Punctuation Is Fun. Punctuation Is Fun? Punctuation Is Fun!

Continuing with our gala Electric Company celebration...

Today's post gets its power from 'Matching Marks Punctuation Match-Ups,' a game that teaches kids all about the miracles of punctuation (unless it concerns the possessive, apparently) and how one little squiggle at the end of a sentence can change that sentence's entire meaning. It's true? It's true! I don't know from Matching Mark but the other characters whose cartoon likenesses are featured in the game were all Electric Company regulars. From J. Arthur Crank to the Movie Director to the Mad Scientist.

The game was simple enough... three identical sentences are printed three times on three different jigsaw pieces. On each card the sentence ends with a different form of punctuation, either a '.' or a '?' or a '!' Should I have put a period at the end of that sentence? There are three pictures printed on three different jigsaw pieces that correspond with the different sentences' meanings and it's up to the players to match words to picture. For example: the sentence "Be careful with that Xacto knife." would be illustrated by Jennifer of the Jungle handing Paul the Gorilla an Xacto knife (handle first for safety!) while the cartoon for the sentence "Be careful with that Xacto knife!" would show Paul howling in pain while clutching the spurting stump of his missing left index finger.

Here are the official rules for official-minded folk-

Simple enough, right? Right! Now you really, really want to play this game at home, don't you? Well, having anticipated your every want & desire, as is so often the case with me, I've scanned all the cards and posted them below in handy groups of three (or six actually.) Just print, paste and cut (be careful with that Xacto knife...) and let the merriment begin-

It's fun and educational! It's fuducational!

Questions and observations-

• What is Jennifer pointing out to Fargo about his decoder machine?
• Does it have anything to do with why Jennifer refuses to believe Fargo's subsequent weather report?
• 'The Movie Director' should be capitalized.
• The Movie Director should probably seek help for her anger management issues. That camera was probably expensive.
• What exactly did Julia Grownup do to that second cake?
• After The Electric Company was cancelled, Pedro auditioned for a part as one of Busch Gardens' mascots, but there was no 'Mexico' in the park so he didn't make the cut.

Hey You Guys!!!

Apparently, I've been planning for this blog my entire life. If I didn't think that I'd one day have to find semi-interesting things to scan and post to a web page on an semi-regular basis then I can't imagine why I saved onto some of the things that I did. Like this pile of semi-complete Electric Company magazines from the 1970's. 'Semi-complete' because I didn't save the entire magazine, I just tore out random chunks of each issue and stored those away. As an archivist I lack a certain thoroughness.

I just stumbled across this pile of papers a couple days ago and they, along with the recently released Electric Company DVD set, reminded me of how much I loved this show as a kid. For those who don't know, The Electric Company was the sister show of the eternally popular Sesame Street. The Electric Company was for children slightly older than the Street crowd and instead of covering a wide range of subjects, it's focus was entirely on vocabulary. And unlike the gentler Sesame Street, EC rocked. Or at least it rocked in a 1970's kind of a way. It was more colorful, much louder and just plain 'hepper' than SS. And it starred Rita Moreno, Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby and Spider-Man! Also that lady who played Ted Danson's nurse/receptionist on 'Becker.' That's an all-star cast!

So in honor of 'The Electric Company' I present the first part of a week-ish-long celebration of all things EC. Or at the very least, four or five things EC. Today's post features random bits of stuff from that pile of magazine bits...

Jennifer of the Jungle always sounded like she had a cold. Shoulda put some pants on.

I've erased my answers so that you can try your own hand at breaking this tricky code. No fair turning ahead to pg. 22 for the answer!

Otherwise known as, "Oh crap! We still have one more page to fill."

The Short Circus (Get it? It sorta sounds like 'short circuit') were your standard-issue annoying pre-teen sidekicks, added to the show to give the viewers someone to identify with, I suppose. Here we see 'Jesse' and 'Samantha' helping human Muppet, Doug Henning perform some sort of magic trick. 'Jesse' is actually Todd Graff, who recently directed the movie 'Camp.' He also wrote 'The Beautician and The Beast' so don't think too highly of him.

Everyone in the Short Circus was heroin-addict thin.

