results were mixed, but overall I'd have to say it was a success.

January 21, 2012 fell on a Saturday. While it wasn't a Friday like it had been in 1983, at least it was still the weekend. It was a snowy day. The Wife and I had gone into Boston for the day and when we returned home to relieve the babysitter there were a few inches of snow on the ground. While I shoveled, The Wife took our Little Monsters to a nearby park to do some sledding. Much like my parents had done 29 years earlier, everyone in the house went out and left me alone for a while. In light of figuring out the date of my popcorn incident on that old audio cassette I had recently purchased a used DVD of "Hell is for Heroes" on eBay.

I hadn't seen the movie in a while and it was no longer available through Netflix (which was how I saw it the last time I watched it a few years back). I also had a bag of microwave popcorn that had gone a bit past its "Best if used by" date. Though I felt bad about wasting a bag of popcorn, at least that made me feel a little better about it.

"Hell is for Heroes" had started at 8:00 PM on January 21, 1983. Because I had to take advantage of my home alone time in 2012 I started the DVD a couple hours earlier than that. The simple act of putting a DVD into the player and starting the movie up is a major change from tuning in to see it on TV--but obviously the chances of one of the few channels we get through our antenna (we don't have cable) showing the movie on that exact day were astronomical. It was another concession to convenience that I had no choice but to make.

With the house empty and the movie on in the background it was time to fire up (figuratively and literally) the microwave. I put the bag of popcorn in the machine and set the timer for five minutes at full power.

With a press of the Start button the bag started cooking. Within a minute the first popping sounds were heard. At about 1:45 into the cycle the popping reached its peak and started to slow down. A little after two minutes the popping slowed and finally stopped. The microwave continued to do its thing for what seemed an eternity until I noticed smoke starting to come out of the edges of the door. At some point the steam that one would expect to emanate from the bag was replaced with smoke. I resisted the impulse to pull the bag out (I should have been sitting in front of the TV, but simply had to watch the carnage myself) and waited as long as I dared.

Wait for it...

At about forty seconds left I could wait no longer. The smell of burning popcorn was already wafting throughout the house. When I opened the door smoke poured out and the smell got a lot worse. The bag was indeed starting to get charred. It wasn't quite as burnt as I remember the 1983 bag being, but it was effective enough. Upon opening the bag I found some very burnt popcorn. This was a mess that simply had to be considered a success.

WARNING: The following section contains graphic images which may not be appropriate for all viewers!

THE HORROR! (with a side of Throwback Pepsi)

Then, an unexpected event made the scene even more authentic--The Wife returned home just after I pulled the bag out of the microwave. Knowing that she would most likely not see the scientific value in severely burning a bag of microwave popcorn, I tried to do whatever I could do to lessen the smell (opening windows, lighting candles and taking the charred bag outside and throwing it on the snow).

Other than the lighting of candles, this was pretty much exactly how I tried to deal with my parents' unexpected early return in 1983. If I had been completely alone for the duration of the experiment that extra element of surprise and panic wouldn't have been there. And, just in case you might happen to be wondering, no, The Wife didn't quite understand the importance of my experiment.

This unanticipated emotional aspect of the recreation was pretty important, and a big reason why I consider it a success overall. It certainly wasn't an exact repeat of January 21, 1983, but then I didn't really think I would actually find myself back in that night like the main character of "Time and Again". I still have to consider it a success though because, in addition to the emotional aspect above, all five of my senses were employed in some way pretty effectively:

Sight: Seeing "Hell is for Heroes" on the TV screen. Seeing the bag of burning popcorn. Seeing The Wife's car pulling into the driveway. Seeing the popcorn bag sitting in the snow outside.
Hearing: Listening to the sounds of the movie. Hearing the popcorn pop and then continue to cook without popping.
Touch: Placing the bag in the microwave and operating the controls of the oven. Feeling the hot and burning bag as it was removed from the microwave. Feeling the cold of going outside without a coat on to get rid of the bag on a January evening in New England.
Taste: While there wasn't any eating involved in the experiment, the acrid smell of the smoke and burnt popcorn did indeed leave an unpleasant taste in my mouth.
Smell: Probably the most important and most visceral element of the experiment came when the smell of the burning popcorn and paper bag hit my nose. It was something I haven't experienced to that extent since January 21, 1983 and it was the element that was the most evocative of that earlier experience.

In conclusion, I was happy with the results of this resurrection, but wonder what might have happened if I could have managed to be more precise with the details (having it happen on a Friday night, having it at my parents' house using the old microwave we had back then, setting up the viewing of the movie in such a way that it started automatically at 8:00 and included commercials from 1983...). While my parents didn't seem to notice the smell of the burnt popcorn in 1983, it was very strong and impossible to miss in 2012. A lingering after effect of the experiment was an unpleasant odor which remained in the house for several days, and which could be detected every time the microwave was used for weeks after. It has been a month since the experiment and it's only now that the smell has really diminished to almost nothing. Quite a lasting legacy (if an unfortunate one).

Jinxing The Home Team

2012-02-05T16:02:00.000-05:00

It's a few hours from the kick-off of Super Bowl XLVI. The New England Patriots and New York Giants are ready for the big rematch of four years ago. And I'm just trying to make sure I don't do anything to lose the game. Yes, little old me feels that something I do could aversely affect the game. Let me explain...

I've written a couple of times about how I can be rather superstitious about certain things. See My Own Personal Superstitions and Friday the 13th Part 2 to read more about them. In both of those blogs I mentioned the fact that I always fear a negative outcome of a sporting event based on what the commentators choose to say (and exactly when they choose to say it). This continues to be a problem, and I will probably end up with calluses on my knuckles from having to knock on wood every time it happens. Just the other night I had the opportunity to go out to the movies by myself. When I got in the car to head home after the film I turned on the radio and the Boston Celtics had a one point lead with only about seven seconds left in a game against the Cleveland Cavaliers. It seemed like a nail-biter, but I didn't realize until one of the many timeouts taken in the last ten seconds of a close NBA game that it shouldn't have been a nail-biter. Not too much earlier the Celtics had a TWENTY-TWO point lead! They had let it slip away almost completely before sweating out a three-point win, 93-90. Luckily I wasn't listening to the whole game (listening on the radio as opposed to watching on TV because we don't have cable). One of the announcers jokingly said something to the effect: "To all the hundreds of people who just tweeted me, there is no such thing as an announcer jinx." Yeah, right! Does he really believe that? I was happy to hear that I wasn't the only one who believed in the jinx--based on the wave of tweets this particular announcer received for something that I (luckily) didn't hear myself.

From what I've written so far it might seem like I'm only concerned with announcers and commentators jinxing major sporting events. In actuality I feel that anyone can be the cause of something bad happening within a game (wittingly or unwittingly). In fact, the person I'm concerned about most of the time is myself! Obviously I wouldn't purposely do anything to endanger my favorite teams' chance of success, but sometimes it just happens. For a perfect example we only have to go back a few weeks to the last game of the regular season between the New England Patriots and the Buffalo Bills. The Pats were 12-3 and the Bills were 6-9. After starting the season with four straight wins Buffalo had slumped very badly. It seemed like a sure bet that the Patriots would win (even though they had lost to these same Bills early in the season).

I'm not one to wear football jerseys while watching games on TV. It's not that I'm against the idea or don't have any jerseys (I do own a few), it just makes me feel a bit uncomfortable--like I'm guaranteeing a win or something (which of course is not at all what I'm trying to do). For whatever reason it just seems like a bad omen for me to overdo the support for the team in the wardrobe department. But this seemed like a good time to pull one of the jerseys out though. It was the last game of the season. The Patriots had already won 12 games, had won the AFC East, were already in the playoffs, but were still playing for something--if the won they'd have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. The Patriots were playing well and the Bills weren't. I pulled out the jersey of one of my all-time favorite Patriots, Troy Brown, and put it on just before the game.

Now I assure you, I do realize just how ridiculous it sounds to say that I thing that something that I do (especially something as minor as my choice of what to wear for a game) could possibly have any effect on the outcome of a game played hundreds of miles away by professional football players who will never even know who the heck I am. Nonetheless, I DO indeed feel that way. I'm sure there are plenty of other people out there who also feel the same way. I sometimes wonder if a win has more to do with the seemingly random actions of a few hundred fans than what the players on the field actually do. Heck, even some professional sports figures are hyper-superstitious themselves. How often do you hear about a player not changing his underwear or wearing the same shirt every day during a winning streak. Remember Wade Boggs with the Boston Red Sox and his habit of eating chicken before EVERY game? Remember Nomar Garciaparra with those same Red Sox and his little fidgeting ritual he'd go through every time he stepped into the batter's box?

So back to the game at hand. Why would I feel like I had any effect on the outcome? Well, let me explain and maybe it won't seem quite so outlandish. The game started and I sat there, feeling just a wee bit uncomfortable in my Troy Brown Jersey. Wouldn't you know that by the end of just the first quarter the Patriots looked horrible and the Bills already had a twenty-one point advantage. Yes, they were up 21-0 in the FIRST quarter! Three possessions, three touchdowns. Well, needless to say, I was just a bit unhappy with the way things were going. I simply had to take my jersey off--not because I was jumping off the bandwagon like a fair weather fan, but because I felt that I had doomed my team to a terrible loss because of my poor choice of clothing. Pretty funny, huh? ...And maybe just a little insane too? Well, check out what happened after I took the jersey off at the end of the first quarter. The Patriots woke up and scored FORTY-NINE unanswered points over the last three quarters to win the game in a blowout 49-21. Did Bill Belichick walk into the locker room after the game and say "Well, thank God that danged Monster Dad guy took off his stupid jersey"? Probably not, but I certainly felt a whole lot better about things after making that decision anyway.

We're hosting a small Super Bowl party tonight, and it's tempting to put on all my Patriots gear and overdo the house decorating, but I just can't bear to do it. Yes, seeing your team in the Super Bowl is a rare and special occurrence (only two out of the 32 NFL teams get to do it each year), and should be celebrated and commemorated. But like they always say, everyone remembers who won the Super Bowl, but no one remembers the runner-up (even if by virtue of losing the Super Bowl they can claim to be the second best team in the entire league). I am nervous enough about this game. I certainly don't want to take any chances on doing something stupid that might cost the team dearly. And, yes, once again, I do realize that saying that itself sounds pretty stupid.

One last superstitious thing about this Super Bowl and superstitions. Sports Illustrated has had a long-standing and well-known history of jinxing players and teams by featuring them on the cover of the magazine (see Sports Cover Cover Jinx at wikipedia for all the gory details). It's amazing just how often this phenomenon had happened. Last week the latest issue of Sports Illustrated arrived at my house with Tom Brady screaming on the cover.

After a moment of panic I realized that I shouldn't have anything to worry about. After all the next issue would hit newsstands well before the Super Bowl. It was a no-brainer that it would have another Super Bowl-themed cover. Since the Patriots (by way of Tom Brady) were featured on last week's cover, this week's was bound to have the Giants on it. Right? Right? Wrong. This week's cover featured the owner of the Patriots, Robert Kraft.

He was supposedly the first NFL owner to be featured on the cover. That is quite an honor. Having the Patriots featured on the cover two weeks in a row is also quite an honor to be sure. But WHY did it have to be these two weeks in a row leading up to the Super Bowl? I get the feeling that Sports Illustrated knows about--and believes--the whole jinx thing and is secretly (or not so secretly) rooting for the New York Giants.

Well, we'll know the results in a few short hours. One team's fans will be jubilantly celebrating while the others will be crushed. How much of that outcome depends on the play on the field and how much depends on what hundreds of thousands of people around the globe do I can't say. All I know is that I won't be taking any chances.

Resurrecting The Past: January 21, 1983 (Part 1: The Past)

2012-01-22T02:35:00.002-05:00

JANUARY 21, 2012

This might seem like a daunting task. In the past we've seen little bits of the past resurrected--like a drive-in speaker, an old rotary telephone and a ColecoVision video game console. But to try to resurrect or recreate an entire day? Well, it's actually only a small part of that day that I'm interested in bringing back. And to make matters a bit easier, I've already done much of the research necessary to accomplish this. Due to the amount of information I need to cover with the topic this will have to be a two-part entry. Part one will explain the significance of the seemingly random date of January 21, 1983 and my reasons for wanting to resurrect it. Part two will cover the actual resurrection process itself.

On the date of January 21, 1983 something occurred that I had never told anyone about for nearly thirty years. For all that time it had been an experience that only I knew about. It might have stayed that way and the memory might have died with me, but last year I decided to share the story with my parents. The funny thing about it was that, for all those years the story sat in my memory, the people I would have least wanted to know about it were my parents. Last year my father was in the final stages of his battle with cancer. I was trying to spend as much quality time with him and my mother as possible before it was too late. I suddenly realized that my "secret" memory which had seemed like something that should remain a secret was actually pretty silly--and in fact even pretty funny.

Growing up I was (obviously) very interested in watching old horror and science fiction movies on TV. But another type of movie I was interested in was war movies--or more specifically, movies about World War II. The 1960s were a time of many, many movies about WWII. Roughly twenty years had passed since the war ended. It must have been that just the right amount of time had passed that there was a lot of interest in films about the war. I suppose that people who were around during WWII (either in the service or on the home front) were interested in the subject, and younger people wanted to learn more about something they were too young to really remember or comprehend. Whatever the reason there were indeed a lot of great (or at least entertaining and watchable) World War II movies that came out during the decade. I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While the 1980s (and the ensuing decades for that matter) were a time when very few war movies were produced (at least in comparison with the 1960s), it was also a time when a LOT of those great older movies were being aired on local TV. The independent Boston-area stations that I watched (WXNE Channel 25, WSBK TV Channel 38 and WLVI Channel 56) frequently featured war films as their 8:00 movies. I saw many of them during this time.

Back to the topic at hand. The memory that this whole topic is about centers around one of these movies--and the identity of that movie was key in figuring out the date in question (January 21, 1983). It was around this time that I remember first being old enough that my parents felt comfortable with going out and leaving me alone at home. The memory that is at the heart of this blog was from one of the first times they did this.

I remember being excited to know that my parents would be leaving me alone for a few hours on a Friday night. I wasn't excited because I'd be throwing a wild teenage party or doing anything illicit. No, I was psyched because I knew that the movie "Hell is for Heroes" (1962) was going to be on WLVI 56 that night. Yes, my parents were going to leave me alone at home on a Friday night and I was going to...sit around and watch a movie on TV. Wild times! Well, "Hell os for Heroes" was not only a World War II movie, it also just happened to star one of my favorite actors, Steve McQueen. McQueen was one of the stars of my (still) all-time favorite war movie, "The Great Escape" (1963).

Not only was I going to have the house to myself to watch a Steve McQueen war movie, I was also going to make myself some microwave popcorn. While that admittedly sounds pretty mundane, it was rather exciting to me. Up until a short time before this, if we had popcorn in my house it was popped by my father on our stove in one of these old-school popcorn poppers:

But at this time we had just recently gotten our very first microwave oven. That allowed us to experience the uber-moden wonder that was Microwave Popcorn! Here is that very same microwave as it appears now, nearly thirty years later:

Of course a microwave is a pretty standard and unexciting thing to own nowadays, but in the early 1980s they were still a somewhat new and interesting technology. I remember being a little intimidated by our new unit as I slowly learned how to use it and to deal with its strange habit of not heating something evenly all the way through. Well, on this particular night I was going to do something very new and exciting; I was going to make my very first bag of microwave popcorn all by myself!

Put all of these factors together (a Friday night, being left home alone for one of the first times, making my own popcorn in the microwave for the very first time ever and a Steve McQueen movie on TV) and you can start to see why this night was pretty special for me (as lame as it might sound today). Remember, this was a couple years before we got our first VCR. That means it was during that ancient era when you actually had to be around and sitting in front of the TV when something you were interested in seeing was on. You couldn't videotape, TiVo or DVR it. You couldn't pop a tape or DVD of the show or move in to watch at your leisure. You couldn't go online to watch it. If it was scheduled to be on at a certain time, that was when you were going to have to see it--or risk having to wait a long time until it was broadcast again by one of the handful of VHF and UHF stations that you could pick up with your antenna.

