Popsicles and Ice Pops

The northeast is in a sweltering heatwave, and that means I'm thinking popsicles, and all things cold and sweet. When it comes to summertime refreshment, three frozen staples come to mind fast, the first being the Fla-vor-Ice popsicle sticks. They came with that infamous "saw blade" serated edge that was damn near impossible to rip off even with your teeth, especially without hacking a lip or mascerating the end, and especially without at least having a little bit of air at the end to work with. (You know what I'm talking about.) Despite being hard to open, they still taste amazing. The red and the light blue were the best, and yes so was the pink one, even if it was socially unacceptable for me to get a pink one. They always came in those big sheets with like a hundred in the box, so if it took you some time to get one finished, the others would be nicely melted. I always enjoyed letting them melt right down to a liquid before sucking them down until all that was left were the little streams running up the sides. (Once again, I know you know what I'm talking about. I can't be the only one to see these things!)

The second frozen summer treat of the typical 90s childhood usually came in a fishnet bag. The were like popsicle links, with two tubular juice pops connected in the middle. Whenever they were passing these out at the daycare, I always wanted to be lucky enough to be given a whole stick, but often they had to be broken in half down the middle and split between us. If that was the case, they came in two genders. One had a rounded bottom with a smaller opening at the top, and the other had a lipped bottom with a larger opening. They didn't taste as fruity as the Fla-Vor-Ice pops, but the grape and the green apple ones were probably the best. Either way, I could down a million of them on a hot afternoon, and still can, and I will never forget the distinctive sound these made when you had to snap them in half. It was like breaking a bone: *thh-pop!*

The double-stick popsicle was probably the most frequent of my refreshment retreats all those summers of yore, and only because they were cheap at the local 7-Eleven. But despite being my most frequent treat, these actually annoyed me. Even a single stick popsicle is better than one of these, and that's what's annoying about it because you'd think doubling it should make it twice as good, but it doesn't. First of all, there's no way to really hold the thing. The sticks are too close together to hold both, but the whole thing is just too heavy to support it on one stick, so you end up uncomfortably groping your fingers longwise aorund two sticks! Secondly, they were always a million times too cold and rock solid to discern any flavor out of them after you broke a chunk off with your teeth and endured that instant brain freeze they'd implant. Lastly, there was no way you could evenly break one in half. It was like breaking a wishbone. They'd always crack off at the top, causing one side to be tiny and the other side to be this odd L shape. Now maybe it's just because I've had a million of them, but there's just too many things wrong with this whole concept to really win me. Besides, they came in like three flavors and none of them were all that sweet.

Going Native at "Indian Head"

Every summer growing up, our parents used to take us up to a popular spot in Franconia Notch NH called "Indian Head" just a few miles down the road from what (sadly) used to be "the Old Man of the Mountain" natural monument. (No, not the Old Coot of the Mountain, that's a different guy.) For anyone who doesn't know from your New Hampshire state quarters, "the Old Man of the Mountain" or "Profile Rock" was a cliff side off of Cannon Mountain in the White Mountains that from a certain angle... looked like an Abraham-Lincolny face. Sadly this icon fell down a few years back, but there's another profile rock worth checking out if you're ever in that "neck of the woods" (literally) called "Indian Head"... a mountain cliff that someone thought looked like a (ahem) "First Nations" man's head. (I don't know, looked like Abraham Lincoln to me.) Regardless, we used to stay at the Indian Head Resort up there, and while there's enough about that to warrant its own post (in time), I'm going to focus this one on something no less amazing to me, albeit far... far less grand. I'm talking about cheap paper hats, plastic bows, and rubber drum sets. 

Oh yeah. 

Flamingo feathers??