Is it just me or is that the most obscene fire hydrant you've ever seen?

These are the jokes, folks. I admit that I kind of laughed at the hippopotamus one.

Fun & Games!

This is all that remains of the subscription form, unfortunately. I really would have liked to have sent in a check.

Coming up... Spidey Super Stories, The Fargo North Decoder board game and Julia Grownup teaches us all how to make yogurt. All you need to start is a little yogurt. Wait a minute...

YouTube-y Doo

Night of the Living Doo


So how come I managed to miss this when it aired on Cartoon Network?

Welcome To Gameland!

Speed limit enforced by radar.

I call foul on 'Magic Mary' being considered a game. Unless you get four or five of them together for a round of paper doll strip poker.

Strange Confessions

The internet has served a lot of different purposes for a lot of different people, but last night it served a very special role for me... therapist.

You see, I've had this secret that I've been carrying inside me since I was just a young thing. It's the sort of secret that you never admit to anyone under any circumstances, not to your best friend in the world, not in your most drunken moment of Dashboard Confessional. This was a secret so perverse and heinous that I knew the rest of the world wouldn't be able to handle it... I had a little thing for Teenage Frankenstein!

Yep, since the very first time I caught a Saturday afternoon movie matinee of the movie "I Was A Teenage Frankenstein" on one of our local stations I became aware of the beginnings of a strange stirring inside me every time the title monster was on screen. I also became aware of the freakishness of this situation. Not only was this a hideously deformed and murderous mistake of science, but he was dead! Technically I was a necrophilliac!!! Nothing good ever came of that!

Through the years I've admitted to having a lot of strange youthful crushes (at one point in my life I was determined to marry Julie Andrews) it's something we all do. We tell our friends our crushes and they tell us theirs and we laugh and say "Oh my God! You had a thing for 'fill-in-the-blank? Weird-o!" But I knew that Teenage Frankenstein was not a pin-up idol that my peers would ever accept. The only Cold War-era creature feature monster that it was even remotely safe to admit to stiffening for was that chick on the 50-Foot Woman poster. Admit it, at some time or another we've all wanted to be parked along that stretch of highway she's straddling. But Junior Frankenstein was not, and would never be, centerfold acceptable.

And thus it was that I resigned myself to a lifetime of silence... until last night.

But before we get to that... Here's Frankie!

















Okay, so he's not much to look at from the neck up, it's what's below the clavicle that counts. You could stick a sack on his head and call him "Skippy" for all I cared... my primal pre-pubescent longings were more than happy with what Frankenteen had to offer from the neck down! Freaky I admit.

Then last night I'm puttering around the web (I don't surf. I've never had the balance.) and I don't remember how or why but I stumbled across a picture of the guy who was hiding behind all that monster make-up... Mr.Gary Conway-

And the heaviness in my soul lifted!!!

Now there was a guy worthy of hanging in somebody's gym locker. So it turns out that I wasn't just a freak-chasing necrophilliac after all. I loved Teen Frankenstein because I was able to look past the monsterously deformed features and see the true beauty that shone with-in him!

I am a very, very good person.

And Teenage Horror Factory is a very, very good web site all about "I Was A Teenage Frankenstein" and other 1950's teen horror flicks!

From The Plastic Pumpkins Case Files: The Mystery of Mill Race Park

I just recently returned from a business trip to Indiana and the small town of Columbus, where I expected to find very little with which to pass my time and instead stumbled upon a mystery that would baffle the greatest analytical minds of our generation, from Trixie Belden to the Bobbsey Twins. By 'our generation' I apparently refer to your great-grandmother's and by 'recently returned' I mean sometime back around the Fourth of July. I'm not up-to-date on what the kids are reading these days and it takes me a long time to get my film developed.

