Mouse Trap was Insane

I think I played Mouse Trap once. You don't "play" Mouse Trap, you construct it and set it off. Who really cared about the game portion of it? You roll the dice, you move around the board...etc., and if you get the cheese first... who knows, someone gets trapped. That's all there was to it. You could skip the whole first step and just go right to the cheese, and you'd miss nothing. It was all about setting off that ridiculously inefficient trap of conveniently placed random objects again and again, because that's the where that sweet, sweet dopamine hit is! Oh yeah, gimme somedat... 

Remember how it goes together: The Wheel of Fortune hits the elastic band of stop sign which hits the old-timey streetlamp of hanging boot... 

...which kicks the marble bucket over at the top of the hill and sends it down the bungly path and chute until it hits a pole...

...which hits a balancing marble which rolls down the drain and hits a see-saw...

...which catapults a diver backwards into a shallow kiddy pool with no water in it...

...which wakes the T-Rex, which fights off the Velociraptors which chase you to a van which brings you to the helicopter... and eventually a cage comes down on the mice.

After 20 times, you'll probably think of 20 better ways to kill a mouse, but none could ever be as awesome, as beautiful, as LSD-inspired. It was like a Salvador Dali painting or a Dr. Seuss book set in plastic. Clearly the work of a straight-up MADMAN. An absolute nutcase. And I hope he's in a straight jacket right now setting off this thing again and again just like we all were. He's my bro. 

He had a point. Do it again... 

The Pizza Head Show

The look of terror.

The Pizza Head Show was a series of commercials for Pizza Hut in the 90's, and I loved every single one of them. They always had this naive and very stale slice of pizza with a "freshly kicked-in-the-groin" (Mr. Bill ripoff) voice whose sole purpose was to get chucked around and preyed upon by this bully pizza cutter named Steve. There was also this complicit narrator who sounded friendly but reveled in the thing's torture. Throw in all kinds of crazy slapstick, copious terrified reaction shots of his bug-eyed olive eyes and gaping red pepper mouth, and the ultimate destruction of many a model red-roof Pizza Hut locale, and you have all the ingredients for a perfect piece of unforgettable 90's television wackiness.

My brother and I even invented a whole slew more ill-fated adventures for this most unappetizing slice, probably even more humiliating than anything they put him through. So now when anyone says, "Sure he is!" all I can think of is deceitful big-brother-like sadism. Love it. 

The Greatest Scene In 90s Movie History

Sorry, but even the T-Rex breaking free in Jurassic Park can't top this... and it's not all that different anyway. It's still a better love story than Twilight. So beautiful, so universal, so poignant. Finch's struggle is our struggle. We feel it through the screen. Such tension. Such climax. Such absolute relief! It transcends time and place. It is humorous. In fact, from the song "Run, Don't Walk" by the Ventures playing to the tension-inducing, holding-it-in schadenfreude of watching this poor sap, to the inevitable explosive emptying of the chick's bathroom, to the whistling ending, it may be the funniest constructed scene ever in movie history (no joke!). It got my vote for the 1999 Oscar... by far. And still does. 

And yes, I've been there.

Shark Week

Better get mako?

To the 8-year-old me, Shark Week was second only to Christmas, and even at that, it was a loose second, in the highlights of my year. Hell, Christmas is a day, Shark Week is a week! It cooled me off so many a hot summer afternoon. Splashing down in the blue with the makos, blues, tigers, hammerheads, and great whites... with only one of those flimsy bird cages for protection, was the best part of any summer... second only to fireworks. But then again, the 4th of July is also a day. Shark Week is a week.

Why did I like sharks? Because it rhymes with Mark. In fact, I was often called "Mark the Shark" growing up, but this is not the only reason. I think it's because sharks are mindless eating machines who just "swim, and eat, and make baby sharks"... and you know, you gotta respect that. You better. When I was a teenager, you could say I too was a mindless eating machine, so maybe there's some affinity there. The point is, sharks are the very embodiment of the word "predator" ...besides the actual Predator. They are probably the most macho animal in existence, and certainly in the sea. Hoo-rah! URRRRP!

Don't judge me.

So if we could catch it, we watched it. If we couldn't see it, we taped it. One portrait of how cool this programming block was to a kid like me back somewhere around '95, involved just a remote control sinking to the bottom of the ocean with a bite taken out of it. "Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the TV..." the caption read. In short, this was TV so intense, I was having second thoughts about going in the plastic pool.

If all the girls in the 90's vowed to become marine biologists after Free Willy, all the boys got into it because for one week every summer, some guy was on TV, in a cage, underwater, swimming with the sharks, poking tracking devices into sharks, taping sharks feed, feeding sharks, or being fed to sharks. It was like watching Jaws without the boring parts. A bunch of people go out on the water, you see them from underneath paddling on their boards in silhouette, someone says "I never saw it coming," and then a dash of red food coloring rolls up the screen in the water. "Whoa! I can feel that in my arm!"

Of course sharks aren't just killing machines, and dorky boys like me actually did find the sciency stuff interesting, like how sharks can't stop swimming or else they die, or how sharks have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, or how they can sense a drop of blood a mile away, or how sharks in a feeding frenzy will bite anything, even themselves (which I found amusing). I learned a lot from Shark Week, and I already had my survival plan ready should I ever come face to face with one. It began and ended with a good punch in the snout. That being said, scrawny me wouldn't have had a chance. 

Console Wars 2

I don't know, they both had parlor Jeopardy games...

BLAST PROCESSING!!!

