My brother sent me an email in which he said that boredom and computers create strange discoveries, and he sent me a few links that had my brain unearthing nuggets of deep memories that had been long since covered up.
The first link was for Battle Beasts, and while the name rung a bell, and the three elements (wood, water, fire) also struck a visual note, it took actually seeing the little action figures to make me truly remember what they were. The Battle Beasts were a series of maybe two-inch animals that were decked out with futuristic knee-and shoulder-pads, and each had a heat-activated sticker on their chests that told you what their element was in the grand scheme of rauchambeau.
The second link was for Captain Power, another bell ringing name, but less so. After perusing the page, I still had little memory of the action-figure series...the description of the series--an interactive animated show where kids at home could shoot a NES-like light gun at the screen during battle scenes--didn't jog my memory, as I don't remember doing anything like that. After clicking on the link for a picture of the toy, I remembered. It all fell into place. A memory of waiting for a double pie at Little Caesar's Pizza with my Captain Power action figure claiming a back counter, rappelling down an invisible rope, and then blasting the (unseen) badguys came rushing up to the front of my neo-cortex, and my Sunday afternoon with no television to watch the Yankees clinch, the Giants rout the Bucs, or the Jets womp the Titans, was totally complete with a stroll down memory lane.
Thanks, Dan.
And who can forget the M.U.S.C.L.E.s, that horde of inch-and-a-quarter fighting men, all of a uniform pinkish color? Some looked like they were made out of brick, some of stone, some had swords or lances, some came with guns. And all looked like they wore helmets. When Uncle Henry learned what the acronym stood for (Many Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere), he dubbed the 10 Sherwood siblings (in the generation before Pat's and Dan's) the MUSCLEs.
ReplyDeleteWow! Check out the memory on m'Da! I still have one of those M.U.S.C.L.E.s here on my shelf, one that held the most meaning for me after I learned what the acronym on his chest meant: ICBM.
ReplyDeleteDan sent me, or maybe I sent him, the link on M.U.S.C.L.E.s last year sometime...