Obscure Nostalgia from the 2000s: A Pointless Iceberg

If the world ever feels like it’s moving too fast, take umbrage at the fact that Human Kimberly even had a gap between her teeth in her concept art.

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Political topics
- Bad language

Sammy's Side-Up
Alright, Break it Up!
Level 1: The Surface
Level 2: The Sunlight Zone
Level 3: The Twilight Zone
Level 4: The Midnight Zone
Level 5: The Abyss

Sammy’s Side-Up

Hello! Hola! Velkommen! Bienvenue! Konichiwa! Aloha! How ya doin’?! Yo! And in any language, welcome to ElectroNuke Island! So long, Sonic and the Black Knight: Pinback Edition! Long live Shadow the Hedgehog: The Recollected Cut – Episode Storybook! In case the tone of that long-winded introduction didn’t suggest as such, things have been looking up lately! I got to celebrate my birthday a week ago, the nation’s riding the blue wave we crossed our fingers would splash down on the midterms, and guess who just took a job offer in this circus of a market?! I’ll tell you this: he loves grocery shopping, but he lives with a mom who hates doing it, so why not get paid to shop for people? If that’s not exciting enough, my orientation’s not until next week, so I figured I’d fill that gap by writing a full and original post about something (mostly) fun and lighthearted! That’s right, no updates to previous posts, and no excuses to share song replacement mod videos!

Yeah, I know I started the Season’s Bleatings series several Christmases ago, and I know I had a prime opportunity to post something special for the Halloween season that just passed. Truth is, for a holiday just days after my birthday, and for as much as I adore the fall season, Halloween just isn’t that exciting anymore. Once it’s over, my mind automatically fixates on how many pounds of mashed potatoes my sister will consume on the next holiday in November. Granted, it’s not like I didn’t celebrate All Hallow’s Day at all besides, you know, exacerbating my GI problems with Twix and candy corn. In a rare situation, I was willing to sit down and watch Halloween, Halloween 2, 1982’s The Thing, and Exorcist III—I’d just received the last two on blu-ray as birthday presents—and for as intriguing as it was to see the director’s cut of the last movie on that list, it was more accurately a loose reconstruction using recovered elements in low quality; the Shout! Factory blu-ray included a 4K transfer of the full director’s cut from the original negative, but our ancient blu-ray player couldn’t read the disc. Sure, Brad Dourif is fantastic in it, but in the director’s cut? Yeah… he was probably ad-libbing a little, ’cause it went on for a good ten minutes or so. Besides that, a huge surprise came in the form of the long-awaited Scarecrow Nightmare DLC for Batman: Arkham Knight being ported to PC by modder DarkSheep! This is significant, as it’s been a PS4 exclusive for the last eleven years, meaning the past couple days just might’ve marked the very first time I’ve ever experienced it (I first played Arkham Knight on PS4 years ago, but I’m not sure I ever even used the exclusive content before returning the system.)

So… what’s the jibber-jabber this week?

Alright, Break it Up!

Oh, boy. This is probably gonna take a while. See, I talk a lot about my own personal nostalgia here, and that’s (a) to fill the empty void in my life, and (b) simply because it brings me joy. Hell, on my birthday, I showed my family the third Sonic movie—shockingly, it’s my second time seeing it, as it’s not only heartwarming and hilarious, but it feels like a love letter to Sonic Adventure 2 that a wider modern audience can enjoy, and Shadow’s actually depicted as a mature and thoughtful character for the first time since Sonic Heroes in 2003 (although LEGO Dimensions did make you help him deliver flowers across the land because it’s what Maria would’ve wanted, so that was a minor spike on the heart monitor). Granted, the goal is to maintain wise mind in that it shouldn’t get in the way of moving on with life, as my recent employment demonstrates, and it can actually be more entertaining to see old things with fresh eyes.

Now, over time, I’ve accumulated these baffling little memories and half-memories, all swirling around in this kooky little head of mine, and I feel the need to jot them down and describe the strange places they’ve had in my early development. I feel the need to catalogue as much from my life as possible because I want to see if others in the world recall the same things, and as Rutger Hauer monologues in Blade Runner, the greatest pain in the end is fearing that all you know and have experienced will fade into nothingness once you’re gone. That’s not to get oversentimental, though, as minus the more, um… enigmatic and, in some cases, questionable spots on this iceberg, this is set to be a fun little exploration of weird shit regarding TV, movies, video games, collectibles, etc. that few if anyone remembers. Of course, these do wade into waters of such obscurity that knowing anyone who remembers them would be a blessing, so we’re gonna deploy the classic iceberg format for the first time on this blog, ranging from the sunlit surface to the depths where no light can pass!

Three major rules apply to the chosen criteria. First off, the topics can’t be anything discussed here at length, so nothing from the obscure childhood games post can be covered. Second, they relate to my own personal memory, so don’t expect me to expound on, say, those Freddy Freaker bumpers from MTV. Or the time Pokémon showed children inflatable breasts and underage bikini contests beyond “ban that shit”. Finally, even the surface entries have to be obscure enough that it’s fifty-fifty on whether people remember them. For instance, I was considering Cyberchase for that level, but I get the feeling it’s a little too well-known for inclusion, and my recollections probably aren’t as vivid as others’ anyway.

So, with that base covered, it’s time to reach through that void, baby! And for the record, no, I mean the void of nostalgia. We can hit second base another time. Did I mention I’ve been building my Exton neighborhood in Minecraft lately?

Level 1: The Surface

1) Creepy SpongeBob live-action elements – Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why would that jumpscare from “Wormy” be included here? Well, obviously, that example won’t be included as anyone with a fondness for SpongeBob’s golden era is familiar with it (not sure how many people know it was sampled from Bill Nye, though), but as many other examples represent, there’s always been something… off about when a cartoon like SpongeBob makes use of live-action imagery. Other cartoons have done this, like that frog hand from the worst episode of Ren & Stimpy: Adult Party Cartoon, but I was fortunate enough to have zero childhood memories with Ren & Stimpy as it would’ve fucked me up even worse than I was.

Regardless, I’m referring to more abstract moments from SpongeBob‘s later episodes, namely specials like “Atlantis SquarePantis”. The Patchy wraparound saw him struggling to survive after Encino, California shrinks down to a handheld size, and the first eerie occurrence is when he’s stranded on a beach and dehydrated. After failing to snatch Potty for food, he finds a tiny version of SpongeBob outside a scale model of his house, and that version of him is a buck-toothed man whose head pokes out of his SpongeBob costume. The second oddity in that special is when he dreams of returning to Encino—or, rather, deep in the hedge maze outside a mansion somewhere in Encino–and the sequence occasionally fast-forwards à la Benny Hill between him getting too close to other residents for comfort… before ending with his ice cream falling out of its cone, at which point the camera closes in tight on the crazed, haunted stare in his eye as cow noises emanate from the melting scoops on the grass.

