Aborted "Thundarr" Video Game

I loved the cartoon "Thundarr the Barbarian" (1980-1982) as a kid, and wrote HERE previously about the proposed "Thundarr" toy line that was abandoned when the TV show was cancelled and the toy company went bankrupt. 

Today I learned of another, similar casualty. Apparently a "Thundarr the Barbarian" video game was developed in the early 1980s for Atari and for ColecoVision. You can view the original, full color press release for the game, including box art and a screen grab HERE.  But this may've been a blessing.  The game was apparently canceled after the licensor, the animation company Ruby-Spears, determined that it was not of sufficient quality.  But you can judge that for yourself, as it turns out. The game was released in 1984 anyway, under the revised title, "Tomarc the Barbarian," and here is a 4 minute clip of it:

Godzilla: Why 1978?

The new "Godzilla" film that will be released later this week got me reflecting on how I became familiar with "Godzilla" as a kid in the 1970s. Of course, the old B&W movies from Japan were shown regularly on TV on Saturday afternoons back then.  But I mostly knew Godzilla from this 1978 toy and from this 1978 cartoon.

Why was Godzilla suddenly revived in America in 1978 (seemingly out of the blue), I wondered?  (Marvel also published a Godzilla comic book at the time, and a set of "Godzilla" View-Master reels were released that year, too.) I couldn't find a single, definitive answer to that.  But it may've been linked to a proposed 1978 re-make of the original 1954 film that was to have been titled "King of Monsters: Rebirth of Godzilla."  You can read more about it on the Toho website HERE. ("But for whatever reason the project never came to pass.")

"E.T." Found In New Mexico Landfill

Have you ever heard the urban legend about how hundreds of thousands of copies of the notoriously risible "E.T." video game cartridge, released by Atari in 1982,  reputed for years to be the worst video game of all time, were allegedly buried secretly by Atari in the New Mexico desert when they didn't sell?

Yesterday the reputed site in Alamogordo was dug up.  Unlike Al Capone's vault (or the search for Jimmy Hoffa), they found what they were looking for.  You can read all about it on CNN here.   I also liked how this article detailed the (amazing) background business decisions made by Atari that led up to this.

Curious what the "worst video game of all time" actually looked like?  You can watch a video posted on You Tube about it HERE.

"Walkman" Perplexes Today's Kids

Any adult who has ever watched in jealous amazement as a child intuitively operates an iPad with casual ease may enjoy watching THIS one minute segment from Good Morning America where a series of kids were handed a Sony "Walkman" from the 1980s  and asked to make it work.

The "Choose Your Own Adventure" Story

As a young kid I was pretty ambivalent about reading, and the only books I remember really enjoying back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were from the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series. Because kids could literally decide at the bottom of each page (from a few options) where the plot should go, a young reader could make the book as entertaining (or, alternatively, short) as they desired.

I found THIS brief history about how the series was originally created in the 1970s to be fascinating in many respects.  It apparently began when a bored lawyer for RCA Records named Ed Packard began writing a story in this format for his kids in 1969.  But it languished unpublished for years, apparently, until a former high school teacher named RA Montgomery (then working at a small Vermont publisher) began championing it as a concept to bigger publishers in New York City.

The series' end is summarized as follows. "By the late 1980s, the series was showing signs of exhaustion. Lackluster concepts like You Are a Shark were pushed through in the rush to keep the installments coming, and the number of possible endings in many titles dwindled. Early Choose books had dozens of endings; later entries saw as few as eight. Then, with the rise of video and computer games, which provided that same interactivity in an even more addictive format, Choose's foothold in the market slipped. In 1999, after selling 250 million copies worldwide, the publisher retired the brand and let the trademark lapse."

"Mad Libs" Creator Has Died

Do you remember "Mad Libs"?  If so, you may want to watch THIS 30 second clip from the NBC Nightly News last night.  It's a short obituary for their co-creator, who has just died.

World's Craziest Water Slides

A new Travel + Leisure magazine article HERE has ranked the the 'World's Craziest Water Slides.'  It includes a slideshow featuring photos of all 13, with names like 'Insano' and 'Leap of Faith' and 'King Cobra.'  Some of them are pretty amazing.  But what surprised me most was that 2 of the 13 are located in Italy and another one is in Austria.

When I think about Italy, many things come to mind immediately.  Over-the-top water slides and giant amusement parks would not have been among them.  Until now.

"Crayola" Makes 3 Billon Crayons A Year

CNN Money did THIS 2 minute profile of Crayola, including an interview with their CEO. Like a lot of things on CNN in recent years, they managed to make this 'fun' topic bland to the point of boring.  But I was surprised when the CEO said that Crayola makes 3 billion crayons a year, and that they're still made in America.

