Giant Robot Invasion! – Home of Comedy Writer Matt Willard

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I loved watching the Fox Kids cartoon block while growing up. Their shows just seemed more exciting and memorable than anything the other channels offered. Plus, the block always felt larger than life. You could argue that Fox Kids was more successful than One Saturday Morning or whatever CBS had-after all, Fox did bring us Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, as well as animated shows from Warner Brothers that would eventually move to their own channel. Fox Kids respectfully used the air time previously occupied by these shows to air a cartoon about cockroaches.

At one point, Fox Kids had a magazine. When I was growing up, I knew that they had one, but I never could get my hands on any issues. Fortunately, a blogger named Vinnie Rattolle has gone out of his way to offer a scan of the August 1995 issue in PDF format. It’s totally awesome-I finally have the opportunity to dig into this undiscovered part of my childhood and check out a magazine I’ve always wanted to own. Your name may sound a bit suspicious, Vinnie, but I really appreciate what you’ve done. As payment, here are my keys, so you don’t have to work so hard when you knife me and jack my car.

I wasn’t kidding about those Warner Brothers cartoons, by the way. I don’t just pull nostalgia out of my ass here.

The big feature of this issue is an interview with Boys II Men, a band I didn’t care about even when they were popular. The magazine uses this opportunity to promote a contest from McDonalds-if you won, you’d get an exclusive Boys II Men concert for your school. Fox Kids was always promoting these wacky contests-later in the issue they talk about winners of previous contests, spotlighting a 10 year old boy who actually won a Camaro. Is that even LEGAL? My favorite, however, is the 7 year old girl who won a crapload of Street Sharks toys along with a trip to an aquarium. It’s pretty obvious that all she wanted was that trip. The Street Sharks toys probably got passed to her brother, who acted out exciting adventures like “Danger in the Submerged Mines” and “Everyone Beats Up Bobby Horton For Making Fun of Me”.

Fortunately, the entire issue isn’t a Boys II Men-stravaganza. There are other embarassing features as well, such as a two-page spread where Spider Man encourages you to make nightmarish pictures with clips from old photos. Then there’s the ridiculously short comic about The Adventures of Batman and Robin which basically unfolds like this:

-Batman and Robin go into an abandoned fun house.
-Robin gets captured by the Joker and tied up in a chair.
-Joker declares that he wants Batman to find him.
-READ NEXT ISSUE TO FIND OUT THE EXCITING CONCLUSION

It’s bad enough when a normal magazine does this, but with a discontinued magazine, it’s even worse. How does Robin escape? Will he free himself and defeat Joker by using the skills Batman has taught him? Or will he be content to sit there and wait for Batman to fall into Joker’s obvious trap? Who knows! I don’t. They want me to check in the next issue to find out. It’s like when you’re watching a show and they break for commercials. I hate it. And now I hate how everyone looks like they’re having fun drinking Pepsi.

Of course, since this is a kid’s magazine, it’s full of games. Most of them are crammed near the back in a section called Fuddlements, but some of them are scattered around the magazine to fill it out. It’s really sad when I look at some of the games and I can’t immediately solve them. I mean, they’re for kids, right? Why do I actually have to think them out? I shouldn’t be wasting my brain power on stuff like this. I should be using it to invent more machines that make our lives easier and do things for us that we hate to do, like exercise.

But there are some puzzles I can solve, like this Carmen Sandiego-themed one. It looks pretty easy. Even better-if I solve it, it’ll tell me where Carmen Sandiego is headed next. That’s a pretty good deal. After all, we all know ACME couldn’t find her even if she showed up on their front doorstep and shot them with an atlas launcher.

Ha! Is this it? A simple substitution cipher? Since O stands for N in this cipher, it’s easy to conclude that each letter in this code stands for the one that precedes it! Really, I was hoping for a more interesting challenge for my genius intellect. You know, a challenge that’s fun to solve, unlike world hunger.

Okay, let’s write in each letter and figure out where Carmen Sandiego is heading next!

Not even the CIPHER can find her! You are so fired.

But no magazine for kids is entirely fun and games. They’re always looking for sneaky ways to educate us as well. Of course, these sneaky educational asides figure that, if a beloved Fox Kids character tells us boring facts, we’ll pay more attention. This may work when the Blue Ranger rambles about how we shouldn’t dick with the environment, but are kids really going to pay attention when they start talking about bloomers? You have to spice it up and draw their interest if you want them to learn something. For example, try reading it during a car crash.

The most obvious bait-and-switch comes from an article about crop circles. It mentions that some people theorize that crop circles are created by aliens, and what better way to lead into an article about alien activity than to slip in a shoutout to Fox Kids’s latest show, Masked Rider?

Educational bits gleefully removed for your convienence.

Yes…Masked Rider, the show that ignored everything good about its Japanese counterpart Kamen Rider to become an asinine sitcom involving aliens and adopted families and a fuzzy duck creature called Ferbus. It pissed off the creator of Kamen Rider so much that no adaptations of his work were allowed until 2009′s Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight, and to get THAT greenlit, the producers had to ace a quiz about Kamen Rider’s legacy. This was reasonable, of course. I can tell you with full honesty that Masked Rider was a painfully stupid show, and I used to watch a show called Big Bad Beetleborgs.

Finally, I have to talk about the advertisements. Most of the ads in this magazine are pretty standard, but there are two in particular I have to address. One of them is for dolls that I never even knew existed until I saw the ad. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered…Power Rangers dolls for girls.

I mean, seriously. Who sat down and thought, “hey, let’s make a doll playset based on Power Rangers!” Did this kind of stunt even work? If you saw a girl playing with dolls, you know it’s probably gonna be a doll that you would actually see a girl playing with. Yet they try to sell this thing with words that might work if I wasn’t staring at dolls wearing spandex jumpsuits. It says you can have fun brushing their hair, putting on different outfits, and doing gymnastics on the balance beam. Look, the only gymnastics we want to do with our Power Rangers toys is to have them perform flying missile dropkicks on their enemies. Then they need to team up with Triple H to fight Godzilla, otherwise the entire free world as we know it is toast.

The other ad is an ad for Cap’n Crunch, with entries from the captain’s diary about a kid named Tim. It seems normal at first, but then you take a closer look at the entries:

MONDAY: Took Tim his favorite cereal, Cap’n Crunch.
TUESDAY: Helped Tim with speech…We had a bowl of my delicious cereal.
WEDNESDAY: Tim’s speech is getting better…Brought Tim 2 more boxes of Crunch.
THURSDAY: …cleaned my room. Have to stop eating my cereal in bed.

Look, I know the Cap’n supposed to like this stuff, but I didn’t know he loves THAT much. He’s practically shoving the crap in Tim’s mouth. Who the hell brings kids excessive amounts of cereal and even admits to eating it in bed? I don’t know, but he’s 32 and still sleeps in the basement.

So that’s the Fox Kids magazine. Sure, it’s painfully obvious that it was made in the 90s, but since it’s a relic of the awesome Fox Kids cartoon block, I’m willing to forgive. Hell, I would’ve loved to have this magazine growing up. I’m glad I had the opportunity to take a look at it, and I hope more issues emerge in the future.

Once again, big props to Vinnie Rattolle for scanning this issue. If you need any favors, just say the word. Maybe you need help moving your couch, or setting up a new computer. Hell, maybe Kino’s squealed on you for the last time. Anything at all-I’m your man.

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