This was a very weird time for SpongeBob. And a deeply disturbed one.

2) Off-putting Rugrats movie elements – Like the previous entry, some of you are likely to know of these examples, but not as many of you are likely to be put off by them. Remember the shimmering beauty of those Disney video and DVD bumpers before each preview? Well, between their high framerate and ethereal audio, they actually felt a little weird for me to watch growing up, and the features before, during, and after Nickelodeon movies on home media had the same effect. See, the production logo for Rugrats in Paris sees a man raking leaves outside his house in Paris when a Nickelodeon ball drops from the sky and crushes his home beneath it, his reaction to which is one of absolute shock. As a kid, my own reaction to that matched his level of devastation, but like the SpongeBob entry, even just the live-action nature juxtaposed with the cartoon to come was unnerving in and of itself. This was the same time in which I couldn’t handle onscreen messages before movies and shows because there was something inexplicably foreboding about them, and yet, it wasn’t even the first time a man lost his house, and presumably his whole family, to the heavenly wrath of a Nickelodeon ball—the logo for Rugrats in Paris is actually an autumn-themed reference to the winter-themed one for the movie Snow Day, which I personally never saw growing up.

The same movie has a heartbreaking plane scene of Chucky seeing the shape of his deceased mother in the clouds outside, but the realistic 3D nature of those clouds (they were probably CGI) resulted in the same juxtaposition. Jarringly enough, after the movie was over came a special feature we’d be too late to turn off before it started, that being an in-your-face “Who Let the Dogs Out?” music video, which itself doesn’t even compare to the infamously surreal Klasky Csupo production logo that proceeded every Rugrats episode. Hell, I know the first Rugrats movie is better known for Angelica singing Blondie, monkeys singing “Witch Doctor”, and making viewers cry when Tommy almost feeds his newborn brother to said monkeys, but it decides to lose its mind on mushrooms when Dill is born earlier on. Surely, it’s just a euphoric and artistic depiction of childbirth, but I’m not gonna lie to you: I was put off by that, as well. I guess I just wasn’t expecting the birth of a baby in a children’s cartoon to play the same way as the birth of Tobey MacGuire’s Spider-Man.

Who expected the weirdos behind Aeon Flux to get so uncanny?

3) Super Mario Sunshine‘s normal ending – Awww! Mona Sax lives on! Shame that ending wasn’t canon, and Max was left all alone instead. No joke, the non-canon ending of Max Payne 2—the happy ending—is the one you get for completing the game on the Dead on Arrival difficulty level. That’s okay, considering the canon ending is the one most people get anyway, but what if the most common ending was the most confusing one? Enter Super Mario Sunshine, one of the only Mario platformers I love even though it’s the one everyone else likes the least. If you’re the ultimate go-getter, you can complete the game’s story with all 121 shine sprites, which requires you to enter the final level Corona Mountain and exit back into Delfino Plaza—you’ll find the town, once flooded before the level, restored so you can collect the rest of the shine sprites. This way, you’ll get a sweet, mellow jingle over a message wishing you a relaxing vacation, but not everyone’s going to get this result. Instead, you’ll find Il Piantissimo, a character you have to race in almost every world, discovering Bowser Jr.’s magic paintbrush on Gelato Beach over nothing but ocean ambience.

Bet you can tell how Little Sammy reacted to that ending.

Equally as strong as my discomfort—in fact, it might have contributed to said discomfort—is the mystery of what the ending means to imply. Based on how the “THE END” text is missing a question mark, you can chalk it up to him finding it and moving on, which is closer to what the glorious expansion mod Super Mario Eclipse does. That mod features a new cutscene that clarifies the ending, but instead of what I expected him to do, he just tosses it into the water, where it snaps in half so that light is restored to the island. Of course, what I expected since the original game was that he’d acquire it and become a future antagonist, his ego clearly bruised from being beaten in every race—by that logic, Shadow Mario being a separate character from Bowser Jr. in Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour would make sense as he’s revealed in Sunshine to be the kid’s alter-ego. It’s comparable to the mid-credits scene from Mario Strikers Charged, in which the Super Team leader from the first Mario Strikers is relegated to cleanup duty by Bowser, where he scrubs the floors behind the scenes before getting fed up and running off… but later came Mario Strikers: Battle League, in which the Super Team never show up to reclaim the championship, let alone anything. Hell, if you really feel like reaching, there are parallels in emotional effect and implications to the post-credits scene with the robot chef in Manhunt—like Sunshine‘s, it could have as deep an implication as the snuff film producers still walking free, but it’s probably as simple as said films being taped over a children’s show—but, thankfully and obviously, that game had no place in my childhood. If anything, it’s whatever the hell the chef’s saying that I find most intriguing, seeing as unused subtitles for the scene read, “Hello, kiddies!” when that sounds nothing like the audio, even in reverse.

What were we talking about again?

Level 2: The Sunlight Zone

1) Maisy – It should be clear why the last zone went on for so long despite how few entries there were: the entries were more so categories of other, more specific topics. This time, though, there won’t be as much said about each entry, and this is a perfect demonstration, seeing as my eldest sister Em has more memories of it than I do. Maisy’s the first title that’s likely to hit you a certain way once you hear it—it might be vague for some of you; inversely, you might light up at the sound of it. It’s hard to think of a more straightforward animated series than this one, as it has a somewhat scrappy and limited, yet charming, visual style, and honestly, it’s the visual style you’re most likely to remember. There’s fewer iconic moments here than from other shows like, say, The Big Comfy Couch that my same sister grew up on (you can bet your ass that show’s too well-known to include, as fun as it is to talk about), where you had the Vetruvian Man-style clock sequences, the belly button song, a nonverbal ragdoll family inside a dollhouse, sentient dust bunnies, a literal crossover between the nonverbal ragdoll family and sentient dust bunnies, and who can forget the euphemism-infused origin story of “where clowns come from”? Honestly, my best memories of Maisy are a part where she somersaults and another where her elephant friend Eddie cuts his knee trying to perform a stunt on a circus ball (it began as a children’s book series, if you can’t tell by now.) However, it has a special place in other people’s hearts, so it belongs on one of the higher levels.

