VHS Memories

August 3, 2024July 25, 2025 russdiminoLeave a comment

The first time it occurred me how much the way we consume media had changed was when my son Dominic was three years old. We were at my parents’ house and I asked him if he wanted to watch something on TV.

“Yes,” he said. “I want to watch the Mickey Mouse where the Clubhouse disappears.”

“Oh,” I said. “That episode isn’t on right now.”

He was confused.

“What do you mean, it isn’t on?”

I struggled to explain that on “regular” TV, you could only watch what was airing at that time. You couldn’t pick the show, let alone the episode. I think I said something along the lines of, “This TV doesn’t have as many choices.” Then Dominic asked if we could go home.

To be fair, if I could’ve gone back in time and told my childhood self that someday you would be able to choose any movie or any episode of any show and watch it with a few clicks of your remote, that would’ve seemed like absolute magic to me. For anyone who grew up in the days before Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus and the like, you really could only watch a show when it was on. In fact, many of us subscribed to a weekly magazine that informed you of what shows would be on when. If there was something you wanted to see and you weren’t going to be home, you would have to go to the lengths of setting up your VCR to record it onto a VHS tape.

If you ever pushed the little flap of the VCR door open when there was no tape in it and looked inside, you would see there was so much crazy-looking gadgetry in there that it didn’t seem like it should even work. When you would insert a tape into the machine it would make noises like you were somehow inconveniencing it, cranking and whirring as all of those little gears and doo-dads loaded the tape and got ready to play it. Eventually you could wear a tape out from watching it too much. Who else remembers seeing the slow, gradual degradation of the picture as those little static lines would begin to creep in from the bottom and top of the screen? You could try to adjust the tracking to get rid of them (I still don’t even really know what that was actually doing), but after a while it became futile. And don’t even get me started on the horror of pulling a tape out of the machine to find that your VCR just “ate” your favorite video – seeing a trail of the tape’s innards being stretched out from the back of the cassette and into the mouth of the machine was like it was some kind of carnivorous animal that had turned against you. It was a stinging betrayal.

Well before DVD box sets existed, I would try make my own sets on tape. The first time I remember doing this was in 1989 when I made collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episodes. It was a sort of “Best of TMNT” tape of only my personal favorites. Every day after school I would have a tape in the VCR ready to go, and I would wait for the title card to come up to see which episode it was. (I only had the theme song recorded once, at the very beginning of the tape.) If it was an episode I wanted, I’d hit record. If not, I’d wait for the next day and try again. (If you’re wondering which episodes made the cut, the four Eye of Sarnath episodes were on there, the Baxter the Fly origin episode, the first Casey Jones episode, and the episode where Leatherhead meets the Rat King.)

There was a fine art to what setting you would have the VCR on when you recorded something. Most had at least two, or possibly all three of the following options: Standard Play (SP), which could fit two hours of high quality video on a single tape; Long Play (LP), which could fit four hours of okay-looking video on a tape; and Extended Play or Super Long Play (EP or SLP) which could fit six hours of pretty crappy looking video on a tape. I would almost always record in EP/SLP because my not-very-discerning young mind emphasized quantity over quality. I wanted as much content as I could get on a single video. The fact that it didn’t look as good wasn’t something I paid a ton of attention to. This was in the days before high definition and wide screens, so shows didn’t always look all that great even when you watched them live. Compared to the 4K resolution we’ve become accustomed to nowadays, TV recorded onto a VHS tape in SLP would look like an impressionistic painting.

If you buy a movie on DVD or Blu-ray, or purchase it digitally on Amazon, Apple TV, or Vudu, you have the exact same copy of it as everyone else. If you recorded something off TV, you had captured that specific airing of it. It might have the commercials that aired along with it, unless you took the time to “cut them out” by pausing the recording each time the show went to break and unpausing it when it came back. We had a tape of Christmas specials from the 80s, and the ads were just as much a part of the holiday magic as the shows. Who could forget the 7-Up commercial with the Countdown to Christmas calendar, or the bizarre Isotoner gloves ad with the nerdy guy who had eight girlfriends?

