Revisiting WCW Halloween Havoc 1990!

We've got the Steiners and the Nastys beating the shit out of each other, Arn Anderson and Ric Flair trying to start a race war and STAN HANSEN YELLING AT A PUMPKIN ... could you ask for anything more in a Halloween special?

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Revisiting 'The Last Halloween' TV Special from 1991!

A loooooong-forgotten early 1990s Hanna-Barbera production about CGI Martians with a hard-on for candy - starring Carla Tortelli from Cheers and Bull from Night Court, of all people.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

By and large, I don't really care for the usual array of Halloween TV specials. Yes, I loved watching the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes of The Simpsons and the annual All Hallows Eve installment of Roseanne when I was a kid, but stuff like The Great Pumpkin and Garfield's Halloween Adventure never had that much appeal to me. Shit, even the Halloween-themed episodes of shows I normally loved - Pete and Pete, Ghostbusters, Family Matters, etc. - never really struck that much of a chord, and that's coming from a guy who absolutely, positively fucking loves all things Halloween more than any adult person ever should. In fact, I struggle to name ten Halloween TV specials I've seen over the years that weren't connected to some pre-existing television show, and of those - Here Comes The Munsters, I'm looking squarely at you, you motherfucker - were really, really unmemorable. 

So I was cruising around the YouTubes a while back and got sucked into a nostalgia vortex and somehow, someway, I stumbled upon a Halloween TV special I literally haven't thought about in 20-something years. As soon as I saw the little icon picture in the suggested videos panel, something in my amygdala just clicked. "Huh ... why does this thing seem familiar?" I thought out loud. With a couple of minutes to spare, I clicked on the video, and about three minutes in it all come roaring back to me. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: The Last Halloween from 1991. 

This was one of those things I had half hazy and half crystal clear recollections of. I clearly remembered the general premise of the special, and kinda sorta recalled what the aliens looked like, and I remembered one of them made the most adorable sound when it moved, but as for the plot gluing everything together, I couldn't remember doo-doo. That said, I vividly recall watching it one dark and dreary late October evening in the year of our lord 1991, covered up in blankets and being really, really bummed out because I thought the title literally meant there wouldn't be another Halloween ever again in real life. Like, if I focus, I can even recall what the pajama fabric felt like that evening. How the fuck - or why the fuck - I've stored that data in the back of my head for a quarter fucking century, I just can't explain ... especially since I'm pretty sure I fell asleep halfway through the movie. 

Of course, we here at The Internet Is In America relish any and all opportunities to revisit obscurities from days long since gone, and this being the formal Halloween season and all, why the hell shouldn't we revisit the 27-year old Hanna-Barbera special and analyze it through our older, sager adult sensibilities? 

We begin the special with a prologue, narrated by William Hanna himself (and if I'm not mistaken, this is the only live-action TV special with CGI effects Hanna-Barbera ever produced.) He tells us the Martians were happy until, one day, the whole planet ran out of "coobi," which he pronounces dangerously close to "coochie." So they sent four Martians in a rocket ship to Earth to get some more "coobi," whatever the hell that is. Oh, and the day they sent them was Halloween on Earth. And I just know one of you science nerds is going to say some shit about it taking 162 days to travel from planet to planet, or make some snide comment about NASA radar not picking up the craft as it enter the Earth's orbit, so before you do, I just want to say this: fuck you and your mother, you worthless, buzzkilling piece of shit. 

So these two dorky kids get off a school bus and talk about the local candy factory closing down and being so poor they have to wear shitty hand-me-down clothes. One of the kids' sister drops her candy bag and he makes fun of her for wearing the same Wonder Woman-like costume every year, but then he realizes it was made by their dead mom so that makes him STFU real quick. Also, their pet dog is named "Digger," so be careful saying that one five times fast.

So the girl is almost run over by a dude in this old ass car. He gets out and he looks like a white George Zimmerman (funny, because he's played by Richard Moll - i.e., fucking Bull from Night Court.) Then this Cruella DeVille looking bitch in the backseat calls the kids a bunch of yard monsters and tells them to not even think about trick or treating at her place, or goddamn else. And what do you know, she lives in a spooky mansion, on top of a hill, that's apparently a matte painting.

The Martian spaceship lands. The dog finds them. Then we cut to a black dude in a bow tie telling this dude at the candy factory that he can't meet production because the lake keeps drying up and that's what powers the whole fucking operation so it's going to be the "last Halloween" in town. Get it? Because the factory is going to close, and everybody who works there is going to lose their jobs and shit? So the kids enter the picture and grandpa tells them "your mom was the greatest wisher I ever saw" and the kids vow to make this last Halloween the best fuckin' one ever.

OK, I know I've seen that fat yellow guy with the red and blue stripes SOMEWHERE before. Help me out, readers: who does this motherfucker remind you of?

Then the aliens fall out of the spaceship. They're all CGI characters, which aren't all that terrible looking considering the primitive tech of the day. And here's our roll call:

Scoota - it's basically the baby from Eraserhead wearing a special needs helmet and burp-talking like a black dude. But the helmet is actually something called a "coob-a-meter," which helps him find all that sweet, sweet coobi.

Gleep - this multicolored Pikachu looking motherfucker with a sorta Southern accent that refers to himself as a "quasar-riding flap-dwap(!?!)" whatever the fuck that's supposed to be.

Romtu - the de facto leader, a blue guy in a giant helmet who reminds me a lot of The Great Gazoo from The Flintstones. 

Bing - a giant spring with eyeballs who makes the most adorable squeak every time it moves. I fucking love Bing and want him to live with me, and if any of you assholes ever say anything bad about him I'll fucking cut 'ya.

We return to the kids. After a brief cameo by a kid in a Fred Flintstone mask, the Martians introduce themselves to our sibling protagonists. The boy lays his plastic sword down and says he comes in peace and Rontu (who sounds just like he's saying "scrotum" whenver he mentions Scoota's name) gives them the rundown on all that "coobi" stuff and the girl says they are free to take as much broccoli from the planet as they want. Interestingly, for a super-intelligent alien race that understands English perfectly, the idea of "mothers" is a totally new concept to them, and Bing asks if he can go "probing" for a mom of his own.

Well, as it turns out, "coobi" is what we Earthlings call "candy." The kids explain how trick or treating work and the aliens start collecting free chocolate. A black woman pulls Rontu's head off and she laughs, thinking it's just an elaborate costume. Man, she is dumb as fuck. Then the nerdy boy at the bus stop from earlier comes out wearing a fairy costume and Bing thinks he is its mom. Oh, the 1990s, back when we still knew what the fuck "gender" meant.

We cut back to the old bitch from earlier. She's trying to find a cure for old age by experimenting on bugs or something. She's making some sort of contraption that's drying up the lake to power her experiments, and she asks her sidekick to go out and find the biggest bug he can get his hands on. 