2) Sagwa: The Chinese Siamese Cat – That title might hit you the same way as Maisy, but I certainly have far more memories with this show. Imagine a look into the history of ancient China, but witness the goings-on of the magistrate’s palace from the perspective of the cats wandering around. Oh, and also Rick Moranis in the form of a fruit bat. Like some of the other shows to come on this post, this is one I remember either my sisters drawing a ton or getting one of their middle school friends to draw for us, and those drawings would usually end up posted on the walls over our basement staircase. Like Rugrats, it would alternate the perspective between the misadventures of the titular cat, her older brother, and her younger sister (her mother would sporadically dole out punishments or impart a moral lesson) and the grounded adult matters of the magistrate and his associates. Call it predictable—either that or infuriating—but the best way to describe the show is as cute as you can possibly get without literally sparkling like anime characters. Fortunately, no human children are forced to marry one of the cats, so it seems Studio Ghibli was not behind its creation. It’s either you get that reference or you don’t.

3) Boohbah – Let’s crank the dial up from wholesome to nightmare fuel! This one should ring more-than-distant bells for many of you, seeing as Boohbah is probably the most infamous children’s program to ape off the success of Teletubbies. It’s the first of multiple British-produced children’s programs to be referenced here—I had Kipper on this list earlier, but I simply don’t remember enough about it besides bits and pieces of episodes. The show featured five, uh… let’s call them bubbly creatures dubbed Boohbahs, all designated by unique names and colors: the yellow Humbah, the purple Zumbah, the orange Zing Zing Zingbah (typing that name just gave me whiplash), the blue Jumbah, and the pink Jingbah. The differences really don’t matter, though, as they all spend their hours charging in tiny Dyson spheres before emerging to soar upwards with the power of their own farts. Or so the sounds they make suggest. They also feature segments with human children called, “Look At What I Can Do!”, where said children do incredibly unimpressive things outside. I do believe there was some real educational value in there, but my family’s history with it mostly amounted to laughing at the farts, assigning each Boohbah to each of us (my dad was Zing Zing Zingbah because he wouldn’t have it any other way), and then changing the channel. As was most other families’, I’m sure. Perhaps, its glossy modern aesthetic helped define what we now call Frutiger Aero; honestly, I only look back to laugh at the fart noises.

4) Web plushies – To preface, I never hated Beanie Babies, even after learning how high the speculator market of the ’90s catapulted their sales prices, although I can understand why people alive before my time (case in point, some of the guys at RedLetterMedia) look back on that shit-show with embarrassment, or better yet, the all-too-similar craze over Cabbage Patch Kids around the same time. Hell, it got so absurd that the purple Princess Diana Beanie Baby became prohibitively expensive just for being stuffed with outdated pellets! Oh, and also for something related to a limousine accident. Of course, if those products appealed to the ’90s speculator market, I recall with much less cynicism the brief run of Webkinz and Neopets, which were fairly successful attempts at linking up adorable plushies with the wild world of the Interwebz™! Think of it this way: each of these plushies would come with a special code that, when entered, added them to your compendium in an online game, like an MMO that starts in reality. This predated the Disney Infinity, Skylanders, LEGO Dimensions, and Amiibo model of linking toys up with video games, another trend that impressively never seemed to spiral into capitalist pandemonium. While I only dipped my toe in the water of either, Webkinz were tonally and stylistically more like web-compatible Beanie Babies whereas Neopets were sleek, modern, and Pokémon-inspired, and frankly? I think there’s something more appealing and tangible about collecting funky stuffed animal mashups than stacks of playing cards, but clearly, Pokémon games (Pokémon Go! especially) have proven how little that stance means in the long run. Hope you cherished the modest success of “web plushies” while you could, folks, ’cause the ghastly pocket monster freakout is back in town!

5) Monkey Quest – Remember playing Club Penguin? Wasn’t that fun? Well, boy, did I miss out, ’cause I sure as hell never played it! From what I remember, there was a time I tried, but I think I might’ve locked myself out of my own account on accident because I was eight. Sometime later, though, Nickelodeon launched their own equivalent in the wake of… Tak? Is that what you call it? Whatever, the little caveman with a cameo in that Rugrats game for the GameCube—the one not even my sisters and I knew about, not to mention a rare game over screen we never had to confront—eventually inspired a browser MMO called Monkey Quest, and while my memories at this point are scattered, I was glued to it for months. It was a 3D sidescroller where you’d customize your monkey, join one of four tribes, and complete a complex web of quests (it’s right there in the title!) tied to bananas and golden artifacts, and it was just a lot of fun interacting with other players’ much cooler monkeys, all of which you knew from the start that yours could never live up to. In other words, it was like GTA Online without the grieving, so naturally, it’s long since been taken offline. There’s currently something called Monkey Quest: Reborn, but… I don’t know. I shed this thing like lizard skin when I moved away, so maybe I’ll check it out. Maybe I won’t. Whatever.

6) Bakugan: Battle Brawlers – Have I mentioned yet that I hate Pokémon? Well, I could tolerate Neopets, and up until a point, I could tolerate Bakugan, but you know what Neopets never was? As opposed to Pokémon, Bakugan, and Yu-Gi-Oh? A cartoon I couldn’t watch without goosebumps. That I know of, I could be completely wrong on that one. To stay positive, though, I’ll point out that the core idea was simple and fun: you’d collect these balls to roll out during a competition, but they’d proceed to flip open into the shape of a dragon or some other fantastical beast, giving it a more tangible and practical quality like Neopets. For me, it was the color combinations that drew me to them—red and orange, white and gold, blue and violet, you name it—not to mention the tiny details added to their combat forms, and they were so abstract due to their lower halves remaining as half-spheres that I could appreciate the simplicity. It was another key example of my autistic brain registering shapes and colors in a positive way. As for the show, I don’t think I emphasize how often I’ve put anime in front of myself over the course of my life, and every time it would happen, I just wanted to turn it off after a while. You had the mystery man with the cool visor named Masquerade, and he later turned out to be this girl named Alice, but… I don’t know. It’s the same problem with Pokémon in that the characters are all blank templates for kids to insert their own identities into. On a purely intellectual level, there’s really nothing there to pilfer, and that’s all I’m gonna say on it.

