We're back, and in COLOUR.

Sorry about the hiatus, I've been nostalgia'd out lately and haven't had the motivation to do any.

Let's get back to speed with a HUGE '90s icon: the Game Boy, or more specifically, the Game Boy Colour. Yes I realize the actual name is Game Boy Color but I'm Canadian so piss off.


The Game Boy Colour debuted near what I consider to be the peak of the '90s, 1998. This is when true hallmarks of the decade like Pokemon and other such franchises washed upon western shores (we all know the west equals the entire world, remember). Like pretty much all electronics of the period, the Game Boy Colour came in several neonish paint jobs now considered to be eye-grating, with such lovely names as Kiwi, Midnight Blue, and Atomic Purple, the latter of which had your classic '90s see-through plastic. That see-through plastic dominated things like Playstation controllers (which we'll get into another day) and if you had it you were the coolest kid ever for being able to see the ~*circuit boards and parts*~ within your electronics. I had three different Game Boys because they got old/stolen: the yellow one, the green one, and the special gold/silver one with Pichu on it that came with Pokemon Gold.


Memorable games for the system of course included the Pokemon series, the worst of the Tony Hawk ports, the The Legend of Zelda Oracle games, and much much more. A cool trick was to put in a regular Game Boy game and move the D-Pad in conjunction with the A and B buttons to change the pallet of your older titles. I thin B-Up was inverted. We used to call it night time.


Though it was only three years before the Game Boy Advance would land, the Game Boy Colour had a lasting impression on many of our collective childhoods. It staved off bored, was a symbol of a new, rapidly changing electronic world, and provided countless hours of countless collecting and fighting our electronic animals. Truly one of the great titans of the 1990s.

Munchies + other novelties

Figures I wouldn't update on 420. Let's do something kind of related to it. Munchies!


Novelty foods really kicked off in the early '90s for Canada because we were starting to get all of the delicious goodies from the USA because of a little thing called the North American Free Trade Agreement. All of those sugary, fatty foods came to clog our arteries, and we were more than happy to let them. Some of their most '90s kitsch commercials filled our fertile young minds with dreams of candy and sweets the likes of which we had never seen!

We got those Pop Tarts with the purple and neon blue frosting (you know the ones I'm talking about, the really good kind). Our consumption of Doritos increased tenfold. At last we could out grease our American goon brothers in contests of who had the greasier Cheetos fingers! What a time to be alive. If you were a kid in grade school, you probably ate Lunch Mates. They came in a variety of "meals" including cheeseburger , pizza, cheese and crackers, tacos, nachos, and many many more. I was never allowed the cheeseburger one and for good reason - it looks absolutely abhorrent. It seems the '90s were truly the breeding ground of wacky foodstuffs that make you go "oh my god how can you eat that". I'm not sure how so many of us made it out of grade school without crippling diseases from all this toxic waste we used to eat.

Delissio pizza (DiGiorno in the USA) didn't come to Canada until '99 but from that year onward, birthdays and other social gatherings were never complete without their delicious array of rising crust pizzas. You had better be damned sure it wasn't delivery, it was Delissio.


It was in this glorious time that I discovered Swanson dinners as well. The chicken nugget ones would be one of my favourite easy to make dinners until I graduated to the Hungry Man dinners in 2002, which I happily snacked right up to the point when they changed the recipe. Gone were my Buffalo-style chicken strips and fries, replaced by some low end imitation with absolutely rank cheese fries or something. Maybe it's for the better because I'm pretty certain one of those and a pack of Mr. Noodles would be enough to kill a man if ingested in one sitting.


Okay, until next week...don't give yourself a heart attack if you decide to track down all this nostalgic sludge!

SUPER SMASH BLOTHERS

Awesome fighting game and the earliest N64 game I can remember caring about. Says a lot about a console when the oldest game you can remember playing on it came out two years before its demise, but whatever.


Super Smash Bros. is one of my favourite fighting games and god dammit they're still killing me every time a new one comes out. I seriously get as happy as a pig in shit hearing perspective rosters for future titles and everything. It brings out the fanboy in me. But hey apparently everything I discuss on this blog does. It should just be called "Things Joe Likes". 

