A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

The good Cap’n looks delighted to harpoon a jolly, effeminate white whale, who in turn looks delighted to send the crew of the SS Guppy to their watery graves.

While pretty bizarre, at least Captain Crunch used to have a cast of characters and go out on wacky adventures, looking for Crunch Berries or fending off his own megomaniacal nemesis Jean LaFoote. These days he rescues snotty boys and girls from overly-strict authority figures and takes them off on a hyperactive sugar-orgy abaord his ship, which conveniently, kids, is as eerily empty as the Mary Celeste and probably on a windward course for international waters.

To further confuse kids, here’s the corporate website, playing on mom’s fears of poor nutrition for her children. The crazed Cap’n gets a token nod, but otherwise they ignore the fact that they’re pitching their fortified sugar-concoction to kids as a fortified sugar-concoction and pretend it’s health food.

Then there’s the “part of a good breakfast” pitch which has gone on since the dawn of sugar cereals. Basically it comes down to the fact that you need everything else they show on that bountiful spread on the side of the box– the toast, orange juice, milk in the bowl and on the side, and sometimes even bacon, eggs, or grapefruit– to get any actual nutrition in your breakfast.

When I was a kid, cereal for breakfast was IT in the morning. And that’s what the milk was for, cereal, and you couldn’t drink it any other time. My brother, always more willing to test the folks more than I, actually tried laying out the whole breakfast shebang like they suggested one time, and the @#$% never hit the fan any harder than that. “Milk to drink!” my mother mocked when she came across the abomination on the kitchen table. “There’s milk in the goddamm cereal!” She was apoplectic over the extra milk part, mainly, but there was also the ever-puzzling “Whadda think I buy juice for, for it to get drank?” routine thrown in for good measure. And it meant extra dishes, that was probably a sore point too.

I always wanted to live on that boat with Cap’n Crunch.

The cereal image via The Southern Florida Sun Sentinel, via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, via Neatorama.

Happy Foods in Skokie, IL

If there was only one reason to turn back the clock and halt the Wal-Mart-ization of America, this is it. How can you beat Happy Foods? And that early-’70s sort of font and signage. Only early Piggly-Wiggly or Red Owl logos might rival it in the grocery store pantheon. And that’s without a character mascot.
It’s actually a nice little place, too, pre-dating giant megastores that take half an hour to get through, or find anything. Although it looks like something from an era where ground chuck is 59 cents a pound, the window signs (hand painted!) give away the fact that times have changed. Tuna steak? 10 bucks? I’m glad they’ve figured out a way to survive…

The 2-year-old is at that magic window where she’s old enough to recognize and idolize characters from TV, but young enough to believe they’re real. And that’s even if we run into a 6-foot tall felt costumed version who can’t talk to her at a theme park or store opening.
We spent a week at a Sesame Street themed resort earlier this year, where her sense of awe and wonder at Elmo and Cookie Monster looked like it might send her into a state of shock. Dora and Boots here are her current favorites so the reaction was even loopier, ellicting a heart-felt “I love you” to each character as we left and leaving a sweaty minimum-wage employee to wonder how we were raising our kid.
Notice the sign behind Dora, proclaiming K-mart your hurricane safety headquarters and urging shoppers to stock up on supplies. You’d think they could distance the kids from that by a few feet. But only in Florida is the usual seasonal aisle in every store dedicated to hurricane supplies instead of, what, July 4th/picnic stuff we’d see up north right now. The entire state is filled with fireworks and pool toys year round anyway so they had to come up with some scare-mongering to drum up business come summer…

Link: http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Space-Angel-Collection-4/9879

Media-hound Mad Hugo sent me a link to a news release about the long-lost bastard brother to Clutch Cargo, Space Angel, coming to DVD this summer.

Space Angel never had the airplay or following of Clutch, at least where I come from, mainly because of WGN’s cheap “let’s buy one cartoon and run it for the next 20 years” mentality. Everybody saw Clutch Cargo over and over again to the point of ridicule, but the better drawn and arguably much more interesting Space Angel is virtually unknown in comparison. For a kid’s space show in 1962 to not only have a tough-guy eyepatch-wearing astronaut-spy codenamed Space Angel, but to have basic equipment like headphones and stalk microphones, and space suits that are actually different than the characters’ street clothes, is beyond incredible to me. Hollywood wouldn’t catch up to that for several more years for the most part.

And as a kid I didn’t know a thing about Alex Toth or Doug Wildey, but I knew that I liked the way that cartoon looked and that there was something way different about the art. I’ll be sure to grab this set when it comes out, especially at this bargain price. I may gag at the dialogue and story, which I don’t even really remember, but for nostalgia’s sake I’ve even sat through hours of the wretched Rocket Robin Hood when it showed up on cable, so I can take it.

The Clutch & Angel info links go to the fantastic Toon Tracker site, the best use of the web I know about…

Link: http://www.bismarck-class.dk/shipmodels/german_models/admiralgrafspeeterra.html

A buddy sent me this link to a guy building a toy battleship big enough to ride around in. I always wished I had this kind of single-minded determination to be able to stick to one giant project for years at a time. This would be great for tooling around the rivers and lakes down here, but I’ll probably just stick to sinking more manageably-sized r/c sailboats…