On Twitter, regarding the Animalympics posts, Tobias Carroll writes
I am absurdly happy that you did this. Said cartoon had nearly passed into the realm of “things I thought I’d hallucinated.”
Everybody has things like this, don’t they? Even in the age of Google.
One of mine, for example, is an educational cartoon from the late 70s/early 80s, that if I had to characterize it in a single sentence I would say was basically “Civilization, the cartoon series” – it was a series of vignettes about human advancement, with a trippy proggy synth-based theme. I’m not sure if it actually existed and I watched it, or if it’s the remnants of dreams as a kid. Does this ring a bell to anybody else?
Post your own “did I hallucinate that or what?” in comments, or answers to other people’s hallucination-or-did-it-happen TV shows.movies.
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Mine. I remember sitting in my elementary school library, watching a cartoon of some sort for a “fun day” at school. Only thing I remember about it was it was about a family of beavers, and there was a scene where one of the parent beavers used it’s tail to spank the child. I have no clue why, and I remember nothing else about it. Did I hallucinate that?
I remember one where these group of kids… travel in time, maybe? and fight a Tyranosaur-like dinosaur with some cavemen in a jungle during a thunderstorm. The Dinosaur is “defeated” when one of the kids sticks a sword-like tree branch in its eye, allowing them to escape.
It was pretty horrifying to watch a living creature with a branch sticking in his eye, which is why it may have been a nightmare and not an actual kids movie.
I also remember being really angry/sad about the awesome dinosaur getting his eye stabbed.
Mine was Mission Top Secret, an Australian kids TV program from the mid-90s that I vaguely remembered watching after school as a kid.
Unlike the other Australian Childrens Sci-Fi I watched (Spellbinder and The Girl From Tomorrow), I couldn’t remember the title, and had no idea if it actually existed or was an amalgam of several other shows.
The only footage of it I was able to find online when searching was a German version of the opening credits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmICXl6VpPc
It seems someone else has uploaded more footage since, including a full episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vHzIa_dKpU&feature=channel_video_title
So I’m going to have to watch that.
MGK, I think you may be remembering a French-produced show with the English title “Once Upon a Time … Man.” Do these opening credits look familiar?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqFsA7uM7E4
i remember a show where the man dressed as a cat would “interview” things. mostly he would interview quarks, and try to get the difference in opinion between the quark of the top of the stairs and the quark at the bottom of the stairs. he had a woman as what i assume is an assistant, and i think his arm was always in a sling
no one that i talk can remember anything about this show
Okay, there’s a cartoon movie I’m pretty sure I saw late ’70s/early ’80s that I remember being sort of in the style of the Rankin Bass LOTR, but it was different. The whole major conflict involved Night or Darkness or something like that soming to swallow everything (and I believe this is before the Nothing in Neverending Story). PLEASE someone help me out it–it’s been nagging at the back of my mind for years.
My hallucination was a scene from a cartoon where these people were being turned into brick-like things and walking away. I later discovered it to be the second Unico movie. I’d post a link, but I’m on dial-up right now, so…
And MIB, could yours be the animated film “Little Nemo”? I believe the villain is an amorphous dark blob in that one.
@MIB — I remember that as well . . .and about as vaguely as you do, unfortunately.
I actually had one of these that was resolved recently. I can remember when Star Wars was made available for a one-night-only PPV on our cable prior to Return of the Jedi’s release. I had only vague memories of the original, having been very young when I saw it, and was looking forward to watching the cantina scene with all of its odd creatures. However, I was surprised and disappointed when one of the aliens I remembered most wasn’t in it — one who drank by pouring things into the top of his head. For decades after I assumed that I’d dreamed it, until about two weeks ago when I was watching a Best of Rifftrax clip and saw that very scene. Turns out that I must have been exposed to the Star Wars Holiday Special at a young age as well, as the head-drinking alien was part of a skit with Harvey Korman.
@Dystopia
You’re talking about a french/belgian show called “Telechat”. Here’s the IMDB link: http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0294210/combined
Another one: when I was 6, my family went to Hawaii on vacation, and while flipping through channels at the hotel I came across a Japanese show which has forever been burned into my brain. It featured some squid-headed creature that would fire the top of its head off at people; those struck would be turned into little tubes, which the creature would then stick inside little racks inside its head before replacing the top. That sequence has stuck with me for the past 30 years, but I have no clue what it was from.
“The story you’re about to hear is a fib, but it’s short. The names are made up, but the problems are real.”
Vivid memories of the following story, but thus far unable to track down title, author, images, or anything beyond the basic plot:
Aliens drop off “collection probe”, but get blown up before picking it up. Fast forward millions of years: Guy is hiking in the frozen north (Alaska? Northern Canada?), and comes across enormous collection of preserved, presumably dead but maybe suspended-animation creatures, all about 75-100 kg, stretching back to dinosaurs. Around the corner comes a “bag of quicksilver” with menacing protrusions, only moving a mile or two per hour, and heading toward him with obvious intent to add him to the collection. Dynamite doesn’t rattle it, it can cross rivers and climb cliffs, and it just keeps plodding along after him at a slow walking pace. For days. Utterly exhausted/starved/dehydrated after about a week, he gives up. The blob rolls up, hoists him, determines that he’s under the weight threshold for collection (having lost weight during the pursuit), and rolls off.
This was my first exposure to the horror genre (I was probably 7 or so), and it still occasionally gives nightmares.
@Jack-Pumpkinhead
I just went and looked at Little Nemo, but unfortunately that wasn’t it. The thing I’m thinking about was much darker, both in color and in tone. And I think maybe it started out with some sort of prophecy or rhyme about the Darkness coming? All I really remember is a guy who looked alot like the RB Bilbo holding a guttering candle and cowering back against a wall while the shadows got bigger and more threatening.
Much to my own surprise, I was able to find the cartoon in question I talked about (although googling anything about beavers and spanking doesn’t lead one to cartoons right off… Go figure)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f421EaZgbJA
The fact that I had zero recollection of Mighty Mouse being in the story, but I do remember papa beaver spanking the kid beaver says all kinds of weird things about my brain…
MIB – could it have been Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093743/
Mine was Plasmo. I caught a couple episodes when I was late to school back when I was 9 or 10. What I remembered so vividly from this stop motion series of episode shorts was the back-story of Coredor, the intergalatic space mercenary that was after the titular character: His very young childhood, being quite literally a test-tube baby. Born without a mother.
