This week's SNT is brought to you by two old crappy commercials I've been wanting to feature.
I never got into Battlestar Galactica in any of its incarnations, mostly because I don't remember ever having access to it as a kid. I was intrigued by its many aliens and robots that I'd spot in various sci-fi rags and the occasional TV Guide, but if my geek cred rode on even the most basic Battlestar quiz, I'd flunk and be shot. That said, it's pretty hard to go through life not knowing what a Cylon is, and I have no trouble appreciating the heck out of a Battlestar Galactica Cylon Bubble Machine.
The "Bubble Machine" technology was nothing new -- basically, you had a tub of bubbles with a large, plastic figurine attached to the top. (A Cylon, in this case.) By flipping the figurine's head back and blowing through a hole, a mass of bubbles sprung from its exposed neck cavity. It sounds kinda macabre when I explain it like that, so it's important to remember that fun soap bubbles can ever be ghoulish.
In the ancient commercial, a couple of kids give us a demonstration. And then they give us another demonstration. And they keep repeating the demonstration, over and over again. They don't even take a breath to look at their bubbles -- fools just keep blowin' away, apparently skirting the usual contest of seeing who can make the biggest bubbles in favor or the less-competed challenge of who could make the most.
One thing the ad doesn't mention is how awesome it was to turn the bubble-spewin' figurine into an everyday action figure once the soap stuff either ran out or got boring. Cylons are pretty badass looking; if I had that thing, there's no way I wouldn't have dropped the bubble bottle and made the topper part of my action figure wars.
Click here to download the Battlestar Galactica Bubble Machine commercial.
I touched on this in an old article, but Toys 'R' Us stores used to (and maybe still do) host big bashes where kids could meet their favorite cartoon characters, movie heroes and sports stars. These events usually transpired during a particular store's grand opening, but I was lucky enough to grow up near a TRU that hosted them pretty regularly.
It was nothing formal. You'd walk to the back, and store hands would sorta herd kids on one side, while other store hands ushered out costumed characters from the stockroom. (The "ushering out" was a necessary bit, because the people inside those costumes could rarely see anything.) Though this commercial promotes appearances by Geoffrey and his family, the Care Bears and Dwight Gooden, my personal experience was far cooler: I got to meet Darth Vader.
See, one of my brothers worked at Toys 'R' Us at the time, and by "time," I mean the early '80s. I have such great memories of what a major mindfuck it was to see him in that old pinstripey uniform TRU workers had to wear, because at a young age, I didn't take that to mean that he was just working a retail job. I thought he was a big part of the TRU machine. Since he was connected, he knew well in advance that VADER WAS COMING, so on his day off on some long ago Saturday morning, he took me there for the show.
I don't remember which other characters appeared, but when Vader walked out from the back...holy shit. These were "official and licensed" appearances -- it wasn't like the store just happened upon a Vader Halloween costume and decided to do this for the heck of it. As such, the costume was movie-level quality. Between the flowing black cape and the blinking lights on his chest box thing, I absolutely believed that Darth Vader was standing...right...there. It was equal parts exhilaration and fear, in part because Vader had taken a peculiar interest in pointing an evil finger in my brother's direction. Only now do I realize that the guy under the mask was probably one of his coworkers goofing on him. To me, it meant that Darth Vader wanted to kill my brother.
Click here to download the Toys 'R' Us Huge Party commercial.
And yes, I totally went home with a shiny new Kenner Darth Vader figure that morning, even though I already had six of them.
Posted by Matt on 01/06/2007. E-mail me!
Chestnuts roasted by 
. You’ll have to go with a classic name, to match E. Claire…how about Victoria Marie? Okay, that sucks, but you’ve got seven months to top it 
. Boy names are harder…maybe you’ve got a grandpa who’d be flattered?
I didn’t have a nearby TRU growing up. The closest one was over an hour away, and we rarely got to go. As TRU’s go, it wasn’t a great one anyway. Very dark, very, VERY, dirty, and pretty depressing. When TRU started axing stores left and right, it was one of the first to go. Now it sits empty next to an equally closed Chuck E. Cheese and an even more closed video arcade. It’s like looking at the corpse of decades gone by, right there on the side of the highway.
So anyway, no TRU character appearances for me. But I DID get to meet the Ninja Turtles at the local Wal-Mart as a youth. I could see the guy behind the mesh in Donatello’s eye holes. It deeply saddened me, but not so much that I didn’t get my picture taken with them. Still, I felt kinda dirty.