Blinders

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Reverend

Blinders

Just some more conceptual art from the bava. Remember now, I’m an artist.

Photo taken by the great Andy Rush.

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What Would Tom Woodward do?

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Reverend

So I have been preparing a post to discredit Tom Woodward because he is increasingly becoming everyone’s favorite technologist here at UMW’s DTLT, and quite frankly it’s driving me crazy. It’s always Tom Woodward this, and Tom Woodward that. Or even “What Would Tom Woodward Do?” It’s not fair, I mean I’m the bava, I shouldn’t pander to some lowly K-12 technologist. I coined EDUPUNK, damn it, (albeit with the help of Brian Lamb). Why does everyone love Tom Woodward? What’s so great about him? I mean just cause he’s been recycling his archive to relive the glory days of teaching is no reason to but him on a pedestal, right? Just cause he writes precise and hysterical lampoons, dreams up brilliant projects for his students, tears Portaportal a new one, and writes succinct and useful WPMu posts—all within a week no less—is no reason to exaggerate his significance.

And while I still felt the momentum to knock him down a notch after reading all of this, it wasn’t until I dug into his Tech Ninja videos that I lost all motivation and finally had to cry “uncle!” to the greatness that is Bionic Teaching. If you haven’t seen his Technology Ninja videos, I highly recommend “Servers and Shortcuts” and “Drinking Dangers”, both of which are freaking hysterical for starters (I’m including them below). It really just doesn’t get any better than this, and I am now an acolyte and true believer. I have officially agreed to help build the Tom Woodward votive shrine here in the DTLT headquarters. But I still hate him!

Download Servers and Shortcut
Download Drinking Dangers

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Day 92: Snake Mountain

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Reverend

snake_mountain

snake_mountain_descMattel’s Snake Mountain had pretty impressive design in terms of the facade, the rotating snake and laughing mountain mouth were pretty wild.  And while the backside of the toy was pretty lackluster at best (no comparison to the Fisher Price Castle, that’s for sure) which suggests the lack of attention to detail for many of the mainstream toys during the 80s, it was the electronic echo microphone of wolf’s head that distorts your voice into a demonic cackle that really made this set memorable for me. I used to chase around my little sister and her friends with this and pretend I was a monster—and it was a blast. The Masters of the Universe figures played a significant role in my collection of early 80s toys, so I imagine I’ll have more to talk about from this line of toys over the course of the series. What I wouldn’t do for a wolf’s head microphone right now to raise the level of my playing monster with my kids, it would change the game.

The commercial for Snake Mountain gives a quick overview of this set, and check out the wolf’s head microphone, genius!

Image credit: Wishbook’s “1984.xx.xx Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog P043”

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Day 93: Entex Electronic Baseball

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Reverend

Entex-BaseballThis is another early hand held digital video game from 1979 in the vein of the Tomy series, though in my mind far more sophisticated. In fact, I wasn’t a sports video game fan as a kid, but after playing this at a friend’s house I was blown away. I’m not sure whether it was the remote pitching unit with five different pitches, or the fact that the balls and strikes were tracked by the LED unit, or even the fact that they included paper scoring sheets for you to follow your entire games.  But for me, this was a game I was immersed in for hours at a time—almost like a real baseball game.  I would often think back to this game when playing the EA Sports baseball series on Playstation. This game was all about verisimilitude, and I have to admit it was pretty impressive back-in-the-day, and the follow-up version, Entex Baseball 2, was supposedly even better.

entex_desc

Entex-BaseballCanadianBox


Update: Just found this review on YouTube by a young kid who is reviewing the Entex Electronic Baseball in response to someone discussing the Milton Bradley Microvision Handheld. As an aside, I dig this kid because he know he is the best 🙂

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Day 94: Hugo-The Man of 1000 Faces

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Reverend

hugo_man

hugo_desc

Image credit: Wishbook’s “1976.xx.xx JCPenney Christmas Catalog P376”

I actually didn’t have this toy, but damn it I shouldn’t have after reading Plaidstallion’s write up (included below). But in truth I was pretty much solidly against any toy I was expected to be imaginative and creative with.  I pretty much held the strong party line of only buying into heavily marketing toys that represented just one arm of capital’s media assault for shaping the ultimate consumers of the future.  I was a guinea pig for capitalism’s creation of the bionic consumer of the 80s, and I quickly learned to avoid anything not heavily marketed, which means I had no time for bland board games, hippie arts &crafts, and anything else resembling some pre-historic notion of traditional play.

In 1975, Kenner produced a doll that was the brain child of special effects artist/director/writer Alan Ormsby who directed the film Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and authored the classic scolastic book Movie Monsters which probably spawned a legion of Monster kids by itself.

