Nightmares on Wax
February 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Prepare your mind for the ultimate thrift store experience !!!
The rabid dogs at BizarreRecords.com have picked apart the refuse heap of 1940s-70s record covers and dragged the silliest into the light for our enjoyment. The “Dorks” and “Preachers” sections are my favs !
Indiana Jones Returns
February 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
First the Forbidden Kingdom, now this… Big Screen Nostalgia overload !!!
Steven Spielburg and a haggard-looking, but still badass Harrison Ford have returned after eons of other projects to breath life back into adventure movies !!! It’s been over 15 years since Indiana Jones took brains and bullwhip to Nazi backside, but in The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (due out in May) Ford will prove that all you need to be a hero to millions is sarcasm, a worn fedora, and a John Williams score.
Cheese Is In The Air
February 12, 2008 | 3 Comments
I grew up in a rusty-grey little town in Ontario called Belleville.
Named by someone who either had a shaky grasp of the French language, or an acute sense of irony, the little Canadian burg is not the prettiest place in the world, but I love it to pieces. It hasn’t got a lot of landmarks to speak of, mainly just lots of hockey rinks and graveyards, but one place always sticks out in my mind. If you drive down South Front Street towards the Bay late at night, through the area of town formerly known as Foster Ward, roll down the window and breath in the night air… you might detect the pungent aroma of cheddar cheese.
What the hell…?
Yeah, it turns out my home town was, and still is, the only producer of Hawkins Cheezies in the whole wide world. Way to go Belleville !!!
What…? You don’t know what Hawkins Cheezies are ? Well lets turn off Front Street and bomb down memory lane shall we ?
In the 1940s a couple ‘o wiseguys named W.T. Hawkins and Jim Marker from Chicago came to Tweed, Ontario with a dream. A dream to extrude lumps of cornmeal into funky shapes, bake ‘em and dust them with cheesey-loving. The resulting puffed snacks were like Cheetos, but with a yummier crunchy texture that made devouring a whole bag effortless, and messy. Tragedy struck our boys in 1956 when a fire gutted their factory, but no worries… they moved to Belleville shortly after and have been pumping out Canada’s favourite cheese snack ever since.
I can remember when I was a kid and my Dad explained what the Hawkins Factory was, and what went on inside. It sure didn’t look like Willy Wonka’s factory from the old Gene Wilder movie, but it sure did spew a little magic into the air. That magic was a potent combination of Cheese dust and baked shortening by-product that swept over the St. Paul St. area and all along the docks. I spent plenty of Thursday evenings at the Sea Cadet corps (it’s a Galway thing) inhaling lungfulls of cheddar-tinged night air. It’s become part of the Belleville landscape, as essential to the town’s character as the green, phosphorescent Bay of Quinte itself.
I imagined this is what went on inside the factory… Oompa Loompa Doompadee Deezies…
If your in Canada, swipe a bag of Hawkins Cheezies and tuck in, or check out the Hawkins Cheezies Website for more info.
It’s freakin neat how powerfully the senses of smell and taste are linked to nostalgia eh ? How many memories have you got that smell like cheese ?
Much love…
The Forbidden Kingdom !!!
February 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Fans of vintage Kung Fu films are collectively trembling with joy at the prospect of seeing chopsocky legends Jackie Chan and Jet Li go at it oldschool in The Forbidden Kingdom. The plot resembles The Karate Kid meets The Neverending Story
with a few roundhouse kicks thrown in for good measure. Check out the trailer HERE !!! The “How good is you’re Gong Fu ?” line is priceless…
The Third Coming of Mario
February 6, 2008 | 5 Comments
It was X-Mas 1990 when I and a billion other young geeks all over the world awaited the coming of a video game revolution. We drooled beside our Nintendo Entertainment Systems awaiting our messiah to leads us from the late-80s slump of too many crappy looking Gradius clones into an 8-bit golden age !!!
Our prophet’s name…? Mario… Super Mario.
The third installment of the “Super” Mario Brothers series of video games was soon to be released in N. America (it was already available in Japan). Since pretty much every kid on earth begged his or her parents for an NES for Christmas that year, the programmers at Nintendo knew they needed a flagship game to rise above the sea of second-rate arcade-knockoffs. It was time to set the benchmark for quality 8-bit games, and who better to do it, then the character that had launched the NES back in 1985. Following in the footsteps of the legendary first Mario game, (and it’s LSD-inspired radish-throwing follow-up that everyone avoids like my crazy uncle Norbert) Super Mario Bros. 3 had to impress big time.
