First Impressions: Johnny Depp does NOT want you to like him.

This week The League is all about first impres­sions. Though I’m cer­tain this won’t be a pop­u­lar choice, my mind imme­di­ately went to a movie that has one of the best open­ing mono­logues in cin­e­matic history:

My favorite Johnny Depp movie isn’t Edward Scis­sorhands or Pirates of the Car­ribean: Jesus Christ Please Stop Mak­ing These Movies .

It’s this lesser-known gem from 2004 called The Lib­er­tine , in which Depp gives one of the best per­for­mances of his career. He also says “The C-Word” quite a lot–something like 50 times by my count.

In 17th cen­tury Lon­don, Depp plays John Wilmot, sec­ond Earl of Rochester dur­ing the prime–and even­tual fall–of his soci­etal reign under King Charles II (John Malkovich). John is a gifted writer, but a mis­an­thropic snob whose fond­ness for alco­hol and insa­tiable lust become his undoing.

His slow decline in both health and social sta­tus is bril­liantly por­trayed by Depp, cul­mi­nat­ing in a spec­tac­u­larly uncom­fort­able speech, in which he looks like this:

It’s quite a trans­for­ma­tion, to say the least.

I can’t help but like him anyway.

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to share a moment in pop cul­ture his­tory that had us say­ing, “Now that’s how you make an intro­duc­tion!”  Here’s what made an impres­sion on my fel­low Leaguers:

• Cav­al­cade of Awe­some was impressed by L.L. Cool J in Krush Groove
• Pop Rewind was more impressed by sequels than orig­i­nal movies
• Diary of a Dor­kette , to nobody’s sur­prise, was impressed by She-Ra!
• Good­will Hunt­ing 4 Geeks was impressed by Thun­der­cats. HOOOOOOOOOOOO!
• Infi­nite Hol­ly­wood was impressed by the Super Mario Bros. 3 machine at a store called Zayre
• Jath­niel was impressed by Superman’s first flight
• Nerd Rage Against the Machine was impressed by Dr. Who
• Stunt Zom­bie also goes the Super­man route, was impressed by Doomsday
• The Bat­cave Toyroom’s world was also rocked by Superman
• Retro Toy Safari was impressed by the orig­i­nal Star Wars
• The Mos Espa Col­lec­tion was impressed by Heath Ledger as The Joker. Kinda pissed I didn’t think of it!
• Geek Chunks was impressed by awe­some car­toon intros he’ll never forget.
• 3B’s Toy Hive was impressed by Batman!

There is Neither Magic Nor Wonder in Zoobilee Zoo. Discuss.

The 80s had no short­age of weird and uncom­fort­able children’s shows fea­tur­ing cos­tumed per­form­ers, but this week’s League topic was to write about some­thing I hated as a kid, so I feel it’s my duty to bring the atroc­i­ties of Zoobilee Zoo to your attention.

For those who don’t remem­ber it, Zoobilee Zoo was a ter­ri­fy­ing children’s show star­ring a bunch of overly-enthusiastic peo­ple dressed up like ani­mals known as “Zoobles” who sang, danced, and intro­duced young chil­dren every­where to what they would later learn was furry porn. Also Ben Vereen.

The show ran from 1986 — 87, which means I was about five or six when I watched it. But even as a child squarely within the show’s tar­get demo­graphic, I can remem­ber feel­ing embar­rassed when­ever it came on. Like some­how I could sense the per­form­ers were all rejects from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, or that the show was endorsed by The Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers even with­out know­ing it was mar­keted as such (thanks ran­dom press release I found online!). Things that teach­ers like are lame, and I, clearly a kid who was too cool for school, rec­og­nized this. Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers Neigh­bor­hood this show was not.

Let’s intro­duce the Zoobles to you!

Here’s the main cast of char­ac­ters, includ­ing each Zooble’s job, because appar­ently Zoobilee Zoo is so broke all the ani­mals have to work. And I thought the Bal­ti­more Zoo was ghetto.

Sandy Grinn as “Bill Der Beaver“
The Zooble with the most prac­ti­cal job and least clever name, Bill Der Beaver is a BUILDER and inven­tor. Get it?

Louise Val­lance as “Whaz­zat Kan­ga­roo”
The bimbo of Zoobily Zoo. She’s not a very tal­ented musi­cian, but gets by on her (good?) looks. Guys dig chicks with fuzzy pink tails.

For­rest Gard­ner as “Van Go Lion“
He’s a painter just like Van Gogh, but still has both his ears. He’s also the rea­son I once mis­spelled “Van Gogh” in a school report. I thought this show was sup­posed to teach us shit?

Karen Hart­man as “Talk­a­too Cock­a­too“
Eas­ily the most annoy­ing res­i­dent of Zoobilee Zoo, she’s a vicious gos­sip who “spreads the news” as well as bird flu.

Gary Schwartz as “Bravo Fox”
He’s a jug­gler and magi­cian. Unof­fi­cially, he’s also kind of an asshole.

Michael B. Moy­na­han as “Look­out Bear”
I guess he’s sup­posed to be a scout of some sort who looks out for dan­ger. I told you Zoobilee Zoo was ghetto.

Ben Vareen as “Mayor Ben“
In Zoobilee Zoo, one of the perks of being the Mayor (besides dress­ing like a pimp!) is you don’t have to iden­tify your­self with a spe­cific ani­mal. To this day I still don’t know what the hell Mayor Ben is sup­posed to be, besides token black guy.

The Zoobles are sup­posed to resem­ble ani­mals, but who­ever designed the cos­tumes opted not to go full-furry. So instead we have an awk­ward mix of cos­tumes, the­atri­cal make-up and pros­thetic noses I find extremely unap­peal­ing, almost repel­lent. There’s just some­thing about peo­ple in bright cos­tumes and make-up with big noses I can’t get past. I don’t know if there’s an exact pho­bia for what­ever this is, but maybe if you’re one of those peo­ple who are afraid of clowns, you can under­stand. I guess this explains why I never wanted to get my face painted as a kid.

Oddly, I’m not both­ered by peo­ple wear­ing cos­tumes that fully cover their faces, or anthro­po­mor­phic ani­mals in pup­pet form. Mup­pets and I are cool. Zoobles and I? Not cool.

My main prob­lem with Zoobilee Zoo (besides being creepy as hell) was that it tried too hard. Every­one on this show acts like they just snorted ten lines of coke. I refuse to believe any­one is that enthu­si­as­tic about wear­ing shitty ani­mal cos­tumes while spoon feed­ing dumb kids all the typ­i­cal social val­ues and moral lessons you’d expect from a show like this, includ­ing the oblig­a­tory “peo­ple in wheel­chairs are just like all the rest of us!” episode that seemed to be a pop­u­lar theme in 80s shows. Even Saved by the Bell was guilty of that one.

By far the worst thing about Zoobilee Zoo, how­ever, is the theme song which I’m con­vinced was con­jured up in a Satanic rit­ual. I don’t rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing unless you want it stuck in your head. All day.

Zoobilee Zoo, Zoobilee Zoo
Magic and won­der are wait­ing for you
It’s as close as a dream
And as bright as the bright­est blue
Wel­come to Zoobilee Zoo

Really? As close as a dream? As bright as the bright­est blue? They weren’t able to come up with any bet­ter sim­i­les? All these ani­mals with jobs and not one of them is a writer.

P.S. Did the show ever say what ani­mal Mayor Ben is sup­posed to be? Does any­one know? I’d look up some more episodes on YouTube to try and find out, but frankly that’s too much effort for a show I’m sup­posed to hate.

Magic and won­der aren’t wait­ing for you.

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to reveal some­thing in pop cul­ture­dom we hated as kids . Here’s what my homies in the League had to say:

• Toyriffic hates G.I. Joe, is un-American.
• Mon­sterfink is secretly a vil­lain and hates the good guys!
• Nerd Rage Against the Machine hates Foot­loose, which means we’ll prob­a­bly never be friends.
• Jathniel’s Space for Rent hates the lack of death in children’s shows, pos­si­bly needs therapy.
• Thir­ty­ish Year Old Boy is hangin’ tough, hates New Kids on the Block.
• My Vin­tage Toy Box hates dolls that crap them­selves. Understandable.
• Hench­girl hates Hermione Granger. The only thing I hate is that she didn’t end up with Harry. (Yeah I shipped HHr what of it?)
• Pop Rewind is sym­pa­thetic to the plight of cereal mascots.
• For­tune and Glory Days , like me, hates Mighty Mor­phin Power Rangers. Sol­i­dar­ity, man.

I’m Never Gonna Say I’m Sorry for Loving Ace of Base

This week The League wants to know what our guilty plea­sures are. Well friends (that is, if you still want to be friends after this) the time has come for me to reveal my secret shame: my deep and uncon­di­tional love for Ace of Base.  I’ve been sit­ting on this gem for a long time, car­ry­ing the torch alone, wait­ing for just the right moment to pub­licly embar­rass myself.

But today you could say I SAW THE SIGN. (Sorry. Had to.)

No, you haven’t time trav­eled back to 1994. You’re look­ing at a very recent pic­ture of Ace of Base CDs and cass­in­gles that I still own. Present tense, baby. Though not quite as strong as it used to be, this photo is evi­dence of my undy­ing love for a band that, by and large, most peo­ple have for­got­ten, as well as evi­dence that I have ter­ri­ble taste in music. It is also evi­dence that “pop reg­gae” was once a thing.

Thou­sands of years from now when gen­er­a­tions far into the future dig up the fes­ter­ing remains of our once great pop cul­ture empire, they will unearth a tat­tered copy of  The Sign, stare deep into the mys­te­ri­ous pink cen­ter of its vagina-like album art, and pon­der its meaning.

The major­ity of you read­ing this prob­a­bly don’t real­ize that Ace of Base didn’t stop mak­ing albums after The Sign– which, if you remem­ber, was damn near inescapable with its string of world­wide hit sin­gles (includ­ing the infec­tious title song) bom­bard­ing the radio and cer­ti­fied nine-time plat­inum status–but they did.

In fact, the band’s sec­ond album  The Bridge was released in 1995 and was, in many respects, a far supe­rior album. Says me. You might remem­ber its ear­worm of a hit sin­gle, “Beau­ti­ful Life,” but prob­a­bly not much else unless you were A) a ded­i­cated fan; B) it was one of your “Just Add Two More CDs to Get Free Ship­ping!” selec­tions from Colum­bia House; or C) your name is William Bruce West . I recently learned on Twit­ter that Will is just as much of an Ace of Base fan as I am, call­ing into ques­tion all my previously-held beliefs about black guys. He even knows about “Ravine.” Every rec­i­p­ro­cated tweet was like a secret hand­shake wel­com­ing me into some loser-y club for which I thought I was the only mem­ber. How­ever, on the issue of Linn hav­ing a bet­ter voice than Jenny, well, Will and I will just have to agree to disagree.

This is how much I love Ace of Base: even though I own all of their albums on CD and dig­i­tally, I refuse to throw away this cas­sette tape.

After  The Sign , The Swedish pop act went on to record sev­eral more albums with com­pletely dif­fer­ent names out­side the United States where they were ignored–1997’s  Cruel Sum­mer  which cov­ered the famous Bana­narama song, and the long-awaited  Da Capo  in 2003–before ulti­mately break­ing up in 2009. A year later the band re-formed with two dif­fer­ent girls (and yes I own that album too).  But like Becky’s replace­ment on  Roseanne , the new girls are pret­tier but it’s just not the same!

As one of the first pop groups I can remem­ber being really into (some annoyed fam­ily mem­bers might say to the point of obses­sion, given they had to endure my end­less loop­ing of “Don’t Turn Around”), Ace of Base gave me my first harsh les­son about America’s rela­tion­ship with pop groups. Namely, how we devour them to the bone, then quickly shit ‘em out and flush. Of course, it didn’t help that Ace of Base’s upbeat, infec­tious pop infused with love and pos­i­tiv­ity ran counter to the flan­nel shirt depres­sion of grunge and alterna-rock that was so pop­u­lar dur­ing their brief period of star­dom, when they per­fected awe­some poses like this one:

Not to men­tion their endear­ingly cheesy lyrics, made all the more so given their less than stel­lar com­mand of the Eng­lish lan­guage. Sweet, naive, thirteen-year-old me was  cer­tain that a big Ace of Base come­back was going to hap­pen some­day, after every­one real­ized their genius. Only they never did. By the time I got to high school I learned to keep my AOB love on the down low, out­side of a few trusted friends who were privy to all my embar­rass­ing inter­ests, like Sailor Moon. Now that I think about it, this could have eas­ily been a post about Sailor Moon.

But hey! At least it’s not Justin Bieber, AMIRITE? In fact you, you can just copy and paste that last sen­tence  and use it for every­thing you’re ashamed of.

Before I go, this post would not be com­plete with­out one of Ace of Base’s clas­sic, uncom­fort­able music videos that make no sense. Play me out, you angelic songstresses of Swedish pop!

Expe­ri­ence some of these other pearls.

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to share one of our guilty plea­sures. I don’t know what can pos­si­bly be guiltier than Ace of Base, but let’s find out. Together!

• Under­Scoop­Fire! is the Corey Haim to my Corey Feldman.
• Calvin’s Cana­dian Cave of Cool likes high school girls…of the Mon­ster variety.
• Pop Rewind’s list will give you Goose­bumps. From Fran Drescher.

I’ll update with more guilty plea­sures as other Lea­guers com­plete the assignment.