So back onto Smash Bros., it has eight of the most famous Nintendo characters duking it out, then four lesser known buggers you can unlock. It's a great game to play whilst drinking, and doesn't limit you in choice if someone picks your character - you simply get a different costume when you pick the same as someone else. There's a story mode that you kind of have to fill in with your mind, but the gist of it is that a giant hand takes toys and jerks them around for his pleasure. You, being one of those toys, have to fight back, but some of your stuffed allies decide to impede you. Thus, you must defeat the many ranks of Master Hand before getting to fight the pale glove himself. Crazy stuff. I like playing as Pikachu because of his dickhead double jump and rude-as-heck Up-B attack. Come at me.


Sorry for the lack of effort in this blog tonight but I just got off work a bit ago and want to wind down. Tomorrows might probably be better!

Way of the Dragon (Ball)

Dragon Ball Z is the best cartoon, nay, best TV show of all time. Thrill to its multi-episode long exploits! Chill at the thought of Goku spending half an episode screaming! Gooniest of goons, fap to the many female characters like Master Roshi would!

YTV, basically the Cartoon Network of Canada, used to broadcast Dragon Ball Z on weeknights at 8PM, usually until 9PM or so. On certain weekends in the summer as well as holidays where parents would be out, they served as a perfect cheap babysitter by locking down with marathons of the movies and key episodes of the show (like ones with the best fight scenes during the Cell Games or Frieza Saga). Basically nirvana for kids.


My favourite characters were always Trunks and Piccolo. Piccolo was one hella badass and had an interesting shift from bad guy to good, and Trunks had a really awesome aura of mystery around him. The way he effortless beat the shit out of Frieza let you know he wasn't playin' around.


Dragon Ball Z is the first anime I ever got hooked on, and it will be the last. I never really cared much about Dragon Ball (it was cool but the alien aspect that conquered much of DBZ was why I loved it), and Dragon Ball GT was a disappointment. Dragon Ball Kai is what I'm using to bang out my rewatch of the series. No filler, no pointless crap.


Seriously, I think any testosterone-enriched human being has to agree that this show is the best thing ever. It's pure male fantasy, the ability to change your hair and become deezed at the snap of a finger, as well as being able to survive being thrown through (not into, through) mountains.


Oh coincidentally I hear there's going to be a game made for the Xbox 360 Kinect where you can fight like a Saiyan. This can go one of two ways; it'll either be the greatest video gaming experience of all time, or a massive failure. Here's hoping there's no screwup!


What will I write about next time? Find out on the next exciting episode of The 90s Zone!

Super Mario Bros. 3!

I don't know if my blog writing powers will be enough to capture how good this game is or even how much I love it, but let's go.


Super Mario Bros. 3 was the first game I ever played, and quite possibly my favourite NES game of all time, except for Mega Man 2. A groundbreaking title in the Super Mario franchise, it brought a lot to the series and expanded upon much of the best from both Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2 (Doki Doki Panic in Japan, but actually was fully intended to be the true Super Mario Bros. 2 until Nintendo decided pulling vegetables out of the ground and drinking magic potions wasn't very Mario-like). The main map of the game was revolutionary for a Mario game, and used it to absolute the fullest the NES could handle, something sadly Super Mario World (or Super Mario Bros. 4 if you're a weeaboo sperglord) didn't hold up to. The card games, the white mushroom houses, the music.

Sorry but I have to gush for a moment.

Wasn't it cool how you could hop into Kuribo's Shoe and and run around the countryside killing things like Piranha Plants with a single stomp? Remember that one level that seemed to have no exit, until you flew up to the very top with a Koopa shell you had to use to open the path to the pipe? How about the Tanooki suit, which didn't see as much use in the series until Super Mario 3D Land tried to bring it back?


Oh my god there are so many things I can say about this game but you should honestly just check it out yourself. It creates this dazzling and very much enveloping environment that not many 8-bit games can muster with their limited technology, making you feel like you're in the Mushroom Kingdom. Which, oddly enough by the way, appears to be built like a stage. The hammered in platforms, the curtains at the beginning, it's like a Broadway musical or some shit and it owns. The feeling of adventure is something I really tried to capture with my own game Tita Gasman, but I'm not sure I could hold a candle up to this masterpiece. I love the orangish skies and the sparkling caves that look like starfields and the white lined skies in the ice world. I love giant land with the huge Koopas and blocks, and the warp pipe maze (actually that maze sucks) and the turbo tanks in Bowser's fleet at the end. I love it all. 


