This one is obvious. What kid didn’t dream of waking up on Christmas morning and finding a brand new Nintendo under the tree? Only kids who already had Nintendos, and by 1990 there were a lot of them. I was a little late to the Nintendo party. I knew a lot of people who already had one (or had the similar, lamer alternative, the Sega Master System), and I had played it casually for a long time at different people’s houses. But among my close friends, I was the only one to own a genuine NES and (very soon) a large library of games. In fact, it’s a little surprising when I look back now how quickly my bundle of Nintendo related crap accumulated. I only had it for about 18 months before I moved on to Sega Genesis, but in that short time I accumulated a disproportionate amount of games and fun.
The Nintendo was one of the very last presents I opened that Christmas. Christmas of 1990 was the Christmas of MC Hammer and the Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons, and I was fortunate enough to add a brand new Nintendo to that embarrassment of riches. It came with a note saying I had to share it with my dad, but other than the original Super Mario Brothers my dad has been unable to figure out a single video game, so I’m not sure what the purpose of the note was. Early on, my parents would play Mario in the other room after I went to bed, and I still have good memories of listening to them argue about the best way to get past King Koopa (as we called him in those days). Sometimes my dad would even come home from work excited because he had learned some new secret from a co-worker. That phase passed quickly, however, and for the most part I had the Nintendo all to myself. Initially I spent all of my time on the three games I got that Christmas: Mario and Duck Hunt, of course, along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Fester’s Quest. Both of the latter games have more than earned their reputation as some of the worst games on Nintendo, even though the Ninja Turtles were so popular that everyone had that stupid game. Standards of video game quality weren’t quite up to their modern standards yet, and I made do the best I could. I enjoyed Mario, but it never quite clicked for me the way it did with a lot of people; it wasn’t until I got Mario 3 a few months later that I really plunged into a Mario game. I also, to my later humiliation, loved the Zelda cartoon series, so much so that I wanted to make it into my very first live action movie, and so a snow day rental of Zelda 2 (not the original) became one of my earliest Nintendo highlights. I was always, and perhaps foolishly, interested in games with established characters and plots, hence the ownership of the terrible Ninja Turtles game.
Somehow, despite the terrible games, I became a big Nintendo fan, and, even more stunningly, my house became a Mecca for other 3rd graders seeking a chance to enjoy time with the sacred gray box. In those days we had a fourth bedroom upstairs that was almost exclusively reserved for playing Nintendo, and it became our club house. Far removed from the rest of the house, it was a place where the kids could learn and study the craft of Nintendo relatively free from adult interference. Shortly I added some new games to the repertoire—Gremlins 2 (yay!), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Good One, and of course Super Mario Brothers 3. The Nintendo age had truly begun. It’s funny—there was nothing more important to me that Christmas than getting a Nintendo, and I have dozens of great, unforgettable memories associated with that thing, but when I think of that Christmas it’s the lesser presents I remember more. Like The Simpsons Sing the Blues, Gremlins 2, my Ninja Turtles Tiger handheld game (remember those?) and my MC Hammer tape. 1990 was more about all the crazy cartoon fads that were exploding in the elementary school pop-culture scene than any big gift. The more I think about it, the more I think that maybe Nintendo might not have become the phenomenon it was were it not so closely linked to all those exploding fads. There were Simpsons games, Ninja Turtles, games for just about every movie and property to come along—most of those games were terrible, but I’m sure they helped sell Nintendos as much as Mario did.
I’ve written more about 1990 than any other Christmas, probably because there were so many popular characters and TV shows swirling around back then. Only in a year as vibrant with pop culture kiddy confection could something as wondrous as a Nintendo be only one among many memorable gifts. What an awesome time to be 8 years old.