Speaking of that Christmas tape – sometimes you might have only part of a movie or show recorded, and that became ingrained in your mind as the complete version. Our recording of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer began a few minutes in, when Mrs. Claus is imploring Santa to “Eat! Eat!” because he was too skinny. Obviously I knew that wasn’t how the special actually started and that we’d missed the very beginning of it. Yet, even now, when I watch Rudolph at Christmas time, the first few minutes of it seem foreign to me. I watched our truncated version so many times as a kid that it feels like the special should start abruptly with Mrs. Claus fattening up her husband.

You could also form associations between movies that had nothing to do with each other just because you had them on the same tape. For example, we had Clue and the Martin Short movie Clifford taped back to back from a time they had aired on Comedy Central. In my mind, those two movies still go together, even though there is nothing else that connects them besides the Dimino family having them on the same cassette. Same with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, both of which we recorded off of Cartoon Network. Somewhere burned in my brain is the idea that after Batman finishes saving Gotham City from the Phantasm, Daffy comes in and recruits Bugs and Porky to start catching ghosts.

If you taped a movie off TV there was a good chance you were recording an edited version of it. I will never forget the time in high school when I had some friends over and one of them referenced the movie Space Balls. I proudly announced that we had it on tape and suggested that we watch it. I didn’t think about the fact that I had recorded it from Comedy Central and it had been edited for language. My buddies gave me some grief for having a toned-down version of the movie, but we ended up watching the whole thing and laughing even harder at the dubbed-over curse words and awkwardly censored scenes. (The line “We ain’t found shit!” when they are combing the desert was completely omitted, which was the scene we’d been talking about in the first place.)

My penchant for assembling “Best of…” tapes lasted pretty much right up until VHS went obsolete. In college, I made a tape for my then-girlfriend (and now wife!) Amanda of her favorite episodes of Full House by waiting for each one to air on ABC Family. Some guys made their girlfriends mix-tapes of romantic songs; I made mine a mix-tape of a T.G.I.F. sitcom. Now of course we have the whole series on DVD, and it’s also available to stream on Max, so we have multiple ways to view any episode at any moment, but at the time that video I gradually assembled was the only way to have those specific episodes in anything resembling an “on demand” form.

Everything is so accessible now, and there is a kind of magic in that. Again, my kid self would’ve absolutely flipped at the idea of having an instantaneous library of movies and shows at his fingertips at all times. But there was a magic in the VHS era too, in being able to capture that movie or that show as a moment in time. I’m not saying it was better. It was clunky, time-consuming, and if you missed the episode you wanted to tape you were out of luck until it came around again in reruns. But I will always look back on it fondly, and remember how it felt to push a tape into the VCR, listen to the sound of the whirring gears, and, at just the right moment, press “Record.”

It’s not too hard to imagine an alternate timeline where technology never advanced past the VCR. I’m sure in that reality I would’ve been making “Best of…” tapes of all of my son’s favorite episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, so he could watch the one where the clubhouse disappears any time he wanted to.

The Warner Brothers Studio Store

October 28, 2023July 26, 2025 russdiminoLeave a comment

One of my favorite things to do when my family would go to Atlanta each summer in the mid-1990s was visit the Warner Brothers Studio Store. There were two different locations that we would go to: one at the Lenox Square mall and one in the Underground Atlanta shopping district.

The Warner Brothers Store in Underground Atlanta, circa 1995

Back then superhero stuff was not nearly as prevalent as it is today. As a kid who loved comic books, it was rare to see my favorite characters gracing any store shelves. Walking into the Warner Brothers Store came with a special rush of excitement as larger-than-life statues of Michael Keaton’s Batman and Christopher Reeve’s Superman appeared to be bursting through the wall of the Underground location. In the summer of 1995 there was a big screen in the middle of the store showing a trailer for Batman Forever. The scene of Val Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne dropping down through a secret passage in his office and arriving in the Batcave was fascinating to me. I couldn’t wait to see the movie.