"How many domiciles have we approached?" Rontu asks. The kid tells him he's worried about his dad's factory. Then he tells Rontu how wishing works and shows him how to skip rocks. Bing, unfortunately, winds up hopping all the way to the old bitch's house. Then her retard sidekick finds him, thinks he's a giant bug and puts him in a burlap sack. The boy learns the old bitch is the one stealing all the town's water. The girl falls down a chute and the retard butler apprehends her. Her brother slides in on a hook and rams a table right into the retard's pelvis. The old bitch then promises to treat the kids to "a trick they'll never forget," but they escape down a sewer drain before she can lay her nasty ass hands on 'em. Then the sidekick guy pours bug extract slime all over his head, because he's a stupid piece of shit and you shouldn't feel sorry for him for any reason. 

Then the boy tells his dad about the old bitch stealing water, and in direct defiance of made-for-TV kids' Halloween special conventions, he actually believes them. The Martians then find the candy factory and go fucking ape-shit, literally taking everything in the facility. Then the cops pull up at the factory, and the old bitch and her servant (Or is it her son? They never really make their relationship all that explicitly known) have already been arrested, entirely off-screen. So, uh, hooray for budget restraints, I guess?

Bing still thinks the little girl is his mom and he thanks her for helping them get all the candy and she gives him her tiara. Then the Martians give the boy some sort of Martian rock and the aliens say they'll come back every Halloween for more coobi. Of course, the dad shows up so the aliens have to vamoose. The kid makes an unstated wish on the alien rock and throws it into the lake. "Guess I need more practice," he lugubriously states.

BUT WAIT ONE GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKIN' MINUTE, YA'LL. The rock starts bouncing around like a ball of light, and it causes the lake to magically replenish itself and re-power the factory! All the townfolks come out to watch the miracle as it happens, as they all celebrate the notion they might still have jobs come Monday morning. Of course, since those Martians took literally their entire inventory, they'll probably go under anyway, but who knows - maybe the Martians refilled the factory with candy when they re-electrified it. Don't you just love it when the producers leave you to fill the plot holes in for 'em?

And we end the whole she-bang with a final quote from Hanna. "Whenever you begin to lose your way, stop and close your eyes. It may be hard to find, but a place where magic still exists is waiting when you let yourself believe." Uh, is that supposed to be about Jesus or something?

Holy shit, do I love me some Bing. So freakin' adorable! <3

So all in all, that was a pretty fun little trip down memory lane. It's amazing how minimalistic the whole thing is, in hindsight. There might be maybe a minute of action in the entire 21 minute movie, and the rest is characters simply exchanging dialogue - good luck doing that with today's ADD-addled young-uns.

Considering how weird some of the edits are, though, there has to be an extended director's cut out there somewhere. That, or else these guys were so poor they couldn't even film the part where the villains are brought to justice, which is a distinct possibility given the (probable) fact that 95 percent of the budget went towards animation costs. I kinda' sorta' think Hanna-Barbera expected the TV movie to pull in huge ratings and be popular enough to warrant a sequel, but to the best of my knowledge the movie aired just once and that was it. And according to the Internet hoi polloi, the thing never made it to VHS, so unless you had a recorded copy of the special in your possession, there was no way to ever re-experience this one. Thankfully, the wonderful advent of YouTube has empowered a legion of nostalgic sorts to violate all sorts of international copyright laws to bring this one back to life, and I, for one, applaud them for their brazen disregard of the intellectual property safeguards of others.

The movie was directed by Savage Steve Holland, who previously directed the John Cusack vehicle Better Off Dead and also created the animation for the Whammy on Press Your Luck. After this movie, he didn't really do shit for a decade, but then he directed a couple of Fairly Odd Parents movies, thus giving this guy quite possibly the single weirdest directorial career in the history of anything ever. It was also executive produced by David Kirschner, whose pedigree includes a fucking who's who list of Halloween-time staples, including Hocus Pocus, The Halloween Tree and ALL of the Child's Play movies to date. He also apparently produced a Monster in My Pocket animated special from 1992, which sounds like the kind of thing I should definitely get around to reviewing at some point.

As for the cast, it wasn't until I hit up the IMDB that I realized the evil old bitch was played by Rhea Perlman - i.e., that one ho from Cheers who also married Danny Devito, which is hilarious because every time I think of Danny Devito fucking anything all I can think of is that one scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia where he made a home movie version of Lethal Weapon 5. Oh, and the guy who played Grandpa was Eugene Roche, who is probably best known for playing "The AJAX Man" in a series of commercials nobody reading this is old enough to remember. In case you're wondering, the kids in the movie were played by Will Estes (who grew up to play some dude on the TV show Blue Bloods) and Sarah Martineck, who doesn't have a single IMDB credit after 1996, so it's probably safe to assume somebody PizzaGated her and ruined her interest in the craft of filmmaking. But, uh, don't quote me on that, please. And lastly, pulling voiceover duties for the movie are Paul Williams, Don Messick and Frank Welker. Really, you're either the kind of person who already knows who those people are or people that don't give a shit they were ever born, so I suppose there's no need to trudge up their respective careers.

I really don't have a continuum in mind for grading the quality of Halloween TV specials, so I can't give you a decent qualitative verdict on the movie. At barely 20 minutes in length, however, it's not like you're wasting that much of your life catching it on YT, so even if you hate it the upfront investment wasn't that bad. I guess it's a historically significant film for the CGI characters, but story-wise, there isn't necessarily anything here you haven't already seen a trillion and a half times before. The Last Halloween isn't good, it isn't bad, it just is ... well, what it is, I suppose. There are better Halloween-themed slivers of pop cultural ephemera out there, and there are certainly worse; but hey, at least it has that whole obscurity factor working in its favor, don't it?

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Cybermania '94!

In the mid-90s, TBS decided to host the "ultimate gamer awards show." The fact they never did another one tells you just how well this one went.

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo___X

Over the years, numerous attempts at a video game awards show a'la the Oscars and the Grammys have come and gone. Naturally, none of them have had any staying power because, at heart, video game consumers and producers don't really give a shit about elitist affirmation. And really - who cares what Gamespot or Spike TV or EGM thought was the best strategy game of the calendar year, anyway?

Although the one-and-done Cybermania video game awards show from November 1994 wasn't the first attempt at developing a video game Emmys, so to speak, to the best of my knowledge it was the first time a major TV network tried to create a truly multimedia, nationally broadcast "interactive entertainment" tentpole spectacle. Of course, it was a colossal flop that nobody into video games or weird-ass digital entertainment found appealing, and in hindsight, the thing was downright embarrassing for everybody involved with it - the "winners" and performers included.

Still, as one of the first concentrated media efforts to make video games at least partially resemble a respectable, mainstream phenomenon, I suppose it is worth revisiting. I do remember watching it live back in the day - it aired at 4 in the afternoon on a Saturday, which is about as far away from primetime as you can schedule in anything - and even as a third-grader I felt extremely underwhelmed by what I witnessed. I still have vague recollections of the show - which was hosted by the oh-so-random combination of Leslie Nielsen and Home Improvement's Johnathan Taylor Thomas - but by and large, it just felt like a really, really half-assed attempt to pander to the fledgling video gamer subculture. So yeah, reflect on the absolute worst thing you ever saw on G4 around 2004, amplify that by about 10,000, and that's the sort of cringe we're talking about here. 