Hugo was a great concept, a puppet version of Lon Chaney Sr, complete with makeup kit so you could give him hundreds of combinations of creepy disguises. As a bonus (?) the Hugo puppet on it’s own was creepier than ten ventriloquist dummies, his unusual stare had him featured in Pee Wee Herman’s original act and on the popular “Uncle Floyd Show”.

And here are some color treats:

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Jim Groom

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Reverend

This may be closest the bava gets to pornography…

Camera and conceptual credit go to the great Shannon Hauser (my own private hacker).

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Day 95: McDonaldland Playset

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Reverend

mcdonald_land_playset

Image credit: Wishbook’s “1976.xx.xx Sears Christmas Catalog (Canada) P220”

This is the second McDonald’s toy in this series thus far (the other being the Playskool McDonald’s set back on Day 107), and what separates this gem is the fact the Ronald and company have their own figures.  Before I knew grimace was a particular type of smile, it was fat, amoeboid like part of theMcDonaldland playset, and he was my favorite. Now this isn’t to say I didn’t like Mayor McCheese, the Hamburgular, or Ronald McDonald himself, but Grimace was so unusual and I loved the fact that he could barely walk.  And while the train that comes with this set is pretty cool, it was really the facade of the McDonald’s store that I liked playing with the best—the menu intrigued me to no end.

What’s more, the figures themselves were freaky.  Flickr user Cracklintulip has taken an impressive series of the set in the wild that really capture how weird looking the characters were.  Everything from the haunted Ronald clown face to the buck-toothed Hamburglar, these figures were not for the faint of heart.  And what’s more, the images below beautifully capture the plastic textures of these dolls, it’s as if you could almost smell them through the photos.  So, I’ll let Cracklintulip’s visuals do the talking on this one.

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Eternal Frequencies

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Reverend

Mara Scanlon, who is quickly becoming a blogger extraordinaire, just blogged about a podcast by Nate DiMeo that discusses Guglielmo Marconi vision of sound waves as a crazy idea of eternal recurrence. To quote Mara:

According to Nate DiMeo, late in his life, Marconi came to believe that sound waves never disappeared, but rather went on and on, infinitely in time and space, and that if he could just find the right frequency, he could listen to the past– to great speakers and figures and historical events, to the praise of others that would ensure he would live beyond his imminent death, to the most intimate of moments in his own life.

What an amazing vision of the past and sound, and Mara’s weaving this together with tuning into Whitman’s poetry a century and a half later is masterful. And for me, I wonder how we might be able to imagine the abstract, disembodied sounds of the past re-congeal within the posts of the Looking for Whitman experiment. I’m fascinated by how that imaginative process of constantly accessing the sounds and visions of the past is what we are framing out right now with the web, and what I love about Marconi’s vision is how chaotic, open, and imaginatively out there it was. It’s a vision that beautifully buttresses Whitman’s call across time to each and every reader/listener/dreamer.

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The Shining–The Bathroom Scene

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Reverend

If there is a better scene in all of cinema, it probably comes from The Shining (1980) as well—the first bar scene? But pound for pound the back and forth between Jack and Grady in the unbelievably beautiful set of the red and white bathroom may be my all-time favorite. I mean the whole “He’s a very willful boy!” part still gives me goosebumps, I think I’ve quoted that regularly for somewhere near thirty years now. It’s a masterpiece of the highest order, and let’s face it when the dust settles on the Kubrick’s legacy The Shining will be remembered as his greatest work 50 years from now, and if it isn’t it’s a commie conspiracy to sap our critical essence!

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Day 96: Strawberry Shortcake figures

Posted on September 21, 2009 by Reverend

There have been some grumblings that the toy series has been dominated by my little boy toys, and I’m sorry about that. But, as fate would have it, I was a little boy, and society did that to me—and I am still quite pissed about that.  But I did revolt in my own little ways against the power structures of conformity I saw all around me, and it often came in the form of stealing my little sister’s Strawberry Shortcake dolls and sniffing them clandestinely in my room. I would usually grab Apple Dumplin’, Apricot, Huckleberry Pie, Purple Pieman and/or Rasberry Tart and breath in their artificially flavored hair for hours. I couldn’t help it, they were scratch and sniff books grafted on figurines, and the whole thing amazed me. I can almost reproduce the heavenly mix of plastic and saccharine rasberry as I write this. My sister even had Strawberry Shortcake’s house, but I have to save that episode for another post.

Image credit: Wishbook’s “1981.xx.xx Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog P037”

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