The Warner Brothers store had merchandise from my favorite show, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I barely knew anyone else who even watched the show at that time. (This was before I discovered all of my fellow FoLCs in the chatrooms of AOL!) The fact that the Lenox location of the WB Store actually had shirts with Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher on them seemed like I’d stepped into an alternate reality where everyone loved the same things that I did.

Two “Lois & Clark” shirts I bought from the WB Store in the 90s

Old cartoons and commercials played throughout the store as well. The “Very Stylish Girl” jingle from one of the clips got stuck in our heads and would be referenced often by me and my siblings for years to come.

Most impressive of all were the animation cels that were for sale. Most cost hundreds of dollars; some were a thousand dollars or more. Actual cels that were used to create Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Batman The Animated Series were framed and on display, and could be yours if you had enough disposable income. I remember thinking that I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to have money to spend on things like that, and to have my own place where I could hang them up. I envisioned having a collectibles room in my house where I could proudly showcase the animation cels, mini-statues, and other novelties that I would undoubtedly be able to afford when I grew up.

The Warner Brothers Studio Store in Burbank, CA

Although the WB stores across America shuttered their doors in the early 2000s, there is still one location open at the Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, California. I recently had the pleasure of visiting this location while on my first ever trip to the west coast. Walking into the store was like going back in time. On display were the actual Green Arrow, Flash, and Supergirl costumes worn by Stephen Amell, Grant Gustin, and Melissa Benoist respectively. Statues, shirts, books, coffee mugs and more from everything ranging from Harry Potter to Gilmore Girls filled shelves as far as the eye could see. I wandered the store with the same wide-eyed expression that my younger self would’ve had back in the 90s.

I didn’t buy anything.

Younger Me would probably be confused and disappointed that Grown-Up Me didn’t come back with a suitcase full of mini-busts and animation cels to adorn the walls of the collectibles room that I should surely have by now as an adult. For one thing, Younger Me seriously overestimated the amount of disposable income I would have. But for another thing, Grown-Up Me found that you can’t put a price on the best thing I would find at the Warner Brothers Store: the sense of nostalgia, wonder, and excitement that comes from being surrounded by so many things that you grew up loving.

Russ Dimino is the author of Spilling My Guts: A Crohn’s Chronicle.

More Action Figures of My Youth

February 25, 2022July 26, 2025 russdiminoLeave a comment

In this edition we will take a look at some more of the most memorable action figures from my childhood years. (You can find part one here, and my original post about playing “G.I.S.” with my brother here.)

Lex Luthor (1984)

My first ever impression of Superman’s arch nemesis Lex Luthor was courtesy of this figure of him wearing his green war suit. I did not know at the time that this armor was designed specifically to give Lex a cool action figure. It was a look that the character would sport only briefly; by 1986 the “Post Crisis” Lex wore a business suit and became more of a corrupt tycoon type of character. Still, in the back of my mind I always imagined Lex having this armor in storage or something, ready to bust it out if he really needed to. The war suit has appeared in the comics a handful of times over the years, and even finally made it into live action when Jon Cryer played Lex on Supergirl. The kid in me was excited for Lex to finally “suit up” after decades of wanting to see it happen!

Stonedar and Rokkon (1986)

Kids have always loved toys that transformed. This is a known a fact. Usually that means a robot that turns into a car or an airplane or some other vehicle. Stonedar and Rokkon were robot aliens that turned into rocks. That’s right, they turned into freaking rocks. For some reason though I thought they were awesome. I’d like to say my young mind was fascinated by the extreme contrast between the advanced technology that comprised their robotic selves and the prehistoric simplicity of their rock forms, but I really think they just looked cool. These guys were part of the Masters Of The Universe line, and they all came with mini comic books that explained who the characters were. Stonedar and Rokkon were some of the first figures that I remember really paying attention to the comics and wanting to understand their backstory. (That backstory being, they were robot aliens that turn into rocks.)