Columbus, Indiana had all sorts of things going for it. Educational and arty things which sounded like the sort of stuff a lot of people would find very interesting. They also had a Starbucks and a Target which was more than enough for me. Most of the places I'm sent to on business trips can offer up little more than a Dollar General and a Tastee-Freez to fill my long lonely evenings, so the Starbucks/Target combo rocked hard. There was also a White Castle restaurant, something I'd never seen before in my life. The White Castle visit alone filled an evening. It was very exciting... people kept telling me that you either love White Castle or you hate them. Magic 8-Ball says... 'Hate them!' Besides the fact of the meat looking and tasting a bit like Play-Doh that's been left out of the can overnight the secret to White Castle's success can be summed up in one word- onions. Every last thing on their menu is dipped in, covered with and reeking of onions. Onions make me sick like I want to kill. Just the smell from the sackful of 'sliders' that I ordered gave me a migraine. Still it was an adventure.

What was the point of this post... oh yeah, the park. Columbus had a lot of parks for a city of its size, a lot of parks. There was Clifty Park and Donner Park (which reminded me of the Donner Party which was not good) and Noblitt Park (which reminded me of Green Giant 'Niblets' which was good) and about 15 other parks, most of which were always empty save for a few people sitting in their cars in the parking lots with the engines off and the windows up, staring straight ahead and not doing much of anything else. Weird, but not the mind-baffling mystery portion of this post.

There was one park called Mill Race Park which I attempted to find on two occasions, driving past the entrance several times 'cause it didn't look like much more than a driveway running through an empty hill past two large upright stone thingies. The stone thingies I later assumed to be the remnants of a mill race. Clever. A sign would have been better.

Mill Race Park is a lovely park, a mish-mashed patchwork of odds and ends but a lovely park none-the-less. It features an 84-foot tall observation platform, a genuine wooden covered bridge, a reflecting pool, a steel trestle bridge sitting in the middle of a weedy bit of field, a lookout hill capped by a concrete slab scattered with one-seater benches facing in all manner of direction and, strangest of all, several structures built of glass blocks and red-painted metal and looking very much like 1960's bus stops. One of these structures was an amphitheater, one was a vine-covered tunnel, one was a picnic shelter and a couple, I think, were restrooms. I didn't have to pee so we'll never know. Then there was the 'Mystery.'

Mill Race Park, like most of the rest of the city's parks, featured plenty of beautiful and well-paved walking paths. Kudos to their Parks Department for these. One of the Mill Race paths took you over a wooden plank walkway, very reminiscent of the Everglades, and onto a metal bridge/platform that spanned a stanky pool of water with a large fountain in the center. On the opposite side of this small lake was a huge concrete observation platform hanging out over the water. In the center of this platform was a large concrete pole. This place is very hard to describe.

On this metal bridge, hidden back up under the tree branches was another glass block/red metal building. It was smallish, about the size of a newstand, with one door in the back which opened up inches away from the edge of the bridge and the thick green water below and a roll-up metal door in the front like a... well, like a newstand. I took it at first to be a rather oddly placed information booth, but I soon discovered that if that was what it indeed was than it was also a long-abandoned information booth 'cause it was securely padlocked and obviously uncared for. It was scrawled with graffiti, half the glass blocks were broken or missing and the interior was full of dead leaves and old candy wrappers.

I walked past it, but found myself returning to it later on. The more I had thought about it the stranger it had seemed. It was too far off the beaten path to have been conveniently located for anyone looking for an info-booth and yet not so far off to steer lost hikers back towards civilization. Could it have been used as a rental booth and if so what did they rent? Fishing equipment for the slimey lake? Bikes? Did they sell refreshments? Umbrellas and cuddly animals like that Roller Coaster Tycoon stand? Upon closer inspection it would seem that nothing of any real importance could have been kept in there since there was no actual roof just a canopy that left plenty of room for encroaching elements to sneak inside. There was a small metal bench beside it, so was it a bus stop? Did there use to be a bus route along that narrow dirt path? None of those options seem quite right for the odd location. Baffling.

And currently forlorn. It looked so sad just sitting there all padlocked and bruised and unused. Nothing but the trees and the subtle stench of the water keeping it company. I wanted to go to the city and ask them if I could take over the little place just so I could fix it up and stand there every day handing out maps of the park to passers-by and just giving the place a sense of purpose.

