Virtual Disneyland In Our Homes

So apparently Microsoft and Disney have teamed up to make the world we live in a more awesome place. First up from this partnership is a video game for the XBOX Kinect which allows you to visit and explore the Disneyland theme park in all it's detailed glory. I'll be honest, this is the first release for XBOX that's made me think about getting my hands on one.

Here's a preview presentation of the game from the latest E3 video game convention:

Two words: Awe some!

Random Sweetness

Some random photographs that I've snapped on my journeys....




< An autographed photo of Jim Varney as Ernest P. Worrell on display at Mr. Ed's Elephant Museum in Orrtanna, PA.

Really cool Yogi & Boo Boo lollipops promoting the recent movie. I picked these up at an RV show from a Jellystone Campground booth.

I love when they do plush of obscure or forgotten about characters. The Disney Store has (among other great plush) Clarabelle Cow and Professor Ludwig Von Drake. Both of these characters were all but forgotten, but now kids know them thanks to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

How sweet would it have been to have this as a kid. It's a replica of Oscar Mayer's famous Wienermobile, but it's a kid's ride on toy. You would have been pretty darn cool riding around the neighborhood in that as a kid, until you got to the age where kids started making jokes about you sitting on a wiener.

Foodles...for Me and Yoodles

Everytime I go to a grocery store, besides the two I frequent, I always find all kinds of goofy and/or cool blogworthy items. Last week while shopping at a gigantic new store in town I spotted these kiddie food trays from afar. I noticed that the shape of the tray resembled Mickey, and then when I got closer I saw some familiar faces staring back at me!

There's several different varieties of Disney Gardens' Foodles, all of which contain a combination of three different healthy snacks in kid sized portions. You might think that $3.49 is a lot to pay for 1/3 of an apple, a handful of pretzels and six grapes...but did I mention that the package is shaped like Mickey!?!

Seriously, it's a pretty neat little treat for kids. And you have to give Disney some credit...they could slap their characters on sugary-sweet breakfast cereal or potato chips (and they have) but they are trying to make a move to associate Mickey and the gang with good food choices for kids. Now, if we can just get somebody to make Batman Broccoli, I might get my kids to eat some veggies!

Disney Gardens has a pretty nice website, featuring games and kid-friendly recipes.

Mickey Mouse Wacky Water 4-Square Mat

Yesterday I was looking in Target for a sprinkler for the kids to play in when I came across yet another Mickey Mouse branded item that I just had to have! The Mickey Mouse and Friends Wacky Water 4-Square Mat by Big Time Toys is a large mat you connect to a garden hose featuring bright colorful graphics of Mickey, Pluto, Donald Duck and Goofy. I bought it not for the 4-Square aspect but for the sprinkler/Wacky Water effect which is good because I don't really see how anyone could play 4-Square on this mat. The mat is too small to play a game of 4-square, you can see that from the illustration on the box. Even very small children would have trouble standing in their square and bouncing a ball. Also, balls don't bounce on water! It is recommended that the mat be set up on grass and since this thing can get kind of slippery, that's a good idea. However, little pools of water build up in the different squares making it impossible to bounce a little beach ball and play a real game of 4-Square.

HOWEVER, the mat does work as a fun sprinkler fountain for little kids. Water shoots up and out from several spots in the yellow area between the characters. My kids had a great time splashing in the puddles, jumping through the gentle jets of water and getting soaked all over this thing. One of the neat things is when you step on the space between the squares the water pressure in the jets completely changes and the water shoots even higher or lower. It caught the kids off guard everytime and was great fun. It actually reminded us of larger fountains that kids can play in at Walt Disney World.

All in all, a fun product! It's not the game that it claims to be, but it's a unique alternative to a kiddie pool or a regular sprinkler.

