Nickelodeon Gak: Halloween Editions!
“Gak,” originally a nickname for the slime used on Double Dare, first hit the retail market in the early ‘90s. From then on, the sludgy plaything slid in and out of production, always returning with new colors and weirder upgrades.
But over the last few years, Nickelodeon’s legion of gloppy toys have become more permanently available. From “Green Slime” to “Floam,” you won’t have much trouble tracking any of them down. This includes Gak, of course.
The benefit to this increased availability is Nickelodeon’s need to constantly reinvent themselves. After all, it’d get pretty boring to buy the same old Gak month after month. So, we get things like this…
Halloween Gak, in two terrific styles! (The white Gak in the skull container has been available in the past, but I’ve definitely never seen that pumpkin Gak before.)
You could argue that only fundamental difference between Halloween Gak and regular Gak is the shape of the plastic container, and I guess you’d be right. But isn’t that enough? Read More…
“Chamber of Horrors” Halloween Tape!
This is going to be one of the shorter Halloween Countdown entries, but make no mistake, today’s subject means as much to me as anything else I’ve covered.
From 1988, it’s the famous/infamous Chamber of Horrors cassette, which I’m sure will be immediately recognizable to a fair chunk of you. “Halloween sound effect tapes” were October mainstays at card stores and bric-a-brac shops, but this specific one REALLY got around.
Since a relative few used the tapes for any on-the-nose purpose, I can’t accurately claim that they were “necessities” of their era. Still, we all had them. Even if you didn’t have this one, I’m sure you had one like it. And if you were anything like me, you devised some pretty strange uses for it.
By and large, tapes like these included one long string of — for lack of a better term — Halloween garbage. Music mixed with howls mixed with creeping door sound effects. Flapping bat wings, ominous moans and rattling chains. Things like that.
There were two primary purposes for them. One, you could throw it on as background noise at a Halloween party. Two, you could blast it from your porch to give the decorations on your front lawn a boost of audible spookiness. (Just by looking at this tape, so many memories of cardboard graveyards come flooding back.)
I bought this cassette a while back, confident that it was the same one I grew up with, but not positive. As soon as I listened to the first five seconds, I knew I had the right tape. Read More…
Classic Creepy Commercials – Volume 6!
It’s time for Volume 6 of Classic Creepy Commercials, and wowza, what a great batch this is! Just a perfect mix of Halloween nostalgia and absurd spookiness, along with at least one instance of Troll dolls shooting missiles at each other. Maybe two.
I’m giving you six ads this time. The first three come from our hero, Larry P, whose collection of spooky commercials never fails to thrill us. The second three come from my buddy Spencer, who so generously dived into his own archive to add to the pile. Thanks, guys!
Meineke “Monsters” Commercial! (1988)
The best thing about this Meineke commercial is that it has absolutely no reason to include monsters. They don’t tie in with any weirdly-named promotions, or even a tagline. They’re just there. Thank God!
Meineke’s countless ads made me aware of mufflers long before I had any idea what purpose they served. It’s hard to believe that any kid would pay attention to a muffler commercial, but Meineke’s were pretty memorable. And sometimes strange. The ads never reached a Geico-level of irreverence, but the people who made them clearly had bigger aspirations. You don’t put movie quality monsters in a muffler commercial unless you’re dreaming of the big leagues.
Our monsters include the Invisible Man and a seriously bitchin’ mummy. (The mummy is so top notch that I must’ve been slightly afraid of this commercial back in ‘88.) Because they were interested in buying mufflers, we must assume that these monsters drove cars. Not such a stretch in the Invisible Man’s case, but just imagine that mummy cruising down the interstate, bopping his head to Belinda Carlisle. Read More…
Halloween Kid Cuisine is back!
So as a matter of full disclosure, I know that only 2% of you are at all interested in reading about a Kid Cuisine microwave dinner — even if is Halloween themed. Still, I do the Halloween Countdown as much for me as for you, and I cannot tell a lie: I’m super excited about this.
Even if I don’t eat Kid Cuisines, I’m such a fan of the concept. If I was the right age, and if my parents had loose rules on what I was allowed to swallow, I’d be all over them. They aren’t fundamentally different from what people imagine as a classic “TV dinner,” but with clever food shapes, colorful boxes and a long string of ties to kid-targeted movies and TV shows, Kid Cuisine lives up to its name.
I first noticed the Halloween editions back in 2003, and have been tracking them ever since. ConAgra doesn’t make them every year (the last time I saw them was in 2011), but whenever they do pop up, I can’t resist buying one. Maybe I wouldn’t if I didn’t have a dumb blog to showcase them on, but hey, that’s why I run Dinosaur Dracula. It’s my excuse to enjoy things that aren’t meant for me. Read More…