Tales From the Kids

I just wanted to share some stories about the kids today...



I told Elias the other day that next summer there was going to be a Batman movie and a Superman movie coming out. Elias asked me if they were going to be in the movie theatre or on DVD. I told him they were coming out in the theatre and he said, "Oh good! That means McDonald's or Burger King will have toys of them!"



Elias soaks things in from everywhere. A few weeks ago he was playing with Fisher Price Little People and pretending to play Halo. His only exposure to Halo is from the advertisement on the security scanner at the entrance/exit to Wal-Mart. Elias also likes to listen to my collection of old book and records. So, he's playing Halo and whenever he plays with action figures he narrates his play like it's a book. I hear him in the other room: "Suddenly Halo jumps down on the bad guys and saves the day! If you would like to hear more of this Halo story please turn the record over to side two."

Tanner is not a big fan of some of the Halloween decorations at the store that move and play music. As we were approaching the Halloween isle at Wal-Mart, Tanner sitting in the cart grabs my attention and says, "Listen to me Daddy! No pushing buttons!"

We heard a radio commercial for Trick or Treating at Hersheypark. When the commercial was over Elias announced, " I wouldn't want to go trick or treating at Hersheypark because I bet all you would get is chocolate there. That's all they have in Hersheypark is chocolate. Chocolate this, chocolate that! Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate!"

Where Do I Get In Line?

Ya Gotta See It To Believe It

Last week I told you about my latest acquisition to my holiday television special collection, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. In case you didn't believe me about the sheer greatness of this program, today WWoB gives the internet screen captures of this 1976 Halloween/Disco extravaganza!

You know it's a Halloween Special because there are jack o'lanterns in the background!

Witchiepoo, The Wicked Witch of the West, Betty White, and Paul Lynde - that's star power my friends!

Here's Lynde as The Rhinestone Trucker. This picture is also in the dictionary next to the word homosexual.

Here's a trucking/CB radio themed musical number. It has nothing to do with Halloween, but doesn't mean it ain't entertaining as all get out!

Witness Paul Lynde playing Monopoly with The Wicked Witch and Witchiepoo!

Mrs. Brady belts out a disco tune. And to think, she used to sing in the church choir with Cindy!

Seriously, you're not even allowed to wear a jacket like that on television anymore before 10:00.

Even Tim Conway can't believe what he's gotten himself into, and he was in a movie called The Billion Dollar Hobo.

You're The World's Most Popular Fruit. What Are You? Humble!

Here's a new one that I've just added to my collection: a 1976 ABC primetime variety special imaginatively called THE PAUL LYNDE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL. First of all, if you don't know who Paul Lynde was he was a very popular actor in the 60's and 70's. Among many other roles he played Uncle Arthur on BEWITCHED, he was the voice of Templeton the rat in the old animated CHARLOETTE'S WEB movie, and he was the center square on the old HOLLYWOOD SQUARES. (Not the one hosted by John Davidson...ya gotta go back further than that!) If you still don't know who he was, let's just say he was gayer than all the styling mousse in France and no one ever made a mention of it! He used to do primetime specials and this particular Halloween special has become legendary for it's line up of celebrity guest stars. It was thought that copies of the entire show no long existed, but the show's original producers were recently able to find the master tapes and now the show can been seen for the first time in 31 years! It just came out on DVD a few weeks ago and it is pure television magic, my friends!

The show kicks off with a rousing musical number where Paul sings the song "KIDS" a song he sang in the Broadway hit BYE BYE BIRDIE! That song has nothing to do with Halloween, but when Donnie and Marie Osmond drop in on the fun...who could care! Right? So then, Paul and his housekeeper Margaret go for a drive in the country to visit Margaret's sister. When they arrive at her house it turns out that Margaret's sister is actually Witchiepoo from H.R. PUFNSTUF and Margaret is actually Margaret Hamilton the Wicked Witch from THE WIZARD OF OZ. Mr. Lynde is creeped out and wants to leave, but the witches offer him three wishes to get him to stay! He agrees, and his first wish is to be a truck driver with a rhinestone covered jacket! (No, seriously!) So then there's a skit with Paul Lynde as a Super-gay Truck Driver and Tim Conway and another truck driver fighting for the love of Pinky Tuscadero. (I had no idea who Pinky Tuscadero was until I looked her up on Wikipedia and found out she actually a character from HAPPY DAYS!?) Anyhow...this truck stop romance turns into a big musical number!