Flea Market Finds: Little Disney Treasures

Sometimes finding the silliest little thing at a yard sale can bring you a great deal of satisfaction. When I go to Flea Markets and Yard Sales I'm basically looking for two kinds of things: stuff for the kids (books & toys) and Disney stuff...more specifically memorabilia from Walt Disney World and Disneyland. This morning I came upon some little treasures that I was happy with. First I found a Mickey Mouse Yahtzee game which I had been looking for in stores and all I could find was either Spider-Man or Disney Princess Yahtzee. Elias played Pokemon Yahtzee at school and loved it, but I'm happy we got some classic characters instead of Pokemon or Spider-Man! Then I was digging through a box of Happy Meal toys looking for my long lost Chip n' Dale to complete my set of last year's Disneyland 50th Anniversary Happy Meal and instead I found this Chip n' Dale on the ToonTown Jolly Trolley ride from Disneyland. This toy is from a Burger King Kids Meal that I'm not really familiar with. So, for a dime, I was excited to add that to my collection of Disney Parks junk that I have hanging on the wall at home.


I also took the time to sift through a box of buttons and magnets that someone had. Buttons are cool collectibles, when it comes to Disney World, because they put them out for every little thing that goes on at the resort. So, my Disney sensors went off when I uncovered this old Minnie Mouse button from Walt Disney World's Showcase of Dolls event. The button has the old WDW resort logo which I love and love finding things with the logo on it. Not quite as exciting but still a cool find was the larger Teddy Bear Classic button from 1992 featuring Teddi Barra from the Country Bear Jamboree. Total cost for the two buttons: 20 cents! Good Times!

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Birthday Party Supplies

Now you can do a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse themed kids birthday party right with tons of new party supplies from Hallmark. Check out these Bubble Blowers here on the right. Very Mickey - Very Fun! They've got all the stuff you'll need for a party with the tablecloth, plates, cups, napkins and all that sort of stuff covered. You can also get Mickey Mouse Clubhouse decorations and banners as well as goodie bags and cake decorations. I've seen most of the stuff at WalMart, but you can order everything online from AllAboardToys.com. Below you'll also see pictured Mickey party blowers and a fun little Mix-Up Activity. If you're thinking about celebrating your little one's birthday with the Mouse you might want to pick some of this stuff as soon as possible. Last year I was lucky that I decided to go ahead and grab all the CARS stuff early in the summer because it was all gone once my son's birthday rolled around!

Disney Easter Egg Kits

One of my favorite parts of any holiday is working my favorite cartoon characters into the picture somehow. There's always lots of cartoon candy and cartoon Easter Eggs to go around. One of the nice things about being so obsessed with Disney and in particular Mickey Mouse, is that people give me Disney stuff all the time. My mother-in-law found this old Mickey Mouse Easter Egg Color Kit at an antique mall and picked it up for me a few years back. This item was produced by SunHill Industries of Stamford, CT. There's no date on it, but I'm guessing it's from the early 80's based on the artwork and the Walt Disney Productions copyright on the back. (They changed their name to The Walt Disney Company in the later 80's.)
All the box contains is four standard dye tablets and the traditional "egg dipper". The Disney fun comes on the back of the box where you can cut out two pairs of nifty little Mickey Mouse Club hats for your eggs, and the two Egg Holders. At the most, you would have had two Mickey eared eggs and two more eggs sitting on the little cardboard rings. Still, a fun item and a reminder of more innocent times.

SunHill also produced these Little Mermaid Instant Egg Art beauties. Sadly, my ownership of this item does not come from a flea market or antique store. My mom recently found this tucked away somewhere from when I had bought it sometime in the early 90's. And yes, I made a batch of Little Mermaid eggs back then too. But these suckers were cool. This kit comes with 12 egg wrappers which are basically little plastic sleeves that you put the eggs into and then you dunk the eggs into boiling water for 3 seconds and the wrapper shrinks around the egg making very clear and pretty eggs with different characters from the movie. The package doesn't lie..."Prettiest Eggs in Only 3 Seconds!" Then when you cracked the egg the picture just came apart with the shell as if you had hand painted it on the egg! Very cool item! I remember taking some over to my friend Chris' house for dinner Easter night. I'm sure his parents and their other guests thought I was out of my mind!

