C’mon Fwank

Yo! What’s good people? Josh here…dusting off the computer and sitting down to do a little talking.  Chase has been holding down the fort on the blog end of things, keeping you updated on his interviews he does every week on the radio.  Make sure to check those blogs out every Monday.  Me, I’ve been doing lots of traveling with my TV work.  Believe me, lots of things are coming to the site soon! I’m working on an article as we speak, as well as getting together a couple things to blog about.  One thing in particular I’ll be talking about soon is the demise of KB Toys.  I got a chance to visit a huge KB outlet in Pennsylvania right as they were shutting them all down.  Kind of a farewell, if you will.  Got lots of pics and all that stuff is coming up.  FwankTV stuff is on the way soon too! Give us some feedback on what you want to see! Get at your boys here at CmonFwank! IT WAS YOUR CHILDHOOD TOO!! YOU DESERVE IT!!! Peace.

Josh

Andrea came up with an awesome topic, that with anybody else in the world would have stumped them for a Grandmother story — but not me!

SEASHELLS! Yes, seashells! Who could have known that my grandmother’s bathroom was once entirely seashell themed! Indeed it was.. Coral colors all over the place, starfish strategically placed where she didn’t want me leaning or sitting.. and SEASHELLS! covering the top of her toilet tank. Many is the time I held one of those SEASHELLS! up to my ear, trying to hear the ocean as many times as I was told I could. Never happened.

Wait for it…

SEASHELLS!

OK… Can’t really think of a SEASHELL! themed SuperBonus. But CJ mentioned something that triggered up another memory. In two weeks time on WPTS, Legends of the Hidden Temple host Kirk Fogg is going to be the special guest. There may be the chance of me joining in on the radio show to quiz the Kirk. (Did I really just say that?)

Hopefully my nerves will not get the better of me, as they did during the 1994 Family Double Dare Live Tour. Picture it. Austin, Texas, Spring ‘94. I’m in the center audience of the Frank Erwin (No Relation) Center, watching Phil Moore and Robin Marrella do an awesome job hosting the tour. I was bouncing around in my Super Sloppy Double Dare T-shirt my aunt had just bought (she was angry I didn’t want the Live Tour shirt–I said it looked ugly) and was keeping watch over me.

Robin and Phil went out into the audience asking random Nickelodeon trivia questions in the search for players to come up on stage for the What Would You Do segment. Kids to the left of me, kids to the right of me were hopping around answering questions and earning their way on stage.

Then Phil came up to me. I panicked. I choked. My face was up on the JumboTrons around the arena, as he asked me “What’s the name of the talking dolphin seen weekends on Nick?”

Of course I knew the answer. Of course it was “Flipper!” But… I couldnt make out the word! I was semi-starstruck by this semi-star asking me a direct question.

He couldn’t wait any longer. He had to move on. I was devastated. I vowed never to make the same mistake again if I ever came across anyone with even a remote hint of celebrity. So we shall see if I can have the.. flippers.. necessary to carry a complete conversation with someone who’s been on TV.

OK, so this time Josh kinda padded the ballot box for the WPTS crew and fed them the topic for this week’s story. I told him this one last night–lo and behold, this morning, I was asked to recount it.

Clocks.

One of the countless fascinations I had growing up was of the clock used on Double Dare. I wanted that weird display, I wanted the bright yellow digits. I wanted it to spin around to the funky beat of a drum set. And my grandmother didn’t see the harm in it at all.

She went on a monthlong trek researching and looking up just where she would be able to find such a thing. Then, while cleaning out our storage shed, she came across something. My late granddad’s old sports equipment catalog, circa 1983. I never got to meet him, but he was the head coach for Pampa Middle School in the early 80s (Go Patriots!). His catalog was one of a few items she’d kept but forgotten about.

Anyway, she thumbed through the book and suddenly found the exact thing I had been asking for.. In the form of a basketball court shot clock. 60-second capability, yellow lights, crooked hexagonally shaped numbers. Minus the twenty lightbulbs around the perimeter, it was spot on.

The catalog also had it listed as being $850. Totally out of our grasp. However, she had an idea… this catalog was from 1983. It was now 1991. Surely the price would have gone down. She wrote off to the catalog company for another, more recent edition.