Level 3: The Twilight Zone

1) 9 – You are traveling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop… an avant-garde song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I mean, a film I only realized in recent years has a minor cult following, as it’s so creatively grim for what you’d expect based on its characters and animation. This 3D-animated, post-apocalyptic, PG-13-rated mystery thriller stars the voice of Elijah Wood as the titular steampunk ragdoll—one from a series of similar dolls with numbers stitched into their backs—trying to recover what’s left of the world and what became of his creator, and all while hunted by an army of malevolent robotic drones, no less. From the dolls, these drones extract the… life force of their creator? The energy field from the human body, maybe? It’s more atmospheric than story-driven, honestly, but it was the film’s dark nature that left me a bit mystified when I saw it. I can forgive the way it’s been forgotten, as it was weird enough in its time, but the one fact about it that’s always impressed me was its release date, that being September 9, 2009—9-9-09. Fucking brilliant.

2) Oswald – Too-too-too too, too-too! Boohbah wasn’t the only kid’s show that tooted its way into my heart! Granted, this is a drastically different kind of toot, that being on a trumpet. While those who remember this short-lived Nick Jr. series look back on its calm, dignified approach as therapeutic, not many people have seen it to say so. Much like Maisy, Oswald is the definition of a picture book to TV adaptation, as the storylines are exceedingly simple and based around the titular octopus traveling around his community from his cozy little apartment, almost never opting to do so without his weiner dog Weenie at his side. While I wasn’t keen on extracting educational value from shows that were not about wildlife (I was a very stupid kid), the positive atmosphere it carried was impeccable, as the soothing light jazz soundtrack cemented. It’s the classical wind riff that my dad would repeat like a running joke for years to come, but suffice it to say, my association with the show in general isn’t purely comedic.

3) Maggie and the Ferocious Beast – Okay, I think I’m gonna have to rescind the “this is about my memories, no one else’s” rule, because this is a show I had to scour far and wide for as I didn’t even know the official name. As my mom recently elaborated, this one also began as a picture book (between this, Maisy, and others like Corduroy, that seems to be a long-running trend in our family), and the minuscule fragments I can recall only hammer that home further. If you wanna know just how fleeting these memories are, the only vivid example I can give you is the secondary protagonist Hamilton Hock vigorously mixing ingredients together in a mixing bowl. Even the exact memory of what the titular beast (his name is literally Beast) looked like had pruned like fingers in a swimming pool—I pictured him being furry like a bantha from Star Wars or Snuffleupagus, not bare and polka-dotted—and it seems I was led back toward this memory for its obscurity alone. In fact, I’m only just finding out that the show was Canadian-produced, and… I mean, I would like to say that explains my unfamiliarity with it, but considering how many British-produced shows I came across growing up, I’m gonna go ahead and call bullshit on that.

4) LinkSonic5 Engine 2 – I suppose shows like Maisy, Oswald, and Maggie and the Ferocious Beast were just too intellectually stimulating for Little Sammy’s brain—it was only natural that, after Teenage Sam rose from the putrid tar pits of puberty, he’d fill the void in his life with something that at least felt nostalgic, even if it wasn’t. In the present day, I’ve officially released my Sonic World Ultimate project alongside all of its addon packs, and while commenters seem grateful for something to tide them over until Sonic World DX 2.0 comes out, I’m sure being aware that the fan-made engine Sonic World in general runs on, Blitz3D, dates back to 2001 would bolster their appreciation of DX 2.0 further, let alone Ultimate. Now, it felt as though I’d witnessed this on YouTube prior to its start date, but a user named LinkSonic5 started a fan project in 2012 that diverged from Blitz3D into his own modified engine, only to cancel it a couple years later. The “game” he created, which owed much to the Dreamcast Era in soundtrack and theming, felt charmingly primitive, for lack of a better term—so much so that the Sonic model and unfinished Green Hill stage used were ported to Sonic World (I’ve included enhanced versions of both in my Ultimate addon packs.) Between the digital cover of the Green Hill theme, unmodified tracks from Sonic Adventure 2 and Heroes, and Ryan Drummond’s voice coming out of an adorably low-poly Sonic, it had a cheap, unfinished charm to it, and the low framerate and overall instability only contributed to that when I discovered videos capturing online multiplayer matches—none of which I’ve ever seen since.

5) Glenn Martin, DDS – Oh, dear. I, um… I think I understand why I remember so little of shows like Maisy and Kipper: I was too invested in subpar late night comedy. I’ll forever regret the things I said in school after watching stuff like Family Guy (granted, I can recite just about every line from their first Star Wars parody by memory alone, and most of them are actually pretty clever), but little did my parents expect that so-called mature animation would leak its way into the kid-friendly territory of Nickelodeon, or at least Nick@Nite. This claymation oddity, whose comedy landed maybe twice per every five episodes, baffled viewers even in its time, but likely none more than parents who couldn’t believe it found its way onto Nickelodeon. It tells the story of a dentist and suburban dad who loses his house after a patient with an overbite snaps his finger off (okay, that’s not the inciting incident, but it is something that happens in the very first episode), leaving him and his family to a nomadic lifestyle on the road in their Winnebago. Subject matter includes sex with a female bodybuilder, mishaps in an Amish community, trouble with the mafia, and most infamously, characters getting their heads stuck inside an elephant’s ass à la Ace Ventura. It should come as no surprise that the series was pretty short-lived, but let me reiterate that no parents are to blame for their kids having seen it, my parents included—it was just a very strange and occasionally funny experiment on the network’s end.

6) Runny Babbit – Okay, come on, now. How can you go wrong will Shel Silverstein? Well, okay, aside from those explicit “Fuck ‘Em” demos he allegedly recorded. Books like The Missing Piece and The Giving Tree explore themes that most children’s literature shy away from despite how strongly they resonate with their intended audience, and I honestly believe they’d hit me far harder today than they would’ve when I was little. I can say with confidence that I fell in love with at least one book he wrote, but let’s just say it wasn’t his most profound work to date. What this book does is cement the comedy premise of swapping out the first letters of words in a sentence—something RedLetterMedia has practiced many a time to great results—like saying “ceed the fat” instead of “feed the cat”, but it starts by defining the “language” in question before telling a series of lightly comedic stories that all make use of it in some fashion. Clearly, the premise alone amused me more than anything, but I can’t say it left any long-lasting impact on my sense of humor or anything like that. It’s just the one book from his enviable library that I inexplicably came to cherish because I simply never got too hung up on reason back then.

7) Dog Train – Well, this certainly explains my diverse musical taste, doesn’t it? See, in either kindergarten or first grade, my class and I were introduced to Sandra Boynton’s read-along CD book Dog Train, and not only was it a wholesome doorway to self-expression and exploration of culture, but my mom especially loved the look of it for the sheer range of talent behind it, let alone that of a sequel compilation by the name of Philadelphia Chickens. Given credited names like Alison Krauss, the Bacon Brothers, Hootie & the Blowfish, Kate Winslet, and even Weird Al himself, I find it rather interesting that it’s always gotten the recurring riff from “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths roaring in my head for how close it sounds to a train horn; I’ll simply never understand the inner workings of my childhood brain. Hell, Philadelphia Chickens attached even more names like Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Scott Bakula, although looking back, even just replaying “The Intermission Song!” in my head annoys me to a psychotic level.

