Jan 28
I’m on a roll with these “10 Years After” columns, really. I’ve done Pokemon, Ace of Base, and the actual 00’s decade itself. In the aforementioned article about the decade in review I had a section about how far Nickelodeon Studios has fallen from grace and a phrase from what I wrote got me thinking; the phrase in question being “somewhere around the Nickellennium the train derailed and crashed through the side of the Fail Station”. The “Nickellennium” as it was called was part of a whole Y2K marketing thing that Nickelodeon started to ring in the new millennium, and while the previously mentioned quote was only part of a larger joke it actually reminded me of said marketing campaign. I started thinking about Nickellennium.
For those of you who are too young or just don’t remember, Nickellennium was actually a six-hour long movie (no commercial breaks either) that cataloged the thoughts, dreams, ideas, and hopes of kids from around the world as to what they thought about the future. It really was a monumental undertaking, and likely the last good thing Nickelodeon has ever produced, but I mean… seriously, putting an 11-year-old in front of the camera and asking him about the future is only going to end in him saying something he’ll regret when he’s in his 20’s. I thought about it and wondered what it would be like to revisit that production a decade later to gauge either how close or how far we are from everything that was said in the film because I’m expecting it to be hilariously skewed towards “THIS MILLENNIUM SUCKS SO FAR”, but mostly just because I’d like to make sure Frank (9, Georgia) cringes when he is reminded “in the future maybe we can talk to dolphins”.
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Tagged with: 10 years after • books • millennium • nickelodeon • nostalgia • spyro the dragon
Jan 17
No, I’m not about to rip into the (many) problems with the modern-day era of Pokemon. As much as I’d like to do that I don’t even know enough about Gold/Silver/Crystal to even begin to fabricate an argument higher in thought than “it sucks pretty bad”. This article is about a peculiar video of the same name, specifically the November 30th, 1999 episode of the show In Focus, a religiously charged broadcast that airs on WVCY TV30 in Wisconsin. This shoddy public access tape traveled all the way from Wisconsin down to the bowels of South Texas to meet me, like a stroke of destiny, in a Goodwill store. I always lurk the VHS section of any second-hand store because I have a knack for the awkwardly cringeworthy and that’s simply the place for the best pickins. Nestled in between a copy of The Land Before Time 45,713 and Popeye cartoons in Spanish lied this VHS – a simple black tape with a homemade type-written label reading “THE PROBLEM WITH POKEMON”. I bought it with a smile on my face knowing this would be superb, and it was.
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Tagged with: 10 years after • nineties • nostalgia • pokemon • religion • vhs
Jan 14
Look at that! 2010 and a brand new shiny graphic that I’m sure I will be tired of by March. 2010 is also important because it means that quite literally the worst decade in the history of decades, the aptly named “Double Zeroes” (named as such because it fails twice as hard as regular decades), is over and perhaps mankind can move on from such crippling things as terrorist attacks, an emo economy, and Luke Wilson advertising AMERICA’S NEXT 4G NETWORK and focus on the more (de)pressing matters like even more terrorist attacks, an economy so emo that it now combs its hair over both of its eyes, and more than likely Whoopi Goldberg advertising the inevitable “5G” network.
I kid; I have high hopes that the 10’s will turn the world around because seeing “10’s” gives me a mental picture of a monster truck completely destroying everything, doing a backflip, and bursting into flames while the judges literally crap their pants and hold up cards reading “10″ while tacking all of their other score cards onto the end of it trying to give Grave Digger a score of “10,987,654,321″ (that’s almost 11 billion points folks, beat that Maximum Destruction). At the very least if the Mayans are right with their 2012 nonsense then this decade won’t even have a chance to turn bad so think of it like that, it’s always great to stay positive!
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Tagged with: 10 years after • crap • internet • nostalgia • television • video games
Oct 23
Seeing as how I am largely a byproduct of the 1990’s I had the opportunity to grow up enjoying a lot of wondrous things such as MC Hammer making a zillion dollars off of one song and subsequently spending it all on the randomest crap ever (2 Legit 2 Pay My Bills), a time when Nickelodeon didn’t suck copious amounts of things I cannot say on this blog, and the awesome green version of Gator Golf (seriously the new orange one is terrifying). Also in the nineties (in 1993 specifically) this virtually unknown Swedish pop band called Ace of Base released their debut album Happy Nation. If you don’t know who Ace of Base is, then you might recognize this song anyways, because it’s terribly catchy in a godawful “this is why some people hated the 90’s” kind of way. Here is, arguably, their biggest hit single ever, The Sign.
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Tagged with: 10 years after • ace of base • bands • crap • music
Oct 20
I was going to originally wait until next month to publish this article, but once the true weight of this piece made its presence clear in my head and wouldn’t LEAVE I decided it would be best to go ahead and write it. On Friday November 12th, 1999 a very peculiar event took place. A movie came out, actually – and no – I’m sorry Kevin Smith, this article is not about your movie Dogma even though it is quite hilarious; this article is about none other than Pokemon: The First Movie.
It won the Academy Award for Best Movie Ever Made (in 1999).
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Tagged with: 10 years after • movies • nostalgia • pokemon • video games