I've totally oversold this place now. Looking at the pictures I can't even begin to understand why I was so morbidly fascinated with this odd structure. Must have been the heat. Still for what it's worth, here's the 'Mystery' building in all its enigmatic glory-

That wing/blade feature was a signature look for the rest of the park's 'bus depot' buildings as well.

A closer look at the padlocked front window

The only picture that really does any justice to the 'abandoned-ness' of the place. You can see some of the broken glass blocks and a bit of the litter. I wish that I had gotten a better picture of the interior, but it made me nervous to get too close to the place. I'm weird that way.

The platform that the building sat on was a good two feet above the scummy water that ran underneath. Anyone who came out the back door on the right side of the above picture would have risked tumbling into the goop.

Like I said, totally oversold. I guess you really had to be there.

The Official (But Not Really Official) Illustrated Guide To The Mascots Of Busch Gardens The Old Country

Surprisingly going against type and following up on a promise made in an earlier post (see below re: "Bevo And Buford Do America!") I've not only dug out that old souvenir map of a 1970's era Busch Gardens Europe complete with costumed mascots, but I've also scanned said mascots, dug up every little last bit of information I could find on them (absolutely nothing) and have assembled scans and info together in what is perhaps the greatest undertaking ever undertaken in the history of internetting- The Official (But Not Really Official) Illustrated Guide To The Mascots Of BG:TOC!!!

That totally deserved three exclamation points.

At the time these cartoon mascots roamed Busch Gardens: The Old Country (as it was called way back when) the park consisted of four themed European 'countries': England, Scotland, France & Germany. There was no Italy and no Ireland as of yet, and the Wildlife Preserve was not even a twinkle in Jack Hanna's eye. There were, however, free brewery tours featuring free beer samples and if seeing the word 'free' twice in the same sentence with the word 'beer' isn't enough to tell you how great a thing that was then you don't deserve beer, free or otherwise.

Each of the four 'countries' were comprised of smaller 'hamlets' some 'countries' being more 'hamlet-y' than others. I'm going to stop putting quotes around the words countries and hamlets now because I think you're probably savvy enough to realize they weren't really either of the two. England and Germany both had two hamlets each, 'Banbury Cross' & Hastings' for England & 'Rhinefeld' & 'Oktoberfest' for Germany. Scotland just had 'Heatherdowns' which consisted of nothing more than the Loch Ness Monster roller coaster and the stables for one of the Busch Co.'s team of Clydesdales. Nowadays there is also a Pigs-In-A-Blanket stand. Scotland's getting screwed.

Now France, depending on how you looked at it, either had two hamlets or one. 'Aquitain' was definately Frenchy, but 'New France?'... that looked suspiciously Canadian to the casual observer. Busch Gardens has never laid claim to Canada as being one of their featured countries so for the sake of arguement we're going to say that 'New France' was a part of 'France' as a whole and not it's own independent organism. Very confusing. I have much more sympathy for separatists now.

Why such concern over things like countries and hamlets? Because each of the costumed characters pictured below would seem to have been meant to represent one of those hamlets. As the official historian of the lot, it's my duty to sort out who goes where. Not an easy task as you'll soon see. I think you'll also quickly come to see why the mascots' place in the park's history was rather brief. To put it as nicely as I possibly can they were a little lame and kind of gay. Not 'gay' in the current lingo which is pretty much synonymous with 'lame' and not 'gay' in the original sense that they are very happy (though they certainly try to give us that impression), but 'gay' as in 'big flaming homos, the whole lot of them.' So without further ado-

-----

The Mascots of Busch Gardens: The Old Country

St. George & Gordon The Dragon

Yes, George and Gordon do appear to be walking arm-in-arm. No, I do not actively pursue evidences of homosexual behavior in the costumed characters of major theme park chains. Sometimes that evidence just walks right up and bitch slaps me in the face.

So, St. George and the dragon (Gordon by name. How very dragon-ish) seem to be close buddies at the very least. I have no problem with that, but it does make we wonder what sort of a falling out they could have had that eventually led the saint to run a blade through his bestest friend's heart. I'm betting it wasn't over some icky girl. Or maybe Busch Gardens was just hoping we'd forget that little part of the legend. Like Disney did with the whole Hercules killing Megara thing.