It quite disturbed my 9/10 year old mind. I haven’t yet got around to buying the DVD boxset from the creator’s website, though.
@Mike Hoye – That sounds like Mathnet from Square One on PBS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_One_Television. I loved that show.
Mine is a classic trippy early 80’s adventure show. The credits show a portal sucking a real-life garage band into a cartoon universe along with their dog and truck. The truck (a yellow Toyota/Datsun pickup, I think) turns into a big hovercraft tank thing that drives around on these loop-de-loop and corkscrew roads. I think the dog turned into some kind of (good) monster. The kids were then thwarting some gratuitously fat villain for no clear reason. Essentially standard 80’s fare, but no one seems to remember it but me.
@auf_weiderzen – That’s Kidd Video. I used to go to my friend’s house every Saturday morning so we could watch it together.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBQS1cgsEdU
I seem to remember an anime movie from what must have been the very early 80’s where there was a dude who was possibly a cyborg that drove around a badass futuristic car. There were wires from all over the inside consoles plugged into him, so while it wasn’t a mech or anything, it was quite similar. What really sticks out for me is that the hero dies at the end in the arms of some lady who may have been the inventor of the car, his love interest, or both, while said Spanish guitar-sounding music played in the background.
For years, I thought that I had dreamed or hallucinated much of the final half hour or so of “2001: A Space Odyssey”, from the moment David Bowman falls into the Star Gate to the end of the film. I first saw it in a late Saturday night film slot on a local TV station when I was in grade school, and sheer exhaustion (certainly not boredom–the weird man-ape scenes and shots of spaceships were cool enough to a grade schooler, but by the time poor Frank Poole met his fate, I was riveted) caused me to fall asleep at about that point in the movie, and the imagery of the Star Gate sequence and the transformation into the Star-Child had me convinced that I had dreamed it all up. It wasn’t until years later that I read the book and realized that Clarke (and Kubrick) were the ones that came up with all of that crazy shyte.
I saw so many awesomely funky movies in that late movie slot, including the entire original Planet of the Apes series. (And I still say to this day that the twist ending of “Planet of the Apes” didn’t mess with my wee little head half as much as the sudden shift in “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” from semi-camp to deadly serious. Three movies of getting to know Cornelius and Zira, only to see them get blown away and their baby orphaned. Deal with that at age 10.)
Mine is a music video I saw circa 1999 in Germany, really late one night. It was a fantastic techno song, with the video consisting of clips from Ghost in the Shell. I only saw it once, and wish that I’d noted the artist’s name…
MIB: It sounds like “Faeries”, a 1981 TV special about the fairy king’s shadow, which turns evil and takes over the kingdom. It’s got a definite Rankin-Bass look to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwNJfs9O8RI
Two shows I used to love:
1) Roundhouse – where I learned lame comedy and really terrible puns (now my specialty). Plus, the ending theme music was catchy as all hell. For years, I couldn’t remember the name. My friends all thought I was nuts.
2) This one, I’m blanking on the name. All I remember was it was a game show for kids. There was trivia and a lot of physical challenges. The final part included this giant contraption/maze that the kids would go through to collect…tags…or something. I think the final portion of the maze was a giant water slide?
Mine is a commercial for Chips Ahoy cookies which featured huge, menacing…telephones? Live action, not a cartoon. I also think they were featured in little comics on the packaging at the time? How did this ever make sense?
ThatNickGuy: #2 has to be Double Dare!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Dare_%281986_game_show%29
Graham: Is this what you’re thinking of? I know it’s not GitS, but another Masamune Shirow anime, Patlabor.
Mine I’m almost sure is a dream. It’s just a tiny fragment of a Balrog-looking motherfucker raging inside a volcano, animated in a Don Bluth style.
I actually figured out my biggest one a couple of years ago. It was a TV movie from the late 70’s, about a teenager who was struck by lightning, and gained electrical powers. It turned out, his parents were scientists, and his mother was in some sort of lab accident while she was pregnant with him, which led to him being able to store and release massive amounts of electricity. He had a dial on his wrist which measured his electrical levels, because if they fell too low, he’d die, but if they rose too high, he’d explode. I forget the name, but I later found out that it was the final version of the Human Torch pilot that kept Marvel from using Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four cartoon. By the time it was made, they’d lost the rights to the character back to Marvel, so they made it a teenager with electrical powers instead.
There was another, even older one, that I vaguely remember from my childhood that I can’t find a reference to. Basically, a crazy old man builds a rocket in his backyard. His friends (or possibly family; they were two men and a woman in their mid-20s/early-30s) basically call him crazy… [i]until it works.[/i] And it was played as a [i]straight drama.[/i] I don’t remember seeing any more episodes, so assuming I wasn’t hopped up on Pixie Sticks or something, it was either a failed pilot or was cancelled after one or two episodes.
@Tucker
No…that wasn’t quite it.
BUT! After YouTubing “Double Dare”, I found a related link and found my answer…
FUN HOUSE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPJCwGfnom4&feature=related
The Crazed Spruce: I believe your childhood hallucination series is Salvage 1 – which aired in 1979. Your ‘crazy old man’ was played by Andy Griffith. There were 18 episodes filmed plus a pilot – but only 14 episodes made it to air.
@broundy
That may be it! I sort of remember the main character’s friend using a light to cast a shadow of him, which is the only way he was able to fight the evil shadow.
Mine has to be an attract loop from an old Laserdisk arcade game based on an anime movie that involved, among other rather disturbing scenes, the main character having his face melted off as one of the kill screens. The other scene that always stuck with me was one of your helper/friends, a cool Walkman-listening skateboarding dude, getting trapped in a cage and turned into some kind of sub-human monster, then used as the core for the bad guy’s energy-attack, getting immolated in the process. I did a bit of research and I think it’s from a game called “Bega’s Battle” – anyone here ever play it, and was it as horrifying as I remember?
