Deadsites #5: Pokemon World, from 1999!
Today on Deadsites: A whole lotta Pikachu. If you don’t care about Pokemon, you uh… may want to pick a different article to read. I wrote two yesterday, if that helps?
Technically, this isn’t as much a “Deadsite” as a changed site. Pokemon.com is still active, obviously, but it’s changed quite a bit since 1999!
Yep, you’re looking at the official Pokemon site from around fourteen years ago. It was called “Pokemon World,” and it was old school in all the best ways.
I didn’t catch Pokemon fever until early 2000, but since its universe moved more slowly back then, everything on this site is familiar territory. There isn’t much on here that I didn’t live and breathe. If you were a Pokemon fan during this era, you’re about to get a fiery missile of Pika nostalgia up the nose. Hopefully, that’s your idea of fun. Read More…
14 Photos of Snakeweed.
I took fourteen photos of Snakeweed. See below.
Photo #1:
This is Snakeweed, one of the evil mutants from the new TMNT series. Which I suppose isn’t all that “new” anymore. The figure came out a while ago, but I normally only see the four Turtles in stores – never their assorted friends and enemies. So yeah, this was my first crack at Snakeweed. A fucking giant plant monster. Bonus. Read More…
1990s Comic Books Ads!
A week or so ago, I bought a big pile of old comic books. Since I have little interest in what Ghost Rider was doing in 1994, my purchase was mostly made to find more of those great old ads. Here are five, at random!
Bic Wavelength Pens
Fantastic Four #67 (2nd printing, 1994)
I’d completely forgotten about these! Bic’s “Wavelengths” were regular pens with plastic “wrappers” around the bodies, or shafts, or whatever you call the stick-like parts.
Rods? Batons?
Many Wavelengths had distinct themes, but there seemed to be even more with completely abstract patterns in crazy colors. It’s hard to believe in 2013, but pens with wacky wrappers really were a big deal.
If you were a chewer like me, you could easily bite the wrappers off of the shafts (or rods, or batons), which revealed normal Bic pens underneath. I did this with virtually all of my Wavelengths, no matter how great the designs were. I dunno, man. Destroying them with my teeth just made me feel so accomplished. I say this not with pride, but with confidence that thousands of you also chewed them, and felt exactly the same way when you did. Read More…
Ocean Creatures Crackers!
The real world kept me from Dino Drac for a week, and now I’m all rusty. I have longer posts waiting to be written, but today calls for something breezy and brainless.
How about cheese crackers shaped like squid?
Ocean Creatures! I found them at Dollar Tree, and was immediately enamored with the concept, the sea life shapes, and the fact that it was all promised to taste like delicious phony cheese.
They’re obviously inspired by Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, which is literally the only food on the planet that I’d be willing to eat exclusively for the rest of my life. I love those fish. Choosing between the Parmesan and Cheddar flavors is my own personal version of the Judgment of Solomon. I’m not sure what I mean by that.
There must be a hundred different Goldfish ripoffs out there, and you know they’re ripoffs, because even with the thousands of animals begging to be immortalized as fun-shaped cheese crackers, these companies always pick some kind of fish.
So why am I covering Ocean Creatures instead of some other borderline-bootlegger? Because they picked six different fish, dummy.
(Okay, three fish, a marine mammal, a cephalopod and an echinoderm. But this is a case where clarifying only makes things better.) Read More…