Tag: reminiscence

Finding “Love”: In Defense of the Muppets’ Melancholy Melody

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A few years ago a story made the rounds that a “lost song” from The Muppet Christmas Carol had been found. The song was “When Love is Gone,” sung by Meredith Braun as Belle. Fans took to social media to express confusion, saying that they remembered that song being in the film already. Many went on to say that the movie was better off without that number, insisting that the slow, sentimental song (which didn’t even include any Muppets!) was a show-stopper, and not in the good way.

I’m going to explain the complicated history of “When Love is Gone,” and why it’s actually essential to The Muppet Christmas Carol.

The tune was always supposed to be part of the movie, with its intended place occurring about 45 minutes into the film when the Ghost of Christmas Past caps off her guided tour of Ebenezer Scrooge’s formative years by making him revisit the day his fiancée, Belle, broke off their engagement. Not long before the movie’s 1992 theatrical release, Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg observed fidgety kids in test screenings during that scene. He insisted that the song be cut, stating that it would lose the younger audience members. Brian Henson and the rest of the creative team pushed back, but they found themselves at a stalemate.

Eventually, a compromise was reached. “When Love is Gone” would be, well, gone, from the theatrical release, to assuage Katzenberg’s concerns about restless rugrats. However, when the movie was released on VHS, it would be restored to its proper place so audiences could experience it as intended. So if you remember the song from your youth, you’re probably remembering watching it on videocassette in the comfort of your own home sometime in the 1990s.

In the early 2000s, The Muppet Christmas Carol was released on DVD. As was not uncommon in this era, the DVD included both “full screen” and “widescreen” versions of the film. (DVDs were still relatively new and most TVs were 4:3 rather than 16:9. Audiences were used to home media releases being modified to fit their screens, so most movies had the picture cropped on the sides via the notorious practice of “pan and scan.”) Here’s where it gets interesting. The “full screen” version was the same as the VHS release, so it included “When Love is Gone.” The “widescreen” version was the theatrical cut, so it had the song omitted!

Check out the back of the DVD release, which touts the full screen version as including a “deleted scene!”

To make things even more complicated, a rendition of “When Love is Gone,” sung by Martina McBride, plays over the end credits no matter which version you’re watching!

Why didn’t they add the song back into the widescreen version too? This is where the song being “lost” comes in. It was the original widescreen version of the scene that had gone missing. And, as the “full screen” format in general began to fade from popularity, so too did the version that included the song. Surely any future re-releases would be of the theatrical version going forward.

It wasn’t until 2020 when Disney went back to the original negatives to prepare a possible 4K release that an additional reel of film was discovered. Brian Henson was brought in to see if it was anything that would be useful for the re-release. Lo and behold, it was the original footage of “When Love is Gone.” They quickly went to work on restoring and reinserting it back into the movie.

The cropped “full screen” VHS and DVD version on the left, the restored widescreen on the right.

So where can you watch the complete version? The most recent Blu-ray release is still the theatrical cut, sans song. The only place you can currently watch The Muppet Christmas Carol, in its highest quality widescreen format with “When Love Is Gone” included, is on Disney Plus – but even there it’s a bit hidden. If you just click “Play” on the movie, you’ll get the truncated version with no song. Instead, click Extras. There’s an option to watch the song on its own, or, to watch the “Full Length Version” which includes the song back in its proper place.

So why does the song matter? It’s slow, it’s sad, it’s sentimental, and it must be superfluous if it was able to be cut without impacting the film, right? Wrong. It’s actually crucial to Scrooge’s character arc, and the movie doesn’t work nearly as well without it.

In the theatrical cut, we observe young Ebenezer Scrooge with Belle on a park bench on Christmas Day. Belle points out that it’s been another year and they still aren’t married. Scrooge attempts to justify this by saying that business continues to be poor and they can’t afford a wedding right now. Scrooge insists that he does love Belle. “You did, once,” she replies. Then she gets up and walks away from him. Cut to Rizzo the rat bawling his eyes out, and the modern-day Scrooge begging the Ghost of Christmas Past not to show him any more of this. It’s an extreme reaction to what we’ve just seen and does not feel at all earned. We can read between the lines that they broke up, but it’s only implied by the brief conversation. It certainly doesn’t carry the weight that would justify the reactions of Rizzo or Scrooge.