All these little factors were enough to make for a memorable night for me. But one unexpected thing happened (the thing which I kept secret for decades afterward) that made the night truly unforgettable. Like I said, I had never made microwave popcorn before. In fact, we had only had our microwave for a short time, so I hadn't made (or even simply reheated) very much in it at all. It was pretty neat to be able to take a flat paper bag, throw it in the micro for a few minutes and have a generous helping of hot popcorn already seasoned with a butter-like substance and ready to eat.

I read the directions, set the microwave for five minutes at full power and returned to the living room to watch a few more minutes of my movie while the micro-magic happened. Not having ever made microwave popcorn before I didn't realize that five minutes was the maximum time and that it might actually take much less time. At this point my wonderful night took a strange turn. Before the microwave finished its cooking cycle I started to notice a burning odor that didn't smell like popcorn. I went out to the kitchen and saw smoke coming out of the oven. Opening the door I was shocked to see the paper bag that contained the popcorn singed and smoking. Not only had the popcorn burned, but the bag itself was burning! Knowing that my parents were going to be home at any time I started to panic. How could I conceal this mini-disaster? I quickly but gingerly grabbed the scorched bag and ran down the back stairs and outside the house. I threw it under our back porch in the snow. then I raced back upstairs to try to deal with the smell of burnt popcorn. Opening windows (and letting cold New England winter air into the house) I tried to coax the smell outside. Naturally I saw my parents' car drive up the street and park in front of the house at that moment. With not much hope of avoiding getting in big trouble I proceeded to attempt to act normal while trying desperately to think of some explanation for my irresponsible actions. Mom and Dad came in the house. I did my best to act like nothing was going on (and feeling like I was failing miserably in my effort), and...they didn't seem to notice anything was amiss! That was pretty much the end of the affair. My fun solo night was tainted, but I got away with my accidental destruction of a bag of popcorn.

It's funny how we can sometimes think something is much worse than it is. I could have simply said something like "Hi Mom and Dad. Guess what, I tried making some microwave popcorn tonight and left it in too long and burned it--and the bag it was in too". It most likely wouldn't have been a big deal, but instead it became one of my deepest and darkest secrets. It kind of festered in my mind and took on a life of its own. It wasn't until last year while sharing memories with my parents that I realized how truly minor of a thing it really was. When I told them the story it ceased to be a dark secret and simply became a funny story about a youthful mistake blown way out of proportion by that youth's over thinking mind.

While I always remembered the details of that fateful night (suppose you could say the memory was seared into my brain), I didn't know until just recently exactly when it happened. I knew it was a Friday and that Channel 56 had "Hell is for Heroes" on that night. I also knew that our microwave was pretty new. That's not really a lot of information to go on.

I had a tape recorder at the time that I used a lot to tape all kinds of stuff from TV and radio. Like I said, this was before we had our first VCR, so this was the best method for me to preserve stuff on TV that I wanted to hear (if not see) again later. Many of those cassette tapes from the time managed to survive the ensuing decades and I was able to recover most of them from my parents' house in the last couple of years. One of these tapes had a lot of interesting things on it (interesting to me at least). In addition to some early 80s pop music there was also the theme from "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", bits and pieces of an episode of "CHiPs", a TV broadcast of "Young Frankenstein" (1974), Parts of the movie "Westworld" (1973), audio from "Force Five"--one of my favorite after-school cartoon shows, and many other things. One of those things was a bunch of battle sounds from an old World War II movie. After listening to it a couple times I was pretty sure the movie was "Hell is for Heroes". Unfortunately I had never written any dates or anything else on the tape, so I had no idea when it was from. It was time for some detective work.

The 1983 cassette tape in question

Three of the songs I had taped were from Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" radio countdown show. I knew that these songs were number 4, 3 and 1 that week. Looking up "American Top 40" lists for the early 80s online I was able to determine that there was only one week that those three songs were in that exact order on the countdown. It was the middle of January of 1983. Taking that bit of information I was able to use my TV Guides from that time to figure out the dates and times of nearly everything on the 90-minute tape. This included the fact that the airing of "Hell is for Heroes" that I taped audio from was on Channel 56 on Friday, January 21, 1983. I knew that I had seen the movie at least two or three times as a kid, so that date didn't really mean a whole lot to me until I realized a few other things.

First, at the beginning of the tape I had recorded the theme to "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". I must have been very annoyed at the time because the recording was interrupted by a couple of things: our kitchen phone ringing at the end of the theme, and a high-pitched beeping noise that I didn't recognize at first. Then I realized it was our microwave oven finishing a cooking cycle out in the kitchen. I was pretty sure that we had gotten our microwave at the very end of 1982 or the very beginning of 1983. This would mean it was still very new at the time of this recording in January of 1983.
Second, I remembered that when I went outside to throw the scorched bag of popcorn under the back porch there was snow on the ground.
Third, it would make sense that early 1983 would have been around the time my parents would have felt I was old enough to leave home alone (a trust I felt I would have forever broken if they ever found out about the popcorn incident).
Fourth, I remembered that "Hell is for Heroes" was on Channel 56. I believe that it was on Channel 56 every time I saw it on TV.

If "Hell is for Heroes" was on Channel 56 on January 21, 1983 (which TV Guide attests to), how many other times would it have been on around the time that our microwave was new? It's not like WLVI 56 put it on once a month. It also had to be around the time when I was just old enough to be left home alone and it had to be at a time when there'd be snow on the ground. The cassette tape also had audio from a network's Sunday Night Movie presentation of "Young Frankenstein" the previous Sunday (January 16). I had already thought that this airing of "Young Frankenstein" was from a night before school was cancelled because of snow. Sure enough, right after taping bits from the movie I also taped part of the no-school announcements on the 11:00 news on WCVB Channel 5 in Boston. There was enough snow on the ground to cancel school on Monday, January 17, so it's a safe bet that there was still snow on the ground that Friday (when "Hell is for Heroes" was on).

All of this information and evidence led me to be nearly positive that the night of the scorched and smoking popcorn incident had to have taken place on Friday, January 21, 1983. There was overwhelming evidence indicating this fact. Armed with this new knowledge I knew that I had a mission that I just had to accept. That mission was to resurrect the night of January 21, 1983. Stay tuned for part two to see whether that mission was accomplished, and how I went about trying to make it all happen...

TO BE CONTINUED

Separated at Birth 2: Tim Tebow and Bigfoot

2012-01-20T14:03:00.004-05:00

Well, after stretching believability a bit recently by suggesting that Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Stiles were separated at birth (see above and refer to Separated at Birth? for more on that audacious claim), I was surprised to randomly find an even more oddball example of this phenomenon. I wasn't looking for another one, but it just unexpectedly presented itself to me. Let me explain...

The Little Monster has pleasantly surprised me lately by showing a keen interest in Bigfoot and yeti. As a kid I was always interested in all the great mysteries that would be covered by the 1970s show "In Search of...". UFOs, ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, spontaneous human combustion and countless other unsolved mysteries would all draw me in. But the greatest one of all for me was Bigfoot and The Abominable Snowman.

I introduced the idea of these Big Hairy Monsters (BHMs) to The Little Monster a while back, but tried to spoon feed her information about them so as not to freak her out and give her too many nightmares. I think an occasional nightmare is a good thing for a kid to have, but I certainly didn't want to purposely terrorize my poor daughter. She is still a bit younger than I was when I first discovered the Bigfoot phenomenon and became both fascinated and frightened by it.

For the past couple of days The Little Monster has come home from school begging to see yeti stuff and learn more about these creatures. I wanted to show her an old "In Search of..." episode on Bigfoot, but wasn't exactly sure where I put my DVDs of the show. Instead I went to my Netflix instant streaming queue and picked one of the more recent Bigfoot/yeti programs I had put in it a while back. The Bigfoot episode of the show "Best Evidence" (Season 1: Episode 2) seemed like a good thing to check out together. I had never seen it myself so it was something we could both experience for the first time.

What does all this have to do with the topic of "Separated at Birth"? Well, early on in the "Best Evidence" episode an eyewitness account was covered.

This man's recollection of his encounter with a strange hairy creature was accompanied by some sketches of the creature he claimed to have seen.

Something about that second drawing seemed uncomfortably familiar to me. Suddenly, two recent events (The Little Monster's growing interest in Bigfoot and the New England Patriots' 45-10 demolition of the Denver Broncos in the AFC Divisional playoff game) collided in a totally unexpected manner.

The combination of those two seemingly-unrelated events was enough to make me suspect that Bigfoot was separated at birth from none other than...the quarterback of the Broncos, Tim Tebow! While the legendary Tebow might not seem to have much in common with the legendary Bigfoot (other than both having "Legendary" status), he has created quite a sensation with both his playing and his habit of going down on one knee to thank the Lord whenever he is blessed with a victory or a touchdown. This signature move has become known as "Tebowing" and is now rivaling "Planking" as the latest useless activity for people who have YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts, cell phone cameras and nothing better to do. Strangely enough, it appears that even the Bigfoot creature itself takes part in the act of Tebowing. Check out a closer look at the sketch above compared with Tim Tebow (and keep in mind that the Bigfoot episode first aired in February of 2007--meaning that it is very unlikely that the sketch artist was subconsciously influenced by images of Tebow doing his thing):

And, maybe it's just me, but I do think that I can see just a hint of similarity between Tim Tebow and Bigfoot. The Wife only saw Tebow for the first time just before the Patriots/Broncos game during the pre-game show. She wanted to confirm the fact that Tebow was worthy of being the latest NFL heartthrob. Once she spotted him she declared him to be "cuter than Tom Brady". Regardless of his hunkiness, the simple fact that Tim Tebow doesn't seem to be able, or willing, to give himself a clean shave has also exposed another disturbing similarity to the legendary Bigfoot:

For more evidence, check out the similarity between another sketch featured in the "Best Evidence" Bigfoot episode and another photo of Tebow:

And now for the final bit of proof. Below is a frame from Roger Patterson's famous 1967 film footage of Bigfoot taken at Bluff Creek, California. This frame is probably the best known image ever of the creature. I was able to find no less than 11 examples of Tim Tebow aping (no pun intended) Bigfoot's gait in both his college and NFL careers. About the only thing missing is a football in Bigfoot's left hand.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But I feel that all this evidence put together makes for a strong case that Tim Tebow is somehow related to Bigfoot in some way. They may not have been separated at birth--since the Patterson film was taken in 1967 and Tebow wasn't even born until twenty years later in 1987--but I just can't help but think that there is something strange going on here...

JOHN 3:16

Friday the 13th Part 2

2012-01-13T14:23:00.003-05:00

No, this isn't a review of the movie "Friday the 13th Part 2" (and I'm sorry if you ended up here expecting to find one). Today is once again Friday the 13th and I figured it was a good time to relate a couple more of my own "Favorite" superstitions that I left out of the previous entry on the topic, My Own Personal Superstitions. While that blog gave plenty of examples there were a couple things I should have mentioned but didn't. And here they are...

Knock On Wood

This might not qualify as a true "superstition", but I always try to find a bit of wood to rap on with my knuckles a couple times whenever someone says something that I believe will lead to something bad. I went into detail in the other superstition blog about how I was afraid of jinxes, and knocking on wood has always been my preferred way of trying to avoid a jinx situation. Whenever I'm watching or listening to a football, baseball or basketball game I always cringe when the commentators mention a stat at just the wrong moment. For instance, they might point out that the pitcher who is currently pitching to a batter hasn't given up a home run in 34 innings. More likely than not--if that pitcher is playing for "my" team at least--that batter will crush the next pitch for a home run. I know this sounds crazy, but it boggles my mind how many times I've seen/heard it happen. My only defense in such instances is to knock on a piece of wood. If I'm sitting down in a chair with wooden arm rests then it's pretty easy. Sometimes I have to walk over to a wooden doorway or something like that. I've been meaning to find a wooden nickel that I can carry in my pocket everywhere I go so I can have something to knock on when no wood is easily available in my current surroundings. Of course wooden nickels are also supposed to be tokens of good luck. While that's not the main reason I'd be carrying it I'll certainly take any additional good luck that I can get along with that which comes from heads-up pennies that I find lying on the ground!

The Wife has given me plenty of opportunities to knock on wood too. She's more of a glass-is-half-full person and I'm more of a glass-is-half-empty type. Because of this I tend to try not to jinx something that could still go wrong by commenting on it too soon. The Wife on the other hand is more than happy to throw caution to the wind (without even realizing it of course) by saying something that could come back to haunt her (or more specifically, ME). If we're on a long drive and the weather is of the rainy variety she'll say "Well at least the rain has stopped" as soon as there is a break in the precipitation. I always cringe at something like that because it seems that Mother Nature also hears it and starts the rain back up in short order. I also never want to admit that an activity we are taking part in is successful or going well until it's safe to do so (like when it's over). I always feel that saying "this hike is going great" is a sure way to invite a sprained ankle or a sudden cloudburst. I don't see anything wrong with just enjoying an activity and then talking about it later rather than take a chance on messing it up by saying how wonderfully it is going. What can I say?

666 - The Number of the Beast

The number 666 is frequently associated with satanism, black magic and that sort of thing. I don't know if it's generally thought of in terms of superstitions, but in my case it is. And it's appearance is only an issue for me in one specific instance--when I'm driving. I don't have any problem hearing the number uttered in a movie or on the radio. It's okay for me to look down at the page number of a book I'm reading and to discover that I'm on page 666 (if I'm ever reading a book with that many pages). The problem arises when I'm driving and just happen to look down at the odometer or trip odometer in my car and see that the last three digits of the current mileage reading are 666. And it's amazing how often this happens. Of course it can only happen once every thousand miles (or twice if we're counting the trip odometer), but it always seems to be there whenever my eyes wander down. And it's not like I check the odometer on a regular basis either. It's something that I'll just sneak a little peek at when things are pretty quiet and there's nothing much else to look at (besides the road of course).

The funny thing about the number 666 is that it generally tends to bother me more than the number 13. Other than Friday the 13th I'm not really all that concerned with the number 13. It can give me pause from time to time, but in general is a pretty innocuous number--even when I see it on my odometer.

The Number 143

It may seem that everything I believe in terms of superstitions is negative, but there's at least one thing that I consider to be good rather than bad luck. The number 143 has been a favorite of mine since high school. There's a long and possibly uninteresting story behind this which I won't go into detail about here. Suffice to say that whenever the number 143 randomly appears in my everyday life I've decided to consider it a sign or omen of good luck. While driving I'm always pleased to see the digits 143 in a license plate of a car in front of me. Along the lines of the number 666 above, I also enjoy (instead of dread) seeing that the last three digits of the odometer reading are 1-4-3. It's also nice to see things priced $1.43 in a store.

I suppose a lot of the reason that the numbers 143 and 666 seem to come up so often in my daily life is simply because I look for them (even if subconsciously sometimes). It would probably be the same case with any random number that I decided to fixate upon. Either way, it always seems strange how such a seemingly random number as 143 should show up in bunches in many different places at certain times.

That's about it for this installment of my own personal superstitions. Please have a safe and luck-filled Friday the 13th!

He Who Spelt It Dealt It

2011-12-30T19:18:00.007-05:00

Over a year ago I wrote in Night of the Living Bread about The Wife's proclivity toward healthy foods and how it collides with my history of less-than-healthy eating. While we've had some pretty heated debates over this subject I certainly do have to appreciate the fact that she is making an effort to reform me so that I will actually live a little longer. As I age I'm starting to see the effects of decades of eating pretty much whatever I wanted. All that saturated fat and cholesterol is starting to catch up with me.

I've recently written about both sugary cereals (Return of the Monster (Cereals)) and Spam (My First Taste of Spam!)--even though the spam I was talking about was the electronic type rather than the sodium heavy canned meat product. In light of these recent posts it seemed like a good time to revisit the topic of scary-sounding healthy food products in my household.