Oh god, I just remembered another one! I had a vague memory of an anime where this woodcarver makes a mouse, but screws up so he looks half rabbit. The mouse comes to life, has adventures, and the end credits show him with a wife and a tree full of kids. For the longest time no one could name it, and I wondered if it was real. Then a year or so ago, someone posted a collage with the character. It’s called “The Legend of Manx Mouse”. Man it was nice to have that one answered. Here, check it out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKPU5XyM8p4
Jack-Pumpkinhead’s comment reminded me of another two that are somehow associated for me: 1) a high-detail Japanese cartoon show, similar in style to “The Littles”, of a nice old man who lives in the forest and has adventures with his woodland friends, usually solving problems with some kind of invention made from logs and twigs. The only scene I can solidly remember is him looking through some kind of bamboo periscope contraptions, maybe right at the end of the credits.
And 2)a talking animal book series similar to the Martin of Redwall series, with war and political intrigue between various factions of animals being the focus, but set in the American South or the Revolutionary War? An elderly badger who wore a red frock coat was their George Washington-type leader. Think Pogo crossed with The Mouse Guard.
anyone remember Candle Cove?
@procci: Yeah, that sounds about right. Thanks. 🙂
@klytus: Candle Cove… Wasn’t it about pirates? I remember a pirate marionete at the mouth of a cave talking to a little girl
There was a Japanese tv show from the 60’s where there were 3 robots – a dad, mom, and kid. The mom and kid looked human, but the dad was enormous. They lived in a volcano, and when called by a special whistle, they could transform into a rocket and launch out of there. Mother was gold, kid was silver, I think. Anyway, I later had to look up a tv title for someone to get episodes and it turned out to the same show – “Space Giants”.
I still maintain that I saw the drink-in-the-head alien in the cantina, along with the Biggs footage, but that may have been an overactive imagination and a picture book. Then again, I also had the distinct impression that Yoda bit Luke to give him Force powers, only dispelled on repeated viewings*
There was also what I remember to be a Henson company production in the Storyteller series, only it was a kid visiting their workshop in London. There was a giant animatronic dragon there that came to life and talked to the kid. Kind of a mix of behind-the-scenes and a what-if story.
*You can’t really blame me though. That “you will be” line was creepy as hell.
@Funkula – That sounds like the monster at the end of Rock and Rule. I loved that movie as a kid and waited about a decade for it to come on tv again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbaoVbbCRao&feature=related
@ Dan
That was a very disturbing short. A highlander kind of thing…brrr
Ah, nevermind. Episode 106 of the Jim Henson Hour – Monster Maker.
When I was about four or so, my family moved into a new house and in order to keep me occupied while they did renovations my folks would put me in whatever room they weren’t working on that day with a tub of Lego and a ten inch television/VCR combo and a bunch of tapes. I spent a month or so watching the Rex Harrison version of Dr. Dolittle, the two made for TV Ewok/Endor movies, and the Kirk Douglas 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
There was another film that I watched on repeat during that period though (there WERE two, but after the internet became a real, accessible source of information I was forced to admit that there WASN’T a third, “really cool, badass” Ewok movie) and I can’t remember much about it at all. I would guess that it came from roughly the same time period as Leagues and Dolittle (’50s and ’60s) and it was about a group of people (woman, children, a couple of men) who were shipwrecked on this large island in the South Pacific. They find the crashed remnants of a large military aircraft (B-32 or the like, I remember it had the big sweep of windows along the nose/gun emplacement) and convert it into a boat to escape…something? Pirates of some kind? Japanese? I remember shark scenes at least. And something about an elephant? It probably wasn’t very good, but as a little kid the idea of turning a plane into a huge boat was just about the coolest thing I could imagine short of turning it into a spaceship.
Anybody know this one?
Never heard of Candle Cove, but a good deal on YT apparently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2h5ym6ZlVY
Was there a stop motion series about these… white, furry creatures with conical orange snouts? Bipedal and lived in hobbit-like homes/holes. One had a Hunter’s cap. They may have had a lenticular 3D board book. Possibly Australian.
Mine is an after school movie about a kid who ends up with a super powered T-shirt. Swear to god. It was British, I think (lots of UK shows played on Canadian tv at the time), came out in the late 70s-early 80s, and the shirt had a tiger on it that lit up when the kid performed a super-feat. All I remember is that a mysterious voice said, “With super strength, you caaaaaan.” oh, and someone evil was after the shirt for their own evil purposes. Anyone know the title?
Can anyone tell what the name of the with a giant one-eyed red carnivorous alien is? If it helps i remember that it ate the doctor/science guy while in a cage like thingamadoddlehasit. Also at the end it bursts through the main control panel of the ship because the last guy and girl alive think that they are safe because the blew it out airlock. Please help this has bugged me for far too long. Thanks for all the fish though.
@ Graham
Might be this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbQCf8F1JsE
I have two, both from probably sometime in the 80s:
1. Vaguely Japanese tv animation, a little girl gets two stuffed koala bears, one is large and blue the other is small and pink. They come alive and take her to a magical alternate world where evil ostriches run some kind of paramilitary government and everybody flies.
2. I think it was a cartoon movie, all the characters were anthropmorphic animals and they were forced to work in a factory or a mine or something. There was a grey goo and if it touched one of the characters it infected them and they’d get turned into grey mud monsters. They’d then be quarantined in a dungeon underground. At the end of the movie they break out and it turns out that sunlight cures the infection completely.
They must be real, because if they’re not, there’s something very wrong with me. Any ideas would be appreciated.
I know I didn’t hallucinate this. It was a part live-action, part animated short that they showed on HBO (or Showtime) where Space Invaders (yes, like from the old arcade game) descend on Earth and various video game and pinball-related heroes rise up in defense. If anyone can find a video of it, I’d love to watch it again.
For the longest time, I thought I had hallucinated this mid-90’s cartoon about a soccer team. They played against an evil soccer team as well as a team of kangaroos and robots and all sorts of other crazy things.
