Friday, September 8, 2017

Anyone Remember These?

I've been tracking down a lot of stuff from my childhood lately, but some things elude me.
  1. Web video, live action, around 2007-2008. May have been BritANik but ????. A group of guys get into a parked car, all facing forward, and seemingly begin having a conversation that makes sense at first but gets more and more bizarre as it goes along. At the end it turns out that they were each having a different conversation, via bluetooth headsets. One was having girlfriend troubles, one was counseling his cousin how to hunt, etc. (which makes it sound at one point that the easy way to get rid of girlfriend troubles would be, “just two shots in the back of the head!” although maybe the other guy could have been talking about a dog instead of a girlfriend, kind of deal, the details are fuzzy.)
  2. Live action TV movie where two brothers like crash a plane on like a desert island and there’s a white girl there who’s somehow native whom they name “Red” after her hair. Possibly miniseries, because I remember it being pretty long for a movie. Not Dinotopia. This was a little before Dinotopia’s time. 
  3. Cartoon show, Science Court-era, takes place at a school and follows this group of friends. I hope it’s not Detention, because that show is impossible to find, but it might be. The floor is literally made of lava in one episode, perhaps due to virtual reality? And so they have to walk along the tops of the lockers, or along this ledge along the lockers, and encounter Indiana Jones-style booby traps. Something about an evil wheelchair-bound kid living in the boiler room in the basement, who turns out to be just misunderstood? And perhaps he’s got a big henchperson to do his bidding for him, I don’t know.
  4. Live-Action film, seemed to be pretty big when it came out like everyone was excited for it, sometime in the mid-to-late 90s. I don’t recall it being that great, so I think the reason it was so exciting for us is that maybe it was shot locally? It’s about a boy who gets stuck inside what is basically an Iron Man armor, but which looks like a person from the outside so nobody knows it’s a robot/not him. There’s a very funny scene where he goes to Burger King and it’s the robot who gets to eat the food, and presenting just a very unappetizing-looking prechewed bolus to the inside of the suit, conveyor belted to a platform in front of his mouth. The climax takes place at night, with a lot of explosions, very action-packed which I remember being pretty tonally at odds with the rest of the film.
  5. When it was still on I always thought that it was Charmed or Bewitched, but those are other things entirely of course. It’s a sitcom about a man with supernatural powers who lives with this family, consisting of at least the mother and two teenage children (whether he’s a wizard or a genie or a fairy godfather or what I don’t know.) I remember a gag where he’s magically conjured up a clothes rack and is choosily sifting through the items. There’s a tux and he says too fancy, there’s a t-shirt and he says too informal, kind of deal, but the punchline is there’s a ballet skirt and he says “too too.” Another episode the woman whose name I always thought was Samantha but the show turned out not to be Bewitched, the mom of the family, is given mindreading powers for the episode. She’s playing chess against the magic dude and he thinks, now it’s time to unleash my secret strategy, only she hears him of course and so he thinks, never mind, it’s not time to unleash my secret strategy. And then, we hear offscreen, the daughter of the family flushing the toilet while the son is in the shower upstairs, and he gets doused in cold water for a few seconds and screams, “Aah! [sister’s name] flushed the toilet while I’m taking a shower!” but inwardly he thinks, alright!
  6. Mid-to-late ‘90s-early-to-mid ‘00s. It was like a Usborne puzzle book, full-page full-color illustrations each spread containing its own puzzle, kind of deal, though I remember it being significantly fancier and more difficult. It was separated into different sections/periods in which the story takes place; there was a medieval period, an Underground Railroad period, a future period with aliens, etc. I remember one chapter in the Underground Railroad section was named Midnight Rendezvous, because I had no idea what a rendezvous was or how it was pronounced. At the end it turned out that all the sections interconnected to tell a single story, and one artifact from one time period turned out to be a macguffin from a different time period under a different name, that kind of thing.
  7. Something about dogs. Not Road Rovers, the dogs were non-anthropomorphic. Saw it on Cartoon Network, 1999ish (they were still doing the live-action Ed Edd N Eddy promo spots.) It opens with a prologue of sorts, something kinda on the violent side happens IIRC, and it cuts to however many years later, with the subtitle saying ONE YEAR LATER (SEVEN DOG YEARS), and outside of a warehouse I think.
  8. A hilarious children’s book our thirdish-grade teacher read to us. Within the first three chapters the narrator is in the shower imagining he’s a rock star. No part of this up to this point has to do with the plot, that I know of- I believe I entered the class partway through the school year and was gone frequently so I missed most of it. The plot itself, as far as I heard, involves a tiny little man who, like, grants the kid wishes, or goes on magical adventures, or something? He’s described as being the man who shuts off the light in the fridge when you close the door, and who at the end of the book decides to pay a visit to the man in the freezer who makes the ice cubes.

If not I'm going to ask at TV Tropes, but I figured I'd start with family first since they're the ones who had these with me. Except for 1 and 8 and maybe 7. My parents would probably remember the live action TV, and I've asked my brother about #6 already I think.

2 comments:

  1. You have asked me about #6, we owned it once and I can't remember either, but I do have the answer to #4: It's "Star Kid" and it came out in 1997.

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  2. Number 3 really is Detention, which by all rights should be on HBO Max (it was a Kids' WB show) but for some reason, isn't? It is on iTunes for $1.99 per episode, though!, so no longer completely inaccessible as it was five years ago. Episode is "Shareena Takes the Cake," it was a baking soda volcano. Wikipedia is telling me that the episode was sneak-peeked during a Pokémon marathon the day before it officially premiered? So that's where I likely saw it. Thanks, Wikipedia editor 199.245.163.9!

    Number 5 is You Wish. He's a genie. Episode described is "Mind Games." The whole show's on YouTube? And like, nobody gives a crap, so it's not gonna be copyright striked anytime soon, either. Thanks, YouTube channels dinobolt1 and MIKER PHONE 2!

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