A Family Guy!

 There's no time to lose, National Gorilla Suit Day is almost over!

But today we celebrate another milestone!

Twenty-five years today, Family Guy premiered after the Super Bowl!

Since it was 1999, I was only 12, and not old enough to stay up that late to see it or the Simpsons episode that followed it. I did see that first episode eventually, and I was immediately hooked with the show. It was the Simpson's edgier Gen X cousin, actually airing on network tv unlike South Park and Beavis & Butt-Head.

It was one of many prime time animated shows that popped up in the late nineties after the success of King of The Hill, like Futurama, Mission Hill, the Dilbert cartoon, and the rest. It was swiftly cancelled after three seasons, after a season of changing timeslots because while it had high ratings when it premiered, Fox tried to see it it would be successful outside of Sunday night.

It wasn't.

But as we all know, the story didn't end there. DVD sales and constant reruns on Adult Swim gave it a new life with a new audience and made its triumphant return in 2005 and hasn't left the airwaves since. 

And once again, Fox is testing the waters to see if it'll succeed outside of Sunday night, moving it to Wednesdays starting March 6th. Blame Fox actually having more than four animated shows going on at once (Simpsons and Bob's Burgers are staying where they are, with The Great North, Krapopolis, and Grimsburg all playing musical chairs in programming slots this year) and one of the shows had to go somewhere.

Will it be the new anchor show to fill the hole The Masked Singer or one of its copycats are gonna leave? Only time will tell!

Unlike a lot of shows that get meme'd to death, Family Guy's impact on pop culture doesn't rely on screenshots (the most notable one being Peter surprised to see someone at the door), but more in short clips taken out of context. When I'm rewatching it, I have to constantly say, "Oh, it's from THIS episode" since most of their cutaway gags have nothing to do with the episode they're from and could've been slotted in anywhere.

Probably my all time favorite was the one where Peter turned the house into a giant puppet.

If not in short, random gags, Family Guy is probably best known for keeping random bits of 70s and 80s culture preserved for all time. 

From Surfin' Bird

To Conway Twitty

To KISS 

Even to The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show.

Unlike a lot of clips that get run into the ground because the gag is because of how long they are, you NEED to see the whole thing of this one. It just gets crazier every moment, and that was just the theme song to an actual show back in the seventies! One of the Hudson Brothers is Kate Hudson's dad. I forget which one.

Not to mention I have this brag:

I knew Peter Griffin since college. Cool guy.

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Goodbye 2021

Well, another year will finally be behind us, and after today, Sealab 2021 will have officially taken place in the past.

Everyone going crazy after a year of isolation? Talk about predicting the future.

I had this whole post thought out about what I've done this year, and show off what I got for Christmas, then I saw the terrible news.

Betty White passing just 17 days before her 100th birthday was just an extra twist of the knife. She was America's Grandma! She couldn't go now! I'm glad that the Betty White Renaissance was a decade ago and we all got to tell her how much we all loved her since then. She didn't need a People Magazine spread to tell her that.

In her 90(!!) years in showbiz, she was in everything and knew everybody! She would've been a legend for just her role in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but she was also one of the best parts of The Golden Girls, Hot in Cleveland, and, well, just everything she did!

I don't need to tell you she was on The Simpsons.

This all reminds me of the great June Foray, who also died incredibly close to her 100th birthday. In both cases, I'm gonna call it "close enough." They made it to 100 in our hearts.

That's on top of losing the great John Madden earlier in the week.

If there was anyone that embodied "football," it was John Madden. Playing it, coaching it, inspiring video games about it, being a commentator on it, he did it all.

What I'll miss most is Frank Caliendo's amazing impression of him.

And with that out of the way, the monthly listicle can begin!

Christmas gifts! Not seen: Lots of gift cards, plus the Smokin Al's barbeque sauce I get every year. The big gifts were the blu ray player and the new Pokemon game. I played Pearl when gen 4 first came around fourteen years ago (it's been that long?!), so I've been itching to jump into Diamond. I haven't been able to play much of it so far, you can thank work for that, but I've been liking it so far.

I also finally entered the 21st century with a blu ray player! Just in time for physical media to die out! Now I need to get some blu rays, they're pretty cheap these days.

And you know you're celebrating Christmas in your thirties when you're excited to get socks. I really needed those socks. They're comfy.

Something else I did this month: I played some pinball! A few months back, a pinball arcade opened up in the local mall, and I finally got around to spending an hour in there.

There were some pretty old cabinets in there, and this was the oldest one I got to play. They were pretty unforgiving in terms of difficulty, but they gave you five balls per shot as opposed to the three you usually get these days.

