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Old things you saw as a kid

Last posted Apr 21, 2018 at 06:43AM EDT. Added Apr 02, 2018 at 11:11AM EDT
16 posts from 16 users

There have been a few things that I remember seeing as a kid that I have not seen or even heard about existing for nearly twenty years. Everyone knows about Disney films as a kid (and most of their spin offs) and things like Thomas the Tank Engine are cemented in Pop Culture. No, this is for stuff that is fairly obscure, stuck on old VHS tapes that might never have gotten a DVD release.

Thanks to the Internet, I've been able to look up the very little bits I remember and verify that these do in exist and I didn't just make them up.

Old Bear Stories
A toy stop motion children's series. I Remember getting a few VHS tapes when I was at my Grandmother's house and watching them. Rewatched the first episode last night. While the animation is good, otherwise not too much to offer adults. Still, it's fairly quite with natural colors and not obnoxious like other kids shows. If I had to babysit a young kid, I could actually watch this with them and not go insane.

Opinion: While definitely for kids, slightly better than I remember.

Little Red Tractor Stories

Based on a children's book series, I remember this only vaguely, as I only saw one vhs of it back in the day. I would not be surprised if I had not seen it in over 20 years. Told in a storybook style, but uses extremely limited animation. While not really bad, it sorta feels like that there is a narrow window for the target audience. But the time a kid is old enough to really understand the story, they are old enough to know the animation is basically non-existence. It works better as a book in that case IMO

Opinion: Not activly terrible, but not a lot of good. Worse than I remember.

Kidsongs

Don't remember much about this one. The feeling I got from watching the intro is enough to know I really am fine not looking at the rest of it. It's not bad, per-say, but it's kind of an odd premise for a show. And then they add the fur suit creatures, which have a very different vibe in today's online culture.

Opinion: As I don't remember much outside of the premise, and I'm really not a fan of much anything that the focus is on kids singing I can't say it's better or worse than I recall. Never ope to see more than the intro though.

Dudley the Dragon

Saw one VHS of this series from the library back in the day. Not too inclined to rewatch any of it based on the intro.

Opinion: It's a kids show with a guy in a Dragon Furry costume. Just not my thing.

Amazing Planet

Much more my thing are nature and based stuff. Nothing says that like adults pretending to be aliens… I actually did really like this show. Not something I would actively watch today, and admit is dumb but it was something that I remember getting at the library multiple times.

Opinion: It's a bit dumb but at least the point is to be educational.

MIGHTY MACHINES

My great grandmother once gave me a collection of VHSs and one of them contained at least two old educational films that I remember seeing. One was about letters at the zoo, but only focused on like five of them and not representing certain animals but rather things they do. For example, the letter E was for Eat and then it would show various clips of animals eating. I think the film was called "Z is for Zoo", but I can't seem to find it anywhere on the internet. The same VHS contained another film that involved learning about the words Yes, No, Stop and Go, and it featured a bunch of kids in a circle being taught by a man while clips of examples of the words were being shown. Like the other, I can't find it on the internet, so if anyone knows what I'm taking about could you possibly find them somewhere?

3-2-1 Penguins: Trouble on Planet Wait-Your-Turn
For some reason, we had a dvd of this show I never watched even as a little kid that our neighbor gave to us for some reason
I watched it once when I realized that I was definitely not the target audience

The Adventures of Tom Thumb and Thumbalina
My sister and I actually watched this a lot as kids, and it's weird that I don't see anyone talking about it, especially the fact that the cast includes Elijah Wood, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Peter Gallagher, and Jon Stewart and was published by Disney.
~~Also the Mole King song still gets stuck in my head and I hate it~~

(yes the animation was as ugly as that cover)

Valiant
Another Disney-published movie that nobody remembers and had a huge cast such as Ewan McGregor, Ricky Gervais, John Cleese, John Hurt, and Tim Curry. It was about carrier pigeons during WWII, and I don't remember much other than that.

I'm going to post about comics because I am KYM's greatest rebel. For decades, I had a vague memory of reading an issue of Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog and seeing a panel of Sonic dead, his body lying limply on jagged, blood-covered rocks. All those years, I could not decide if I manufactured the experience in my mind or if it really happened. It couldn't have. Sega wouldn't allow such a grotesque image in a comic aimed at children. But I could have sworn I saw it. Several years ago, I came across a huge online archive of Sonic comics (now deleted). After consuming large swaths of more recent issues, I finally focused on the earlier, more juvenile ones. Mostly, it was so I could be a big nerd and say I read every issue of Sonic the Hedgehog, but a part of me was searching for that image to prove to myself it was real.