O.K...so then KISS make their their primetime television debut playing "Detroit Rock City", there's another dream sequence where Paul plays a Shiek trying to woo Florence Henderson, and then Paul gives his third wish to the witches. They wish to go to a Discoteque...sure, who wouldn't??! So they all go to a Discoteque where Florence Henderson sings a disco version of "Strangers in the Night". KISS sings two more songs, oh...and I forgot Billy Barty is the witches butler and Betty White pops up somewhere in the middle!

As you can see, it's pure entertainment gold! As someone wrote in IMDB.com, "it's one of the best things ever committed to videotape." With the exception of THE HANNA-BARBERA ALL-STAR COMEDY ICE REVIEW hosted by Roy Clark and Bonnie Franklin, I just might have to agree!

Here's a clip...

Lame A. Tempt

We've got one video store left in town that actually rents video cassettes. All the other rental stores sold off all their VHS in the last year or two, but luckily I've still got one place to hunt down old crap on VHS. Seeing as how Halloween specials are just about completely extinct from airing on television, I wanted to dig up some of the classics to show my kids. The only thing of note that I came across was THE GREAT BEAR SCARE staring Ted. E Bear. Now, ya know things are off on a wrong foot when your main character is named Ted E. Bear. How original is that!? Oh...and get this, the monsters in the show live on Monster Mountain! See, it's a mountain...where monsters live...!?! And don't forget Ted's girlfriend Patti who is a reporter for Bearwitness News...instead of EYEwitness News, ya understand!? (I don't even get that pun!?) One more...the bears live in Bearbank...there's a city in California called Burbank, but these bears live in Bearbank. OK, that was is actually kind of funny. And this 1984 animated tale isn't half bad, while the story is kind of lame the script itself is pretty clever. But to enjoy this special you first have to get over the animation style employed here. It's not even really animation. The poses the characters move between are transitioned with very stylized fades. It kind of looks like animation, but it looks more like a cheap preschool storytime video.

And like yesterday's Grinch special we mentioned, this Halloween special is a follow up to a Ted E. Bear Christmas cartoon produced some ten years earlier....oh wait, forget that...I just thought of another one! Instead of Madison Square Garden, the monsters all meet at Madison SCARE Garden...because they are monsters and they like to scare people! Ya see how that works!?

Anywho..don't look for THE GREAT BEAR SCARE on TV anytime soon. Instead you can look forward to multiple airings of Dora's Halloween Fiesta` or some other junk like that!

How The Grinch Didn't Save Halloween

Last year I had this idea that I was going to do lots of posts here at WWoB about Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas specials. Then it ended up that I did next to none, so here's the first entry of what will hopefully be many more. Yesterday I dug out of my archives HALLOWEEN IS GRINCH NIGHT, a terrible attempt to follow up HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS with more Grinchy holiday fun. The Grinch Christmas special was based on Dr. Seuss' classic 1957 book of the same name and first aired on television in 1966. The screenplay was written by Dr. Seuss and the film itself was directed by animation legend Chuck Jones. I have read that Dr. Seuss was very proud of this production, and did not generally like film versions of his stories except for the Grinch Christmas special. Now fast forward to the 1978 Halloween special and it appears someone had a gun to Seuss' head to write this crap-o-la. Any charm, message or holiday spirit is thrown right out the window in this production.


As you may guess, I've seen alot of animation and as a viewer there is one rule you can always count on. If a cartoon's musical sequences are abstract and involve characters running around in different colors with no backgrounds, you can pretty much guarantee you're not watching a good cartoon. Case in point, during HALLOWEEN IS GRINCH NIGHT about 48 songs are sung in the course of 22 minutes. In one song, while the Grinch tries to convince a young Whoo that he IS the real Grinch, the Grinch's eyebrows fly off of him and flutter around while various Halloween images dance across the screen. Everytime this sequence is played, the ghost of Dr. Seuss jabs a Thrunkle-fork or a 3 foot pointy edge Knock-Glock-Grabber directly into his heart! I'd like to tell you the plot of this Halloween cartoon, but I couldn't make heads or tales out of it! For some reason, the Grinch decides to pay the residents of Whoo-ville another visit, he spends that next 20 minutes making his way down his mountain (again), Max the dog takes time for a song about why he's so sad, and then the Grinch meets a little Whoo whom was blown away from a storm out of his backyard while on the way to the outhouse. Yes...it's that bad.