Believe it or not, today is twenty years to the day that the Simpsons Christmas Special first aired way back in 1989. Though the show remains popular, by Fox standards, it has never again reached the insane level of merchandise saturation it hit in that very first year. Nothing captures the way the Simpsons exploded into popular culture in 1990 more than The Simpsons Sing the Blues, a full length album of different Simpsons family members performing old blues and jazz standards. The Simpsons characters (with the possible exception of Lisa) have no connection whatsoever to blues music—odds are these songs were cheap to license, or else some blues fan on the staff was just dying to record an album. I have no inside knowledge on how this thing came about. It doesn’t matter. Knowing why it was created would only take away the magic. All that matters is that the album sold, going platinum in the US and making it to #3 on the Billboard charts. I got it on tape along with a glut of other Simpsons merchandise back in 1990, and I listened to it at least as much as I would one day listen to The White Album. Maybe even more. The main selling point was “Do the Bartman,” a rap/rock/new jack swing song ghost written by Michael Jackson, a huge hit on the playground in 3rd grade. Bart Simpson was the coolest kid on the planet back then—the show centered around him, and he was marketed to death. If you were a fan of the Simpsons during that first huge rush of popularity the song is sure to hit you in face with a powerful slap of nostalgia. If not, it must seem a very sad relic indeed.
My favorite song, however, was and still is one of the few other Simpsons-original tracks on the album, “Look at All Those Idiots,” sung by Mr. Burns and Smithers. Unlike the rest of the album, which mostly consisted of the Simpsons voice actors singing real-world songs that I had never heard of, “Look at All Those Idiots” had a real story based around real Simpsons characters, and was, wonder of wonders, funny. Okay, so maybe it’s not side splittingly hilarious now, but if you’re in 3rd grade it’s top notch stuff. Mr. Burns and Smithers were probably the first Simpsons ancillary characters to break out of the pack—they were definitely the first ones I was aware of, and it was great fun listening to Mr. Burns complain about the incompetence of his inferiors to a groovy late 80s dance beat. It’s the one song on the album that shows the clever, intelligent direction the show was headed.
As for the rest of the songs, they were happy to cash in on the show’s status as a fad. Do we really need to hear Homer and Marge singing a duet of “I Love to See You Smile” or Lisa Simpson doing a cover of “God Bless the Child”? Apparently I did, because I listened to the album nonstop from Christmas Day until at least March. And it had some stiff competition: I also got Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em that Christmas. Come to think of it, I listened to that tape all the time, too. Damn, that was a good Christmas. It’s amazing how many things you can be passionately interested in when you’re eight years old, and somehow there’s time for them all.
So like many of childhood’s delights, The Simpsons Sing the Blues is a pretty sorry experience without nostalgia backing it up. It’s hard to explain in words why I had so much fun with it, and listening to it sure isn’t going to get the message across. It’s just one of those weird things that perfectly captures a specific set of memories—there’s something of the Spirit of 1990 alive in The Simpsons Sing the Blues. Or maybe it just captures that in 1990 there were millions of kids just like me who would buy absolutely anything with Bart Simpson’s face pasted on it, even a mediocre blues album. As happy as I was in 1990, I bet Matt Groening and The Simpsons producers were even happier.
Sometimes you’ll get presents so interesting or bizarre that they defy easy categorization. These next gifts are things I very much enjoyed at the time (and in some cases still do), but they stand out to me as being unique, embarrassing, or just insane. Basically, it’s an excuse to write about more than ten Christmas presents without having to come up with some new numbering scheme. Enjoy!
1. Nickelodeon Gak (1992) Surprisingly there’s already been a lot of internet literature composed on this particular topic—a simple Google search will reveal just how widespread love of Gak is among 90s nostalgia fiends. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. The stuff was useless goo that made a farting sound when you squeezed it. Other than that, I’m not sure what its purpose was. Today it seems, dare I say it, cheap.
But try telling that to my 5th grade self. My group was really into three things back then: Goosebumps books, Narnia books, and Nickelodeon Gak. And no matter what their other merits, books can’t fart (though the later Goosebumps books tried their best). So when it came time for my friends and me to exchange Christmas gifts, Gak was the only way to go. I must have gotten at least six separate cans (for lack of a better word) of the stuff that year, and given just as many as gifts.
Oh, the fun we had with our Gak! It had a million uses! You could look at it inside the can, take it out and look at it, put it on a table, hold it in your hands and, the coup de grace, squeeze it to make farting sounds. Mattel had finally found a way to combine children’s love of farting with their love of goo, and the profits must have been enormous. It was like combining a whoopee cushion with snot.