Frisbee with a Girl

To this day it never ceases to amaze me how mindless I was as a kid, so gung-ho about having it my own way. But one thing doesn't surprise me anymore, just how mindful everyone else was. Especially girls. They towered over my understanding. I was like a worm, mentally crawling through the dirt, absolutely sure of the ground, and they were somewhere in the clouds, saying "aww, that's adorable." But what do boys got? "You throw like a girl!" (Yeah, those famous last words.) Screw The Sandlot. At least, that was the wisdom of the era, but prepare to come back in a body bag. So naturally, I could always count on girls to blow my mind, or if not, to kick my butt.

The summers I had growing up usually meant I was stuck at daycare on the days my parents worked, which meant long afternoons of heatstroke in the blazing backyard of the sitter's house with nothing but the occasional tube-Popsicle or hard plastic kiddy pool with more grass in it than water to give us some relief. Each day after lunch we were all just stuck out in the backyard like dogs to while away the hours with the clouds and the ants, and that was all there was. In any case, you can imagine why we might start getting on each other's nerves out there in the heat.

So there I was, about 9-years-old, scuffing the grass like a rearing bull, upset with this girl there because she had no intention of going along or playing off the arm of whatever grand make-believe movie I was trying to make with her, and at some point a Frisbee entered the equation. We tossed it back and forth at each other for a few minutes or so, but she just couldn't throw the thing right. It'd always end up rolling back somewhere toward the bushes and the trees, and I'd always have to go fish it out "because I was closer." This happened time and time again, so I began purposely throwing it wrong at her just to get back at her for her lame "girl-tosses"... just to make her have to run after it for a change.

A bit of a shouting match ensued, and I'm sure I flung out the inevitable "you throw like a girl" line, from which there is no return. I was a dead man. And sure enough, on one of her turns, she winged that thing with a perfect precision there-before unseen... and on target too, right between my eyes! Clonk!

It hit my face so hard I fell over backwards on the ground. My eye and nose stung for a few minutes, and she couldn't help from cracking up. Sure, it had been an accident, but a very well timed one! Almost too well timed. And so there I lay on the grass, emasculated, which got me so enraged I stormed off to "tell on her." Here we go, I thought, let's see how she likes this! I really played it up too when I got to the sliding glass door: "she hit me on purpose!" I may have even tried to shed a few tears. But that sitter did the right thing. She said, "Oh don't be a crybaby. You're not hurt." And I swear the second she said that, the "pain" was gone.  

If only she'd been good at it, I thought, then I could say it was on purpose! Something told me she knew what she was doing all along.

Here's the lesson kids. This is why it's always a good idea for girls and boys to play together, because that's how valuable lessons are learned. That day I learned that when it comes to getting even with someone by hitting them with a Frisbee on purpose, two words reign supreme: plausible deniability. Girls know this by birthright. We boys learn it the hard way, if at all. We think we're hot shits, but in fact, when it comes to girls bulls-eyeing grumpy boys, it's always 5 points for the arm, 20 points for the head!

I'm just lucky she didn't want to play the game of splits! 

Battle Chess was Badass

Battle Chess was badass. As in: BAD. ASS. As in, probably the coolest computer game you could play in the early 90's (besides Doom), and all the boys loved it. And for once I can actually include myself in that equation. It tapped into something primative, something absolutely out for blood and guts, the great hard-on for gore we all have. This was a decade before all these first-person shooters and role playing games took over the scene, and back then you were lucky if you saw blood in a video game.

But if I remember right, this game not only had blood... it had guts... it had limbs getting chopped off one by one... it had people going up in a blaze, or getting shrunk down and squashed... it had dudes getting pounded into puddles of blood... It had... weapons! This game was hard core in those days, and guess what, they even let us play it in school. Imagine that! Something boys could like... in SCHOOL! Something about watching these little minions smash each other to a bloody pulp made me shit myself with "aww-yeah." No seriously, whenever they let us play this, we literally shit our neon pink shorts!  

I don't know much about other schools, but in my elementary school, if you could play chess, you were considered one of the Elite... the coolest of all. You had MAD skills. If that game of chess involved knights that cut the arms and legs off pawns, rooks that turned into rock men who could pound pawns into a puddle, and kings that had a whole arsenal of weaponry under their capes (whips.. swords... bombs... GUNS??), then you weren't just cool, you were flannel cool. Heck, this game was so badass, it didn't even care if you saw it cheating. Seriously, you'd be playing against the computer, and all of sudden the pieces on the other end of the board would just switch places. "That's right, I just did. What you gonna do about it bitch?" 

This game was chest beating on a 32 bit scale. You only played it to be cool, playing it made you cool, and refusing to play it made you absolutely de-balled. If you were a girl playing it, it bestowed on you honorary balls, which as everyone knows are even ballsier. This is literally the game that taught me what Chess is all about. Strategy, battles, and pure unbridled machismo. Hoo-rah!  Time to go knock over a vending machine with all my rage! Aw yeah! *URRRP!* "Look at all its blood!"

And yeah, it's a bit much, but it's just that when your primal energy was denied you for so long, we'd go kinda overboard when we finally got to express it for a few minutes. But never you worry. Soon enough class was over, and it was back to reading Madeline books, and glazed-over eyes, and sleep-induced drooling for the rest of the day as usual. Yeah I'm sure they would have preferred us playing kiddy games like Sticky Bear and Grammar (which to the 8yo Me was something you called your grandmother), but the only other game that could touch this in "computer-Class" was Oregon Trail (and that is deserving of its own post). Without games like this, computers sucked my big fat one.