Thank you for hold­ing. Your League post is very impor­tant to me. It will be listed here in the order in which it was received. Beep!

21 Red-iculous, Random Things About Me

The color of the day is red, like Honey Boo Boo’s neck. Or cats dressed like lob­sters . Or the ex-Power Ranger who does gay porn now ‚ and other awful red things you would have prob­a­bly never thought of on your own. You’re welcome.

This week The League threw down a red photo chal­lenge . I accepted. I even came up with the word “red-iculous” just for you guys.

I went all through my house to find as many red things as I could, exclud­ing dec­o­ra­tions because that shit’s bor­ing and nobody wants to see pho­tos of that. So that left me with a bunch of ran­dom red crap I had no idea how to tie together in a blog post, until I got the bril­liant (or totally lame–I haven’t decided which yet) idea to do this:

21 Red-iculous, Ran­dom Things
(You Might Not Know) About Me

Kiss a lit­tle longer with Big Red.

Shit. Why didn’t I think of that com­mer­cial before I started this post? Oh well.

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was a photo chal­lenge: I’m see­ing red! Here’s how my fel­low Lea­guers inter­preted the topic:

• For­tune & Glory Days shows off a great col­lec­tion of red action figures.
• Flash­lights Are Some­thing to Eat lis­tens to Redd Foxx. On vinyl!
• Neme­sis Com­plex asks Red Skull, “What If?”
• That Fig­ures plays with a bunch of rad, red, retro toys. (Say that 5 times fast!)
• The Thir­ty­ish Year Old Boy found a bunch of ran­dom red things around the house too.
• Hench­girl argues for the awe­some­ness of Dex-Starr, because cats.
• The Com­bat Work­shop treats us to din­ner and a movie (both involv­ing red things).
• Neato Coolville ‘s photo of red things is totally rad. (View­mas­ter! Bub­blegum! YESSSSSS.)
• Toyriffic also loves Dex-Starr!
• Over at Branded in the 80s , things are get­ting bloody.

Fantasy Shopping Spree at Hake’s Americana & Collectibles

I want money, lots and lots of money, so I can buy all this cool stuff at Hake’s!

This week’s assign­ment from The League was to pre­tend money is no object and go on a fan­tasy shop­ping spree at Hake’s Amer­i­cana & Col­lectibles . Part of Baltimore’s famous Geppi’s Enter­tain­ment Museum, Hake’s is a huge auc­tion site filled with tons of nos­tal­gic col­lectibles and pop cul­ture mem­o­ra­bilia, rang­ing in price from sur­pris­ingly rea­son­able to somebody’s going to have to donate a kid­ney. Brows­ing through the hun­dreds of pages of toys, nov­el­ties, comics, pins, posters, auto­graphs and every­thing in between, I was over­whelmed at how much stuff they have. I spent a good hour or so just click­ing through all the links and typ­ing in ran­dom searches to see what I could find. Nat­u­rally I checked out their Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles stuff first ‚ how­ever, I did resist the urge to fill up a blog post with just TMNT col­lectibles. You should be proud of me.

Any­way, cue the cheesy mon­tage music. It’s time to go shopping!

So, we’re sup­posed to pre­tend like we’re buy­ing stuff to dec­o­rate our man­sions, but if I were filthy rich I’d totally live on a huge yacht like Goldie Hawn in  Over­board  com­plete with use­less, empty, hair-polishing, toe-polishing  rich bitch sun tan­ning days . Instead of trav­el­ing the world col­lect­ing fine works of art, I’d fill up my yacht with vin­tage video games, valu­able comics, toys, movie mem­o­ra­bilia, rare Ninja Tur­tles stuff, and other price­less (to me) trea­sures from all over. Basi­cally it’d be just like  Over­board  except I’d own much cooler stuff and my crew would play ‘80s music around the clock. And also I wouldn’t be a total bitch.

Here’s what I bought!

I know it’s a lot to take in. Believe me, I had a hard time nar­row­ing it down to just this stuff. Here’s a break­down of every­thing I pur­chased with my pre­tend monies, and why:

1. ‘Blues Broth­ers’ Button

The Blues Broth­ers is one of the best movies of all time. If you dis­agree, you are wrong. The Blues Broth­ers were a few years before my time, but I grew up watch­ing the iconic film with my Dad and catch­ing up on those early years of Sat­ur­day Night Live (some­where along the way I also devel­oped a mini-crush on John Belushi which is pretty weird being that he’s a dead guy, and all). This vin­tage Blues Broth­ers but­ton pre­dates the 1980 film and depicts Dan Ack­royd and John Belushi in char­ac­ter as Elwood and Jake.

Price: $12.00

2. Buster Brown Plas­tic Ring

The mall in my town where I’ve lived for over 30 years used to have a Buster Brown children’s shoe store back in the early 80s, and every time my mom took me there to buy a new pair of shoes, it meant I would get one of these cheap plas­tic Buster Brown rings . For me, that was the whole point of going because I  hated shoes and still do. I think I must have been trau­ma­tized by a shoe sales­man at an early age or some­thing. I know it’s atyp­i­cal because I’m a woman and we’re sup­posed to like shoes, but if I could get away with going bare­foot or wear­ing flip-flops year-round, I would.

Price: $15.00

3. ‘Star Wars’ Ken Steacy Signed Lithograph

This Star Wars print is so bad ass! Not only do I love the copi­ous amount of hot pink, but the per­spec­tive makes Darth Vader look like a giant. Either that or some­body shrunk the Death Star. This Star Wars lith­o­graph is from a lim­ited run of just 50 prints and is signed by artist Ken Steacy.

Price: $150.00

4. Pair of 6″ Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles Buttons

You knew there was going to be  some Ninja Tur­tles stuff here, right? These over­size 6″ but­tons are the kind that have a pop-out card­board stand on the back to prop them up. I already have the match­ing Donatello, Leonardo and Michelan­gelo ver­sions; I just need Raphael and the group shot with the logo, which are sold together in this TMNT but­ton lot .

Price: $35.00

5. David Bowie ‘Seri­ous Moon­light’ Tour Pin

This super 80s-tastic David Bowie pin (I seem to have a thing for pins) is from his 1983 Seri­ous Moon­light tour. I was only two years old in 1983, but I love me some David Bowie–especially 80s Bowie (blame Labyrinth !)–and I love this abstract style of art. Thank God for YouTube which is like a time machine where I can watch the whole con­cert . Lets dance!

Price: $15.00

6. Jim Henson’s Mup­pet Watches

I love all things Jim Hen­son and Mup­pets, so this Ker­mit watch with a Rain­bow Con­nec­tion theme caught my eye. It’s part of a larger store dis­play of Mup­pet watches and clocks from 1982. I really like the sim­plic­ity of the art­work and the green color of the band which matches Kermit.

Price: $250.00

7. Nin­tendo Power — ‘Final Fan­tasy’ Crys­tal Orb Prize

Here’s one of the few video game-related things I could find at Hake’s, but it’s a good one! Back in 1990, Nin­tendo Power ran Final Fantasy-themed Trea­sure Con­test and sec­ond prize was one of fifty cus­tom dec­o­ra­tive Final Fan­tasy crys­tal orbs with the game’s name and emblem etched into the glass. As a nice bonus, it even comes with a copy of the Nin­tendo Power issue it was announced in, which is awe­some too because the cover is ded­i­cated to Maniac Man­sion, one of my favorite NES games.

Price: $250.00

8. ‘Star Wars: Return of the Jedi’ Roller Skates

I had no idea Star Wars roller skates existed, but now that I do, I must pos­sess them. I guess I really shouldn’t be sur­prised, since there is Star Wars every­thing . Another thing I’d own if I were rich is my own pri­vate roller rink mod­eled after a late-80s Skate Land. You’d all be invited to come hang out any­time you want, of course. And if skat­ing in wide cir­cles to The Cars is not your thing, don’t worry–there’ll also be a bitchin’ arcade and pizza parlor.

Price: $100.00

9. Mechan­i­cal Mighty Robot with Spark

I don’t really know any­thing about this mechan­i­cal windup robot toy, except that he seems like a lot of fun and looks totally rad. The descrip­tion on the web­site tells me he’s from Japan and was made in the 1960s. Sup­pos­edly when you wind him up he walks for­ward and you can see sparks shoot­ing off inside his chest win­dow. See what I mean? Totally rad.

Price: $50.00

10. Bat­man Out­fit with Button

Who doesn’t want to be Bat­man for a day? With this cape, mask, and offi­cial “Char­ter Mem­ber Bat­man & Robin Soci­ety” badge, you could be. I just like the silli­ness of it all, and how the pack­ag­ing says “TV Cape” instead of Bat­man. I don’t know what that’s all about, but evi­dently this Bat­man out­fit only costed 98 cents back in 1966. Being Bat­man for less than a dol­lar sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Price: $75.00

11. X-Men Comic Panel Buttons

You might not know this about me, but for a time in the early 90s I was even more obsessed with X-MEN than I was Ninja Tur­tles. I have since gone back to Tur­tles almost exclu­sively but I still keep up with X-MEN to a loose degree, and still hold on to sev­eral long boxes full of comics that doc­u­ment that period of my life. These X-MEN comic panel but­tons are from 1986–1987 and fea­ture awe­some art­work, includ­ing my favorite 80s-era red and brown Wolver­ine style.

Price: $35.00

12. ‘Top Gun’ Show­time Button

More but­tons! I could prob­a­bly eas­ily fill up a whole wall of but­tons, or at the very least, a whole jean jacket. This one is a Top Gun promo but­ton  from 1987 pro­mot­ing the Show­time net­work. I don’t really care about that part, I just like it because it’s Top Gun.

Price: $15.00

13. Miss Piggy Cam­paign Button

Did you know Miss Piggy ran for pres­i­dent back in 1980? This Miss Piggy for Pres­i­dent  but­ton was dis­trib­uted as part of her cam­paign, along with an appear­ance in Life mag­a­zine. Per­son­ally, I would not have voted for Miss Piggy and her fem­i­nist agenda, but it’s fun to imag­ine what the coun­try would be like today if she had won. #Beaker4President, amirite?

Price: $25.00

14. Walt Disney’s Game Parade Board Game

This vin­tage 1940’s Dis­ney Game Parade caught my eye because of the box art and inter­est­ing design. Sup­pos­edly this thing is 15 board games in one, using dif­fer­ent boards and play­ing pieces. But the real rea­son I like it so much is because Toby Tor­toise is rep­re­sented on the cover. You just don’t see that guy around much. It’s a shame he never became more pop­u­lar after his Silly Sym­phony days.

Price: $125.00

15. Toby Tor­toise Tooth­brush Holder

Speak­ing of Toby Tor­toise, check out this keen Toby Tor­toise tooth­brush holder from the 30s, which was back when they said things like “keen.” It makes sense that Toby would store your tooth­brush in his shell, you know, because he’s a tur­tle. Just like how it also makes sense that he’s wear­ing box­ing gloves, because he’s a boxer.  In a way, Toby Tor­toise is kind of a pre­cur­sor to the Ninja Tur­tles. He’s def­i­nitely cool enough to war­rant more car­toon appear­ances than the few lousy ones he got. I’m root­ing for ya, lit­tle buddy.

Price: $200.00

16. ‘Tales from the Crypt’ Pin­ball Adver­tis­ing Button

Though I’m too young to have grown up with the orig­i­nal comics, one of my favorite hor­ror anthol­ogy shows was HBO’s Tales from the Crypt . My mom used to let me and my sis­ter stay up late and watch it with her over a shared bowl of pop­corn. This Tales from the Crypt but­ton is asso­ci­ated with the pin­ball machine that was pro­duced in 1993. Sadly, Hake’s doesn’t have the whole pin­ball machine or I’d buy that, because why not, I’m all rich and stuff now? The Crypt Keeper is def­i­nitely some­one I’d hang out with on Fri­day nights. At the very least he deserves credit for my love of ter­ri­ble puns.

Price: $60.00

17. ‘Reform School Girls’ Large Pro­mo­tional Button

This is a large promo but­ton from the 1986 extreme low bud­get B-movie Reform School Girls. Don’t be sur­prised if we–and by “we” I mean “I”–end up cov­er­ing this one over at Cult Film Club .

Price: $28.00

18. “The Swingers” Beatles-Like Fig­urines on Card

I had no idea The Shitty Bea­t­les existed out­side of Wayne’s World. This set of “The Swingers” plas­tic fig­urines is clearly a knock-off of The Bea­t­les. The fact that they’re made in Hong Kong is a dead give­away. I think knock-off prod­ucts are hilar­i­ous, espe­cially when they have such sexy names.

Price: $25.00

19. Rea­gan Satir­i­cal 1980s Post­card Lot

Not much to say about these satir­i­cal Rea­gan post­cards , except that I find them hilar­i­ous because I’m imma­ture. Ronald Rea­gan + Rambo = RONBO. Ronald Rea­gan + Ronald McDon­ald= Ronald McRea­gan. DO YOU GET IT, GUYS? I just want them for kitsch points, and also because the lot includes a card where Rea­gan has a giant penis on his head .

Price: $35.00

20. Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles Power Rings Set

Okay, I had to sneak one more TMNT item in here. These are a set of eight Ninja Tur­tles “Power Rings” that came from Nabisco Shred­dies (hurr hurr!) cereal in Canada. I like that the Tur­tles are all mak­ing dif­fer­ent faces, which is rare for pieces like this; usu­ally they just use the same sculpt and change the mask color. I’m also a lit­tle upset there’s no Bebop, but these are just tri­fles. In no way does that mean I want the whole set any less than I do, which is badly.

