If you don’t know what Napster is, A) you’re an idiot and B) I’m surprised you even made it to our site from the tube entrance. However if you do know what Napster is, then you probably joined the app’s creator, Shawn Fanning, and hate Metallica. Don’t feel too bad for poor Shawn, though…he recently cashed in his latest venture for 300,000 benji’s - that’s a sweet $30 million for the group A bunch.

Dumb.

When I first discovered Napster, I, along with everyone else on the planet acted like a bunch of kids in the candy store. Grabbing almost every file we could find whether we actually wanted the song or not. It was like this huge party, everyone was listening to music, carrying hundreds of songs in theirs pockets and not on shiny metallic discs. Things couldn’t be better. But then the aforementioned assholes showed up and took a leak in the party punch.

I’m not going to get into the hypocrisy behind a band that got it’s start because the fans were freely sharing their music through free demos distributed by the band. Anybody that’s ever even touched a musical instrument knows that you only want people to hear your music if they paid for it! Right?

Anyway, you know the story, they sobbed to the government, Napster became a second rate, subscription-based file sharing site, and Metallica continued to reward their ever so loyal fans with loads and loads of crap (the latter, Rock Band: Metallica, will probably bank them more than any album releases — just like it did for Aerosmith).

But all is not lost. There are still A LOT of ways to get Metallica music for free. Not because we like to listen to the music, but just to piss them off.

Side note: There was one shortfall to Napster. The closest thing to porn that anyone had was the sound of a woman having an orgasm (or was that Donald Duck?). Now, don’t get me wrong, that can do wonders when you’re in a pinch, but I much prefer the plethora of material offered by today’s file sharing services (and I’m not talking about that shitty application that only has songs that fax machines can understand known as Lime Wire).

Bucket o' Fun

How many of you have ever finished an entire bucket of gum? The pieces of gum in those buckets have flavor that last about 30 seconds then you’ve gotta pop 3 more in. I still curse my mom everytime she sends me a package of bubble gum (yes, she still does) as I shovel 4 or 5 pieces in my mouth at once. I’m not going to let it go to waste. I didn’t go through 4 years and thousands of dollars of painful orthodontics just to push that sweet sugary freedom aside!

Bubble gum is so awesome, it has it’s own section at the store! There were like 40 different kinds of bubble gum to choose from when I was 8. Now all I buy is mint flavored, sugarless crap because my dentist says to. In a tribute to the days when our teeth didn’t hurt and we felt it neccessary to obtain sugar rushes at all times of the day, we want the readers to vote on the favorite gum of their childhood. If your gum isn’t on the list, leave it in the comments and we’ll ridicule you for being different.

The original is now only in our hearts, but we linked to a mirror so you can still  enjoy the best animated-gif-background-(completely-illegal)-song website known to the tubes. This here is straight from ‘98. It appears the hamsters went on vacation on June 13, 2000 and  never appeared again.

We all have to thank the pet hamster that brought the inspiration: Hampton Hamster. The page was created by now 46 year old Deidre LaCarte (read: 38 year-old hamster owner). Trying to cash in on the “FWD: FWD: FWD: RE: FWD: HAMPSTERS DANCING” popularity, Deidre  tried to tee up against the Chipmunks and sell strange hamster-related merchandise like CD’s and ornaments.

If you haven’t caught it by now, this fad was so popular that it didn’t even have to be spelled correctly…it went by Hampster Dance (yes, with a ‘p’). That’s a misspelling by a 38 year old Canadian who apparantly sucks at web design…not ours. But that wasn’t her biggest mistake - she failed to register the hampsterdance.com domain name when the original geocities site had 45 million visitors  & instead had to go with (you guessed it) hampsterdance2.com. I wonder just how many sales of CD’s with hamsters singing she left on the table.

Just for funsies I’m throwing some good ol’ fashioned blinking text in this post.

No. We’re not talking about that fat retarded purple dinosaur that likes to hang out with little kids all day and annoy the crap out of anyone over age 6. We’re talking about REAL dinosaurs. Blue Collar Dinosaurs. A hard working,  middle class family trying to keep up with the jones’s in the crazy mixed up world that was 60,000,003 BC.

Just Some Working Class Dinos

According to the wikipedia entry, there were some pretty strong political undertones that played into this whole show that I was completely ambivalent to when I was a kid. In addition to that, I was unaware that essentially every character name in the show was somehow associated with an oil company. Every character name except for everyone’s favorite character.

You can't handle the truth!