8) The Snowman – Okay, slow down, partner. I’m not referring to the Michael Fassbender flop, although that is a fascinating story in its own right. Rather, this is a British animated short film from 1982, and let’s just say it’s a very different winter-themed film from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Rather than full of blood, paranoia, and shapeshifting aliens, this is an underrated gem not even my whole family is aware of, and it acts as more of a musical Christmas mood piece to help you sleep on a cozy December night. A young boy’s snowman comes to life and takes him on a wondrous flight through the blizzard and, soon enough, all the way to Santa’s workshop where a colony of snowmen dance together. The somber ending sees the snowman having melted the next morning. You won’t be surprised to know that I was introduced to this film through my elementary school music class, meaning you can couple it with Dog Train and Philadelphia Chickens when it comes to how my school and hometown helped shape my lifelong musical taste.

9) ChalkZone – What comes to mind when you think of chalk? It’s the sound of nails on a chalkboard, right? At worst for me, it’s the dry dustiness that’s torturous to feel between my fingers on a sensory level. At best, however, it’s ChalkZone, another short-lived show that most people have no clue existed while those who do get giddy at the mention of it. First off, it needs to be emphasized that the protagonist’s name is… get ready… Rudy Tabootie. And they say it a LOT. Maybe possibly the greatest name in all of fiction. Being a dork who struggles academically, he uses a special type of chalk in his classroom to teleport himself to an alternate realm where he’s followed by a female friend named Penny and a tiny Doodlebob-esque luchador named Snap. An unexpected element is that, like The Partridge Family, each episode would feature an in-universe music video at the end, not to mention voice talents like Rodger Bumpass (AKA Squidward) and Jim Cummings apparently played supporting roles. Go figure.

10) DVD games – Yes, this topic has been talked about by others, but my family has a very specific history with it, so this is my two cents on it. For all you naïve youngsters out there, we had physical media before streaming, and certain family movies would contain subpar interactive games on their DVD menus. Other YouTubers can offer you more in-depth deep dives into this topic, but the two instances my family dreads even the memory of came with Madagascar and Shrek the Third. The former featured a stealth sim inspired by Metal Gear Solid where you’d have to escape from the shipping freighter as the four Penguins, but like Run Lola Run, it seemed entirely dependent on trial-and-error until you’d nail down how not to fuck up (yes, I did just compare a cheapo Madagascar TV game to Run Lola Run.) Or maybe we just didn’t know how to play Metal Gear Solid with a TV remote. The Shrek the Third game was called Far, Far Away Idol and required different characters’ auditions to be rated in a set time limit. Suffice it to say, we were hindered by the time limit, and because this wasn’t L.A. Noire, it was sometimes hard to tell a good performance from a bad one. The result? Well, when it came time for the winner to be be announced, the pretentious in-universe host would throw the contestants’ cards away, proclaim “It’s me, everyone!”, and start singing horribly on top of his table. Rinse repeat thirty times over and you’ll realize the rage and bloodlust we acquired for that fucker is infectious.

11) Strange licensed action figures – So, we’re talking about toys again, are we? Well, I don’t think I’ve stressed enough here that I was one hell of an action figure collector when I was little (the space they’ve left has been filled in by video games, although I did receive a 2008 holographic Dooku figure, which I emotionally associate with my old hometown, for my birthday), and it was the largest and most detailed ones I obsessed over. The greatest I had was a twelve-inch Sideshow figure of Emperor Palpatine, which came with a throne of pure die-cast metal and even his red chancellor robes as part of his multilayered clothing. Now, whereas Star Wars toys have proven rather odd at times, like a Zam Wesell Barbie doll and the ’80s Darth Vader Kenner figure with arm holes in his cloak—not to mention a box set of bendy rubber Family Guy figures, some of which my dad continues to keep—I also recall owning three figures from G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra for… some reason, although there was a genuine appeal to all of them. One had a rubber mouth that actually synced up with the words he said, and all while you could make him sprint and fire his weapon (or at least the sound of it) using a switch on his back; another was twelve inches and depicted the creepy redesign for Cobra Commander, the Deadpool-style face of whom inspired me to remove the robes from my twelve-inch Sideshow Darth Maul figure and turn him into Emperor Palpatine until I got the official Sideshow figure; and the last was of the female villain that could be undressed because I was apparently a sex pervert back then. Moving on, I of course had my fair share of Sonic toys, but only two really stick out in my mind: the grayscale “prototype” Sonic tie-in for Sonic Adventure 2, of which only five hundred copies were ever produced (I, no joke, made this figure playable in Sonic World Ultimate); and Sonic X figures that each came with a robot part, allowing you to construct a “megabot” that never appeared in the show once all of them are collected. Oh, and then, you have the Sonic Heroes McDonald’s tie-in that coupled Happy Meals with tiny handheld games, which was genuinely exciting at the time.

I’m gonna be stuck in my childhood for eternity, aren’t I?

12) Star Wars arts and crafts projects – Apparently so. Nonetheless, if there somehow was a Star Wars character I couldn’t get my hands on (I searched far and wide for Garmidan, the imperial spy from A New Hope, but I don’t remember actually buying anything), I figured I’d go full Grinch and make it instead. Seeing as my mom had previously folded me seven paper Chaos Emeralds, she helped me with a lot of these projects, best of all a homemade “Tooka doll” and a Hammerhead sock puppet we discovered the instructions for online. The former, for reference, was kept by a Twi’lek child on the war-torn planet Ryloth in The Clone Wars, and you can give Mom most of the credit for sewing the soft purple and beige felt together and attaching the green button eyes. As for the latter, Hammerhead’s one of those cantina patrons who became famous for his unique appearance alone, and I guess having a detailed Sideshow figure of him (that might’ve been the real coolest figure I ever owned, so much so that I’m kinda wishing I still owned it) just wasn’t enough, considering Mom also worked with me on an adorable sock puppet using googly eyes and metallic gold pipe cleaners. I only wish these two fruits of labor stuck around longer than they did, but in a way, they were just more obscure equivalents of a book series during the 2000s—two entries of which you’re likely to recognize as The Strange Case of Origami Yoda and Darth Paper Strikes Back. Whatever the fuck these stories are about, they all end with instructions to fold the namesake crafts together yourself. Granted, they do seem to be well-known enough that I don’t really count them on this spot. They just happen to be related closely enough for a brief mention.

