Andre Meadows on “What About Gremlins?”

Friend of the site and YouTube video creator Andre “Blacknerd” Meadows has released a Black Nerd Rants video about Gremlins!
He has been a huge fan and supporter of everything Gremlins for as long as I have known him and proudly wears his Gremlin fandom on his sleeve for all to see.

I don’t normally link to vlogs as they aren’t my thing, but Andre has been a positive force in the Gremlins community and this video raises some great points that everyone should see and I am sure most Gremlins fans can relate to.

As many of you know I love Ghostbusters as a close second, but Gremlins is my one true love in pop culture, so I really hope that we see more Gremlins in the near future over anything Ghostbusters, or as many say…why not both? Check out the video below:

One thing I want to address that Andre did not, is how Ghostbusters has a lot more wish fulfillment and roleplay that tied into children’s hearts in the 80’s all the way to today. It is easier to pretend you are a Ghostbuster versus specifically being Billy from Gremlins. Ghostbusters in that respect is an easier sell for toys. Everyone loves a cute Mogwai but kids don’t want to BE a mogwai for the most part. They want to bust ghosts and be the hero. So I get it from a marketing standpoint.
All that said I am sure there were at least a few others out there that would carry their Hasbro Softies Gizmo doll with them everywhere in a backpack, even going so far as to rip their shirts pretending they were Billy Peltzer. No? Just me? Ok then.

My Bedroom

Welcome to My Bedroom. 

Originally I was designing a post of how I am adult with an adult paycheck and a sense of nostalgia. It was going to explain how I began a hunt for many of the toys and fond memories that were lost over the years due to moves and toilet-pipe-leaking accidents. I planned on having said post kick off a years-long chronicle of my journey to re-acquire these things of my childhood.

Then a new realization dawned on me, I don’t need all that stuff. Don’t get me wrong, if I came across a crazy good deal on a Get-Along Gang bed sheet set I would snap it up in a second, but looking around as an adult with an adult paycheck, I really don’t need extreme amounts of “Stuff” taking up closet space for me to only look at when moving or looking for something my son to enjoy.

I decided to do the next most awesome thing, and that is bring my memories to Gremlins Online and share them with each and every reader out there. There are thousands of articles on the internet that feature my memories, all written by people with similar-era childhoods that just predate the internet as we know it.

So I now invite everyone to My Bedroom. This is a collection of my childhood, some first-hand photos of me and my things and memories, others found on adventures online. If you are anything like me, you will hopefully share in that sense of wonder and nostalgia along with me. I also encourage everyone reading this to share their memories and maybe we can help one another unlock those long-buried memories of toys and experiences.

Let’s begin with the two photos I scanned a few years ago for archiving.

First up is this far-too-serious selfie (note the camera remote in my left hand).

So here we have me posing on my Jurassic Park bed sheets with freshly-cut out Star Trek Magazine pages behind me. I only know they are fresh-cut since I had no patience and left the magazine pages all over the bed when taking the photo as you can tell. Fun trivia fact: I hated jeans. I loved corduroys, and I only wore shorts if I absolutely had to. Most of this remains the same but cords seem so hard to find.

The date on the photo of November 14th 1993 is most likely accurate, Both Deep Space 9 and Jurassic Park came out in June of that year.
Next we have my friend Patrick and myself playing Star Trek with our homemade computer consoles. We were both big Star Trek fans, and as you can barely see from my shirt I have always loved raccoons. No idea why really, but I still love raccoons. 

In fact, one of the few dear friends I still keep in touch with these days helped me conceptualize a comic called “Super Raccoons”. Basically picture Ninja Turtles but raccoons. The two main characters were Raccoony and Coonskin, and I was Raccoony, he was Coonskin and we were terrified of lawnmowers which we called “Roto-Dum-Drums” (you see raccoons don’t know the proper terminology for some things. ) I would find the comics I made but I am pretty sure they were lost in a move at some point. This is probably for the best since my art skills were horrid then and are somehow worse than that today.  Regardless, those dumb comics and pretending I was a super-powered raccoon were some amazing times in an oft-rocky childhood. I sometimes don’t think I ever expressed how much the few friends I had meant to me beyond wanting to be at their side 24/7, and I really should have. 

I had this really odd tendency to stick components together into random assorted gadgets. They never did anything but I liked to pretend something was happening. Let’s take a look at some of the random gizmos that were somehow powering my starship.

The Motion Sensor Set.

This was a staple in any of my gizmos, because it would actually click and make a digital counter readout increase whenever the sensors were tripped.
This was my dad’s I assume for when he would go take photographs in the woods, well before I was born. Here you can see one of the Army green motion detectors. The other is pretty well hidden across from us. I think we used them for lasers? Maybe sensors? Probably both.
I also liked to keep tons of books and magazines under my bed in plastic bins. You can see a copy of Stephen King’s Firestarter under there. I was a weird 11 year old.

Vtech Precomputer 1000 and “Breathing Machine”

The “Breathing Machine” as I always called it is in actually a Spirometer. I had no idea what it was actually called until today. I had a lot of various medical equipment around due to my father’s ill health. They often made my contraptions look more futuristic. I am pretty sure this was our dilithium chamber/warp core. My reasoning is because we often chucked it across the room whenever the warp core needed ejecting. (which was pretty frequently)
The Vtech Precomputer 1000 was about as close as I could come to having a reasonably working computer at the time. It let me do some BASIC programming, and play a few games, but not much else. It was our navigational console.

Retrotech did a great video recently on this device, check it out!

The NES/Gameboy Gadget.

Obviously you can see the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy that functioned as some kind of control panel, and there isn’t much to say about that beyond that I still have those.

