Happy SNT, if you're here for it. I'm itching for one of our running commentary movie nights. Is anything decent on? By decent I mean scary/awful.

I miss Quackers. Anyone remember them? Pretty early '80s junk food inspired by Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, but in the shape of DUCKS? That was really the only difference; even the variety of flavors was the same as the more popular Goldfish crackers. I was half-obsessed with them, especially after using Quackers to send no less than 100 seagulls into a psychotic frenzy on the beach in Wildwood.

These weren't the first crackers to make a bid for Pepperidge Farm Goldfish's throne, and they certainly weren't the last. I agree that Goldfish crackers are just about perfect and that they're probably the foodstuff most commonly served in heaven, but I wish Quackers survived for longer than three hours. They didn't, and that's why you don't remember them.

I've written about this Star Wars "Friends of the Force" activity book before, and now...I'm going to do it again.

Strangely, while the cover art seems to suggest a fair amount of Original Trilogy coverage, 350 of the book's 400 pages are exclusively dedicated to The Phantom Menace. This was explained away once I noticed that "Friends of the Force" was published in 2005. I guess they wanted to repurpose leftover stock and/or art, but since it was a bit late to make a fuss over Boss Nass, they got sneaky.

I don't have many horrible things to say about this one. I'm a total sucker for activity books. In my youth, I loved nothing more than to hole myself up under a blanket tent, with an activity book, a pen and copious amounts of pretzels. And if I was fortunate enough to construct my blanket tent next to one of our heating vents, I had all the makings for the ultimate night.

Still, with "Friends of the Force" boasting an absurd 400 pages, its cornucopia of mazes, word searches and how-to-draw guides was sure to have at least a few clunkers. Like this one!

There are at least 30 pages dedicated to "puzzles" like this, where you're supposed to choose one of four options to correctly complete the picture. Suffice to say, even the Retarded Penguin who kicked off X-E's Summer Megaparty wouldn't find much trouble with this. While it would've been interesting to assume that Luke's head was a rock or that Yoda spent his twilight years teaching the ways of the Force to a much taller Yoda, these "complete the drawing" puzzles were filler of the highest order.

Here's another...

This one was already testing the waters of obscenity, and then it cannonballed right the fuck in by making one of the four "complete the drawing" options a patented guide-the-blowjob hand.

Messy Tessie.

Finally, we have the sando aqua monster, which I feel should be capitalized, but who am I to argue? There's nothing wrong with this page...I just love sando aqua monsters. If you don't recall, we saw one of them fairly early in The Phantom Menace, during the underwater monster fish chase sequence. The thing was only onscreen for like half a second, but it's still probably my favorite visual from the entire movie. Well, aside from that weird grimace the old fruit vendor chick made before informing Anakin of the impending sandstorm. Cracks my shit up.

Posted by Matt on 07/12/2008. E-mail me!