Level 4: The Midnight Zone

1) Catscratch – You’re in the jungle now, Max. We all float down here. Of all the spots on this level, this is the example you’re most likely to recognize as it had a much longer run than you’d expect from it, but it’s still ridiculously niche. This 2D-animated Nicktoon was a stranger experiment than Fanboy & Chum Chum and eighty notches less obnoxious. It told the stories of three cats—scrappy but affable Gordon, dopey and naïve Waffle, and bossy control freak Mr. Blik—who were somehow independently wealthy, residing in a mansion with monster trucks, pet newts, a root beer addiction, and a butler named Hovis. It seems the detail that managed to burn itself into the minds of others was that Gordon fawned after a young girl named Human Kimberly, but fortunately, this never pulled a Sonic ’06 or Cat Returns and evolved into an actual romance. They would try to blend in among Kimberly’s friends by dressing in drag, hunt for unicorns, show up on a game show centered around root beer, look after a kraken, and travel to Scotland so Gordon could reconvene with his old brotherhood. It even got meta when Waffle left his fellow cats behind after being convinced he was a dog, which was a full acknowledgement of the fact that he looked nothing like a cat (Dad very astutely compared him to Jar Jar Binks, which was a more apt comparison than I knew at the time.) I’ll also point out that, more prominently than the whole Kimberly thing, seeing a live-action unicorn on the horizon at the very end of its related episode brings us once more to the uncanny emotional state that started this iceberg. Oh, and good luck getting the fuckin’ theme song out of your head.

2) The X’s – It’ll take your brain a good few seconds to figure out if you saw this one in its day. This Nicktoon, for the microscopic window in which it aired, began in the wake of The Incredibles, and the resemblance is barely there. It’s a “blink and you’ll miss it” situation. That is to say it was about a spy family rather than a superhero family, the most notable detail being Patrick Warburton (AKA Joe Swanson from Family Guy) as the dad. Every family member was a Parr family stand-in, but for as blatant as that was, you at least got a hammy and visually neat supervillain named Glowface to stand out from our heroes. You also got an episode that ended with the parents gassing the daughter’s bitchy friends presumably to death, which was honestly satisfying enough to demand a lasting legacy of some kind. Other fun premises saw the mother trying to continue her job while confined to a wheelchair (it got pretty intense when she entered a crash course with the villains’ coffee table) and the son becoming an acolyte to the villain. Beyond that, the art style should also be noted, as it matched that of those animated 2000s Esurance commercials, and that’s not a bad thing. The one featuring “What I Like About You” is the one that sticks with me, as I assume is the case with many of you.

3) Mighty Beanz – Oh, boy, this was my jam, and oh, boy, am I embarrassed to admit that! For the most part. The rise of this early 2000s collectible was like slamming the target at the carnival, in which case it gets reasonably close to the top… only to go down as fast as it went up. What you had were these pellets designed as funky and vivid characters like a caveman or a vampire—the artwork was genuinely cool and well-done—and the budget way to go was buying small packs that contained random beans… but if you were privileged middle-class snobs like my family, you’d buy the bright red collector’s pack containing the whole current wave! Like Bakugan, the color schemes played a key role in my obsession with these things, even past the point where my sisters let me keep their collection because the fad had died down (the vampire named Bloodthirst, for example, had the unlikely combination of blue skin and red clothes), and there was just a quality to collecting and organizing these smooth, colorful capsules that satisfied my senses… although I do now regret using the term “colorful”, as they could sometimes fall into rather, errr… antiquated cultural depictions. Like a drunken bandito colored yellower than Gwyneth Paltrow with jaundice. Oof.

4) Despicable Me‘s teaser trailer – We may no longer be in the Twilight Zone, but we sure as hell are looking into another dimension. Imagine a world, if you will, with no pointless sequels and none of those insufferable yet ever-marketable Minions. I know. Where do I sign up? For the record, though, the first Despicable Me was a very good movie, as it told the story of a jealous supervillain who comes to prioritize the family he starts over the preservation of his ego. It had actual thematic and emotional weight, and while I haven’t seen a single one of the sequels, the story of the first movie was an open-and-shut case—the conflict that made it impactful has simply been resolved already. Regardless, think back to 2009 when this thing was first teased, and not only do you never get the impression it’ll be a funny and heartwarming story about fatherhood, but you more than likely suspect that it’ll have a radically different focus. All you’re given after the unrelated comedy sequence of the Great Pyramid being stolen is a news report followed by the pointed nose of Gru’s shadow aligning with a pencil outline, accompanied by the awesome Bond-esque theme song. Like I said, I wasn’t the most studious child with topics other than art and science, but it’s pretty incredible how the subtlety of this trailer ignited my imagination. My best prediction was that it would feel Bond-esque, following a global law enforcement agency like Interpol trying to track down a wanted man, which I’ll admit sounds like a way cooler movie (think of it like the cartoon version of Catch Me if You Can just to emphasize the potential it had.) Shame I could only recall the nose alignment visual before being reminded of everything before it.

5) Tux Paint (and the Sesame Street equivalent) – Leh leh leh? Yes. Leh leh leh. First and foremost, before I started going to a high school in my new hometown, where we were given tiny budget laptops to use for classwork, we at Exton Elementary and Stetson Middle had Macbooks and iMacs! Sure, they were typically those bulky white iMacs for most of my time there, but it was a privilege, goddamn it! Now, I’m not sure how this of all programs was found and installed, but it became a tradition at my autistic support program to spend breaks messing around with a painting app themed after Tux, the penguin mascot of the Linux OS. Yes, apparently, it was designed for Linux and MacOS, and I even recall installing it on a Windows PC at some point. Better add that to my maybe-possibly-optional to-do list next to Monkey Quest: Reborn. Anywho, once you’re in the app, you’re given a truck-load of colors, brushes, and stamps to spice up your canvas with, and I fondly recall each of the stamps playing an associated soundbite when selected, like Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man” quote when placing an astronaut. Of course, part of my interest may have originated from an official Sesame Street browser lookalike that seemed all too similar in retrospect, although there’s only two facets of that experience that stand out to me in tandem: me placing toilet stamp after toilet stamp, one after the other, and eventually laughing even harder when Elmo would say, “Whoops!”, as he would whenever you’d hit your stamp limit. What a strange little man, I was.