But why let my foggy remembrances tell you the story when you can just boot up the original broadcast - complete with its quarter century old commercials - on the YouTube anytime you want and relive the groan-inducing failure of an awards show as if it was actually happening?

Oh, you know you want all of this. You really, really do, even if you keep telling me "no, for real, Jimbo, don't nobody anywhere want this."

Alright, so we begin our TBS broadcast (which, certainly, wasn't aired live) with a quick intro from JTT accompanied by a quick-cut montage of NBA Jam, NHL '94 and Aladdin on the Genesis. Then we throw it to a cold opening with a cutscene from Miramar Productions' The Gate to the Mind's Eye, which looks like a really shitty, Blade-Runner inspired re-do of Sewer Shark. A disembodied announcer lets the viewing audience at home know this thing is coming out of Universal Studios Hollywood LIVE (but not really), referring to the shindig as "a celebration of the best in computer, cartridge and interactive entertainment." He then gives JTT and Nielsen their proper introductions, describing them as our "very live and very interactive hosts."

To "boot up" the show, an actress portraying Hillary Clinton comes out. She tries to turn on a computer monitor in the middle of the stage, and when Leslie plugs in an extension cord, the computer explodes and Clinton walks off with black soot all over her face. The audience ... doesn't really know how to react to this. "I sure hope she has health insurance," Nielsen remarks. Get it, because at the time, she was floating up ideas for a universal health care plan!

Ahhh ... you can almost smell the aspiring school shooter.

We learn that all of tonight's winners were picked by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, which a quick Google search reveals is not only still around, but still running a video game awards show that is probably the closest thing the industry has to a legitimate Oscars-caliber event. Granted, they didn't start handing own their own proprietary awards until 1997, so whether you want to consider the results of this show canon or not is up to you.

But wait, you can also vote online for your favorite games using PRODIGY or calling a not at all toll-free number! Up next, we have our first of many, many cyber-stories bumpers, which are aesthetically similar to all of those old A.D.D.  Sega Genesis commercials with quick cuts and some over-aggressive dweeb yammering on and on about shit you're not really that interested in. Anyhoo, he does the world's worst William Shatner impersonation and talks about the transition from the heyday of the arcades in the '80s to modern gaming in the mid-90s, concluding with a vague description of all the awesomeness the Information Superhighway is going to bring us someday.

The first award of the night is for best action-adventure game, and our presenters are Matthew Perry and The Next Karate Kid era Hillary Swank. And strangely enough, the guy doing the actual nominee voiceover is the REAL William Shatner. 

Alright, the nominees! Doom (uh, I've always thought of it more as a FPS, but since FPS games weren't as commonplace then, I suppose it kinda makes sense to put it in this awards category); Mega Race (which, as the name implies, is actually a racing game); Return to Zork (which is very much a traditional adventure game); Jump Raven (something I've never heard of but the gameplay leads me to believe it is likewise a classical PC adventure game); Critical Path (looks more like bad Sega CD interactive game than anything else); Super Street Fighter II (come on now, it has the word "fight" in its title!); Tomcat Alley (which actually is a shitty Sega CD Top Gun wannabe); and Super Metroid, which Shatner hilariously pronounces like "met-are-oid."

For an added touch of geekiness, the winners are revealed via an old school Newton PDA. The winner? DOOM, and some id Software guy gives an acceptance speech all of five seconds long. 

Time for a transition shot to a Las Vegas hotel's arcade (which include Nielsen namedropping "Goro the Monster" in one of the most surreal moments in TV history.) The host calls the kids at the arcade a bunch of "cyber punks" and cracks a joke about "NFL Jelly" and "NHL Marmalade" being released in the wake of NBA Jam. He then hurriedly reveals a "top secret" tip to play as Akuma in SSFII, but he says it so fast and broken up that it is nearly impossible to decipher what the fuck he is actually saying.

And that brings us to our five nominees for game of the year: Doom, Mortal Kombat, Myst, NBA Jam and Super Street Fighter II. Granted, you can quibble over the technicalities (MK was released in 1992 while all the other games came out in 1993) but you really can't argue against the selections - those are unquestionably the five most important and influential video games of the early 1990s and it's not even close to debatable.

Time for our first commercial break:Paul Reiser hawks IBM. HBO is showing Whitney LIVE in South Africa. Some hot blonde chick with short hair wants you to wear Soft&Dri underarm deodorant.  Little Caesars thinks its cool to use an orangutan ordering two female companions as a metaphor for their better deals than Pizza Hut. And fuck, you haven't LIVED until you've seen the 1995 Toyota Celica.

And we're back. Nielsen does a few quick reviews of game based solely on their box art, at one point picking up a Donkey Kong Country box (presumably) and stating it's a game about monkeys "that need to be spanked." Behind him a midget dances inside a giant balloon, until Nielsen gets sick of his shit and pops it. Yeah, there is a lot of humor like that in the show, so consider yourselves more than warned.

Then we get a quick retrospective on the history of video games and Pong, of all things, gets a standing ovation. Other unorthodox selections for this time filler includes such illustrious offerings as Karate Champ, Pinbot, The Legendary Axe (which I actually kinda' liked) and Pit Fighter. JTT talks about the audience vote again and then this bearded guy comes out and tells you can contact the show this afternoon. His voice also audibly cracks on camera and you will laugh out loud. 

Presenting the award for best CD Game is Saved By the Bell alum Lark Voorhees, who is introduced via a heavy metal riff very, very reminiscent of the iconic SBTB theme song. She stumbles through the intro, but since she looks hot as fuck, we can all let it slide.

Even neo-Nazis want to kiss her. And members of the Ku Klux Klan at least want to smell her hair a little.

The nominees? Myst, The 7th Guest, Mega Race, Return to Zork and Escape From Cyber City, whose mission, according to William Shatner, is "escape from the city and survive!" Shit, isn't that the premise behind half the fucking video games made in the 1990s? 

Anyhoo, the winner is The 7th Guest, which is actually a really forgettable survival horror offering. In fact, it's so forgettable that the real creators of the game didn't even bother showing up, so some limey in all white has to go up on stage and do all the yapping. He's pretty much all over and done with in 10 seconds.

This dude backstage is talking about SimCity with the mayor of Santa Barbara, Calif. and this one kid who is supposed to be the smartest child in America. And yeah, a real shocker here, but he's Asian. If the kid wins, he gets to run the city for a full day, and if the kid loses, the mayor gets to "acquire the services of the kid" for 24 hours. Well, that doesn't sound all #PizzaGatey or nothing.