Sadly my love affair with Gak did not last beyond that Christmas. Like any goo worth its salt, Gak becomes dry, brittle, and useless if left outside of its container. Much of my supply met such an end, the rest was simply abandoned. Other Nickelodeon oozes came and went in the years to come: Floam, Gooze, Smud—but it was never the same. Gak was one of those once in a lifetime moments, the kind you can only look back on years later with a kind of winded awe and remark, “Wow. I was there, man. I was there.”
2. Bust of the Emperor Caesar Augustus Modeled After the Statue at Prima Porta (2005) That’s right, I’m the type of person that keeps a bust of a Roman emperor on their coffee table. Not only was Augustus one of the most badass leaders in history, but when you have a piece of Roman statuary in your living room you know you’re on the right track in life.
Augustus was an unknown teenage nephew of Julius Caesar who through cunning and luck defeated all of his rivals and united the Roman Republic under his sole leadership by the time he was 32, beginning 200 years of peace and prosperity and becoming Rome’s first emperor. My statue, on the other hand, was made in Italy in the 1890s as part of a contemporary craze in Roman decoration, bought by some rich couple on a tour, and sold to another rich couple.
It then spent fifty years or so gathering dust in the basement of one of the old houses in my hometown. When the owners died, it was sold to an antique shop, discovered by my father who thought (correctly) that it was the coolest thing in the world, and placed under our Christmas tree. It would soon become what it was always meant to be—a display head for comical hats, like the kind worn by snowboarders in the mid 90s.
I can honestly say that I never expected to get a bust of a Roman emperor for Christmas, but now that I have, I can’t imagine what life would be like without it.
This one is obvious. What kid didn’t dream of waking up on Christmas morning and finding a brand new Nintendo under the tree? Only kids who already had Nintendos, and by 1990 there were a lot of them. I was a little late to the Nintendo party. I knew a lot of people who already had one (or had the similar, lamer alternative, the Sega Master System), and I had played it casually for a long time at different people’s houses. But among my close friends, I was the only one to own a genuine NES and (very soon) a large library of games. In fact, it’s a little surprising when I look back now how quickly my bundle of Nintendo related crap accumulated. I only had it for about 18 months before I moved on to Sega Genesis, but in that short time I accumulated a disproportionate amount of games and fun.
That phase passed quickly, however, and for the most part I had the Nintendo all to myself. Initially I spent all of my time on the three games I got that Christmas: Mario and Duck Hunt, of course, along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Fester’s Quest. Both of the latter games have more than earned their reputation as some of the worst games on Nintendo, even though the Ninja Turtles were so popular that everyone had that stupid game. Standards of video game quality weren’t quite up to their modern standards yet, and I made do the best I could. I enjoyed Mario, but it never quite clicked for me the way it did with a lot of people; it wasn’t until I got Mario 3 a few months later that I really plunged into a Mario game. I also, to my later humiliation, loved the Zelda cartoon series, so much so that I wanted to make it into my very first live action movie, and so a snow day rental of Zelda 2 (not the original) became one of my earliest Nintendo highlights. I was always, and perhaps foolishly, interested in games with established characters and plots, hence the ownership of the terrible Ninja Turtles game. 
It’s funny—there was nothing more important to me that Christmas than getting a Nintendo, and I have dozens of great, unforgettable memories associated with that thing, but when I think of that Christmas it’s the lesser presents I remember more. Like The Simpsons Sing the Blues, Gremlins 2, my Ninja Turtles Tiger handheld game (remember those?) and my MC Hammer tape. 1990 was more about all the crazy cartoon fads that were exploding in the elementary school pop-culture scene than any big gift. The more I think about it, the more I think that maybe Nintendo might not have become the phenomenon it was were it not so closely linked to all those exploding fads. There were Simpsons games, Ninja Turtles, games for just about every movie and property to come along—most of those games were terrible, but I’m sure they helped sell Nintendos as much as Mario did.