6) That one, um… curious episode of C.O.D.E.N.A.M.E.: Kids Nextdoor –You’re gonna hate me for this, but I was never that big on Cartoon Network. I occasionally caught an episode of Dexter’s Lab and Powerpuff Girls, but neither really appealed to me in the long run. Like with Shel Silverstein’s best books, there’s a lot of shows besides these two that I’m sure I would’ve liked if I gave them a shot, but that just didn’t happen. One show I caught more often than the rest, however, was C.O.D.E.N.A.M.E.: Kids Nextdoor, which was exactly what you’d call a cool kid’s show (but still undoubtedly a kid’s show). Four episodes spring to mind the most, or three minus the episode I’m here to discuss. These include Number One getting caught in an aging ray, the evildoings of a former candy store owner and supervillain dubbed the Neck-Brace, and a music-driven episode about a freaky cafeteria lunch lady villain. Just the chaos and strange musical implementation of this third example made it intimidating to watch at the time (I know, what a wuss), but it doesn’t even hold a candle to the fourth and most important one. See… there’s no way to put this lightly, especially today, but… it features a villain called Count Spankula, whose need to do what his name suggests to children is like a disturbing inhibition he cannot control. He is stopped and arrested in the end, but the last scene literally sees him breaking free to continue spanking our underage heroes among the jury. I don’t know, am I wrong for getting some Dan Schneider vibes from this? Is that even a suspicion you can withhold given all we know? I don’t know. Dial 1-800-CANCELSPANKULA to share your opinion.

7) Super Robot Monkey Team, Hyperforce Go! – Ummmmmm… what? Look, I’m sorry, typing that title gave another dose of whiplash. Really, though, if there’s one channel you can bank on Little Sammy thoroughly enjoying, it’s of course Jetix, which was fifty percent anime and fifty percent shows that tried their best to feel like anime (listen, I was in the hospital a few weeks ago, and I was stuck for four hours with a more recent example of these shows for someone else in the ward, so I might be a touch worn out by them.) One could argue this sleek, flashy cartoon oddity falls right in line with the channel’s focus, but it was just unique and absurd enough that I wasn’t writhing in my seat trying to watch it. It follows a young boy in the distant future having discovered an abandoned lab where a clan of, you guessed it, robot monkeys rest in stasis. The facility and its owners’ creations are reactivated, and it more or less becomes a futuristic superhero mashup of Pokémon, Astro-Boy, and Batman Beyond. Like previous examples, I remember it more for its premise and merchandise than any actual episodes—I owned at least two of the monkeys themselves in figure form—although it’s hard to forget the climactic special in which a very creepy older man essentially steals and lives under this underage boy’s identity, complete with a repeat of the intro where he’s in the place of the boy and dressed up as him. Now, here is where I play the show’s earworm of a theme song over a still image of Lorie Erica Ruff. You either get that joke or you don’t.

8) Robo-Sapien (and the annoying Bigfoot equivalent) – For the record, I still consider artificial intelligence like robots cool; you just have to pretend there’s any regulation over them. Now, sure, I’ve worked with systems like LEGO Technic to toy around with the construction and programming process, but, I mean… where’s the fun in building a robot? Yeah, right, nerds. In case you’re a cool dude like me, on the other hand, you might remember the “automatons” produced by a little electronics firm called WowWee, and no, I’m not referring to the game show that killed people once. While mostly remote-controlled, they knocked Little Sammy dead with creations like CHiP and Roboraptor, but the final frontier of robotics, the red carpet for ASIMO and other Japanese innovations, is replicating the great homo itself. Please, progressive views just won the midterms. Homos everywhere, homos for everyone. Homo Sapiens, that is. Well, WowWee did that as well, and let’s just say, they lent a lot to Roman idealism, ’cause their homo was jacked. This RC grab-happy wobbler had me hooked, and for a while, it practically was the spiritual mascot of the company… but as greed goes, why stop there? Why not make him furry and marketable, or at least capture an impressionist representation of fur and marketability? Well, lo and behold, I eventually earned enough allowance money to get my hands on that, produced by Fisher and Price at the same time! Oh, there was a lot this big ol’ rascal could do on its own, yet there was only one thing my parents wanted him to do: SUFFOCATE. Long. Hard. And SLOW. Damn you, Imaginext, whatever you are.

Level 5: The Abyss

1) Gordon Bleugh – Welcome to Hell, Brucie Boy. The sun don’t shine on this end of town. The first entry might not be dark in tone, but it is in exposure. Preemptive thanks to Dad for repeating the opening line on several occasions, as well as to Blameitonjorge for covering the media itself so I could vaguely recall it on my own. It couldn’t have surpassed much more than three to five episodes, so it’s more like an MTV or Adult Swim bumper as aired on Nickelodeon, but it was nevertheless a series of micro-length claymation shorts that followed a French frog chef whose kitchen setting, ingredients, and utensils despise him with an almighty passion, and they ain’t about to hide it. It ran for five years from 2000 to 2005, so it came close to exceeding my ability to remember it, but it was considered lost media up until 2022 when all missing episodes were marked as recovered. This fleeting memory is far from the only UK-produced bullet point on this post, and it’s not even the last short-lived and long-lost Nickelodeon media on this level.

2) Unknown local West Chester puppet show – Did you think Philadelphia Chickens wasn’t Pennsylvania enough? Well, this entry is my equivalent of the Subway “Perfection” commercial, which aired locally in the same state, became lost, and was eventually found because it was cherished and recreated by LEGO artist Julius von Brunk. It was only on during the weekend when Dad was flipping between the channels, and all we saw of it was a high-framerate digital video recording of what may have been a live public performance. The most recognizable sequence switched between a dog puppet making “dum, dum, dum” noises and a little girl puppet yodeling a chipper, adderall-fuelled verse among the lines of, “the doggie ate a cookie, and he had a…” Reevaluation? Self-aggrandization? Early child intervention? This sausage is the last? Point is, these puppets looked like you drained all the plastic and articulation from the Peppermint Park puppets. To segue from that, we also caught a comparable broadcast one summer vacation in York, Maine, or at least my middle sister and I did while Mom caught the tailend. It was a local advert for “The Sausage Kitchen”, shot on VHS in 2010 and featuring a catchy but painfully generic jingle over the smiling pig logo (it literally just went, “the Sausage Kitchen, mmm mmm!”) Turns out, Mom caught just enough to elaborate that it was probably just a meat processing plant or factory in the area. Thank you, Upton Sinclair and Teddy Roosevelt. You made the thought of that considerably less nauseating.