You'd have to go out of your way to catch this vintage TV special now. It no longer airs, luckily for me I taped it off television about 20 years ago!

Oh Yeah...That Contest

Answers to the movie screen capture contest:
1) Amazon Women on the Moon
2) Ernest Goes to Camp
3) Honey, I Blew Up The Kid
4) Masters of the Universe
5) A Boy Named Charlie Brown

Congrats to our winner: Brian in CA.

Garfield Holiday Celebrations

I've never been a huge fan of Garfield, but I've always enjoyed his animated outings. And of course I love Holiday Specials which makes this disc all the more attractive. GARFIELD HOLIDAY CELEBRATIONS came out a few years ago, but is still a staple in any stores holiday DVD offerings. This disc collects all three of Garfield's end-of-year holiday specials and offers them on one disc for a small price.

When it comes to Halloween, GARFIELD'S HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE is second only to IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN. It's become pretty much required viewing each October as a double feature with Charlie Brown! GARFIELD'S THANKSGIVING is my favorite of the bunch. It's a very funny tale of Garfield calling in John's Grandmother to fix the Thanksgiving dinner. A GARFIELD CHRISTMAS rounds out the trio with a sentimental yarn about getting together with family at the holidays.

All in all, it's a nice collection of some great holiday entertainment from the 1980's.

Look Who's Hiding in Cocoa Pebbles

On a recent grocery shopping trip, my four year old son selected Cocoa Pebbles as his cereal selection mostly because the front of the box had a picture of Fred Flintstone dressed up as a knight yielding a sword. (Hey, I've bought things for dumber reasons!) The box opens up like a book and has an elaborate game/contest where you have to figure out some puzzle on the box and then go online and enter in a code and get help to finish the game on the box. On one hand, it's always nice to have lots of stuff to read and look at on a cereal box, on the other hand this whole business with having to use the internet to enter codes and collect points to win prizes is stupid. What happened to the good ol' days where you just dug a toy out of your cereal? Now you've got to log in, jump through hoops, do research, adopt a puppy, and find a cure for AIDS before you can milk a prize out of these cereal companies! All that aside, the illustrations on the box of Cocoa Pepples features Fred, Barney and the gang in a medieval tale finding them all dressed as knights and princesses. What was really cool about the drawings is that some secondary characters from the Flintstones series ended up on the box as well:

This one is the coolest, Fred's mother-in-law Pearl Slaghoople as a witch. Perfect casting, as Fred and his dear ol' mother-in-law never got along too well.

Fred's boss Mr. Slate as some kind of guard.

And here's the Great Gazoo playing the role of the Sorcerer. He's even gone so far as the borrow Mickey Mouse's hat from Fantasia. It's nice they included some of these supporting players from the original series, but what's the deal with Fred being drawn a bit off-model in this last picture!?

Screen Capture Contest

Here's something a little different for ya that I've been wanting to do for a while....a contest! Below you will find five screen captures from five different movies that I love. All you have to do is send me an e-mail with your guesses for the five movies. All entries must be received by midnight EST September 30, 2007. The entry with the most correct answers will win a prize. In the event of a tie, a random drawling will be held to determine the winner.

This isn't easy, and there is no rhyme or reason as to the movies I picked, I just thought they'd make funny screen caps. Good Luck!

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

Enter even if you have no idea what the heck I'm talking about. E-mail me at: discomickeymouse@yahoo.com or leave a comment and it will be kept private.

A Day Out With Thomas

Yesterday we went to A DAY OUT WITH THOMAS, a unique event where kids get to see Thomas the Tank Engine upclose and at work. Everyone even gets to take a ride on a train pulled by Thomas! It's a fun experience and a must for any family with a little Thomas fan. The special event is going on now through the weekend at the Strasburg Railroad in PA. The next two weekends Thomas will be at the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad in Cumberland, MD. He'll also be stopping by Strasburg again Nov. 30 to December 2. Here's the National Schedule for those of you in other parts of the country.

Take a look at some of the fun from yesterday at my Photo Album page.

Ed's Bookshelf #5 The Love Bug

Here's the front and back covers for the original novelization of Disney's 1969 hit THE LOVE BUG. Notice anything different about Herbie between the two covers!? That's right...on the front cover of this widely distributed book the little VW Bug is missing his racing number 53 from his passenger side door. The cover picture is a still from the actual movie which also features the numberless Herbie. This same image from the film was also used on the original laserdisc release of the title. The Herbie car seen here was a stunt car built with a tilt for the shot they needed. I guess the crew was so wrapped up in pulling off the stunt that no one noticed Herbie needed a bit of a touch up from the makeup department.

