Cruel Summer 2018

Below are five more ancient TV commercials, plucked from my ginormous pile of dusty tapes. May they make you 10% happier for 2.5 minutes. Child’s Play 3! (1991) In terms of horror, the Child’s Play franchise was my first love. I was a late bloomer with a weak stomach, but Chucky al

I’m here to tell you about the sexiest Pepsi can ever. That’s it, right there. It was one of the four Pepsi “Cool Cans” released in the summer of 1990. The soda was the same, but the cans were given various pop art makeovers to make them more attractive to younger demos. Special ed

Y’all heard the news about Funko’s amazing line of cereals, right? They all look interesting, but two were of particular interest to me. You can probably guess which! Yep, we now have officially licensed Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees BREAKFAST CEREALS. I still can’t believe it. I

In November of 1989, Pizza Hut began selling funky sunglasses to promote the release of Back to the Future Part II. As a ten-year-old who liked Marty McFly, pizza and funky sunglasses, I was all the hell in on it. They were called SOLAR SHADES, and they were AMAZING. Meant to wink at the f

I didn’t want to let the summer slip by without hitting a flea market at least once, so this past Saturday, I braved the sun and swore to never do that again. The Englishtown flea market in New Jersey did not disappoint. It rarely does. This is the same flea market I’ve written about m

To tie in with Dino Drac’s Cruel Summer event, everything featured in this edition of Five Retro TV Commercials has something to do with summertime. Or cruelty. Get set for ice cream, fried chicken and water-squirting robot men! Butterfinger Ice Cream Bars! (1991) I was never big on Butt

Remember last year when I showed you some pages from my 1992 diary? Well, here’s the 1993 version: That’s the diary, right there. Or “journal,” because diaries were for girls, I guess? I kept this one during the summer of ’93. I was 14, though the book reads like it was writt

Captain Pollution is the best thing that ever came out of the Captain Planet universe. Fight me. There’s my dude. Captain Planet’s evil double, which is pretty much my all-time favorite trope. Powered by pollution and sounding like a dickhead version of Michelangelo, Captain Pollution

To keep this edition of Five Random Action Figures on-brand for Cruel Summer, I will only feature figures that have some tangential tie to the season. Enjoy! Mike, The Sewer Surfer! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) This screwball Michelangelo was from a set of TMNT figures that gave our

I love popcorn! I love popcorn so much that I get extraordinarily excited when it turns up in movies. Especially horror movies, where it often becomes a prop in bizarre murders involving alien clowns or unreasonably toxic spiders. Below: Five scenes from horror movies that feature popcorn.

It is my great honor to introduce you to the coolest thing on Earth: THE JAWS BAR. If you listened to the last Purple Stuff episode, you heard us gush about these incredible shark-shaped treats, which are made in South Korea. So did our friend Nicole, who discovered that they were actually

Guys! I found the perfect subject for Cruel Summer’s first video: That thing. A Talking Cryptkeeper doll from 1993, where our pal is randomly dressed like a beach bum. Dude could be the mascot for Cruel Summer. Here’s everything you need to know about this sunny savage, in just under f

I’ve owned more Happy Meal sets than I can remember, but only a few transcended the novelty of “free toys.” Getting plastic baubles with my McNuggets was always welcome, but on certain occasions, those plastic baubles were my total reasons for being. The Super Mario Bros. 3 Happy Mea

Dino Drac’s CRUEL SUMMER… has begun! WATCH IN HD ON YOUTUBE! Consider this my attempt to rediscover the joys of summer, because I gotta tell ya, it’s been my least favorite season for years now. The heat! The traffic! Those bugs! We spend our youth thinking of summer as a two-month b

Nothing screams “summertime” quite like ice cream. Except maybe the beach, or fireworks, or big gross slices of watermelon. Ice cream still gets my vote. To kick off our summer season, The Purple Stuff Podcast’s newest episode is all about ice cream. (Well, ice cream and frozen treat