On a nearly moonless night in late May, as I stumbled down a wide, smooth path near a large campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it suddenly occurred to me that I can’t see in the dark anymore. I’m not sure when I lost this ability, since I hardly ever get to test it these days; most of my life has…
Stephen King’s dark imagination as an adult always makes people wonder what the hell happened to him as a kid. But King didn’t have that unusual of a childhood. He’s more interested in everyone else’s curiosity about how he grew up and their assumption that something horrific must have happened for him to write about…
Our friends at The A.V. Club just published an insanely awesome oral history of the obstacle course from Nickelodeon’s classic game show Double Dare, and it’s chock-full of icky, messy fun. This look behind-the-scenes comes is timed right: Nickelodeon is airing a one-night only Double Dare special on Wednesday to…
There was no happy ending, no neat resolution, when Moe bullied Calvin out of his toy truck. But during that two week stretch of Calvin & Hobbes strips from 1989, cartoonist Bill Watterson made a dark but salient point about how unfair life can be. It was a gutsy move, and it resonated with anyone who had a less than…
Apparently some people are angry that the new Ghostbusters movie has “ruined their childhood.” But I must confess that this came as a shock to me. Because either these people discovered a way to travel back to the 1980s... or they don’t understand how the simple progression of time works.
I was never a pillowcase kid. Fill the sheets that I put my head on with the goods, risking an errant Mr. Goodbar besmirching my sleeping quarters? No thanks. Besides, a pillowcase would need to go in the wash eventually. My plastic pumpkin was a dedicated trick-or-treating device. And somehow, it managed to stay…
There’s a stupid obsession with the 90’s that’s weird because the 90’s were pretty boring and really just speaks to our base desires of wanting to re-live childhood because all of us are old and slowly deteriorating into dust. But still, even cold hearted me can appreciate this supercut of Disney movies from the 90’s.
In following Pinky and the Brain's hilariously cursed cartoon quest to take over the world, we kids get to see a story about the classic odd couple and the funny hijinks they run into. What we don't see is the truth that adults willfully ignore: that lab rats live a miserable life and would totally want to rule the…
I think this animation should totally be a test to see if you're a decent human being who remembers the 80's or 90's: if you have feelings of nostalgia or get some tingles when you see some of these animations, you're a human! If you don't, you're a sad robot (or a sucker who wasn't around when life was fun).
Japan has selected the adorable robot cat Doraemon as its special ambassador for its 2020 Olympic bid. And as we all know, Akira predicted the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. That can mean only one thing...
Here is some guaranteed nostalgia for you. Follow the life of a Game Boy in this wonderful animation: watch it get assembled in a factory and packaged for an excited kid and see it get played by youthful thumbs and then eventually be tossed away by a teenager. It's every toy's story. Throughout its journey you'll see…
Do you know what the most disappointing thing about being an adult is? It's not the slow metabolism or the achy joints or the plateau of growth, it's the fact that we're all failures to our childhood selves. We don't eat candy, we don't play with toys and we drive responsible vehicles. Not John Bitmead though, he's…
Yeah, it's easy to romanticize the past, but there's something almost sweet about Confiscation Cabinets, an exhibition at the V&A's Museum of Childhood showing 30 years' worth of contraband swiped from kids at over 150 schools in London.
Two thoughtful sons came up with a wonderful gift for their mom: they would recreate old childhood photographs of themselves, from 20 years ago, as adults. They would visit the same spots as the pictures, wear similar clothes as their kid self once did, pose the same way as they did two decades ago, and basically…
It's every generation's responsibility to grow old and become cranky at the next generation while talking about how growing up back then was so much more fun than growing up today. THESE KIDS KNOW NOTHING. All they do is stare at iPads and play crappy games by swiping on giant phones. At least we 90's kids stared at…
Computer programs have long been used to help teach children important life skills: Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing a shining early example of a virtual world in which kids could learn.
Aww, remember what life was like as a 2-year-old? Toddling around, barely able to keep your spit from dripping out of your mouth and then not having the capacity to wipe it up. Eating mush. And always, always, chasing after Dadddddd-yyyyy.
Dear Disney,
I hear you're releasing The Lion King in 3D. First you shit out two horrible sequels and now this? Are you trying to ruin my childhood?
When I was growing up, you weren't a kid if you didn't have a sword. Foam, plastic, or even just a tree branch. Naama Agassi's Branch Holder is an elegant reminder of that time when you could really be the neighborhood samurai.
This fall, there'll be a new version of Monopoly called Monopoly Live that places a 10-inch tower right in the middle of the board. Why? Because that tower controls every aspect of the game: it rolls the dice, it calculates rent, it knows whose turn it is and where your piece is on the board, and knows exactly how…