Six to eight weeks later, the catalog arrived and we looked through it together. They were still offering the shot clock… but the price was still out of our budget $600. In all we got an insight into how outrageously priced school equipment was… and she ordered me a set of those weird cardboard bricks meant for indoor pavillions kids can use for playtime.

SUPERBONUS TIME! … Starting to think I need a Flash file of a fanfare to play if the mouse passes that word, but I digress.

Also in that storage shed she found my granddad’s old stopwatch. Thanks to the hands of time and misplacement it was in a bad shape. It had a coating of iodine crusting around the plastic lens that had stained the face of the watch itself. That or maybe just some other reason, caused the watch to jam and stop at the 53 second mark. Being the perfectionist I was, that wouldn’t do.

It took a long time, but I managed to pry off the plastic lens and clean off all the rust and iodine. And I was ingenious (stubborn?) enough to gently pull back the second hand so that it wouldn’t brush the edge of the face. Bingo. There went the jam.

So naturally, with a woring stopwatch now in my posession, I had to find a way to use it in a way that it was not intended. Follow me here. Fox’s Family Double Dare logo had a clock in place of the first ‘O’ in Double. I also had a dry-erase board with a bunch of markers. I also had a new pack of Scotch tape. I also had a lot of free time on my hands.

I drew the DD logo, as best as I could (it sucked eggs), left out that first ‘o’ , and wadded up as much Scotch tape as was necessary to make that stopwatch stick, and stuck it in place and turned it on. Which meant all of it.

I proudly took it into my grandmother’s room to show her, and was promptly yelled at with my full name in that scary threatening tone.

This week, CJ and Andrea came up with the topic of Jumping Jacks in their attempt to stump me with my (world?) famous grandmother stories.

They almost won this round… if I hadn’t un-repressed an embarrassing memory involving me, my grandmother, and a Sesame Street book-on-tape.

The tape in question was called “Bounce Along with Big Bird.” In it, our feathered friend leads the listener in a 40-minute exercise routine, from warmup, to aerobics and calesthenics, to cool down. I’m sure it’s available on eBay; Biggest Loser has nothing on this routine.

But I digress. My grandmother became the victim of my precocious nature, and I led her in the -entire- 40 minute routine one Saturday. She’s 75 today, so at the time she was about 60… if you can imagine a 60 year old woman being forced to do such things as jumping jacks, hugging yourself (!), and pretending you’re crouched in a trash can so you can pop out and be grouchy, you’d easily see why I didn’t want to sour my grandmother’s perfect image!

Now for the bonus: There was a song in that tape in which you’re to square dance, basically, following the caller’s commands, and at certain intervals just skipping in a large circle. One night, having become bored with just skipping in circles, I had the marvel idea of skipping over something. (If you’ll recall from an earlier post, ‘marvel ideas’ of mine usually involve destruction of property.) I found another book-on-tape I apparently didn’t really enjoy, unwound the whole thing, and laid the shiny magnetic tape out on the floor, so I could skip in and out of the weaves and loops I had made.

CJ and Andrea at WPTS very valiantly tried to stump me this week with a completely off the wall topic for this week’s grandmother story… Penguins!

I must admit I was filled with a tinge of panic… for about a split second! But I was reminded of a very special Christmas with a myriad of toys and games that my aunt, mom, and grandmother buried me under a mountain of. One of those was a game — the name of which eluded me on air — it involved a line of magnetic penguins going up a staircase and sliding down a twisting slide, to end up at the bottom of the staircase again.

Neither of us could remember the name of the toy… but after five seconds of Googling, I found it. And it couldn’t have been more simple. PENGUIN RACE!

Courtesy Shop72.com

Now for the SuperBonus… That Christmas was a treasure trove of 80s/early 90s nostalgia. Not only did I get that quirky Penguin Race game, but also:

• Hit Stix, the motion-sensitive electronic drum sticks. Josh was a fan of these too!
• Magic Copier, a toy that’s been re-released by Playskool the last year or so
• Thin Ice, the plastic-cubes-soaked-in-water-then-placed-on-kleenex game (that had penguins on the cover of the box!!!)
• Puffy paint. ‘Nuff said.
• Fisher-Price Little People McDonald’s Restaurant… I played with it as-is for about a month. Then my desire to “close down” places and reopen them reared its ugly head… the McDonald’s soon became a Dairy Queen, albeit with FryKid playscape still attached.