There were entire episodes dedicated to this baby dinosaur going batshit insane for various reasons where he always ends up hitting father in the head with a frying pan and shouting “Not the mama!”  As an 8 year old, this cracked my ass up. Little did I know that this show would remain funny when I was an adult. I recently rewatched one of my favoritte episodes from my childhood titled: When Food Goes Bad. The episode revolved around the two teenagers being left alone to watch the baby while Fran and Earl go out to enjoy themselves at a nice restaurant. The baby is tricked into opening the fridge (by some food) and releases General Chow and his minions onto the unsuspecting teenagers and the baby. They demand the following as a ransom:

• Jogging outfits
• Comprehensive Dental Plan
• $40 million and a helicopter
• Own Saturday morning cartoon show

If you watched this show when you were a kid and you were amused, you should go back and rewatch. It’s still hilarious, but you finally get all the other jokes and not just the frying pan on the head schtick. However, if you’re still into the frying pan on the head, then you’ll enjoy the opening to the show:

While we’re on the topic of dinosaurs and stuff that was cool, I’d like to give a nod to Jurassic Park. Not only did you show the world that you can’t just toy with life or it’ll come back and eat your ass while your sitting on the john. But you helped to make it common knowledge that a Tyrannosaurus Rex has vision based on movement and that Velociraptors are more than just ‘clever girls.’ Thank you Stephen Spielberg.

This post is an extract from The Retro Machine (Vol 15) posted by Spencer over at RetroJunk.

I had this exact Dune Buggy. I’m not sure that it was a Power Wheels toy or not, but it was one of the coolest toys I owned at the time simply because it made me think I was driving places. And it’s true, I was driving places in my backyard. Sure, the battery took like a day to charge and worked for like 20 minutes before dying, but I always savored those 20 minutes.

When I got to drive the Dune Buggy, it was a major event in my day. It was serious business. I never did have another one, they were always too expensive and I always wanted other stuff anyway. But I did envy the kids who had the Bigfoot Power Wheels.

If baseball pants would bring World peace, these things could start wars.

Nowadays, Hammer might be doing Super Bowl commercials telling us that he’s trading in his gold records for cash and Vanilla Ice might be apologizing for what he did in the 90’s, but before MC Hammer was rapping sermons we all envisioned that the two used to hang out and laugh at how popular their one hit wonders were. However, I would argue that this song was a buzz-kill from the start. Unless you were some sort of rad break-dancing turtles (U Can’t Touch This was in TMNT III) or wore pants fit for 4 with moon shoes you had no hope in moving anyway and making it look like you actually knew what you were doing. The guys could never dance to it and it gave the girls a catch-phrase that unfortunately caught on: “can’t touch this”.

The  Evolution of Dance clip below shows Judson Laipply impersonating every 8th grader that tried dancing to this thing (if you let the clip continue you’ll get another shot of “Jump on it“). It certainly wasn’t an easy song to kick a beat to - which could be why despite it’s world-wide success never actually topped the US Billboard charts and peaked at #8.

You can catch Hammer’s daily rants about vitamins, sports and faith all on twitter.

Photo credit: Xerxies

Principals Are Cool.

Try to listen to this song and not think MJ Fox Johnny B. Goode Style.

I still remember where I was the day I heard that Mark Paul Gosselaar died in a motorcycle crash…unfortunately, I also remember where I was the day I saw Dustin Diamond smear his poo on some nice lady’s upper lip. The Davis’s parents were soooo embarassed that I caught them watching it. Especially with The Davis in the room.

2 completely different experiences, yet both made me uncomfortable and sad. Fortunately, only one of those turned out to be true.

This show was a staple in my 6th - 8th grade TV repertoire, and it was pretty awesome. I was like any kid in those grades. I did not want to be sitting in a classroom, but when school was over; I had no qualms about racing home to WATCH kids sit in a class room.

I couldn’t wait to be a high schooler. Stealing money for secret spaghetti sauces, fashion shows, student-teacher swap week, popular geeks, brick phones and experimenting with mediocre non addictive drugs.

I knew that one day, I too could hook up with a hot wheelchair bound teen filled with angst if I was smooth enough on the volunteer teenline.

Timeout. I’m going to break the fourth wall here and talk to just the readers.

Save By The Bell wasn’t high school. There are no fashion shows or wheelchairs. Your principal is a dick and taking caffiene pills sounds like a pretty boring Friday night.

Time in.

Even though the show isn’t a realistic depiction of what high school was like, it still rocked my Saturday mornings. We all remember the later years: The College Years w/ Bob Golic, the shitty spin off they called “The New Class”, that lesbian tori, even a few tv movies, but nothing warms you up like the original.

The whole crew is still around:

• Zack Morris didn’t die
• AC Slater enjoys dancing and hot showers
• Screech discovered some of life’s finer things
• Lisa Turtle still has crappy 90’s fashion sense
• Jessie Spano is STILL a feminist
• And Kelly Kapowski…well Kelly is just plain hot.

The whole gang appears to be happy and doing well, which means we at STWC are happy. But remember: There’s No Hope With Dope…..or highly concentrated caffeine pills.

This post is an extract from The Retro Machine (Vol 6) posted by Spencer over at RetroJunk.