Time for another commercial break! Stay tuned, and YOU could win a copy of that crappy Double Dragon fighting game based on the Saturday morning cartoon nobody ever watched! Here's a Fuji camera commercial with a white kid in a dashiki. And an ad for the CASIO G-SHOCK ILLUMINATOR wrist-watch. You can get a FIVE DOLLAR rebate if you purchase Speed on VHS. Hey, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is coming out for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. Back to back commercials for SteelTec toys and that one truck from Ready Set Go. Every Thursday night TBS shows NBA games. Hmm ... a Seattle Supersonics player superimposed over a crumbling building ... predictive programming about the Oklahoma City bombing, perhaps?

And we're back. Nielsen responds to a car alarm and he runs into Doc Brown next to a DeLorean and then he pulls out a gun, enters one of those Wild West stunt shows, does an entire Buster Keaton routine and then JTT rewards him by giving him a tip to go into "battle mode" on the SNES version of Mortal Kombat. Yeah, I have no idea what the hell that means, either.

We squander some time talking about The Mask video game that was supposed to come out on the SNES and Genesis but never actually got released, and then there's a brief interview with director Chuck Russell. We go behind the scenes of The Mask CGI (which, admittedly, was a pretty big deal back then) and we get yet another cut scene from The Gate to the Mind's Eye, for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than the fact they probably paid a shit ton of money to have their crappy ass game pimped on the program. 

Presenting the award for best portable game is the second Darlene from Roseanne and some bitch that looks like Randy Savage's old squeeze Miss Elizabeth. The nominees? Aladdin (presumably, the Game Gear version although it really, really looks like they are using footage from the Genesis game), Wario Land, Home Alone (the Game Gear version, which, per Shatner, revolves around the exploits of "the world's most dangerous pre-teen"), what Shatner describes as Game Boy Donkey Kong and Link's Awakening. And while it's pretty much a given that the Zelda game is the best of the whole bunch, they end up giving the award to Aladdin, because ... well, I'm not really sure, to be entirely honest.

We throw it to an arcade in New Jersey, where a bunch of kids are shouting ... something. Then the host gives us some tips on Double Dragon V, so if you want to know how to finish Billy Lee, you BETTER use that goddamn standing hard punch, for real.  

Alright, presenting the award for best comedy (no, not best comedy game, just plain old "best comedy) is Charles Fleischer, some French fruit who is prolly best known for voicing Roger Rabbit. After doing a joke in binary, he does a routine about Prince Charles visiting Watts and getting harassed by black dudes, because that is ... uh, funny, I guess. 

The nominees! I'm Your Man (which, to me looks pretty dang close to being a porno), That's News To Me (starring Dennis Miller), The Wacky World of Miniature Golf (starring Eugene Levy as an anthropomorphic golf ball), Bugs Bunny' Rabbit Rampage, and Dating & Mating, which apparently is quite keen on jokes about autoeroticisim.

The winner? That mini-golf game. Picking up the award are two unnamed women who you would never fuck in a million years for any reason.

Eh. Still more tappable than Amy Schumer or Lena Dunham, though.

Hey, did you know you can vote for your favorite game for just 99 cents a call? Well, you can, and we're going to keep telling you that every five minutes. 

COMMERCIAL BREAK! Hey, there's a Double Dragon movie coming out and it's prolly going to suck big time (note: it did suck big time.) A Cartoon Network promo for their Super Chunk lineup, back when they still showed cartoons. Here's a commercial for the 3D0 (when Gex is your most impressive looking title, you KNOW the hardware is fucked). Then a commercial for Gerber Graduates baby food, and then, a brief promo for Earth 2 on NBC. Man, I haven't thought of that show in LITERALLY 20 years. And for very good reason.

We return to the show and Nielsen talks about computer graphics while dwarves juggle and spin plates behind him. Then, a guy lauded as "the leading artist of the Information Superhighway" comes out and reads a telegram supposedly penned by Al Gore and as you'd expect, it's so fucking boring everybody in the audience fell asleep.

On to the awards for best arts and graphics in an interactive product, presented by two people nobody gives a shit about. The nominees are Myst, Tuneland (featuring the voices of Howie Mandell, if you care, and you shouldn't), Oceanlife II AND III, Space: A Visual History and Mac World Interactive Vols. II and III. The winner is Myst, and really, ain't nobody going to complain about that considering its competition.

Presenting the Governor's Award for Best Achievement in Virtual Reality is that one chick from My So Called Life who isn't Claire Danes. It goes to IWerks Entertainment for making this fruity arcade game where six people sit in a plastic bathtub and fly around underwater dinosaurs.

An update: Doom is leading the Prodigy poll, while MK is leading it on the phone polls. 

COMMERCIALS: The Knicks play the Magic this Thursday night on TBS. Hey, there's a different Paul Reiser IBM commercial. ANOTHER Pitfall commercial. ANOTHER Fuji film commercial. That Ready Set Go toy truck commercial AGAIN. That Casio watch commercial AGAIN. And the Speed five dollar VHS rebate commercial AGAIN.

We're back. Some redheaded bitch at an arcade at the Universal Studios' park in Orlando interviews a kid in a "Jesus Freak" shirt about his love for Mortal Kombat and gives us a top secret hint for the upcoming SNES game Ren & Stimpy: Timewarp - use the rubber suction cups to climb over the monkey cages.

Next, Nielsen talks about hackers which leads to a surprisingly cheery PRO-hacking apologia piece featuring interviews with guys with names like "deth vegetable" interspersed with clips of the B-movie Teenagers From Outer Space and a guy eating a pizza with a Mattel Power Glove. Which, naturally, segues into a performance by Herbie Hancock titled "Cyber-Generation," featuring a bunch of Soul Train dancers booty dancing while every camera filtering effect in the world is used. Then some white bitch comes out and does the shittiest rapping you've ever heard and this one black dude starts twisting his neck around like Gumby.

You might be wondering to yourself "what does this have to do with video games?" And if so, the answer is clear - "you're a racist."

Then a breathless Hancock (did you know he did the soundtrack for Death Wish?) walks us through a segue into the next video clip - dedicated entirely to the Aerosmith vehicle Revolution X and some other stupid computer game nobody played. Cue a cheesy video segment within a video segment featuring Tom Hamilton of Aerosmith - who at one point dons a Ronald Reagan mask - congratulating Cybermania for simply existing.

Co-presenting the award for best musical alongside Hancock is none other than Thomas "She Blinded Me With Science" Dolby, who delights the crowd by dressing like the dork from a 2000 teen movie and making a joke about the nonexistent game Mood, which is like Doom except you run away from the monsters.  

The nominees? Peter Gabriels's Xplora I, Video Jam (which, trust me, is the shittiest looking thing you've ever seen), Interactive by the Corpse Formally Known as Prince, Freak Show by the Residents and Uptown Blues, which isn't really a game, but something you listen to when you want to pretend to be a culturally enlightened white person. And the winner is the Xplora I, with two white guys with shitty haircuts who aren't Peter Gabriel accepting the award on Peter Gabriel's behalf.

Backstage, we get an update on the SimCity contest. The mayor says he cut taxes 20 percent and got re-elected, so fuck that little snot-nosed brainiac fuck over there. The announcer guy talks about the academy behind Cybermania, but he gets distracted by some chick who wants to "play in a chatroom" instead.