We still have fruit smoothies made with tofu for breakfast. We still have tofu and spinach lasagna on occasion. We still have cous cous, quinoa and wheat barley for sides instead of the evil that is white rice. And we still have multi-grain (at least a dozen minimum), all natural wheat bread instead of white bread most of the time (this includes the infamous Ezekiel 4:9 "bread" detailed in the earlier blog). A few weeks ago I was wondering what we were going to be eating for dinner on a Friday night. Seeing as how it was a Friday I was kind of angling for something tasty. The Wife surprised me by announcing that we were going to be having burgers and fries for dinner! Needless to say this isn't a regular meal in our house. I had seen a package of ground beef in the refrigerator and knew that we had a few frozen french fries in the freezer (another thing not frequently found in our home). I got pretty excited by the prospect of a "normal" meal of burgers and fries and almost fell for the ruse. Then The Wife asked me if I could put the burgers in the oven for her. BURGERS IN THE OVEN?!? What was going on? I looked at these "burgers" and realized that I had been had. They almost looked like hamburger patties, except they had a bunch of green stuff sticking out of them. I believe it was spinach. Not only that, but one of the main ingredients along with the ground beef was... Bulgur Wheat! Not just any bulgur wheat would do either. This bulgur wheat was "all natural" and contained soy for good measure. Yum!

While it probably seems obvious that nothing much has changed since the last time I wrote about this subject, I still thought it would be fun (interesting? scary?) to take another look at a few of the products that have found their way into our house lately along with this wonderful bulgur wheat. And I still have no idea what bulgur wheat even is.

Needless to say, Cookie Crisp definitely isn't something The Wife would bring into the house. I was guilty of this a while back, but just had to throw this one in here. The funny thing is that even sugary-sweet breakfast cereals have attempted to get into the whole healthy eating thing. I'm well aware that this stuff isn't healthy in any way, but find it hilarious that General Mills touts the fact that Cookie Crisp is a "Whole Grain" cereal. In fact, apparently General Mills cereals are "America's #1 Source of Whole Grain at Breakfast", according to this box. It makes it a bit hard to know what is actually good for you when it seems like everything is telling is about its healthy and all natural ingredients these days.

I'm all for having noodles with a meal. We used to have regular pasta pretty frequently, but that has been replaced by whole wheat pasta. Doesn't seem like a giant difference, but there definitely is a difference. Now the product pictured here isn't pasta of course. These are Soba Noodles. And these are special because they go beyond the common "whole wheat" designation and are in fact made of 100% Organic Buckwheat! Yet another item to add to our ever expanding vocabulary of healthy foods.

The beloved (by some at least) cous cous. This has become a popular rice alternative in our house.

Here's Pearled Barley--another rice alternative for a healthy side dish. In our house it also finds its way into delicious soup loaded with vegetables...and noticeably void of meat.

Whole Ground Flaxseed Meal--a wonderful addition to almost any food. Now if this stuff doesn't get your juices flowing, nothing will! I know about the benefits of fiber and Omega-3 fats in a diet, but have to admit that I've never heard of Lignans before and don't have any idea what the heck they do for you. Strengthen your ligaments?

I'm used to berries being a fruit that you can get either fresh or frozen. I'm familiar with blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries. But Wheat Berries were a new one to me when they made their first appearance in our home. How's this for an appetizing description: These whole grain wheat berries are made from "High Protein Number 1 Dark Northern Hard Red Spring Wheat". I can remember a more innocent time not that long ago when simply calling something "whole wheat" was enough of a designation to get people excited about the health benefits of your product. We've come a long way since then baby!

And for breakfast we can forget about such old favorites as the Monster Cereals and Cookie Crisp seen above. In fact we can even forget about such previously thought to be healthy cereals as the much dreaded Cheerios and Wheaties. Instead we can now chow down on the sublime taste of Musli #3! I think it goes without saying that this cereal is all natural. Check out the ingredients too. The first three listed are Whole Grain Spelt, Whole Grain Oats and Barley Flakes. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it!

And, finally, here are a couple more bread choices to go along with our frozen supply of Ezekiel 4:9. Both of these loaves come from Jessica's Brick Oven:

Tuscan Pane Whole Wheat bread. Not to be confused with run-of-the-mill wheat bread, this one is made using Stone Ground Whole Wheat. I have to admit that I can't really figure out what exactly makes bread so much healthier and more appealing when the wheat in it was ground on stones rather than metal (or however they grind all that pedestrian wheat found in more common breads).

Surprisingly enough, the people at Jessica's Brick Oven don't even mention the fact that this is an "Artisan" bread. You have to look at the label on the back to discover that comforting bit of information (as well as the fact that this bread is "Rustic"--and I'm not sure exactly what "Rustic" entails or what makes rustic bread better than more "urban" types of bread). "Artisan" is another popular term in foods that I don't like. I picture an "artist" painstakingly crafting individual loaves of bread one at a time--when I know that no matter how healthy a bakery is they are still churning loaves out in some mechanical manner. Remember a few years back when Wendy's was promoting their now-discontinued deli sandwiches that were served on "artisanal" bread? What a joke!

Last but not least is Jessica's "Ancient Grain" bread. This echoes the biblical grains touted in Ezekiel 4:9 bread. And of course it also contains our old friend spelt! You'll also note that this bread contains the hallmark of all the healthiest and earthy-crunchiest breads out there: a generous portion of nuts and seeds on the OUTSIDE of the bread. It seems like healthy eaters are suspicious of a bread's true all-naturalness unless they can actually see all the grains and such on their loaves. Couldn't these nuts and seeds provide just as much of a health benefit if they were in the bread dough instead of being on the crust? In general I'm not a big fan of old and stale bread (who is?). For whatever reason, calling this bread "Ancient Grain" just doesn't sound appetizing to me. I'd prefer the grains in my bread to be the newest and freshest ones available. I suppose that's just me though...

My First Taste of Spam!

2011-12-27T18:59:00.003-05:00

Anyone who is familiar with me would know that the title of this post is a lie--or at least that it appears to be one. Of course I've tasted Spam in the past. While I don't indulge in this versatile mystery meat very often, I do enjoy it when the opportunity comes up--as crazy as that might sound to some. But no, the title isn't a lie, because in this case the Spam I'm talking about is that of the electronic variety.

I get spam in my e-mail inbox (or more frequently in my spam folder) all the time. But today I got my first taste of spam in relation to this blog in the year-and-a-half that I've had it. While that might seem like a bad thing--and I suppose it is--I'm actually kind of glad to receive this bit of unwanted attention. I would imagine that the big and successful blogs get hit with spam attacks all the time. Little ol' Monster Dad's humble site and small viewership wouldn't seem like a very tempting place for spam to settle. So, rather than getting all pissy about it, I've decided to consider my first spam comment to be a sign that I'm getting just that much closer to The Big Time!

A while back I posted a comment to a fun blog I subscribe to called The Baseball Card Blog. I checked the box to receive e-mails when follow-up comments were posted. Well, I was surprised to see a flood of comments a couple of days later. The strange thing was that they were all from various casino and gambling-related "names", and none of them made any real sense--especially in relation to the blog post they were supposedly in response to. While I don't really know all things about spam it seemed pretty obvious that this was a very clear cut case of it. The blog's writer and a couple other commenters made light of the obviously automatically generated and sent messages. And I suppose that, as long as no real harm was done, it was pretty funny if you looked at it in the right way. There was a small part of me that wondered why I wasn't "good" enough to warrant a spam attack. ...And there was a big, gigantic part of me that was thankful that I hadn't beed targeted--or at least not yet.

This morning I was checking my e-mail and was pleasantly pleased to see that someone had been kind enough to leave a comment on a blog I had just written a few days earlier. My blog doesn't usually generate a lot of comments, so it's always a nice thing when one pops up unexpectedly. Just for reference (as will become obvious soon) the blog was Resurrecting The Past: 1980 Sears Holiday Wish Book. I have my blog set up so that I can review comments before they are posted, and choose whether or not I want them published. While I don't intend to turn down any thoughtful or honest comments, this one became the very first one I decided not to publish. It was a pretty lengthy comment, followed by eight website links that I will definitely NOT be clicking on. I will also not be repeating them here--just to keep my readers safe. The comment was posted by someone called "cheaprsgoldforever" and included Mr. or Ms. cheaprsgoldforever's website address as well.

So anyway, while I won't be listing the web links here, I do want to share with you exactly what cheaprsgoldforever was kind enough to say about my blog post in their comment. Especially since it won't find its way to the blog itself. Here it is:

"I believe that this all to explain that I would pore over the Sears list (or otherwise the plaything segment) each and every late-November/early-December, and also group of friends a silly quantity of items that My partner and i "wished" for. My partner and i realized that we has not been you go to acquire everything that stuff, but it was just enjoyable in order to think a little. Itrrrs this that manufactured your Sears Want Publication this essential the main season for me. I did so end up with a number of items from the listing. Whether or not they originated in Father christmas, Sears as well as other department shop I can not point out definitely, yet I will talk about some of these products once we obtain them. And now you're ready to examine the particular contents of the Sears Want E-book to the Christmas season involving 1980. I am not planning to illustrate each and every page, in the end it has a total involving 668 web pages (which includes insures). Alternatively we will just look at a few of the several highlights (or at best stuff that My partner and i take into account shows). These kind of features defintely won't be assembled by simply classes. Instead they're going to use web site number--just like we've been seeking through a list from front to back."

Note that it not only doesn't really make any sense whatsoever, but it also includes snippets lifted directly from the blog post itself--presumably to make it look more "legitimate" and less like an automatically generated message. It's actually pretty funny in a way. But, for whatever reason, I just can't bring myself to believe that it's a genuine comment. I'm sure others have seen this kind of spam, but it was my first experience with such fun. I'm just glad I have the ability to check and approve (or not approve) comments before they're posted to the blog. And I also feel pretty lucky that it was only one comment, rather than the multiple ones The Baseball Card Blog received on their post.

Now I'm hungry for some Spam!

Resurrecting The Past: ColecoVision (aka Best...Christmas Present...Ever)

2011-12-24T01:10:00.007-05:00

It is Christmastime 2011. I'm preparing to watch my Little Monsters excitedly rip open their presents that they will find under the tree. It's not unusual for me to think about the past and what life was like when I was a kid. I'd imagine that most people (at least those that celebrate Christmas) have a lot of fond memories of the Christmases of their youth. I know I do. I used to love Christmas, not to mention the inexorable build up to it during the month after Thanksgiving. It all culminated with Christmas morning and seeing all those wonderful wrapped presents under the tree. With all the gifts Santa (or my parents) gave me from Christmas it seems like it would be tough to pick an all-time favorite. But in this case it's actually pretty simple. One Christmas present stands out above all others in my memory (at least as far as gifts that I remember anyway). That gift was opened up in 1982. Its name was ColecoVision.

Image borrowed from the site The Computer Closet

While the graphics featured on the Atari 2600 video game system seem crude and archaic today, there's no denying they were a huge step forward from what had been available in home video games systems that could be connected to televisions up to that point. Before the Atari 2600 the only real option was some variation on the simple game of Video Pong. A lot of the early Atari games weren't much better than Pong, but at least they were in color and the system had arcade-like joystick controllers.

The Sears Video Arcade (taken from the 1980 Sears Wish Book), a clone of the Atari 2600

The Atari 2600 was the undisputed king of the hill for a couple of years before the competition really heated up. I never owned one, but played a lot of the games at the homes of friends who did have it. It was a lot of fun, but I never really felt a burning need to own one for myself.

Intellivision upped the ante a bit with its slightly improved graphics, but in 1982 a new generation of consoles arrived that blew everything else in home video gaming out of the water. Those new systems were the Atari 5200 and ColecoVision. It was around this time that I was really getting into playing video games. In addition to using my friends' Atari 2600 I was also frequenting some of the video arcades that seemed to be sprouting up everywhere. When I saw the near-arcade-level quality of the new systems I suddenly felt that I had to have one. Deciding between the two was a surprisingly difficult choice. Since there was no internet to refer to, my research was limited to a few sources: the video game magazines that could be found at newsstands near me, the TV commercials for the Atari 5200 and ColecoVision, and opinions of fellow kids who either owned one of the systems or had played them.

December 1982 issue of the magazine Electronic Games

After much deliberation I finally realized that ColecoVision was the video game system for me. I'm not sure what the deciding factor was. It may have been that ColecoVision had the expansion port that allowed you to add onto it. The most important module that came out was the Atari 2600 adapter. With this you could play all of the games that had been made for the 2600--and there were a LOT of games available. Another incentive was that Coleco put out its Adam Computer unit, which would also attach to the Colecovision console to turn it into a full-fledged home computer (a new and exciting idea back then). That way I could say that the system offered more than just video games (even if I was really just interested in the games for the most part rather than any potential educational value).

Now I had a system of choice. The only problem left was how I was going to go about getting one of my own. These things weren't exactly cheap. I did have a paper route at the time, but my meager earnings wouldn't have allowed me to purchase a game cartridge for the Colecovision--never mind the console itself. That left the parents as my last hope of getting in on the gaming goodness. It was fall when I was doing all this deliberation and Christmas was approaching. Not unlike Ralphie in "A Christmas Story" pining for his much desired BB gun, I began lobbying hard for a ColecoVision. Not only did I simply tell my parents that I wanted one for Christmas, I also touted all the values and benefits of having a ColecoVision. I knew it was a rather extravagant request for a gift, but it really was pretty much the only thing I wanted that year. Eventually I felt that I had worn my parents down, but didn't know for sure until Christmas morning when... A large present under the tree was unwrapped and discovered to be a ColecoVision! It was actually a "family" gift and not something just for me. I was more than fine with that. Being the youngest in my family I knew that I'd get more than my fair share of time in front of the TV playing great video games!

Flash forward to 2011. The ColecoVision was utilized and enjoyed a lot during its first year in our house. It was used a little less over the next couple of years until it finally became so idle that it was put away and forgotten about. While the improvements in home video gaming had continued apace making ColecoVision obsolete while constantly refining graphics, sound and playability, ColecoVision wasn't replaced in my heart with a newer, flashier system. I simply drifted away from video games. While I'd still drop a few quarters into the big games at arcades I didn't really play any home-based games for a while. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) came out I was in the Army and never really became aware of how much of an improvement it offered over the ColecoVison generation of game systems until I played Super Mario Brothers at a friend's house couple years later. I came close to getting addicted to the game, but somehow managed to avoid getting sucked back into the video game world. Even with all the great stuff available now, I have never owned a video game system since ColecoVision.

A year or so ago I started feeling nostalgic for that great old ColecoVision experience. It was difficult to determine if our old console was still around at my parents' house. I started looking for one on eBay, but they seemed to be pretty expensive and I didn't want to spend a lot of money for a thirty-year-old unit that I might not end up using a lot. While visiting my mother a few months ago I did a little searching and was very excited to dig up the old Colecovision! It wasn't in a box and had become very dusty and a little grimy over the years. Here's what it looked like when I found it:

The label had even fallen off the Donkey Kong cartridge

I brought the unit home with me, along with a few things that went along with it. I had no idea if it still worked--or whether I'd be able to fix it if it didn't. It seemed to be complete at least. I put a bit of work into cleaning the old gal up and it ended up looking pretty good once again.

When I plugged in the gigantic (and heavy) power supply unit and turned the console on I knew that it was getting power, but still didn't know whether it would actually work or not.

Because it has an old-style RCA plug I figured there would need to be some kind of modification done to get it to work with a modern TV. But I was surprised to find that all I had to do was pick up a little Coax to RCA adapter at Radio Shack.

A few bucks later I put the adapter on, attached the wire to the TV, plugged the unit in and... didn't know how to get the TV to the right setting to pick up the console's signal. Because all the channels are now digital signals I had to figure out how to tune the TV into the non-digital (Standard) version of channel 3. When this was done the screen was filled with the familiar snowy screen that was so common back in the old days, but which you never see anymore. That was a good sign though. Then I turned the console back on and saw the old ColecoVision title screen!

It was strange to think that this machine had been sitting around for so many years (probably a couple of decades at least) and hadn't put that image up on a TV screen for such a long time. A lot has changed in the video game world, in my life and in the world in general since the last time something was played on this old unit.

