Nine Gnarly Horror Wikis.
If you’ve ever looked something up on Wikipedia and wanted more information than its editors would allow, the good news is that there are dedicated wikis for practically everything these days. These wikis often lack the speed and crowd-edited finesse of Wikipedia, but they make up for it where it counts: Superfluous entries on inconsequential nonsense!
For proof, look no further than the horror genre. Every major franchise has its own wiki. Even franchises than only ten people care about have them. If you’re the type of horror-loving trivia-gobbler who likes to keep reading until unconsciousness happens organically, these wikis are a positively blessed find.
I’ve collected nine of my favorites below — but please note that this barely scratches the surface!
All of these wikis are hosted on Wikia, a site that lets anyone build an online encyclopedia for free. The trade-off is that the pages are covered in resource-draining ads. Before you start browsing, I’d suggest creating an account on Wikia. Logging in seems to limit the ads somewhat, and you’ll only need one login for all of the wikis featured below!
The next time you’re wide awake on a stormy night with an emptied DVR and no one to talk to, give one of these a try.
#1: Description: A celebration of All Things Friday the 13th, with the strongest emphasis (obviously) on the films. While the pages on each movie are really no more thorough than what you can already find on Wikipedia, the Friday the 13th Wiki shines in its extracurriculars: There are entries on every major character (and minor) character, not to mention pages for the semi-canonical novels and comics.
Size: Currently over 430 pages, so even considering the many “stubs,” there’s a lot to read.
Appearance: White text on a gray background may kill your eyes after a few hours, but it does set the mood. Uses cool F13 images liberally.
Thoughts: Though missing some neat bits — there are no pages for the various toys, for example — the wiki is still so packed that even super devoted F13 fans are sure to learn something new. Many horror wikis are left abandoned after only a few days’ worth of work, but this one is still regularly updated.
Notable Pages: Learn about Roy Burns, who pretended to be Jason Voorhees so he could kill people more freely. Read a summary of the Friday the 13th Part 2 novelization, which believe it or not actually exists. Get the scoop on Jason’s appearance in Mortal Kombat, which pieces together every hint of inspiration to explain why he looks… the way he looks. Read More…
Five Random Action Figures, Part 19!
In this edition of Five Random Action Figures, I’m standing up for the little guy.
Smaller figures just had so many plusses! Because they were sold in multipacks and were individually cheaper than “regular” action figures, it was easier to build armies, and very easy to convince ourselves that we had to collect all of them. In effect, we treated little figures much in the same way we did trading cards: Quality was nice, but quantity was better.
In 2015, there are several popular toy lines banking big on their dwarfishness, from Squinkies to The Trash Pack. All of those lines owe a huge thanks to the ones featured here. These older weirdos were the pioneers!
The Claw!
M.U.S.C.L.E., 1985
To me, M.U.S.C.L.E. will always be the gold standard for “little figures,” forever imitated but never duplicated. I’ve written about my fondness for M.U.S.C.L.E. before, but stopped short of naming my favorite figure in the set.
It’s this guy. It’s gotta be this guy. Before anyone chimes in with Claw’s real name from his Japanese Kinnikuman origins, I’ll remind you that kids in the States largely had no idea about that stuff. Most of us named the wrestlers as we went, and accepted their visual personas at face value. If one of them was a claw with a face, that’s all he was.
Every M.U.S.C.L.E. figure was weird by our standards, but Claw was weird even by M.U.S.C.L.E. standards. He was literally just a sentient hand, one whose methods of locomotion must’ve been similar to that of a banana slug.
Only serious M.U.S.C.L.E. collectors are aware of the super rare (and often even stranger) figures. For the rest of us, Claw seems way in the lead as the fan favorite. Read More…
In 1991, I turned our shed into a clubhouse.
Last weekend, we attempted to help my mother tidy up her shed. It turned into quite the ordeal.
It seemed as though nobody had been in the shed since my father died, and that was close to ten years ago. Only, that’s not entirely true: A closer inspection revealed that the shed had been visited quite frequently — by birds and bugs, and probably raccoons.
If it looks a little big for a shed: It is. My father was an architect who knew how to build, and what made him successful at work made him an absolute terror at home. Every room in our house had been pummeled and rebuilt five times over, sometimes for the sake of improvements, but more often because my father just wasn’t happy unless he was remodeling something.
Eventually, our house hit a point where even he had to admit that any additional wall-smashing would’ve been excessive. So he took the show on the road. When it came time to replace our shed — one of those modest metal things that you’ve all seen a zillion times — he decided to just build one himself.
Well, sort of. What he built was less a shed and more a studio apartment. I mean, not really, because it didn’t have a bathroom or a sink. But this “shed” was certainly large enough to double as a bedroom. It even had electricity. In its day, it looked nice and was another in his long string of impressive constructional achievements, but I can say with all certainty that we didn’t NEED a shed like this.
And this recent visit was a reminder of how nicely that worked out for me. Read More…
Eight Great Trading Cards.
Today on Dino Drac: 1500 words about eight old trading cards. I’d like to say that I give people what they want, but nobody asked for this.
The eight cards are from eight entirely different sets, spanning from the late ‘70s to the mid ‘90s. If you can stand a site like Dino Drac, there’s a good chance that you collected at least one of these sets.
May this article help you remember a time when there was nothing sweeter than curling up next to a heating vent to read the backs of Batman trading cards. Fifty cents went so far!
“Robocop… Triumphant!”
Robocop 2 (Topps, 1990)
I posted this card on Twitter yesterday, and y’all seem just as impressed as I was. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this card does depict the scene where Robocop tears out Cain’s brain stem. That’s a special kind of “holy shit.”
The Robocop 2 set pulled no punches — the cards were full of gore, and Topps made no effort to neutralize it for kids. With today’s checks and balances, a set like this would never get approved.
That was one of the thrills of collecting sets like this in the ‘80s and ‘90s. No matter how strict your parents were about R-rated movies and “mature” entertainment, they were unlikely to pay much attention to trading cards. We all amassed huge piles of suggested sex and outright gore, and the fact that we weren’t necessarily ready to absorb such things made the cards all the more… what’s the word… invigorating? Read More…