I remember one particular episode where the evil soccer team’s owner had designed new soccer cleats that made you a terrible player and had the company that made them sponsor the good soccer team, forcing them to wear the boots so they would lose. They only won because one player always played barefoot and painted his feet to look like the cleats to trick everyone.
It was only much later that I was able to Google the show and found it was called “Hurricanes” and wasn’t just a product of my overactive soccer-loving imagination.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricanes_(TV_series)
Mine is an intensely trippy 1981 British animated, musical version of John Gardner’s Grendel, with Peter Ustinov as the voice of the lead monster called Grendel, Grendel, Grendel.
Here. Have a couple clips. The first one is a non animated introduction and should not be considered indicative of the rest of the film. The second includes examples of the entire movie’s hysterical dialog (“Grea Bogey?!?! You mean theone we don’t believe in?!” also prime examples of the acid trips that were the musical interludes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBV6Yal_rOc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX_xr-tK4WU&feature=related
It was insanely awesome. It took me a year to track it down on VHS. I have never found it on DVD.
@Snap Wilson
Ask and ye shall receive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUUdQGCoPug
@Snap Wilsion: I remember the video you’re talking about.
Ok, googling “Space Invaders vs. Pinball characters video short” gets “Arcade Attack”
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?publicUserId=5450684&bId=8453726
I remember Hurricanes!
My college mates smoked pot. I watched Capitain Simian and the Space Monkeys instead. Just as trippy, minus the brain damagey thing.
Kai and LurkerWithout, thank you both!
It was like 5:30 in the morning, and some french cartoon came on TV. There was no dialogue, and predominantly red. It was about a rich fat man who sits down to a banquet, then transforms into a machine and shovels the food into his mouth. Then there are a bunch of emaciated kids staring at him, who morph into creatures with claws and sharp teeth and eat the guy. The end. Am I crazy or did that happen?
reading about the reprinted ‘sargasso sea’ stories by william hope hodgson a few years ago reminded me an old disney-esque film i saw the end of years back, set on the sargasso sea, but it took me forever to actually identify it as ‘the lost continent’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ3oQMLMBnk
FYI: A little googling brought me to http://www.retrojunk.com/, which should be a help to some of those whose memories seemed as warped as ours.
I remember some kind of animated special from, oh, the late ’70s, about a baseball game between some aliens and some cartoon animals, who were very much the underdogs in this game. One of the outfielders for the animals was the daydreamy cat who unwittingly makes the game-concluding catch behind his back while sniffing flowers. I think the word “All-Star” was in the title. Ring a bell for anybody?
I remember seeing “Otherworld” one summer before I really knew what “failed pilot” meant; the little kid inside of me remembers it as being one of the best shows on TV at the time.
And I *know* I hallucinated the episode of Dr. Who that involved the members of KISS walking down the side of an empty road towards a large, brown, funnel-shaped spaceship that had a room inside with a gigantic eye sticking out of one of the walls.
But the movie I *know* I saw one Saturday afternoon that I’ve never been able to identify with any certainty features a somewhat-grizzled space (smuggler? pirate? rebel?) captain with a heart of gold who ends up with a little kid on board his spaceship (kidnapped or stowaway, I don’t remember). The main thing I can remember is that one of the crewmembers gets hurt by blaster fire, and the captain shoves the barrel of a gun-looking device into the wound and shouts, “Breathe, dammit, breathe!”; then towards the end of the film, the captain himself gets hurt and the kid uses the healing-gun and shouts the same line, and manages to save the captain’s life. The only other thing I can remember is a massive T-shaped spaceship commanded by someone (a vizier?) who’s after the kid.
I’ve been told it might be Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars, but from what I can find of that on Youtube, the T-shaped mothership is the only thing that seems to fit, and even that ship isn’t quite how I remember it. (Some of the handguns in there look a lot like I remember the “healing gun” looking, so perhaps it was another Roger Corman film and he re-used props?) I’m *certain* I saw the movie, but I just don’t have enough to go on to search for it.
An anthology comic, with short stories all on the theme of cancer. There was character who was paranoid about developing cancer, and eventually contracted it from a medical scan, a ghost taking revenge on the CEO responsible for his cancer, and so on.
In my first year of high school, our social studies teacher showed us this kid’s cartoon that taught the complexities of economic policies
The story was about these three islands that just figured out rock based technology and agriculture and stuff. one became capitalist, one communist and one maintained a barter system without currency. There was some b-plot about magic crystals that only one of the islands had access to that everyone wanted, and we learned how stock markets and planned economies worked through it.
My mother is a teacher, and to this day has never heard of this thing nor heard any other social studies teachers talking about it
Towards the end of my Freshman year of College, I discovered my friend had not seen the Secret of Nimh. So we got a bunch of folks together, a couple of beers and watched it. About halfway through, my friend shoots up out of his chair and says “I HAVE Seen this! According to him, he used to watch it every day when he was about four or five, and only remembered it as a strange recurring dream he once had.
@ Captain N: The big deal Hawaii Japanese shows were Kikaider and Kamen Rider V-3. Others were Inazu-Man and Rainbow Man; yours sounds like V-3, which IMO had more nightmare fuel than the rest.
My lost show: when I was around 8 or so, I remember a “Gary Seven” show that was NOT the Original Star Trek episode, but titled “Gary Seven” using the Star Trek typeface.
snippets from two animated specials or films:
A science-knowing kid in some sort of final duel with an evil being just before dawn points out that the light left the sun eight minutes ago.
Magic characters describe the historical basis for practices surrounding Halloween, including an etymology (which is possibly spurious) for ‘witch.’
Aardy–
You’re thinking of Space Raiders. It re-used a lot of special effects scenes and stuff from Battle Beyond The Stars. And it did have the kid and the grizzled space pirate (who was actually part of a larger team, though not all survived the whole movie). I actually saw that one in the theatre, along with some people who kept pointing out every shot taken from the previous film.
Also, Otherworld wasn’t a failed pilot. There actually were additional episodes, but the only one I remember is the one where the teenager son and daughter form a band and ‘invent’ rock and roll.
Does anyone remember a strange cartoon called ‘Dig’. All I can remember is it involved a kid travelling underground.