Baxter The Fly (1989)

Most cartoon shows would always return things back to the “status quo” at the end of each episode, so that they could be watched in any order. That’s why it blew my mind when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had Baxter Stockman, Shredder’s scientist assistant who appeared in many early episodes, turn into a human-fly hybrid and stay that way. It was unheard of to have such a dramatic change occur and have it stick. Also, it happened because Krang threw Baxter into a disintegrator unit with the intention of freaking killing him. It was the most hardcore thing I had ever seen in my life. (I was kind of a sheltered kid.) I wanted the Baxter The Fly toy so bad that I actually had a dream about it one night, and I was crushed when I woke up and realized I did not really have it. When I eventually got it for my birthday I was overjoyed. (As my dad said at the time, “They can’t make ‘em ugly enough!”) I did wish they had made a figure of Baxter in his human form too though, so I could’ve re-enacted the episode where he transformed.

Casey Jones (1989)

Speaking of Ninja Turtles characters I was obsessed with. When they introduced Casey Jones, I did not understand that he was supposed to be a parody of dark and gritty urban vigilante heroes, probably because he was my first exposure to a dark and gritty urban vigilante hero. I thought the idea of a guy wearing a hockey mask beating the crap out of criminals with golf clubs and baseball bats was incredible; the tongue-in-cheek nature of the character and the fact that his voice was a Clint Eastwood impression was lost on me. I loved the character so much that I went as Casey Jones for Halloween that year. Everyone thought I was supposed to be Jason from the Friday the 13^th movies though, which pissed me off. Also, I brought the Casey Jones action figure into school for show and tell one time. Steve C. in my class asked if that was the version of the figure where his mask comes off. I said no. He said he had the version where his mask comes off. I am pretty sure he was lying, I don’t think that was a real thing. But it did make me wonder what Casey looked like behind his mask.

Ace Duck (1989)

As the Ninja Turtle toy line went on, they started adding more and more characters beyond just the turtles and their villains. Sometimes they added characters that came out of nowhere and had nothing to do with anything. Ace Duck was an anthropomorphic duck who dressed like a pilot. To my knowledge he only ever appeared in a few seconds of the animated Turtles TV show, as a character the Turtles were watching on TV. That’s right, he was a character on a show on a show. However, I was also an avid reader of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic books. There was a storyline with a very different version of Ace Duck who was a muscle-bound intergalactic wrestler. Rather than finding this confusing I just found it very interesting that there were such different versions of this obscure character. (Also, it was really hard to get that figure’s hat to stay on.)

Deep Sea Diver Batman (1990)

Aren’t everyone’s favorite Batman adventures the times when he puts on a bright yellow suit and fights crime underwater? This was so odd that my brother and I usually had him be some kind of Batman impostor in our games rather than the genuine article.

Don The Undercover Turtle (1990)

This one came from later in the Ninja Turtles line when they were trying to find new ways to re-release the main characters. Having Donatello come with a disguise, including a mask, so he could go undercover and have detective adventures was really intriguing to me. At the time I wished he was wearing gloves, pants, and shoes too so when his mask was on you could not tell he was a turtle at all. (My son Dominic and I still use this figure when we play action figures to this day. Somewhere along the line we added the fact that he is obsessed with tuna sandwiches to his personality.)

“Jimmy Olsen” (Pee-Wee Herman) (1988)

Often in our action figure games, my brother and I would adapt random figures into characters that we didn’t have. We would pretend this Pee-Wee Herman figure was Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen in our G.I.S. adventures. I guess because they both had bow ties? Jimmy tended to get killed off in many of our games and then miraculously be okay again in time for the next “episode,” almost like a precursor to Kenny from South Park. Good times.

Part of This Complete Breakfast

April 17, 2019July 25, 2025 russdiminoLeave a comment

CookieCrisp3

One of the first home movies we have of me as a kid is me doing my own version of the Cookie Crisp commercial. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, holding a box of the cereal, exclaiming the slogan, “If you like cookies, you’ll love Cookie Crisp!” (I watched a lot of TV.)

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, every cereal commercial made sure to mention that it was “part of this complete breakfast.” It then showed a quick shot of the cereal accompanied by toast, bacon, eggs, a glass of orange juice, a bowl of oatmeal, and about eight other things. I remember wondering why my parents were under the impression that it was okay for me to be eating just cereal and why they didn’t know I was supposed to be having a lot of other stuff with it. Were they being lazy or just uninformed?