In the version with the song, the scene goes on as Belle lyrically laments:

There was a time when I was sure
That you and I were truly one
That our future was forever
And would never come undone
And we came so close to being close
And though you cared for me
There’s distance in your eyes tonight
So we’re not meant to be

Meredith Braun’s voice is gentle yet powerful, conveying sorrow but with a sense of conviction. It’s a compelling performance. As Belle sings, Young Scrooge approaches her several times, trying to touch her arm or put a hand on her shoulder. Each time she turns and walks farther away from him.

Old Scrooge, though he only exists in ghost form and cannot be seen or heard by young Belle, stands beside her and joins her in singing. It’s the first time we’ve heard Scrooge sing. Michael Caine purposely doesn’t match Ms. Braun note for note. His timing is a little off from hers; he is about a half a beat or so behind her.

“And yes, some dreams come true,” the song goes. “And yes, some dreams fall through.” Scrooge stumbles over this lyric. He gets choked up and starts to cry. That line got to him. We’ve found a moment that he regrets. There is a consequence to his actions, and we can see that he feels it. Now, the fact that Rizzo was moved to tears makes sense.

The scene is a turning point for both Young Scrooge and Old Scrooge.

Before this, everything we had seen of Young Scrooge indicated that he didn’t understand or particularly care about Christmas, but he didn’t seem like he hated it. We saw him as a boy, using the Christmas holiday to catch up on his studies at boarding school. We saw him as a young adult, poring over the books at Fozziwig’s Rubber Chicken Factory and questioning why his boss would waste money on a party. But it’s not until after his split with Belle that he seems to truly despise the holiday, wishing ill upon anyone who celebrates it.

Old Scrooge changes as well after seeing this flashback. Prior to this we don’t see an ounce of remorse in him. Seeing the Marley Brothers spooked him, and he was surprised and amazed at seeing the sights and sounds of his past. But nothing seemed to really get through to him before this moment. He was skeptical, bitter, and kind of annoyed at having to go through this time-traveling nonsense in the first place.

Once he has re-experienced his breakup with Belle, his attitude is different. The next spirit he meets, the Ghost of Christmas Present, asks him, “Have you ever noticed that everything seems wonderful at Christmas?”

For the first time, Scrooge doesn’t answer with a “Bah, humbug!” or other expression of disgust. Instead, he looks a bit ashamed. He hesitates. Then he admits, “In all honestly, spirit, no. Perhaps I’ve never understood about Christmas.”

The ice around his heart has been chipped away a bit. For the first time, the adult Scrooge is willing to concede that maybe Christmas is something he just doesn’t get. That maybe, just maybe, he’s been in the wrong.

The song is reprised at the end of the movie, when Scrooge, seated at the head of the Cratchit family table, leads the whole town in “The Love We Found.” It’s an emotional coda that harkens back to the day he lost his love. It’s a total tonal contrast between the moment that left Scrooge bitter and broken, and the day he allowed himself to accept and be accepted by the people around him. The emotional high of “The Love We Found” is not nearly as poignant when it doesn’t have that juxtaposition with “When Love is Gone.”

It’s getting to be that time of year when we all put on our favorite Christmas movies as we wrap presents, drink eggnog, and get into the spirit of the season. If The Muppet Christmas Carol is on your to-watch list, I’d encourage you to watch it with “When Love is Gone” this year. You might just see the story of Scrooge’s journey a little differently.

After all, wherever you find love, it feels like Christmas.

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

Waxing Nostalgic

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When I was a kid, there was no more magical place to visit than Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Just across the U.S./Canadian border were not only the awe-inspiringly majestic waterfalls that provide the city’s namesake, but also a veritable wonderland of tourist attractions. Clifton Hill and the surrounding streets of Victoria Avenue and Falls Avenue are lined with restaurants, arcades, mazes, haunted houses, and, my personal favorite, two wax museums: Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks and Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars.

You might be asking yourself, does the town really need two wax museums? How different can they be? As someone who has visited both of them numerous times over the years, I can tell you that they each have their own style. Louis Tussaud’s has mostly statues of celebrities (actors, musicians, even politicians) in a gallery environment where you can pose with the figures and take photos with them. Movieland has figures of characters from movies or TV shows displayed in scenes that are set back in such a way that you can view them but not get up close to them. There are exceptions to these rules at both museums (Movieland has a really great superhero gallery at the end with tons of figures you can pose with), but by and large that is what distinguishes them from one another.