Three billion seems like a lot to me.  Crayola LLC a private company, so its financial information is not publicly available. But if the crayons are still made in America, presumably they're mostly sold here as well. (Could they realistically compete on price in, say, China with knock-off products manufactured there.)  According to ChildStats.gov HERE, there were 24.3 million children ages 0-5 in America in 2010 and a further 24.6 million aged 6-11.  Can 49 million American kids really be consuming the majority of 3 billion crayons a year?  If they bought a collective 2 billion a year, that would mean each and every kid in America ages 0-11 was getting 41 new crayons a year.

I also thought it was interesting how relatively 'low tech' the manufacturing process still was.  (Though on reflection I'm not sure what else I was expecting, given the nature of the product.)

Chuck E. Cheese Makeover - Surprise Atari Link

"The company that operates the chain of children’s pizza restaurants is retiring the giant rodent’s outdated image... CEC Entertainment Inc. says it plans to launch a national ad campaign Thursday with a revamped image of Chuck E. Cheese as a hip, electric-guitar-playing rock star,"  according to THIS article in The Washington Post today. (You can see the new version of the mascot in the Los Angeles Times HERE.)

This impending change sounds terrible to me.  But the last line of the article caught my eye anyway. "The chain was founded by Nolan Bushnell, who also co-founded Atari and Pong."  This revelation surprised me at first.  But the more I thought about it, it wasn't really a surprise at all. Atari turned 40 itself earlier this week, according to THIS article in the USA Today. "The Atari 2600, launched in 1977, was the first video game console in millions of homes, long before the Nintendo Entertainment System (1985), Sony's PlayStation (1994) and Microsoft's Xbox (2001)."

I'd never heard the name 'Nolan Bushnell' before.  Who is this genius of innovation? According to his Wikipedia article, he's still alive and is 69 years old.  It sounds like he had a great 1977.  That year he sold Atari, which he'd co-founded only 5 years earlier,  to Warner Communications (now Time Warner) for $28 million, the same year the iconic Atari 2600 was launched. He also opened the first Chuck E. Cheese that year.  But by November 1978, he was forced out at Atari and by 1981 he'd turned over day-to-day operations at Chuck E. Cheese. By 1984, the computer game market had crashed and Atari was split up and sold off.  Chuck E. Cheese declared bankruptcy later the same year.   Bushnell has continued to be a serial entrepreneur, apparently.  But he's never had another year like 1977.

Cornerning The Market For "He-Man" Dolls

When you think of the term "cornering the market," what do you think of? My first thought is probably of the attempt by the Hunt Brothers to corner the silver market in 1979.

My friend Jeff brought THIS article to my attention this morning.  It concerns the current attempt by a British performance artist named Jamie Moakes to corner the market in vintage 1980s "Ram Man" action figures. (Ram Man being a supporting character from the old He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon.)  Moakes is documenting his every purchase (and the prices) on You Tube.  (This article has a link to his You Tube channel.)

Creator of "Mad Libs" Has Died

Do you remember "Mad Libs"?  If you do, you may want to watch this obituary about their creator, who died recently, that aired on the NBC Nightly News last night. It includes a 2008 interview with him, where he explains how he stumbled on the original idea.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rules of "Scrabble" Not Changing In The US

You've probably played the board game Scrabble many times over the years.  You remember it: the game where each player picks tiles with letters printed on them and then tries to spell-out words on the game board like a crossword puzzle. Despite being invented in 1938, Scrabble apparently still has a rabid fan base around the world, even today, as well as a circuit of sanctioned competitions and professional players.  But controversy erupted among its fans last week when news leaked on the internet that a new version of the game to be released in Britain will change to the rules to allow proper names (like cities and celebrities) for the first time.  


The New York Times is reporting this morning (really, it's made that much news) that this rule change will not, in fact, be made to the version of the game sold in the United States, however.  You can read the article HERE. Beyond the hysteria about this (seemingly minor) rule change, I thought that this news was also interesting because it revealed to me that Scrabble is not made by the same company all over the world.  It turns out that those rights are actually split between two giant toy companies. Hasbro owns the rights to the game in the United States while Mattel holds the rights outside the United States.  So this new rule change may be less a reflection of any cultural differences between the United States and Britain (at least among Scrabble enthusiasts), but, more prosaically, merely the different marketing strategies of two multi-national corporations. 

Barbie and "Talking Malibu Stacy"

The world famous "Barbie" doll by Mattel made it's public debut on this day in 1959 at the American International Toy Fair in New York. While indisputably iconic and enduringly popular, Barbie has also come in for more than a little criticism over the years for her 'sweater girl' shape and the 'frivolous' interests implied by her accessories. 


