Video: Sugar Cookie Pebbles Cereal!
The 2013 Christmas season hasn’t been especially hot for weird food, but if you look hard enough, there are a few big time players.
Like this one, for example. Post’s Pebbles cereal with a limited edition SUGAR COOKIE flavor. It looks good, it tastes good, and the box features Dino wearing Grinch dog antlers. I have exactly zero complaints.
Get the whole story in this sickly sweet video review:
For the life of me, I could not find this in stores. Still haven’t. I got so fed up with the fruitless department store runs that I gave in and ordered it from some third party seller on Amazon. If you’re dying for a box, try there!
Freezy Freakies: Gloves of Glory.
Freezy Freakies. The one time I had any opinion at all about gloves.
Made by Swany, they were decorated with everything ‘80s kids cared about, like robots and jets, and cute little animals. On that merit alone, they were destined for big things. 99% of gloves were boring, and if a child had to pick between normal gloves and GLOVES WITH ROBOTS, well, duh.
But that wasn’t the half of it. The real reason Freezy Freakies became so legendary is that they had magical powers. See, only when you wore the gloves outside would their cartoony symbols fully materialize.
This bizarre old commercial tells the story:
In the house, your Freezy Freakies might have had the image of a rocket ship on them. Sounds okay, but check this: Once you got those fuckers outside, the rocket ships grew blazing red exhaust trails.
Don’t pretend like you don’t want to clap.
Okay, yeah, if you weren’t a part of the fad, I guess they wouldn’t seem like such a big deal. Believe me, they were. Those gloves marked my first-ever interest in fashion. You could’ve dressed me in mismatched sneakers and a shirt that said “My Life Is Bingo,” and I wouldn’t have cared. But GOD HELP YOU if you sent me onto the snowball battlefield without Freezy Freakies.
Me, my friends, we all had them. I don’t know who started the trend, but once Freezy Freakies turned up in our neighborhood, none of us wanted to be the jerk without ’em.
A snowstorm isn’t a good time to be the odd man out. Not when you’re seven, at least. Everyone liked a good snowball fight, but we liked unfair snowball fights even more. The ones when you totally outnumbered your opponents. There was no quicker way to make five antsy boys throw snow at you than to be the only kid out there without color-changing gloves. It was like walking into Crips HQ without the blue bandana. Read More…
Christmas, 1988. A Photo Journey.
Christmas Eve, 1988.
I was nine years old.
Our whole giant family spent most of the day in the dining room, like we always did on Christmas Eve.
Actually, it wasn’t just the dining room. That dining room wouldn’t have fit even half of us. Instead, our regular table was joined by two folding tables, effectively spreading the disease that was us to the entire living room. Even then, a few people had to eat in the kitchen.
The tables are what I remember most about those parties. They were such glorious messes!
Even with the three tables lined up to form one Super Table, you could still identify the components by their tablecloths. In 1988, one was white, one was red, and the third was green.
The main table was reserved for my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. It was always covered in strange liqueurs and burnt walnut shells. If you wanted cigarettes or punchlines you’d never get, you visited Table 1.
The middle table was for my older siblings and cousins, plus their significant others. There were never enough seats for everyone who had the arguable right to sit there. It was first come, first serve, and extremely competitive. If you left the table for too long, you lost your seat. Table 2 always felt the most alive.
The third table, not shown in this photo, was where I would’ve been. That was the table for kids, and for the people who didn’t have enough fight in them to make it to Table 2.
Even though we were all technically sitting at one big THING, the different tablecloths created a clear caste system. If you were at Table 3 and someone from Table 2 talked to you, it was only because they had Christmas pity.
Fortunately, I was nine, so none of this really concerned me.
I didn’t care about where I sat, or if there would be any crab legs left by the time the big foil platter hit Table 3.
All I cared about was midnight.
Sweet, glorious midnight.
Midnight was when we opened our presents. Christmas Day was only moments old.
That year, we opened them downstairs. What you see under the tree isn’t even a third of them. Everybody gave everybody presents. I can’t handle the math, but it was something like 8 x 2 + 6 x 2 + 3. That many presents.
By 1988, even I was probably in on the fun. This may have been the year that I gave all of my brothers and sisters $5 glassware sets from Bradlees.
Absolutely none of them needed glasses, but those sets came in big heavy boxes. If you didn’t know better, you’d have sworn I paid four times as much. Basically, I gave everybody glasses because it made my Lincolns wear Jackson costumes. Read More…
Classic Christmas Commercials, Volume 2!
I’ve been absent for a few days, because, as it turns out, December just isn’t my month!
Still, nothing can pull me out of a forced funk faster than a Friday the 13th happening during Christmastime. Thank you, Jason and Santa. Now my world is rosy again.
Here’s another batch of Classic Christmas Commercials, once again donated by Larry P. I guess reading Volume 1 isn’t mandatory, but I’ll say it is anyway.
Pepsi’s Nintendo Giveaway!
(1989)
Pepsi’s “Nintendo Holiday Game” gave soda addicts the chance to win Nintendo systems and cartridges – or if they were really lucky, a brand spanking new Game Boy.
(I can attest to the brouhaha surrounding a Game Boy giveaway in 1989. When I didn’t get one for Christmas that year, I reacted as poorly as I hope I’ll ever react to anything.)
Ads like these always have money behind them, but this one had HEART. You can’t buy heart unless you’re willing to indulge the Wilson sisters with their ridiculous concert rider. Good luck finding 400 pens made out of peacock feathers. If I had an editor, paragraphs like this would never make it.
The ad mixed traditional animation with an 8-bit flavor to rave reviews, and if you’re not won over by the sight of Santa Mario treating a general store like Level 1-3, you’re horrible and there is no pleasing you.
Also, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for a clean version of the Nintendo-style Christmas music heard under the voiceover. NOTHING I wouldn’t do. If you have a copy, we can get as filthy as you want. It needs to replace the triumphant circus music as my ringtone. (I don’t know why my new phone had “triumphant circus music” set as the default.) Read More…