World’s Blankiest 80’s Cartoons

If the 90’s were about music, then the 80’s were definitely about cartoons, at least when viewed through the eyes of my elementary-school self. I used to love watching these cartoons, and in some cases, I still do. Here’s a bunch of them I remember fondly:

Alvin and the Chipmunks – My favorite was the cartoon movie, in which they got to travel around the world. My brother, sister, and I always watched that one when we were kids, possibly because it was recorded onto one of our favorite VHS tapes of all time, which also had our own copy of Star Wars.

Captain N: The Game Master – I loved this show, probably because it was pretty much an extended Nintendo commercial. If memory serves me (and it might not, given that I spent much of my childhood watching TV and playing video games) this was one of my favorite shows because the main character was magically transported into his TV where he was part of the video game. It doesn’t get cooler than that.

Care Bears – Say what you will, but this show was awesome, and so were its two 80’s cartoon movies. My mom sewed stuffed animals for us of nearly all of the characters (again, if memory serves, there must have been at least a hundred… or maybe just a couple of dozen…). My siblings and I used to get out all the Care Bears and line them all up to do their patented Care Bear Stare against Shredder or Cobra Commander or some other evil action figure, leaving the villain helpless.

C.O.P.S. – This show is about fighting crime in a future time. Although it was in some ways just another 30-minute toy commercial, this show had a great cast of good guys vs. bad guys. A year or so ago I bought a copy of the first season for my brother and I must say that I’m jealous. The shows were still interesting and funny (in a retro sort of way), and I remembered most of the important characters and even which minor characters that had been my favorites as a kid. I remember playing outside in the yard pretending that we were these characters, and I can definitely say that happened more than once.

DangerMouse – What I remember most about this show are the theme song (very awesome) and the sidekick that always said “Oh, Crumbs”. These two facts alone make this show worthy of being included in this list. Also it was British.

DuckTales – Another cartoon that produced another great movie. I’m not sure how many ways Uncle Scrooge could lose his money or how many times Launchpad McQuack could crash a plane without losing his job, but we always tuned in to find out.

Garfield and Friends – This show was great. I think I actually liked the U.S. Acres part of the show more, mostly because of Roy the rooster. That guy was crazy. Also, Binky the Clown was crazy (and had a voice surprisingly similar to Roy’s). This show generated the greatest birthday song of all time (as sung by Binky “Heeeeeey Caaat!!!!” the Clown):

“Happy birthday, happy birthday, whoop-dee-doo, whoop-dee-doo! May your day be pleasant, open up your present. Just for you! Just for you!

We watched this show religiously on Saturdays growing up, and we still quote it to this day. That’s staying power.

G.I. Joe – Although most of the characters went through months and months of training, none of them could shoot a laser weapon. OK, maybe it’s the lasers that were defective, but either way, there were never casualties in the world of G.I. Joe. That’s the world of 1980s children’s television: every show must have a moral and no one can die (with the notable exception of one Optimus Prime from Transformers). Even with all that, little kids don’t know the difference, and so my brother and I used to pretend we were Duke or Snake-Eyes all the time. I don’t remember pretending we were transforming robots very often (that’s what action figures are for).

Heathcliff – When you hear the name Heathcliff, do you think of a character from Wuthering Heights, a former All-Star pitcher in Major League Baseball, or a cat? I usually think of the cat, and it’s all thanks to his great song. Perhaps it should be added that I never think about the character from Wuthering Heights. Thanks a lot, Heathcliff. I’ll never get that song out of my head.

Inspector Gadget – What kid didn’t love Inspector Gadget? With the voice of Don Adams from Get Smart and powers that RoboCop would envy, Inspector Gadget was the best crime fighter ever. Except for Penny and Brain, of course. I think it’s also a requirement for these shows to have awesome theme songs. Inspector Gadget was no exception.

M.A.S.K. – This show rocked. If you haven’t seen it, you’re really missing out. Of all of these, it’s only second to Transformers, and that might just be because I was actually able to collect some of the Transformers toys when I was young. You see, my brother, our neighbor Tyler, and I were obsessed with this show and we wanted all of the action figures. We each had a favorite character, and each character on the show had his own helmet that gave him super powers. We watched reruns of this show on WGN, and by the time we were really into it the toys had come and gone from the stores. Every morning we searched through the classifieds for people selling these toys, but tragically, my brother and I never found them. Our only consolation is that now we have poor-quality recordings of the show… why, oh why don’t they release this on DVD?

