(no subject)

[rachelmanija]

[Poll #572841]

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

a Three Investigators novel, in fact, gets a cameo in my first novel. *g*

My clothes are wet, my neck is killing me, and my damn glass has broken on the floor, littering it with pale blue shards and a wet stain that soaks into the cement. The book I was reading is still sliding from my lap, the arrogant, aristocratic silhouette of a long-dead movie director embossed on the spine. I catch it before it hits the floor, check the page number and toss it into a crate with the others I haven't gotten around to yet.

I loved those things.

***

What, no Masquerade? No Misfits of Science? No Manimal????

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I LOVED the Three Investigators. I can't remember anything about them (except wasn't the fat boy named Jupiter? And didn't he ride a bike a lot?), but I loved them.

I, personally, am stunned by the lack of Sue Barton, Student Nurse.

I would so totally buy Max Headroom on DVD if it came out. I would pre-order it, without even checking via rental to see if it really was any good.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Manimal! Can I be forgiven for loving it beacuse I was 14 at the time?

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

I loved the Three Investigators too!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Never heard of any of those. But Manimal reminds me of a commercial I can still sing because it came on so many times while I was watching the shows referenced above, for a toy truck:

"The Animal...
The Animal...
Can anything stop...
The Animal?"

Little claw-like thingies pop out of the wheels.

"The Animal! Clawing its way to the top!"

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Strange Luck isn't OUT on DVD. DAMMIT. As soon as it is, I'm buying it.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Wait, wait, wait -- Ellen Kushner? Choose Your Own Adventure? Dude. I think my brain just broke.

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Actually, she wrote 5 of them, although some I only have in Catalan or Spanish, not in English (though they did have an English edition first).

I'm pretty sure I have OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD FOREST and THE STATUE OF LIBERTY OF ADVENTURE. And one in Catlaan that might translate back as THE ENCHANTED REALM or THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM? they're back in NYC, though, so can't check.

[larryhammer]

They're ..., well. Pretty standard Choose Your Own Adventure books. Really.

---L.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

I never read any of those series books as a kid. I don't know how I missed them. So many other people have fond memories of them, and I don't even remember seeing them until I was much older (except Encyclopedia Brown, which sounded dull to me. Did I want to read an encyclopedia? I did not).

[jinian.livejournal.com]

You didn't? I loved our 1966 World Book set. It said the most astounding things about Russia.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I filled out the poll wrong (I'm not quite sure what happened) because I don't think I've ever seen Night Visions (Nightstalker, yes; Night Gallery, yes; but Night Visions, no) but I might have seen an episode of The Fearing Mind.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Did it have a standard sitcom-type story about a Dad who wrote horror stories and his family that intertwined with the horror story he was writing?

smug little Encyclopedia Brown can bite me

[octopedingenue]

I only checked "Land of the Lost" because I vaguely remember a live-action series with a guy and his two kids and muppet dinsoaurs and a terrible theme song playing in Saturday morning cartoons when I was little. "Livin' in the LAND of the LOST! LAND of the LOST!!"

I mourn that choose-your-own-adventure smut fanfiction has never taken off as a genre.

Re: smug little Encyclopedia Brown can bite me

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

'Land of the Lost' was brought to us by Sid and Marty Krofft, who were also responsible for 'Electra-Woman and Dynagirl' and 'Sigmund and the Sea Monsters'.

[marici.livejournal.com]

I was pretty fond of Probe, though I'm not sure how much of my conviction that the secretary was /also/ a genius would have held up to more canon.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

Seconded. XD

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Where there lots of anonymous books purporting to be the diaries of dead teenagers? Or was it just the two Twin Peak books (Laura Palmer's diary and Laura Palmer's secret diary)?

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

You forgot "Go Ask Alice."

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

Missing from your list is The Phoenix, starring Judson Scott (aka Khan's boyfriend who dies in The Wrath of Khan). Cheesy sci fi in the desert! With amulets and freaky powers!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I never even heard of that one, but I'm sure I would have lapped it up if I had.

Also, Khan has a boyfriend??? (Other than Kirk.)

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

I remember the soft drink ads Max Headroom did. That counts, right?

And the only Hardy Boys adventure I recall reading was the Nancy Drew crossover story where they went to Québec city.