When I found the ColecoVision console I also found a few game cartridges too--including the one that originally came bundled with it, Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong, cleaned up and with the label glued back on

Naturally, Donkey Kong was also the first game I had to try out once it was confirmed that the system still seemed to work. It was like going back in time when the first notes of the Donkey Kong song started up. Despite all the years that had passed since I had last played it, it all seemed to come back pretty quickly. Of course the graphics don't seem anywhere near as groundbreaking as they did in 1983, but it was still pretty good to see. While looking into buying a used Colecovision earlier I had checked out some videos of a few of the games on YouTube. After looking at Donkey Kong on Intellivision and the Atari 2600 there I was reminded of just how much of an improvement Colecovision was over those systems.

I also tried out Zaxxon, which was another favorite of mine way back when our ColecoVision was new. I still remember seeing the commercials for that one when it came out which showed how closely it mimicked the arcade version. In all I found a total of seven ColecoVision game cartridges: the Donkey Kong one that came with the system, Mr. Do, Zaxxon, Space Panic, Smurf, Looping and Mouse Trap. One of the keypad overlays for Mouse Trap was still on one of the game controllers when I found the console and the games. The other overlay, as well as all the boxes and instruction booklets for the games are all missing. Of course the games themselves are the most important thing anyway.

The only expansion we ever got for our ColecoVision was "Expansion Module #1, the adapter that let you play games made for the Atari 2600. This was a great one to have, as it opened up our choices to hundreds of additional titles (even though we had to accept the 2600's graphics along with the games). We never got the steering wheel controller, the track ball controller, the Super Action Controller Set or the Adam computer module. I believe those were the only other ones ever produced. In another area in my parents' house I was able to find the old Expansion Module. It was in a similar state to the ColecoVision unit--dusty and dirty, but in good physical shape. I cleaned this one up too, but haven't tested it out yet. It seems like it should be fine.

Here's the Expansion Module #1 connected to the ColecoVision console

I do have some Atari 2600 games around that I can try out in it whenever I get around to testing it. In the meantime I still have to check out the rest of the Colecovision games to see if I can remember any of them like I remembered Donkey Kong and Zaxxon.

It's been a fun and nostalgic experience to rediscover an old friend from my youth like ColecoVision and bring it back to life after such a long time. The fact that it is now Christmas 2011 and I know that I first opened this very same unit exactly twenty-nine years ago makes it all the more special. So much has changed, but the games remain the same...

GAME OVER

Resurrecting The Past: 1980 Sears Holiday Wish Book

2011-12-21T20:02:00.009-05:00

This edition of "Resurrecting the Past" was originally going to be "Resurrecting the Past: Christmas 1980", as the photo above sort of illustrates. I was going to go over the contents of the 1980 Sears Wish Book and also survey what was on TV during the week of Christmas, using the TV Guide from that time. Once I started thinking about what was going to be in this post I realized that my original vision was much too ambitious--and the post would be way too long. Not only that, but after seeing how long it was taking to put this whole thing together I'd be working on it until well into the New Year (and the hope was for this to be published before Christmas). So, for brevity's sake I'll just concentrate on the 1980 Sears Wish Book. Perhaps the TV Guide part of the story will eventually make it onto the TV Guide Time Machine sometime in the future. Without further delay, let's get started...

When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s a sure sign that the holiday season was getting under way was when the Sears Holiday Wish Book would arrive at the house. We didn't get it every year, and I don't remember if they came in the mail or if my parents picked them up at Sears. But I do remember the excitement of opening up one of these thick and hefty tomes. Nowadays you can get most of your shopping and sale information online. You can even actually do most of your shopping online for that matter. The need for a gigantic catalog from Sears every few months has greatly decreased over the years. That's good news for trees, but I feel that it takes one little bit of what was special about the holidays away. Yes, it was a very small part of the overall picture, but it was something I really enjoyed just the same.

My family wasn't rich. My parents worked hard to support our large household. We never went without, but we were also never overwhelmed with piles of unnecessary "stuff". Mom and Dad always managed to get plenty of gifts for everyone under the tree on Christmas--and maybe we had a little better appreciation for that stuff than someone who always got every minor whim fulfilled. I say all this to explain that I would pore over the Sears catalog (or at least the toy section) every late-November/early-December, and circle a ridiculous number of things that I "wished" for. I knew that I wasn't actually going to get all that stuff, but it was just fun to fantasize a bit. This is what made the Sears Wish Book such an important part of the season for me. I did end up with a few items from the catalog. Whether they came from Santa, Sears or some other department store I can't say for sure, but I'll mention some of these items when we see them. And now it's time to take a look at the contents of the Sears Wish Book for the Holiday Season of 1980. I'm not going to illustrate every page, after all it has a total of 668 pages (including covers). Instead we'll just look at a few of the many highlights (or at least things that I consider highlights). These highlights won't be grouped by categories. Instead they will go by page number--just like we're looking through a catalog from front to back. And here we go:

1980 Sears Wish Book front cover

Here's the cover of the 1980 Wish Book. It was certainly a wonderful thing to see as a kid. I don't remember this one specifically, but can imagine seeing the cover and being totally put into a Christmas frame of mind. It doesn't hurt that there are a couple of kids checking out their new presents under the tree with their parents looking on in the background. In 1980 I would have been eleven years old at Christmas, so my taste in toys had changed a bit over the last few years. Nonetheless I was still very much interested in all things toys.

Page 13

I wasn't interested in sports much on 1980, but if I had been I'm sure I would have asked Santa for one of these NFL football jerseys. Most likely it would have been the Number 14 jersey worn by quarterback Steve Grogan of the New England Patriots.

Page 20

Or perhaps one of these NFL jersey and helmet sets would have been a more tempting gift to request!

Page 46

Now like mentioned earlier, I mainly concentrated on the toys in these catalogs when perusing them as a kid. But in the interest of giving a better idea of what kind of stuff Sears was selling in 1980 we'll look at a bunch of other things as well. Here are some nifty pajama sets. If I was to check these out I probably would have had a tough time deciding if I wanted one of the Star Wars ones, the Buck Rogers one or the Star Trek one.

Page 66

I definitely wouldn't have been checking out the latest fashions while leafing through the pages of the Wish Book, but here's a hint of what the well-dressed kid might have been wearing that year (not to mention a look at what pretty much every kid hoped and prayed wouldn't be under the tree).

Page 70

I don't really remember this, but apparently there was quite the western/cowboy fad going on at the end of 1980. This might have had something to do with the popularity of movies like "Urban Cowboy" (1980) and songs like Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy". Maybe it was even related to the continuing interest in CB radios and trucker culture that I mentioned in the TV Guide Time Machine blog "Smokey and the Bandit (March 23, 1980)". Whatever the case I suppose I would have been slightly less horrified by wearing these duds than the suits above.

Page 74

Here's a few more fashions of the day (check out the pockets on those "Perma-Prest" jeans!). The only reason for this page being here is the Empire Strikes Back t-shirts, which I definitely would have liked at the time. Heck they even make "retro" shirts like these today.

Page 182

A selection of clocks that could be of interest to kids. I seem to recall the Big Bird one in the upper left hand corner, but didn't have it myself. A friend or relative must have owned one of them. On the other hand I did own a Star Wars wristwatch, which I'm almost positive was the blue C-3PO and R2-D2 one on the left. Like most of the items I'll mention that I owned I have no idea whether I actually got that watch for Christmas in 1980, or if it was given to me at a different time, but since it's in this Wish Book I figured it was worth mentioning.

Page 221

Does anyone else remember these horrid-looking boots that we always called "Moon Boots" when I was growing up? I don't remember if I ever actually had any of these ugly things myself, but I do know that I always thought they were ugly--even in 1980 when I was 11 and a fan of science-fiction movies. You'd think that something called "Moon Boots" would have appealed to me, but no.

Page 340

The Wish Book also had a section on Christmas trees and all sorts of holiday decorations. Here's a look at a few of the trees they were offering in 1980.

Page 352

Could you really have called Christmas Christmas back then without a fruitcake? I never partook of them, but they always seemed to be around. It was a tradition that I never quite "got". Oh well, to each his own.

"The MASTERPIECE"

Page 362

While I didn't have a taste for fruitcakes, I did enjoy those meat, cheese and cracker boxed gift sets and felt they were an integral part of the holidays. I'm not sure if we had them all the time, but it seems like it in my memory. They would probably have been received at Christmas, and I remember enjoying them around New Year's Eve. Maybe this is a sort of made-up memory that has always caused me to have a soft spot in my heart for these things that I'm sure some people find as horrid as I found fruitcakes back then.

Page 407

We didn't get our first microwave until about two years after this catalog came out, but they were already one of the hot (no pun intended) new technologies of the early 1980s. I put this one up because it looks very similar to the one we would get a couple years later. In fact, here is that very microwave for comparison:

Page 421

For anyone who thinks that camcorders have always been tiny things that fit in the palm of your hand, check out this "portable" Video Cassette Player with Video Sound Camera! While the camera itself isn't terribly large, keep in mind that you also had to lug the VCR around with you when you went outside to film your home movies. There'd probably be a whole lot less mindless stuff on YouTube if we still had to record video on these behemoths. Of course at the time they were a miracle of technology and miniaturization. Not only that, but they even used the smaller (and soon to be obsolete) Beta video tapes instead of VHS ones. On the page before this one Sears also offered a selection of pre-recorded movies that you could buy and watch in your own home whenever you wanted! Yeah, that doesn't seem like anything special today, but at the time it was revolutionary. Most people still didn't have cable and it had only been recently that you could actually buy movies (if you could afford the astronomical cost of a VCR. I should also mention that Sears only offered twenty-one titles at this time. Here are a few of them. Note the prices:

"Silver Streak" ($54.95), "M.A.S.H." ($54.95), "The Poseidon Adventure" ($54.95), "The Sound of Music" ($74.95), "The Muppet Movie" ($54.95), "Night of the Living Dead" ($54.95), "Grease" ($59.95), "Barbarella" ($59.95), "The Making of Star Wars" ($54.95)* and "The Ten Commandments" ($79.95).

*Keep in mind that you would be paying $54.95 for a tape of "The Making of Star Wars", not the actual movie "Star Wars" itself.

Page 436

A few months after this Christmas I bought my first ever tape recorder. In fact I got it on St. Patrick's Day 1981. I don't think I was into them in December 1981, but soon after I got the fever to tape stuff bad. For the next few years I'd prop my little portable tape recorder (similar to the ones above) up next to the speaker of the TV or radio and tape music or the audio of movies and TV shows. That probably seems like a strange thing to do, but VCRs were still very expensive at the time and we didn't get our first one until 1985. It's amazing how entertaining I found the process of taping and then listening to stuff from the TV. I've managed to find most of those old tapes in the past couple of years and have really been to travel back in time a bit by listening to them once again.

Page 440

I was just starting to get into music at the end of 1980. By 1984 I was very much into it and wanted to get a guitar so I could become the next Jimmy Page or Eddie Van Halen (an ambition that never came to pass). While I wasn't really into them at the time I remember stopping on the musical instrument pages to look at the guitars that Sears offered. Maybe they lit a little spark inside me without me even realizing it. Who knows?

Page 444

Disco was close to being dead at the end of 1980. Punk, synth-pop and new wave were really taking off, but you'd never know it by looking at the selection of groovy disco lights and strobe lights that Sears was selling in this Wish Book.

Page 447

Roller skates were big at this time (and I suppose roller disco probably was too, to some extent). Here's a few of the skates that Sears was selling about a decade or so before the introduction of in-line skates.

Page 460

It's seems strange now to think that Sears sold real, honest-to-goodness firearms right along with the roller skates and guitars seen above in 1980. I don't think they do any more (though I can't say that for sure). The times have sure changed. I probably checked out the pages with rifles and shotguns back then, but I wouldn't have circled any of them. It didn't really seem like something that Santa would be likely to leave under the tree.

Page 479

It seems like soccer (or football a it's known throughout most of the world) has been trying forever to become really popular in the United States. I remember playing soccer as a kid and enjoying it, but it just never seemed to be able to catch on. There are just too many long-entrenched sports to choose from already (football, baseball, basketball and hockey) for soccer to really be able to take a bite out of them. Of course soccer is still around, and millions of kids (I might be exaggerating) are in youth soccer leagues today--not to mention that as a result we now have the well-known term "soccer moms". There are even professional leagues for both men and women that try to draw spectators away from the other sports. I forgot that there were also pro soccer leagues back in the 1970s and 80s. Here are a selection of uniforms and apparel from the long defunct North American Soccer League (NASL). Wonder how these were selling around Christmas 1980?

Page 515

There was a time before iPods and MP3s when people would actually listen to stuff on records, cassette tapes and 8-track tapes. Along with a selection of classic children's books this page features a multi-media entertainment option that I remember loving as a kid: book and record sets. You'd put on the record and actually hear music, sound effects and even the story itself while you followed along in the book. Talk about interactive entertainment!

Now, we're finally going to start checking out some toys! Like I mentioned earlier, I would have gone straight to this section when I opened up a Sears Wish Book as a kid, but for the sake of giving a bit of a more complete picture of Christmas 1980 we've taken a bit longer to get here than I might have back then.

Page 532

No, I wouldn't have been asking Santa for Barbies as a kid. But I just had to add this page here. Check out the size of this Barbie Dream House! That little girl could have practically lived in the house herself! I was also struck by the Sport & Shave Ken doll featured here. I know that times, fashions and styles change (we've already seen that in earlier pages), and I know that Barbie and her friends change right along with them--but check out Ken! Check out his funky 'fro! Check out his groovy (and shave-able) beard! And check out his shorts!

Page 554

Finally, we're starting to see some of the "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back" merchandise that was selling so big around this time. "The Empire Strikes Back" had been released in May, so The stores must have been absolutely flooded with all things "Star Wars". In the photo at the top of this blog can be seen my very own "The Empire Strikes Back" comforter/sleeping bag that I may very well have received on Christmas morning in 1980 (though I'm not positive). This page features models rather than true toys, but check out the detail. Right along a sailing ship, a visible engine and a Pontiac Firebird we have the Millennium Falcon, Darth Vader's Tie Fighter and an X-Wing Fighter.

Page 560

Here's some more visual and audio entertainment for kids in the days of yore before the internet, iPods, iPads and downloadable movies and music. I remember having a Talking View-Master. It was similar to the book and record sets above in that it took an existing visual medium and added audio to it. It seemed like an amazing thing to me back then. The Winnie-the-Pooh Show 'N Tell Phono Viewer, the Movie Viewer Theater and the Talk-to-Me Player and books provided similar multimedia experiences. And I used to have one of those little Walt Disney Movie Viewers seen on this page. It was so cool to turn the crank and watch a cartoon through the viewer that actually looked like an 8mm home movie camera.

Page 561

The next page featured the details of some of the products listed above, as well as a bunch of View-Master reels that were available. The only actual toy on the page was the 2-XL Talking Robot.

It kind of surprises me that 2-XL was given only a small corner on a black and white page, but there there he was. Maybe it had already been available for a couple years and wasn't "new" enough to warrant more attention? I never owned a 2-XL myself, but remember playing with one at a summer program I used to attend. It seemed like such a cool thing to have a robot talking and interacting with you. There are similar educational toys out these days (my daughter got an Alphie robot for Christmas last year). The thing that I find so interesting about 2-XL now is that he was a futuristic-looking robot whose information was supplied by...8-Track Tapes! Nice.

Page 563

Sears sold a number of instruments (both real ones and toy versions) in this catalog. We've seen a couple of the electric guitars they had earlier. I put up these rather toy-like drum sets because I had one very similar to these. In fact it might very well have been the "Denim Country" one featured on this page. I like the pitch Sears used for these sets: "Drum up some interest in music while boosting child's dexterity." While those may be valid points, they fail to mention all the noise the kids will be making at all hours of the day and night if you got them one of these!

Page 566

This page features some pretty cool communication-based toys. Walkie-talkies were always a cool thing for kids to have while running around outside. I remember wanting one of those spiffy-looking space helmets featured here. The best thing on this page though is the Sound FX Machine.