This brought to mind an episode of The Simpsons. Lisa is angry and disappointed that the new talking version of her favorite Barbie-like doll, Malibu Stacy, says only things like "I wish they taught shopping in school" and "math is hard."  A 48 second clip is embedded below. 

The Sea Monkeys' Creator Was A White Supremacist

Over the years I've learned that, with regard to many of my more obscure childhood interests (like comic books and Dungeons & Dragons, for example), there's almost always a "story behind the story" that's surprisingly compelling, or shockingly prurient or incomprehensibly bizarre.  Well, I've now stumbled on another example.


A couple of days ago I wrote here about the novelty "X-Ray Specs" that used to be sold in the 1970s via ads in the back of comic books, and how their creator also invented "Sea Monkeys."  Well, it turns out that man, Harold von Bruaunhut (who died in 2003 at the age of 77), was a white supremacist who had a long-term association with The Aryan Nations, to whom he funneled some of the profits from his toys, including Sea Monkeys. This is all the more surprising because he was apparently raised Jewish as "Harold Nathan Braunhut" in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s.  The Los Angeles Times ran an expose about all this in October 2000, which includes some shockingly racist and anti-semitic quotes from him, that you can read in its entirety HERE. Here's an excerpt:

"There are newsletters from an organization called the National Anti-Zionist Institute, headed by 'Hendrik von Braun,' whose return address, P.O. Box 809, Bryans Road, Md., is the same place one sends away for Sea Monkey paraphernalia.... Floyd Cochran, spokesman for the Aryan Nations until 1992 and a reformed racist, recalls Von Braunhut as a slight, balding man with 'a rather large nose for a person of the Aryan Nations.' He says Von Braunhut was something of a misfit. 'He'd give long speeches about numerology and he'd make references to the pyramids,' Cochran says. 'It just didn't play very well.'"

What Were Those Novelty X-Ray Glasses Really?

If you grew up as a kid in the 1970s and ever any read comic books, you doubtlessly came across ads like the one above for a product called "X-Ray Specs." For a mere $1 you could get your very own pair of x-ray glasses, enabling you to see through walls like Superman. If you were a boy of a certain age back then, you were probably somewhat intrigued by the gross-out possibility of viewing the bones in your own outstretched hand, but were positively captivated by the prospect of being able to see through women's clothes.  


Today these types of products are dismissively categorized as "novelties."  The fact that they did not work as advertised is therefore taken a given.  But not back then.  At least not in my elementary school. No one ever ordered a pair, I don't think. But as we hit 4th, 5th and 6th grade, these x-ray glasses came up in conversation more and more frequently, especially when girls were nearby. 


But what were they, really?  As it turns out, they had nothing whatsoever to do with real x-rays, of course. They were really just an oversized pair of glasses with plastic frames and cardboard lenses. Each "lens" consisted of two layers of cardboard with a feather sandwiched between them. A small hole was then punched through the middle. And the wearer viewed objects through these holes. The veins of the feathers were so close together that they diffracted incoming light, causing the user to receive two slightly offset images. And that produced the (blurry) illusion of x-ray vision apparently.  (Would it surprise you to learn that the guy who invented these was the same man who marketed brine shrimp to children as anthropomorphic "Sea Monkeys"?)


In fairness, looking at that ad above in more detail now, there is more truth in the copy than I remember.  It does term the whole thing a "hilarious optical illusion," and says that you "seem" to see the bones in your hand.  I didn't remember these ads being anywhere near that equivocal.  But if I had ordered  a pair, I am sure that I would not have found the whole underwhelming reality anywhere near as "hilarious" as the makers suggest.  


As an aside, did you notice how the ad treats the more prurient "look through women's clothes" aspect?  There's a very clear drawing of a bug-eyed boy staring at a woman's silhouette under her dress. But then the text below reads, "Look at your friend.  Is that really his body you 'see' under his clothes?"  'His' body? Was that some sort of attempt to soften this aspect? (Better to encourage young boys to try to look at each other unclothed, I suppose they thought, than their matronly school teacher?)

My Atari Christmas (SCRAM!)

One Christmas in the very early 1980s (maybe 1980), my parents gave me an Atari home computer: the Atari 400. Not the more famous Atari 2600 from the 1970s (the one that only played games). This was a genuine home computer, designed to compete with the increasingly popular Apple II home computer of the time. Embedded below is a 30 second TV advertisement for it from 1981. "Atari computers: we've brought the Computer Age home," the narrator concludes. Atari dared to envision a brave New World, it seems, where even the ditziest mothers could eventually be trained by modern computing to learn all the state capitals. ("With Atari home computers anything's possible.")

This commercial also captures the graphics of its games very well. I also loved the fact that, among the stack of games and other programs shown, there's one for "Touch Typing." Ah, the irony of that. For the Atari 400 had a "membrane keyboard" (i.e. no keys, just a plastic overlay on which a simulated keyboard had been printed), which made typing excruciatingly slow (you had to press each letter very firmly to make it register on screen) and "touch typing" essentially impossible.