Price: $35.00

21. ‘E.T.’ Jew­elry Neck­lace Lot

I don’t wear a lot of jew­elry, if at all. I hardly even own any “nice” jew­elry. When I do wear jew­elry, I like it cheap and crappy like these gold­tone E.T. neck­laces , or even the plas­tic stuff from vend­ing machines. It’s not that I don’t appre­ci­ate nice jew­elry, it’s just highly imprac­ti­cal for me and I’ve lost more than one nice rock. I’d wear the shit out of these E.T. neck­laces, though, which come in  four dif­fer­ent designs, includ­ing my favorite, Trans­ves­tite E.T.

Price: $20.00

22. Disney’s ‘Robin Hood’ Lunch Box

Here’s another fun ShezCrafti fact: my Dad’s name is Robin Hood. No joke. As a result, I’ve always been kind of drawn to Robin Hood-related stuff since my fam­ily has always sort of unof­fi­cially col­lected it. This Robin Hood lunch box is a lit­tle beat up, but I love Disney’s ver­sion of the Robin Hood leg­end and I like the artwork.

Price: $60.00

23. ‘The Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show’ Sou­venir But­ton Trio

Lastly, I couldn’t resist this set of three Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show sou­venir  but­tons . Again with the but­tons. Not only do I love the movie, but it’s the ulti­mate cult film.

Price: $24.00

So, how much did all this awe­some­ness cost?

$1,639.oo. Yup, I’m going to have to donate a kidney.

What would you buy from Hake’s if money were no object?

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to go on a fan­tasy shop­ping spree at Hake’s Amer­i­cana & Col­lectibles . I pur­posely did not look at what my fel­low Lea­guers posted before putting together my own list, so I can’t wait to take a peek at all the crazy things they bought. Or maybe it’s just me who went crazy?

I’ll update this sec­tion with more links & info as every­one fin­ishes the assign­ment and I actu­ally get a chance to read them.

• Progress 13
• The Lair of the Dork Horde
• Branded in the 80s
• The Robot’s Paja­mas
• Hench­girl
• For­tune & Glory Days
• The Blog­ger from Planet X
• Achieve­ments in Gam­ing
• Nerd Lunch
• The Com­bat Work­shop
• AEIOU and Some­times Why

Oh, A Cowboy Needs a Horse (Needs a Horse! Needs a Horse!)

The first ran­dom thing that popped into my head (well, besides Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive”) after see­ing today’s assign­ment from The League , was an ani­mated Dis­ney short from 1956 called A Cow­boy Needs a Horse . I sur­prised myself by think­ing of it, because this car­toon is one of those things from the obscure, nearly-forgotten minu­tia of my child­hood that I’m con­stantly redis­cov­er­ing in weird ways (quite like Que­stron and the Clue VCR Mys­tery Game ) ever since I started blogging.

A Cow­boy Needs a Horse (which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube right here ) is about a lit­tle boy who goes to sleep one night and dreams of being a cow­boy. As he slum­bers, an incred­i­bly repet­i­tive song of the same name accom­pa­nies his trans­for­ma­tion from an ordi­nary boy into a cow­boy com­plete with a horse, a rope, a song, a hat, a pair of fancy boots, and a set of shiny spurs, which are all “drawn” into the scene. It’s all very  Lit­tle Nemo-ish  and the ani­ma­tion is clas­sic Disney.

Here’s the song. Please don’t hate me after it inevitably gets stuck in your head!

Since I was born in 1981, I’m obvi­ously too young to have remem­bered this car­toon when it was new. My intro­duc­tion to it was in the form of a Dis­ney Sing Along Songs VHS tape that I got for Christ­mas one year–this one, to be precise:

If you’re around my same age, you might remem­ber these things. They were a series of home video tapes that fea­tured a com­pi­la­tion of songs you could sing along to from both ani­mated and live-action Dis­ney movies and shows. Most mem­o­rably, kids were encour­aged to “Fol­low the bounc­ing ball!” which looked like the Mickey sym­bol and helped you keep time with the lyrics. (And I swear to this day, the insanely catchy intro song  from these tapes still gets ran­domly stuck in my head sometimes.)

A cowboy’s gotta keep ridin’, ridin’ along…

This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was sim­ply the word, “cow­boys.”  Here’s how my fel­low extra­or­di­nary blog­gers inter­preted this fun topic:

• For­tune and Glory Days loves spaghetti west­erns and Red Dead Redemp­tion (which is an AWESOME game, by the way).
• Branded in the 80s waxes nos­tal­gic about The Leg­end of the Lone Ranger toys.
• Mon­ster Cafe Saltillo  scored a great deal on The Lone Ranger DVDs.
• Flash­lights Are Some­thing to Eat was the cutest lit­tle cow­boy I’ve ever seen back in 1976.

*I’m early this week (for once!). I’ll update this sec­tion with more links as more folks turn in the assign­ment.

My dream job is to do nothing.

This week’s assign­ment from The League  was an inter­est­ing one:

If money was not a con­cern and you could choose any career path, what would be your ulti­mate dream job? 

Well, first of all, there’s a false assump­tion here that I would  want  to have this thing called “a job” if I didn’t have to. If money was not a con­cern, I would hap­pily live out my days play­ing video games, watch­ing movies, read­ing books, etc. etc. and get out even less than I do now. That’s right, I would do nothing.

But, if I have  to give an answer (and you know how seri­ously I take these League assign­ments, so I will), my first incli­na­tion would be to say I’d pur­sue some­thing cre­ative, whether it’s writ­ing a novel or screen­play, direct­ing a film, or rekin­dling my long-held dream of design­ing a video game–specifically a point-and-click adven­ture game just like my per­sonal gam­ing hero, Jane Jensen .

But my prob­lem, as always, is the fear that once it becomes my  job to do these things, I’ll cease being pas­sion­ate about them. That’s kind of the bitch about cre­ative endeav­ors. Once things like con­tracts and money and dead­lines and oblig­a­tions and other people’s opin­ions are involved, I’m almost pos­i­tive I will lose inter­est. I often won­der what amaz­ing films, books and games would exist if the tal­ent behind such works had absolute cre­ative power and unlim­ited resources. Then again, I look at guys like George Lucas and start to re-think this position.

What’s your ulti­mate dream job?

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to pre­tend that money was no con­cern and pur­sue a career we’re pas­sion­ate about. Here’s what my fel­low Lea­guers said:

Adamo­tomy wants to do some­thing involv­ing management…and golf?
For­tune and Glory Days wishes he could be a toy hunter . Or an archae­ol­o­gist! They’re the same thing, really.
That Fig­ures wants to explore space. SPACE, bitches!
Lair of the Dork Horde already has his dream job. And yeah, we’re all jeal­ous.
Flash­lights are Some­thing to Eat wishes he could work at and indie record store , like in High Fidelity .
The Man Who Stares At Toys wants to write a book on the his­tory of toys!  Fit­ting.
Hench Girl’s dream job is very spe­cific: to be a  Well-Heeled Exec­u­tive of a Sleazy Com­pany  I admire that kind of brazenness.

Merry Geekmas! Come get your presents!

Yeah, you heard me. Presents!

Thanks­giv­ing may be over, but I’m feel­ing espe­cially thank­ful right now, in this moment. In the span of a sin­gle month, I sur­vived a hur­ri­cane, lost my job AND my car died on the same day (that’s what this post  was all about, by the way–thanks to every­one who sent words of sup­port and encour­age­ment my way) only to gain a new job mere weeks later , get my car fully repaired, helped start up a new pod­cast , made guest appear­ances on two other awe­some pod­casts ( here & here ), and offi­cially  joined The Dork Horde . And of course on top of all that, the hol­i­day sea­son is in full swing and my halls are nowhere near fin­ished being decked.

I’ve been insanely busy and the post­ing qual­ity and fre­quency around here prob­a­bly reflects that, but I feel over­whelm­ingly grate­ful to not only have been able to turn my sit­u­a­tion around, but to have come out of it swinging–and I’m pos­i­tive it’s all because this blog exists. So, not to get all sappy and stuff, but I want you reg­u­lar read­ers, com­menters, and toy-pushing enablers to know how much your online cama­raderie means to me.

Blah, blah blah–where’s my present?

If you’re in The League, The Dork Horde, a Twit­ter friend, a Cult Film Club devo­tee,  or just a “fan” of ShezCrafti.com (which feels weird to say), I WANT TO GIVE YOU A GIFT. (That is, if you feel com­fort­able giv­ing your mail­ing address to a 31-year-old who loves video games and Ninja Tur­tles.) It’s not going to be some­thing extrav­a­gant, obvi­ously, but it will be some­thing small, cool, geeky, and above all,  heartfelt.

So, please  send me an email  with the sub­ject “Merry Geek­mas!” and include your mail­ing address if you’d like to get on my gift list. I don’t expect any­thing in return, nor will I be upset if you re-gift what I send you, but you might get some funny looks if you do (there, con­sider that your hint).

Update 12/17/12
Sorry, the dead­line to get on my gift lift has passed!
But you can still send me your address if you’d like this year’s Christ­mas card.

Oh, right–and since this post is also serv­ing as this week’s League Assign­ment , here’s my “some­thing festive”:

More hol­i­day spirit from around The League!

This week’s League assign­ment was to “write or pho­to­graph some­thing fes­tive and pop cul­ture ori­ented.” Okay, so I cheated a lit­tle bit with the comic scan, but since I’m not done dec­o­rat­ing my house yet, there isn’t much else to show right now. BUT! Do check out all the fes­tive & merry things my fel­low Lea­guers posted:

• Cool and Col­lected — OMG  S.L.U.G. Zom­bies’ Santa Claws
• Good­will Hunt­ing 4 Geeks — Geeky Christ­mas Orna­ments
• Adamo­tomy — TMNT Christ­mas Sweater  (yes, it’s glorious)
• Infi­nite Hol­ly­wood — It’s the Gam­era Christ­mas Spec­tac­u­lar!
• For­tune & Glory Days — these cool Super­hero Christ­mas Orna­ments
• Green Plas­tic Squirt Gun — shares his Top 10 Fond­est Christ­mas Gift Mem­o­ries
• Of Fly­ing Mon­keys and Ewoks Oh My! — Christ­mas Movies & TV Spe­cials
• Ran­dom Nerd­ness — is host­ing his own Christ­mas spe­cial in pod­cast format!
• The Man Who Stares At Toys — starts the new Kick Justin Tim­ber­lake in the Balls  hol­i­day tradition
• That Fig­ures — I don’t even know WTF this is sup­posed to be …
• Lair of the Dork Horde — shares an awe­some Christ­mas orna­ment and mem­ory
• Dou­ble Dum­b­ass On You — is cel­e­brat­ing A Very Starfleet Christ­mas
• 3B’s Toy Hive — knows it’s all about the Christ­mas Tree Cakes

What if Daniel lost the All Valley Tournament?

This week’s “What if…?” assign­ment from The League might be the most self-indulgent, fan­boy­ish one yet–because hon­estly, what do fan­boys love more than sit­ting around imag­in­ing alter­nate real­i­ties for their most beloved fan­doms? In case you haven’t noticed already WE’RE GROWNUPS WHO PLAY WITH TOYS.

As tempted as I was to write a “What if…?” sce­nario involv­ing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles, I decided that between the comics, car­toons and movies their uni­verse is already so frig­gin’ wacky my “What if Raphael acci­den­tally killed Leonardo in a blind­ing fit of rage?” idea wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch, which would be miss­ing the whole point of this exer­cise. (Also I already cov­ered that in my super secret fan-fiction and no you can­not read it.)

Instead I decided to plun­der from one of my all-time favorite movies, The Karate Kid .

I chose The Karate Kid specif­i­cally because to me it is one of those rare movies that is so ingrained into pop cul­ture (not to men­tion a per­ma­nent fix­ture of my child­hood happy place) that it’s above crit­i­cism. As far as I’m con­cerned, there is not one bad moment in this movie, freeze-frame end­ing, cheesy dat­ing mon­tage and all. It is PERFECT. Per­fect for me to poop on . Sorry, I don’t know where the hell Tri­umph came from.

I give you:

What if Daniel lost the All Val­ley Tournament?

Well, obvi­ously we’d never get The Karate Kid Part 2 or Part 3 , which is heart­break­ing in and of itself, but here’re some other things that would prob­a­bly happen:

Ali would get back together with Johnny.

We know from Part 2 she broke up with Daniel on prom night, so you know she’s a two-faced bitch anyway.

Mr. Miyagi would take some time to re-evaluate his priorities.

Because he real­ized he just spent months train­ing some punk kid karate FOR FREE and it was all for nothing.

John Kreese’s stock goes up.

The Cobra Kai Dojo flour­ishes, enroll­ment is at an all-time high (as are sales of black gis).

The Cobra Kai vow to remain dude­bros for life.

In ten years they will invest in some­thing called “Amer­ica Online” and become even more dis­gust­ingly rich. Dutch, always the loose can­non of the group, will lose his for­tune to hook­ers and blow.

Daniel’s mom finally caves and moves them back home to New Jersey.

Mrs. Larusso begins a slow, down­ward spi­ral of shame and resent­ment and starts drink­ing heav­ily after real­iz­ing her pussy son caused her to give up her dream so easily.

Daniel gets laid, becomes a man.