Now, this was something I REALLY wanted and I'm sure I circled it in our Wish Book. I did indeed get one of these and had a ball with it. Once again, I'm not sure that I got it for Christmas, but it's certainly likely. I was able to find my old Sound FX Machine recently (as well as its somewhat worn box (seen in the photo at the top of the blog). Unfortunately it doesn't work very well anymore. It powers up and makes noise, but you can't really adjust the sound much. I'm hoping it's something I can fix someday. Here is my very own Sound FX Machine (minus the battery cover, which I believe I do have lying around somewhere):

And, for a little then and now, check out the ad from 1980 and the recreation from 2011:

Page 568

Here's some arts and crafts stuff. This page features the classic Lite-Brite, but the main reason I'm putting it up is because I had the Crayola Craft Art Workshop Kit at the upper right of the page. It's yet another of the things that I may or may not have opened up on Christmas morning in 1980, but at least it's in the Wish Book.

Page 570

Here's another classic: the Speak & Spell. Another one of those electronic educational toys that tried to make learning fun. I remember having fun trying to figure out ways to make the Speak & Spell say inappropriate things. There was also a comic in the mid-80s who had an act where he had a conversation with a Speak & Spell. I had the Little Professor math teacher on the bottom left of the page. It seems pretty similar to the Professor Mathics one next to it.

Page 585

It was a bit of a surprise to not find any Big Wheel cycles in this catalog. This page has some cycles that obviously "borrow" pretty heavily from the classic Big Wheel look. Maybe another department store had exclusive rights to official Big Wheels or something. I have no idea. All I know is that the Star Patrol Cycle above is rather nifty looking. And those Hot Cycles on the right are pretty much clones of the Big Wheel. Check out the CHiPs one that even had a siren!

Page 606

Page 607

Just a few classic Fisher-Price toys, including the familiar Play Family School House and Play Family Farm. Note the little telephone on the bottom of page 606 that they still sell today as a retro toy--even though kids don't know what a rotary dial is anymore.

Page 624

Page 625

I think most kids who were into toy cars were probably either Matchbox kids or Hot Wheels kids. While you could certainly own both, it seems like the one you preferred most probably said something about you. What that was I don't know. I myself was a Matchbox kid. Here's two pages with a bunch of stuff from both companies (as well as some from others like Fast Wheels and Roadmates). I collected Matchbox cars for a few years spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s. While I don't know if I got any of these for Christmas in 1980, here are some of the ones I still have from what was shown on page 624 of the Wish Book:

14 of the vehicles in the "24-piece Collector's Set"

A less-impressive display of 3 vehicles from the "8-piece Country Set"

Page 630

And now we finally see the Star Wars toys! After seeing characters on shirts and pajamas along with a few models here are the classic Kenner toys that most kids who grew up during this time remember so well. I had many of the action figures here (IG-88 was always a favorite of mine for some reason). I also had (and still have) the Darth Vader Collector Case seen here.

Page 631

While I never got the Millennium Falcon toy pictured here, a friend bought me the newer (and much larger) one put out by The Legacy Collection for my 40th birthday a couple years back.

Thirty years later...Better late than never!

Page 632

Here's a few more neat toys. The one I really wanted from this page was the Chutes Away parachute game in the middle. This is the one where you look through the little scope and drop parachutes from the plane into the cups on the turntable below.

I still remember the old commercials for these things and how cool it all seemed to pilot that plane and drop chutes to their target at night. I have a feeling that if I had actually gotten one the novelty would have worn off pretty quickly. Since I never did the memory of what I imagined it to be like lives on.

Page 634

There were a lot of slot car sets for sale in the 1980 Wish Book, many of them with glow-in-the-dark elements. Here's just one of them.

Page 641

How's this for a sign of the times (or two)? In the remote control section we find a page featuring a customized Thunder Van and another Pontiac Firebird (looking very Smokey and the Bandit-ish). How 1980 can you get?

Page 655

And here's the Sears Video Arcade System (better known to most as the Atari 2600)! This was the first major step ahead from Video Pong, and despite how crude and basic it seems compared to today's video games, it was an exciting time when these babies came out. I never had one, but played with them at friends' houses quite a bit. Though I never really felt a burning desire to own an Atari 2600 I do remember a couple years later when the next generation of home video games was introduced I quickly jumped on the bandwagon. The Atari 5200 and Colecovision both seemed light years ahead of the 2600. After doing as much research as I could I decided that Colecovision was the one for me. I lobbied very hard for one and was rewarded with my favorite Christmas present of all time in 1982--a Colecovision for my family! But 1982 was in the future when this Wish Book came out, so that's a story for another time.

Page 656

Here are some of the video games available for the Sears Video Arcade--not to mention a good look at the stunning graphics that were featured in them.

Page 659

Here are some electronic games. While of a similar size to the Game Boys of the following decade and similar units that followed, these ones only featured one game apiece (or a variety of very similar games). Cartridges were available for the Atari 2600, but technology hadn't quite gotten to the point of allowing game platforms like that in a handheld format. Of the four games featured on this page I owned two (Stop Thief and Quiz Wiz) and remember playing with the Merlin Electronic Wizard--though I don't think I ever had one of my own.

Page 660

And here's a few more neat-o handheld electronic games. I never owned any of these, but remember thinking that Hit and Missile looked really cool. I did have an Electronic Concentration handheld game that I probably got around this time (or at least within a year or two). It was pretty similar to the units seen on these last couple of pages. I got mine at a childrens' Christmas party that the Tupperware company put on every year (my Dad worked for Tupperware at the time). Like the Sound FX Machine, I was able to find my old Electronic Concentration game recently. It is also in the photo at the top of this post. Here's a closer look at it:

Back cover

That's about it for the 1980 Sears Wish Book. While the back cover isn't exactly exciting (unless you happen to be into major household appliances of course), it is an appropriate way to close out this little trip back in time by symbolically closing the catalog. Hope you enjoyed it. Depending on your age it might have brought up old memories, or simply made you laugh at what passed for toys a few decades in the past. Despite how long this post has been we've only touched on a little bit of what is found in the 668 pages of the catalog. If you have any interest in checking out more of these, the website Wishbook Web has a bunch of Christmas catalogs from different years and different companies from the 1930s through the 1980s that have been scanned and can be looked through page by page. It was a nostalgic trip down memory lane when I first heard about that site. Also, someone called Wishbook has posted scans of many Sears and other companies' Christmas catalogs on flickr. They even have the 1980 one from Sears, just in case you just didn't get enough of it here. Even though they're available online now online I really wanted to get my very own physical copy of a Sears Wish Book that I could go through for a bit of holiday nostalgia. A search of listings on eBay showed that Christmas catalogs from this period were selling for a pretty steep price. You never know what people are going to want, huh? Eventually I was able to find my 1980 edition very cheap. While it was something I really wanted I don't think I would have payed very much for it--especially since there are ways of checking many of them out online. Who'd have thunk that would be possible back in 1980?

Return of the Monster (Cereals)

2011-12-07T14:30:00.009-05:00

This is a post that really should have been written in the month of October...but it wasn't. Anyway, I'm sure that there are many adults out there that have fond memories of the so-called "Monster Cereals" from back in the 1970s (give or take a decade). I know that I certainly do. We didn't always get the sweet sugary cereals in my house when I was a kid, but when we did it was always a special occasion (for me at least). While I've never been much of a breakfast kind of guy, if you were to offer me some Cap'n Crunch, Fruity Pebbles, Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms (the list could go on for a long time), I'd be hard-pressed to turn it down.

The Monster Cereals were Count Chocula, Franken Berry and Boo Berry. [Franken Berry sometimes seems to be referred to as Frankenberry, but I'll stick with Franken Berry, as that is how it appears on General Mills' website.] These cereals were always a little extra special when they'd appear in the house. I mean, not only were they sweet sugary cereals, but they also featured MONSTERS! What more could a Monster Kid ask for in a breakfast treat as he/she was about to sit down to some Saturday morning cartoons? The three cereals mentioned are the main ones that everyone remembers. Some people seem to have a favorite Monster Cereal, but I've never been able to pick one. They're all yummy. Speaking of "yummy", there were a couple others Monster cereals too (Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy) that came and went while the "big three" were always available. I remember Fruit Brute mainly because the upstairs bathroom in my house had a glow-in-the-dark Fruit Brute light switch sticker on the light switch cover.

Here's the box that the light switch sticker came in back in the 1970s
(Image borrowed from planet-q on flickr)

Here's the sticker that graced our bathroom for many years
(Image borrowed from Zooty the Newt on flickr)

I can't say that I really remember what Fruit Brute tasted like, but I remember the cereal and the character because I'd always see the eponymous Fruit Brute every time I'd have to turn on the light to use the bathroom. On the other hand, I don't really seem to remember Yummy Mummy at all. I'm not an expert on this branch of the cereal world, but have heard that Yummy Mummy replaced Fruit Brute at some point after Fruit Brute was discontinued (possibly after I was of an age to be exposed to it?). Whatever the reason, both of them eventually disappeared altogether. As I hadn't seen any of the three main Monster Cereals on the shelves of grocery stores in quite a few years (though I admittedly wasn't searching for them either) I had assumed that they had also been sent to the great cereal bowl in the sky.

Monster Dad and friends (including Count Chocula) in 1987

Well, it turned out that I was wrong. The Monster Cereals are still around--even if only in a limited release form. Like any good monsters they rise from the grave each October to put fear into the hearts of children everywhere (or at least into the hearts of the mothers who probably fret about the high fructose corn syrup and all the other strange and unnatural ingredients their kids are ingesting from these "Whole Grain" cereals that are "part of a nutritious breakfast")!

It might not be this way everywhere, but in my neck of the woods--the Northeast--the Monster Cereals only appear on shelves in October (obviously to coincide with Halloween). And they can't be found just anywhere. The only place I've been able to spot them close to me is at Target. Last year (2010) I was perusing the aisles of the local Target store picking up fun stuff like diapers, laundry detergent and toilet paper when what to my wondering eyes should appear but three familiar monstrous faces (Count Chocula, Franken Berry and Boo Berry) gracing the fronts of their respective cereal boxes! The monsters had been given a bit of a modern makeover since I'd last seen them, but there was no mistaking who they were. Knowing full well that The Wife would be hugely disappointed in me for bringing fare of such questionable nutritional value into our house I did what any good husband and Monster Dad would do--I bought them and promptly hid them in the basement upon my return home!

The Little Monster was just about to turn five last October, and was really getting into the whole Halloween thing. I may or may not have encouraged this interest, but either way it was a beautiful thing for a Monster Dad to see. I was excited to be able to share the Monster Cereals with her, especially at that time of the year. We both tried each one. I was brought back to a wondrous taste experience from my youth and The Little Monster simply loved them (naturally).

The Little Monster meeting Franken Berry, Count Chocula and Boo Berry for the first time!

I'm not sure how much they've changed the recipes of these cereals since I was a kid, but they all seemed to taste the same to me. They do seem to have changed the look though. From what I recall the cereals used to be made up of little circular pieces with an "x" in the middle of them, and little marshmallows shaped like...little marshmallows. Now the cereal is shaped like little ghosts and the marshmallows come in different shapes and colors. In the case of Franken Berry those marshmallows are shaped like little blue or purple bats and little pink Franken Berry heads.

Here's what the modern Franken Berry looks like

A closer look at the cereal and marshmallows of Franken Berry

...And an even closer look

The cereals were rationed out slowly, as neither of us was really used to eating this caliber of sugary treat in the morning and I didn't want The Little Monster to get addicted or anything. The two of us enjoyed watching fun movies ("Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein", "Young Frankenstein", "Godzilla vs. Mothra"...) and eating Monster Cereals while counting down the days until Halloween and Trick-or-Treating.

Then November arrived. The spooky magic of Halloween gave way to the cold and barren wasteland that is New England in winter. The candy was eaten, the costumes put away...and the Monster Cereals disappeared off the store shelves--once again banished from the world of the living. ...At least until the next year!

I've since learned that the Monster Cereals brand has cashed in on the memories and nostalgia of thirty- and forty-somethings who remember eating them as kids by putting out some new products in addition to the cereals themselves. There are now plush dolls, bobblehead figures, lip balm and other toys and products based the Monsters. They even have Fruit Roll-Ups in Franken Berry and Boo Berry flavors. I haven't tried these, but can just imagine kids begging their parents to buy some when they see them on the shelves of stores.

The Little Monster checking out Monster Cereal plush dolls at the Rock and Shock show in Worcester, MA in October 2011

Fast forward to October 2011. This year I was armed with the knowledge that the Monster Cereals would be available at Target. They were all spotted during a visit I made early in the month (or possibly even at the end of September). I figured I'd wait for a couple weeks to pick up my three boxes. Unfortunately, when I went back later in the month...they were GONE! I don't know if they ran out or if they simply didn't feel like keeping them on the shelves throughout October. Either way I was out of luck, and my new "tradition" of getting a taste of Count Chocula, Franken Berry and Boo Berry was broken after only one year. I'll have to scoop them up right away if I see them next year.

After scouring the food aisles I did manage to find one end cap that was full of Franken Berry! For whatever reason this was the only flavor they had left--and they had a LOT. They were clearance items and the price was marked down. Apparently Target had a surplus of Franken Berry for whatever reason, and wanted to clear them out before October ended. While I was happy and felt blessed to have found at least one of the cereals I was after, I was also disappointed in what Target considers a clearance price on its items. When I hear "clearance" I generally expect to see deep cuts (40 or 50 percent or more off the original price). Target routinely marks its stuff down ten or fifteen percent, slaps a red sticker on it and calls it "Clearance". Fifteen percent off hardly counts as a very good sale, much less the kind of price slashing I associate with the term "clearance". But I digress... Anyway, I did manage to pick up two boxes of Franken Berry to share with The Little Monster--and saved a whopping forty cents off each box. To be fair, the rather smallish boxes only cost $2.66 to begin with, so getting them for $2.26 wasn't bad.

As I said, I'm no expert on the Monster Cereals or anything--just a long-time fan. For more information on them check out the following:

Here's Wikipedia's page on them: General Mills monster-themed breakfast cereals. I just looked at that one and it answers some of the questions I had above. There are Wiki pages for each of the five cereals too.

Here's General Mills' own page on the cereals: Monsters.

The cereals even have their own Facebook page (naturally): Monster Cereals.

And, finally, here's a few old Monster Cereal commercials that can now be easily found on YouTube:

Here's Count Chocula and Franken Berry showing that they get scared too

(This one has a good look at what the cereals and marshmallows used to look like):

The first Boo Berry commercial:

Fruit Brute makes his first appearance:

Here's when they introduced the monster-shaped marshmallows!:

And here's a rare look at Fruity Yummy Mummy:

THE END

...at least until next year!

The Berenstain Bears Meet Bigpaw

2011-11-23T00:51:00.006-05:00

It's nearly Thanksgiving. Compared to all the great movies, shows and cartoons that focus on Christmas, there are relatively few programs devoted to Thanksgiving. My favorite Thanksgiving movie of all-time is easily "Planes Trains and Automobiles" (1987). It's something I try to watch every year around this time. Actually, it's a great movie to watch any time of the year. As far as cartoons and Thanksgiving specials, I never really had a favorite, and there never seemed to be to many to even choose from. I suppose The Peanuts cartoon "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" (1973) is probably at the top (especially because of the ridiculous Thanksgiving dinner Snoopy engineers featuring toast and popcorn!). But that show pales in comparison to the classic Peanuts specials that are featured both before and after Thanksgiving: "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" (1966) and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965). Other than the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and all the football games, the holiday seems to have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to movies and shows.

A few years ago I became aware of the cartoon special "The Berenstain Bears Meet Bigpaw" (1980). Because of my long time interest in Bigfoot I just had to see this one. One of the libraries in our area had the cartoon on VHS and I borrowed it. It seemed strange that I had not seen this when it aired in 1980. I would have been eleven at the time and it seems like it would have been right up my alley. When watching the VHS tape of the show it did seem somewhat familiar. Perhaps I had seen it and had forgotten it. Or perhaps the fact that I watched the tape couple times made it start to seem familiar to me even though it really wasn't. Either way, I liked the show and had a feeling that The Little Monster would enjoy it as well. I wanted to introduce Bigfoot to her at some point, but didn't want to frighten her off or give her nightmares with something too scary. "The Berenstain Bears Meet Bigpaw" turned out to be the perfect way to give her a bit of Bigfoot-related material without terrorizing her. We regularly read Berenstain Bears books at bedtime so she was already familiar with them. We first watched "Bigpaw" together three years ago when she was three years old. It has since become a regular thing that comes out around Thanksgiving--and occasionally at other times during the year. About a year after first watching the show I found an old VHS tape of it at a book sale at our local library for about a quarter or so. It may have been the very same tape we had watched earlier.