There was one vague memory that haunted me for years. A cartoon set in a world in which everyone had pointy heads, except for the main character, a boy born with a round head. Recently, I saw a reference to a cartoon called Get The Point, narrated by Ringo Starr. I assume that’s what I’m remembering, but I’m not absolutely certain.
Mine is the sitcom Out of the Blue.
It was a Happy Days spin-off featuring and Angel moving in to be the care taker for a family’s kids in the present day. It was thanks to the Internet I found proof of its existence.
@Entertained Organizer: dunno about the second, but the first is The Nuzzles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEZVaD1psOE
Mary: It sounds like you’re most of the way there on yours. A quick wikipedia search yielded up this page about “The Point!”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Point!
And we’ve got it up on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGFlACG6qvI
I do have a feeling that, after this thread, I’m going to be dreaming in ’70s animation tonight. Gonna freak me right out.
I am seeking one memory now that Arcade Attack has already been found for me.
1. Some kind of animated cartoon that I saw in the early 80’s (looked British, almost Gilliam) about some kind of mad scientist that had attacked the world with some kind of black smog. While there were several heroes in the group, the one that ended up stopping the bad guy was a shape-changer who kept changing from animal to animal until he changed into a fly, landed on the reverse button and was swatted by the bad guy and all the black clouds got sucked away.
I remember both Mitchell’s movie and Matthew E’s cartoon. Don’t remember the names, but I remember the shows.
In the movie, a kid’s lucky shirt gets mixed in with a bunch of clothing that a scientist zaps with some kind of radiation, which somehow gives whoever wears the shirt superstrength. After the kid retrieves the shirt, a couple of crooks see him using his new power, and chase him down throughout the movie to get the shirt. (How either one of ’em expects to squeeze into a kid’s sized shirt is beyond me, though.)
In the cartoon, a group of cartoon animals are playing a pickup game of baseball, when a group of aliens land and challenge them to a game. The aliens cheat constantly (including some pretty nasty traps all over the field, like hidden pitfalls in the outfiled, and a remote-controlled brick wall along the baseline), and the animals play fair, so for a while they get their anthropomorphic asses handed to them. But then the flighty cat that Matthew metioned accidentally lays down a bunt, and the aliens scramble over themselves trying to catch it, falling into all their own traps, and the cat winds up with an in-the-park home run. After that, the animals realize that they can still win by playing fair (because before the bunt, they’d argued about whether or not to cheat as well), and begin playing the game of their lives, neatly dodging all the traps, and eventually squeeze out a one-run lead, which the cat’s final no-look, behind-the-back-while-sniffing-a-flower catch turns into a win, and teaching the aliens the value of fair play in the meantime.
I have this vague memory of watching something as a kid, live action, about this mouse. Only it wasn’t an actual mouse, it was like a toy mouse, with wheels instead of legs. Like they took a remote control car, took the shell of the car off the toy, and put a stuffed mouse looking thing around the toy itself. Anyway, this mouse/toy car thing proceeded to come out of a hole in the wall every night and kill a different member of the family while they slept, dragging the corpse back to its hole. For some reason the family didn’t seem to notice that they were steadily dying off. This terrified me as a kid, though thinking about it as an adult I suspect the thing was actually being played for laughs. Maybe? I’m positive it was a real show, but I’ve never found anyone who remembered it.
@Mecha Velma: Twice Upon a Time?
For me, not a movie but a comic–possibly indie-American, but more likely manga, or maybe European. It’s got a spaceship full of people in suspended animation. One of them is woken up before the others (deliberately, I think, by the ship’s computer). S/he puts on a spacesuit and walks around on the surface of the hull, looking at the stars. The part I remember most clearly is that the hull is covered in a foot or two of thick dust, almost like snow, from plowing through space for so many years/decades/centuries, so the character leaves deep footprints behind him/her.
Later I think they reach a planet, where there’s some kind of…mining operation? Dunno. The only part I remember clearly is that damned dust.
@ Entertained Organizer
That’s probably the 1993 NBC TV movie David Copperfield. All the characters are anthropomorphic animals (David himself is a white cat), and David is forced to work in a cheese factory. There was some sort of experimental cheese accident, where if you touched it, you got covered with it. And yes, those infected were kept around in a dungeon, and at the end it was revealed that sunlight would break off the cheese.
You can watch the movie on YouTube here.
Chris:
The short story you’re thinking of is The Ruum by Arthur Porges.
My mystery one for these is a King Arthur cartoon I recall watching on video ~1986 that I remember having pretty good animation. Specific images that remain are the baby Arthur being smuggled out of a burning castle, and a Green Knight. I think it was anime, and I’ve found on youtube what I think are the intro scenes.
Powerleveler and Skemono thank you so much. Both of those had been driving me crazy for years. That David Copperfield movie was the source of so many nightmares when I was younger.
There is one cartoon I saw in the 80s that I don’t think I’ll ever figure out what it was.
It was about a boy whose parents moved to Toronto and the boy hated it because it was a big scary city and had no friends.
Somehow he used his imagination to access some alternate reality where he was in some Neverending Story kind of world.
He was riding a train to somewhere important. The 2-3 episodes I saw there was always someone trying to stop the train. The episodes would end with the parents checking up on the boy and he’d be in his room daydreaming, but there was the implication that the dreamworld might be real.
My hallucination was this show about a bunch of kids being chased by some sort of giant purple gum monster wearing a leather jacket. Like a purple biker Jabba. If the gum monster caught them, they’d be trapped in giant sticky gum bubbles until someone broke them out. Also, there was a ball of light that couldn’t make any noise, but could write words. And that’s pretty much all it did.
@Dolloch: the drink in the head alien in the Cantina is from the Star Wars Holiday Special.
For my Star Wars hallucination is from ROTJ when Luke is confronting Jabba, Jabba says “I was killing your kind when being a Jedi meant something”
ITT: Make outlandish shit up to confuse strangers.
@Mary Warner: THANK YOU– Space Raiders is definitely it. I’ve been trying to I.D. that one for about as long as there’s been a World Wide Web. And now that I know what to search for, I see that the whole thing is on Youtube. Time to go re-live some childhood via Corman schlock…
@CrazedSpruce: Are you describing My Secret Identity?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094516/
Starred Jerry O’Connell.
