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Posts from the ‘Archive of Childhood’ Category

Feb 25

Wax Rainbows

There are a few combinations in life that create magic.  Things that simply belong together and would not be nearly as grand standing alone.  Peanut butter and jelly, cookies and milk, both qualify.  There is another combination though, that for me, defines my childhood.  It is what occurs when you combine melted wax with color pigmentation – Crayola Crayons.

I remember the sheer joy I felt when opening a new 64-pack of the crayons in the early 70s.    The perfect fit of each one as it stood tall  in the custom-made box with built-in sharpener.  I would spend hours experimenting with the different shades  in my coloring books.  The only downside of coloring was when a crayon broke.  What a shame to no longer have perfect rows of lean soldiers.  The afflicted crayon could never stand straight again and you knew it was only a matter of time before others fell victim to play.

As we read in Chudacoff’s chapter, Children at Play, many toys were targeted specifically for boys or girls.(180)  Not so with crayons.  Both sexes could enjoy coloring.  Parents were happy because crayons were inexpensive, and stimulated the imagination.

Two chemists, Howard Smith and Edwin Binney came up with the non-toxic formula in 1903.  They named their new company “Crayola” which means “oily chalk” in French.  The exact Crayola formula is highly guarded, but you can see how crayons are made in this 1974 Sesame Street video.

uploaded by KitsuneDarkStalker on youtube, 2007

Over the past 109 years, colors have been discontinued, added, and changed.  The history behind the names is quite fascinating.  On the Crayola website, you can find a chronology of the names.  Today there are more than 100 colors and the appeal for crayons continues for both the young and young-at-heart.

 

Feb 22

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation

From as far back as I can remember, I have always had a love for video games. My earliest memories of video games are of my sisters and I playing Mario World on the Super Nintendo. Almost all of the games my sisters and I owned were Mario games for the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64. Then, the PlayStation was released. Because Mario was a Nintendo franchise, I began to play other, more challenging games. One of the first PlayStation games I owned was Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was developed by Core Design Ltd. and published by Eidos Interactive, Inc. in 1999 for PC, PlayStation, and later Sega Dreamcast. This action and puzzle-solving game, set mainly in Egypt, presents Lara Croft, tomb raider, who, after uncovering a lost tomb and unwittingly releasing the ancient god Set, must do whatever it takes to reimprison Set and save the world from total annihilation while also being pursued by her arch-rival, archaeologist Werner Von Croy.

While I enjoyed the adventure and puzzle-solving aspect of this game, perhaps the aspect I loved most about Tomb Raider was the fact that the main character of the game was a female. In video games especially, it is rare to see this. However, when I grew older I realized that, while the main character is indeed a girl, she is obviously sexualized. In the game, Lara Croft has a ridiculously proportioned body, with her hips and breasts being way bigger than the rest of her body. She is seen multiple times in the game wearing clothing that is way too small for her and also climbing and sliding down poles that just happen to be in the tombs. While reading David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, I couldn’t help but relate the comic books that portrayed women with poorly proportioned bodies in skimpy clothes to Lara Croft, because it is essentially the same thing. This is especially true with comics like Wonder Woman, in which the story line revolves around a dominant heroine saving the world. However, even though these types of comics books can almost be directly related in terms of content to this game, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation faced a significantly less controversy than the comic books, which shows how society’s views on pop culture have changed over the past fifty years.

PlayStation disc cover of "Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation" game, developed by Core Design Ltd. and released in 1999 by Eidos Interactive, Inc.

Feb 22

Spongebob Squarepants

While watching the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie clip in Monday’s class, I could not help but think of a contemporary children’s show that adults enjoy watching. I am speaking of Spongebob Squarepants. First aired in 1999 on Nickelodeon, Spongebob Squarepants has enjoyed mass success for the past thirteen years. While it was obviously marketed for children, it has been a very popular show for people of all ages. It has aired on both MTV and Spike TV, which are intended for more adult and young adult audiences. I still enjoy Spongebob on occasion, and I find jokes in old episodes that I did not understand enough to get when I watched the show at nine years old.  Of course, that is not a suprise, since the creator, Stephen Hillenburg, and a lot of the people behind the scenes were involved with Rocko’s Modern Life. Rocko’s Modern Life is an older Nickelodeon cartoon that is notorious for it’s provocative jokes that were geared towards the adult crowd. The clip I included is a short YouTube compilation of 10 more adult jokes in Spongebob Squarepants. Adult Jokes in Spongebob Squarepants. The compilation was put together by YouTube user maishah123 in January of 2010.  When I thought of Spigel’s “transgression of generational roles,” I thought of this show immediately. First of all, there is a large adult following of Spongebob. There is also adult content integrated into the writing.  There is even, at times, an adult figure in the show.  My association of Spongebob Squarepants with the ideas conveyed by Spigel helped me to grasp those ideas.