Here's this years entry into the Disney Easter Egg Decorating Kit cannon. Cars and Winnie the Pooh were the only two Disney themed egg kits I saw anywhere this year! I found them at Dollar Tree of all places! These bad boys come to us from The Paper Magic Company of Scranton, PA. (Rivals of Dunder Mifflin, no doubt!) Here we get FIVE dyes and the bent coat hanger...I mean, egg dipper, plus we get 48 stickers featuring all the four wheeled friends from the CARS movie. The package also promises "9 Fun Tops" and a "Punch Out Drying Tray". The tray, is the box itself with little perforated circles that you can punch out on the back to lay your wet eggs in. The "Fun Tops" are the little cardboard circles that you punched out to make the tray. The box instructs you to "Punch out the circles from the back of the box and push a toothpick into the center, then spin like a top!" Wow...how lame is that? I'm sure our CARS eggs will impress the Easter Bunny though!

Happy Easter!

The Black Hole...in Comic Form

The 1979 sci-fi movie THE BLACK HOLE continues to be a source of humor for me. I was greatly amused when the remastered soundtrack album to the film was recently made available on iTunes. The film was Disney's attempt to cash in on the STAR WARS craze while they were still kicked themselves in the seat of their pants for having passed on making STAR WARS themselves a few years earlier. The film is not that bad, it's just not really a "Disney movie" and besides having robots and a few laser gun fights, there's not much in it for kids! Yet the film was heavily merchandised as I'm sure everyone involved in the project thought they had the next STAR WARS on their hands. There were BLACK HOLE action figures, coloring books, sleeping bags, book and record sets...even a comic book, which is advertised here (from another 1979 comic book). I'm sure kids were lining up around the block to pick up their copy of the comic adaptation of THE BLACK HOLE. Who wouldn't want to read about Ernest Borgnine and Anthony Perkins in comic book form? As for myself, I was lucky enough to have a pair of BLACK HOLE pajamas!

Over-Analysis of a Book Written for Six Year Olds

When you're a parent of young children you find yourself reading them the same book hundreds of times. When you're a stay-at-home parent you find yourself reading them the same book thousands of times. Once you've got the book memorized and don't even need to look at the words to read the story, your mind can start to wander. Which is why I have harshly picked apart this little 1988 Golden Book gem titled "Mickey Mouse and the Peanuts". Let's start with the way Mickey Mouse looks on the front cover. Simply put, he looks like Carl from SLING BLADE, and if you've never seen SLING BLADE go rent it because it's a good movie and then you'll also get my reference! Second of all, this book has one of the lamest titles for a book ever. Is that really the best they could do, "Mickey Mouse and the Peanuts"? Really guys...that's it!? You sure? ...and the Peanuts!? OK?!



Let's move on to Minnie in this picture. While the rest of the cast is dressed like Andy Griffith's yard boys, Minnie Mouse is sporting Madonna's "Like A Virgin" look!? What's up with that!? This book is from 1988, so even then Minnie's outfit was at least 4 or 5 years out of date! And while we're on the subject...what in the world did they put on Donald!? Perhaps he traded in his signature sailor suit for this lovely Barber Shop Quartet outfit. I'm pretty sure my great grandfather wore a shirt like that to my baptism in 1973!


And last, I'd like to share this picture which cracks me up the most. In it, Daisy Duck (who's dressed the right way) is drawn completely out of proportion with Donald. She towers over him! If you look at how their shoulders line up, Daisy would have to be 3 times the size of Donald! See what I mean...? Just nit-picking this book to death while I read it for the 9,531st time! But seriously, Daisy is like a giant in this picture! She could squash Donald!

Mickey Mouse Talking Telephone

YouTube.com has got to be one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind since the invention of the Mickey Mouse waffle iron. Over the last few days YouTube has brought me the unaired pilot episode of the 2001 revamp of ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL and a complete episode of the disco-filled NEW MICKEY MOUSE CLUB from 1977. One of my favorite things to look at on YouTube is old commercials. You can find stuff dating back to the beginning of television on there! Last night I found this commercial to one of the greatest toys put out during my youth - The Mickey Mouse Talking Telephone. Bob-Howdy, that toy was awesome! You could dial up your favorite Disney characters using the telephone book dial on the right side of the phone. There you could see a picture of a character and their telephone number, which if I recall correctly was only three digits. (Ah, the 70's!)