3) NakNaks – Oh, Mighty Beanz… where art thou, dear Mighty Beanz? The course of true Mighty Beanz never did run smooth… but compared to NakNaks, it probably ran smooth as butter. The question of the week is, what in God’s name is a NakNak? That would be a very unique type of toy that became a Happy Meal inclusion for a limited time around the Halloween season, and the premise wasn’t much more sophisticated than that of Mighty Beanz: each “figure” was comprised of body parts depicted on rectangles, and these could be snapped together at the joints in any combination. For example, if you had the parts for a robot and a mummy, you could build yourself a cybernetic mummy in an instant. Yeah, I know it sounds ghetto—that’s why it was sold at McDonald’s—but hey, it was still higher-tech than Mighty Beanz! You could even link ’em together like Monkeys in a Barrel! That’s pretty nifty, ain’t it, sport?

Jesus fuck, I’m getting old…

4) The Upside-Down Show! – Hey, I’ve got sand in my shoes. Let me take my shoes off so my feet can be roasted like bratwurst because I’m out in the Sonora Desert. That’s a flimsy callback to a bit from The Upside-Down Show!, whose title I only remembered in my recent research because a guy from my day program miraculously knew of it. Because the two leads, David and Shane, were clearly British, I assumed this was another piece of British programming—there’s still more from that category to come—but it turns out to have been produced by Sesame Workshop. Go figure. From what I remember, they lived in what was essentially Pee-Wee’s Playhouse without the Evil Dead demons possessing the furniture, but they could travel anywhere their imaginations could reach through a solid white void. The bits I remember the most are them learning about how movies work and getting lost out in the desert, hence the bit I just referenced only in the form of a vicious comedy cycle—take shoes off, burn feet, put shoes back on, rinse repeat. That’s literally all I got. I have to go back to my planet now.

5) Astrology with Squidward – I’m a Scorpio, by the way. I have no clue what that means or why I should care, but I might be interested to know if Squidward Tentacles were to tell me. Stephen Hillenburg, God rest his soul, was devoted to his material, and it presumably popped into his mind that, “Hey, why not produce short interstitial sketches of Squidward informing viewers on zodiac signs?” Sure, when these aired during SpongeBob‘s first season, they didn’t have the budget to make the animation up to par—it was relatively jerky compared to the main series—but the comedy was alive and well, if not more so than usual. The beloved grouch would attach different signs to appropriate characters like Taurus to Patrick, joke about psychics being money-grabbing quacks, and describe déjà vu as “the feeling this moment has happened before”. And then describe déjà vu as “the feeling this moment has happened before”. And then end the episode by describing déjà vu as “the feeling this moment has happened before”. Like Gordon Bleugh but with the property recognition that makes it far more surprising, these were lost for neigh on twenty years until the official SpongeBob YouTube channel shared them, although they were later uploaded in their unedited form as the official upload was broken up by dumb commentary.

6) Harry Potter LEGO Thing’s lost “sequel” – What is that mysterious ticking noise? It’s… kind of catchy. Yeah, you bet your ass my sisters and I were Potter Puppet Pals fans, and its popularity was far too high for me to describe it here… but I have found a loophole. The animated rendition featured Harry and Ron “bothering” Snape, or rather, they just smacked him around a lot while shouting “BOTHER! BOTHER! BOTHER!” on repeat. This gag actually originated from a stop-motion YouTube short from 2006 using LEGO minifigures, which has since racked up around ten million views. Now, if the third Sonic movie is delightful for sharing some of my own personal Sonic nostalgia with today’s world, The LEGO Movie without exaggeration paid homage to fan projects like Harry Potter LEGO Thing in the way it was animated… but that wasn’t the only stop-motion short of its kind. Oh, no, you’re one search away from realizing these were a dime a dozen on YouTube, but my sisters and I once confused a similarly titled short as an official sequel, and I’ve been unable to track it down since. All I can remember is that it was of even worse quality than what was standard, it began with an incomprehensible shot of McGonaggall standing in front of what looked like a tropical storm, and at one point, Harry did the Worm. Yep. Good luck finding it based on that criteria, fruitcakes. You’ll only find seven hundred eighty-six dance videos animated the same way.

7) The cannibal episode of Make Way for Noddy – Okay, look, unless you’re British, there’s no way that properly registered for you. Who’s this fucker named Noddy, and why should I yield for his sorry ass? Honestly, I couldn’t give you a definitive answer if I tried, but it was one of those cheapo 3D-animated children’s cartoons from overseas like Imaginext, which spawned the same remote-controlled hairy-ass bitch that plagued my parents’ dreams. They’re ultimately harmless, but they’re also nothing different from all the ’80s cartoons that existed solely as a marketing ploy. Make Way for Noddy is lighter on that angle, simply telling the day-to-day stories of a wooden boy akin to Pinocchio as well as the fantastical residents of his community, but I’m still unsure of how I even happened upon it, and only two parts are burnt into my memory: the episode where the mischievous goblins have to be good for a day like an inverse of The Purge (this show would honestly be saved if everyone just started killing each other) and the one I truly am surprised made it past network censors in the UK without issue. In “Master Tubby’s Chocolate Dream”, the eponymous trickster bear eats all the chocolate on Chocolate Day only to dream that he’s become a solid, unmoving chocolate statue the entire town wants to feast upon. It needs to be stressed that you hear him wailing internally for them not to devour him, yet they clearly can’t hear him. It’s like watching a vorarephile stuck in sleep paralysis! Who in their right mind thought this was okay?! I mean, I think it deserves several award nominations for the comedy alone, but it’s pretty fuckin’ scary for tiny children to witness!

8) The Hitler and NASA episode of Huckleberry Hound – Ha! I knew I’d get you with that title! Why stop running when you’re yards from the finish line? So, much like the local puppet show, Dad just happened upon this between channels and told me he watched a fair bit of it growing up. Seeing as it’s from Hanna Barbara, it only makes sense for it to have popped up on Boomerang, and it was a simple plotline of the titular cynic taking a rocket to space, but… I’m not sure how to say this. Something just… sucked the air from the room, or… rather, it brushed the air from the room. With the ol’ black toothbrush fluff under the nose. Yeah, the admiral at NASA in the episode was designed a little too anti-Semitic for our liking, but the horror turned to hilarity when he walked alongside the canine protagonist. For some reason, the animators at Hanna Barbara decided, “You know… I really think, when Adolf Hitler walked, he would thrust his arms toward the ground behind and ahead of him like Pee-Wee Herman dancing to ‘Tequila’.” I was either hallucinating in the moment or just a kiss too young to watch The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which, as you know, is just as much a treasure trove of comedy.