Muppet Babies – A little-known fact about this show is that it actually launched the careers of Howie Mandel and Dave Coulier. Plus it was based on a scene from The Muppets take Manhattan. I do still have one question from when I watched the show originally, however. Where on earth were these childrens’ parents?

Snorks – These amazing creatures had snorkels on their heads, which must have been for breathing. Wait, no, that can’t be right, they were all the way underwater. Odd. I remember a few things about this show, mostly something about an octopus.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – I remember when my friend brought his new favorite toy to show and tell, a Ninja Turtle action figure. Everyone (at least all the boys in the class) were really excited to see this cool toy, but I wondered to myself why it took all of them so long to catch on, and why I hadn’t brought my Turtles into class before. I can still remember my excitement after walking out of the Wal-Mart with my new favorite toys. This show gave us the best arcade game of all time, and two-and-a-half great movies (TMNT was actually pretty good, and I try to forget the third movie because it didn’t have a cool rap from either Vanilla Ice or M.C. Hammer).

ThunderCats – I’ll always remember a trip we took to visit my relatives in Nebraska, but aside from a cool childrens’ museum we went to, the only thing I remember about this trip was that my cousins really liked ThunderCats. Tragically I never was able to watch them much as a kid, but I certainly remember Lion-O and Tygra fighting against the evil whats-their-names.

Transformers – This show is definitely back, thanks to its former popularity among the children of the 1980s. This was the king of 30-minute toy commercials, and if you didn’t have Transformer toys as a kid, you weren’t cool. My grandma used to go to garage sales a lot, and she had a knack for finding lots of these toys discarded by children whose parents didn’t recognize the coolness factor of having every Transformer ever, especially the ones that were part of larger robots made up of four or five Transformers. This was definitely my favorite 80’s cartoon, and I’m even the proud owner of all of the box sets that made up of the original series. That’s right, Hasbro. Your 30-minute toy commercials worked.

Voltron, Defender of the Universe – Although he was always the lesser of the transforming robots in my mind, Voltron was still a great show. In college a bunch of us found some old Voltron tapes and watched them, which made us the coolest people on our dorm floor. The plots are familiar and the endings were cheesy, but isn’t that what the 1980s cartoons were all about?

It Starts at Home

I just read a great article that seems to begin with the exact words I wish everyone thought: Online Safety Begins with Parents, not Laws and Government. It seems like this should be common knowledge, but that’s decidedly untrue. Although many parents might know deep down that they are the ones responsible for their children, it’s all to common for parents to at least behave as if they thought the schools were in charge of raising their kids.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I worked with elementary-age children who were at an age of exploration. They were often seeking of ways to test their boundaries, and it was obvious which ones had structured limits at home in the things they were allowed to do. This lack of parental responsibility was a frequent topic on our drives home, and we realized that proper boundaries could help children learn much faster than if they were given free reign to explore boundaries for which they weren’t prepared. It’s up to all us – parents, siblings, friends, whatever – to help raise future generations, so let’s never think it’s someone else’s problem.

In Memory of a Prophet

Gordon B. Hinckley passed away Sunday, and since then I’ve thought back on the many memories I have of him. He was called to serve as a counselor in the first presidency one week before I was born, so his face has always been a familiar one. In March of 1996 he was ordained 15th President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (casually known as the Mormon Church). In our seminary class later that year we were given a challenge to learn if he really was a prophet. Around the time of General Conference that fall, I took that challenge to heart and prayed to learn if he really was a prophet of God. After praying, I felt in my heart that he really was someone that God had ordained to teach us and reveal his will to us. Explaining how I know it is difficult, but this scripture from the Book of Ether, written by an ancient American prophet, may help:

“But he that believeth these things which I have spoken, him will I visit with the manifestations of my Spirit, and he shall know and bear record. For because of my Spirit he shall know that these things are true; for it persuadeth men to do good.”

Ether 4:11 (emphasis mine)

As a prophet, President Hinckley led and guided his people. As a leader, he touched our hearts and helped us do good. As a person, he was a humanitarian and someone who loved others. A recent insert to the Daily Universe, Brigham Young University’s student newspaper, highlights many of the major accomplishments of his life.

I am very grateful to have been able to listen to his words, including a few times when I was able to listen to his teachings in person. His words touched my heart and helped me become a better person.

