Brilliant! So many clips, footloose, fame, dirty dancing, splashdance, grease, and more!

Hammer Time!
MC Hammer announced a new clothing line at a UFC fight today. No doubt trying to capitalize on the growing popularity of the sport. His clothing line joins the ranks of several others already on the market competing for UFC fan dollar.

Sadly, there are no over-sized curtain panels made into pants, better known as Hammer Pants, to be found in the lineup.

Sean Duffy from Real World Boston, who now has 5 children and is married to Real World San Fran Alum Rachel Campos, is running for Congress in Wisconsin. Not only that but he’s also a Republican with endorsements from Sarah Palin. Now this seems to fit perfectly with what I recall about Rachel, she was an uber-religious, uber-conservative “bad girl.” Lets also not forget that Rachel kissed Puck! Eww! Scan below from one of the Real World books I have (more on those later)!

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I feel lucky to have survived the years of playing with Lawn Darts and Slip ‘N Slides….these and more are on the Popular Mechanics list of top 5 banned toys and games. Check out this commercial for Crocodile Mile. It looks like miles of danger now!

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30 Retro Cereal Boxes. Some fun stuff! The biggest omission would be NERDS. I was a big fan of nerds cereal even to the point of collecting enough UPCs to get a special nerds cereal bowl. The bowl was divided in half with a “flood gate” between the two sides. I only wish I knew where this bowl was now. Eating cereal could be fun again.

Want your own box of Ghostbusters Cereal? You can actually buy one…I wouldn’t recommend eating it though.

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I had forgotten about the holograms on cereal boxes craze!

Upon checking out the wiki page for USA Network’s Cartoon Express, I discovered a really odd factoid…Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC and who some consider one of the last real journalists, was the narrator of Cartoon Express during the mid 1980’s! Hearing of this I headed straight to youtube to locate any videos that might demonstrate what his narration of the show was like, but I was unable to find any from around that time. You can view what YouTube has for Cartoon Express bumpers and trailers here.

Cartoon Express was a staple for me each and every morning. I remember drag myself out of bed and into the living room, where I would lay half awake watching as much of it as I could before having to get ready for school or falling asleep again.

So many cartoons were shown during Cartoon Express plus the bumpers such as “In A Minute”. My favorites would be Scooby’s Laff-A-Lympics, Shirt Tales, Pac-Man The Animated Series, The Smurfs, and later The Real Ghostbusters and The Snorks, which were just underwater Smurfs.

What was your favorite part of Cartoon Express? Anyone have a video with Olbermann as the narrator?

Yahoo Internet Life (YIL) magazine was a strange little creation from the dawn of the tech bubble. It featured reviews and collections of links to all the latest and greatest on the web circa 1997. We’re talking animated gifs and sites with loads of frames. The issue below, from February 1997, informs us that search engines found 6,000 hits for Elvira. Today that search returns 35,700,000.

Secrets from Super Mario World on SNES. Keep in mind we did not have GameFaqs.com back in the day! These books and Nintendo Power were the only way to “quickly” find tips and help assuming you didn’t want to just spend the 2 hours figuring a hard level out.

Fireball Island was perhaps the largest board game mass produced. At least  I remember the box seeming HUGE! Check out the commerical for it here