The Indian Head Resort had its own gift shop (just like everything) where they sold various """""Native American"""""-ish gifts, toys, shotglasses and the like, and believe it or not, perusing this little overstocked alcove was the height of any four day stay for me. The reason? Namely, cheap paper """""Native American"""" headdresses, plastic bows, and rubber drums sets. These were a MUST have. There was no question about it. The headdresses were just a red paper front with an "eh, close enough..." """""Native American"""" pastiche design on it tied around the back with an elastic string which always broke out of its staple 20 minutes after wearing it, and poised atop would be five or six colored feathers. I could put this thing on and feel like I was the "Brave Chief" for the day (as it said on the hat)... or at least for 20 minutes.

My parents usually passed on the drum kits and archery sets because they were expensive (and eBay doesn't lie), and you have to consider that getting one of anything always meant getting two of anything (because close-in-age brothers be like that.) But I do remember getting the bow and arrow and the drum kit at least once, and I even have photographic evidence of this fact (see above). The archery set came with a couple of "suction cup" arrows that would get lost 10 minutes after they were torn from the package, a flimsy bow with a string that wouldn't send them any decent distance anyway, and a fake plastic knife that probably found its way under the car seat for the rest of the trip. The drum kit was one of those mock "hide drum" cans with some rubber stretched over both ends to make it look more """""Native American"""" I guess. It wasn't loud enough to annoy my parents but was damn cool enough to keep us entertained in the backseat of the car as we jotted down the Kancamagus.

And I say that in all respect, because I don't for a second think any of these things communicate any significance about actual Native American history or culture, which I was genuinely interested in as a kid, but to the 8YO me, these little trinkets were just the coolest toys I could imagine having in a place called "Indian Head" up in the scenic splendor of the White Mountains. I may have once or twice walked all of "the Flume" with my feathery gear intact. If you don't know what that is, you're just going to have to check it out for yourself... or wait until I tell the tale.

Just Goin' Fishin'

It's summer time again, and few things say the great outdoors like fishing. But when it comes to real fishing (or is it reel?), my knowledge of the sport ends with the Zebco Kids' push-button spin-caster rod and reel. This was one of those gifts that you loved as soon as you got but then "gave up on" as soon you got it caught in something on the first cast across the driveway to pick up the plastic fish. After that it was confined to the "floaty fish in the kiddy pool" kind of fishing, which usually meant the plastic hook was going in my brother's shirt at some point. Score!

BUTT... beyond the backyard "sword fights" and other shenanigans with it, dad used to actually take us out on the lake in the canoe a few weekends to put it to use. The best thing I can say about this rod and reel from these experiences, besides the fact of just "having" a cool fishing pole like every guy wants (especially when it's a nice long one... impressively long and... well, long being the point), is how the whole one-pound test on it was strong enough to snag even the flimsiest surface weeds! Watch the bobbers!

Truth be told, the only fish I think I ever caught, besides the plastic kiddy pool variety, were the feeder fish (which in the kindness of my heart I set free in the lake once... dad was not happy about that). Animal rights activism aside, there was nothing like being out on the lake with dad and bro, just us guys, playing with our rods, but that time spent with this one usually involved untangling the lines, unhooking the line from bushes, trees, clothing, and body parts, rethreading the lines, untangling the lines, and generally... untangling the lines. That and listening to my dad complain about how the lake had been overfished by "the Portuguese" (... yeah, to this day, I still don't understand it either). 

But despite my complete lack of luck or common sense when it came to fishing, I did manage to net me at least one good catch... a real live mermaid! And that may sound like one very unbelievable fish story, but I swear it's the truth. Once my brother and I showed up to some kid's Halloween costume party, and because we weren't all that creative in our costume ideas (and because we had probably just got our fishing poles so it's all we cared about), we came with our poles for some reason. Now, it just so happened that at this party was this girl from our daycare dressed as Ariel, the "Little Mermaid".... so naturally... it was only a matter of time before she was taking our hooks out of her costume. I mean, obviously it was going to happen, but for some reason she didn't think it was as funny as we did, until of course we were forced to put the poles away.