Anyway, George and Gordon were the "Big 2" in so far as the BG mascots went in that I believe they held dominion over the park in its entirety and not just one little nicely decorated corner. They are also the only two mascots who have still managed to maintain a small prescence in the park today, mostly via children's clothing and other souvenirs.

Buford Beaver

Buford was one of the two mascots that we met in an earlier post. Buford, as we have previously established, is Clearly Canadian. He's a beaver, he's wearing plaid, he has on one of those McKenzie brothers caps and he's flashing a peace sign. Buford's designers could not have beaten us over the head with the fact of his Canadian-ness any better than if they had rammed a hockey stick up his hairy beaver ass.

Bevo The Fox

He is not man, he is Bevo!

Bevo, the fox-in-the-Robin-Hood-outfit-who-thinks-that-his ass-isn't going-to get-sued-by-the-Walt-Disney-company, was the other of the two mascots I talked about in the earlier post. I also used that exact same 'sued by Disney' joke in that post. I'm using it again because it was very, very funny and I know that you aren't ever going to bother to scroll down and read that other post. I'm recycling for the environment.

Bevo is most probably British. I'm sticking him in Hastings because that was the more medieval and woodsy of the two British hamlets. I had made another joke in that previous post about Bevo and Buford Beaver being a gay couple, but I'm starting to think that they may have been the only straights in the entire park. Witness-

Francois Flambe

What can I say.

If you have ever sat through ten episodes of "Are You Being Served?" then you've seen Mr. Humphries wearing an outfit almost exactly like this one in at least eight of them. I don't know what Busch Gardens could have been thinking in having a mascot who's so obviously... French.

"Francois Flambe, What can I say?" sounds like the start of an old nursery rhyme. If I was any type of clever I'd have made one up and swore that it was real.

Tallulah Toad

Drag queen.

Ha! I kid. Tallulah was another Frenchie and although I had said earlier that she was a frog she was not actually a frog, she was a toad. Frogs and toads are two completely different species of amphibions. Tallulah was a toad, not a frog and thus, not a mean-spirited and cliched stereotype.

She may have been a hooker.

Alfie, Rufus & Robes-Pierre

Also known as 'Things One, Two & Three.' ARR-P were three very similar looking... mice? Maybe bears. No mice, I'm pretty sure they're mice. Alfie's snout (the only one in complete profile) is most certainly rodental. Mice they are.

Could be bears.

Whatever they are I'm betting that the costume shop where Busch Gardens purchased the other characters threw these three in for free.

As far as assigning things to places, ARR-P present a small problem. The name Robes-Pierre rings of the French (and he's wearing pink leather and feathers for God's sake!) but we already have Francos coming out of our noses. Where are we going to put another one. Alfie screams cockney so I'm putting him in Banbury Cross. That leaves Rufus without a home and Germany without any mascots at all. What kind of name is 'Rufus' for a German? Shouldn't there be a Klaus or a... Klaus is the only name I can think of. Okay, I'm sticking Rufus in Oktoberfest. Whatever nationality he may be he looks like he can enjoy a good party. Robes-Pierre is going into Rhinefeld because it's close to France and I figure maybe he hangs there to get away from Tallulah and her 'uncomfortable touches.'

-----

So there they be. Everyone with a home and a home for everyone.

I don't think it will be too forward of me to say that with the publishing of this post, 'Plastic Pumpkins' becomes the foremost website devoted to this particular subject matter and even though I didn't know the first little thing about these characters beyond their names I can safely continue refering to myself as the unquestioned authority on Busch Gardens Europe's 1970's mascots. And I do refer to myself as such on an almost daily basis.

Seriously, if anyone has any more info on these guys or pictures of them or souvenirs featuring their likenesses, I'd love to see some scans!

Simzilla Returns!

Awakened yet again by underwater atomic testing off the coast of SimCity, Godzilla heads for shore! Who will fall vicitim to his prehistoric fury this time?

"Say goodbye to your high score ' yaoiluvr92!' "

"What the-?"

"Your machine ate my quarter. I demand a refund!"

"No refunds, buddy! Didn't ya read the sign?"

Godzilla did not read the sign.

The End?