What got me in the door in the first place was their Simpsons arcade machine! I remember playing it back in the day, but again, pretty unforgiving. It's full of elements that make no sense now, like how most of the villains were pretty generic and SMITHERS of all people was the main bad guy who had to fight to rescue Maggie.

I played as Marge, with her...trademark vacuum cleaner. But she was the long reacher of the four characters, much like Donatello on his own machines.

I was wondering how this place could stay in business...

...until I found out it wasn't. Today was the last day, and I found out too late that these great machines were going off to parts unknown. That space is gonna be pretty big for the store that's replacing it, so I hope that most of these machines find good homes if they don't stay behind.

I don't want to end this post, and this year on a bummer, so here's a picture of my cat!

Ain't she cute?

And here she is looking at the tree. We've got some good ornaments up this year.

Thanks to a bidding war on eBay, I finally have a Snow Miser ornament to go with the Heat Miser. I paid a little...too much for it, but it was worth it for a picture like this.

Happy New Year everyone! Let's make 2022 better than what came before!

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Stuff I Should Have Bought At That Flea Market Yesterday

It's summer once again and that means flea market season is upon us yet again. My friends over at Dinosaur Dracula and The Sexy Armpit had their own flea market adventures recently so I figured it was time to join in on the fun.

I've written about past adventures at the Bellmore Train Station Flea Market here and here and yesterday's trip did not disappoint on the goods. Good weather on Memorial Day weekend always guarantee good vendors coming out and there was plenty of great stuff. Sadly, I've been running out of room to put random junk so stuff really had to tickle my fancy enough to justify buying it. Sadly, not much did but I took plenty of pictures to give me enough buyer's remorse to write about it. Well, not buyer's remorse. What's the kind of remorse you have for not buying something? I have that kind.

When people ask me if I had Prince Albert in a can I'd actually have an answer, but I couldn't justify any kind of price tag on a joke older than my parents.

Hey, a genuine chemistry set that is sure to put some smiles on your kids, and this picture on a few government lists. Can't believe Sears used to sell My Little Bioterrorist sets back in the day. Kids today can't be trusted, I guess. Did I say kids? I meant meth addicts.

Ooh, Second Edition. I'm not that big of a nerd, I have enough giant spiral notebooks full of stuff I'll never read again, thanks.

You want old Disney stuff? Well, there were plenty of tables selling plenty of odd things with Mickey's face on it, with a candy box from...I wanna say China? amongst those tops and that box with Sleeping Beauty on it.

From that same table, a few books, a bank, that sweet Disneyland tin box (looks Mexican), and a Sword in The Stone trash bin. It could have been one of those big popcorn tins but who didn't use those for a makeshift wastebasket?

Old Disney stuff sometimes crosses that blurry line between really crude crafting or equally crappy bootlegs. I see a copyright on the top of the box, it must have been made during that time when toy manufacturers weren't paid enough to give a shit about keeping to character design. Seriously, Minnie's dead eyes are gonna haunt me for a while.

These kids really have that "I wish we were playing with an Easy Bake Oven" look on their faces.

Or maybe they were pining for these awesome electronic football games sitting a few feet away. The games around here all seem to suck but man I miss how awesome box art used to be. They used to set us up for disappointment.

And this neat Disney China set used really old Mickey and Minnie designs and didn't really want to know the price tag. Since there's a lot of Chinese packages on this table, I'm calling bootlegs.

By the way, if you can't read it, the Great Flying Boat at the top of the picture says "Go action with da da sound." That's just enough broken English to be charming and I wish I didn't notice that until just now.

This looked old and legit. And most likely expensive. Seriously, it was under glass, I'm sure artwork that good would have set me back a few bucks.

This, however, was just laying out in the open on a stack of cels from things even I couldn't identify. While having a cel from some forgotten Sugar Bear commercial would be pretty neat to have, I kept getting reminded of what Comic Book Guy told Bart about the value of a cel of Scratchy's arm: 

"This is a drawing of nothing, drawn by nobody. It is worth nothing."

A Pink Panther cel WITH the original artwork?! And you're telling me this is one of THREE on sale?! And that they were going for $20 each? Man I wish I was a big enough Pink Panther fan to buy that. If it was Looney Tunes or Simpsons artwork, then you'd have my full attention.

The vintage video game sellers were out in full force today, too with just about every platform under the sun. If you were looking for Blast Corps for the N64 or Rainbow Six for PS1, that's was your lucky day. That mostly MIB NES you are above was probably the best find that day. The gray zapper alone makes it valuable.

The seller had a lot of games in rental boxes, too. Sure they're not the original box but those big plastic boxes are pretty neat in and of themselves. At least they had the artwork on them.

