Freddy, Jason, Michael & Chucky Together on One Awesome Retro-tastic Poster

That’s a pretty neat print! I was a guest on the Beau­coup Pop pod­cast this past week­end and we got to talk­ing about mon­ster mash-ups and how we were all sur­prised that there hasn’t been a mod­ern take on the Mon­ster Squad where a bunch of slasher movie arche­types get together and have to be brought down by a group of kids.

Oh, and the stuff I miss most about VHS was all the lit­tle phys­i­cal things. Top load­ing play­ers, play­ing with the record-ability tab on blank VHS tapes (or putting mask­ing tape over a bro­ken tab so that I could record over the tape again), tapes that were slightly incom­pat­i­ble with our player/TV set up and the image would roll, mak­ing sure all the tapes in my col­lec­tion were stored prop­erly with the heavy por­tion of the tape spool towards the bot­tom so the tape wouldn’t stretch, get­ting aes­thet­i­cally pissed off at the hand­ful of clamshell VHS cases that didn’t fit in with my paper-sleeve tapes, etc…

Oh man, I hated the wrin­kles in the plas­tic! Yeah, I remem­ber when the Goonies finally hit VHS in the late 90s and it was in one of those goofy Disney-esque clamshells. Oh, and even worse, buy­ing pre­vi­ously viewed out of print VHS from video stores that had cases that were either seri­ously weath­ered from being near a win­dow (but it’s the only copy of The Mon­ster Squad to be had) or were sold in one of those blocky, black or brown hard plas­tic cases they’d rent you the tape in. Oh so ghetto…

to me, VHS tapes are dying the ugli­est, worst-aging/decaying death of any sort of media. the card­board cases lit­er­ally rot away, the plas­tic ones shrivel, the tapes them­selves break down and they have this weird smell, too. open­ing a clamshell unleashes this weird filmy, mildewy stench. just hav­ing a VHS col­lec­tion seems like an omi­nous black stain in your base­ment corner.

I had a ham­ster like that once. His name was Noo­dles. Fat lit­tle bas­tard lived for over 4 years. I buried him out in my parent’s gar­den to great cer­e­mony, only to have the neighbor’s dog dig him up and scat­ter his remains. That shit is trau­ma­tiz­ing when you’re 10.

with my pet ham­sters. I learned about how par­ents some­times eat their young, or in my case, their entire new­born liter. every. last. one. It’s prob­a­bly my fault. I was touch­ing them and nam­ing them the night before. The par­ents (cheerfully-named Mickey and Min­nie) prob­a­bly thought they were defiled.