Speaking of fishing, I seem to remember being particularly good at this very "indoor" game called Let's Go Fishin': "the action fishing game where players try for the biggest catch!" You take your tiny fishing pole and hook the fish that circle around the pond bobbing up and down and opening their mouths. The first one to hook the most wins! You might remember this as the kind of game you usually found stacked up in that carpeted basement playroom at your rich cousin's house along with the NES, the robotic arm, and all the other cool toys you couldn't have. You'd slide it out of the box and, wouldn't-ya-know-it, half the fish would be missing from the pond (just like they would be on a real fishing trip). Just don't blame "the Portuguese."

The Amazon Trail 3

For a while as a kid I had a thing for rain forests. This was after my thing for deserts and before my thing for oceans, but it was the strongest of my biome "things" and lasted a good six or so months in the 3rd grade. I'm not exactly sure why rain forests, but I think it was just the beginning of me being a sucker for anything "exotic," which continues right to the present. (Heck you could shit in a cup, but if you want to sell it to me, you better say it's coffee and call it "Sumatran!") (Hmm, tastes nutty!) This is why I loved playing the little PC Oregon Trail game clone "Amazon Trail" so much. Back in the day they were giving the CD for this game out for free on Cheerios boxes, so we brought it home and quickly got addicted to it. Unfortunately "free" apparently meant the shipping had the right to rub the CD in sand before they sent it, so the game never really worked right for us, but we still played it all the way to the end at least once.

It begins with this talking jaguar on a very cool looking shield in a museum who proceeds to lay some very brief exposition on you about being the "chosen one" before whisking you away by ancient magic of some kind to the amazon river delta. There you chose your guide and are told to travel to this town at the end of the river called "Vilcabamba" to do something I was never quite sure about. It had something to do with trading and solving problems with the people you meet to gain special talismans or something, but the main point of it was, as with all educational PC games in the 90s, actually to "educate" you, and this game spent a lot of time doing just that. But with its jungle atmosphere, bird call sound effects, and pan flutes a-plenty, it really does make you feel swept away to some exotic place, which for me is an enjoyable experience.

Just make sure you're traveling in the right direction in the boat because every way on the river looks exactly the same (as if you're careening toward a distant shoreline at every turn!), while you also play pole position with the logs and other debris sure to "log" your canoe. I remember getting completely lost and going in circles for hours trying to find the "side" of the river for some bearings, but rest assured there are none. According to this game the Amazon river is endless fathoms wide, and you're just expected to "go forth" into unknown depths and careen towards a mirage of a shoreline that you are never going to reach no matter how much you try to convince yourself of progress made. Be sure to also check the map often though or you could be venturing down a tributary into jungle-nowhere, where you will be mysteriously unable to get back.

During the game you travel across time as you head down the amazon river, meeting people in very obviously computer generated settings, although at the time they looked very realistic. All of the people you run into in these sumptuous photo-still CGI environments are live action people performing 4-second gif-like loops, and half of them are either out to rob you, kill you, or educate you about the flora, fauna, and history of South America. Like any RPG you have response choices to communicate with them, so sometimes it was just fun to run around ticking people off by choosing the worst dialogue options before unloading your useless "trading packets" on them for some anti-malaria medicine or fish or some other. My brother and I ran across this conquistador who refused to let us leave until we gave him ALL our shit, answering everything with a "that's not bad...but I want MORE!!" We had to restart the game to get away from him, but it turns out that you can kill him with the "medicine" that the old medicine man gives you towards the beginning. 

Damn you medicine man!! Fuck!

You could also go fishing in what appeared to be the clownfish pond at the local hotel by chucking spears at the fish-shaped shadows, providing that the pond was stocked with barracuda! They'd wait until you were starving and dying of scurvy to give you the one area of the Amazon completely devoid of fish. Then you could journey on land presumably and take pictures of the scenery as the moths and tropical birds flew by, because you know, it actually did beat going outside and doing the same thing. This was way more "exotic" than the backyard, and very computer-generated. After all this, we did make it to the end once due to the constant bugs with our version of the game, but found it to be completely underwhelming. The ending was just two hippies giving you the standard "save the rain-forest" and "protect the earth-mother" kind of stuff, but that aside, it was a fun little bit of tropical escapism while it lasted. And as one of the more grumpy people you meet whines:

"What else would a man be doing in this rain-soaked land of mosquitoes!" 

