Since this will obviously just be another of my “random old comic book ad” reviews, there isn’t much point in slaving over a meaningful introduction. Instead, I’ll use this space to tell you about last night’s dream.

I went into a sporting goods store, which I guess was the first clue that this was going to become a nightmare. Indeed, as soon as I stepped inside, I realized that the entire store had been taken over by the goblins of Nilbog, from Troll 2. They’d transformed the place into a mossy Swamp of Death, with puddles of skin-melting slime all over the tile floors.

In that weird way that dreams change without any rhyme or reason, the swamp suddenly vanished, as did Nilbog’s goblins. In their place was a horde of Gremlins. Specifically, the Gremlins from the original movie, not the sequel. The more uniformed and bloodthirsty kind.

If the Troll 2 portion of this nightmare was only a creepy mindfuck, the Gremlins portion was an all-out action movie. These things were AFTER ME. They chased me around the aisles, always grabbing at my feet, until I finally lost them by zipping into a wing of the store that hadn’t been there a moment prior.

It was there that I found an official Craftsman Curved Shaft WeedWacker. Or maybe a generic version of one. Thank God this sporting goods store moonlighted in lawn care!

With my new weapon, I turned the tables. Suddenly, the Gremlins were running from me. Whenever I managed to hit one of them, the WeedWacker’s business end cut through ‘em like butter. I must have killed twenty of the things before I woke up, startled.

I don’t know why I was startled. I was winning!

That was last night’s dream. Lest anyone believe that I made this up and included site-appropriate movie characters for bonus points, fuck you. If I was gonna fabricate, I’d come up with something much more interesting than killing Gremlins with a WeedWacker.

And now, old comic book ads!

7UP Soda-Licious Fruit Snacks!
Silver Surfer #76, January 1993

Soda-Licious fruit snacks were soda-flavored and bottle-shaped, gooey on the insides but with rough sugar coatings. Since soda-flavored candy was never my strong suit, I remember the commercials much more than the snacks, which starred two-dimensional children who literally fattened up by eating packs of Soda-Licious. An interesting conceit for a junk food commercial, if you think about it.

Somewhere along the way, magic happened. Soda-Licious teamed with 7UP for co-branded bits of deliciousness that gave all corresponding promo materials the excuse to be covered in Cool Spot. (The red guy. I guess there was more than one. Cool Spots?)

Arriving in both original and cherry 7UP flavors – complete with distinct bottle colors – the snacks turned skeptics into fanatics, and if you believe the stories, caused Jesus himself to travel to Rob’s Bagel Palace in Birch Tree, Missouri, all for the one thing that kept Heaven from living up to its name.

Look close at the ad. Did they really include Spot-shaped fruit snacks, too? That sounds impossibly cool, but they were pretty clearly hinting at that, no? I need answers. Somebody give them to me. Read More…

In this edition of Deadsites, we’re taking a look at the official movie site for 2002’s Ghost Ship.

Starring Gabriel Byrne and Julianna Margulies, it’s about an abandoned luxury liner stuffed with treasure and torment. Here’s the trailer:

I saw Ghost Ship exactly once, on a night when I was too wired to fall asleep, but not lucid enough to fully absorb the weird shit on television. Regardless, I remember liking the film. After a freakin’ killer opening (where we see the ship’s original passengers die in comically gory fashion), Ghost Ship settles into something best summarized as The Shining mixed with Event Horizon… on a boat. Read More…

This will probably be the last edition of The Popsicle Parade for 2013, so please, a moment of silence from those who have enjoyed looking at old ice cream stickers.

Thank you. That was special.

#21: Firecracker Root Beer Float!

I’m loving the discovery that this “Firecracker” popsicle was actually a family of popsicles, identical in shape but with wildly varying colors and flavors.

Remember the bizarre version from my last review, which mixed red hot cinnamon with cotton candy? Well, here’s one with a slightly less iffy theme. Firecracker’s “Root Beer Floats” blended root beer and vanilla ice to create something that’d make the freaks at Jack in the Box proud.

More importantly, it looks like that super special Jell-O Pudding Pop – the one that married chocolate and vanilla into one swirlrageous piece of magic that every self-respecting junk food junkie had to eat first. Read More…