This game is a veritable feast for the eyes and ears.

MXC and Pants-ing

So it's time to discuss one of those things that weren't really '90s built still feel like it! I put them in what I call the "90s gray area". Let's get to it.

MXC was a hell of a show. It stood for "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge" and followed contestants as they performed wacky stunts and off-colour challenges for a shot at the prize. It always featured two teams with very little relation to each other, like the Porn Stars vs. the Cheese Factory or what have you, and there was always one person whose last name was Babaganush on either of the teams. It was the quintessential Japanese game show.




MXC was adapted from a show called Takeshi's Castle which did in fact air in Japan during the late '80s and early '90s. It definitely had the period aesthetic within it, hence why I chose it for the blog. Amongst the characters (created for the English version by dubbing over the original run) were Kenny Blakenship, the drunken womanizer whose dirty comments made the show, Vic Romano, the straight-faced foil to Kenny and smarter of the duo, Guy LaDouche, the perverted field reporter, and Captain Tenneal, the marshal who lead the challenges. Here's a clip of the crazy shit they used to do!:

Back in the day there was a thing kids did called "pantsing". For the uninitiated, it was when you ran up behind an unsuspecting fellow and pulled down his pants. The four seconds of embarrassment before you raced those trousers back up was unparalleled, and you prayed to god you were wearing underpants. I remember this happened to one kid in late grade school while he was strolling along in the dead centre of the paved area. Poor guy had every boy, girl, and staff member turn to see him before he could get the pants back up. The kicker? He never wore underpants.


Anyways how this relates to the first thing I was writing about is that we actually used to imitate the MXC challenges when we got a bit older. My buddies and I were doing some obstacle course shit in a garden-type place that was fenced off and had a big tree in the middle. Adjacent to it was (at the time) a country road, and a busy one at that during high noon. Well I was hanging off the tree as part of a challenge and out of nowhere one of my mates came and pulled my shorts right down to my ankles. Because my hands were clasped to a tree branch (as they usually are when one is hanging from a thing), it took me a bit more time to react and figure out the safest way to get my pants back up. Unfortunately I was wearing Batman boxers at the time so every driver on the road could see my affinity for the Dark Knight plastered all over my rectum whilst they sped by.


At least I wasn't the guy whose shrivelled scrotual shame was exposed for all to see though. That's something that ruins lives.

Buffy

Man I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Actually I mostly love Sarah Michelle Gellar (it's her birthday today!) and the '90s but it's kind of the same thing.

Anyways this show is fantastic. Made by the ultra goony but nonetheless talented Joss Whedon, it chronicles young Buffy Summers on her quest to vanquish dark spirits from the world. It's pure fanboy gold in that it has a bangin' hot lead character who kicks a lot of ass, along with some pretty awesome side characters like Willow (Buffy's best friend, also a lesbian [this is important to the story]), Giles (librarian at Buffy's high school who educates her on dark forces), and that other guy who's always with them (I think he does something important but I can't remember). 


I remember Buffy aired after Dragon Ball Z on Saturday nights back in the mystical time period of the '90s at 10:00PM. My mother was cool and let me stay up to watch. My first crush was Buffy and apparently still is because I own the first season on DVD. Back in high school my desktop wallpaper was the below picture of her until admin told me to take it down. Good times.

The show had some pretty intricate storylines but a lot of good humour peppered throughout as well. It went from kind of lighthearted in the beginning to a bit darker and edgier (for the better, of course) in the later seasons. I never saw the original movie but the poster makes it look like it's early '90s/wannabe '80s whereas the show was definitely the grittier type of affair that defined the latter half of the decade.


Blogs are now gonna be done only during the week because I have things (i.e. a life) going on on the weekend.

Neopets

Neopets are one of those things that came out in the last half of the 1999s that are still very much 90s despite never really catching on until the early 2000s. Oh well, to me the '90s die with Sept. 11, 2001. Bite me if you disagree.

Neopets are the epitome of the web in its adolescence. I'm not going to say it was the first social media, because it wasn't, but it was almost a prelude to that. I mean think about it. There were clubs you could join, games you could play, there was instant messaging and you could connect with people you met in the real world and online. Plus once it started dying off people flew over to Myspace, circa 2004. Then after that, Facebook followed. But this isn't about them, this is about our goddamn virtual pets.