Pre­sum­ably by Judy or one of those other car-chasing sluts. He never men­tions his humil­i­at­ing defeat and resumes what­ever social sta­tus he orig­i­nally left behind. I bet you thought this wouldn’t have a happy end­ing, didn’t you?

BONUS:

Freddy would still wear awe­some shirts.

Like the classy one with the ‘Two Pigs Fuck­ing’ motif you see here.

In this alter­nate Karate Kid world, Johnny is no cream puff!

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to write an alter­nate turn of events for a pop cul­ture sto­ry­line. Go read some of their amazing/terrible ideas:

• Pre­dictably, more than one blog­ger cov­ered Star Wars. Check out these entries from Ran­dom Nerd­ness ‚  The Dork Horde  and Of Fly­ing Mon­keys and Ewoks, Oh My! .
• The Good­will Geek  didn’t write much about The Grem­lins vs. Crit­ters, but the con­cept is so awe­some he doesn’t have to.
• The Man Who Stares at Toys writes a whole lot of words about Aliens . I read most of them.
• The Clay­ma­tion Were­wolf dares to ask: What if Todd Mac­Far­lane had cre­ated the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

ShezCrafti Then & Now: The State of the Site

The League is mix­ing things up yet again this week with a topic that steps out­side our reg­u­larly sched­uled pop cul­ture pro­gram­ming. Go grab your­self a snack or something–I sug­gest these –and set­tle in, because this is going to be a long post.

Write a “State of the Site” for your web site. How’s it going? What excit­ing things have hap­pened this past year?  Where do you want your site to be in a year’s time? 

I found this topic to be more than a lit­tle chal­leng­ing. This web­site  is me, so quite a bit of my per­son­al­ity and per­sonal his­tory is inter­twined with the state of ShezCrafti.com, and it’s never easy to write about your­self. Also, I don’t really have any grandiose plans, ambi­tions, or visions of world dom­i­na­tion for ShezCrafti and there­fore it’s dif­fi­cult for me to look at my site from the per­spec­tive of whether or not it’s a suc­cess. Hell, I don’t even run any ads here.

As a per­sonal blog, ShezCrafti is sim­ply a place for me to geek out about what­ever it is I hap­pen to be geek­ing out over on any given day–usually that’s video games, ter­ri­ble movies, TV shows, comics, music, 80’s & 90’s pop cul­ture, and yeah, Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles. I use this site as a way to col­lect, share and orga­nize all the geeky/stupid/random things I care about as well as a means to “offi­cially” put new things I’m excited about on my radar. Occa­sion­ally I’ll have a coher­ent thought, humor­ous anec­dote,  or some­thing insight­ful to say about what­ever it is that I’m shar­ing and the words I write will res­onate with a ran­dom vis­i­tor and they’ll go out of their way to leave me a com­ment. I like it when that hap­pens. But as far as suc­cess met­rics go, you could say I’ve set the bar pretty low.

But before I get into what I’ve been up to lately and how this past year has gone, I’d like to take some time to reflect back on the his­tory of this site and how it came to be–for posterity’s sake, as well as your poten­tial amusement.

Please, please, a moment to reflect.

Cre­ation: The Late ‘90s

The mythol­ogy of ShezCrafti’s ori­gin is one that is deeply rich and steeped in lore.

Pic­ture it. AOL. 1998.  That was the year before I grad­u­ated high school, and a time when Amer­ica Online was the nation’s pri­mary means of access­ing the inter­net. It was also the year the Beastie Boys dropped their bomb-ass album Hello Nasty!  on us which I used to lis­ten to non-stop and it con­tributed heav­ily to the defin­i­tive sound­track to my senior year .

As I men­tion on my About page because I do get asked rather fre­quently what this name means, I was once very obsessed with the Beastie Boys. “She’s Crafty” is my favorite song by them, so that’s what I chose for the all-important, personality-defining AOL screen name that would become leg­endary among the 312 priv­i­leged peo­ple on my Buddy List.

And then: TRAGEDY STRUCK. “She­sCrafty” was already taken–by some­one whom I sus­pect is a much less cool and deserv­ing individual–and so I had to spell it retard­edly, and thus ShezCrafti was born. That’s my legacy, folks. And as Howie from Under­Scoop­Fire once told me, I own it.

Late Antiq­uity: 2001 — 2004 (ish)

You may be sur­prised to learn that ShezCrafti.com actu­ally began life some­time back in 2001 as ShezCrafti.net, a crappy, self-centric per­sonal home­page I was host­ing on Yahoo Geoc­i­ties (lol!) as a way to keep in touch with friends, write blog posts about things prob­a­bly only 5 other peo­ple in the uni­verse cared about, and col­lect all the stu­pid, ran­dom crap I had stum­bled upon on the inter­net; you know, clas­sic time-wasters like All Your Base and the  Ham­ster Dance. The con­cept of “blog­ging” wasn’t nearly as pop­u­lar back then as it is today, and blogs were gen­er­ally asso­ci­ated with Live­Jour­nal and sim­i­lar sites.  This was back before social net­work­ing had offi­cially become “a thing,” before MySpace and Face­book existed, before Twit­ter, before “the cloud”, even before Word­Press which is the plat­form mak­ing it pos­si­ble for you to read these very words.

Dur­ing my col­lege years, the orig­i­nal ShezCrafti site was some­thing of a weird cre­ative out­let, as well as a way for me to prac­tice HTML and learn CSS. But mostly it was an excuse to dick around on the inter­net while pre­tend­ing like I was doing some­thing impor­tant or some­thing that any­one out­side of my close cir­cle of friends gave two shits about.

Through the mir­a­cle of The Way­back Machine, I was able to cob­ble together this screen­shot for you:

As you can see, I was going through my cru­cial anime phase and evi­dently I pre­ferred a mono­chro­matic color scheme. “Life. Stuff. What­ever.” I was  deep . I’ve cho­sen to blur out some of the stu­pid things I wrote because read­ing it ten years later just makes me want to gag. (It’s also a sober­ing reminder that the things you put on the inter­net have a ten­dency to live for­ever.) I have no idea who I was or what I was think­ing when I wrote or shared most of this stuff, and my life today resem­bles noth­ing of that girl’s. Hilar­i­ously, though, I also dis­cov­ered that my old Guest­book (remem­ber those things?) is STILL func­tional . That was worth look­ing up my 21-year-old inter­net self for.

The Dark Ages: 2004 — 2007 (ish)

Dur­ing this period I wasn’t very active online, if at all. For two years the role of ShezCrafti was played by an unhap­pily mar­ried woman whose career was in flux and didn’t have much to offer cre­atively. This was also around the time she became addicted to World of War­craft and as is typ­i­cal of most WoW addicts, the pro­duc­tiv­ity lev­els for most other aspects of her life reached an all-time low. I com­pletely let ShezCrafti.net go and even­tu­ally Yahoo took it down. The *crick­ets* were deafening.

The Renais­sance: 2008 — 2011 (ish)

After going through a divorce, land­ing an awe­some new job, and liv­ing on my own for the first time, I began to get back in touch with myself and sort of re-discover all the things I was once inter­ested in that I had been miss­ing. My cre­ative muse returned and I started doing free­lance web design & devel­op­ment work on the side not because I needed to, but because it was some­thing I’m gen­uinely inter­ested in. After build­ing sev­eral sites and Word­Press blogs for other peo­ple, I thought, hey, why not do this for myself? I had got­ten the itch to start doing some­thing cre­ative again, but I wasn’t sure what. I was inspired by pop cul­ture sites like X-Entertainment and The Surf­ing Pizza , but I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily want or have the moti­va­tion to write a col­lec­tion of lengthy, nos­tal­gic per­sonal essays, as much as I enjoyed read­ing theirs. I also wanted to write about video games in some capac­ity, since I am a gamer and do play them quite a bit and make an effort to keep up with all the lat­est gam­ing news. I just knew I wanted to do some­thing,  anything.

And so it was that I launched ShezCrafti.com in Novem­ber of 2008, not really know­ing what the hell I was doing or what I was get­ting myself into.  This was my first post.  In it, I attempt to explain why I started this site and what read­ers could expect from me, not that I had any idea what that would be at the time this was writ­ten. There’s also a great pic­ture of 5-year-old me pet­ting a goat. (Yeah, I don’t know either.)

Today

Although this web­site in its cur­rent form has been around since 2008, it wasn’t until February/March of this year that I began blog­ging with any sort of reg­u­lar­ity. After get­ting a third notice that my domain was up for renewal, I made it a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion of mine to get back in the habit of post­ing reg­u­larly with the goal of trans­form­ing this site into some­thing that was valu­able  to me;  oth­er­wise I didn’t see the point of keep­ing it around. That’s when I switched gears and estab­lished the fol­low­ing “rules” for ShezCrafti:

• Write only about the things I gen­uinely care about and feel like writ­ing about. No other oblig­a­tions need apply.
• Not every post has to be a mas­ter­piece or even well-written, though I do try. This saves me from get­ting too hung up on the impos­si­bly high stan­dards I some­times set for myself. (Believe it or not, I do have stan­dards some­times, you guys.)
• Above all, I have to be hav­ing fun.

So far these rules seem to be work­ing out, and it’s been very free­ing to aban­don for­mal­i­ties and sim­ply blog for myself and not worry too much about what any­one else thinks. Fol­low­ing this path has led me to meet­ing some awe­some new inter­net friends and other blog­gers with whom I have a lot in com­mon, even if there’s thou­sands of phys­i­cal miles between us.

The biggest step for­ward for ShezCrafti, how­ever, was join­ing The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers back in June, which is headed up by the super awe­some Brian of Cool and Col­lected . I had stum­bled upon a cou­ple of League-related posts over at Branded In The 80s and Flash­lights Are Some­thing To Eat and knew right away I wanted to be a part of this crazy crew. I mean  how could I NOT want to par­tic­i­pate in group blog­ging top­ics like “When I Was 12″, “Kurt Rus­sell is Awe­some” and “Why 1984 is Pos­si­bly the Great­est Year in Pop Cul­ture His­tory”? I don’t mean to brag, but I’m an expert on those topics.

Since join­ing The League I’ve met and con­nected with even more amaz­ing blog­gers, and have even come out of my shell a lit­tle bit to par­tic­i­pate in a few pod­casts, write guest posts, and in gen­eral join in all the geeky pop cul­ture cama­raderie that seems to sur­round The League. I look for­ward every day to read­ing and com­ment­ing on all of the great things they post. I orig­i­nally planned to give a shout-out to a few of my favorite fel­low Lea­guers in this para­graph, but as I started mak­ing the list it quickly spi­raled out of con­trol. There’s just too many awe­some sites and peo­ple in The League, and there’s no way I could give them the indi­vid­ual level of praise and atten­tion they deserve, so I’ll just leave this here as it applies to all of you:

The Future

I have no idea where ShezCrafti will be even in a year’s time, and I won’t pre­tend like I have lofty goals or ambi­tions for this site beyond just hav­ing a nerdy cor­ner of the inter­net to call home and con­nect­ing with like-minded blog­gers.  And for right now, I’m 100% OK with that.

What state are you in?

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week The League was tasked with writ­ing a “State of the Site” address for our web­sites. Here’s what some of my fel­low Lea­guers had to say:

• Redis­cover the 80s just cel­e­brated the site’s 1st birthday!
• The Good­will Geek may be new at blog­ging but he’s already one of my League favorites.
• The Crooked Ninja Tur­tle Gang  is another new favorite League site of mine, and not just because of its name­sake; honest.
• Things are going great for Mon­ster Café Saltillo ‘s new blog AND busi­ness. Rawr!
• The Man Who Stares at Toys  wants to make some improve­ments, but I already think he does a great job.

Free Halloween Costume Ideas, Courtesy of Pre-Trainwreck Adam Sandler

Remem­ber back when Adam San­dler was funny? Remem­ber when we used to laugh at all his obnox­ious voices and stu­pid faces? Remem­ber that one time on Week­end Update when he spouted off a bunch of silly ideas for cos­tumes you can make for free using stuff you’ve got lying around the house? Is this a cop-out for almost miss­ing this week’s assign­ment from The League ? Yup.

I had a much bet­ter post planned, but it involved me going over to my par­ents house to dig through boxes of old pho­tos to show you some of the musty hand-me-downs and hideous fab­ric shame-fests my mom hand-sewed and forced me to wear over the years, but I ran out of time, and trust me, you’re much bet­ter off with­out me recount­ing those mis­er­able expe­ri­ences.  The thing is, I’ve never been big on cos­tumes. Not only do I not enjoy get­ting dressed up in  any  capac­ity or putting makeup on my face, I don’t like call­ing atten­tion to myself. Candy was always my num­ber one pri­or­ity every Hal­loween, and as far as I was con­cerned, putting on a cos­tume to go out and get it was just a formality.

On top of that, my par­ents refused to splurge on any kind of decent store-bought cos­tume for me, ratio­nal­iz­ing this obvi­ously poor par­ent­ing deci­sion as being thrifty because, and I quote, “why spend a lot of money for some­thing you’ll only wear once?” And so, my Hal­loween cos­tumes through­out the years have ranged from mild dis­ap­point­ments to total fail­ures, and even­tu­ally I stopped car­ing alto­gether and gladly put in the least amount of thought and effort as possible.

In that respect, the above clip I posted is a per­fect sum­ma­tion of my feel­ings about Hal­loween cos­tumes. JUST GIMME SOME DAMN CANDY!

