And now... these messages

Kind of a boring weekend, as we wait to see if Kimberly has a baby. Meanwhile, I've generally been busy with work, and haven't had any time to post. There's a bunch of stuff I want to write about, most of it involving stuff I've found on YouTube, the best website ever invented. Occasionally at work I'm just waiting for builds or tests to finish, and while that's going on, it's YouTube Research Time.

This week I've been looking at a lot of the old Saturday morning cartoons I used to watch. Sadly, this video is probably a fair representation of my Saturday mornings circa 1984, minus the actual cartoons but with the great network bumpers and commercials:

Yeah, those cartoons based on arcade video games were really bad. I would hate to have been a writer for one of those.

PRODUCERS: You, there! We need to create a cartoon about Q-Bert! GO!
WRITER: @$#$!

But the CBS bumpers I totally remember, as well as Crest vs. the Cavity Creeps, and C3PO's, which I did not make Mom buy... I think even then I could see through the poorly-conceived product tie-ins. Not that it kept me from watching the Dungeons and Dragons poorly-conceived tie-in cartoon:

Actually it's this end-credits clip that blew my mind:

...because it features the oft-watched bumpers with Rick Dees voice-overs (post-"Disco Duck", pre-Weekly Top 40), a Levi's commercial I must have seen at least 100 times that year, and the ending credits, including credits for writers I now recognize after reading way too many comic books (Mark Evanier and Steve Gerber). Plus the Marvel Productions logo. Awesome.

CBS also used to run short two-minute segments called "In the News" in a poorly-conceived and largely-ignored-by-kids effort to educate us in between ads for toothpaste and sugary cereal, and I'm pretty sure this depressing installment about the atomic bomb scared the hell out of me:

Furtherly scary: I remember watching this Muppet Babies primetime special (it's the one where they recreate Star Wars), in the basement of my grandmother's house in West Seattle in December 1984, when the whole city was totally excited about the Seahawks-Dolphins game coming up later that week. And I totally remember the promo for He's Hired, She's Fired, a poorly-conceived Mr. Mom knockoff.

By the way, you can watch all of the Saturday morning network bumpers here. Some really good ones, including the NBC ones from when Casey Kasem was the voice of all that network's promos.

Yeesh. Nostalgia is an ugly, ugly thing. You can really get caught up in it. I recommend using it sparingly.

Next up: the scariest thing ever broadcast over the airwaves. I'm not even kidding. Scariest. Thing. Ever. And it's all thanks to... Max Headroom?