Me with Superman and Batman in the superhero gallery at Movieland in 2022

Both museums currently reside at different locations than they did when I was a kid. They were originally across the street from each other at the bottom of the hill. Tussaud’s has since relocated all the way to the top of the hill and is technically on Victoria Avenue now and not on Clifton Hill proper. Movieland didn’t move quite as far, now residing about halfway up the hill across from the Rainforest Café. They have been in their current locations since around 2005.

Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks

Here is a picture of me as a young tyke, circa 1991, where you can see the original Louis Tussaud’s on Clifton Hill in the background. Compare that to the picture on the right of the museum’s current location on Victoria Ave.

Here are a couple of photos from the old Tussaud’s location. Left, my dad with Ronald Reagan. Right, Martin Luther King Jr. Neither figure is included at the current location, although there is still an area with many historical figures.

My wife remembers the original location having a “torture chamber” display in the basement, with statues in medieval torture scenarios – complete with placards describing what these poor souls were being subjected to. I can tell you for a fact that I did not visit this part of the museum! This area was apparently scrapped when the museum moved up the hill. (There is some torture stuff on display at the nearby Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum, if that’s your cup of tea. Also, Tussaud’s and Movieland both have optional “horror” sections that you can skip if you’re a chicken like me…!)

Even in more recent times, the statues at Tussaud’s change fairly frequently as celebrities enter or exit the public eye.

Here’s me with Bruce Willis in 2007. Bruce is no longer on display.

Here’s me with Christina Aguilera in 2007, also no longer on display. I guess the genie went back into her bottle.

Here’s my wife, Amanda, with Oprah Winfrey in 2007. Oprah is no longer on display.

Here’s me with Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and James Dean in 2007. None of them are on display today.

Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman seems to have had a wardrobe downgrade over the years. The top photo, from 2007, has her in a very faithful vinyl version of her Batman Returns costume. In 2024 she is in a different mask (the “ears” are too long), and the rest of her costume is a different fabric that doesn’t match her mask or boots. Her pointy fingernails are gone as well. No clue what might’ve happened to Selina Kyle’s original threads. It’s a shame, because the old outfit was purrrfect.

Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars

The original Movieland location can be seen in a photo from an old brochure that I still have from the 1990s. Note that it was just called “Movieland Wax Museum,” and they had not yet added the “Of The Stars” to its title. The current location is in the photo on the right for comparison.

Movieland originally had an Indiana Jones display at the entrance to the museum, where Indy was suspended from the ceiling via a rope. This can be seen in a photo from that 1990s brochure. Today the same figure is still in the museum, but he’s been relocated to a completely different display.

Also near the entrance to the museum was a statue of Marilyn Monroe standing over a grate. Every so often, a gust of air would blow upwards and make her skirt flutter, mimicking the famous scene from “The Seven Year Itch.” Marilyn is no longer on display at Movieland.

Also in that old 1990s brochure was a figure of Eddie Murphy from Beverly Hills Cop. Mr. Murphy is no longer on display.

One of the first scenes Movieland added that visitors could pose in was The Simpsons, sitting on their famous living room couch. As you can see from these pictures, that scene has changed over the years as well. The first photo is from that old brochure, and you could not pose with the family – note that Bart is standing on the couch. The second photo, taken in 2002, moved Bart to a stairwell and allowed fans to sit on the couch next to Homer, who was wearing a new shirt. In the third photo, taken in 2024, note that both Homer and Marge have changed clothes, and baby Maggie is missing.

In this 2002 picture of Darth Maul, we can see him holding his infamous double-ended lightsaber. In 2024, the lightsaber is gone – perhaps some aspiring Sith lord absconded with it? – and Maul is instead holding onto his belt, which seems a bit strange. Jar Jar is still there, he’s just mercifully not in the photograph.

In 2002, E.T. had his finger pointed outward so you could recreate the famous “ouch” moment with him. Either that, or that mischievous Extra Terrestrial wanted you to pull his finger. By 2024, his arm had been repositioned so as to force E.T. to keep his digits to himself.

Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Michael Keaton’s Batman were originally part of a display based on the bell-tower scene from the 1989 film. By 2024 they had both been relocated to a window display at the front of the museum and are now joined by Heath Ledger’s Joker. (There’s a Joaquin Phoenix Joker at Tussaud’s… if they were all at the same museum they could do a Three Jokers display!)