No, this is not a piece about the PC game, this is a piece on the fantastic PBS game show that aired in the early 90’s. The cheesy clue sketches, comedic interactions between Greg and The Chief, the memorable melodies of Rockapella, and the colorful cast of Carmen’s crooks, all added up to one of the finest educational game shows to ever air on public television. Seriously, if you missed this show as a kid, you truly missed out.

Lynne Thigpen (The Chief), who sadly passed away in 2003, was the true anchor of the show. She had this authoritative air about her that retained the humor of the show, but at the same time instilled this sense of urgency that compelled you to watch in hopes that Carmen would get caught.

The show captured the spirit of the game, keeping close to the detective theme (words like “gumshoe” come to mind) all throughout. The prizes they gave away were always funny. The third place contestant would walk away with a Carmen T-shirt while the second place contestant would get something like a world band radio. The grand prize was always a trip to anywhere in the lower 48 states, but to get that you had to find seven places on a continent in 45 seconds. It wasn’t easy, and many kids failed to catch Carmen. The ones who did had to have an absolutely flawless run.

Without a doubt, the one thing that to this day remains as the shows legacy was it’s quirky theme song. I can’t think of any other way to end this than to show the amazing a capella theme song…

This is a guest post by Sports Kate, who has her own blog that is cool.

Once upon a time, I was an insanely dorky and awkward middle schooler. I had horrible bangs I was trying to grow out, never left home without a scrunchie in my bag and wore t-shirts just about everyday, tucked in.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I adored spring, summer and fall weather, though not for the sunshine, or flowers. It was because it meant it was time to crack out my Umbros!

Though the company manufactured all sorts of soccer clothing and gear, for some reason it was Umbro’s shorts that really took off. You could find them everywhere: soccer stores, athletic stores, even department stores at the mall! There were the shorts with the classic shiny checkerboard design, and the ones that looked like windpants material with a different color piping at the bottom. Many had bright color combinations that would hurt your eyes. All had the unmistakable diamond-within-a-diamond logo on the bottom of the short’s left leg.

Early on, most people I knew who wore Umbros were soccer players, at least recreationally. But I hadn’t played the sport since 4th or 5th grade. I actually hated soccer, but boy did I love Umbros shorts! Stylish? No. But comfortable? Absolutely.

As you may have guessed by my scrunchie ownership, I was not one for style. Apparently this is a trait I shared with Jessica Biel. When quoted in Harper’s Bazaar, Biel said:

“I literally wore Umbro shorts, No Fear T-shirts, and sneakers until I was, like, 15. I didn’t care, and my mom didn’t care. I didn’t have fashion icons.”

Neither did I. I probably wore them til age 15 as well. I remember vividly when I made varsity volleyball in 9th grade, I got teased by older (and much taller) teammates and earned the nickname “Umbro girl.” Thankfully by that point in time I had developed a keen enough fashion sense to realize I shouldn’t wear the shorts for all occasions, though they were certainly an option for warm, lazy days and working out. But in four years of varsity volleyball and nickname-dom, I never came around to the spandex-y leave-nothing-to-the-imagination shorts everyone else preferred. I may have been a nerd and the laughingstock of the team, but hey, at least I was comfortable. And an added bonus: I could easily gain 1o or 15 pounds and no one would notice. I could just loosen the drawstring waistband and enjoy the bagginess in the thighs that my Umbros offered. Take that biker shorts!

Sexy, sexy, sexy shorts! Boo-yah!

This post is an extract from The Retro Machine (Vol 2) posted by Spencer over at RetroJunk.

When I was a kid, every self-respecting toy line pretty much had to have a slime-related component. The Masters of the Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Ghostbusters all had slime.

For those of you (not to be sexist, but probably girls) who never had the pleasure of playing with it, slime was a wet, gooey, giant snot-like substance that toy companies shoved into little plastic jars that were bundled with the favorite toys of your male counterparts.

For the Ninja Turtles, the slime was known as “Retromutagen” and was sold in little canisters like the one pictured above. Inside you would find yourself a plastic baby turtle (if you remember, it was the “Retromutagen” that was responsible for turning regular turtles into walking, talking, pizza eating mutants).

I have to say though that my favorite use of toy slime ever was with the “Real Ghostbusters” line of toys. In the Ghostbusters universe, the slime is “ecto-plazm”, a residue left behind by the manifestation of ghosts. You’d get a tub of slime every time you bought something Ghostbusters related (complete with little plastic ghost inside), so rest assured there was plenty of slime to douse your action figures with. As you see in the file photo (above right), my friend Jeff and his cousin Lindsay used the Ecto-Plazm to give a Ray Stanz figure the slime of his life. My friend Jeff actually had a ton of Ghostbusters figures and made good use of his slime. He’d have it on the walls, in the carpet, and as you can see above, covering the patio. After a certain time, his parents confiscated any new slime he received.