The X-Entertainment Blog

02/13/2003: Wacky. Wall. Walkers.

New Article: Remember those sticky, squishy rubber octopus toys you used to get out of cereal boxes and vending machines? They were called Wacky Wall Walkers. Believe it or not, behind their wall-sticking stretchy-pully goodness lies a semi-famous marketing success story. Anyway, read it. Somehow, it’s one of the better articles I’ve done recently. Gooey octopi are a motivator.

Anyway, the next article is about the old Photon television series. If you haven’t seen this, trust me, it’s absolutely unreal. This isn’t the cartoon, rather the live-action Japanese show featuring lots of bad voice dubs, blue screens, giant lizards, and drug references. It’ll be up at midnight.

Also: in terms of article scheduling, I think I’ve decided that taking weekends off will be a necessity. I’ve been putting ungodly amounts of time into the posts lately, and if I don’t sleep it off over the weekends, I know I’m gonna burnout pretty fast. The goal is to have something new up Mon-Fri, meaning you’ll at least get five articles a week. Considering my past hobbies of disappearing for weeks on end, that’s quite a load. Since there’s far fewer people browsing on Saturday and Sunday, I suppose those are the best days to throw to the lions.

Despite that, I don’t want to not have anything ready for the weekends. If you’ve got any suggestions as to what I can do on Saturdays with the site, I’m all ears. So far, the two candidates are reserving Saturdays for a ‘classic’ article, or writing a short week-in-review going over the recent articles and other crap. Neither choice is making me sprout heart antennas, so if you think you’ve got a better idea, let me know.

Sundays will be reserved for adding files to the downloads section. This’ll happen a lot more regularly once the archives are done. When will they be done? Not sure. Hopefully by 3046.

PS, the Baleen Whales section has been updated. With more baleen whales. Yeah.

Posted by Matt. E-mail me!

Dude, week in reveiw is not cool dude. Dude, you should just quickly do one of them action figure dude stories for the weekends and only the weekends dude.

my favorite thing that you do are the action story articles, like when skeletor visited Pee Wee’s play house. do those take as long? maybe you could do those? otherwise i agree with atomicpunk, you should go outside and frolic in the slush.

Spend the weekend drinking. You know, I realize that a lot of the comments that I post on here involve drinking. Oh, well.

i think you may be me. my girlfriend and i came to this conclusions a few weeks ago. you know, like in fight club.

this assumption was made concrete just now, as i literally was just thinking about wacky wall walkers VERY recently, and wondering if the plastic bag containing two yellows, one blue, and one red were still in the closet at my mother’s house.

how this can happen i’m not sure, but i have been pretty tired alot lately, and the lines of reality have been blurring. i know the same applies to you (me) because your memory is hazy. it was my girlfriend that ate nads, not you(me). understandable since you (i) are living two lives on nearly opposite ends of the east coast.

uncanny factoid #246: recently mourned the loss of a 5" pet peacock mantis shrimp. you (i) created the recent stomapod article as a subconcsious tribute to the death of "leviathon".

perhaps you are the living embodiment of that which resides in my memory vaults?

I know I speak for many of the fans of this great site when I suggest that you spend at least a few Saturdays finishing the Christmas countdown. Since they are only two paragraphs I would assume they would not take anywhere near as long as the other articles.
If that is too time consuming go to a flea market/junk store and find more weird stuff to review. That way you are getting out and are doing something for the site as well.

I speak for the others who don’t mind the advent calendar being unfinished. Bring on movie reviews for the Garbage Pail Kids or some kind of Goonies Tribute. Thanks Matt!

I just watched the Bridge-Layer commercial. I noticed one small thing they left out: it was painfully difficult to either get the bridge disconnected or reconnected. And I mean PAINFULLY, as in I had pinched fingers all the time from a part that just didn’t quite want to bend where it should have. I even thought it was just a problem with my own tank, but even my friends’ toys were painful, too.

Instead of X-E, during the weekends, you should have sex. Lots and lots of sex. And then post pictures of said sex on Monday.

Preferably sex with someone dressed like Rainbow Brite, the Baroness, or the Sorceress (am I the only one that finds the new Sorceress in that new He-man show kinda hot, in a weird way?).