Other Attractions

These photos aren’t from either of the wax museums, but since they are from Clifton Hill I thought I’d share them. On the left is the exterior of the House Frankenstein, circa 1991. Note the monster looks like the Boris Karloff version of the character, and he’s accompanied by the Bride of Frankenstein. Sometime well before 2024 they were replaced by the version on the right – a more generic version of the monster and a mad scientist bringing him to life. No more Bride. (I guess Franky got to keep the house?)

Here’s a picture of me with a statue of the world’s tallest man, Robert Wadlow, taken at the now defunct Guinness World Records Museum. There is an animatronic statue of him that alternates between standing up and sitting down in the Ripley’s museum today.

Last but not least, here’s a picture from inside the Fun House, which used to have a wall of cartoon figures that you could stick your face through. That part of the attraction is long gone, along with many other elements that have been changed out over the years. I have a vivid memory of a giant skeleton behind glass at the end of the Fun House that was supposed to light up as you walked by it, but the lights were not working. The image of the huge skeleton in the dark was a very creepy way to end a walk through a Fun House! At least there wasn’t a torture chamber!

And that, at least for this edition, my friends… is the whole ball of wax!

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

VHS Memories

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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 Top of the Stairs

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It’s Christmas morning. Val, Josh, and I are at the top of the stairs, waiting for the okay from Mom and Dad to come down and feast our eyes on all those glorious presents.

“Can we come down yet?” Val is the one to ask. The middle child, but in many ways the leader of our trio. She doesn’t think of herself that way; she is just always the one to want to clear things up, set the record straight, or be the mediator of any conflict. I often refer to her as Josh’s attorney/interpreter because she will jump in on his behalf in any argument, major or minor.

“Not yet,” Mom replies from the kitchen. “I’m making coffee and Dad is getting the video camera ready.”

The suspense is almost too much to bear. We’ve waited so long for Christmas to arrive. This is the final obstacle to overcome before getting our hands on those gifts! As frustrating as it may be to three young kids, it’s a moment that is magical in its own way. It stretches things out just a little longer, letting the excitement build just a little more.

Josh, the youngest and most adventurous, sneaks down a few steps and peeks around the corner. He needs confirmation that there really are presents down there. “He came!” he whispers excitedly as he hurries back up the stairs. “Santa came!”

It plays out this way year after year, becoming a tradition of its own.

Years later, when I am a teenager, I stay in bed, refusing to emerge from my room until we get the green light from Mom and Dad to come downstairs. Val and Josh are appalled. The drawn-out moments of anticipation at the top of the stairs are part of Christmas morning. How could I possibly sleep through them? What they don’t know is that I am wide awake, trying to play it cool. I can’t make it seem like I’m too eager. Me trying to “sleep in” on Christmas morning becomes a new layer to the bit.

Now, as adults, long since having moved out and living in our own homes with families and traditions of our own, my siblings and I still text each other on Christmas Eve:

“See you at the top of the stairs.”

The Warner Brothers Studio Store

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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

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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 13th 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

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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.

capn
Imprisoned by the Sogmaster

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.

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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!

Why I Read Comics – Part One

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My wife and I were at Wal-Mart shopping for school supplies for our 5-year-old son who will be starting kindergarten in the fall.  We wandered up and down the aisles, consulting the list: pencils, glue, markers, tissues, backpack… As we came to the display of backpacks, it was hard not to notice a common theme.  Batman.  Iron Man.  Spider-Man.  Captain America.  The backpacks (and in fact, lunch boxes, and much of the back-to-school apparel as well) were almost all adorned by a veritable who’s who of superheroes.

“Superheroes were never this popular when we were in school, were they?” Amanda asked.

“No,” I answered quickly and with a laugh.

“Man,” she replied.  “You must be loving this!”

I didn’t answer.

Do I love that superheroes are everywhere now?  It’s not quite that simple…

Incredible_hulk_tv

When I was three years old I used to love watching The Incredible Hulk TV series with my mom.  I was obsessed with the transformation scenes, when Dr. David Banner would turn into the Hulk, or vice versa.  They were my favorite parts of every episode.

“When is he going to change, Mom?” I would ask, eagerly.

“You just have to keep watching,” Mom would patiently reply.

Children just kind of assume that their parents have some sort of innate gift of precognition. After all, their parents are always telling them “We’re leaving in 10 minutes,” “You’re going to bed in 5 minutes,” etc.  Why wouldn’t my child self assume that my mom would be able to tell me exactly when David Banner was going to Hulk Out?