But just to humor you guys and get my check plus from the teacher for doing the work, here are my responses to the actual ques­tions we were asked this week:

1. What was the most leg­endary cos­tume you ever wore?

A witch. The “leg­endary” part is that I wore it to junior high for Hal­loween Spirit Day on the WRONG GODDAMN DAY. I was the only one in the entire school dressed up, and yes, it was mortifying.

2. What would you dress up as this year?

Crazy News­pa­per Uni­corn Man

And what are you sup­posed to be?

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was tasked with describ­ing the best cos­tume we ever wore , and what we would dress up as this year. Here’s a cou­ple of my favorite responses from fel­low Lea­guers who put much more thought and effort into this assign­ment than I did!

• AEIOU and Some­times Why ‘s cos­tume is so scary I almost peed myself. I said almost.
• Cool and Col­lected got a rock for his clown cos­tume of shame.
• Mon­ster Cafe Saltillo wants to be Spider-Man…again.
• The Man Who Stares at Toys once dressed up as a Ghost­buster, so he auto­mat­i­cally wins.
• The Bat­man cos­tume  Crooked Ninja Tur­tle Gang  wore at 4 years old is STILL bet­ter than bat nipples.
• Infi­nite Hol­ly­wood cus­tomized his own Ninja Tur­tle costume!

An Awesome Welcome Home Package from The League

Spend­ing eight hours in a cramped car dri­ving  back from vaca­tion  is not my idea of a fun day. I woke up this morn­ing to a sunny, per­fect beach day in Murell’s Inlet, South Car­olina and had to tear myself away to get on the road early, if I had any hope of get­ting home at a decent hour. Long road trips home after vaca­tion are the worst , espe­cially when you’re leav­ing behind beau­ti­ful weather. All you can think about is how short it was, and stress about all the crap you have to do when you get home. By the time I reached Bal­ti­more, I was in a pretty suck-tastic mood.

When I finally got home, there were a bunch of pack­ages on my doorstep. Look­ing a lit­tle closer, I saw they were all from mem­bers of The League which put an instant smile on my face and made me for­get how tired and cranky I was. I wasted no time tear­ing into them.

Pack­age #1, from Tupa’s Treasures

The first pack­age was a big box full of awe­some retro stuff from Christo­pher Tupa, the tal­ented artist and blog­ger behind  Tupa’s Trea­sures . Chris sent me an intrigu­ing email a week or so ago say­ing he found “some­thing I might like” that he wanted to send me.

Well Chris, you have def­i­nitely done that and then some! In fact, I’m hav­ing trou­ble fig­ur­ing out what the orig­i­nal “some­thing” is, as pretty much every­thing in this pack­age is a trea­sure. Here’s what was inside:

• Six Guns and Shurikens , a TMNT paper­back book from 1990. This took me back to 5th grade right away. I used to have this book, along with a few other TMNT paper­backs that I ordered from my ele­men­tary school’s book fair once upon a time. Flip­ping through the pages was like recov­er­ing a lost relic from my past.
• TMNT Ther­mos with my favorite Tur­tle, Raphael on the front! I saw this posted on Chris’s blog a few weeks ago , which he scored for a quar­ter at a yard sale.
• Inva­sion of the Punk Frogs , a VHS of episode 13 from Sea­son 2 of the orig­i­nal 1987 TMNT car­toon. I can’t even imag­ine how much shelf space you’d need to col­lect the entire 80’s TMNT car­toon on single-episode VHS tapes.
• TMNT toy bike ; I’m actu­ally not sure which TMNT toy line the bike is from, but it totally fits my new Nick­elodeon Tur­tles fig­ures. Does any­one out there know?
• New Kids on the Block paper­back book — another relic from my past! I never had this book, but my friend/frenemy across the street did. She was obsessed with NKOTB and we used to get into stu­pid fights about what was cooler: TMNT or NKOTB. Obvi­ously I was the one who was correct.
• The Last Starfighter movie novel. I had no idea a nov­el­iza­tion of that movie existed until I saw this thing  on Chris’s blog . It’s one of my favorite cheesy 80’s sci-fi movies and I can’t wait to read it.
• A stack of Garbage Pail Kids stick­ers. Yes! I don’t have that many GPKs any­more but would love to start col­lect­ing again. These are a nice head start.

My favorite item, how­ever, is this water­color of Raphael that Chris drew and painted him­self:

I love Chris’s car­toony, col­or­ful style which I fell in love with when I saw the super-cute Pop Cul­ture Road Trip sou­venir map he designed for The League. I’d love to see what a whole group shot of the TMNT would look like. (Do you take com­mis­sions, Chris??)

He also included this adorable lit­tle printed art book­let called “Ode to Spring” which is lit­er­ally too cute for words:

Chris, you have com­pletely over­whelmed me with how much awe­some you packed into this box. I don’t know what I did to deserve such a nice sur­prise in the mail, but thank you, thank you, thank you! This made my day.

Pack­age #2, from Top Hat Sasquatch

Mov­ing on to the soft, squishy pack­age I got from Tommy Day of  Top Hat Sasquatch , I knew right away it must have been the kick­ass THS t-shirt I ordered.

Fea­tur­ing orig­i­nal Alex Deli­gian­nis art­work of the sophis­ti­cated ‘Squatch him­self, its high brow design makes it appro­pri­ate for all occa­sions when an extra touch of class is needed–weddings, black tie events, job inter­views, state dinners…

As an added bonus, there were 8-bit THS stick­ers, but­tons, and a TMNT goodie bag full of retro trad­ing cards! The Tur­tles lunch bag was a nice touch and really brought back some mem­o­ries; I prob­a­bly haven’t seen one of those things in over twenty years! My Dad used to pack all my lunches in them, and would write funny things inside of drawn-on speech bubbles.

I can’t wait to wear the shirt to work and answer the inevitable ques­tions peo­ple will ask about it. (“Why yes, that is a fancy sasquatch in a top hat blow­ing bub­bles from a pipe!”) Thank you, Tommy, for the wear­able work of art and con­ver­sa­tion starter!

Pack­age #3, from Branded in the 80s

Last but not least, I received this per­sonal mix­tape (err…mix CD?) from Shawn Robare of Branded in the 80s . (To be hon­est, this has prob­a­bly been chill­ing in my mail­box for a week or more, but I didn’t open it until today. Even when I’m not on vaca­tion, I’m lazy about check­ing the mail.)

This disc is the phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of a recent League assignment–to cre­ate our own per­sonal  high school mix­tape –which Shawn opted to give away for free to any­one who wanted a copy (ana­log piracy!) because he’s old school like that.

It’s an eclec­tic mix of all the songs Shawn was jam­ming to back in the early ‘90s, and includes Ween, Weezer, The Rentals, Weird Al, and even some tracks from the ani­mated Trans­form­ers and X-Men movies. My favorite track on it, how­ever, is “Girl­friend” by Matthew Sweet. I’ll never for­get the first time I saw that music video and thought how cool it was to have Japan­ese ani­ma­tion in it.

Shawn, thank you for going the extra mile (as you always do!) and tak­ing the time to mix, burn, and mail these CDs out. I really enjoyed your “liner notes” and it was fun tak­ing an audi­ble jour­ney into your past. One of the best ways to get to know some­one is through their music, and your high school mix­tape just con­firms what I already sus­pected: you were one of the cool kids.

NINJA FORCE FIVE, Assemble!

Yes, I’m still on vaca­tion. But how could I pass up a League topic like this?

“Who would you take in an 80′s char­ac­ter fan­tasy draft? Your team’s goal will be to defeat a shady con­glom­er­ate of Russ­ian busi­ness­men and their team of hired nin­jas. It’s go time.”

Mr. Miyagi

Task Force Role:

The Wise Leader

Spe­cial Skills:

• Extra­or­di­nary mar­tial arts skill passed down from gen­er­a­tions of Miyagi-Do karate teachings
• Dec­o­rated World War II vet­eran, awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery
• Deep philo­soph­i­cal knowl­edge of life
• Zen-like patience and sharp reflexes (pre­sum­ably from years of try­ing to catch flies with chopsticks)
• Respected sen­sei who gives karate lessons dis­guised as house­hold chores
• Mys­ti­cal heal­ing powers
• Handyman
• Bicy­cle repair
• Car restora­tion expert
• Cos­tume designer
• Fisherman
• On top of every­thing else, he’s a hell of a gar­dener and makes a fab­u­lous cup of tea.

Seri­ously, is there any­thing Mr. Miyagi can’t do? He leads Ninja Force Five with poise and grace, usu­ally dis­pens­ing wis­dom and train­ing from the side­lines, but doesn’t hes­i­tate to jump into the fray and kick seri­ous ass when needed. Bad guys, take note: don’t under­es­ti­mate Mr. Miyagi–he’ll fuck your shit up.

Richard “Data” Wang

Task Force Role:

Spe­cial Com­bat, Tech­ni­cal Expert

Spe­cial Skills:

• Invent­ing weapons, armor and spy tools from com­mon house­hold objects
• Set­ting “booty” traps
• Zipline mastery
• Flu­ent in Chi­nese (Needs work: English)

As the tin­kerer and inven­tor of the group, Data sup­plies all of the team’s weapons, armor and spy gear. Sure, they’re not exactly what you’d call “high tech,” and they don’t always work, but they get the job done. His loose grip on the Eng­lish lan­guage is often an unin­ten­tional advan­tage to Ninja Force Five in com­bat, as the bad guys are momen­tar­ily con­fused try­ing to fig­ure out what­ever the fuck he just said.

Sho’nuff, The Shogun of Harlem

Task Force Role:

Kung Fu Warrior

Spe­cial Skills:

• Kung-Fu Master
• Being the meanest
• Being the prettiest
• Being the bad­dest mofo low down around this town

Though highly skilled in Kung Fu, Sho’nuff is one crazy moth­er­fucker and often flies off the han­dle. But he’s con­stantly sur­rounded by a posse of hot bitches, so Ninja Force Five keeps him around.

Raphael, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

Task Force Role:

Ninja War­rior, Comic Relief

Spe­cial Skills:

• Ninjutsu
• Sai mastery
• Impen­e­tra­ble shell armor
• Sarcasm
• Pizza throwing
• He’s the only mem­ber of the team who can break the fourth wall
• Plus, he’s a mas­ter of disguise

As the only actual ninja in Ninja Force Five, Raphael is the go-to guy for all of the team’s ninja-related train­ing and knowl­edge, a role for which he gladly steps up as it makes him feel impor­tant and needed (some­thing he strug­gles with back home, liv­ing in Leonardo’s shadow). Expertly skilled with the sai, his close-up com­bat is bru­tal and his dis­tance, thrown attacks are deadly accu­rate. When he’s not shov­el­ing down pizza, he dis­penses both ass-kicking and wise­cracks with style and sar­cas­tic humor.

“Hand­some” John Pruitt

Task Force Role:

Vehi­cle Dri­ver, Backup

Spe­cial Skills:

• Com­mer­cial truck driver
• CB radio operator
• Vehi­cle repair and maintenance
• Handy with a gun
• Hand-to-hook close combat
• Decades of hard­ened high­way wisdom

Don’t be fooled by the hook–he may be a rough and tough high­way­man, but he’s got a heart of gold (so long as his wife isn’t sleep­ing with “that bas­tard” again). Pruitt trans­ports Ninja Force Five around incon­spic­u­ously in his big rig truck, which Data has tricked out with Ninja-fighting tech­nol­ogy. Though a hum­ble truck driver/sometimes-mechanic, Pruitt knows how to han­dle him­self when shit gets real. He’s been known to swoop in and save the day when you least expect it.

 The League Loves Ninjas!

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was tasked with assem­bling a team of 80′s heroes to fight an evil Russ­ian con­glom­er­ate and their ninja assas­sins. Who did they pick?

• Under­Scoop­Fire! also recruited a Ninja Turtle!
• Green Plas­tic Squirt Gun could have just stopped at Chuck Norris.
• Mem­o­ries of Toy­mor­row recruited from his favorite Sat­ur­day morn­ing cartoons.

The Class of ’99 Mixtape

This week every­one in The League is mak­ing a high school mix­tape ! We were asked, “what songs were for­ever being looped on your car’s stereo back in high school?” Thank­fully Brian, our fear­less leader, had the good sense to put a limit of 12 songs on it, oth­er­wise this post could have eas­ily turned into a black hole of every embar­rass­ing music phase I ever went through in high school, in which you’d hear all about my short-lived ICP fan­dom (yes, in 10th grade ShezCrafti was down with the clown), my Ace of Base obses­sion, and every Jock Jams and MTV Party to Go album I ever owned. I will spare you that fate.

Instead, I’d like to ded­i­cate this mix­tape to my grad­u­at­ing class. Hope you’ve  pre­pared for Y2K  and are ready to  get jiggy wit it , because in this post I’m lit­er­ally going to party like it’s 1999.

But first, come with me on a lit­tle jour­ney back in time…

ShezCrafti: The High School Years

Can you spot me in this group of 99’ers?

1999 was the year I grad­u­ated from Fall­ston High School. By senior year, I just wanted to get the hell out of high school and was doing the absolute bare min­i­mum to slide by. It’s not that I didn’t like school, I just felt I wasn’t learn­ing any­thing of real impor­tance and I was eager for my life to start. I was also supremely lazy and often went to school in paja­mas and flip-flops. I think I cleaned up pretty well for my senior year­book pic­ture, though:

And this was my senior quote:

“A toll is a toll. And a roll is a roll. If we don’t get no tolls, then we don’t eat no rolls.”

