One thing was bound to warm ya up on a cold day, when you're staying indoors at the sitters and probably watching Disney movies or whatever other KidsSongs "VHS BS" they had stacked on the shelves in the plush-carpeted playroom. I remember it well. We'd freeze on the dark, cold mornings the whole way over to the sitter's house in the car, waiting for it to warm up, and mom would be rushing us out the door with lies about how she was "already supposed to be at work." Then we'd come into the well-lit playroom at the sitter's house... a large den with a wide plush blue carpet, toys lined against the wall, a television in a case resting low on the floor, and a solitary couch we'd all fight over... and we'd hunker down with a very overplayed VHS tape until we had to go to school. That would shut us up. Especially me. Heck, never mind shut up, my brain would shut off!
The classic blue Disney logo with the pipes on the end would play, and we'd get maybe an hour into The Fox in the Hound, The Jungle Book, or The Little Mermaid, before we'd have to call it quits. There were many movies I never got to see the end of simply because we had to cut it short to go to school, but there'd always be something playing, whether it was early morning Nick shows or a movie. Those of us with shorter attention spans might wander away and play with the toys, and those of us with less brainpower to resist the television spell would be glued to it. Needless to say, the moment a TV went on anywhere, I was losing brainpower (if I had any). It didn't matter how silly or weird or just plain girly it was... if it was on, I watched it. So I watched a lot of slowly degenerating celluloid crap.
Which is a pretty good thing for me, considering all the crap they shoved onto home video in the 90s! They had a "home video" for everything, from "Be Cool! About Fire Safety!" videos that taught you how to start a grease fire, to "stranger danger raps" that made getting molested the "cool and hip" thing to do, to instructional videos about how to amaze people at a party with the whole "staircase behind a couch" trick, to videos that were just kids singing Jeff Fogerty and Beach Boys songs... no joke. All of this was of course always delivered in pristine no-budget, with adult C-list celebrities invariably there to serve out DUI community service sentences, and always the absolute dorkiest-looking kids imaginable (soooo in need of a good pummeling in the groin it's not even funny, I swear...), ever partying it up to corny music sprinkled with a metric ton of terrible acting. Never once did I learn anything useful from any of it, except maybe the importance of hiding my shame, and my rapidly depleting Y chromosome due to plastics in the water.
And for those too young and privileged to not know what KidsSongs was, here's everything you need to know, from "Let's Play Ball"... the Mona Lisa of corny straight-to-video, badly lip-synched kiddertainment... warning, it will get stuck in your head forever... and yeah, you bet I sang and danced along to it in my day...
On the weekends when we didn't have school, we'd still be at the sitter's, and we'd be there all day long, so there was a hell of a lot more time to sit around watching movies for the umpteen-millionth time. I'd be there with my legs dangling off the couch, trying to be comfortable, while we watched tape after tape of whatever silliness was in store. I don't know how our sitter could stand it... endless repetition of "Skip to my Loo," the "I Wanna Be a Fireman" one, the "I Get Around" go-kart one (actually, that was pretty cool), the "Down By the Bay" cringefest, with all the kids, and particularly the girls, singing along, each in unison... ad infinitum, ad nauseum. "Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro?" ... Needless to say, I watched it, and yes, I sang along too. "Do you hear farts blow?..." etc. If only!
At some point we'd all be called into the kitchen, and we'd sit at the lower table and eat our Eggo waffles (always Eggos for breakfast, loaded with syrup... back when I liked syrup that is), and then we'd head back and resume our movie. Those Eggos were about the best thing to look forward to every morning. In fact, now that I've watched this crap again, I could go for some now.
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