My ancient VHS tape of the show

This year I introduced the show to The Tiny Creature (The Little Monster's little sister) for the first time. She seemed to like it too. They both found it just a tiny bit scary the first time they watched it. That's the perfect reaction. While it's hard as an adult to imagine watching something as kid-friendly as this and finding it scary, that's exactly what I love about the innocent imagination of children (and what I miss about myself now that I'm a grown-up). It's what makes watching old bad monster movies that you'd only laugh at as an adult a thrilling and scary experience as a kid.

The Little Monsters watching the show

The story is about how Bear Country has a Thanksgiving legend about a creature that will come to town and destroy everything if the bears "become selfish and greedy, and unkind to the needy, and insufficiently thankful for nature's great bounty". Mama bear realizes that the legend is coming to pass when she sees a big pawprint in a pan while "reading the harvest honeycomb".

The harvest honeycomb's frightening harbinger of doom for Bear Country

And the actual footprint of the legendary Bigpaw!

Of course the whole point of the story is to teach a lesson about being a good and thankful person. Bigpaw makes his appearance and inspires fear and hatred in the bears. It turns out that he's actually nice, and it's a big misunderstanding. This recalls another lesson that I've been pointing out to The Little Monster in a lot of the books that I read to her at bedtime, namely that you can't judge a book by its cover.

Here's the townspeople discovering that Bigpaw is on his way

Bigpaw makes his first appearance in the show

He certainly makes an imposing impression

But Brother and Sister Bear quickly learn the true nature of the monster

Brother and Sister enter the ominous Sinister Bog

Bigpaw makes his debut and sings his very catchy theme song

Brother and Sister Bear are the first to realize the truth about Bigpaw when they encounter him in Sinister Bog, but of course the grown-ups won't listen to them. Everything comes to a head as an army of bears climb the nearby mountain to do battle with Bigpaw. He is up at Echoing Ledge merely relaxing at and preparing to take a nap by his campfire, but the amplified echoes of his yawns and the enlarged image of his shadow as he stretcthes projected by his fire make him seem every bit as fearsome as everyone already believes he is.

Bigpaw relaxing at Echoing Ledge...

...And the terrifying image of his shadow that Papa Bear sees

Bigpaw prepares to topple a stack of boulders onto his attackers, but stops when he notices that Brother and Sister are in the path of the rocks. He saves them and everyone realizes the truth about Bigpaw. They then invite him to join them for Thanksgiving dinner.

I still wonder if I saw this show when it first aired. It certainly became pretty rare in the years since. Now it's one of my (and The Little Monster's) favorite holiday programs. I never read a lot of Berenstain Bears books as a kid, but really like reading them to The Little Monster now. My VHS tape of "The Berenstain Bears Meet Bigpaw" is very old, but I'm pretty sure that it's now available on DVD. One of these days I might just have to get a new copy. If you have kids (or are a kid at heart yourself) it might be worth checking the show out too. Here it is (in four parts) on YouTube:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

One last thing. We just watched "The Berenstain Bears Meet Bigpaw" for the first time this Thanksgiving season yesterday. The Little Monster is now in Kindergarten and the students all visit the school's little library once a week to take out a book. Yesterday (knowing that we were planning on watching the show when she got home from school) she picked out "The Berenstain Bears' Thanksgiving" as her book. It is actually a retelling of "The Berenstain Bears Meet Bigpaw" with a different (more commercial?) title. It even has a lot of the same dialogue that is in the show. I don't know if the book or the show came first, but I was pretty happy to see that The Little Monster had brought it home with her. After watching the show after school I ended up reading the book to her at bedtime.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Resurrecting the Past: Rotary Dial Telephone

2011-11-22T16:49:00.011-05:00

For those who remember the old rotary phones that were used for decades until pushbutton phones became standard, this story might be of interest. For those too young to know about these phones, this might be seen as a bit of a history lesson from the relatively recent past. Hopefully it will prove interesting for both parties in some way.

Recently I picked up an old red rotary dial telephone at a flea market. I've been wanting to get one of these for a while. They're not terribly hard to find, but the prices for them seem to vary in range from very cheap to quite pricey. The one I bought was in very good shape and had a regular standard phone jack. This was important, as I didn't want to have to try to rewire a phone that had one of those old style plugs. The deciding factor was the price though. They wanted ten bucks for it, which seemed fair. When I asked if they could do any better they gave it to me for seven dollars. Sold!

I have a nostalgic feeling for these old phones because I remember having and using them in my parents' house when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. The look, feel and sound of these little time machines brings you right back to those old days. What I was really looking for was one of the wall-mounted models--as that was what I remember using most of the time in my house (ours was yellow). This one (image borrowed from the website Vintage Rotary Phones) is very similar to the one I spent so many hours on back then:

Since I didn't really want to have to drill holes into a wall to mount one of these models, a desk model seemed like it would be a better choice. I wasn't too concerned with the color. I was kind of thinking that a black one would look nice, or maybe some funky 1970s green or orange number (the kind that would look right at home in the Brady Bunch house). But when I saw this red one I knew it was meant to be! It's like having a direct line to the President. ...Or better yet, Batman!

It's kind of surprising to learn that you can still plug one of these babies in and use it like any other phone. I know there's some kind of difference between how new and old telephones use the phone line, but when this one was plugged in I got a dial tone right away. It's a strange feeling to be dialing a phone number with the rotary dial after all these years--especially since you have to physically dial the whole eleven digits for most phone numbers now. Back in the days of rotary phones I remember being able to simply dial the last four or five digits of a phone number for local calls. When I tried to make a call on my old red phone--and after dialing all those digits--the call went through just as it should. The only problem is when you get a recorded menu and you have to punch in a series of numbers to navigate through it to actually reach a human voice (if you're lucky).

I suppose the main reason it seems kind of odd for these phones to work so well is the simple fact that you don't see them much anymore and they seem like relics from the past. Nowadays you can go to any department store and pick up a phone for anywhere from a few dollars to a couple hundred bucks (depending on the quality and features you want). Back when the old rotary phones were being used they actually belonged to the phone company that provided you with your service. When rotary went the way of the dinosaur and these phones were replaced with pushbuton ones, the phone company apparently went into the homes of their customers and removed "their" phones. In an unused room at my parents' house you can still see the mark on the wall where a phone was removed--as well as the holes from the screws that mounted it. Check out this message on the receiver of my red phone which would let you know that the phone you used in your home wasn't really "yours":

BELL SYSTEM PROPERTY
NOT FOR SALE
WESTERN ELECTRIC

While I bought this old telephone mainly for its nostalgic value, it has actually come in handy twice already. Back in August we were hit with the remnants of a hurricane. There wasn't much damage, but we lost power for a couple days. Without electricity our cordless phones (which have to be plugged into an electric outlet) wouldn't work. We also couldn't charge our cell phone. I plugged the old red phone in and was able to communicate with the outside world! At the end of October we got an early snow storm which again knocked out the power for two days. Again, the old red phone came to the rescue!

After the storm

I mentioned that these kinds of phones have a certain look, feel and sound that take you back to an earlier time. The "look" part is obvious and can be seen in the photos already posted here. The "feel" part has a lot to do with the sheer weight and solidness of an old phone. Phones of today are very light, slim and small--almost dainty. When you lift the receiver of one of these older phones it's pretty large and you can feel a substantial weight. Compared to modern telephones and cell phones, these practically feel like dumbbells. It's a reassuring weight to be sure.

Finally, the "sound" part has everything to do with the actual bell mechanism inside the phone that makes it literally ring. It's hard to explain what this sounds like if you have never heard one and have only experienced the electronic "ringing" of a modern phone, or the multitude of ring tones available for cell phones. Instead of even trying to explain the sound I'll post this video I made of my new-old phone so you can hear it for yourself. It starts off with a call to our regular cordless phone to set the stage. Next comes a call from a cell phone to the old rotary phone. Finally, the old phone is used to call the cell phone.

Talk about old-school technology meeting new-school technology!

Pennsylvania-6-5000

867-5309

Separated at Birth?

2011-11-21T02:20:00.005-05:00

Remember those old "Separated at Birth" books that came out back in the 1980s? They were humorous looks at people (generally celebrities or politicians, but occasionally animals) who seemed to resemble each other in photos. They'd put the two photos side by side for comic effect. I think that Jay Leno or David Letterman used to do a similar skit on one of their shows. Anyway, I guess that the idea never really went away. I had one of the books (and probably still do have it, just need to track it down), but kind of lost interest in the subject over time. I haven't done much research (and it wouldn't take much), but I'm sure there are now plenty of websites and other online sources dedicated to this kind of thing.

Here are the two "Separated at Birth?" books from the 1980s:

Which brings me to the point of this blog. I recently stumbled upon something to add to the Separated at Birth list. I haven't had cable for close to ten years. This means that I've missed out on a lot of the big must-see cable-based shows of the last decade ("The Sopranos", "Mad Men", "Weeds"...). Of course this doesn't explain why I've never seen a single episode of the show "24". That show was on Fox, which is, of course, a broadcast network. Well, thanks to the internet, Netflix and DVDs, I've been able to catch up on some of the stuff I've missed over the years (like "Battlestar Galactica", "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Breaking Bad"). The Wife got me a Roku box for my birthday and we've been streaming a lot of stuff on our TV from Netflix through the Roku unit. We've subscribed to Netflix for a long time, but have mostly gotten DVDs from them through the mail. We never really did much "instant viewing" on the computer. Now that we can do it on the TV instead we're getting into it more.

Thanks to the convenience and instant availability of Netflix streaming, we finally started watching "24" recently. The show started a decade ago in 2001, and there are apparently close to 200 episodes. That number feels just a wee bit daunting to us at the moment. We've only seen about half of the first season so far and have a long way to go. So what, you might ask, does all have to do with "Separated at Birth"? Please let me explain...

When you go onto the Netflix channel on Roku and search for "24" a certain image from the show shows up on the screen as an icon of sorts. I see this image every time we start and finish watching an episode of the show. It is an action shot of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) jumping onto a taxi while firing his pistol at (presumably) some bad guys. It's an image that must have been part of the publicity for the show and was probably used on the cover for the DVD set of one of the seasons (or something like that). Well, every time I see this image I can't help but think of... Julia Stiles! Bet you didn't see that coming, huh? Actually, it makes me think of the movie that she was in called "Save the Last Dance". I never saw the movie (and don't plan to), but I do remember the poster for it for some reason.

So who exactly am I suggesting were separated at birth? It might seem like I'm trying to say it was the stars of these two productions, but I don't think that Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Stiles look anything alike. Here the two stars are as an example:

No, I'm not suggesting that they look alike specifically, but I can't shake the feeling that the image from "24" I see on Netflix through Roku and the poster for "Save the Last Dance" were separated at birth. Here are those two images that I can't seem to separate in my mind when I see either one. You be the judge...

Or, more specifically...

What do you think?

* For another example of the Separated at Birth phenomenon please check out Separated at Birth 2: Tim Tebow and Bigfoot.

2011 October Horror Challenge Recap

2011-11-18T00:55:00.004-05:00

So the 2011 October Horror Challenge is now history. I've decided to write up a separate post detailing all the movies/shows that were watched throughout the month. This is a convenient way (for me at least) to be able to see everything that was watched without having to browse through seven different posts.

The final score of the Challenge was: Monster Dad - 44 and October - 31

Here's what those forty-four items consisted of:

1. Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy (1955)

2. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

3. End of the World (1977)

4. The Fly (1958)

5. The Crazies (2010)

6. Eegah (1962)

7. Contagion (2011)

8. Bigfoot Lives (2007)

9. Teenagers Battle The Thing (1958)

10. The Curse of Bigfoot (1978)

11. Mad Monster Party (1967)

12. Monster Quest: Bigfoot (2007)*

13. The Snow Creature (1954)

14. Trollhunter (2010)

15. Let The Right One In (2008)

16. Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968)

17. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

18. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

19. Night of the Living Dead (1990)

20. The Thing (1982)

21. Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

22. The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye (2010)*

23. Return of The Fly (1959)

24. They Live (1988)

25. The Walking Dead: Guts (2010)*

26. Attack of the 50 ft. Woman (1958)

27. Let Me In (2010)

28. Them! (1954)

29. Curse of The Fly (1965)

30. The Others (2002)

31. Creature from Black Lake (1976)

32. I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

33. Young Frankenstein (1974)

34. The Dreadful Hallowgreen Special (2010)*

35. Curse of the Demon (1957)

36. Spooks Run Wild (1941)

37. Happy Hell Night (1992)

38. The Thing (2011)

39. Sh! The Octopus (1937)

40. The Werewolf and The Yeti (1975)

41. The Fly (1986)

42. Terror in the Midnight Sun (1959)

43. The War of the Worlds (1953)

44. Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943)*

* Denotes the five items that could be considered ineligible for the Challenge. That includes three TV shows (the Bigfoot episode of "Monster Quest", the first two episodes of "The Walking Dead"), "The Dreadful Hallowgreen Special" and "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" (which was watched on November 1st).

I think that this challenge featured a nice variety of movies--from comedies with horror undertones like "Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy", "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" and "Young Frankenstein" to true examples of the horror genre like "The Crazies", "Night of the Living Dead" and the two versions of "The Thing" that I watched. The titles also cover a very wide time range too--from 1937's "Sh! The Octopus" right up through 2011's "Contagion" and "The Thing". There is at least one representative of each decade from the 1930s to the 2010s.

The unofficial theme of Bigfoot-related stuff included seven titles: "Bigfoot Lives", "Teenagers Battle The Thing", "Curse of Bigfoot", the "Bigfoot" episode of "Monster Quest", "The Snow Creature", "Creature from Black Lake" and "The Werewolf and The Yeti".

Should you be interested in reading about the Challenge in more detail, feel free to read all seven chapters in the story:

THE 2011 OCTOBER HORROR CHALLENGE

Part Seven: Day 25-31

2011 October Horror Challenge (Part 7: Day 25-31)

2011-11-06T23:16:00.013-05:00

Get caught up on the Challenge here if you missed any of the previous installments:

It is the Middle of November and I'm just now getting around to writing the final piece on the October Horror Challenge. The Challenge was going along fine until October 29th, when we got a big early-season snow storm. We lost power for two days and had a lot of limbs that came down around our property, but were very lucky to have not sustained any major damage to our house or cars. Unfortunately, two days of movie watching were missed because of Mother Nature's little pre-Halloween practical joke. I also missed an event (and a movie) that I've been looking forward to for a long time. Without further delay I now present the final chapter of the 2011 October Horror Challenge...

OCTOBER 25

Item No. 36: SPOOKS RUN WILD

It took me five days, but I finally watched a Bela Lugosi movie to celebrate his birthday on October 20. I saw "Spooks Run Wild" (1941) today. While it's more of a comedy than a true horror movie, it does have Lugosi and a lot of elements of the "old dark house" genre of movies from that era. It was good for a few laughs, but overall I wasn't too impressed with the film. The most interesting (and oddest) moment was when members of The East Side Kids pulled the old prank of having someone get down on their hands and knees behind a victim while someone else pushes the victim over the first person. In this case the "victims" were Bela Lugosi himself and his diminutive cohort. I know that Bela did a lot of stuff after "Dracula"--much of which was less than stellar--but I'd have to think that he might have considered this moment to be a career lowlight.

Later in the day I watched "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) with my Little Monsters. Since I already watched it earlier in the month with The Little Monster I didn't count this viewing toward the Challenge total. It was still a special moment though. First, I was psyched that The Little Monster (big sister) herself suggested watching it when she got home from school. Second, it was the very first time that The Tiny Creature (little sister) experienced the movie. In fact, it was one of the first "Monster Dad"-type movies she's seen with me at all--a very good way to start. And third, it's just a great movie!