As you can see, I took my future very seriously.

Speak­ing of the future…

Cas­sette tapes were already long-since obso­lete and pretty unpop­u­lar in 1999, thanks to CDs and the rel­a­tively new (at the time) MP3 for­mat.  I, how­ever, drove a red 1991 Ply­mouth Laser, a hand-me-down from my mom, which only had a cas­sette player.

If I wanted to play CDs in my car, I had to give shot­gun to my Sony Dis­c­man and hook it up to my car stereo with one of these things:

So uncool. Not to men­tion the discs would skip unless I drove like a grandma and obeyed all posted speed lim­its (yeah right). So despite the advance­ments in tech­nol­ogy toward the end of the last mil­len­nium, I was still rock­ing mix­tapes on my car stereo in 1999. LIKE A BOSS.

The Class of ’99 Mixtape

As one of the youngest mem­bers of The League, the music on my mix­tape will prob­a­bly be the most cur­rent. My process for putting this together was a bit like grad­u­a­tion itself: bit­ter­sweet. From my worry-free days of nap­ping in art class and under­age drink­ing, to the more  seri­ous mile­stones like prom and Senior trip when it began to sink in that it was all com­ing to an end, there are songs that remind me of the good times, there are songs that remind me of the bet­ter times, to bor­row a few lyrics from Chumbawumba.

When I look back at my high school days, par­tic­u­larly the year I grad­u­ated, these are the tunes that stand out the most:

Side A:

 “1999” — Prince

In 1999 you couldn’t go any­where with­out hear­ing this song, espe­cially if you were a Senior at my high school. Nat­u­rally it was the de facto theme song for pretty much every Class of ’99 related event. It’s as if Prince future-proofed his own music when he penned this song in 1983. “They’ll for­get all about this album for a few years,” I imag­ine The Pur­ple One say­ing to his posse, “but just you wait until the year 1999 rolls around and it will rule the air­waves again eheeheeheeheeheehee!”

“Inter­galac­tic” — The Beastie Boys

I couldn’t very well make a per­sonal mix­tape about my high school days with­out pay­ing homage to The Beastie Boys, to whom I owe this blog’s name­sake . They’re one of my favorite groups, and when Hello Nasty dropped in 1998 it com­pletely rocked my world. I remem­ber hear­ing “Inter­galac­tic” at every major school sport­ing event, at every dance, blast­ing out of everyone’s cars on the way home from school, but most of all, blar­ing from the ghetto blaster in my bedroom.

“…Baby One More Time” — Brit­ney Spears

My life has had a lot of strange par­al­lels with Britney’s. We were both born in 1981, we both have (nat­ural) brown hair and brown eyes, we both got mar­ried in 2004, we both filed for divorce in 2006, and are both inter­na­tional superstars–oh wait. When this song–Britney’s first #1 single–came out in 1999 it was HUGE, and I’m not ashamed to admit I played the shit out of it.

“Too Close” — Next

If there was ever a song I would call “my jam,” this is it. This is the song that made all the teach­ers and chap­er­ons uncom­fort­able at our school dances. I can’t really blame them with lyrics like, “I won­der if she can tell I’m hard right now?” It is the ulti­mate sexed-up, slow-grindin’ dirty danc­ing song. Who­ever danced with me to this song was prob­a­bly going to get some that night.

“What is Love?” — Haddaway

Though recorded in 1993, thanks to those damn SNL skits and The Night at the Rox­bury , this was another song that was EVERYWHERE in my junior and senior days of high school. And just like Austin Pow­ers, every­one thought it was hilar­i­ous to imi­tate these guys at every oppor­tu­nity. (It wasn’t.) I do love the song, though.

“Semi-Charmed Life” — Third Eye Blind

I’m clos­ing out Side A with an upbeat tune that was one of the most pop­u­lar songs of the 90’s and also fea­tured promi­nently at the end of Amer­i­can Pie,  the defin­i­tive high school movie of my gen­er­a­tion, which also hap­pens to be about the Class of ’99. The song may be about drugs, but the cho­rus is vague and relat­able enough to have turned this song into the “good times” anthem that it was. “I want some­thing else, to get me through this semi-charmed kinda life, baby.” Don’t we all?

Side B:

“It’s All Been Done” — Bare­naked Ladies

A hum­bling song that reminds us no mat­ter what we do and how amaz­ing, genius or awe­some we think we are for doing it, some­one else has done it before. Per­fect life advice for the Class of ’99.

“The Verve” — Bit­ter­sweet Symphony

Speak­ing of life advice…here’s some from The Verve, whose career, like my high school days, didn’t last very long:

Cause it’s a bit­ter­sweet sym­phony, this life
Try to make ends meet
Try to find some money then you die

After this one major hit, the band broke up in 1999.

“With or With­out You” — U2

This was our Senior prom theme, and every time I hear it I’m trans­ported right back to that night. The song is a pretty heavy one about the pain of lov­ing some­one so much you can’t live with or with­out them…or some­thing. Either way, it didn’t really apply to my boyfriend at the time, but we still had an amaz­ing time at prom.

“Changes” — 2Pac

As a big 2Pac fan in the 90s, the rapper’s “death” was one of the first celebrity deaths that really affected me. (I put it in quotes because whether you’re a believer or not, it’s fun to per­pet­u­ate the  2Pac is still alive  rumors, which is by far my favorite con­spir­acy the­ory.) Any­way, the remix of his song “Changes” was released at the start of my senior year and it’s like a per­fect time cap­sule of all the world’s prob­lems at the time. If only 2Pac were “alive” today, he’d have lived to see the first black pres­i­dent of the United States, an unre­al­is­tic pos­si­bil­ity he raps about in the song.

“Grad­u­a­tion (Friends For­ever)” — Vit­a­min C

Des­tined to become a grad­u­a­tion anthem for years to come, Vit­a­min C unleashed this cryfest of a song on the world in 1999. It was the sound­track to count­less photo mem­ory slideshows and year­book sign­ings dur­ing my senior year.

Fun­fact: Vit­a­min C, whose real name is Coleen Fitz­patrick, plays the role of megabitch Amber, oppo­site Ricki Lake in John Waters’ cult clas­sic,  Hair­spray .

“Good Rid­dance” — Greenday

This song came out toward the end of 1997 and seemed to mir­ror a lot of the things I was feel­ing at the time. It per­fectly cap­tures the uncer­tainty and anx­i­ety we all feel when our lives are at a major turn­ing point, not know­ing what lay ahead and hop­ing we’ve made the right choices.

What did my fel­low Lea­guers lis­ten to in high school?

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to cre­ate a 12-song mix­tape from the music we lis­tened to in high school.

Flash­lights Are Some­thing to Eat still had one of his old mix­tapes lay­ing around!
Good­will Hunt­ing 4 Geeks  had well-rounded musi­cal tastes in high school.
Cool and Col­lected  makes me jeal­ous that hair bands weren’t cool any­more by the time I got to high school.
Cav­al­cade of Awe­some shares my love of rap and hip-hop.

If there is one movie that deserves an awesome reboot, it is ‘Masters of the Universe.’

How­ever, this won’t be that awe­some reboot.

Instead you’re get­ting my big gay  Mas­ters of the Uni­verse  cheese­fest and you are going to like it, dammit. The orig­i­nal 1987 film was spec­tac­u­larly awful, which of course means I loved it. (That’s why I’m allowed to make fun of it, ok? It comes from the heart.)

In all seri­ous­ness, though, MOTU fans have got­ten the shit end of the stick for a long time. I’m excited by all the recent buzz about the upcom­ing real reboot, even if it’s still in the early stages. But I’ll leave the seri­ous stuff to Hol­ly­wood and you obses­sive fan­boys instead of clut­ter­ing up the Inter­net with yet another He-Man dream cast list, which Google tells me it already has thou­sands of results for.

So, with­out fur­ther ado…

He-Man

There aren’t many actors as built, blonde and dumb as Dolph Lund­gren. And Matthew McConaughey is already com­fort­able with semi-nakedness and skimpy leather cos­tumes. BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL, BRA!

Skeletor

I’m def­i­nitely not the only one out there who wants this to hap­pen. But at 69 years old, I’ll have to cast zom­bie Christo­pher Walken if this reboot doesn’t hap­pen soon.

In the mean­time, here’s a fun bonus activ­ity: read these Skele­tor quotes  aloud to your friends in your best Christo­pher Walken voice!

Teela

I swear it didn’t occur to me that “Teela” and “Mila” rhyme until after­ward. But now that it has, I feel even bet­ter about my cast­ing choice.

Evil-Lyn

Part of Me 3D  qual­i­fies Katy Perry as an actress, right? I hope so because THE RESEMBLANCE IS UNCANNY!

Oh, I guess her looks are kind of sim­i­lar, too.

Duncan

You can put Will Fer­rell in every movie as far as I’m concerned.

Gwildor

In my  Mas­ters of the Uni­verse  uni­verse, Gwildor is a mostly silent, incon­se­quen­tial fix­ture of the back­ground who only rarely inter­jects with his bizarre antics that are awk­ward for all involved. Gal­i­fi­anakis would be per­fect, and the resem­blance isn’t that far off.

Edi­to­r­ial note:

I wanted to cast some­one for Orko, but I sup­pose that wouldn’t have been fair since he wasn’t in the orig­i­nal and we got Gwildor’s furry ass instead. Sorry, lit­tle buddy.

I lost my horse and my dignity in The Swamp of Sadness.

Fact: The Nev­erend­ing Story is suicide-inducing depres­sion fuel dis­guised as a children’s movie.

Here is but an abridged overview of the suf­fer­ing con­tained within: bul­ly­ing, cop­ing with the loss of your dead mother, child psychologist-concerning lev­els of inse­cu­rity, ass­hole adults, unsym­pa­thetic giant tur­tles, wolf-like beasts that feed on chil­dren, and of course, the sim­ple mat­ter of the end of the world.

But there is one scene in par­tic­u­lar that out-depresses all the oth­ers and never fails to reduce me to a pathetic, snif­fling mess:

When Artax Dies in the Swamp of Sadness

It’s one thing to lose your beloved horse. It’s another thing to watch him slowly sink to his inevitable death while you have no choice but to stand there and watch it hap­pen. But it’s on another level of PLEASE GOD JUST KILL ME NOW all together to have this hap­pen in a place called “The Swamp of Sad­ness.” And that music—oh God, that music.

Over twenty years later, it still gets to me.  Here’s the scene, if you don’t mind hav­ing your day ruined:

I mean come on, that is some trau­ma­tiz­ing shit to see as a child.

Thank good­ness we had the shiny, happy Nev­erend­ing Story theme song by the always hair-fashionable, openly-gay Limhal to lighten things up (which I recently learned  sounds pretty fan­tas­tic on a ZX Spec­trum, by the way), oth­er­wise I might have attempted to off myself with Pop-Rocks and Pepsi at an early age.

Other Lacrimal Fluid-Generating Posts from The League

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from  The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers  was to write about the things that make us cry –what movie, TV show, book, etc. turns you into a blub­ber­ing baby every time you see it? Here’s a round-up of what they said:

• Flash­lights Are Some­thing to Eat always gets misty for The Rookie
• Toyriffic loses it over this Father and Daugh­ter ani­mated short by Michael de Wit
• Green Plas­tic Squirt Gun  tears up over  The Boy Who Could Fly

Fuck Yeah America!

One day, hun­dreds of years from now, when my gen­er­a­tion of cyn­i­cal, reli­gion­less ass­holes have given birth to whole new gen­er­a­tions of cyn­i­cal, reli­gion­less ass­holes, this will be America’s new national anthem:

You know, Amer­ica may not be a per­fect coun­try. We have an ongo­ing debt cri­sis, fail­ing edu­ca­tion, racism, sex­ism, any type of “ism” you can think of, really, and a bro­ken polit­i­cal sys­tem that polar­izes every issue. We’re a nation of enti­tled, self-righteous, hyp­o­crit­i­cal, fat slobs who value things like Tim Tebow and the iPad over real solu­tions to our own problems.

 But you know some­thing? I wouldn’t live any­where else. Whether I lean left, right, or choose not to give a shit, I’m thank­ful I live in a coun­try that lets me do it. And if you don’t like the way things are, you can always move to another state.

Kenny Pow­ers knows what I’m talk­ing about.

Finally, because there’s noth­ing more patri­otic than a large-breasted blonde pranc­ing around in a bikini to Dixie, and because I’ve been want­ing an excuse to post this clip any­way, here’s 60 sec­onds of Brid­get Fonda doing exactly that:

God bless America.

Other Patri­otic Posts from The League

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to write about   Patri­otic Pop Cul­ture –what are the things that make us want to stand up and salute Old Glory? Here’s a round-up of what they said:

• Green Plas­tic Squirt Gun likes Team Amer­ica too, just not the same one I do
• Branded in the 80s gets his Amer­i­can rocks off to the 1986 ani­mated G.I. Joe movie
• Infi­nite Hol­ly­wood thinks Hack­saw Jim Dug­gan is wrestling’s biggest patriot
• Ado­mo­tomy waxes nos­tal­gic over the Bomb Pop, one of my favorite child­hood ice cream truck treats (sec­ond only to my beloved  Fat Frog )

I’d Go ‘Overboard’ for Kurt Russell

Kurt Rus­sell: great actor or the great­est actor? That’s the ques­tion posed to The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers this week. Well, okay, to be hon­est I just made up that ques­tion. But we really are sup­posed to write about Kurt Rus­sell , even if you’re not a big Kurt Rus­sell fan or think he sucks–in which case you would, of course, be wrong.