Feb 21

A Christmas Story

Growing up in a very typical American family, I was very used to the idea of tradition throughout my childhood. Of course, we had many different traditions that we practiced each year, but the ones I always looked forward to were the ones that fell right around the Christmas holidays.  One of the best parts of Christmas Eve was when my parents and my brother and I would gather around the TV to watch A Christmas Story before we all went to sleep. This movie has always been special to me, but I started thinking about it for a different reason after we watched the clip from Tom Corbett, Space Cadet in class.

A Christmas Story was a movie made in 1983 that showcased a typical 1940s middle-class family and their trials and tribulations they experience at Christmas time one year. This film stood out to me for two different reasons that pertained to our class after reading Spigel and watching the short clips in class on Monday. First of all, looking back and realizing how young I was when I started watching this movie was startling. There is definitely adult humor incorporated into the film, and there are also some parts that include curse words. However, the fact that this film is broadcasted on TBS for 24 hours straight on Christmas Eve and Christmas day makes me think I was not the only child being entertained by this movie during the holiday season.

The second reason I thought of A Christmas Story while watching the short clips is because there is a very similar scene to the one in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet where he is plainly advertising Kraft Dairy Fresh Caramels. The scene in A Christmas Story shows the main character getting very excited about receiving his Little Orphan Annie Decoder Pen to decode a message at the end of the radio show. He ends up being disappointed when the message is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.” This is another example of the very direct advertising technique used during the 1940s and 1950s. The product placement would have directly appealed to the younger generation since Ovaltine in primarily drank by younger children.

Feb 15

Beanie Babies

When I was three years old my mom got me Lucky the Ladybug, my first Beanie Baby.  Lucky quickly became one of my favorite toys and after receiving her I wanted all of the Beanie Babies.  Back when I was growing up I would spend hours playing with my stuffed animals.  For some reason they were more appealing to me then regular dolls.  I suppose since they were animals it allowed me to use my imagination more.  Beanie Babies were a huge deal for me and for many other kids when I was in elementary school.  Beanie Babies were stuffed animals made by Ty Warner Inc. in 1993 with only nine different animals at the time and they eventually became extremely popular in the late nineties. There were several different animals and styles that you could collect and I wanted all of them.  The more Beanie Babies I had, the more crazy and exciting adventures we could go on.  Many parents got their kids Beanie Babies so they could collect them and have them be worth something someday, and many limited collections are very valuable.  Some rare collections can go from hundreds to even thousands of dollars in certain markets.  I, personally, wanted the stuffed animals with the sole intent of playing with them.  Their bright colors and individualized name tags were very appealing to kids because they all seemed to have their very own personality.   Beanie Babies were definitely a very popular childhood item, which relates to the reading by Stearns and Cross.  They state that “an array of new consumer products was aimed at children” (Stearns 3).  These stuffed animals were directly aimed at kid’s imaginations.  They also were not necessarily gender specified like dolls; boys and girls could both collect the stuffed animals without feeling pressure from friends or their parents for collecting them.

Google Images

Feb 15

Pog Panic

 

POG matches played on school playgrounds during the 90s often resembled gambling.

During the early 1990s a game emerged from Hawaii that would, like a Hurricane, take the nation’s youth by storm. From coast to coast, children of the 90s were playing “Pog”—a simple, bizarrely popular game that was traditionally played with milk bottle caps. The caps were originally made of cardboard and stapled shut onto the lids of the containers. Hawaiian children would collect these caps, stack them, and take turns throwing a heavier cap to slam on top of the stack. Overturned caps were counted as points, thus, the object of the game was to flip over as many caps as possible. When the stack was depleted, whoever retained the most caps was proclaimed the winner.

