The True Legends “Tree Warrior.”
Okay guys, we need to talk about Tree Warrior.
Tree Warrior is part of the True Legends line, a collection of low cost, lower quality fantasy toys.
If you’re a TRU hound, you’ve probably seen their aisle full of True Legends offerings, ranging from battle-ready elves to giant neon dragons. The toys cut a few corners to make sense of their fantastically low retail prices, but the themes are great and they really do look good.
I was happy enough to admire them from afar, but there’s just no turning down Tree Warrior. Someone on Facebook gave me the tip, and I would’ve gladly spent triple what Toys “R” Us wanted. (A mere ten bucks!) Read More…
French Toast Crunch is back!
I know I’m late on the draw and that 99% of you have already heard the news, but for the remaining 1%: French Toast Crunch is back!
It’s true!
The cereal debuted in 1995 but was discontinued in 2006. From then until now, you could only find French Toast Crunch on “DO YOU REMEMBER EATING THESE?” listicles, sandwiched between photos that were callously stolen from Dino Drac.
General Mills didn’t just catch wind of the growing nostalgia — they made it their main selling point. French Toast Crunch is being marketed almost as a relic, celebrated not just for what it is, but for the bygone years it reminds us of.
(And I’m down with that. With so many of the recent junk food revivals, that’s secretly been the point. Why not just come out and say it?)
The box design is mostly unchanged, with the same fiery red background and the same perfectly arranged spoonful of cereal. Read More…
Extremely Old Bubble Gum.
Tonight’s random topic: BUBBLE GUM. Very old bubble gum that I spent too much money on. Turning frivolous purchases into Dino Drac content is my eternal salvation, so here we are.
Below: Five bubble gum brands from the ‘80s and ‘90s. May they help you remember a time when perusing the candy rack at your local deli meant everything in the world.
While Ouch (properly styled as “OUCH!”) still exists in a less-interesting form, this is the original version. Made in the early ‘90s, Ouch was like a less flashy Fruit Stripe. In truth, the gum couldn’t have mattered less. The real reason everyone bought it was for the insanely cool packaging.
Sold in tins meant to look like Band-Aid containers, each stick was wrapped in a bandage-like wrapper. “Band-Aid gum” doesn’t sound immediately thrilling, but the draw was in carrying around blazingly pink aluminum tins. That was our version of “accessorizing.”
The best part was how you could repurpose the tins after the gum was finished. I’m sure a great many of you will look at that photo and remember how well they worked as portable coin banks. Read More…
Saturday Television of a Misspent Youth.
Back in junior high, I spent a lot of my free time alone. I don’t mean that to sound maudlin; I had friends, and we’d hang out often enough. Thing was, we had few common interests, and whenever they ran off to do whatever normal boys did, I hid at home.
This was during the early ‘90s, and I can’t sugarcoat it: Those were pretty lonely times. My experiences certainly weren’t unique, as I’m sure a lot of you were also victims of demographics, living in neighborhoods where, God dammit, not one other person was anything like you.
I made plenty of friends in high school — many of whom drove — and suddenly those years spent bored and bewildered were just a part of my past. I didn’t miss them then, but the weird thing is how much I miss them now.
A quiet freedom (literal and figurative) comes with solitude, and I can’t help but idealize those long ago weekends, when I threw myself into hobbies and discovered everything that made me tick. I’ve spent my whole life dabbling in obsessions, but most of my truest passions were defined in that era. (And I know that they’re the truest, because I had no audience.)
The bulk of those weekends were spent in my bedroom, which was less a “bedroom” and more my own personalized ecosphere. It wasn’t just a place to sleep — it was a place to live. In there was access to everything that kept me sane, from toys to videos to Nintendos to back issues of Starlog. The walls were covered with pleasant sights, the shelves topped with plastic joy. There you’d find me filling out order slips for vintage Star Wars collectibles, reading books about sharks, and drawing bad ripoffs of The Infinity Gauntlet. I didn’t know it, but I was happy.
I watched a lot of TV on those weekends, on a half-fritzed hand-me-down with perpetual fuzz and three of the buttons missing. Nothing makes me remember that time of my life quite like those old shows.
In a sense, those weekend programs were my friends, dropping by to provide me with much-needed distractions. I counted on them, big time. I’m not talking about Saturday morning cartoons, either — I was already a little old for those, and besides, it’s okay if Saturday mornings are boring. It wasn’t until late afternoon that joining the Little League started to seem like a good idea.
In the early ‘90s, weekend programming on network television was… interesting. There you’d find made-for-syndication sitcoms that never played on weekdays, stuck in horrible Saturday timeslots that guaranteed audiences no larger than two dozen. By late afternoon, the more popular syndicated shows would get their first-runs. Finally, in the dark of night, there was my beloved parade of eerier entries that made going to sleep with the lights off tough.
Below are six examples. At the time, none of these shows were anything approaching my “favorites.” I started watching them simply because they were the best case scenarios. Every single one of them reminds of those lost ‘90s weekends, when I was stuck in my bedroom to stew-or-swim. Seeing a mere snippet of any of them makes me feel simultaneously depressed and inspired, as impossible as that sounds. Read More…