Wow, looking at this now, I don’t think I have cleaned these in…ever. I should probably do that. They’ve been in storage for at least 20 years, and while I like having them, it isn’t like I desperately needed to break into my Real Ghostbusters lunchbox for one of the three remaining games I own these days and play them: Rocket Ranger, Predator and American Gladiators.

So there you have it.

I wish I could remember any of the games we played in my room beyond “some star trek thing” but it is nice to have a few photos that I can look back on and try to figure out what was happening rather than complete swiss-cheese brain.

Thanks for joining me on this self-indulgent journey through a couple rad childhood photos!

Gremlins Animated Series In The Works?

Variety Reports that there WB is working on a Gremlins animated series for their upcoming streaming service!
Check out the full article here.

While Variety is a much more reliable source than the typical third-hand updates we have been getting for Gremlins news lately, it is best to take this with a grain of salt. This may be very early in development and may take a long time to see come to screens, if ever.

Let’s hope for the best!

{Rad Chat} 4 Movie Covers That Terrified Me – Volume 1

 

Growing up, I had a video store about 3 blocks away from my house named Nord Video. This was essentially my home away from home, and it captured my imagination something fierce, especially when it came to horror movies.

I loved browsing the movies at Nord video, it was your typical 80’s video rental store, with awesome standees and posters all over the slightly too-small space and floor-to-ceiling shelves of movies.

Usually you would find me there browsing the video games or renting the My Pet Monster VHS Movie for the 27th time, but while my mom was looking for something to watch I would peek around the corner and see the horror section. I say peek because the covers absolutely terrified me as a child. Something about how they didn’t really tell you much but seemed to hide a terrifying experience that I imagined would be a million times worse than what it was.

When thinking of movies that triggered that fear response for this article I realized this batch is exclusively movies from 1986.
’86 seems to be my year. As much as I love 1984 thanks to Gremlins and Ghostbusters, 1986 is a huge year for me in movies; Trick Or Treat (featuring Sammi Curr, Rock’s Chosen Warrior), My Pet Monster, Little Shop Of Horrors, The Fly, Maximum Overdrive, Invaders From Mars, Rawhead Rex and so many more.

1. Critters

Right off the bat, we have Critters. This cover confused and scared me because of the Krite grinning right at me, but yet it seemed reminiscent of a Gremlin. Like some sort of distant cousin. The back of the video was just as confusing, since it didn’t actually have shots of the creatures, but random pictures of the main cast. The shot of April Brown being attacked by the giant Krite’s arm always seemed to be a snake-type creature to me. It still looks odd to this day.

2. Chopping Mall

I remember this cover vividly being more unsettling than anything else to young me. I was drawn to this because I could not get my head around the image for the life of me. I was a teenager before I actually saw the movie and then realized it was a bag of body parts, instead of some weird bug-eyed troll creature with feet-like hands and unusual ear placement. Yeah, I was a weird kid. This is still one of my favorite movies of all time, I can only imagine how much I would have loved it as a kid if I could have gotten over the cover.

3. Troll

So here we have Troll. This was the big one that kept me from going all the way down the horror aisle. I would watch this cover from the corner of my eye, then when I got within a few feet, I would run around and go to the other side. I would not cross Torok’s gaze. Again it goes back to the stare, similar to the Critters cover, it just seems to follow you, even if you hide behind the Mickey Mouse standee on the end by the kids zone! To be fair the tagline just enhanced the terror as it beckons the potential viewer to “Come Closer”. Nope big ol’ nope there.

4. House

Again the tagline did wonders for my young brain, much more effective than the movie was itself at being scary. Like there is no comparison for the cover vs the actual film. There is no hint that the film is a weird horror-comedy (the original one I saw as a kid didn’t have the review on the cover) but instead a movie about disembodied zombie bionic hands coming to kill people after ringing their doorbells.
Seriously I had no clue what to expect, and the funny thing is when I finally saw the film around the age of 12? maybe 13? I discovered that I had seen parts of it on TV or at a family member’s house, I just never knew that it was this film.

Thanks for joining me in this journey of nostalgia and video cover related fear. I am going to go curl up under some covers and ignore the fact I just stared Torok the Troll in the face for nearly 10 minutes straight.

 

{Rad Chat} #2 “Terror Stickers”

I had a surprisingly uneventful day at work, so when I left I asked my wife if she wanted anything on the way home. She decided she desired a late-night snack from the local supermarket. Sounds good, I told her, and I was looking forward to getting home a bit earlier than usual, so we could spend a bit of time chatting or playing random video games in the same room. We live an exciting life.

As I left the supermarket we go to a few times a week, I passed the usual vending machine which has fidget spinners, sticky hands, cheap plastic jewelry and the other usual not-as-good-as-when-we-were-kids trinkets.

This time though, the sticker machine caught my eye. “TERROR STICKERS” it proudly proclaimed.

As you can see, the stickers feature not-quite-on-brand designs of legendary horror icons.
We have Kinda Sorta Leatherface, A decent Leprechaun,  Old-Age Pennywise, Angry guy breaking through a wood hut, Wood-shop killer doll, Reflective Jason Voorhees, and Almost Hannibal Lecter.

I don’t regularly have change for chance encounters like this but fate smiled upon me as I searched my pockets at 10pm at night in front of a vending machine like a maniac, and a few quarters were found!

My mind reeled with thoughts of getting some awesome TERROR STICKERS. I was already planning on where they would live on my laptop followed by my witty posts showing them off on twitter and Instagram with my fellow horror fan friends!

Phone at the ready, wanting to document the moment the sticker came out of the machine, I put two quarters in and out came my prize…