COMMERCIALS! McDonalds has a "two buck conversion" deal so you can get two Egg McMuffins for just two dollars. TNT airs In Search of Dr. Seuss TOMORROW. There's that Double Dragon movie ad again. And the Soft&Dri underarm deodorant ad again. And here's a Scoopaway commercial with two dogs mad at a cat for getting to shit indoors. Then we get a commercial for Troy Aikman NFL Football, where the premise is that Troy Aikman has LITERALLY had his brain stolen (by Jerry Jones, acting just like Dr. Frankenstein) so he just acts retarded in the huddle, saying "hummunahummanahummuna" over and over again. Knowing what we know about concussions now, this thing is just all kinds of ominous.

Nielsen is back. Two reps from PriceWaterhouse are on stage. They validate Nielsen's tickets and promptly leave.

Yep. Because Twitter has done everything except turn kids into autistic, racist NEETS. 

Up next, the bitch from Mr. Payback (back in the day, touted as the world's first ever "interactive movie," and yeah, it sucked bunches) and some white nigga' from Deep Space Nine hit the podium. The nominees for best strategy and/or simulation game be: SimCity: Enhanced CD-ROM, Dune II (the Genesis version, at least, is fucking great), Flight Simulator 5 (which, yeah, I guess you could blame 9/11 on), Castle II: Siege & Conquest and Forever Growing Garden. The winner? SimCity - a shocker, I know. The bitch almost calls it an "enchanted CD-ROM" and I chuckle a hearty chuckle. Then the recipients hit the stage and give the shortest acceptance speech ever in the history of anything.

JTT is back on stage. He welcomes Shelly DuVall (the bug-eyed ho from The Shining) to the program. For some reason, she's wearing a fruit salad on her head. Cue a video looking at the impact of computers on education. There's a great line early on where a dude says teachers no longer have to throw chalkboard erasers at students' heads to get them to pay attention now that they have the Web in the classroom. "Learning has become something hip," one of the talking heads says. Then he talks about CD-ROMS replacing overhead projectors, and that's literally the first time I thought about overhead projectors in at least two decades and I kinda' had a moment there. And yes, the fucking irony of the dude talking about CD-ROMS being the future of education when, at this point, they are every bit as outmoded as educational tools as the overhead projectors.

And Duvall still ain't done flapping her gums. She talks about calculators being a big deal when she was growing up and then introduces these two kids who designed their own games and then E.A. and a couple of other companies got together and gave them both $25,000 scholarships. Then a video game about a Mexican dude who did a lot of cocaine and ecstasy and another game about a talking dog who really wants a bone on Sundays, especially, get individual awards for e-learning or some shit.

COMMERCIALS, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS. Here's that Thursday night NBA ad again. And another 3D0 commercial featuring a guy in a rubber room having maddened visions of that one Road Rash game that was actually kinda' awesome. The Paul Reiser IBM spot again. That Troy Aikman football game spot again (available NOW at Kay-Bee Toys, if you have a time machine.) And hell, why not one more spot for that god awful Double Dragon movie?

Now we get a video segment on how games are actually made, and you will fall asleep during this, for sure. Then, Marla Gibbs and The Barbarian Brothers from Twin Sitters take the stage to hand out the award for best sports game. And yeah, if you want the ultimate back-to-back dose of misguided '90s cinematic nonsense, I can't think of a better double feature than Mr. Payback and Double Trouble. Anyhoo, Gibbs asks the Barbarian Brothers to bring her a rope and a ball gag to subdue George Jefferson - you know, because she played the wisecracking maid on The Jeffersons back in the day? Then they pretend to get into a huddle, because that's what happens in sports sometimes. 

Alright, the nominees? NBA Jam (no console specified, so I take it this means all of them, the Atari Jaguar and 32X version included), FIFA International Soccer (looks like the Genesis version), NHL '94 (my all time favorite video game ever, and it should be yours, too), Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (although I always preferred Winning Run instead), Caesars World of Boxing, Sports Illustrated's Multimedia Almanac, QB1 and Great Day at the Races. 

And the winner? Caesars World of Boxing, which officially is the worst winner in the history of any awards show. Shit, not only was that NOT the best sports game of 1993, it wasn't even the best boxing game that came out that year. Hell, it may not have even been one of the top five boxing games that year, for that matter, and that it was selected over the single greatest hockey video game of all time shows you just how little these Cybermania motherfuckers knew about anything.

Up next we've got the only part of the show that's really stayed with me over the years, and to be fair, it is a pretty funny little segment. To showcase WCW Superbrawl on the SNES, Lord Steven Regal and Brian Pillman come out for a demo. While they are playing, Nielsen does a monologue (set to the music from Patton, of all things) discussing the recent controversy over violence in video games. Naturally, Regal and Pillman start beating the shit out of each other and while Nielsen name drops Bad Mr. Frosty from Clay Fighter, a bunch of midget 'rasslers enter the fray so Leslie has to pull out a gun and shoot it in the air to get everybody to stop monkeying around.

Yep. This is the best Naked Gun movie EVER.

And now we're getting down to the acting awards, so you know this shit is going to get tough to sit through. Presenting the awards for best actor, female, are Terri Austin and Robert Culp. The nominees are: Grace Zabriskie in Voyeur, Eileen Weisinger in Critical Path, Tonia Keyser in Man Enough and Virginia Caper in Gabriel Knight. Not that anybody at any time at any point in history has ever or will ever give a fuck, but Zabriskie won. 

We get yet another cutscene from The Gate to the Mind's Eye and hey, what an opportune time for more commercials, ain't it?

There's the Fuji spot (again), that shitty fuckin' toy truck spot (again), a promo for The Lion King video game, that damn Casio wristwatch ad (again), that commercial for the Speed rebate (again), that Gerber's ad (again) and a promo for Thursday Night NBA basketball ... again.

We're back. Presenting the award for best male actor is Dave Thomas (no, not the guy from Wendy's, that guy from Grace Under Fire) and one of those hos from Blossom. The nominees? Robert Culp in Voyeur, Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (although I swore that game came out earlier than 1993), Tim Curry in Gabriel Knight, Christian Erickson in Mega Race and Mickey Rooney in Great Day at the Races. Hey, what do you know, the winner is the guy who was just on stage a few moments ago, Robert Culp. He thanks the Academy and then gives a meandering speech about video game acting probably becoming a big deal int he future and then walks off in a dazed an palpably confused state. 

Time for an update on the SimCity bet. Just so you know, the kid won. Which begs the question: just how do you "beat" SimCity, exactly?

Alright, kids, pull out your game pieces from Sam Goody/Musicland, it's time to see what you won in the super-duper Double Dragon prize giveaway! If you have some blond fruit with a gay man mustache, you won a coupon or something. If you have a blonde bitch with short hair, you won either a Double Dragon action figure OR a cartoon VHS. Have Scott Wolf's picture on your piece, and you get a copy of Double Dragon V and a strategy guide that should've told you to buy a better game. If you have a picture of that other guy in the movie, you won the INTERACTOR, MOTHERFUCKER, and your life will never, ever be the same again. And if you have a picture of a medallion, you won a TV and some other shit.