Oh snap, Rad Racer! Yeah, I'm hoping that this'll be the only page on the internet where that sentence has been typed.

Now we're really getting into the "stuff I really wish I went home with" part of the entry. A big, red metal S has a dozen uses, many of those uses involve being mounted on my bedroom wall. My big problem would've been lugging it home and explaining to my folks why I would've spent money on this.

When I was taking the picture, the last guy looking at this said "I would be like Flavor Flav and wear it around my neck" as he walked away. Now I REALLY regret leaving that behind.

Since I'm in New York, memorabilia from the 1964 World's Fair is a common sight at flea markets (there were certainly two or three booths selling stuff from it), so anything from any of the other World's Fairs is a rare sight, even a glass from the Knoxville fair from 1982. I figured I had enough glasses I don't drink out of, and I don't really trust myself around fragile things (I dropped a glass I bought in Vegas for a friend not two minutes after buying it, but that's a story for another time) so I took the picture and left it behind.

Of course the Simpsons fan in me loves it for the association with "Bart on The Road," where Bart and his friends take a road trip to the Knoxville World's fair, only to find the site in ruins and the iconic Sunsphere filled with wigs. 

And of course a fellow fan out there already ran the picture through photoshop:

Beautiful. I have a friend who lives in Knoxville who hates it whenever I bring up this episode and even she told me she wanted this glass. And now I'm thinking about scouring eBay for it, and they happen to be plentiful.

And now for the one thing I did buy, this Simpsons thing from 1990! From what I was told, this was a promo card that stores would stick up to advertise it, I guess. I've said it before but I just love the crudeness of early Simpsons merch, it's only here and in bootlegs where Bart wears blue shirts. This was only a dollar and since the guy had like twenty of these I just couldn't pass it up! That guy also told me that these things had been going for $10-20, but I wouldn't pay more than a dollar for this anyway.

I also bought this: 

I've been loving Hot Wheel's "let's make tiny versions of classic pop culture cars" series, and finding the BTTF DeLorean is a hell of a score, even if it was in a pile with about eight of the same one. It joins the Flintstones Car, the Jetsons Car, the A-Team Van and The Homer in my collection. I just need to track down the Mystery Machine and I'm good to go.

And with all the stuff I did get pictures of, there was plenty of good stuff I didn't get, like stacks of Jet magazine, license plates from 49 states (Hawaii was nowhere to be found), and genuine Nazi memorabilia. I don't believe in the cause, I don't like them, but man that stuff looked awesome. Please don't take that last sentence out of context. I feel like I'm on enough lists as it is with that picture of the chemistry set.

(EDIT: The pictures in this post were originally posted with the "Instant" filter left on; the colors have been corrected and now look much nicer. Compare the two World's Fair glass pictures, the old pictures were too bright.)

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The Big Game!

This month really crept up on me, folks. Seriously, it felt like just yesterday I was watching the ball drop and now February will be tomorrow.

But anyway, the Super Bowl is coming up on Sunday and everyone will be cheering for the Jacksonville Spungoes and the St. Louis Scorpions or whoever the hell is playing this year. As per usual I'll be alone amusing myself with the Puppy Bowl and the occasional riffing of the weird commercials that we'll all be sick of in a week, all while gorging myself with those Scoops chips, the best snack God almighty had blessed unto us.

But hell, the Puppy Bowl is something I anticipate more than the Super Bowl itself these days. All 18 hours of it. I hope Meep The Bird livetweets again, she's one of the few Twitter feeds I trust these days.

Look at that, they got penguin cheerleaders this year! Do the Broncos have penguin cheerleaders? No. No they do not. But at least the real game will have competent refs. So many missed calls in last year's Puppy Bowl I lost about 400 dollars. I think I have a problem with gambling, guys.

And apparently this year there's going to be a few alternatives to THAT, like the Kitten Bowl on the Hallmark Channel.

I love kittens more than I love puppies and this is supposed to parody the Super Bowl but come on, at least have them pretending to play a different sport! Maybe a little rugby or hell, some foreign version of football that's not actually called soccer! At least it's better than what's gonna be shown on Nat Geo Wild, the Fish Bowl.

Everyone's a fucking comedian these days. Seriously, I'm not making this up, it's definitely happening. At least literally watching a fish in a bowl is better than watching yet another Duck Dynasty marathon.

What's also interesting about Sunday that for the first time that I can remember, Super Bowl Sunday just happens to fall on Groundhog's Day.

I guess if Mr. Phil sees its shadow, it'll be 6 more weeks of Peyton Manning or something. I never said I understood football, you knew this going in.


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