I was going to mention Ken "Dr. Fad" Hakata myself, until I noticed that Matt mentions him in the article, so I didn’t need to.

By the way… anyone remember the full lyrics to the Dr. Fad theme song? I haven’t watched it since I was a little kid… oh wait… YTV, which shows a lot of Nickolodeon programming in Canada, didn’t start broadcasting until I was 13, so I must have been watching it well into my teens *blush*…

"(Dr. Fad)
Take a walk on the wacky side.
(Dr. Fad)
Have some fun that is bonafide."

In regards to Evan’s comment… no, Sailor Mars… or Circuit Breaker from the old Transformers comics… or Trini from really, really, really old episodes of 3-2-1 Contact.

I recently (couple years ago) got a red wall walker out of a vending machine, which I kept in the egg because if I take it out, it’ll get ruined. I just pretend the egg is its spaceship. It actually has a face, a little round mouth typical of cartoon octopi and big blank pac-man eyes.

Strangely enough though, I never had them or saw them when I was younger. Instead, I had a different kind of sticky wall creature. I swear to god they WERE called wacky wall walkers, but they looked like fuzzy worms with bulging eyes. They came in little blister packs and me and all other kids I knew went through millions of them. Maybe they were called wacky wall "crawlers" instead…

Brilliant…now try to track down the Wacky Wall Walkers animated Christmas special…no, I am NOT KIDDING, there was a Wacky Wall Walkers animated Christmas special, "Deck the Halls With Wacky Walls"…dunno if anybody has it on tape…

Around where I live we had less of the wall crawlers and more of the things that were made of the same stuff but were supposed to be used as maces. They were blobs (either actually shaped like maces or a big hand) on the end of a thin little string of the same stuff. They met two fates:

One, you would wing the thing around your head so fast that the string would break and the blob would fly off under the fridge or something and collect so much dust it was unuseable, or two your mother would confiscate it and throw it out because you kept schlupping the thing against her walls and windows and it would leave a big greasy smear.

My friend has permanent eye damage from taking a driect hit from one of those things on the bus. *Sniff* Good times.

Photon was so freaking surreal. I remember the show vividly as I think it seems to have shaped my dreams somehow, as when I sleep, the world in my dreams is not unlike the one on that show.

I just remembered that Photon had a new lease in life on The Super Mario Brothers Super Show..well, it wasn’t SMBSS anymore, it was when they replaced it with "Club Mario" and had two pothead dudes instead of Mario and Luigi.

They’d show clips of Photon episodes, serializing one episode throughout the week, and they’d talk to the green skinned, she-hulk looking princess from the show to introduce the bits.

THAT might be easier to find than old episodes of the show, but they didn’t do it for long, just a few weeks probably.

Happy Crapentines,folks! I used to have a wacky wall walker, but my cat, Keaton, fell in love with it and took it over. He used to cuddle with it and lick it. It was a very very weird relationship, but I think they were truly in love.

The fact that the one thing that made this show hard to follow, was "DA ALI G SHOW" BLING BLING… HOLLA!

Ads in the middle of the articles don’t bother me, but this actually looked like it belonged, which was scary.

Kaiju is the next Photon! Imagine WWE meets Power Rangers and you now know the next big fad. Not bad for a bunch of Mass College of Art students. http://www.kaiju.com

We didn’t get the Photon TV show in Canada - so I’ve had to wait until recently for minimumrage to satiate my curiosity.

Unlike the old Afternoon Specials which used to preach morals, Photon appears to smack you across the shins with said morals, wait until you’re lying on the ground crying and them jam them down your gullet much like a 1lb bag of Gummi Bears (mmmm, Gummi Bears). They made a cartoon about the Gummi Bears too, you know. One of them, Tummi Gummi, had the same voice as Garfield the Cat. Garfield liked to eat lasagna, which is Italian just like Mussolini. He was the main dude in Italy during WWII and was allied with Hitler. And the Dark Guardians (the Photon bad guys) try to enlist Hitler in one of the 6 books written about Photon. It’s all so clear now. I just finished watching three of the episodes from minimumrage so I’m having a few problems right now.

Seriously though, you made a few mistakes in your post. And I am not for a second going to list them here like Comic-Book Guy from the Simpsons. Instead, you’re going to have to watch that episode again - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! That is, if you even give a damn.