Mine is VERY weird: I remember watching one of the networks on a Friday or Saturday night, and seeing a sitcom called “There Goes the Neighborhood.” It was a very broad comedy about a trio of homeless guys who won the lottery and now live in a mansion, yet still act like they’re homeless; one guy sleeps in a fancy couch under a pile of newspapers. I also remember they scandalize a bunch of stuck-up rich people who come over for dinner (they insist they be referred to as “bums”).
Sounds too insane to be true, and I can find NO evidence on the Internet, but the memory is crystal clear.
@Matthew E. and The Crazed Spruce – That sounds like Take Me Up To The Ballgane, one of the many trippy specials Nelvana made before Rock N’ Rule.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJ4twy8ZL8&
@VoodooBen – Coul it be Hunger? I saw this at the Ottawa Animation Festival a few years back. It’s one of the first pieces of computer animation.
http://www.nfb.ca/film/Hunger/
Man, with a heritage like this it’s no wonder I became an animator.
Off topic, but MGK if you haven’t seen yet, Dr. Strange is in Ultimate MvC3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBuPbb3tNno
Oh man… no one’s heard of mine? I’ve been googling like crazy to find it but so far no luck.
Damn. A friend remembers the dinosaur getting stabbed in the eye as well, so I’m fairly certain it wasn’t a fever dream too…
Anyone remember a live action version of Snow White, with the shirtless woodsman being tied to a rope wall and whipped?
I remember my elementary school showing this in the gym to the whole school (hey, it was the 70s). I also remember the school getting into some trouble for playing it for the students, but I have no idea which movie it was.
Kind of curious if this was real or not!
Thank you Adam Ruining. That’s it. You’re awesome.
Sorry Allegretto, it sounds like something from Land of the Lost maybe.
@BlueRing: There’s quite a few Bega’s Battle clips on YouTube — I know, because I had just about an identical experience with the attract mode nearly scarring me for life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iloK0RIzNk
The actual gameplay is entirely benign.
For years I had a vague memory of something animated called “The Secret of the Selenites” (or so I thought, since that was the theme song.) Found it on Youtube eventually, under the title Moon Madness- Baron Munchausen and Merlin go to the moon and meet the Selenites and defend them from an invasion of robot bugs. Didn’t hold up that well, but still neat.
Now I’m trying to recall something- I think it was in the Senor Rossi series- where all it was, was a scene of two cats meowing in time to a clock chime.
Waaaay back upthread: I’ve got a candidate for MIB’s “whole major conflict involved Night or Darkness or something like that coming to swallow everything”. It may, believe it or not, be the very first My Little Pony animated TV movie, “Rescue at Midnight Castle”.
For all that the Ponies’ signature jingle is very nearly the musical embodiment of spun-sugar cuteness, that first film has a surprisingly grim aspect to its plot, involving a scheme by one Tirak to turn several of the Ponies into suitable steeds for pulling his flying chariot. The darkest-before-the-dawn moment has Tirak uttering an Evil Incantation, thus: “The Rainbow of Darkness, that darkness sends; now begin the night that never ends!” There’s no DVD, but the feature is on YouTube, beginning with this (the line quoted is in the third and concluding segment).
A 70’s cartoon, that was a fairly straight version of Star Trek…with cats. Maybe the Klingons were dogs, I don’t quite recall. Good lord, I think I’ve actually found this online and still feel like I imagined it.
That would be Star Trek: The Animated Series, which had appearances by Larry Niven’s Kzinti in them, on the basis that everything Larry Niven is involved in will have the Kzinti in it somehow.
Thanks for the suggestion Mecha Velma, but this one was a cartoon… or did Land of the Lost have a cartoon version I haven’t heard about?
Anyways, thanks for the suggestion.
Computer game, I played it in the late ’90s. You were a human astronaut having gotten lost in some other galaxy where life has died out. You get a time-traveling spaceship and have to help rebuild the local alien civilizations. I SWEAR it was called ‘Millenium’, but I haven’t been able to find it and this KILLS me. It’s brilliant.
@doyle
The movie that you’re thinking of is “The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark” with Elliot Gould.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081031/
It’s a B-36 hired to transport a bunch of animals for some church thing or another. The plane goes off course overnight because one of the people who hires the plane hangs a radio near the compass, causing it to give the wrong heading. They crash land on an island that is the home of a couple of WWII Japanese soldiers who don’t know that the war is over (and seeing the B-36, think it’s come to find them).
The plane ends up getting converted into a boat to escape the island.
Disney, of course.
And here’s something I actually may have hallucinated:
I would swear that I recall the verse “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” turning up as a musical number on The Muppet Show back in the day — specifically, with the tune written by Lucy Simon when she and Carly were the Simon Sisters. Google and YouTube find me a variety of W/B/N videos that are not the right version (either it’s the Buffy Ste. Marie music, which I don’t like nearly as well, or the Simon version but not the Muppets).
Can anyone corroborate my backbrain on this one, or have I been Beakered too often by Dr. Bunsen Honeydew?
Dr. NerdLove:
Thank you so much! This story played a significant role in forming my literary tastes, and it’s a treat going back to the source.
MGK:
Thank you for the prompt/catalyst/forum to make these discoveries! It’s a delight watching folks connect (and being connected) to our childhoods.
Might be one of the “Secret Lives of Waldo Kitty” cartoons that were first shown alone and then stuck in the Groovie Goolies and Friends show as “The New Adventures of Waldo Kitty”. Can’t find a still online to save my life, though…
A cartoon about two kids, a girl and boy trying to catch rats to afford food while living in industrial revolution London while avoiding being put in orphanages or work camps. They slept in a rundown boat.
@TrivTriv: No, it’s definitely not My Secret Identity. I loved that show, and the movie I was talking about predated it by at least a decade.
@Steven: Yeah, that’s definitely the cartoon I was thinking about. Thanks!
@John The Muppet Wiki has Lucy Simon doing Wynken, Blynken and Nod on Sesame Street.