Kurt Rus­sell is one of those ver­sa­tile actors who can play prac­ti­cally any role. The guy can do (and has done) every­thing from badass action movies ( Tomb­stone, Big Trou­ble in Lit­tle China ) to com­edy ( Cap­tain Ron , Tango & Cash ). Like Golden Cor­ral, he’s got some­thing for every­one. But I won’t drone on about how awe­some (even if awe­somely bad ) Kurt Russell’s movies are because I’m unfash­ion­ably late to this week’s League topic due to being on vaca­tion in Myr­tle Beach and every­one else has already beaten me to it.

So, in keep­ing with my run­ning theme of beach and ocean-themed posts this week, what I’d like to do instead is write about one of my per­sonal favorite Kurt Rus­sell movies, Over­board .

For those who have never seen it, it’s easy to dis­miss Over­board as cheesy roman­tic com­edy, which it is, com­plete with a Randy New­man song. But look a lit­tle closer and you’ll find a movie that’s hilar­i­ous on so many levels–and not just because it’s a reminder of every­thing embar­rass­ing from the ‘80s like frizzy perms, Pee-wee Her­man, and brick-sized cord­less phones. It’s got an absurd plot, a north­west small-town set­ting quirkier than Twin Peaks, and ridicu­lous but lov­able char­ac­ters who deliver extremely quote-able lines like:

• “Sorry, Annie. I got horny.”
• “Stop star­ing at me. Eat your checkers.”
• “Inga, you don’t shove the food down Shiitake’s throat, you place it on her tongue. Don’t they have dogs in Sweden?”
• “We say ‘Foca!’ ‘Foca’ means ‘seal’ in Portuguese.”
• “Tofuti… Tofuti where are you when I need you? Tofuti Klein-dein-dein-dein-dein…”

Or am I the only one who quotes this movie inces­santly? Okay, I’m get­ting ahead of myself here…

In Over­board , Kurt Rus­sell stars as Dean Prof­fitt, a lowly, down-on-his-luck car­pen­ter who’s also the sin­gle dad of four boys. One day a lux­ury yacht makes an emer­gency repair stop in the small, red­neck town of Elk Cove, Ore­gon, and it’s mega-rich, super­bitch owner Joanna Stay­ton (Goldie Hawn) hires Dean to remodel her closet on a whim. When he doesn’t do the job to her sat­is­fac­tion, she stiffs him on the pay­ment and pushes him over­board, along with all his tools.

Later that night, as the yacht leaves the har­bor, Joanna tries to retrieve her lost wed­ding ring from the deck but acci­den­tally falls over­board. She washes up on the Elk Cove garbage scow with a seri­ous case of amnesia–and since this is the most excit­ing thing hap­pen­ing in Elk Cove, it makes the local news. Dean Prof­fitt doesn’t waste any time tak­ing advan­tage of the sit­u­a­tion. In an attempt to get even with Joanna, he shows up at the local hos­pi­tal to claim her as his wife so he can bring her home and make her work off what she owes him. (Like I said, it’s ridiculous.*)

*Ridicu­lously  awe­some.

And because this is the ‘80s and any­thing goes in these movies, they obvi­ously end up falling in love. Even after Kurt Rus­sell deliv­ers an epic insult right to Goldie Hawn’s face:

Kurt Russell’s Guide to Bag­ging Mega-Rich Women with Amnesia

• Step 1: First, get a good, hard look at her ass while help­ing your­self to all the fancy food in her refrig­er­a­tor (to make sure she’s worth the effort). Come up with a highly con­vinc­ing fic­tional life his­tory. Accept­able embell­ish­ments include ter­ri­ble maiden names like “Goula­hee,” hav­ing grown up in a nuclear waste dump, and hang­ing out at Hank’s Donut World. Bring her home in the back of your dirty pickup truck (but it’s OK for your dogs to ride shotgun).
• Step 2: Learn Pho­to­shop (or ask a friend with Pho­to­shop skillz–preferably inter­rupt­ing him while he’s get­ting laid) so you can coun­ter­feit some wed­ding pho­tos to make her believe she deserves her shitty life in which you’ve pre­pared for her a list of house­hold chores as long as Edward Herrmann’s face and stolen all her ideas for your hill­billy minia­ture golf course. And make that bitch sleep on the couch!
• Step 3: ?????
• Step 4: PROFIT!!! Mrs. Annie Prof­fitt, that is. Hurr hurr.

How does Over­board only have a 6.4 rat­ing on IMDB? Come on, The Inter­net, this movie deserves at least a 6.5.

Other Kurt Rus­sell Awe­some­ness from The League:

• Clay­ma­tion Were­wolf and Kurt Rus­sell are ON A BOAT!!!
• The Man Who Stares at Toys prefers plas­tic Kurt Russell
• Movie Hodge Podge thinks Kurt Rus­sell is Disney’s great­est child star
• Dork Horde’s  Lite Brite skills put mine to shame
• That Fig­ures reveals 6 Things You Never Knew about Kurt Russell
• Adamo­tomy thinks Kurt Rus­sell thinks Val Kilmer sucks! (For the record, ShezCrafti thinks Val Kilmer is awesome.)
• Green Plas­tic Squirt Gun’s favorite Kurt Rus­sell movies don’t include Overboard :(

What ‘Pickers’ would be like if I spent a week with the hosts…

This week’s  assign­ment  from The League was to write about which of our favorite TV treasure-hunting show hosts we’d love to spend a week with and why.

I’m going with Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz from Amer­i­can Pick­ers :

It was an easy deci­sion for me, because I already had a ready-made answer in the form of this blog post that I wrote a few months ago, in which I describe my ideal treasuring-hunting TV show con­cept that I’ll re-post here:

“Pick­ers” for Gamers

You know the show  Amer­i­can Pick­ers  on the His­tory chan­nel? Well this would be  pretty much the same thing except a pair of nerds—the less socially skilled and more awk­ward the better—would go around to yard sales, liq­ui­da­tions, pri­vate col­lec­tors’ homes, maybe even Craigslist and Ebay in search of rare and valu­able video games and gam­ing col­lectibles. You know, stuff like the  Medieval Mad­ness  pin­ball table,  Air Raid  for Atari 2600, or the  Vir­tual Boy   (just kid­ding about that last one–nobody really wants one of those things).

On the real Pick­ers , hosts Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz nego­ti­ate to the point of high­way rob­bery. This show would be the oppo­site because gamers are sen­ti­men­tal fan­boys who are known to put things like rare, ridonku­lously expen­sive Neo Geo car­tridges ahead of their finan­cial future–which is part of the appeal too, so that we at home can all have a good laugh about it.

Work­ing Titles:

• Epic Looters
• Shit Gamers Will Pay Obscene Amounts of Money For

// end of re-post

But seri­ously, folks…

Pick­ers is a great show, but for me the for­mula tends to get old. If you’ve seen one rusty old bicy­cle part, you’ve seen them all. Of course, I don’t col­lect things like rusty old bicy­cle parts but I’m sure those types of finds are much more inter­est­ing to some­one who does. I watch Pick­ers  because some­how hosts Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz man­age to make things like rusty old bicy­cle parts a hell of a lot more inter­est­ing. And also to catch glimpses of their occa­sional gaming-related finds, like in that Sea­son 3 episode that was all about  vin­tage pin­ball machines .

I’d love to see Mike and Frank pick stuff like this:

Did you know the aver­age age of U.S. gamers is now 30 years old? I hap­pen to be a gamer and exactly 30, so I’d con­sider myself the tar­get demo­graphic for a show like the one I described above. There’s a whole gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple just like me out there with vast stock­piles of poten­tially rare or valu­able plas­tic things from Japan that we’re all try­ing to fig­ure out how to store or sell off to other nos­tal­gic gamers who have invested as much time and money in their col­lec­tions as the rest of us.

Mike Wolfe and Frank Fitz are the type of guys that’d be per­fect to send into the funky, uncharted depths of the aver­age video game hoarder’s nerd lair. I don’t know how they’re able to main­tain a straight face at some of the weird, tooth­less coun­try trolls they encounter with piles of ran­dom crap on their lawns big­ger than Space­ship Earth, but they han­dle it like pros. Just imag­ine how they’d inter­face with know-it-all, overly-territorial gamers. I bet nego­ti­at­ing wouldn’t be as easy.

That’s why I’d spend a week with the Pickers–to inject some much needed nerd­stal­gia and appre­ci­a­tion for vin­tage gam­ing into a show that’s miss­ing the boat on roughly 44% of the U.S. population.

Update 8/1/2012 — This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talk­ing about:

Leg­end of Zelda pro­to­type car­tridge goes to auc­tion for $150,000

Other Trea­sure Hunt­ing Tan­gents from The League

• Stor­age Wars 2.0 — Geek Till it Hurts
• David Dick­in­son of Bar­gain Hunt — Mem­o­ries of Toymorrow

My Top 10 Obscure But Awesome Teen Movies of the ‘80s

Yes­ter­day I took a big step for­ward for my nerdy lit­tle cor­ner of the web here–I joined The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers . You could call them the Super Friends of pop cul­ture bloggers.

This week’s assign­ment (my first!) was to come up with a Top 10 Movies list using any of our own themes or qual­i­fiers. I jumped right on it because I’ve been dying– DYING– to have an excuse to men­tion some of the obscure but awe­some ‘80s movies that I’m about to show you.

But first, let’s talk about what it is that makes these films “obscure.” When most peo­ple hear “80s teen films” they imme­di­ately think of John Hughes ( The Break­fast Club, Fer­ris Beuller’s Day Off ), pop­corn flicks that star Michael J. Fox ( Teen Wolf, Back to the Future ) or raunchy sex come­dies like Porky’s and  Fast Times at Ridge­mont High –all awe­some films, by the way. But for this teen movies list I wanted to focus on those lit­tle known (and con­se­quently under­rated) hid­den gems that I think deserve more attention.

So here they are, in no par­tic­u­lar order:

‘Three O’clock High’ — 1987

Three O’Clock High  is prob­a­bly the most well-known movie on this list, but I think it’s just obscure enough to still qual­ify. It’s exactly the right amount of obscure, if you will.

In case it’s not glar­ingly obvi­ous from the poster, it’s about a high school geek tak­ing on a high school bully. In other words, it’s a film we’ve all seen many times before.

The film takes place over a sin­gle day in the life of Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko), who offends trans­fer stu­dent and rumored psy­chopath Buddy Rev­ell (played by douchebag extra­or­di­naire Richard Tyson, whom you’ll prob­a­bly rec­og­nize as the bad guy from  Kinder­garten Cop)  when he acci­den­tally touches him. Buddy tells Jerry he’s going to beat the shit out of him in the park­ing lot at–you guessed it–three o’clock. What fol­lows is a series of des­per­ate acts where Jerry tries to do every­thing and any­thing in his power to avoid the confrontation.

Why It’s Awesome:

In short, the way it’s filmed. There’s all kinds of unusual cam­era angles, odd close-ups, slow-motion sequences, and other zany cam­era effects you wouldn’t expect but which are all used to great effect to mag­nify the sense of dread that Jerry Mitchell feels. The Tan­ger­ine Dream sound­track helps, too.

‘Just One of the Guys’ — 1985

This is one of those movies I’m always sur­prised when peo­ple tell me they’ve never heard of it, which is a thing that hap­pens so often to me (prob­a­bly because it’s my “go-to” ‘80s movie dis­cus­sion ice­breaker) that I felt oblig­ated to include it.  Just One of the Guys stars the beau­ti­ful if androg­y­nous Joyce Hyser as Terry Grif­fith, a pop­u­lar high school stu­dent who wants more than any­thing to be a jour­nal­ist. When her arti­cle for the school’s con­test to win a sum­mer intern­ship at the local news­pa­per is rejected, she believes the school’s sex­ist teachers–who don’t take “pretty girls” seri­ously as writers–are to blame. Her solu­tion? Trans­fer schools and dress up like a guy!

With the coach­ing of her sex-obsessed younger brother (played by the adorable Billy Jayne) and a wad of rolled-up socks, Terry (who con­ve­niently has a uni­sex name) gives her­self a trans­sex­ual makeover that could give Hilary Swank’s Oscar-winning role in  Boys Don’t Cry  a run for its money. Hilar­ity ensues as Terry ven­tures into for­bid­den places like the men’s bath­room, gets bul­lied by the local jocks, hit on by other girls, and befriends–and even­tu­ally falls in love–with shy music nerd Rick More­house (Clay­ton Rohner).

Why It’s Awesome:

The big reveal scene at the prom. It’s the best “TITS OR GTFO” moment ever in a movie, and Rick’s reac­tionary quote is one of my all-time favorites. Plus, for you Karate Kid fans, there’s William Zabka (Johnny of the Cobra Kai!) doing his trade­mark tough-guy douchebag thing.

‘Old Enough’ — 1984

Old Enough is your typ­i­cal “two friends from oppo­site walks of life” com­ing of age story (think Lit­tle Dar­lings ) but has enough charm and real­is­tic inno­cence to make it a stand­out; some­thing that’s largely due to the chem­istry between the two leads. Sarah Boyd stars as the wealthy but naive Lon­nie who meets scrappy but street­wise Karen (Rain­bow Har­vest, whose par­ents I sus­pect must have been hip­pies) one sum­mer day on the streets near her home in New York City. There’s an almost imme­di­ate infat­u­a­tion between the two girls, who quickly become unlikely friends.