Someone at my office for some reason has "The Safety Game" sitting out by the boxes of trash. I will take it.

It comes with a video and a CD. I will watch it in celebration of Valentine’s Day, because I am not a loser.

How about MattChat on Saturday’s for some live interaction with the fans of the site? It could be done on irc or wherever.

Great site by the way. My favorite articles are the ones where you try out products, like the Ultimate Warrior dressup kit or the Freddy Krueger makeup kit (did anyone NOT find those step by step pictures hilarious?).

I take it you guys havent heard of ali g? he’s huge over here in england…….

FYI, VH1 will be showing the "Living With Michael Jackson" special sometime over this weekend. Have your VCR ready, Matt. This thing’s born to be an X-E article.

And you can take the weekends off. You’ll get some quality frolicking-in-the-bitter-cold time, and give us kids who can’t check in every single day a chance to catch up.

And, yes, you HAVE to finish the Christmas Countdown! I’m flipping out in suspence here! AIIIIIGH!!!

I was wondering when someone was going to bring up Photon. I must have been single-digit ages when that show was on the air, but it was on early Saturday mornings on WPIX (Ch. 11 in NY)… I think.

I had no idea that Photon was originally a Japanese import. Could have fooled me with all those American-looking actors. :) At least Ultraman Tiga you could tell it was Japanese right from the start. They didn’t even bother recasting. Just dub voices that don’t even match the mouths of the original Japanese actors. Maybe that’s why I fall asleep on it.

Anyway, your episode review and the link to minimumrage.com really brought back memories. Tivia looked kinda hot, even tho’ she had a bit of an attitude.

There weren’t any Photon centers to speak of in my neighborhood (there was a Chuck E. Cheese, but due to some legal poop they relocated to Long Island and parts of Jersey) but I got a chance to try Photon at a display in FAO Schwartz. Needless to say, I lost.

If you would like to simulate what Photon would have been like, just go to any lazer tag arcade. Just make sure you go with a bunch of friends. It makes the battle much more betterer.

Wall Walkers… even I remember those. I was born in 82, a few years too late to remember some of the 70’s stuff featured on XE. I remember these things though, because I sent away from some. Kelloggs sent me some glow-in-the-dark stickers, a few markers, and a mass-produced message apologizing because THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANY MORE! I was upset at the time, but only after reading the article ddid I get a full idea of how unlucky I was.

And I have no idea why I had to send away for them, but I did. I think the offer was for about five of them.

Third grade, a kid brought one of these to school. It was red. It was science class. It was BRILLIANT! He was thinking outside of the box before anybody even thought of that phrase and started overusing it to the point of my intense annoyance.

What he did was… HE TURNED IT INSIDE OUT. He turned the thing inside out, so it resembled a squid rather than an octopus, THEN he threw it onto the ceiling. It stuck there, legs down, and it stayed there…. all year. It Stayed There All Year.

We would look at the thing every day… "Is it still up there?" Yep, it was still up there, every second of every day for the rest of that year. Until summer vacation at least. When we came back, most of us had forgotten all about it, but a few of us remembered, and when i realized it was gone, and pointed it out, we all went "aww" and mourned for the formerly Ever-present Inside Out Wacky Ceiling Hanger. The mystery of what happened to it will never be solved, but for that whole year, it was our friend.

Like I’ve always said, fuck the advent calendar…I would like to see a Garbage Pail Kids review, but I don’t want you to have to sell a kidney to get your hands on it. As for your weekends go, here’s my thoughts…
1) Have lots and lots of sex if you want…but DON’T post pics of it…I like you and all, and I’ll be happy for you getting laid, but I don’t want to see that. However, if you are banging some hottie that’ll dress up like the Baroness or Circuit Breaker (damn, that’s a blast from my masturbatory past), by all means, post pics of HER, even though X-E isn’t necessarily known for it’s cheesecake material.
2) The Skeletor/Pee Wee type articles are always great, but again, I don’t known how long those take…I’m guessing they take a nice chunk of time to put together.
In closing, fuck the advent calendar, fuck No Holds Barred, fuck the Baroness (literally, of course)…just keep up the great work.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2003 at 9:54 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.