Yesterday I took Gleek to Blockbuster video. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, and just let you know that she picked “Rainbow Brite: Horse of a Different Color” all by herself. None of my kids had ever seen this particular sappy, sweet, horrid, 80’s-era cartoon. Naturally, they’re all quite taken with it.
This morning Sandra drove halfway to Pocatello to swap Howler for Kiki. Upon arriving home three hours later, Gleek ran downstairs and popped in the video. I’ve caught bits of it, and the video saccharine is almost instantly carcinogenic with just a single exposure.
On my way back downstairs to pencil I caught the intro. “… She lives far away in Rainbow-land …”
Ugh. Not far enough.
–Howard
Yeah, the “free kid’s rentals” sure seem like a good idea at first, don’t they? We ended up with two Care Bear movies and the Snorks.
Personally I think the rental places are in league with the alcohol industry, because it takes a lot of booze to wipe that junk out of your memory. @_@
Get Miyazaki.
It’s a good antidote, and Totoro and Kiki are usually good to grab kids with.
Or else send Schlock to meet Rainbow Brite… RAMBO BRITE!
Re: Get Miyazaki.
We’ve already got both of those, and the kids have tired of them. The tapes come out once every few months, though — they’re great movies.
–Howard
As a child, I started a club called Rainbow Brite Busters. There’s a lot of artwork from that period, saved by my parents, of Rainbow Brite with one of those red “Ghostbusters”-type slashaes through her, or of me shooting her with various types of laser gun. What this says about my young psyche I don’t know.
Don’t be surprised if she wants Rainbow Brite toys…since, after all, that’s what most of the caroons of the 80s were designed to do: sell merchandise.
and that they did, like they had some sort of subliminal message buried in there…
Still do actually, we get the occasional saturday morning re-runs of things like thundercats, sentinals, etc etc. My daughter has me looking on the various nostalgia sites for toys from those.
Actually, I was commenting to my wife and my buddy the other day that when we were kids, you actually got cartoons that could be out for years before toys came out.
Now, the toy line comes out and then the cartoon hits the airwaves to sell the toys.
Yup. That’s one reason I’m a real fan of Animaniacs: they made a cartoon in the 90s that wasn’t a vehicle to sell toys, and was actually funny.
That it was…although WB don’t seem to have released it to DVD…another good cartoon (on many levels) not to get to DVD as yet is “Blazing Dragons”…totally unavailable in the UK AFAIK…got one airing each season on childrens ITV and that was it.
Indeed, WB has not released any of the 90s funny stuff they did to DVD. I bought my iMac originally to copy my collection – Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and Freakazoid! – to DVD.
My niece loved Rainbow Brite and the Care Bears…..
You could entrance her with a bootleg Snow White (Disney at the time said they’d NEVER release their “seed corn” on tape)
Later she went for movies like “Death Row Game Show” and “Death Race 2000” and now…..
Enjoy the saccharine before the desire for SFX kicks in.
Trancesphere Radio
I’ve been listening to Trancesphere Radio during my indoor time today. Excellent stuff. Your “current music” for this post was my tip to go find it.
My work here is done…
My work here is done. I can go to bed happy. 🙂
Rainbow Brite 20 years later…
You are aware that these days, Rainbow Brite is 27 years old, has been in and out of rehab three times (the down side of living in rainbow land for all those years), but is now clean and sober and in a committed relationship with Strawberry Shortcake? (The down side is she’s gained 30 pounds and can’t make a living stripping anymore, so she now works the graveyard shift doing phone sales, at least until her girlfriend’s catering business takes off.)
Both of their residuals from their respecitve series ran out years ago, you know. The whole child star thing. Sad, really…