Finally, the inevitable would happen. Banner would be caught by the bad guys, who would beat the crap out of him and throw him into some kind of trap.  He would get angry, the music would swell, his eyes would turn white.  His clothes would rip as his muscles grew and turned green.  With a growl and a roar he would rise up, the transformation complete!  The one, the only, the Incredible Hulk!

“Now when is he going to change back??” would of course be my immediate next question.

One day in the fall of 1986, when I was four years old, I was at Wegmans with my dad, getting some groceries.  My dad happened to park the cart for a moment next to a magazine rack.  I noticed something on that rack that looked very familiar.  Even though I couldn’t read yet, I recognized the word on the cover because it was in the same big block letters that I saw every time I watched my favorite TV show with my mom.  “HULK.”  The picture on the cover showed a man transforming into a giant gray monster.

“Dad!!  Dad!!” I cried excitedly.  “It’s a book about Hulk!!  It’s a book about Hulk!!”

hulk_324

I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was looking at was Incredible Hulk #324, the issue that brings back a gray incarnation of the character that first appeared in Incredible Hulk #1.  I begged my dad to buy it for me.  With a cover price of just 75 cents, my dad relented and bought me my very first comic book.  He would have no idea that he was spending those three quarters on something that would ultimately turn into a lifelong hobby for his son.

That night, my dad read that comic book to me as my bedtime story. The story started off with Doctor Banner captured and being held at the mysterious Gamma Base, unconscious and in some kind of restraints with lots of people watching him.  On the very next page, he transformed into the Hulk, still unconscious and restrained!  He then transformed rapidly back and forth between Banner and Hulk for several pages before busting out of his restraints.  To a kid who was obsessed with the transformation sequences, this was pure gold.

The story ended with Banner turning into a gray Hulk and then turning back to normal, feeling that he may finally be rid of the Hulk after all.  A message at the end of the comic book proclaimed: “You Won’t Believe It!  We Don’t Believe It! The NEW Hulk!”  I was hooked.

Over the following months my dad bought me the next issue, and the next, and the next.  We would read them together at bedtime, and in the long stretches as I waited for the next monthly installment to come out we would re-read the old ones.  To help fill the gap between issues my dad would sometimes buy me other, non-Hulk, comics. Some others I have vivid early memories of – “Man of Steel” #5, where Superman fights Bizarro;  “Superman” #19, where his powers are siphoned off one by one by a mysterious new villain; “Web of Spider-Man” Giant Sized Annual #3, which featured profiles of all of Spider-Man’s allies and villains.  Oh, and a special Nestle’s Quik promotional issue called “Superman meets the Quik Bunny.”  Veering further away from the superhero genre and into the realm of other soft-drink tie-ins, I also had several “Adventures of Kool-Aid Man” comics, where the big anthropomorphized pitcher of punch known as Kool-Aid Man fought Scorch, who was a being made of fire who hated how cool and refreshing Kool-Aid Man was.  But, despite how awesome that sounds, my favorite of all was still the Hulk.

quik  koolaid

Comic books are how I learned to read.  I wanted to be able to read them on my own, so I basically taught myself to read by sounding out the words and correlating them to what I already knew from hearing the story so many times.  There was one thing that made this especially difficult, however.  What I didn’t know was that my dad was paraphrasing those Hulk comics as he read them, and “toning them down” for the sake of his four-year-old audience.  Those comics were not really written for kids.  Bruce Banner is suicidal in issue #328, contemplating the idea that killing himself might be the only true “cure” to being the Hulk.  In the very first issue that I owned, #324, when Banner is caught in mid-transformation, he begs a group of SHIELD agents to kill him.  The darker themes of those issues flew right over my young head, regardless of my dad’s reworking of the dialogue or not.  I just wanted to see a guy turn into a monster and smash stuff.