COMMERCIALS! Time for a different 2-Buck Conversation spot for McDonalds (I don't know about you, but getting two Big Macs for just $2 does sound pretty snazzy.) Now it's an ad for Super Return of the Jedi on the SNES, then Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, which is like that Pitfall game they kept showing ads for earlier, except way better. We get another NBA on Thursday spot, that stupid toy truck commercial again, and that Troy Aikman football game spot ... again. And coming up next on TBS, its the live-action Masters of the Universe movie, which means whatever you spent your afternoon doing when this thing initially aired was a lot better than watching TBS for the next two and a half hours. Even if you were being raped, prolly.

And now, we arrive at the moment of truth - the announcement of the Game of the Year award recipient. JTT slowly names all of the games again, and our winner is ... Mortal Kombat! Here comes Ed Boon and John Tobias (I think) and they thank Probe Software and then they leave. 

And to wrap up the show? Nielsen says he can't wait to go home, play with his joystick and boot up his hard drive, and then we get a whole bunch of ads for NBA Live '95, NHL '95, Northwest Airlines and Microsoft and we are COMPLETE-O in Hollywood.

"We would like to thank the Academy for forgetting at least 300 better games came out in the 1993-94 fiscal year."

Well, I suppose you don't really need any explanations on why Cybermania was a one and done event, do you? Outside of the fact that video games were starting to make a lot of money at the time and nobody else had tried to capitalize on the rapidly-expanding market, I'm not really sure the producers of the award show knew why they were putting together the gala. The categories were confusing and haphazardly assembled, there was way too much time dedicated to crappily edited together video vignette segments and the emphasis on "comedy" - and yes, you have to put it in quotation marks - gave the entire program a needlessly self-degrading quality. If the whole idea of Cybermania was to turn video gaming into some sort of legitimate pop cultural commodity, they really couldn't have done a better job of instead making it look unsophisticated, juvenile and unrefined.

For the industry of video gaming, Cybermania is certainly something to be forgotten, a truly embarrassing attempt at permeating the mainstream consciousness that couldn't have come off as anymore low brow and amateurish if they tried. As an artifact of video game culture, however, the event, I suppose, is not without some historical significance. This is certainly the earliest I recall any major cable network treating video games like something that at least partially resembled something more than flash-in-the-pan ultra-niche entertainment, and - for better, but mostly for worse - it does do a fairly serviceable job summing up the video game zeitgeist of the times (yes, people really were splooging themselves thinking interactive movies were the next big thing in entertainment even though they rightly died out within a year of this very broadcast.) Naturally, the greatest retroactive appeal of Cybermania is in its snapshot of old-school gaming fandom. As corny and cheesy and hokey as the broadcast may have been, it is pretty fun to travel back down memory lane and reflect on just how gonzo people were for stuff like Mortal Kombat and Doom, and if you can't crack a smile watching Lord Steven Regal toss midgets around while Lt. Frank Drebin cuts a soliloquy on violence in Clay Fighter, I really don't know why you bother continuing to live.

So what more can be said about Cybermania '94? It gave us young Simba from The Lion King reciting the blood code for the SNES version of Mortal Kombat, Herbie Hancock slumming his way through the worst performance of his (or really, anybody else's) career and featured what were - without question - the single worst award recipients in the history of anything being given out ever. Quite succinctly, it capsulized everything lame, stupid and crass about video gaming in the post-SMB3, pre-PS1 1990s ... which, in a weird roundabout way, I suppose, completely loops around the rules of time and space itself and inadvertently becomes, well, kind of awesome. 

... but only the absolute dumbest kind of "awesome" you can think up, of course.

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A Tribute To Ten Magazines That Shaped My Youth

A fond look back at the periodicals of yore that inspired my love of writing and continue to influence me (sometimes subconsciously) to this very day.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Growing up in a single mother family in a single-wide trailer, money was never something we had a lot of in my upbringing. I had to wear shitty shoes and hand-me-down clothing and while all the kids at school got to play with those newfangled Jurassic Park toys, I had to make do with whatever bullshit my mom could afford at the flea market (which almost entirely consisted of old He-Man action figures with various appendages missing.) So yeah, I never really got to do a whole lot of the regular stuff kids in the 1990s got to do, like visit Chuck E. Cheese's or go to Disney World or get a dentist appointment (seriously, I didn't get my first check-up until I was in my fucking early 20s.) 

For me, the written word was both an escape from the pains of an impoverished childhood and an economical way to stay abreast of the modern world. Back then, you could score yourself a 400-page magazine for about $3.99, and that shit would keep you occupied for at least a week. Before long, those monthly dispatches from the publishing world became my raison d'etre, that thing I looked forward to each and every morning. School may suck and we might be eating off-brand pork and beans for dinner again, but holy shit, the new Game Players issue is on sale at K-Mart, and that almost makes up for everything else. 

And because the publications were relatively cheap, I could engorge myself on a whole host of magazines covering all kinds of divergent elements of pop culture and modernity. Really, it was at this point in my life that I realized I enjoyed reading and writing about things more than actually experiencing them, and had it not been for the immense impact of the periodicals listed below, I probably never would've become a writer and gone on to do something stupid with my life, like become an investment banker or somebody who does I.R.S. compliance sheets for low-to-mid-range accounting agencies. More so than any other pop cultural construct, I'd say the monthly and semi-monthly publications listed below did more to frame my writing style - and really, my personality - than anything else in my youth. Wondering where my weltanschauung came from, admirers and haters alike? Ponder no more - for better or worse, the following publications are most responsible for forming me into the individual I am today...

Electronic Gaming Monthly

Well, this one shouldn't be surprising at all, considering my nomme de plume is an homage to the publication's most mysterious staff writer. More than anything, EGM - as well as its short-lived and much, much harder to find spinoff EGM 2 - is what got me into video game culture ... yes, even more than the games themselves, to a certain extent. Looking back on it, the writing does leave a lot to be desired (surely, after skimming a few back issues, I'd say that rival mag GamePlayers had far better content), but the way EGM was presented was just outstanding. Yes, it was a very, very aesthetically-driven magazine, but the way those flashy images, gaudy layouts and idiosyncratically curt columns were welded together just created a total sensory print experience that - to this day - I don't think has ever been rivaled. There wasn't a single element of the magazine that I didn't enjoy, from the reader mail section (who can forget the "Psycho Letter of the Month" feature?) to QMann's stream of consciousness gossip section to the 30 pages dedicated to Japanese-only Super Famicom games that people in the U.S. would never, ever get their hands on to the much imitated but never duplicated "Review Crew," whose infrequently syntactically-correct blurbs extolled the pros and cons of late-ass NES and Game Gear releases with a commixture of already passe Bart Simpson lingo and only barely gussied up marketing speak? I read the mag religiously up until the PS1/N64 era, where I lost interest in video gaming for a couple of years, but I resumed regular EGM consumption in high school (right smackdab in the Dan Hsu PS2/XB/GC era.) Since then, I've spent many a squandered weekend trying to fill the gap, which means I've got a good five years of Sega Saturn, Dreamcast and Game Boy Color coverage to joyously pilfer through when I can't sleep. But still, whenever I think EGM, I think of that wondrous 1991-1995 run through the Genesis and SNES years, and all those fabulous issues dedicated to Mortal Kombat II and Beavis & Butt-Head and Rocko's Modern Life. Shit, even combing through the old advertisements (which always comprised 60 to 70 percent of the bulk product) is an absolute delight, and every bit as enjoyable as the "genuine" editorial content. You university kids today have your online "safe spaces," and I've got my PDF copies of Electronic Gaming Monthly - and I'll gladly take my paper sanctuary of yore over your sanctimonious sociocultural sanctums any damn day of the week.  