The Doublemint Gum Jingle

Old Spice's new bar soap commercials have rekindled my desire to hear classic 80s and 90s commercial jingles, which anyone over twenty right now will immediately remember. For those not privileged enough, there was an innocent time not so long ago when nearly every commercial had these corny backing vocal groups harping on whatever was selling over strings and piano, as if to imbue anything common and ordinary with that oh-so radical kick of fresh, filtered "life!"

Yes, the world really did at least once pretend to be this jolly, and you might even get the illusion that these were simpler times, and yeah, that's because they were. Usually these jingles were so incredibly "upbeat" they would soar into this positivity-crescendo by the end played over random shots of people just smacking tennis balls and splashing in the pool, and were almost impossible to watch without lifting your arms up and shouting "yeah!" or "I can do it!" to whatever the tagline was. And of course you'd sing along. It was hard not to sit up and take notice. From Kitkat bars to Rice-a-Roni there were many jingles I loved, but one has been stuck in my head for probably way over a decade now. One so cleverly written I'm still mystified by it. I'm talking of course about Wrigley's Doublemint Gum, which played throughout the early 90s in one form or another:

Think about how brilliant this is. Everything is doubled except the "no single gum" part, get it? Trust me, once it's in there, it's going to be in there for good, so you might as well start counting all the things that are "doubled up," including that two-piece blonde who shuts the car door with her... "double-ness."

Hey babe...  My breath is fresh but I'd still pop a whole pack of Doublemint for ya....  

Wait, what was this commercial about?  

Steven Spielberg Films

For a good part of my young life I wanted to be a filmmaker when I grew up, thanks mostly to Stephen Spielberg. I was a Spielberg fanboy by the age of seven at least, or as soon as I learned that not only had Spielberg directed Jurassic Park (my favorite film at the time), but had also directed all kinds of other great films. This is why: Spielberg has always been about giving the audience what they want, but also telling good stories along the way. He gets accused of audience manipulation and being overly-sentimental at times, and he has gone a bit overboard on the Nazis, but even some of his worst films carry with them a pure enthusiasm for good old-fashioned cinema magic (yes, even Hook...), and that's exactly what I've always loved about his films. I never ended up going into film-making (it's way too hard!), since all my pretend movies would've been very derivative and Spielbergian anyway, but that love of telling a good adventure story still inspires me to write my own tales to this day (which are still forthcoming). Here's a look back at some of my favorites which have played a part in forming who I am today:

"Come in through the door!"

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - This is currently my favorite movie. It's got just enough intrigue, suspense, pacing, humor, and eye-popping special effects to make it for me. Some of my earliest memories of this movie involve the colorful ships buzzing past the boy on the road, the "mashed potato mountain" scene, and the trash mountain in the living room. And I don't care one bit that the aliens (spoiler!) don't "do anything" at the end, because Spielberg spends the whole film piquing your curiosity and wonderment until you're numb from it and then delivers the best light show you've ever seen, which is pay off enough in my book. It's good old-fashioned movie-making, taking full advantage of that "warm summer night" feel to inspire you to go look up to see what you can spot in the horizon-backlit starry sky. Spotlights and lens flares galore-- all Spielbergian trademarks.

"Smile you son of a *bang!*!!"

Jaws - I first saw this movie on late night TV when I was like 10 or so, and lucky me it was the last half when they really start going mano-a-sharko with that monster of the deep. I also saw the "Shark!" beach run scene, which features one of Spielberg's other favorite trademarks: namely, women clutching their children and screaming (also seen in Close Encounters and E.T.). When that shark started chowing down the boat, bit Robert Shaw in half, and he spit blood at the camera, that was THE most graphic thing I had ever seen in a movie up until then, and it was awesome! Then there's plenty of thrills to be had, especially when the boat starts sinking, but overall it's just a huge entertainment-fest of a movie from beginning to end. I even found the drunken fisherman's rant and song entertaining back in the day, which inspired many "Lego remakes" in our downstairs playroom, featuring sharks and our Lego boats.