The site used to have a lot of really cool games et cetera that you could play, plus items to buy, a house to build, and a whole wack of other neat things to do. You collected Neopoints, which were kind of like money, by playing games, buying stuff then selling it for more, and exploring the world. It was cool, and all the while you had to take care of your pets. You could pimp them out with fancy costumes or by magic paintbrushes that turned them rare colours (you started off with a choice of four and had to work hard at games to get colours like purple, gold, or even Christmas-themed). Back in the day it wasn't uncommon to spend a good four hours a night after school on Neopets. What a waste of time.

The guilds were kind of cool. I remember going on a Pokemon-themed guild and made friends with the leader. Then, being a little idealist, broke off and started my own. I asked to become allies with the head of my old one and she flamed (word we used that meant "got really militant with") the absolute hell out of me, saying I cheated or something and professed she would never do that. It was really really funny in retrospect, seeing that kind of spergrage over a Pokemon group on a virtual pets website. The person still has their page up and is still pumping out MS Paint comics, so go read those if you want to reminisce/laugh at art still trapped in the world of ten years ago.

I recently went back a few summers ago to try and eat up spare time I had, and my god they've royally screwed that place. It's very corporate now, "buy Neopoints or upgrade to a plus account" kind of thing, which I guess was only natural considering the site was moving towards that in 2003 before I left. The site heads used to be dicks and make you wait for a very slim opening to get rare breeds of Neopets (always the really cool designs), and now I can only imagine they flat out make you buy them with a credit card or something. Tis a shame.

Wayne's World! Wayne's World!

Yeah sorry not making advertising the focus of this week like I planned!

One of my favourite all time movie duos. This one's dedicated to my boys Ben and Dustin, with whom I've seen these movies like a thousand times. Srs. We watch them like once a year and I always piss myself.


I can remember being a wee lad who loved Austin Powers seeing the poster for this in Blockbuster. My mother didn't have much affinity for them (saw them when they first came out and thought they were so stupid. can't blame her) but I remained in awe. I caught it on cable for the first time not long after that, and apparently so did my aforementioned chums. We watched and watched and watched them. I think that was how we learnt the words to Bohemian Rhapsody. But isn't that how everyone does?


The best scene in these movies is in the second one. Not even gonna bother typing it out because there's no way I could do it justice. Just watch:

Until next time, see ya

Old Commercials (Part II)

This is probably only nostalgic if you're Canadian, just warning.

Hokay. So all of you probably remember those Concerned Children Advertiser's messages from the '90s/2000s, right? If not, allow me to jog your memory.

The house hippo is totally a Canadian icon. I mean everyone knows who he (she?) is. The main focus here though is those damn commercials. They ran on every channel I watched (basically Teletoon, CTV, and YTV). There was no escaping their positive message. And the worst part is, I still have them all memorized. I'm not just talking two or three ads, they ran a series of a good fifteen or twenty that have been burned into my eardrum and retina to this very day.

The silliest ones were about personal image and self esteem. They used the most dire child actors (keyword is child though so maybe that has something to do with it) and the lamest scenarios. Heh, anyone remember the one with the bully who's talking to himself at a fence about smashing kids faces in et cetera?

I wonder whether he's pumping gas or dealing crack now. Both are leaps and bounds better than screaming at a wall though.

Old Commercials (Part I)

Where would advertising be without the '90s? They marked the transition from the wooden, boring commercials of the '80s to the wooden, in-your-face commercials of the early 2000s. They compelled you to buy everything from board games to air conditioners. They didn't care you how little you were interested, they were making damn sure you saw it and wanted it. Take this commercial for the game "Perfection" for one:

Nobody plays board games anymore because they're lame (actually nowadays we play Jenga at the pub and it's 1000x more fun) but back when I was a kid those fifteen seconds made me go screaming bloody murder at mum to buy the thing!

