Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Pointless Nostalgia

When Insanely Violent Trading Cards Attack!

dino_wrapper.jpgI have a pretty good memory for idiotic things that were aimed at my demographic as a kid, even the most obscure stuff. Every few days I get the theme song to Kidd Video or Galaxy High stuck in my head. Ask me some time about my deep, sincere obsession with a short-lived series of toys called Spy Tech. Go on, ask me. I dare you.

But last weekend, my cousin reminded me of one item of my youth that I’d completely forgotten about. It’s possible this never crossed my radar, but it’s also possible I may have blocked it out of my mind as a defense mechanism. The thing I’m alluding to is Dinosaurs Attack!, a series of trading cards created by Topps in 1988.

The series was meant to be an homage to Mars Attacks!, the trading cards from the early 1960s depicting an alien invasion, which caused parental conniptions for their violent imagery (and thus became highly sought after collectors’ items). I would say Dinosaurs Attack! was a rip-off of this earlier serial, except that it was devised by the same creative team, Len Brown and Woody Gelman. Or at least it was according to Bob Heffner’s Dinosaurs Attack! Home Page, a lo-fi site dedicated to their memory, which passes for scholarship on this subject. (Bob doesn’t cite his sources, so take that with a grain of salt.)

Brown and Gelman longed to recapture the glory of their first big success. Topps must have had a lot of faith in their ability to do so, since they actually aired commercials for this series, which was unprecedented for non-sports trading cards. (Sadly, I cannot find any video of this online.) In a financial sense, the effort failed, since the cards sold poorly. If Topps hoped Dinosaurs Attack! would attract the kind of parental outrage (and resulting publicity) Mars Attacks! did back in the 1960s, they were disappointed in that regard too. They didn’t even attract the kind of tsk-tsk-ing Topps received a few years earlier for Garbage Pail Kids.

However, on the artistic front, they were completely successful, because Dinosaurs Attacks! is the most depraved, gruesome, twisted, pitch-black thing I’ve ever seen intended for children.
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Pointless Nostalgia

Challenged

challenger.gifA teacher was going into space and I’m in fourth grade so that was a big deal. We did lots of assignments and activities about the whole thing. Like, we had to write a page on why our teacher should be going into space and why. I finished early and drew a picture of my teacher in a lunar module. A lot of kids stopped drawing stuff on their assignments in like second grade but I’m a good drawer and they never say I shouldn’t draw on my assignments so I do.

A teacher going into space was such a big deal that they let us watch the launch on TV. They wheeled a huge cart into our classroom, with big ikd black-and-white set sitting on top of it. The picture came in bad sometimes but you could mostly see everything. Other classes came into ours to watch it too. There were kids in there I’d never seen before, not even on the playground.

The footage was boring for a real long time. Shots of the spaceship from real far away and lots of newspeople talking. I hated newspeople, with their big heads and weird hair. The News was something my dad watched so I couldn’t watch any more cartoons.

We saw the astronauts including the teacher walk into the spaceship and wave, and the it took forever for anything else to happen. And then there was a countdown and all the kids counted down from 10 to 0, and then the spaceship took off. It looked weird in black and white. The edges of the smoke blurred and almost burned the screen.

And after the spaceship was in the air for a while, it just of disappeared. At first I couldn’t tell if something weird happened or if it was just the crappy reception on the TV. But it looked like the fire took over the whole ship, and then it all turned to smoke, and then the smoke divided and split off into different directions. It kind of looked like a Y.

My teacher turned off the TV and told us we all had to go back to our desks and classes. So we did and we were all really quiet. I thought to myself, “That couldn’t be real, right? That was a show or something. Because if it was real, then all those astronauts are dead and the teacher too. So of course that wasn’t real.”

I think everyone else thought the same thing, because nobody said anything and nobody talked about. Not any kids and not my teacher. And not the next day or the day after that.

The next morning, the newspaper had a picture of that Y-shaped smoke thing on the cover, in color. The newspaper never had color pictures. I guess that meant it really happened. But the color looked weird. It was too pink and orangey and the sky was more green than blue. It all looked so unreal to me.

I kept thinking, are they gonna find the teacher and the other astronauts? Like they had ejector seats or something? Because otherwise, they would’ve died and that couldn’t have happened. That’s just too…it’s too something. I don’t know.

I keep all my homework because sometimes I like to go back and read the stuff I wrote and look at old drawings, and sometimes I’ll get stickers from them too. But I don’t think I have those assignments I did where I wrote about my teacher going into space and drew her in a lunar module. Maybe I lost them. Maybe she lost them. I was gonna ask about them but I feel like I shouldn’t. Like, we should keep not talking about it for a really long time.

Pointless Nostalgia

The Ghoulishness of Retirement Plans

lotto.jpgI’m sure I’ve said this before, but at the risk of repeating myself (and that risk has never stopped me before), many of my Hates have dissipated as I get older. In keeping with my Renewed Positive Outlook on Life, I’ve tried to whittle down my Hates to the most essential and manageable–i.e., specific things that I can actively change. Everything else should get nothing stronger than a shaking of my fist.

But there are a few Blanket Hates I still carry around with me, and one of them popped up recently. When the Mega Millions jackpot rose to a ridiculously large jackpot, NY1 interviewed hopeful lotto players about what they would do with their winnings. Their answers were nothing infuriating–retire, pay off debt, and so on. And yet when I saw these people spending hypothetical riches, I wanted to throw my remote through the TV. What a buncha jerks, I thought.

Immediately, I questioned the virulence of my own hate. Why get so mad at these people? So they want to play the lotto and dream up imaginary wealth–who cares?

And then I remembered my summer working at a convenience store, dispensing all forms of lotto, and I questioned my hate no more.

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