Lon­nie ditches sum­mer camp to hang out with Karen, who teaches her about things like boys, make-up and shoplift­ing, and in return Lon­nie tries to impress her own morals and upbring­ing. The whole film only takes place over a cou­ple of days, but in that time each girl does quite a bit of grow­ing up and the expe­ri­ence feels gen­uine. Along the way they have a few mis­ad­ven­tures, dis­agree­ments, awk­ward social sit­u­a­tions, and laughs. Noth­ing really earth-shattering ever hap­pens; the film is sim­ply a chron­i­cle of a few days in these two young girl’s lives.

Have you ever gone away some­where and met some­one you felt you really con­nected with only to never hear from them again–but you’ll always look back and remem­ber them fondly? That’s kind of what Old Enough  is like. If you don’t like slowly-paced char­ac­ter stud­ies, steer clear of this one. But if you give it a chance, you just might find your­self becom­ing mes­mer­ized by the act­ing and scenery as I did.

Why It’s Awesome:

Old Enough  is filmed entirely on loca­tion in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, so you’re treated to a great sum­mer­time walk­ing tour of this part of the city. I love, love, love movies that take place in New York City, espe­cially movies that take place in the eight­ies  in New York City (blame my Ninja Tur­tles obses­sion if you must). Also, you get to see Alyssa Milano in her first movie as an adorable eight year old. She plays Lonnie’s lit­tle sis­ter and lends some much-needed cute­ness and light comic relief, as some of the scenes get pretty angsty. Oh, and I almost for­got to men­tion the seri­ously synth-tastic score!

‘White Water Sum­mer’ — 1987

Speak­ing of sum­mer camp and com­ing of age sto­ries, White Water Sum­mer is another teen movie you should know about if you enjoy that sort of thing. It stars Kevin Bacon as Vic, a rather creepy wilder­ness guide hired by the wealthy par­ents of a young, intro­verted city boy named Alan ( Goonies-era  Sean Astin!) to accom­pany him and and three other boys on their first wilder­ness expe­ri­ence. Vic is a skilled “sur­vivor man” who’s good at what he does, but has some­thing of a pushy camp counselor/big brother com­plex that he takes to extremes. He wants to make men out of his shel­tered, socially awk­ward recruits but his ego and over-abuse of author­ity turns what should be a fun hik­ing trip into their worst nightmare.

Why It’s Awesome:

It’s Kevin Fuck­ing Bacon .  Even bet­ter, it’s  creepy  Kevin Bacon which is exactly how I like my Bacon. It also has a great sound­track fea­tur­ing music from Cut­ting Crew, Bruce Hornsby, The Cult and Jour­ney that evokes exactly the right feel­ing of “Hey, look at us young, vir­ile bunch of guys hik­ing around in the woods and doing cool out­doorsy stuff in the sum­mer of ’87!” feel­ing you’d expect from a film like this. If you’re a nature enthu­si­ast you’ll also appre­ci­ate the rugged scenery, as much of it was actu­ally filmed in New Zealand (surprise!).

‘Nice Girls Don’t Explode’ — 1987

Wow… Where do I even start with this one? I’m going to go out on a limb and esti­mate that at least 95% of you read­ing this have never heard of Nice Girls Don’t Explode . I know you’re already think­ing “Holy crap that’s an awe­some movie title!” and you’re right. The premise is even more awe­some: April Flow­ers (great name, huh?) is a teenage girl with a very “spe­cial prob­lem.” That is, when April gets inti­mate with men she explodes!

Except not really. You see, April’s mother, who loves her lit­tle girl more than any­thing and doesn’t want her to be swept away by some man, has con­vinced April from the time she was a child that her hor­mones are all out of whack. She tells April she’s a “fire girl,” whose hor­mones can ignite fires when aroused and there­fore she’ll never be able to get too close to men. How does she man­age to con­vince April of some­thing so ridicu­lous? By ignit­ing the fires her­self, of course.

April’s mom isn’t exactly what you’d call nor­mal, either. She has aban­don­ment issues and some­thing of a June Cleaver com­plex, spend­ing her days metic­u­lously keep­ing house and bak­ing oat­meal cook­ies. Oh yeah, and craft­ing bombs in her kitchen! She stalks April on her dates and uses a remote con­trol to set off fires when­ever things get too steamy, usu­ally to the effect of April never hear­ing from her dates again. But things begin to change when Andy, April’s child­hood sweet­heart, comes back into her life.

Why It’s Awesome:

To really appre­ci­ate this movie, you’ll need to keep your expec­ta­tions in check because I must warn you that it is extremely low bud­get. That being said, there is still plenty of awe­some here. For one thing it stars Michelle Meyrink (whom you might remem­ber hav­ing a nerd crush on in Real Genius ) as April; she’s an actress I always wished did more things. “Mom” (you gotta love that she has no other name beyond that) is played by an extremely coy Bar­bara Har­ris who is so good at being such a smug bitch and at the same time you can’t help but love her. But the best part has to be Wal­lace Shawn (“Incon­ceiv­able!”), the quirky, socially awk­ward pyro­ma­niac whom I guess you could describe as April’s mom’s bomb dealer. His scenes are hilar­i­ous and com­pletely steal the movie.

I also think it’s worth men­tion­ing that the set design and dec­o­ra­tion for this movie (if you’re the type who appre­ci­ates such things) is fan­tas­tic. I love the lit­tle details like the cookie mag­nets on Mom’s fridge, her mid-80s era orange Tup­per­ware, and the bal­le­rina dolls in April’s bed­room.  The film is like a per­fect time cap­sule of 1980s sub­ur­bia, and you can tell they they did the best they could with it.

‘The Last Amer­i­can Vir­gin’ — 1982

Atten­tion ‘80s music fans: please direct your eyes to the below poster for  all the rea­sons you need to see The Last Amer­i­can Vir­gin :

For the rest of you who came for the tits and cheese­ball com­edy, The Last Amer­i­can Vir­gin is like an early Amer­i­can Pie –it’s about a cou­ple of horny high school guys who just want to get laid.  Gary and his bud­dies Ricky and David are look­ing for love in all the wrong places until Gary meets a beau­ti­ful new stu­dent named Karen (Diane Franklin, who despite hav­ing an over­grown almost-unibrow was blessed with incred­i­bly allur­ing eyes– JUST LOOK AT THEM! –and man­ages to some­how be insanely attrac­tive) who isn’t as inno­cent as she comes off.

Gary soon finds him­self com­pet­ing against his best friend in a love tri­an­gle for Karen’s affec­tion, lead­ing to some of the most angsty teen melo­drama (you know, the good stuff) you’ll find in a movie that’s sup­posed to be a raunchy ‘80s teen com­edy. What sets TLAV apart, though, is that it has a com­pletely unex­pected “WTF!?” end­ing that will ruin your day. It’s like the film­mak­ers were all, “Oh, you were expect­ing a happy end­ing? Well fuck you.”

Why It’s Awesome:

Didn’t I just tell you?

‘A Night in the Life of Jimmy Rear­don’ — 1988

Unless you’re a die-hard River Phoenix fan, A Night in the Life of Jimmy Rear­don  prob­a­bly won’t be famil­iar to you. (By the way, if you do describe your­self as a “die-hard River Phoenix fan,” say hello or some­thing because I need to know you). Like I alluded to in my Last Amer­i­can Vir­gin  syn­op­sis above, Jimmy Rear­don is a film that suf­fers from being mar­keted as some­thing dif­fer­ent than what it actu­ally is. I mean, just look how stu­pid happy every­one appears to be on this poster:

The actual movie is kind of a downer in the same way that What’s Eat­ing Gilbert Grape? is. It’s a mature com­ing of age film, not the shiny, happy but mind­less teen film the pack­ag­ing leads you to believe. There’s quirky char­ac­ters and funny dia­logue but everyone’s kind of an ass­hole with depress­ing life problems.

Jimmy is a rather jaded young man who’s try­ing to fig­ure his life out while he smokes and sexes his way through it. He’s actu­ally kind of a jerk, but he writes poetry (see? he’s sen­si­tive!) and doesn’t want to end up like his dad. The movie chron­i­cles a night (and unfor­tu­nate acci­dent) that will become a major turn­ing point in his life as he tries to find love and make peace with his father.

Why It’s Awesome:

How many direc­tors do you know who wrote a semi-autobiographical novel and then directed a movie ver­sion? William Reichert did.   He made this movie at the height of River Phoenix’s career and although it wasn’t a very pop­u­lar or suc­cess­ful film (for many rea­sons beyond the director’s con­trol) it’s an impres­sive demon­stra­tion of his act­ing range and abil­ity. Plus, you get to see two incred­i­bly attrac­tive young peo­ple, Ione Skye and River Phoenix, get­ting it on. So there’s that…

‘Seven Min­utes in Heaven’ — 1985

If you think Labyrinth was the only awe­some film Jen­nifer Con­nelly made in the ‘80s, you prob­a­bly haven’t seen Seven Min­utes in Heaven  (I’d also point you toward Argento’s hor­ror film Phe­nom­ena  from the same year).

Jen­nifer Con­nelly stars as Natalie, a mature and stu­dious teen girl whose father is away for a few weeks on a busi­ness trip. Her good friend Jeff (Byron Thames), who’s kind of a dork, talks her into let­ting him move in because his home life sucks. Mean­while, Natalie’s other good friend Polly (played by Mad­die Cor­man) is obsessed with boys and throws her­self at a famous base­ball player. You might think this all sounds like a wild house party just wait­ing to hap­pen, but you’d be wrong. Rather, the film is an exam­i­na­tion of the types of sit­u­a­tions young peo­ple encounter on their way to becom­ing adults. The per­for­mances are out­stand­ing and sur­pris­ingly honest.

(Side­bar: What’s with all these idi­otic par­ents in ‘80s movies leav­ing their teen kids home alone for weeks at a time? I’m look­ing at you  Risky Busi­ness  and  Just One of the Guys!  I’m not com­plain­ing, though, because it makes for inter­est­ing plots. )

Why It’s Awesome:

Seven Min­utes in Heaven is a great lit­tle slice of ‘80s teen dram­edy that explores the friend­ship between three high school­ers and their blos­som­ing sex­u­al­ity. If you love movies like  Pretty in Pink  and  Some Kind of Won­der­ful , this is right up there with them.

‘For Keeps’ — 1988

An ‘80s teen film star­ring Molly Ring­wald that isn’t directed by John Hughes or called  Fresh Horses ? DO GO ON!

For Keeps is the one about high school preg­nancy where she gets knocked up by her boyfriend and they have to decide what to do about the baby. It’s a film that tack­les young love on the rocks, a promised career cut short, abor­tion, adop­tion, post­par­tum depres­sion, fam­ily drama, and all man­ner of other unpleas­ant things that go along with los­ing your child­hood too soon.

Why It’s Awesome:

Because it’s a much more accu­rate and hon­est depic­tion of the real­i­ties of teen preg­nancy ver­sus films like Juno where wealthy young cou­ples mag­i­cally mate­ri­al­ize to adopt your baby and all is for­given by being a cute, quirky hip­ster. And Molly Ringwald’s per­for­mance is phenomenal.

‘Teen Witch’ — 1989

Teen Witch  is one of those movies you watch because it’s SO AWESOMELY BAD that it’s some­how good.

As far as ‘80s movies go, Teen Witch arrived at the tail end of the decade after all the good teen movies had come and gone, the hun­gover house party guests were leav­ing, and the more seri­ous era of the early ‘90s were upon us.  It’s as if the ‘80s were des­per­ately cling­ing to what­ever was left and hurled them­selves directly at this movie.  Teen Witch  is an ‘80s fan­tasy movie that has the hair, the fash­ion, the req­ui­site flimsy premise, and a bunch of ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble, pop songs you should never lis­ten to out­side of watch­ing this movie.

And it has this God-awful poster and tagline, too:

Louise Miller (Robin Lively–hey, remem­ber her from Karate Kid 3 ?) is a shy, nerdy high school girl who learns one day that she’s descended from the witches of Salem and has inher­ited mag­i­cal powers…which dis­ap­point­ingly only seem to work when she’s wear­ing her mag­i­cal amulet. With the help of an expe­ri­enced witch/fortune teller Madame Ser­ena (Zelda Rubin­stein), she uses her pow­ers to make her­self more pop­u­lar and win the heart of the high school foot­ball cap­tain. But her upgraded social sta­tus almost comes at the price of her best friend Polly’s friend­ship, and Louise begins to ques­tion if its right to cheat her way to popularity.

Why It’s Awesome:

Because it has out­ra­geously cheesy song & dance num­bers like this , this , and this . And who doesn’t love Zelda “Come into the light Carol Ann!” Rubin­stein? Nobody, that’s who.

Final Thoughts

Yes, I real­ize some of these movies are way more obscure than oth­ers, but that’s okay. If this list of ‘80s teen films has intro­duced you to at least one movie you’ve never heard of that looks even mildly awe­some, I will con­sider my mis­sion accomplished!

Other Top 10s from The League:

• Top 10 Movies Fea­tur­ing Time Travel — Cav­al­cade of Awesome
• Top 10 80s Action Movies — Movie Hodge Podge
• Top 10 Mon­key Movies — Cool and Collected
• FASTE’s Top 10 Movies — Flash­lights Are Some­thing To Eat