Cereal was not just something to eat for kids in that era. It was a way of life. Each cereal had its own personality, brought to life by the colorful characters that appeared on the box and in the commercials.

LUCKY CHARMS – Lucky the Leprechaun. The kids were always after his Lucky Charms, trying to find them like treasure. The thrill-of-the-chase theme of the commercials as the kids tried to acquire the cereal was appropriate because it mirrored the quest of trying to get your parents to buy it for you. Even in the days before nutrition information was printed on the box, getting your mom to buy you a box of marshmallows for breakfast was a hard sell.

COOKIE CRISP – Similarly, it made sense that the mascot for this cereal was a crook who was trying to steal it. That’s basically what you had to do if you wanted to get your hands on this one. Eating it felt like you were really getting away with something.

CINNAMON TOAST CRUNCH – It confused me when the Cinnamon Toast Crunch bakers went from being a trio to just being one baker, Wendell. What happened to the other two guys? Did they split up due to creative differences? When the commercials with just Wendell came out I kept wondering if there would eventually be commercials with just each of the other two, like maybe they were spotlighting each baker individually as a series, but that never came. I did have a wallet with a hologram picture of all three of them. Nowadays even Wendell does not appear on the box – it’s just a sentient piece of the cereal itself. Apparently CTC became self-aware and no longer needed its creators. Chilling.

TRIX – I never really cared for the ad campaign of a bunch of rude kids who refused to let the Rabbit have any Trix. You have a whole box, it’s not going to hurt to let him have some. It was just too mean-spirited. The ads all ended with the rabbit looking depressed as the kids taunted him. “Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids!” Eventually they did have a promotion where you could call in and vote on whether or not you thought the rabbit should get some Trix. I got my parents’ permission and voted for him to have some. I guess a lot of other kids in America felt the same as me, because at the end of the promotion they did have a commercial where he finally got to try them. But, things quickly went back to the status quo right after that and he was not able to have them in subsequent commercials. Also, interestingly, this cereal seems to change every so often between being colored balls vs. being actually shaped like fruit. It’s like they can’t make up their mind on what this cereal even is.

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COCOA PUFFS – Sonny the Cuckoo Bird is like the opposite of the Trix Rabbit. The Rabbit can never have Trix, and Sonny is addicted to Cocoa Puffs like they are crack. He has a bite and loses his mind. I also respect the fact that they recently decided that the fact that it turns the milk chocolatey should be a selling point and started marketing this right on the box.

CAP’N CRUNCH – The Cap’n was different from a lot of the other mascots in that he was benevolently giving his cereal to kids rather than them having to try to steal it from him or anything like that. Some of his ads even had storylines that increased your investment in the product. Who could forget when the Sogmaster locked up Cap’n Crunch in a commercial that ended with “To Be Continued,” launching the “Free The Cap’n” promotion on specially marked boxes? A cereal commercial with a cliffhanger? I couldn’t wait for the next ad to come out to see how the Cap’n would get out of this one.

FROSTED FLAKES – Tony the Tiger always proclaimed how grrrrrreat this cereal was, usually in the context of it giving you energy for sports. I don’t know how many athletes really fueled up with Frosted Flakes. It would give you a sugar rush of energy for about ten minutes and then make you feel sick to your stomach. It was also one of those cereals that tended to cut up the roof of your mouth. I don’t know that you’d want to head right out to the basketball court after eating it. Most likely you’d be laying down with a headache and a bleeding mouth.

FRUITY PEBBLES AND COCOA PEBBLES – These cereals are the only ones I can think of that had pre-existing characters as their mascots. How did the Flintstones get roped into being Post cereal spokesmen? I don’t know. It’s also interesting to think that there are kids today who only know the Flintstones from cereal boxes.

FROOT LOOPS – Toucan Sam was a hip, laid-back bird who encouraged you to follow his nose to some Froot Loops. Usually he was offering that advice to someone who was down on their luck and he was suggesting they have Froot Loops as a kind of a pick-me-up. I never cared for this cereal all that much but I respected that Toucan was a positive role model, trying to help out his fellow man by hooking them up with some of his cereal instead of keeping it from them like some of these other characters.