The reason for all the blood vessel-popping anticipation was Nintendo’s enormous advertising campaign aimed right between the eyes of teens and tweens like me and my friends. It was the largest video game-based marketing campaign to date, encompassing all forms of media, and including such heavy-weight partners as McDonald’s, Mattel, and DIC Entertainment. Waaaaaaaaaaay before the game was actually released, we were swimming in oceans of merchandise like Scrooge McDuck and killing brain cells glued to our TVs for any hint of Mario-related news. Here’s some of the swag:
Gas stations started selling Mario Bros. sticker packs featuring new characters and enemies from the upcoming game, hidden just underneath the label… sneaky buggers.
- Nintendo Power, the magazine dedicated to… you guessed it, Nintendo, offered tantalizing snippets and screenshots of the upcoming game, and ran contests in each issue for Super Mario toys and apparel. Peek if you dare at the Nintendo Merchandise Database in all it’s nerdy glory!
- McDonalds was all in with a line of plastic wind-up toys available in Happy Meals that could hop, flip, spin, and cause accidental blindness if aimed improperly. Check out the original MCeeDees Mario Commercial on Youtube.
- A syndicated part-live action, part-animated Super Mario Bros. Super TV Show hosted by (hold on to your brain-stem) Pro Wrestling legend “Captain” Lou Albano aired right up until the release of SMB3 (after which it was changed to The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3). I remember watching the show back in the
day, but sweet zombie geezus, it hasn’t aged well… This has to be one of the scariest, most embarrassing, and uproariously funny TV shows of the late 80s ! You can click your way to hilarity @ Youtube’s Super Mario Bros. Super Show to watch the badly hip-hop-infused intro… but be warned, you WILL need new pants!
- Probably the biggest publicity stunt of ‘em all was the release of the movie The Wizard in 1989 just months before the SMB3 game hit American supermarket shelves. Starring Kevin from the Wonder Years, and some other people, the movie was a ludicrously-plotted epic of 80s camp that actually featured more video game previews then actual acting. Both Nintendo’s SMB3 and the Power Glove were heavily plugged, and the movie went on to become a cult classic among Morlocks everywhere…. I love the Power Glove, It’s So Bad!
We had been hyped to the point of no return, our dreams were invaded by overweight Italian guys with red ‘n blue suits and raccoon tails. My neighbor’s kid was threatening Hari-Kari if Santa didn’t drop the Power Glove down the chimney. Thankfully, Nintendo pressed a billion or so cartridges into being and made ten times more cash then any video game company had a right to. Just about every household in N. America awoke to the sound of teenage offspring sobbing with joy on Christmas Day. Mario bless us… everyone.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was a revelation. The graphics, the controls, the level design… everything was superior to all the games that had come before it. No longer were Mario and his retarded-yet-underrated brother Luigi pixelized, they were chubby, fully rendered characters. The different worlds you could play in were actually scenic and unique (instead of just the same background with different coloured clouds ala Mario 1). The game mechanics had been tweaked, allowing for more control of your character. The controls for this game paved the way for how I play games to this very day (ie. my habit of always holding down the run button before I jump in platform games). 
Every kid that you, me, or anyone knew had this game. It was the one accessory you HAD to have as we dove collectively into the 90s. And every kid you talked to knew the lingo of the game and all the secrets, without the help of game guides or anything! ‘Course we actually witnessed the guy from The Wizard give away the biggest secret in the game (Warp Whistle baby!), but there was still so much more to explore in such an expansive game. For a couple of months there in early 1990, just about every kid in N. America with access to an NES was connected to a vast after-school video-game network of sunlight-hating explorers venturing into the heart of the Mushroom Kingdom. It kinda felt like Woodstock for gamers. It let us know how many of us there were out there, that we weren’t alone in our love for portly Italian plumbers… wait… that didn’t come out right…
So yeah, go back and re-live the experience on your Wii (you can download the game for a buck ‘or two), or just download an NES Emulator for free. Heck, if you still have your old NES lying around somewhere (I think mine is propping up the BBQ), plug it in, blow the dust outta your SMB3 cartridge, and fire it up! You’ll re-connect to your inner nerd, and reminisce about the day you found salvation with the Mario Bros.
Much Love…
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