My favorite ever game for it was a Donkey Kong rip-off called "Miner 2049er." I've also embedded below a 45 second clip of the start of the game.

Despite the clunky membrane keyboard, it really was a great machine that I continued to play for several years afterward. (It apparently sold millions of units through 1985, and was a great success for Atari.) Among other games, I later got a nuclear power plant simulator for it called "SCRAM," which was released in the wake of the Three Mile Island "disaster." It simulated (in a serious way) the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor, and allowed the player to simulate what had happened there in 1979. (That's a screen shot above.) The game was accompanied by a detailed 55 page manual, which included a primer on the basic principles of thermodynamics. (Fun for any 11 year old boy!) The program was apparently designed by a "gaming luminary" named Chris Crawford who characterized it years later as, "a stupid game devoid of entertainment value." If he could do SCRAM all over again, he's quoted as having said, he'd start by asking himself "What is fun and interesting about nuclear power plants?" to which he'd answer "not much," and then he'd scrap SCRAM outright.

Tiger Woods Action Figures Flying Off Shelves

Despite having been dropped by multiple sponsors in recent days, the Tiger Woods scandal has been really good for at least one tiny corner of his business empire. According to this 1 minute story from NBC News embedded below, Tiger Woods action figures, which apparently hadn't been very popular before, are now huge sellers for the distributor. ("This is the first athlete who's had a problem where we've been able to sell their product.")

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

X-Mas For Star Wars Fans: Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

Stumped for a Christmas present idea? How about the new Tauntaun Sleeping Bag? Pretend to be a hypothermic Luke Skywalker as he was shoved into the belly of a tauntaun by Han Solo at the start of The Empire Strikes Back. (See recreation using Star Wars figures at left.) Just look at the attention to detail on that sleeping bag: the inner lining even has a print of the tauntaun's oozing guts. (You never get used to the smell, do you?)

And as you can see from this photo at left, it's not just for little boys. Forget the depressing Snuggie. Adult single women will love this, too! (Especially the stuffed legs and tail.) A rare night in my dear?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sold for $60 Million

The kid's cable television channel "Nickleodeon" (owned by Viacom) has struck a deal today to buy all the rights to the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" for $60 million from the co-owners The Mirage Group and 4 Kids Entertainment. According to the "Los Angeles Times" today, Nickeloden has made this deal because they want to attract more boys to its channel. A new cartoon series is apparently planned, as is a feature film.

If you remember the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" at all, you probably think of their huge popularity in the early 1990s in the wake of their successful cartoon series, which inevitably spawned a seemingly ubiquitous line of action figures and other merchandise. There was a year or two there around 1990 where if you happened to be in a shopping mall or an airport, you couldn't go 10 minutes without seeing a young boy wearing a "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" t-shirt, or with one of the dolls dangling listlessly from one hand.

It all started much more humbly, however, as a black and white comic book first published by "Mirage Studios" in 1984. Mirage Studios was actually just two guys, the creators: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. They wrote, drew and published the early issues entirely themselves, using money borrowed from family. (They called themselves "Mirage Studios" because there was no "studio" really, just them.) They had only 3,000 copies of the first issue printed, and sold it at a comic book convention being held at a Sheraton hotel in their home state of New Hampshire. The comic book was initially a somewhat crudely drawn parody of the two most popular comic books at that time: "X-Men" (thus the "Teenage" and "Mutant" in the title) and "Daredevil." (The image above is from those early days.)

But it was the Saturday morning cartoon, which started in 1988, that really popularized them. What followed was a textbook case of the power of cartoon marketing to kids. (A vintage commercial for the dolls, featuring clips from the cartoon, is embedded below. See how the artwork and the entire concept itself has been softened from the original black & white image above?) The "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" became an unlikely household word there for a time. Eastman and Laird made millions. Imagine what the property would have sold for in those days? A lot more than $60 million, I would have thought.

Fads: Bankrupt By Beanie Babies

Remember the Beanie Babies craze of the late 1990s? Embedded below is an 8 minute documentary that a college student made detailing how, when he was a younger kid, his father became caught up in the mania and ultimately bought 15,000 or so Beanie Babies at the peak of the craze as an "investment."

At one point, the mother (who is clearly a little embittered) says of her husband, "it was always, 'oh, this is for their college education.' And I used to joke, 'what are they going to do, take a basket full of Beanie Babies into the admissions office?'..... Probably for about 6 months from when we started buying them, we were able to kinda realize that we could buy them and then turn around and make a profit on them. Although that was plan, it never happened because we never sold them, we just bought them. We missed that boat. "