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GOLDEN CRISP – Sugar Bear was like the Fonz of cereal mascots. He was cool but also seemed to get into a lot of fights. He’d say “How about a vitamin-packed punch?” and then punch someone in the face. In retrospect it seems weird that those ads were so violent, but Sugar Bear was just so awesome you didn’t really care about it at the time. (This cereal was easily confusable with the very similar Honey Smacks, which featured a frog mascot called Dig’em. It seems like a missed opportunity that Dig’em never smacked someone when they asked for his cereal.)

MONSTER CEREALS – Frankenberry, Boo Berry, and of course Count Chocula combined every kid’s natural love of monsters with their equally natural love of sugary cereals with marshmallows. Today these cereals actually go out of production for most of the year and only become available again for a couple of months around Halloween, which only increases their mythological status.

ducktalestoys

THE PRIZES INSIDE “SPECIALLY MARKED BOXES” – Every box of cereal used to come with a prize right inside the actual box. These days most cereals have you send away for stuff in the mail, or enter a promo code online to see if you got something. Back in the day you’d reach your grubby little hand inside, dig down deep into the cereal, and pull out a toy that was inevitably one of a series of toys that you’d be compelled to try to collect all of. (Which, of course, meant buying more cereal.) Sometimes through, to avoid getting a run of duplicates, you could send in some proofs-of-purchase and a few bucks for shipping and handling and have them send you the full set. I was all about the Disney Afternoon, so my mom did this for me for the Duck Tales, Rescue Rangers, and Darkwing Duck toys that were in various Kellogg’s cereals in the 90s.

Some of my favorite “lost gems” of cereal history:

turtlecereal

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLE CEREAL – When I look at a picture of the box I can still remember exactly how this stuff tasted. It was really good. Even though it’s been discontinued for more than two decades I’d honestly still call it one of my favorite cereals. It was like Chex, but with more sugar, and marshmallows. Plus, each box came with a mini-comic book inside, and there were trading cards to cut out on the back of the box. I was obsessed with the Turtles, so anything having to do with them was already a win in my book, but the fact that the cereal tasted awesome catapulted this one into legendary status. A few years ago I even called the Ralston company to ask them to bring this back into production. They informed me they lost the license for Ninja Turtles a long time ago. I suggested they could bring the cereal back and call it something else. The person I spoke to did not seem to think that this was likely to happen but thanked me for my call.

TEDDY GRAHAMS BREAKFAST BEARS – This cereal was amazing and prompted one of my favorite “comfort snacks” to this day, which is to pour milk on a bowl of Teddy Grahams and eat them like cereal. The difference is that actual Teddy Grahams go soggy in milk in a matter of seconds. You need to pour a very small bowl, eat it quickly, and then refill, or else you’ll be eating mush. The cereal would go soggy too but it managed to resist the milk for a much longer period of time. Actually the best consistency you could get with the cereal was to wait for it to go slightly soggy. There was a brief window of time where it was just soggy enough to be a little bit soft but not too mushy. With the cereal that window was a couple of minutes. With actual Teddy Grahams it’s about ten seconds. Also the cereal box had a mask of a bear’s face that you could cut out and wear if you were so inclined.

nintendo

NINTENDO CEREAL SYSTEM – This cereal came out right when Nintendo was starting to become popular. It was the first cereal I’m aware of that was actually two cereals. Each box had two bags of cereal inside, a Mario cereal and a Legend of Zelda cereal. The gimmick of two cereals in one, coupled with the fact that it had to do with video games, made this one even cooler in concept than the actual product probably tasted. I don’t remember the taste as much as I remember how exciting it was to have it.

ghostbusters

GHOSTBUSTER CEREAL – I don’t remember this cereal very well. We do have a home video of my cousin getting a box of it for Christmas one year and my aunt asking him if it’s one of his favorite things.

These are all of my cereal thoughts for now, but I have a feeling I’ll have more to say on this topic in the future. What are some of your favorite cereals, past or present? Let me know in the comments!