The issues continued to descend into even darker fare.  Todd McFarlane, probably best known today as the creator of Spawn, took over the artistic duties on Incredible Hulk starting with issue 330.  His style lent itself to a more sinister incarnation of the Hulk, really bringing out the more monstrous aspect of the character.  Peter David, the writer, seemed to tailor his writing to match McFarlane’s style.  Issue 333 was the most disturbing yet, as it dealt with a woman who has been beaten by her husband so many times that she considers killing him.  A lot of it continued to go over my head.  The idea of a husband beating up his wife was so completely foreign to me that it didn’t even really occur to me that that was what was going on, but McFarlane’s image of a woman with a black eye and puffy lip holding a gun certainly still registered in my mind as being messed up.  My dad struggled way more than usual to come up with dialogue that made any sort of sense in a G-rated format.

blackeye

After that issue my dad told me he didn’t think he could buy me any more Hulk comics because they were getting too violent.  We skipped a few issues and he did eventually buy me #337, which gave me my first ever glimpse of the X-Men (Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Ice Man guest-star in the issue, although technically at that point they were members of a spinoff group called X-Factor rather than the true X-Men).  Appropriately, the issue ends with Gamma Base, which was the primary setting of most of the issues I owned, being blown to smithereens in a bomb blast set by SHIELD Agent Clay Quartermain.  It was the end of an era for me as well as for the comic.

I continued to cherish the issues that I had and re-read them frequently, on my own and still sometimes with dad.  I even have a few cassette tape recordings that still survive to this day of my dad reading me the old Hulk comics, because I was obsessed with recording things on my tape recorder.

But I knew my parents really objected to them now.  They reacted and spoke very differently about me continuing to read those comics (I am certain issue 333 is what pushed them over the edge) and would always refer to them as being “too violent.”  It was clear that they did not approve of my Hulk obsession anymore.

One day, in an effort to please my parents, in the ultimate act of a kid trying to do what he thought his mom and dad wanted, I threw all my Hulk comics in the trash.  That’s right, of my own free will, probably age five at this point, I gathered up every issue that I owned and discarded them.  I proudly told my parents what I had done.  I did not get the reaction I expected.  I thought they would be happy, proud, elated that I had done the right thing and disposed of those wretched, violent comics that had no doubt been corrupting me.  Instead they seemed surprised, and I could tell they felt bad that they had driven me to do that.  “Are you sure you want to do that, buddy?” they asked.  The trash had not been taken out yet and I’m sure they were wondering if they should save them in case I had a panic attack once I’d come to my senses and realized what I’d done.  But, I was adamant that I had done the right thing and confident in my very mature decision.

It would not be until much later, when I was in my teens, that I would gradually track down and purchase all of those old issues again, via back issue bins, conventions, and online orders.  (Lest you thought that my meticulous memories of each issue number and corresponding content were all from three decades ago, they are not – although a lot of it certainly stuck with me.)

Even after throwing away the old Hulk issues, I still really liked comic books.  The blend of words and pictures to create a story resonated with me, and kept me interested in reading.  I still had the Superman, Spider-Man, and Kool-Aid Man ones I mentioned earlier, and my dad continued to buy me some more lighter fare in the form of ALF, Ninja Turtles, and DuckTales comics.  I loved any Carl Barks or Don Rosa Uncle Scrooge comics, although at that point I was not really registering the names of any of the writers or artists who were creating these stories.  I remained very interested in comics but I would not say that I was actively collecting them or keeping up with what was new and coming out at any given time.

alf   unclescrooge

That would change in November of 1992.  I still remember being in school, in my 5th grade class, and our REACH teacher Mr. Dupra saying, “Hey, Dimino, do you know what today is?”

I thought for a minute.  I don’t know… Wednesday?  What’s he getting at?

“What?” I asked.

“Today is the day Superman dies,” he replied.

November 18th, 1992 was the day that Superman #75 came out.  It was “The Death of Superman,” and everything was about to change.

Grandpa

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Grandpa

The smell of pipe tobacco takes me back like a sensory-fueled time machine. I’m back in the old house on English Road, and Grandpa is sitting on the couch. He’s wearing his blue Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, smoking his pipe, and the old black-and-white Batman serials are on the TV.

I brought over my binder full of Marvel superheroes trading cards to show him, with several new pages of entries since the last time. I tell him who everyone is, and he adds some anecdotes of his own on the Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, and Captain America; all characters that he remembers fondly from when he was a kid like me who read comics and loved superheroes.

Outside in the backyard I can still smell the faint hint of chlorine in the air and feel the grass under my bare feet. My fingers are wet and wrinkly as I grab another cracker from the small brown bowl on the patio table, and I eat it even though I know it will have a slight pool-water taste.

Grandma has made another batch of her famous peanut-butter chip brownies. There is a whole Tupperware container of them hidden somewhere in the house, a tradition that started simply due to the fact that my brother would get into them within seconds of us getting to their house. The brownie treasure hunt only makes them more rewarding and taste that much sweeter.