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Wynken,_Blynken_and_Nod
My hallucination that I’ve never been able to google comes from my sixth grade math class. We were watching a murder mystery movie vaguely like Clue, with six guests invited to a mansion, and they all kept disappearing throughout the night. Eventually two of them (or maybe two more guests?) realize that everything’s been based on math, and that the guests were criminals who’d proved mathematically that they were innocent.
Turns out the butler (of course it was the butler) hated math, so he locked everyone up in the dungeon… and I have no idea what happens after that because the bell rang and googling “mystery butler math” simply does not work. It’s been bothering me ever since.
@Travesty
Could you be thinking of Millenium – Return to Earth? I remember that one, it was FANTASTIC fun. Like early versions of SimCity just in space.
@Ducky: That butler thing was an episode of mathnet on squareone. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0643420/
I miss that numbermuncher guy. He only won once ever that I remember. Poor guy. He tried so hard.
Ducky: I saw that, but in this instance I distrust the Muppet Wiki. I have a vinyl compilation disc — part of a set — with the Simon Sisters’ original recording of the song, and also an album on which the Irish Rovers perform the verse using the Simon music…and I think at least one of those may predate any possible Sesame connection. Also, I can find no footage anywhere of either Simon sister performing the song in company with Muppets, whether for Sesame Street or the Muppet Show. Which seems odd, considering that the (woefully inferior, IMO) Ste. Marie iteration is findable in several places on the Web.
@duquesne_pdx
Thanks a lot, man, you got it. Much more recent than I remembered, but hey: it has Elliot Gould in it. That’s pretty cool.
@Allegretto:
Just so you know you aren’t alone, I remember that too, but I have no idea what it was either.
…so…yeah…I suppose that wasn’t very helpful…
TrivTriv: I remember that one myself, though I’d had it in my head that the three guys were classic hobos who just couldn’t give up that lifestyle even after they’d gotten the millions of dollars from a fourth guy, a hobo friend of theirs from way back who’d made good somehow before he died. My only definite lasting memory is at the end, with the three of them sitting around a campfire in the back yard eating mulligan stew and talking about what had happened to them; I assume that if the series had been picked up from that pilot, the “Mulligan stew around the campfire” scenes would have been to that show what the Denny-and-Alan scenes on the balcony were to “Boston Legal.”
Sean: could you be thinking of “The Running Man”? 1986, was part of the anime compilation film “Neo-Tokyo”, and was shown on MTV’s Liquid Television (how I miss you, Liquid Television!).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZHe1vhzjck&NR=1
Ted: that comic sounds very much like something that would’ve been in either Heavy Metal or Epic Magazine. Remember anything about the art style?
MGK, I think Brandi’s got it, ’cause it was Star Trek, with cats! Like a Captain Cat, Spock cat, the whole nine yards!
This was pretty much how it was between me and Rock & Rule. For many years I wondered if it had been a real thing that I’d seen on TV, this beautifully animated Heavy Metal-ish sci-fi opera cartoon, or just a fantastical dream. I didn’t even remember its name. Then somebody mentioned that I had a “Rock & Rule” art style. I looked it up, and lo and behold.
Black Rabbit: Heavy Metal or Epic would be about the right time period–this would’ve been maybe 1990 or so when I saw the comic, though who knows how long it’d been sitting around before then–but I want to say it was manga. Pretty sure it was black-and-white, fairly realistic and detailed. There’s a manga artist named Yukinobu Hoshino who produces space-themed manga in a realistic style, but I’ve checked everything of his I could get my hands on (though that’s not everything he’s ever produced), and no walking-through-dust-on-a-starship-hull scene to be found.
@Powerleveler That’s it!!!! I’ve never even heard of Mathnet, and I certainly wasn’t looking for an episode of something. I wonder if I can eBay it…?
Rock & Rule was actually the “secret ingredient” in the Anime Music Video Iron Chef contest last year, if anyone’s interested in some trippy videos.
CB: I’ve seen that one get mentioned before whenever I’ve looked for this, but no. A lot of the gameplay was a kind of Wing Commander-esque space combat simulator (you could see the timestream as it stood at any given moment, and a lot of what you did was traveling to points of history either to convince people to do things that would avert disasters or fight off the aliens who had ‘historically’ wiped everyone out anyway). There was this undertone that got mentioned in places that the aliens who had given you this task were throwing every possible solution at this, which meant that you even got to encounter evil alternate universe versions of yourself where you had instead been hired to ensure the destruction of all sentient life in this galaxy.
Like I said, good times.
CB-Your referring to that 90’s PBS show called Ghostwriter. It was set in Brooklyn and featured a cast of racially diverse pre teen detectives who worked in conjunction with a “ghost” (the ghostwriter of the title) that only they could see and who would give them clues on the case.
The specific episode(s) your referring to is Attack of the Slime Monster which was the last episode of the series.
When I was a kid in the late 70’s or very early 80’s there was a show with a marionette skeleton in front of a black background who had a reverby voice. There was another show with a ventriloquist dummy doing the news. Yet another one where kids were always trying to outsmart a green floating head guy. All of these were on PBS or other broadcast channels, all late 70’s to 1982 at most, no cable.
VoodooBen, the animation you’re thinking of is Hunger, an NFB short that was one of the first to implement computer animation. What’s remarkable is that it doesn’t look like CGI, but would be closer to Flash today.
Oh, and Matthew E, the Baseball cartoon you’re thinking of is the Nelvana short, Take me Up to the Ball Game. It was one of my favorites while growing up, because it had references to Newspaper comics, from the Cow mascot, the Bill-the-Cat expy, and a Churchy la Femme turtle. Not to mention the rival team all had smiles like the Joker and cheated like mad. Also, the competing leaders of the main baseball team were a beaver and bald eagle.
Rats – I now see that Steven’s already answered your questions. Well, I’m not letting my descriptions go to waste.