I found it.

It was actually in one of Sonic's first comic appearances, issue #2 of the initial mini-series Archie published to test the interest in a continuing series. It was beyond satisfying to finally find the elusive image and get some context on why it was made. My memory was partly correct: Sonic was dead on rocks. But it wasn't as morbid as I remembered. There was no blood, the rocks were decidedly un-jagged, and Sonic's pose was much more cartoony with lulling tongue and X eyes. Still, one can understand why seeing an image of a childhood favorite character lying dead can stick with someone for years.

So, why was he dead? Turns out, it was part of a back-feature listing the reasons why the reader should continue buying more issues of Sonic the Hedgehog. Reason #1 was that Archie wasn't going to kill him off. For context, keep in mind that this issue was published in 1993, a year after DC's Death of Superman event. The panel was a surprisingly faithful parody of the famous image of Lois Lane mourning Superman.

Notice how Princess Sally's hands are in the same position as Lois', and the artist thought to place the flag and rubble in approximately the same spots. The Archie writer obviously had fun with it too, putting "Dying" in parentheses since Superman was back in no time, and a nice dig at the excessive collector's market.

It felt good to get a satisfactory answer to one of my childhood's most persistent mysteries. Even if it wasn't as gruesome as I remembered, it was still pretty shocking to a little kid. Evidently, early-90s kids comics did not pull their punches.

Last edited Apr 03, 2018 at 12:31AM EDT

Help, I'm a Fish! (2000)
To begin with, it features the voice talents of Alan Rickman, Terry Jones and last but not least, Aaron Paul. It's poorly displayed due to a badly-designed Nemo-desparate cover-art that has one A-list cast member listed. You're supposed to imagine if Don Bluth made a movie that is answer to The Emperor's New Groove in termes of It's Not Easy Bein' No Longer a Human but ended up as a missed opportunity at its most fatal. The story is there are three children had gone fishing, meet a scientist, become aquatic creatures and get the antidote in 48 hours. There are two potions made to make any human survive in climate change impact and for the scientist's newest vlog, Fish Potion and Antidote.

Lightbulb of anglerfish, chinstick of codfish, precipitated ink of octopus and anomea

Flyfish yells like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) while looking for his little sister.
So it leaves you to this question?

Chemistry, bitch!

I think Pan-Pizza is a perfect person to review this one fair and square.

Last edited Apr 03, 2018 at 08:23AM EDT

Honoring the recent death of Isao Takahata, Heidi:

this old sports video for kids which i have uploaded to the internet for everyone's enjoyment

Those old cartoons that would air on Boomerang, back when Boomerang was actually decent. I remember they even had a late night feature block which would air the more serious content about super heroes (they even added Teen Titans later on), but I barely watched it because my parents would never let me watch TV late.

I remember watching a VHS in elementary that was about a bunch of animals and ecosystems as a youngin, but I remember the desert segment the most due to the cheesy and lawyer friendly Road Runner impression. I have not heard of the tape since then.

Loved watching Julie Andrews' Sound of Music with my grandma back when I lived with her in the Philippines. To this day, it remains one of my all time favorites.

There were tons of cartoons I watched when Fox Kids was a thing. I remember a series of one minute to less than 30 second shorts that had a white background and a plethora of wacky/superheroic characters (no, it wasn't The Tick) doing… I don't know, one skit involved stairs. My memories are very fuzzy on that matter.

However, what I do remember clearly was Toonsylvania. Obscure, but a classic still.

Something entirely different but, at the same time, a concept that my brain refuses to remember, was this anime or movie that had a style that could and couldn't be like Akira Toriyama's. To summarize the plot, there's this beast dwelling in a "cavern" who was virtually impossible to defeat. The scene switches to an Earth-like planet and we meet our heroes. At one point, some guy tries to rob an office building but upon seeing a cockroach, he jumps on a table and screams hysterically. I don't know what happens after that, but the protagonists hear about the cavern threat and they hop in a rocket and set off to face that enemy. What I considered the most powerful and cool-looking characters are left behind because they have chores to do.