In 1993 Alan Rypinski turned the idea into a multi-million dollar business venture known as the World Pog Federation. Pogs were so common that the Federation’s lawyers compared the legal battle for the Pogs trademark similar to the ones endured by Coke, Kleen-ex, and Q-tip. With many imitators vieing for the “Milk Cap” market, World Pog reached marketing agreements with major companies like Warner Bros. to differentiate their product. According to the New York times, “A packet of caps cost a quarter and up, while collectibles could run as high as several dollars.” It was only a matter of time before this value system translated to the school playground, creating problems within grade schools across the nation.

More often than not, the game was played primarily for fun and all caps were returned to their rightful owners as the match came to an end. Though, to some, playing for fun was not enough to elicit the feeling of true excitement (or competition). When children discovered the exchange value for highly sought after Pogs, a moral panic struck a nerve in the elementary educational system across America. More and more children were playing for “keepsies” on the playground. Adding to the already violent motion of “slamming” plastic and metal objects onto concrete, children who did not adhere to the rules, or who were not accustomed to losing often, would duke it out to reclaim their prescious Pogs. Due to the violence and resemblance to gambling, parents and school administrators saw the game as a threat to the moral interests of their children. As a result, Pogs were banned indefinitely from schools and the trending game quickly died out shortly thereafter.  

 

Feb 15

The Death of Superman and the rise and fall of the comics marketplace in the 90s

Superman dies so that you may live!

 

 

Way back in the early nineties, DC Comics decided to jump-start sales of their Superman comics by killing the Man of Steel!  I was ten years old, and not too familiar with comics.  I knew Superman, of course, and Batman and Wonder Woman and Spiderman, etc., but mostly through cartoons and movies, not actual comics.  This time was also long after the moral panic Hadju describes in his book, long past Dr. Wertham and his Seduction.  In fact, because of those days of moral panic and the overall dismissal of comics as a valuable medium – the resulting lack of preservation of comics – that old comics were seen as valuable collector’s items.  That carried into the present and provoked collecting crazes across the comics landscape.  Superman 75, the Death of Superman – which to me was simply a comic displaying Superman falling in the line of battle, protecting his city from the hulkish Doomsday – was a prime collecting event for others (mostly adults).  They assumed such a historic comic would be very valuable later.  Lock it in a safe for thirty years, then make a fortune.  This did not take place, unfortunately for most collectors.

In both the moral panic of the fifties, and the collecting craze of the nineties, the adult world collided with the adolescent to transform the sales of comic books.  During the moral panic, sales slumped, especially of the highest selling crime and horror comics.  This allowed abysmal and silly “children’s” based superhero comics to rise to the fore and dominate the medium for the next several decades.  With the collecting craze, however, the entire medium exploded in sales.  This was mostly due to the perception that comics of any type would be valuable someday.  Most didn’t take into account the laws of supply and demand.  Simply, the comics of by gone eras were treated poorly and were rarely preserved in mint conditions, hence their value as commodities based on the relatively small supply of cherry comics.  Modern day collectors immediately bagged comics and put them away from harmful sunlight, hoping to preserve the form and content of the pages.  But because this practice was done en masse, the books still have little value today.  It would take another comic book death march perpetrated by parents, harping on their kids to get rid of the silly things, for comics of the nineties to rise in value.  This may still happen, but probably not.

Again, what was to me a seminal experience of idol destruction, was for others an opportunity to make a buck (the comics industry equally guilty in that conceit).  The comic that was mostly meant for kids again broke through into the adult world and caused sales to sky rocket.  The unfortunate result, however, similar to the moral panic of the bygone era, was a huge sales slump following shortly after.  Collectors eventually got wise to how inflated the comics market had become and left it overnight.  This caused many comic companies to go out of business, and seriously wounded the bigger companies.  I still love Superman 75, especially the final blows both Superman and Doomsday administer to one another, mortally wounding each.  Superman dies as the savior of Metropolis and the world.  But this one comic almost killed the industry, too.  Again, the creators allowed adult interest dictate the format of their industry, and sales plummeted eventually as they had during the moral panic of the 1940s and 50s.

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