Remember? This happened too!

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial - This may just be the ultimate Spielberg film. It's got everything (except the Nazis). There's the "initially-scary-but-ultimately-benevolent" government types from Close Encounters once again flashing their high-intensity spotlights all over the place, the sentimental "average American family antics" we saw in Jaws and Close Encounters, the main character who becomes "obsessed" with something (Eliot toward the alien), mothers grasping their children and screaming, plenty of "movie magic" with the flying bicycles and the spaceship, and at least a few classic "They're heeere!" or "We're gonna need a bigger boat..." kinds of classic movie lines, including: "E.T. phone home.." and "It was nothing like that penis breath!" The movie just has all the elements of a great adventure tale that Spielberg made staples, and every scifi movie in the 80's wanted to be this movie.

"Start the engines! Start the engines!"

Indiana Jones Trilogy - Yes I know there's a "fourth one," but to be honest I was very disappointed so that one's going to have to be out for me (sorry George). I'm including the first three films in one just because there's no separating them. Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade are, once again, that classic Spielbergian adventure-serial concept, only now we're globe hopping from booby trap to booby trap with the most elite archaeologist to ever pick up a pick and shovel, not to mention handy whip and damn cool-looking hat. No boy ever turned away from these movies and didn't at least consider a career in archaeology (including this one). Plus we get badass NAZIS now to schadenfreude-ourselves into bliss by blowing apart, crushing, incinerating, exploding, and running over with tanks. Admittedly, Temple of Doom (the supposed "prequel") was the weakest and possibly one of the weirdest films Spielberg ever made. It also had the most annoying female lead in the history of cinema (so useless she made Short Round look like Shaft!). But even Temple of Doom has enough of its own spectacular "suspension-of-disbelief" action scenes that make it worthwhile, and the actual temple was pretty cool.

"Clever girl..."

Jurassic Park - Nothing more need be said on this one. It's got all the elements of a classic Spielberg adventure tale once again, only this time we're in the jungle and there's dinosaurs amok! The T-Rex? The Velociraptors? That's "Land Jaws" as far as we're concerned. The family antics? Well, we got the sentimental back-story of two semi-lovebird paleontologists defending their somewhat "professional relationship" from the attacks of the real carnivore on the set (the Goldblum!), and of course the Spielbergian "kids in peril" that we care about because they're "kids in peril" (we saw this in Temple of Doom as well). But really, what's so great about this movie? It's got just enough suspense (of disbelief), just enough sentimentality, just enough death and (mostly) bloodless carnage, and the special effects are fantastic. And nobody can film helicopters just simply "flying around" like Spielberg (also check out Close Encounters for that)!

Spielberg's films are defined by epic story-telling, evocative dramatics, and sentimental audience manipulation which (often) works. Nearly all of them serve as tributes to well-crafted crowd-pleasing movie-making, giving us just enough awe and just enough excitement or drama to do what films ought to do, which is entertain and inspire. Some other honorable mentions I'll include are: Poltergeist (he produced it and it definitely has all the Spielbergian trademarks), The Goonies (another he wrote and produced), Empire of the Sun (evidence that underrated Spielberg films do exist), and even War of the Worlds wasn't half bad. Let's also not forget that he produced a lot of the now-classic WB cartoons like Tiny Toons and Animaniacs. Oh yeah, not to mention Saving Ryan's Private and Schindler's List, because he didn't have enough anti-Nazi movies already.

Glowing Better Blocks

I was a major fan of anything glow in the dark back in the day, and if you were even alive in the 90s and don't remember these, then check your pulse. These things looked like the coolest block set out there from the castle lighting up at night to the pirate ship that was "glowing with fright." But what they weren't telling you was that 200 blocks wasn't nearly enough to build half that stuff. You'd need like 50 sets to build as much as they show in the commercial!