Val, Josh and I head down to the basement. I can still feel the damp coolness setting in as we walk down the creaky steps. The pool table, the bar with the “Cold Beer” sign, the little old TV, and the bookcase full of mystery novels make it the coolest hangout ever. We stay down there for hours, hiding the pool balls, cracking jokes, playing games and making up stories. When our cousin JD is in town for a visit, that basement becomes a whole other world. We make movies with the video camera, creating our own zero-budget adventures as we transform the basement into a crime-fighting headquarters, or a seedy underworld tavern where ghetto secret agents do battle with evil scientists.

I’ll always feel a special connection with my grandfather. Not just because we share the same first name or a love of superheroes, but I think because we share the same quiet sense of humor as well. I can still hear him saying “Some joke, eh boss?” and cracking that wry smile. Any time my grandma would ask him to remind her about something, for example if she’d say, “Remind me to call Susan,” he would wait approximately three seconds and say, “Hey, don’t forget to call Susan!” I pull that same joke on my wife, Amanda, today. (She finds it about as amusing as my grandma did.)

Near the end of his life, after he’d had surgery due to throat cancer, he could no longer enjoy the big Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners with the family. He’d sit at the table with just a can of Ensure, which was all he could consume at one sitting. I didn’t know how he could stand it, sitting there while everyone else was enjoying such amazing food that he could not partake in himself. I am sure it must have bothered him, but he didn’t let it show. Ironically it would only be a few years later, when I was in the very worst stages of my battle with Crohn’s disease, that I would regularly find myself in essentially the same situation, watching family and friends enjoy meals that I knew I’d never be able to touch. The greatest thing I could have ever taken from my grandfather was the ability to keep that sense of humor. I remember vividly, even drinking something as simple as the can of Ensure, when he’d start to gag and choke, going into a brutal coughing fit. He’d put a hand over his mouth, coughing and coughing and coughing, his face turning red as he put up his index finger as a simple “wait a minute” indicator… and then, when the coughing fit finally passed, he’d clear his throat, blink his eyes a few times, and say, “Boy! That’s good stuff!”

It’s been 12 years now that he’s been gone. But, whenever I catch a smell of pipe tobacco, it’s like he’s still there, sitting on the couch, ready to look at my latest batch of Marvel cards and reminisce about the Golden Age of superheroes with his grandson.

Christmas Eve at Mema’s

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It’s Christmas Eve and I am five years old. I am at Mema and Pepa’s house for a big Christmas Eve party. Packed into the small sunroom at the back of the house are Aunt Karen and Cousin Nick, Aunt Jeneane and Uncle George, Aunt Chris, Great Aunt Marian, and of course Mema and Pepa, my parents, and my baby sister Valerie. The picture windows reveal fresh-falling snow against the nighttime sky while the wood burning stove keeps the room all toasty and warm.

Presents are being handed to us kids faster than we can open them. Mom asks me who that Thundercat action figure is from, trying to compose a thank-you card list in her head. It’s too late, Mom, that was three presents ago and I don’t even remember who gave me the one I am opening right now.

Christmas music plays softly in the background, just beneath the sound of ripping wrapping paper, the click-clack-flash of cameras, the clinking of glasses, and the sounds of laughter. I swear I just heard a “Ho Ho Ho!” from the other room. I think it was Pepa, but it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if Santa himself couldn’t resist making a brief cameo at this shindig.

The food that is laid out on the dining room table looks like it could feed a group ten times this size. Turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, salad, biscuits, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce. I’m too picky to appreciate half of it at age five, but even I can’t deny that the aroma in the air is enough to make your stomach growl.

Nick and I stage an epic fight between my Silverhawks and his Ninja Turtles, ducking behind piles of presents that form the battlefield. The floor is covered with cookies, Muscle Men, Ghostbuster Cereal, Pee-Wee colorforms, and trucks that go wheelies. We play and giggle until we are exhausted.

Finally the time comes to trek back out into the snow and pile into the car. It’s freezing cold in the back seat and my mom wraps a blanket around me. As we drive home I look at my little sister asleep in her car seat. I look out the window at the snow, still falling so gently down from the pitch-black sky. I stare in wonder at each house that is lit up with Christmas lights as my eyelids start to get heavy. I think about the fact that tomorrow morning is Christmas, and there will be even more presents and fun to be had.

I drift off to sleep in the back seat feeling warm, safe, and content.

This is what Christmas Eve feels like to me.