The Weekly World News

There was an old Beavis & Butt-Head book in which the main characters said supernatural-tinged sensationalist nonsense like The Weekly World News was pretty much the reason they learned to read. For me, that actually was the catalyst for pursuing literacy. As a four-year-old, I desperately, direly wanted information, but it was a very particular kind of information. Since I wasn't even in kindergarten yet, the only two things that really mattered to me was what was on cable and whether or not monsters were going to get me, and with TV Guide fulfilling my fist hierarchical need, The Weekly World News did its part to complete the dyad of knowledge. All of those black and white newspapers at the cash register at the grocery store with aliens and Bigfoots and ghosts and shit on it certainly piqued my curiosity, so while everyone else was learning to read via Dr. Seuss, I was introduced to literacy via the apoplectic rants of Ed Anger, that one half-kayfabe wrestling article WWN used to publish up until the mid-1990s and, of course, following the saga of Batboy as if it were some kind of radio serial. People tend to forget, WWN actually did contain a pretty good chunk of actual news, mostly concerning particularly scintillating sex scandals and psycho murderers - which, naturally, captivated me even more than the clearly made-up bullshit about the Loch Ness Monster and George H.W. Bush getting a handjob from a Martian. Granted, a lot of the material was probably above my comprehension level - sure, any first grader can grasp the intricacies of Book of Revelation prophesies coming to life and made-up stories about women giving birth to half frog chimeras, but the less fabricated stuff about serial killers and husbands intentionally infecting their wives with AIDS? Yeah, that stuff may not have been designed with the Barney viewership set in mind, but by golly, it gave me a sociocultural leg-up on my grade school competition, for sure - indeed, I'm pretty sure I was the only kid in second grade that not only knew how to spell "lobotomy," but describe to you the most up-to-date technical description of the procedure. It was a mag worth reading up until 9/11, when the editors figured there was too much real-world spooky shit going on and they decided to make it way lighter and fluffier with a bunch of wishy-washy, more P.C.-friendly articles that felt more like PG-rated The Onion pieces than anything actually worth reading. Still, it ain't too hard to find old copies of the paper from its glory days circulating 'round the Internet - definitely check out the stuff from the late '80s and early 90s if you have a keen taste for the good sleaze. 

Wizard and ToyFare

Like everybody else in the early to mid 1990s, I bought a shit ton of comics because I was under the impression that my stockpile of Sludge and Major Bummer comics would someday be worth $300,000 and I could retire a millionaire before I was 20. The thing is, although I avidly purchased such funny books back in the day, I never really read them - even as a fourth grader, I knew the writing in X-Men and Spawn was subpar stuff, no matter how angular and pointy all the pictures looked. So outside of a couple of old Spider-Man reprints and stuff like Milk & Cheese, my treasure trove of comics mostly collected dust in bins in my closet, appreciating in value at about .0000000001 percent of a penny per year. Since I wanted to keep a close eye on the ebb and flow of the common market value of Young Heroes in Love No. 1, I was an avid reader of Wizard, whose price guide was considered the industrial gospel back in the day. The funny thing is, the price guide - the whole point of the magazine's existence - was probably my least favorite element of the publication. What really drove Wizard was this biting, self-reflexive humor that simultaneously celebrated and skewered nerd culture long before it was call to proclaim your geekdom publicly. Like EGM, the retroactive appeal of the magazine is mostly aesthetic, but it's hard to not reflect on their content-lite regular columns - like the Casting Call feature and a rundown of the ten most "popular" comic characters of the month, complete with a sardonic homage to a shitty forgotten character from yesteryear - and not smile. The articles ran the gamut from glorified P.R. (but you did usually get an exclusive "mini-comic" for free, though) to the fairly inspired (their top ten features were well worth reading) all the way up to legitimately great journalism, such as their piece on the arrest and conviction of indie artist Mike Diana for producing "obscenity" and their retrospective on the impact of Seduction of the Innocent. Oh, and their Halloween and April Fools editions were absolutely required reading, since they usually contained a fair amount of niche-interest snark and/or horror-tinged awesomeness. Wizard had several sister publications, but none were as memorable as their action figure-heavy magazine ToyFare, which in addition to featuring one of the best layouts of any nerd-interest magazine of the era, was also one of the funniest, thanks in no small part to the Mego Action Theater and price guide "one-panel" mini-comics. Shit - I have to find their special all-pro-wrestling-edition issue from circa 1998 now!

Mad and Cracked

It was until recently that I realized just how pronounced an influence the Mad and Cracked runs of the 1990s had on my subconscious. The same way I find myself almost instinctively trudging up the George Carlin/Richard Pryor/Bill Hicks party line when people ask me about abortion, gun control and eating pussy, it has dawned on me that pretty much EVERY opening paragraph I've written from the year 1997 on has been directly tailored around the tried-and-true Mad and Cracked article intro. You've got the table-setting opening sentence, the follow-up sentence that puts a spotlight on the target of satirization and then, you've got the final sentence that jerks open the curtain for your parody. It's such a perfect template, and one I'd advise all aspiring English majors to adapt for their term papers. As far as the content of the magazines, I think that even now these publications don't get the credit they deserve as social criticism. Remember, this shit was before Reddit and Voat and YouTube, so these magazines were pretty much the only media outlet out there specializing in niche interest humor. I thought Cracked did a better job lampooning popular culture while Mad did a better job overall making fun of general U.S. society. But more than that, I think these satirical publications wound up doing  better job encapsulating the 1990s zeitgeist than even the "legitimate" journalistic publications of the era. If you want to see the decade hive mind in action, feel free to comb through any back issue of Entertainment Weekly or Newsweek. You want to experience what it was TRULY like to live - and laugh - through the Clinton era? Hunt you down some old copies of these two mags and get to guffawing in no time. 