Ruby on Rails and CakePHP

This past week I’ve spent some time evaluating CakePHP and trying to compare it to the things I’ve learned in Ruby on Rails. I checked out CakePHP over a year ago, and I admit I didn’t get into it as much as I had hoped. Having dealt with Struts while using Java, I felt at home with both in terms of their MVC nature and I have no desire to go back to life without a framework. Because CakePHP started out as a Rails Clone, they share many advantages:

  • Convention over Configuration – Each framework tries to follow a set of standards in filenames, controller names, and so on so on. When I work on a site someone else designed using a framework, I know where things go and I can familiarize myself with that application much more quickly.
  • Don’t Repeat Yourself – Specifying code in one place means that you only have to change it once should it need updating.
  • MVC and a focus on “Fat Models” – Separate models, views, and controllers make life easier down the road when it comes time to switch to a new system that has a new database or when you want to make a fancy interface for an iPhone or the next new thing.

There are many other advantages to each, but let’s move on to the differences and disadvantages of these frameworks (keep in mind that this is from a somewhat unexperienced perspective, please let me know if these don’t convey the whole truth):

  • CakePHP isn’t as mature as Ruby on Rails. Migrations aren’t fully integrated and the feature set seems to be a few steps behind Rails.
  • CakePHP isn’t as easy to deploy as Ruby on Rails. This might matter more for larger applications, but I haven’t seen anything like Capistrano in Rails.
  • Documentation is somewhat lacking in both. I had a hard time getting going using only tutorials that I found online. Rails has some great books, but I haven’t found any for CakePHP (although the tutorials and my familiarity with PHP made things easier).
  • Ruby is new to me. In my opinion, it has a higher learning curve than PHP (possibly because I already knew Java before learning PHP).
  • There are far fewer hosting solutions that provide good Ruby on Rails support. Although it’s pretty easy to get both up and running (especially for the lucky users of Mac OS 10.5), good hosting is pricier for Rails applications.

With all that said, there’s no way I’d like to go back to plain old PHP for developing a website. Things have come a long way even in just the past year for both of these frameworks, so I hope to keep learning them both. In the meantime, though, I’m devoting more of my time to Ruby on Rails, simply because I’m actually finding it fun to code in Ruby (and the Ruby Quiz is something I wish my programming classes had been) while PHP never had me quite as excited.

Crazy Eights

This is a meme that Beth tagged me to do. You asked for it, you got it. Toyota.

8 things I’m passionate about:
1. Learning
2. Being a good husband and father
2. Living up to my beliefs
3. Having fun
4. Being prepared
5. Tinkering with technology
6. Learning about how to be a good husband and father
7. Learning about having fun
8. Learning about how to tinker with technology

8 things I want to do before I die:
1. Finish school
2. Decide what “finishing school” actually means
3. Own a house
4. See lots of places with family (because family vacations are more fun)
5. Get season tickets for a baseball team and go to every game
6. Never throw up again
7. Become a contestant on Jeopardy!
8. Visit all 50 states

8 things I say often:
1. “You guys are dangerous”
2. Too early for flapjacks?
3. When will then be now?
4. We got no food, we got no jobs, our pets’ heads are fallin’ off!!
5. Don’t you worry about blank, let me worry about blank.
6. God’s given me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well.
7. You have the whitest white part of the eyes I’ve ever seen. Do you floss?
8. Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn’t take Lorraine out that he’d melt my brain.

8 books I’ve recently read:
1. Hop on Pop
2. One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (I hope to have this memorized soon)
3. The Book of Mormon
4. There Was an Old Lady
5. Clifford does something with something else
6. Agile Web Development With Rails
7. Grover’s Own Alphabet
8. The King of Torts

8 songs I could listen to over and over:
1. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by R.E.M.
2. “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by Crash Test Dummies
3. “Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants
4. “Arch Drive Goodbye” by Eve 6
5. “Real World” by Matchbox Twenty
6. “Soul Meets Body” by Death Cab for Cutie
7. “Omaha” by Counting Crows
8. “Breathing” by Lifehouse

8 things that attract me to my best friends:
1. Humor
2. Respect for things that I respect
3. Easygoing nature
4. Similar interests
5. Affinity for the movie Groundhog Day
6. Respect for my beliefs
7. Cheerfulness
8. They drive me to be a better person

8 things I’ve learned this past year:
1. Being a parent is often more fun than it should be.
2. Children do crazy things.
3. It’s easier to be happy when you have a budget
4. I don’t take enough pictures
5. I enjoy having a backyard
6. Playing in the snow is fun
7. Be sure to make comments like “If the Rockies go to the World Series, can I go?” when they have such a small chance of doing it that your spouse is required to say yes.
8. “By small means the Lord can bring about great things”

8 people I think should do Crazy 8’s:
1. The Monster from Cloverfield
2. A monkey with a typewriter
3. Jane Austen
4. Mike Tyson
5. Optimus Prime
6. OK Go
7. Snagglepuss
8. Howie Mandel, cult leader