By the way, the back cover won the Scholastic award for most use of parenthesis.

Ed's Bookshelf #4 Felicity and Friends

Here's a weird one still sitting on my bookshelf, Felicity and Friends by Kristin Sparks. This is one of those cheap, quickly thrown together books to cash in on the sudden popularity of The WB teen drama Felicity. Felicity was about a young girl who secretly had a crush on a guy in high school and she ends up going to the same college as he does just for the chance to get to know him better. The show had me onboard from minute one as the title role of Felicity was played by Keri Russell.

I was first aware of Keri from her days on The Disney Channel's Mickey Mouse Club. I spent my hours of my teenaged years watching that show. From MMC, Keri appeared in the Disney flick HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID which remains one of my favorite films to this day. She bounced around from project to project, none of which ever captured much attention. That includes the sitcom DADDY'S GIRLS which she costared in along with Dudley Moore. (Wow)

Anywho... this book, and others like it, takes about a magazine article worth of information and manages to stretch it into 181 pages of actor bios, episode recaps, and quotes from such pillars of journalism as YM and Tiger Beat magazine. There's also Chapter 17 "Touring the Web with Felicity" which is all about different Felicity websites that you could visit.

Felicity's creator J. J. Abrams went on to create two more popular TV shows: Alias and Lost. He's also doing the new Star Trek movie.

Smurfs' Alive!

Here's a cool picture from an early 90's Kings Dominion brochure that I had to share with ya'll! How excited are those girls to be meeting THE Papa Smurf in the flesh?! This picture is also great for the background peak at the Hanna-Barbera Land sign. This giant rainbow stood over the entrance to the kiddie land section of the park. Once you passed beneath this huge rainbow the landscape was filled with giant colorful mushrooms and flowers. One of my favorite touches was a little audio-animatronic frog, chomping on a cigar and playing the piano, accompanied by a chorus of singing mushrooms! That was good times right there! Now, Kings Dominion's kids section is filled with two dimensional graphics of long forgotten Nickelodeon shows like Little Bill and CatDog. Long Live the Smurfs!

Surf's Up @ The Boardwalk

We went to Hersheypark last weekend and checked out their latest attraction, a whole new section of the park called The Boardwalk. Hersheypark isn't really known for their impressive themeing but they went all out for this new one-of-a-kind waterbased area. The Boardwalk takes you to your favorite east coast beach resort where there's a boardwalk with food, games and shopping. There's a beach area, complete with a wavepool and there are plenty of water slides to keep the crowds busy. They did a really good job capturing not only the look and feel of a trip to the beach but even the smell. It really smelled like a salt-water breeze was in the air! I'm not much for waterparks, especially inside an already established theme park, but it's it's your cup of tea It's worth a visit next summer when the sun returns. One of the unique stands along the boardwalk was a photo op booth where you can have your picture taken in some wacky beach sets. Being the suckers we are, we plopped down $20 bucks for these cute pictures of our kids...

Catch A Wave - Elias' Hawaiian shirt really seals the deal here, plus he was cooperating! (Which is rare!)

Open Water 3 - How cute is Tanner up front there!?! Sadly, the boys were devoured by the sharks shortly after we snapped this picture.

Carowinds Entertainment 1988

Today for your odd viewing pleasure we have the entertainment schedule from Carowinds 1988. (For those of you that don't know, Carowinds in a sister park of Kings Dominion/Kings Island on the NC/SC border.) Live shows ain't quite the priority at theme parks today as they were 20 years ago. This lineup of shows is a great example of the different kinds of shows just about every park had. The show names and the songs would change every year, but the shows themselves were always the same!

First off you might notice IMPACT, a Cinema 180 film just like I wrote about last week. Suddenly you're in the middle of a fast-paced, mound-leaping motorcross race. That just about sums up how all the Cinema 180 films were. (How great would a DVD of these films be!??)