My Little Monsters watching "A&C Meet Frankenstein"

OCTOBER 26

Item No. 37: HAPPY HELL NIGHT

I've had "Happy Hell Night" (1992) sitting in my Netflix queue for quite a while. I didn't know much about it. In fact, I had forgotten why I even added it to the queue. Well, it was simply because the movie had Darren McGavin ("Kolchak: The Night Stalker", "A Christmas Story") in it. It turns out that maybe I should have left it sitting in the queue...or deleted it from the queue all-together. It wasn't a very good movie at all. I feel pretty secure in saying that it was the worst thing I watched in the entire Challenge. Darren McGavin's part was small and not very good either. I kind of feel bad for him to have been in this wreck and wonder why he agreed to take the part at all.

Item No. 38: THE THING

Now, one might look at the Challenge and say "Hey, you already watched 'The Thing'. How can you be counting it again?" Well, on October 26th I finally got around to going to the movies and seeing the brand new version of "The Thing" (2011). It's only the second new release I saw as part of the Challenge (along with "Contagion"), and was a definite highlight of the month. A good antidote for the unfortunate experience of "Happy Hell Night" earlier in the day. This version of "The Thing" is actually a prequel rather than a remake. But it has the look and feel (as well as the title) of John Carpenter's 1982 version of "The Thing". It could have been disappointing to find that this supposed prequel was so similar to the 1982 version, but that wasn't the case. The 1982 version was a GREAT movie, so it's not a bad thing that this one emulates it so closely. I wasn't even too bothered by the CGI effects (usually something that I don't like). They really managed to capture the spirit of Carpenter's movie. And at the end there is a little epilogue that ties it in to the 1982 movie perfectly. You could easily watch this one and the 1982 version back-to-back. I'll probably try to do that once this one comes out on DVD.

One final thing that made this movie a highlight of the Challenge was that I saw it with one of my best friends. This was special because I watched the 1982 version for the first time back in 1985 with this same friend. We had just gotten our first VCR and I was experiencing all kinds of R-rated movies that I'd rent from our local video store. To top it all off, my friend's son also joined us for this late-night, mid-week showing of "The Thing". He is only a few years younger than we were when we first watched the 1982 movie, so it felt a bit like passing the torch to the next generation.

OCTOBER 27

Item No. 39: SH! THE OCTOPUS

This movie was a bit of an unexpected addition to the Challenge. I heard from a friend that the Warner Brothers Shop website was making "Sh! The Octopus" (1937) available for free streaming for a limited time for a few days before Halloween. They usually sell the movie as part of the Warner Archive series. I had never even heard of the movie, but am not one to pass up something that's free! It didn't do a lot for me, but I'm always glad to see something a bit different to broaden my horizons a bit. Like "Spooks Run Wild", "Sh! The Octopus" utilizes the popular "old dark house" setting. But in this case the "old dark house" is actually a lighthouse. Also, like "Spooks Run Wild", this one was more of a comedy than a horror movie.

Item No. 40: THE WEREWOLF AND THE YETI

Continuing the trend of watching Bigfoot-related films for this challenge ("Creature from Black Lake", "The Snow Creature", "The Curse of Bigfoot", "Bigfoot Lives"...) I watched "The Werewolf and The Yeti" (1975). This film (aka "Night of the Howling Beast") is one from a long series of werewolf films starring Paul Naschy. I picked this one up on DVD-R from eBay around five or six years ago (mainly because of the yeti/Bigfoot connection), but have never watched all of it until now. It's actually my first Paul Naschy movie. I've been meaning to check some of them out--especially since he passed away a couple years ago. The plan was to watch this one and Naschy's "Fury of the Werewolf" (1972) for the Challenge too, but ran out of time. It was pretty good schlocky fun, but I kind of wish that there had been more of the yeti in the movie. The werewolf and the yeti look pretty similar. After the yeti (at least I think it's the yeti, though it could have been the werewolf) attacks some people before the opening credits we don't see the creature again until the end of the film.

OCTOBER 28

Item No. 41: THE FLY

Yes, I've already watched "The Fly" this month. But that was the 1958 original. After seeing the whole 1958-65 trilogy of "The Fly", "Return of The Fly" and "Curse of The Fly", I decided it was time to see David Cronenburg's remake of "The Fly" (1986) again. I saw this one when it first came out, and most recently saw it on DVD a year or two ago. Even though it hadn't been all that long since I'd seen it I just wanted to watch it again after seeing the originals.

Item No. 42: TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN

Another film I've owned for a while on DVD but haven't gotten around to watching was "Terror in the Midnight Sun" (1959). I've been wanting to see this one since seeing a trailer for it on Something Weird Video's sampler DVD many years ago. This Swedish monster movie features a giant hairy alien monster (think giant Bigfoot-type creature), which unfortunately only shows up toward the end of the movie. It was a little slow in places, but still a fun bad movie. The Swedish-ness of it reminded me of the Danish-ness of the classic monster flick "Reptilicus" (1961). The Little Monster watched a little bit of this one toward the end. Even though it has a giant monster, she didn't find it particularly scary. "Terror in the Midnight Sun" also marked the second Swedish movie of the Challenge (after "Let The Right One In").

OCTOBER 29

Saturday, October 29th was the date of the big freak Nor'easter snowstorm that wreaked havoc with the Challenge. We've seen snow in New England earlier than this, but not usually so heavy. In our town we got about 8-9 inches of wet, heavy snow. The problem was that most of the leaves were still on all the trees--meaning there were a lot of snapped limbs and toppled trees causing lots of property damage and widespread power outages. We lost power on Saturday afternoon and didn't get it back until Monday, the 31st. This meant two full days of no power to watch DVDs or stream movies on the Roku Box.

Here's our house after the Oct. 29=30 snow storm

OCTOBER 30

Sunday, October 30th was supposed to be one of the highlights of the month for me. The New Hampshire-based Horror Host show Saturday Fright Special was putting on their sixth Spooktacular show in Keene, NH (see poster for the event above). I'd been to the last two shows and was looking forward to this one. The feature movie was "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" (1943). Since The Little Monster was familiar with the classic Universal monsters Frankenstein and The Wolf Man (not to mention Dracula) from watching "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) I figured she'd enjoy seeing this one too. The show went on as planned, but because of the effects of the storm we were not able to attend. What was going to be one of the highlights of the month became one of the biggest disappointments.

Here's the promotional ad for Spooktacular VI

OCTOBER 31

Halloween, and the last day of October, was another disappointment. We still didn't have power, and there were still a lot of snow and downed trees all over the place. Things were so bad that many towns were postponing the Halloween Trick or Treating. Our town put it off until Friday, November 5th. This was the first time I could remember that Halloween was celebrated on a day other than October 31st. The only good thing about the situation was that it actually extended the holiday a lot further than normal. Usually November first brings an abrupt end to what had been a monthlong build-up toward Halloween and everything shifts to looking ahead to Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Before we got power back in the mid-afternoon I was able to attend National Amusements' Silver Screen Classics show once again. They had been showing Alfred Hitchcock movies through October as part of the series. Unfortunately, the movies weren't ones I could add to the Challenge. They were suspenseful and thrilling, but simply not what I could consider "horror". Today's movie was "The Lady Vanishes" (1938). A good film that I had never seen before, but once again not something I could add to the list.

Item No. 43: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

We did eventually get power back and I was able to watch one more movie before the month ended. George Pal's "The War of the Worlds" (1953) seemed an appropriate way to finish out October. Even though the movie doesn't take place on Halloween, it always reminds me of the holiday because of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds". It's an all-time favorite of mine too, so it's always something good to see.

NOVEMBER 1

Item No. 44: FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN

October was over, but I felt it was okay to extend the Challenge for one more day (and one more movie) since I lost two full days when the storm caused so many problems (not the least of which was the loss of electricity). Since I was so disappointed to have missed Saturday Fright Special's Spooktacular on the 30th, it seemed like watching "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" (1943) would be a very appropriate way to finish off the Challenge. The Little Monster didn't have school (cancelled for the second day because of the storm) so she was able to watch the movie with me. It is an okay movie, but a little slow in places for a five-year-old. Frankenstein's Monster shows up about halfway through the movie, but the climatic meeting between the monster and the Wolf Man doesn't happen until the very end--and it seems just a bit quick and anti-climatic after waiting so long for it. The Little Monster did a good job of paying attention during all the non-monster build-up. Along with the unofficial theme of Bigfoot-related movies, the Challenge also featured a few werewolves too. The Wolf Man showed up in both "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" and "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man", and Paul Naschy played a werewolf in "The Werewolf and The Yeti". As mentioned above, I was also going to watch "Fury of the Werewolf", but just ran out of time.

FINAL SCORE

Monster Dad: 44

October: 31

Well, that's the end of the 2011 October Horror Challenge. I consider it to be another successful Challenge. The numbers weren't as high as last year's Challenge, but I watched far fewer TV show episodes and other non-movie programming. Even eliminating stuff like the two "The Walking Dead" episodes I watched, "The Dreadful Hallowgreen Special" and the Bigfoot episode of "Monster Quest, that sill leaves 40 movies. And if you don't count "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" because it was watched on November first, that still leaves the total at a respectable 39. Not too bad. As I said last year, this is my Challenge with my rules. As far as I'm concerned, the final score is indeed 44-31. If I decide to take up the Challenge again next year, it will probably have a new name that better reflects the kind of stuff I want to watch. Until then, keep watching the skies!

From "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man"

2011 October Horror Challenge (Part 6: Day 20-24)

2011-10-26T00:35:00.009-04:00

There's only one week left of October! Only one more week until Halloween. And, only one week left of the October Horror Challenge. Click the links below to get caught up with what has already transpired.

The 2011 October Horror Challenge:

Part 1: Day 1

Part 2: Day 2-6

Part 3: Day 7-12

Part 4: Day 13

Part 5: Day 14-19

I've seen some cool stuff this month which hasn't quite qualified for the Challenge. This year's standards are just a wee bit tighter than last year's inagural edition of the Challenge. While I have counted "The Walking Dead", I have generally been trying to not count television show episodes this time. For instance, we just recently started receiving the channel MeTV. Over this past weekend they had a bunch great programming that I simply couldn't count. On Friday they had the "To Serve Man" episode of "The Twilight Zone" (1959-64). Last year I probably would have counted that classic episode, but not this time around. Saturday night I caught some of Svengoolie's presentation of "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" on MeTV. Of course that one has already been counted. It's okay to have repeats from last year's list (not too many though), but it just wouldn't be right to count repeats from earlier in the month. I've also watched various Halloween-themed videos and DVDs with The Little Monster that won't count. The one that might have counted last year is the all-time classic "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" (1966). We're also checking out a few of The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror" Halloween episodes too. Finally, I've been able to make it to National Amusements' Silver Screen shows the past two weeks. While they're featuring early Alfred Hitchcock films throughout October--and they're all thrillers of one sort or another--I just can't justify adding the ones I've seen: "The Man Who Knew too Much" (1934) and "The 39 Steps" (1935). They were both good films that I've never seen before, but they're simply not "horror" enough to count.

OCTOBER 20

Item No. 27: LET ME IN

"Let Me In" (2010) is the American remake of the 2008 Swedish vampire film "Let the Right One In"--which I watched earlier in the Challenge. I figured I should check both of these out, and it seemed like a good idea to start with the original. The American version is a perfectly fine film. I think that if I had only seen this version I would have enjoyed it quite a bit more. The original was a very well made film and didn't really need to be remade so quickly (other than to cash in on a good movie and let Americans watch it without having to read subtitles). The new one is fine, but pretty much just tells the same story in the same way. They made a few minor changes which were okay, but it was still basically the same movie with different people and in a different language. I did like the fact that it's set in the early 1980s (like the original). It didn't really seem necessary to set it in the semi-recent past (and probably made production just a bit tougher with having to make sure all the clothes, vehicles and scenery were time-appropriate). The main benefit of this setting was the 80s soundtrack! I might have to pick that one up at some point.

Item No. 28: THEM!

After watching a very recent horror movie like "Let Me In" I wanted to check out a classic one. I chose one of the best of the 1950s desert-based giant bug movies, "Them!" (1954). It had been a few years since I've seen "Them!" and it's a great movie, so it was nice to spend some time with an old favorite. I still have never been able to find a young Leonard Nimoy in his bit part as an Air Force Sergeant in the film, but that's just something to try to figure out the next time I see it.

OCTOBER 21

Item No. 29: CURSE OF THE FLY

I was happy to have managed to see the entire "The Fly" trilogy during this year's challenge. The last installment, "Curse of the Fly" (1965) was watched on the 21st. It's interesting that (unlike today's sequels) this three-movie series didn't feel the need to put numbers or Roman numerals after the title. It's also interesting that each sequel features characters from a generation after the previous film--yet all were filmed within seven years and they all seem to be set in what was the "present" at the time. The son of the original scientist who turned into a fly was a boy in the first film, an adult in the second and an old man in the third. The third one is also the first to not feature either Vincent Price or a fly. It was still a pretty good movie, but probably a good time to call it quits on the series.

Item No. 30: THE OTHERS

On the night of the 21st The Wife and I watched "The Others" (2002). This was the first film that we were able to watch together all the way through for the Challenge (after The Wife conked out halfway through "They Live" last week). I didn't think I'd seen "The Others" before this, but for some reason it seemed awfully familiar in places. Perhaps I had seen it? Strange that I could so completely forget a movie--especially one that wasn't bad. All in all it was a pretty good, spooky Nicole Kidman film with a genuinely surprising ending.

OCTOBER 22

Item No. 31: CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE

Not to be confused with the recently watched "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954), "Creature from Black Lake" (1976) is a much less well known monster movie. This one is about Bigfoot (keeping with what has become a bit of a trend in this year's Challenge). In fact, "Creature from Black Lake" is one of my all-time favorite Bigfoot movies. October 20th was the anniversary of the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film. I wanted to watch something to commemorate that, but it took a couple days to get around to it. October 20th was also Bela Lugosi's birthday. I still haven't watched anything to commemorate that--but plan to before the end of the month.

Item No. 32: I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF

"I Was a Teenage Werewolf" (1957) is a pretty rare film to find. Because of various legal and financial reasons it has never been legitimately released on DVD. But it was one of the classic films shown on Creature Double Feature when I was a kid. I was able to find it at the Rock and Shock show in Worcester a couple years back and had managed to put off watching it until now. The plan was to try to get together with some old friends to watch it, but that plan never came together. I figured that since I have the movie in my collection (and who knows when or if it will ever get a true DVD release) that I should just go ahead and watch it. It's a fun American International Pictures cheapie featuring a young Michael Landon as the titular teenager/werewolf. I hadn't seen this movie since I was a kid, and there was only one scene that I remembered from then--but I remembered it pretty vividly. It was the scene where Michael Landon is watching a gymnast practicing in the gym when a bell goes off near his ear--causing him to turn into a werewolf and attack the gymnast.

OCTOBER 23

Item No. 33: YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN

I introduced The Little Monster to Mel Brooks' classic "Young Frankenstein" (1974) last year. We watched it together again on the 23rd. This was another repeat from last year's October Challenge, but it's a great one. I was surprised by some of the things The Little Monster forgot, as well as some of the details she remembered. After watching it last October it became one of her favorite movies for a while and she watched it a number of times over the next couple of weeks. "Young Frankenstein" and "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" will probably be Halloween month traditions for us until she grows up too much to be my Little Monster anymore.

OCTOBER 24

Item No. 34: THE DREADFUL HALLOWGREEN SPECIAL

Monday October 24th marked one week until Halloween. I bought "The Dreadful Hallowgreen Special" (2010) quite a few months ago, but have managed to not watch it until now. How appropriate to finally see it one week before the big day.

Penny Dreadful is the host of the New Bedford, MA-based Horror Host show Shilling Shockers. I've gotten to know her pretty well over the past few years--we were both among the thousands of kids permanently affected by Creature Double Feature back in the 1970s and 80s. The Little Monster has also met Penny (and her husband/co-star Garou the Wolfman) on a few occasions. See my blog Penny Dreadful's Shilling Shockers for more on that topic. Anyway, last year, Penny Dreadful hooked up with Nashville, TN Horror Host Dr. Gangrene (who I am not familiar with at all) to make this Halloween special. It was shown on public access TV last year and then released on DVD by Alpha Video. I bought it through the website oldies.com. Here's a link to the DVD at the site.