Pro Wrestling Illustrated (and all of the other Bill Apter mags)

What made PWI and its myriad spinoffs like The Wrestler and Inside Wrestling awesome was that they were basically monthly multiverse crossover spectacles. If you read the proprietary WWF or WCW magazines, they all kept it "in-universe," so all they ever did was talk about their own promotions and wrestlers. But PWI, though? They covered ALL of the 'rasslin promotions out there, including those weird beard promotions in Mexico and Japan. PWI introduced me to ECW (mostly, through those super bloody 1-800-Run-4-ECW ads on the back page) and the entire cosmos of puroresu, including such illustrious names as Kenta Kobashi, Mitsuharu Misawa and Toshiaka motherfuckin' Kawada. If you want to see an "event" issue done right, look no further than the annual PWI 500 issue, which was pretty much required reading for any 'rasslin dork worth his weight in Hulk Hogan apparel. Sure, by the time the rankings got into the 200s you had no idea who any of the people they were talking about were and I'm pretty sure they just made up the wrestlers in the 400-500 rankings, but still, you just felt like you had so much industrial knowledge pumped into your noggin just by perusing its thin, black and white pages. Oh, and for all you Johnny-Come-Latelies, yes, the entire PWI publishing armada - to this very day - keeps their writing entirely in kayfabe. You know, not that I trusted their old articles from the 1990s about the N.W.O.'s top secret plans to recruit Bret Hart and Sabu to their ranks, or that one piece purportedly penned by Shawn Michaels about how he would beat The Giant to be 100 percent legitimate journalism to begin with...

Fangoria

I was pretty late hopping aboard the Fango bandwagon (I didn't start reading it religiously until around 1996, a good 10 years' past the publication's heyday in the mid-80s), but there was still plenty of good stuff going on with the magazine in the great post-Scream, pre-Blair Witch boom period. When it comes to kitschy ephemera, this was a veritable treasure trove, from the cover stories about Resident Evil commercials to the full color ads for straight-to-VHS turdfests like Crinoline Head. Of course, you also had regular columns touching upon the "best" in recent horror videos, books and even video games, even though what Fango deemed "horror-worthy" was oftentimes debatable (uh, guys, is the original Grand Theft Auto on the PlayStation really a survival-horror opus?) And the features were usually pretty great, with the writers going into absurd detail about the technicalities of the gore effects in forgotten B-fodder like Aberration, The Ugly and yes, even that all-time celluloid classic, Revenge of Billy the Kid. Even though most of what they were covering was total crap, Fango managed to make that crap sound at least partially appealing; if you want to see journalistic turd polishing par excellence, check out any issue from 1997 or 1998.

Metal Edge

To be fair, I wasn't exactly a regular reader of Metal Edge - pretty much the only time I bought a copy was when they did their semi-regular "Top 100 fill-in-the-blank-specials" - but I knew enough to know they were way better than everything else on the magazine rack trying to cater to the metalhead demographic. Since this was the middle of the 1990s, the magazine was caught in this weird historical epoch in which a lot of bands that had lost a lot of relevancy at the end of the 1980s were still touring and putting out albums, so you'd just be flipping through stories about Anthrax and Slayer and then boom, you'd get hit with a spread about fucking Firehouse, Trixter and White Lion. Granted, it was a rather superficial publication - about half the content was just flashy poster dressings and catalog ads - but it did have some fairly decent material in it from time to time. My favorite? A recurring feature where the magazine dialed up random rock stars and asked them really stupid questions, like what was their favorite thing about Thanksgiving and what was the worst movie they had ever seen. I also recall a pretty entertaining column in which heavy metal staples "reviewed" videos receiving heavy rotation on MTV, but my memory is a bit hazy - it just as well could have been a feature in another heavy metal mag.

Black Belt

If nothing else, Black Belt deserves recognition for getting me into mixed martial arts. Dana White and pals may never admit it, but this kung-fu crazy publication did wonders for the UFC in the early vale tudo days, absolutely pimping the fuck out of their first couple of shows and dedicating huge chunks of their print space to event recaps. Of course, the primary intent of the magazine was to spread all sorts of nonsense about the practical applications of karate and Taekwondo and all those other totally useless disciplines that serve no purpose in legitimate combat, and the rag frequently dipped into "survivalist" fare (I remember one recurring column teaching you how to supposedly survive mass shootings and knife attacks, among other things) and some really, really questionable pieces about the "history" of ninjas and jujitsu. There was also a pretty healthy amount of page space dedicated to fisticuffs-heavy movies, so it had your pop cultural bases covered, too. Throw in the insanely detailed pictorial spreads on how to use nunchucks and a million billion ads promising to reveal you ancient Chinese techniques to get laid and deflect bullets with your pinkie and you have all the makings of one highly memorable - albeit highly suspect - martial arts magazine.

The Ring

I may have owned perhaps just three or four issues throughout the 1990s - and those were because they came on the heels of big fights and I thought they'd be worth major moolah someday - but The Ring nonetheless made a huge impression on me. I wasn't as gung-ho about boxing as a I was the fledgling sport of MMA and the long-established pseudo-sport of pro 'rasslin, but I definitely enjoyed the strangely acerbic tone of the planet's leading pugilism publication. Make no mistakes, The Ring was one cynical ass magazine, which went as far as to openly mock boxers in its pages as overrated and out of shape (keep in mind, this is the same magazine that refused to call Muhammad Ali "Muhammad Ali" until damn near the middle of the 1970s and also invented boxers to give their own championship belt greater cultural resonance.) This had to be the most blatantly confrontational sports periodical of the Clinton decade, and if absolutely nothing else? It showed an entire generation the proper way to write columns like a know-it-all asshole.

The Weekly Reader

And of course, it's impossible to talk about periodical print publications that immensely inspired me without bringing up the one that was state mandated. If you attended elementary school in the years between 1991 and 1997, surely you encountered this flimsy little reading material, which sought to turn really big, overarching sociopolitical issues - like unemployment and the War on Drugs - into semi-digestible, low-syllable count blurbs the Power Rangers set could kinda-sorta' comprehend (with plenty of teacher insight, naturally.) Sure, the content wasn't very good and the writing just barely skimmed the surface of highly controversial and deeply nuanced social issues - plus, the liberal bias was glaringly apparent, even to somebody who slept with Ren and Stimpy plushies - but I nonetheless looked forward to each and every issue. Even way back then, I grasped the real significance of the printed medium - their worth wasn't in being contemporary containers of up-to-date knowledge, but little slivers of history that combined the factual with the user-preferred version of what actually happened. Despite being painfully condensed and non-complex, I could take away some sliver of significance from each issue, even if the only thing that had any relative historical value were the ads (which, really, are just as important in encapsulating the times as the "proper" magazine copy - if not substantially more, in many instances.) Yes, even as a second grader I grasped the impending retro-value of the publication, and while all my classmates just discarded their copies at the end of class, I hoarded every issue given to me from the first grade to fifth grade graduation. I lost my treasure trove years and years ago, and while I can't for the life of me remember one single article from the publication (except for this one they ran that cut off in mid-sentence and a story about bullying that was a hoot to read because it had the word "butt" in it), the import of that cruddy little periodical on my life - and desire to write professionally - lingers on to this day.

So if any of you assholes take offense to anything I write, I say take it up with Scholastic ... after all, they are the ones that - advertently and inadvertently - got me into the publishing biz to begin with.

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