As for other animated shows I vaguely remember, there’s an animated/live action show that I have trouble finding any context for. It involved kids wandering a fantasy land reminiscent of the Snow Queen. One sequence had a scary creature in the shadows with glowing eyes and thunder and lightning. Then in the next scene, the creature walked out… revealing itself as a cute little pink/purple elephant. I don’t quite remember the context of the rest of the movie/show, but there was a scene I still remember today. The Snow Queen had some kind of mechanism tied to a magical safe that would rise and fall as per her command, like some kind of snowflake cage. Somehow, the kids managed to knock her controller in the “down” button, and tossed it into the snow cage. The Snow Queen dived after the controller under the gate of the snow cage where it hovered above her arm (like the safety restrictions for an elevator) with the controller was just slightly out of her reach while she cried in frustration. I never felt so bad for a villain than at that moment.
The other one I recall is a Christmas special involving live-action dolls, a kind of Velveteen Rabbit kind of thing. Only, this rabbit wanted to be regifted as a present to the child, so it would be loved all over again. There were constant flashback fantasies of the girl opening her present and happily spinning and hugging her little doll. But in one flashback, it zoomed in on the face of one of the forgotten toys who’d been arguing against this plan, and it was shown it’d been crying.
An a comic book front, there was a graphic novel that I saw in a bookstore in 1995 where there was a sorceror who wanted to infiltrate utopia, which was guarded by a female deity. For everything that was thrown at the sorceror, he easily brushed them aside, and was making short work of their defenses. But just as he was going to step through the gates of paradise, she made a last-ditch effort – she relocated utopia somewhere else that not even she knew was, so he’d never find it. From that moment on, everybody on Earth suddenly felt miserable, even though they had no idea why. Despite this somber description, it’s actually quite funny, and there’s the creation of a log cabin in there somehow.
I can’t believe no one’s done this;
@ Kyle W. Your first one is “Flight of Dragons”, amazing Rankin/Bass cartoon. That scene is near the end of the film. The second one is lost to me.
Oh, and maybe someone can help me with these videos my cousin had that I watched once in a while.
One was a bear who found a mountain full of monsters that were going to attack the bear village on Hallowen, but he gets everyone to trip up the monsters and retreat to the mountain.
Two is some kids befriend a witch or wizard who convinces a nearby Halloween-hating town that Halloween is OK and they all turn into monsters.
Thanks Sigma! The game play does actually look pretty weaksauce. Nightmare fuel averted.
Mine is a computer game that I think that I played when I was around 7 or 8. It was a platformer where you played as a bunny, and carrots were prominently involved- beyond that, I’ve got nothing. I remember it being a lot of fun, though.
@DeBT Your rabbit is actually Rugby Tiger from The Christmas Toy. It was my favorite Christmas special growing up (hell, it still is).
http://www.toughpigs.com/myweekxmasanother02.htm
Okay, here goes:
I’m from England, and I have a distinct memory of a strange show, seen when unwell and home from school in the mid-nineties.
Back in the day, there used to be educational programming in the middle of the day, usually literacy/numeracy shows with narrative frameworks like trying to escape a castle. The general idea was of these shows being shown in classrooms in primary schools (that’s ages 5-11 for you foreigners). When ill and at home from school, these shows were the only ones my parents would let me watch.
ANYWAY:
I recall catching a few minutes of once scene of a program that seemed a lot darker than the usual programming and more narrative driven than educational. I think it was about the aftermath of some kind of invasion of Earth.
I remember a bearded, strongly-built man in elaborate insectoid golden armor reminiscent of a beetle, especially on his back, where some kind of rigid cloak thing evoked a beetle’s wing-cases. He stood on a low, wide staircase, and argued with an elegant woman in a strange formal gown.
I also remember the special effects being similar in, well, crapness to the other shows of that time, and being the kind of level of sfx that were usually found in those midday educational shows.
That’s all I remember, I think I changed the channel. This would probably have been between ’95 and ’97, at a guess, and I think it was in ITV or Channel 4.
It’s possible I dreamed it, but I’m pretty sure I was just skiving off school and therefore was entirely lucid and alert at the time.
There’s not really enough to go on there, but maybe I’ll get lucky and someone will recall something.
@Mark Temporis If you haven’t Googled this by now,The Gary Seven show is real. It was a failed pilot for a Trek spinoff showing the time traveling (AND CORRECTING) adventures of Gary Seven, his secretary Roberta Lincoln,and his sometimes cat (and sometimes not) Isis.
@Travesty,
Ok, now I want to know what it was because that sounds fantastic. Like Dr. Who the game.
I saw this film at school in the mid-80’s, though it was probably made much earlier..it was about a kid that got separated from his tricycle, which magically comes to life and begins to search for him. I really only remember the end…when the trike launches over a police roadblock.
I’ve hunted for this thing, but can’t find a reference anywhere on the net. It was run on a film projector, and I doubt there are any copies left…unless it was all a dream. No. No, it was REAL.
d’wetts, you weren’t imagining things. This actually existed. I knew, because I saw a living tricycle story twice. The first time I saw it was at camp along with two other NFB shorts such as Hot Stuff and Cosmic Zoom. (Very eye-opening stuff for a young kid) The name of the story was The Remarkable Riderless Runaway Tricycle, and there’s even a Youtube video included.
http://zrecs.blogspot.com/2007/07/remarkable-riderless-runaway-tricycle.html
Oh, and thanks to Ducky for naming the Xmas special. I’d completely forgotten it was muppet related.
DeBT: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. You have made a stranger very happy tonight. One of the last big question marks of my childhood eliminated! Nostalgia buzz!!
@Mark Temporis Based on your tip, I scoured episode guides of both shows, and one episode title of Kikaida jumped out at me: “Crimson Squid: Stalker of Pretty Coeds.” After many months of waiting for the disc to be available via Netflix, it arrived yesterday, and I can confirm that it was indeed the show that has haunted my memories for 30 years. Can’t thank you enough.
@ Graham, THANK YOU for your post! I have been looking for that song for many years…I watched on german VIVA channel, I love that song too.
Si , you are THE BEST!
I know this thread has been dead for a while, but I’m desperate.
My grandma had an animated vhs of little ‘life lessons’. They’re were a few different stories on this movie. The one I remember was about a white cat. He was traveling through the woods and wouldn’t listen to any of the other characters that gave him warnings and advice. I’m pretty sure he ended up dead. I think He was eaten by a black dragon or something. Help!!!