The special itself is pretty good and funny. Penny (and Garou) and Dr. Gangrene have to join forces to try to save Halloween from a mysterious shift that has caused the holiday to become all cuddly and lovable instead of dark and scary. In an interesting twist, the two hosts come to the realization that they both unwittingly had a hand in causing the problem before they ultimately figure out how to fix it. As an added bonus the special is itself hosted by yet another Horror Host, Count Gore De Vol. There are also a number of entertaining special features on the disc.

Item No. 35: CURSE OF THE DEMON

The Wife agreed to try to watch another movie for the Challenge with me. I wanted to show her a longtime favorite, "Curse of the Demon" (1957). It's the American release of the British movie "Night of the Demon" (1957) (which is not to be confused with the grisly Bigfoot movie "Night of the Demon" (1980)--which shares the name, but not much else). Some friends and I first discovered "Curse of the Demon" at Blockbuster back in the 1990s. None of us had ever heard of it and it looked like a fun B-movie to watch on a Saturday night. Well, it turned out to be a very good quality movie all around, and also genuinely creepy in parts. It has been a favorite of mine ever since. "Curse of the Demon" was released a few years back on a double feature DVD that also includes the original British version. While The Wife was a real trooper to agree to watch it, she did fall asleep some twenty minutes before it ended (just at the most exciting part of the film).

With one week to go I have already gone past the 31 movie goal for the month. Now it's time to see how this all ends and find out if I can surpass the 46 movies and shows watched in last year's Challenge. It will be tough to reach that total, but at least this year the Challenge has featured far fewer television show episodes than were counted last year. Stick around to see how it all ends...

CURRENT SCORE

Monster Dad: 35

October: 24

From the end of "Curse of the Fly"

To Be Continued...

2011 October Horror Challenge (Part 5: Day 14-19)

2011-10-20T12:40:00.014-04:00

Suddenly the month of October is more than halfway over. Fall is in the air. The spirit of Halloween is everywhere (especially at the stores). My Little Monsters are looking forward to Halloween of course. And, the October Horror Challenge goes on...

Here's what has transpired so far on this thirty-one day journey:

Part 1: Day 1

Part 2: Day 2-6

Part 3: Day 7-12

Part 4: Day 13

OCTOBER 14

Item No. 20: THE THING (1982)

Like I mentioned earlier, even though it would have been appropriate, I was glad that October 13 didn't fall on a Friday this year. Instead, it fell on a Thursday. On Friday October 14 the new version of "The Thing" was released. This is the third time that this story has been put on film, after "The Thing from Another World" (1951) and John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982). It's amazing to think that this new one comes nearly thirty years after the last one. That's almost the same amount of time between the 1951 and 1982 versions! Actually, this new one is supposed to be a prequel of sorts rather than a remake, but it shares the same name as the 1982 version and has pretty much the same look as far as the title and poster go.

I'm interested in going to see the new "The Thing" at the theater, but as much as I love movies I have to say that one of the greatest real-life horrors for me is movie crowds. I love going to the movies but generally always hate the crowds there. It's a bit of a catch-22 for me. Anyway, I watched the 1982 version of "The Thing" on videotape with one of my best friends back in 1985 when my family got our first VCR. It was quite an experience. That same friend and I are planning on going to see the new "The Thing" once it's been around for a while. More on that later. In the meantime, the opening day of the 2011 version of "The Thing" seemed like the perfect time to watch my DVD of Carpenter's 1982 version again. It really is a great movie, and I hope that the good things I have heard about the new one are true.

Friday the 14th was also the opening day of the annual Rock and Shock show in Worcester, MA. I went to the show on Friday night and also was planning on taking The Little Monster on Saturday before we went to the Worcester Sharks (AHL) home opener that night. Along with other things we had going on I didn't think that there would be too much movie watching getting done over the weekend. But there was some...

OCTOBER 15

Item No. 21: CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

The month (and the Challenge) started of on October 1 with a double feature of "Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy" and "The Incredible Shrinking Man" on THIS TV. Well, on Saturday the 15th THIS had another nice retro double feature. I was able to catch "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954) at 1:00, but missed out on "Island of Lost Souls" (1932) at 3:00. Like both the films that started the month off, I own "Creature from the Black Lagoon" on DVD (and I also saw it on the big screen in 3D last October too), but it just seems like an event of sorts to see it playing on TV.

Item No. 22: THE WALKING DEAD Episode 1: DAYS GONE BYE

I was also able to finally watch most of the pilot of "The Walking Dead", called "Days Gone Bye" (2010) on the 14th. I knew there was a lot of buzz about this show when it started last year, but since we don't have cable I never got a chance to check it out. Now that I've seen the pilot on Netflix streaming I think I'm going to have to watch the rest of the show. It's very good. In a way it feels very much like a continuation of the zombie scenario in George Romero's Living Dead trilogy: "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) and "Day of the Dead" (1985). Part of the reason for watching it now was that one of the guests at the Rock and Shock show on Friday night was Addy Miller from the show's pilot. She has the distinction of being the very first zombie seen in the show--and was also the first one killed. There were supposed to be a number of other cast members of "The Walking Dead" at Rock and Shock, but apparently AMC decided that they should cancel and go to a Comic Con in New York City instead. After watching most of the pilot I took The Little Monster to the Rock and Shock show Saturday afternoon, where we not only met Addy Miller, but also met Sherman Howard, who played Bub the zombie in "Day of the Dead", and hung out with Penny Dreadful and Garou the wolfman from the show "Penny Dreadful's Shilling Shockers"!

OCTOBER 17

Item No. 23: RETURN OF THE FLY

After one day with nothing to add to the October Horror Challenge I got back into it on the 17th and watched "Return of the Fly" (1959). After watching "The Fly" (1958) earlier in the month I wanted to see its two sequels too. I had never seen "Return of the Fly" before. It was pretty good. While the first movie opens with the fly monster's death and then goes back to tell the whole story, the sequel doesn't introduce the monster until about twenty minutes before the end. Of course we have the knowledge of what happened in the first film (and what we just know is going to happen in this one). Plus, it also has Vincent Price again--which is always a good thing!

OCTOBER 18

Item No. 24: THEY LIVE

Another guest at the weekend's Rock and Shock show was "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. I didn't get a chance to meet him (all the big name guests were charging thirty bucks for an autograph and I simply couldn't afford to do that this time). But I did see Mr. Piper at his table. He seemed to be a bit frail and was wearing a neck brace, which just seemed wrong. I just had to watch John Carpenter's "They Live" (1988)--which starred Roddy Piper. It had been a few years since I'd seen the film, but it's always a fun watch. It includes one of the great fight scenes of film (between Roddy Piper and Keith David) and and one of the best lines of all time (uttered by Roddy): "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. ...And I'm all out of bubblegum."

The Wife actually watched about half of the movie with me before going to bed. It was the first thing from the Challenge that we've watched together--seeing as how we chickened out on watching the "Bigfoot" episode of "Monster Quest" when we were staying at the cabin in the woods last week. See Part 3 for more on that incident.

Item No. 25: THE WALKING DEAD Episode 2: GUTS

After watching "They Live" I finished up the pilot of "The Walking Dead" (which I started back on the 15th). Then I also watched the second epidode, "Guts" (2010). While I'm trying to limit this year's challenge to movies as much as possible, "The Walking Dead" certainly falls into the realm of appropriate subject matter (zombies, horror) despite being a TV show. It certainly is cinematic in its scope and quality level.

OCTOBER 19

Item No. 26: ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN

Keeping with the theme of watching all kinds of stuff from all different eras, I watched the original "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" (1958) on the 19th. The movie was remade for cable in 1993 (starring Daryl Hannah), but I still haven't seen that version. The original is pretty low on the quality scale, but falls into the "so bad it's good" category. Also, this is one of the few films from the era that was really a horror movie for women. Allison Hayes plays the title character, who is a woman betrayed by her cheating husband before the circumstances that make her grow to fifty feet in size. Luckily, her increased height enables her to exact revenge on both her husband and the floozy he's shacking up with. There have been other films about people growing to extraordinary size (or shrinking to a tiny size, like "The Incredible Shrinking Man"), but this is the only one I know of that seems to have a bit of a feminist side to it. A nice touch, and something to distinguish it from other movies. My favorite giant-human movie is "The Amazing Colossal Man" (1957), but this was certainly a fun one.

We're getting closer and closer to the end of October and Halloween. The Challenge is going well so far, but it's certainly not over. Stay tuned for more updates...

CURRENT SCORE

Monster Dad - 26

October - 19

2011 October Horror Challenge (Part 4: Day 13)

2011-10-14T14:22:00.004-04:00

2011 October Horror Challenge

Part 1: Day 1

Part 2: Day 2-6

Part 3: Day 7-12

OCTOBER 13

Thursday, October 13 was a very good day in the October Horror Challenge. It's highlighted by something I was hoping I'd be able to make happen, but wasn't sure of it. The day actually started with the end of "Let The Right One In" (2008). I counted it as being watched on the 12th, but actually had to finish it up on the morning of the 12th. Eve so, I was still able to add four movies to the list. As an aside, I was glad that the 13th of October fell on a Thursday and not a Friday. While a Friday the 13th would be perfect in the month of Halloween, I do tend to get a little nervous whenever a Friday the 13th rolls around. See My Own Personal Superstitions for more on that side of Monster Dad. And now, on with the Challenge...

Item No. 16: MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND

For some reason, I'm not able to access Netflix through out Roku box at the moment. This is causing a bit of concern--as I was counting on using this service for a lot of movies through the rest of the month. But even without Netflix streaming I still have access to plenty of movies in my DVD collection (as well as some stuff on VHS, stuff available from libraries and free movie channels on the Roku). I decided to tap into my DVD collection for this item. A couple years back I saw my first Al Adamson movie, "Horror of the Blood Monsters" (1970). It was an absolutely horrid movie that I barely managed to make it all the way through. Now I like bad movies, but this one was especially bad (and not in a good way). It made no sense that I could discern. Well, believe it or not, after watching it I ended up...watching it again! It had a commentary track by producer Samuel M. Sherman that I thought might shed some light on the mess I just witnesses. Turns out it was one of the most interesting and entertaining commentary tracks I've ever listened to. I learned that the movie was actually made up of two or three separate movies spliced together in an ineffective attempt to make one complete movie. It even had footage of a couple of the actors from the film shot quite a few years later, and they were obviously quite a few years older in that footage--making it even more senseless!

Through the commentary track I learned quite a bit about the movie from Mr. Sherman, and I found myself wanting to watch more of his movies (or at least those that have DVDs with his commentary tracks on them!). A few months back I ordered two more of them (and bought "Horror of the Blood Creatures" too--believe it or not). I got "Mad Doctor of Blood Island" (1968) and "Beast of Blood" (1971). Turns out that these movies are parts two and three of the so-called "Blood Island Trilogy". Even though I haven't seen the first part, "Brides of Blood" I had a feeling that I wouldn't be missing out on much by watching these two out of order. On the 13th of October I watched "Mad Doctor of Blood Island" and was rather disappointed by it. No, not because it was so bad, but because it didn't measure up to the total badness that was "Horror of the Blood Monsters". Yes, it was still a pretty terrible movie, but it actually seemed to make some sort of sense on some level (unlike "Horror of the Blood Monsters"). I still have to watch it again with the Sam Sherman commentary. Hopefully that will give me a deeper understanding of "Mad Doctor of Blood Island".

Item No. 17: THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Talk about perfect timing. The Little Monster made a request on the 12th to see "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993). She saw it for the first time last year and went through a little phase where she watched it pretty much every day for a while. I was glad that she enjoyed something that I had enjoyed so much myself, and was able to share it with her. She hadn't seen the film in many months, and I was pretty proud of her for suggesting it just in time for the Challenge, without any prodding from her dear old Monster Dad. I let her watch it on the 13th. I watched a good part of it with her (and the Littlest Monster too), but have to confess that the "Dad" part of Monster Dad took over for a bit--I missed some of the movie while preparing dinner for The Little Monsters. When I apologized for not watching all of it with her, The Little Monster replied "That's okay Daddy, you've seen it before." Fair enough. I still think I saw enough if it to count it toward the Challenge.

Item No. 18: ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN

This was the highlight of the day (and possible the month so far). The Little Monster saw "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) for the first time during last year's October Horror Challenge. I was very glad to see that she enjoyed it. As a kid I grew up watching Creature Double Feature on Saturday afternoons on WLVI Channel 56 out of Boston. But after watching those two monster movies from 1:00 to 4:00 PM I got to indulge in another tradition--Channel 27 out of Worcester would play an Abbott and Costello movie at 6:00 every Saturday during the same period. If you were lucky enough to have a really cool 4:00 movie on channel 56 (or WSBK TV38 for that matter) you could conceivably have an entire day of fun TV watching, starting with Saturday morning cartoons, continuing with Creature Double Feature a good 4:00 movie, and finishing it all off with an Abbott and Costello movie at 6:00.

Of course "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" was always a favorite of mine. It was always special when one of their Classic Universal Monsters tie-in movies was on, and "A&C Meet Frankenstein" was the best of all. As it turns out, this film is a perfect way to introduce kids to the classic monsters from early Universal Horror movies (namely Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and The Wolf Man). True, the original movies that featured those monsters mostly came out in the 1930s and 40s and might seem pretty tame compared to the monsters and special effects in the movies of today. But for a kid with a good imagination and ability to pay attention to an old film, they can still be pretty scary to this day. Starting in the 1940s Universal decided to mine its monsters for a series of films featuring Abbott and Costello. While it might seem like a bit of a disrespectful way to treat those monsters--by putting them in comedy movies for laughs rather than scares--the fact that they were being made relatively close to the time of the originals, and the fact that they were being made by Universal actually make them pretty good--especially for fans of Abbott and Costello (like myself).

This movie was also the perfect way to introduce all those classic movie monsters to The Little Monster without being traumatizing. It's so great to be able to experience a favorite movie of mine like this through her eyes. Regardless of the fact that it's obviously a comedy, and the fact that it's hard to see it as anything but that as an adult, I love that The Little Monster can actually get a bit scared during a few scenes (like when A&C are delivering the crates that contain Dracula and Frankenstein's monster). It's a great way to get back in touch with how I would have felt watching the movie as a little, imaginative kid.

So what made watching "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" such a special event this year (especially in light of the fact that she's already seen it before)? Well, besides all the great stuff mentioned above, this year we were able to see the movie outside our house. Our local library had a screening of the movie on the 13th. The Little Monster and I went to see it there. Yes, it was only a DVD projection, but going somewhere to see it on a semi-large screen was still a pretty cool thing! The biggest disappointment of the night was that only four other people bothered to come out for the movie (and they all left well before it ended). It did end almost an hour after The Little Monster's normal bedtime, but sometimes you have to make exceptions, right?

The Little Monster preparing to watch "A&C Meet Frankenstein" at our library

There were a couple additional bonuses for me too. First, I was surprised (but amused) to hear that The Monster still calls Dracula "Drac-Lea". Also, when we were leaving the library she told me that "Seeing Count Drac-Lea reminded me of that cereal." She was referring to the fact that I introduced her to the General Mills Monster Cereals last October (Count Chocula, Frankenberry and Boo-Berry). Add in that she found a few scenes scary enough that she had to sit close to me and even hide her face behind a napkin made the night all the more special!

Item No. 19: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Believe it or not, that's not all for October 13. The Littlest Monster had a cold and was having a tough time sleeping. Since I was up late trying to get her down anyway, I decided to check out Tom Savini's 1990 remake of "Night of the Living Dead". While a big fan of the original, and a fan of Mr. Savini, I had never gotten around to seeing this version. At first it seemed so much like the original I kind of didn't see the point of making it. Then it took off in some interesting slightly different directions. It was a pretty good movie, and you just know that the make-up effects would be special, with Tom Savini behind them!

CURRENT SCORE

Monster Dad - 19

October - 13

To be continued...