As part of the period aesthetics, everything had either rich, primary colours or bold, secondary colours with awesome shading (only usually hand drawn stuff for Ring Pops or skateboards or whatever though). If you were a girl you might remember Lisa Frank, whose warm, tropical design was plastered all over trapper keepers and the like. Times New Roman was for those adult type ads (not for porno or anything, that's not what I meant) to give a bit of class before it started looking dated towards the turn of the millennium. I haven't actually picked up a magazine in years so I can't speak for today's modern page advertising, but this stuff popped out and enticed you.


Tomorrow we might take a look back at those Concerned Children's Advertising commercials. We could turn this into advertisement week or something.

Easter Sunday; Nirvana and other fitting things.

Sorry that I didn't do one of these yesterday. Turns out Easter is a hell of a thing!

Welp, 18 years ago today we lost a king of the underground music scene. That's right, Kurt Cobain died today back in 1994. As far as I know there's a lot of mystery surrounding his death and everything (official ruling was suicide, but who knows), with the most popular theory being that it was that harpie Courtney Love who had the entire thing orchestrated. Wouldn't shock me. It's kind of funny that he had his own little Yoko Ono considering the guy loved The Beatles. His life story really is a downer but if you don't mind that check it out because it's really interesting. He did quite a number of pretty good Led Zeppelin covers too which is really awesome.


I'll admit that Nirvana's heyday was a little past my time, but back in grade school I got a mix CD from a friend that had some of their stuff on it and I was hooked. Truly a sound for the ages! Even all throughout high school I enjoyed flicking them on every now and then.


I refuse to link to the VEVO of Nirvana's music, because I feel Kurt himself wouldn't want me paying into the capitalist hierarchy of music. 

On second thought he probably wouldn't give a shit and have general apathy towards it, but whatever.

Holy shit it's Batman

Batman is so cool. Even today he's the most epic badass of all time. I don't understand the appeal to Chuck Norris - he got his ass kicked by Bruce Lee and doesn't really do much of anything nowadays. Batman is probably one of the few people who could give Bruce a run for his money.

Of course Batman didn't get his start in the 90s; goodness, the guy's been around since at least the 1940s. However, the dark knight had quite a revival in his popularity during that period, and even went through some rough patches before bouncing back up to the top in the mid-2000s (see left). I'll admit I didn't think the 1989 film was the apex of his career, but there's no denying that Batman Returns is just awesome. Serious. Batman and Robin, as I alluded to above, sure was a thing and a half, and if you don't take it seriously (years of Nolanverse Batman has left me conditioned though) it can be really enjoyable to hear some of the worst ice related puns ever. Freeze Birdboy! Stay cool! Allow me to break the ice! Oh my god I'm starting to hear Schwarzenegger as I type this.

There's the whole matter of the cartoons and toys too that defined Batman in the 1990s; those toy commercials were some of the most compelling things on television and made damn sure you went screaming to your mom and dad to buy you the new Batmobile so you could teach that nasty Joker a thing or two. The cartoons were really neat because they were dark and gritty but not in a way where kids would be put off or scared. Okay maybe some were but those usually were the ones who told on you if you swore at school or something. 

At the end of the day Batman still reigns supreme and continues to put out a myriad of really really neat things. Here's to another 70 years of the bat!

Super Inclusive!!!

This was one of the things I remember most about the 90s: super inclusiveness.

You will no joke see it in every cartoon stretching from the late 80s to early 2000s. The Burger King Kids Club thing above shows it perfectly. Srs. Look how inclusive that group is. You have a black kid, a hispanic, a hacker-type bad boy, a damsel in distress, a tomboy, a kid in a wheelchair, a nerd, and goddamn dog. I even bet the nerd has a dumb name like IT or something.

These peripheral characters I'm certain were only there to show how inclusive it we all had to be. You probably could get rid of the hispanic kid and combine the dumb ginger nerd with the hacker.

It's a cute kind of thing in retrospect but only in a laughable way. Oh 90s!

Smash my Pumpkins

 '90s alternative rock is the best kind of rock out there. The epitome of this is acts like The Beastie Boys and The Offspring, and of course The Smashing Pumpkins.

Billy Corgan with hair is a weird sight nowadays.

There's a lot of hilarious personality and behaviour in this group. Albums like Gish, Siamese Dream, and Mellon Collie are fantastic. I can't listen to 1979 without getting shudders of nostalgia for the 1990s (funny how that works). The reason the original group broke up, of course, is because everyone in the band was addicted to heroin -- but that didn't stop them from still owning whenever they were together. Take this video from Brazil, for instance:

D'arcy is strung out of her mind, and Billy can't even wrap his head around that piano solo the guy from the other band plays. The look on his face is basically "cool thanks I guess". What a great group.