[kate_nepveu]

It said a lot about my childhood that the only boxes I checked were for books.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I was surprised at how many of the tv shows I could check off: for a good chuck of my childhood, we didn't have a tv, and when we did, we not only had extremely limited reception, we also had parentally-limited viewing time. I must have mooched off friends and relatives a lot more than I thought. Or caught more later in syndication. Or both.

[canandagirl.livejournal.com]

I saw V as a little girl, but the man-eating lizards gave me nightmares. I have to say, I only watched them because my much older brother wanted to lust after Jane Balder (lead man-eating lizard), and of course I was too stupid to anything else but sit next to him and get freaked out by the whole concept.

I read the Chose Your Own Adventures, but they never had endings I liked. For some reason I always picked the route which caused me to die a terrible and undignified death.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I only saw a tiny bit of V: It wasn't the man-eating that bothered me; it was the guinea-pig eating. Go figure.

[larryhammer]

I inherited from my mother's older siblings a dozen volumes of first-run Bobbsey Twins and two first-run Tom Swifts. I preferred the former, though the habit of titling chapters after an event of the previous chapter, as a sort of spoiler prophalactic, drove me buggy, even at seven. I occasionally pick up a book of one of the later incarnations and after a couple pages, shudder and put it down. I suspect I'd do the same with an original as well. They don't age well, even in memory.

---L.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I loved, and still love, the Three Investigators. Jupiter Jones is clearly a computer geek in training. I want to write a novel about them as adults.

[seajules]

If Probe is the one I'm thinking of, it was Parker Stevenson (aka Older Hardy Boy), not Fisher Stevens (aka zany sidekick in Short Circuit, among other things). And how sad is it that I know this?

Other "cult classics" I watched include:

Wizards and Warriors
The Powers of Matthew Starr
Lightning Force
Super Force
Island City
Voyagers
The Fantastic Journey
Starman

Listing the books would take too long.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Ack! You're right!

Parker Stevenson.

Fisher Stevens.

I never even heard of any of those TV shows, but I read a bunch of Wizards and Warriors books.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I have fond memories of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, even though they were never as good as I wanted them to be. I'd even convinced myself that one of the main psuedonyms used for them wrote better books than the other.

Anyone remember the Star Wars Choose Your Own Adventure Book (not part of the formal CYOA series, but of one of the knockoffs--Choose Your Fate, maybe?) One of the options was to get a nice job with the Empire, settle down, and live a happy, well-paying life. That always kinda amused me.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I watched Max Headroom for a white, quite enjoyed the theme music and the episodes, and then lost interest. I'm not sure why.

I was disappointed that Strange Luck got canceled, and am annoyed it is not yet out on DVD. I want to rent it to rewatch. (And if it really catches my fancy, I'd buy it.)

I think I probably read a Nancy Drew or two, and, at someone's house, probably a Cherry Ames. (The lead character was upset when she played tennis with a boy because he took it easy on her because she was a gurl.)

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I think I watched V on VHS, fairly recently. (Late 1990s or early 2000s.)

Yes, I liked girls' books. Sue me.

[slithytove.livejournal.com]

I preferred Nancy Drew to the Hardy Boys. Hardy Boys stories were too scary.

But best of all I liked a series you haven't mentioned: the Dana Girls. A pair of girl detectives, in the Nancy Drew mode, but better, for some reason. It's been so long I no longer know why. Maybe it was the interaction between the girls. I was an only and somewhat lonely child; maybe it was a subconscious longing for a sibling.

I read a little Tom Swift, but even I could see it was pretty sorry stuff. I didn't really get into SF until running into Andre Norton and Asimov's Foundation series a few years later.

[naomikritzer]

I lived in the UK for a year when I was 13 (1986-87) and discovered the Girls of St. Clare series. I loved it. I have, in fact, always loved boarding school stories -- I adored Burnett's A Little Princess, which is also a (horrifying!) boarding school story, and I adored the Harry Potter books in part because they riffed so perfectly on the British Boarding School Story. (I was actually a little surprised by how well it turns out that the British boarding school story genre works for Americans.)

I did at some point write Girls of St. Clare fanfic, of a "years later, here's what everyone is up to" variety, although I don't think it was actually a STORY so much as a list of what everyone was doing.