I didn't even remember this commercial, and I obviously hadn't seen it in at least 25 years or so. Yet, when I saw it last night, I remembered everything the little girl said on the phone. Creepy! And sad...because I'm sure that info is stored somewhere in my brain where something useful like math or history should be! Oh well!

The 1970's capture so well on film. Check out the carpeting in these kid's playroom. It looks like this commercial was filmed on Cookie Monster's back!

More Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Toys

Internet searches for toys based on the Disney Channel preschool series MICKEY MOUSE CLUBHOUSE continue to be the number one generator of traffic for this website so now I feel as if it's my duty to provide news on new products in the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse line up. I snapped a pic of these new BENDABLE BUDDIES sitting on the shelf at Target. They are basically stuffed animals of Mickey and the gang. They have a wire frame inside that allows you to move their arms and feet and they will stay in place. Not too much unique here except the first chance to get Minnie dressed in her pink outfit from the show. All the other characters pretty much wear their traditional outfits, but Minnie who sports the pink dress and bow instead of her trademark red and white polka dot dress and bow. Perhaps it was easier to animate without the polka dots or perhaps they wanted to make Minnie a little more girlie!?

Mickey's Counting Glove is one of those items that went from first eye-contact to shopping cart in under 3 seconds! When you slide on Mickey's four fingered glove, you'll have to slide two of your fingers into one of Mickey's. You can go around the house and pick up or just touch things and Mickey will count them for you. He counts all the way up to 100 with ya. Or you can play a find it game, where Mickey might ask you to find seven chairs in the house. The glove has no idea if your touching a chair or an aquarium but Mickey counts along with ya and offers encouragement when you reach your goal. The third mode on the glove is Silly Sounds, instead of counting the glove makes silly cartoon sound effects when something is touched or held. Overall, it's a cute little toy even though you only get one glove in the box. They should provide a second, non-counting glove, so you can have two Mickey hands at once!

Not a CLUBHOUSE product, but still fun nonetheless is this giant box of Disney Gummi Favorites we found at BJ's this week. The Mickey Gummi Swirls have been out for a while but now they are in little .9oz bags for quick snacking or lunches. They are pretty tasty little candies with a creamy/fruity taste. The Finding Nemo Gummi Fish are standard fish shaped Gummi Bears but with a nice little squirt of liquid inside each one! Good eats! And of course when you buy them at BJ's, you get 50 little bags in one giant box!

More Disney Food That Is Good For You

Today we've got another look as some more Disney branded food items that are coming your way. Disney has been licencing their characters for use on food and beverage items since the 1930's. Mickey and Donald have been used to sell everything from baby food to coffee. During World War II you could find over 200 different Donald Duck products on grocery shelves across the country. (Of those 200, only Donald Duck brand Orange Juice still lives on today.) Recently Disney announced that they would start eliminating trans fats from the food they serve in their parks and the products which they licence their characters too. Yesterday we showed you some new breakfast offerings, here we have a look at some more goodies hitting the shelves. One way to look at it is more nutritional options for kids, I look at it as a way to buy more Mickey Mouse stuff!

Above you'll see some apples from Disney Farms. (You may remember an earlier post about Disney Farms Cars Grapes) I'm quite sure when I get my hands on a box of those, I won't be throwing away the box anytime soon. I guess Nemo is a good choice for Disney's drinking water, it just seems odd to have the words "Purified Drinking Water" next to a picture of two dirty tropical fish swimming in water!? However the Mickey ravioli's are a nice touch. They are shaped like Mickey's head and any food that you can shape into Mickey's head should be sold as such!

Below are more items you'll see on the shelves soon. Even a Disney character can't make oatmeal exciting in my book!