Oh, and they had a really cool guest spot on The Simpsons back when that was good too.

Red and Stumpy

I've already missed a day! I need to prewrite these blogs for the week the way people premake their dinners on Sunday.

Anyways today I'm going to remind you all of Ren and Stimpy. Back in the day I used to call Ren "Red" and I thought he was the cat. Didn't everyone though?

Ren and Stimpy was a great show though! The animation was just as good as any classic Road Runner or Bugs Bunny-era stuff (and blended in seamlessly with it when Teletoon ran them all in the same block). It was zany, out there, and larger than life. Some of the episodes even got banned for being too violent! I couldn't really understand this myself - it didn't seem any worse to me than Tom and Jerry. I suppose it was the part where Ren actually tries to murder Stimpy in the Sven Hoek episode though (which is a great episode to watch after stumbling home one night, by the way). I think there was an episode with George Liquor that got banned too, probably because of his name and the fact that ARE CHILDREN had to be safe from the evil mentioning of alcohol and 90% of everything else people do in the real world (we banned Pokemon cards for introducing kids to the occult, after all!).

To refresh your memory if you lost, I'm just going to mention a few things from the show: Log, Powdered Toast Man, Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence. Hope this helps!

I'll always believe Ren and Stimpy peaked in its earliest seasons, before John K. was booted out. Ironically enough, he spearheaded the revival show in the early 2000s, but if you were like me and expecting it to be any good, you were sorely disappointed. The old show had pretty hilarious implications of adult humour but when they went out of their way to make it so explicit, well, it just sucked.

Austin Powers

These were the greatest movies ever growing up.


I remember watching the first with my friend and his dad at age seven or eight. Us two didn't get all the jokes, but laughed nevertheless and it was great. I know a lot of people really don't like them, and I can't figure out why. I know the characters and premise are kind of silly, but isn't that the idea of a comedy? I mean I'd almost go as far as to say they were the same quality satire as The Simpsons during its peak. But I also tend to say things like Empire Strikes Back being the greatest movie ever made.


Aside from being a riot to watch I've always thought they had extremely good soundtracks and production values. As a designer I've always been in awe of the campy charm of Dr. Evil's quasi-futuristic clothing, or the tin foil-like spacesuits he wore in the second one. Things like the volcano base too were really need - I mean I know they weren't the best but they certainly had something about them that influenced me. 


Later in life I got a lot of great music out of these movies when I rewatched them in high school. Strawberry Alarm Clock, Steppenwolf, etc. I mean they made me like Madonna for christ's sake.


I'm still waiting for a fourth one. But hell I'm also still waiting for a third Wayne's World.

"Super" Nintendo

I'm going to start off by confessing that I didn't own a Super Nintendo.


I did play them a lot, but no I never owned one. Either way it was a hell of a console. Donkey Kong Country is one of those games that I will never forget, along with other type hits like Super Star Wars and Super Mario World (as an aside, I like how all the games on the SNES had the word "Super" in their title, just in case you forgot how super they were). One of the very first things I did when I bought the Wii was go back and buy all of the games I knew and loved from the console. It's really a shame that Earthbound was never rereleased because it's one of the lowest effort kind of cash grabs Nintendo could pull, and it'd introduce a new generation to a killer RPG. I thought they liked those things?

The control mechanisms were a nice kick up from the NES - nothing too overly complicated but enough to give developers far more freedom than they had with the original. Games like Super Mario World and Mega Man X changed the classic formula of their respective series as well. Probably a good thing for the latter seeing as how Mega Man 6 was being bitched out by game magazines for being the same stuff you could get from Mega Man 2. What a time to be alive!

Gorgeous!

If you still have a SNES booting around you've probably noticed it's gotten a lovely colour about it now. Back in the '90s, grey-white featureless plastic was the rage for everything from computers to printers to telephones. And, keeping up with a changing world, oxidization seems to have rid all these things of their grey skin!


Plastic that changes colour would be a really neat thing if piss-yellow wasn't what you got. Oh well!