Every park had their one big theatre were they put on the BIG production, here it's called GOTTA DANCE. Probably a lot of glitter, short skirts and a prerecorded music track. Some of the performers in the big show would always also be found in smaller musical reviews around the park. BRAND NEW BEAT and COUNTRY ROADS I'm sure followed this formula: three guys and three gals (one of the guys would be slightly overweight OR one of the six performers would be black...it could go either way), script about how much everybody loves that particular type of music, a salute to a particular singer or songwriter of the genre, duets galore, a finale where some big prop like a fake car would be brought out. They never sang a whole song in these shows, yet they would cover portions of about 35 songs in 20 minutes. The most overused theme for these shows was 60's beach music which would always involve an underdeveloped plot about a romance between two of the singers. (Yes, I saw alot of these shows in my youth!)

My favorite show would always be the character show, here YOGI'S GREAT ELECTION. The character show was made up of several costumed performers and one live human actor. The cartoon characters voices were prerecorded on tape and the live actor dropped in his or her lines live on stage. The live actor character's name would be gender neutral like Chris, Sammy, or C.J. so that it didn't matter if it was a guy or gal - Yogi Bear could still address them by name. Whoever was with me at the park always had to suffer through at least one of these shows with me. One summer during college I took a girl to Kings Dominion and made her attend a performance of THE BEDROCK SQUARES, she was so mad at me she wanted to leave the park after the show. Whatever Katie...at least I got to see the Flintstones!

Some Cereal Commercials

I was in the mood for another YouTube post today, so here's two great cereal commercials from Saturday morning cartoons circa 1983.

Flintstones Sell Insurance

Luckily I have a wife who takes care of things like the car insurance and that bill you have to pay every month to keep your house, but if I was running the ship I would so switch our insurance to Geico just because of this new commercial...



...and then I'd have to switch back again when I saw another one of those Caveman commercials.

I Miss Cinema 180

One of my favorite amusement park attractions growing up was the Cinema 180, a movie projected onto a huge, round 180 degree screen. The image was so large and surrounding that it completely gave you the feeling of movement even though you weren't moving at all. In fact, these theatres never even had seats - everyone just sat on the floor. The theatres itself was actually a big dome tent-like structure that housed nothing more than a screen and a projector. But I used to love those things! The movies never had any point to them what-so-ever! They would be a collection of images such as driving real fast through traffic, flying in all sorts of airborne contraptions, and the very popular front seat of the roller coaster shot. All these movies had at least one trip on a roller coaster which the audiences loved, which looking back on it is kind of silly because these theatres were in amusement parks where an honest to goodness REAL roller coaster experience was just a few footsteps away. I remember one of the more creative Cinema 180 films features larger than life footage of a circus and another scene where a man opened a jar and tarantulas came crawling out toward the audience.

My most vivid memories of Cinema 180 come from (of course) Kings Dominion. Their theatre used to be slightly off International Street on the right hand side. It's not there anymore, however over at Hersheypark the Cinema 180 tent still stands but it's used as an arcade. I suspect most parks got rid of their theatre when the technologies of motion-simulators became popular at amusement parks. These rides offer a similar sensation except your seats actually move.

The image above is from a brochure for a long-gone Orlando, Florida attraction called Adventure Dome. This Cinema 180 theatre wasn't part of an amusement park, it just sat by itself on the side of the road and you paid for just the movie. It didn't last too long.

In Pac-Man We Trust

Recently I mentioned my trip to Six Flags Over Georgia in the great summer of 1984 and a little remembered attraction known as Pac-Man's Play Port. I still haven't been able to find out much information about the kids themed area of the park except that a few of the other Six Flags parks had a whole Kiddieland section devoted to Pac-Man. Anywho, my mom (who is always quick to get my crap out of her house by offering it to me as material for the blog) offered me these Pac-Man game tokens which she assumed were from Pac-Man Play Port. Alas, these tokens are from the 1982 World's Fair which was held in Knoxville, Tennessee. Pac-Man had a big presence at the `82 World's Fair and I remember it all quite fondly. There were several large gift shops throughout the fair selling all kinds of Pac-Man stuff. If I'm not mistaken, I got a Pac-Man elastic belt with a magnet buckle, it had Pac-Man chasing the ghosts, and dots and power pellets all around it. The Fair also boasted lots of arcades which were superhot at the time. These Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man tokens are just two of the seven that were produced for the fair. They are pretty cool. The image on the Pac-Man token is a popular graphic that was used on a number of items like lunch boxes and Frisbees.

And finally we leave you with this image from the 1982 World's Fair staring 9 year-old me along with my brother and a certain ghost chomping friend who mistook us for Inky and Blinky!