11/08/2002 Entry: "Reader Mail & Search Engine Keywords"

The Pac-Man Cereal article is up, and I swear I wrote it sober. Not sure what's coming up next yet - maybe it'll hit me after some coffee and possibly a sacrifice using rats. In any event, it's that special time again - reader mail. This time with bonus X-E search engine keywords!

Rob writes: Hi, Matt, was wondering if you could help me identify a toyline that I vaguely remember from when I was a kid. My details are sketchy at best, so if you can't help, that's understandable. The main thing I remember about these toys is that they really creeped me out, that's why I'm looking for more info about them. I don't think they were ever a really popular line and I may have only seen them at the closeout stores, if that's the case they're probably impossible to get information on. If I recall correctly they were fairly large figures, roughly on scale with the MOTU figures. The main guy that I remember was some sort of weird creature that appeared to be made solely out of muscle, that is with no skin or anything. I believe that it had pinchers instead of hands. I also sort of remember a guy in an orange jumpsuit with a blue face and I think he could change his face or something like that. The only other figure I even vaguely recall might have been a green woman and I think you might have been able to see through her and see her insides or something like that. Anyway, if you can help, thanks, and if you can't, thanks anyway.

REPLY: I'm glad I can aid people in the identification of old toys and toons and stuff, but you have me stumped this time. From the sounds of them I'd say they were Power Rangers figures, but I doubt you're asking about a line so recent. I think the problem here is the image I'm getting in my head. Rob, can you tell me - do the characters you've mentioned look anything like this?

Tell me if I'm on the right track. Conversely, I sometimes picture the naked green girl with a third eye.

Survivor writes: Hey, just read the Mortal Kombat video article. Nice job, I had forgotten that thing existed. Anyway, I thought you'd like to know that there was, indeed, a Mortal Kombat animated series. And get this - it was actually good. It was like a cross between MK III and GI Joe. Seriously. The MK guys (Liu Kang, Sonya, Jax, Sub Zero, etc.) had a base in the Outworld (I think) and they, you know, tried to save the world. It even put in some of the more obscure characters, like Jade and Rain. Rain? Yeah. He even joined the team and was all cool before he revealed he was evil. Then he kinda sucked. The plot was sometimes... a little weird. An episode I remember was an earthquake or something opened up a rift in the ground and some of the good guys fell in. They couldn't get out, and there was some lava, so naturally Sub Zero started melting... or something. He couldn't take it and they had to get him out soon. Anyway, I'm sorry I can't provide any pics or anything like that, I just remembered it from when I would watch it on the weekends. Just thought you'd like to know!

REPLY: I got a bunch of e-mail about this Mortal Kombat cartoon, and it sounds like something I'd want to see. Most of the people who wrote in told me that the stories were pretty asinine - in one, Shao Khan unleashes some evil green gas that makes everyone evil, and to illustrate that, Sonya keeps telling Jax he was a fat kid. That'd probably be my favorite scene in any television show, ever. Thanks for the info!

Carl writes: I just wanted to lend my support. First, let me tell you that I've been
studying English now for almost 5 years, and I'm currently at University in
England. I also write fiction, and hope one day to become a fully fledged
author.

I wanted to let you know that, presumably like the rest of the oxygen-breathing world, I also spell 'occasionally' wrong almost every, nay, absolutely every time (my first attempt here was 'occassionaly'), and in my humble experience of studying literature and language, I still can't explain the difference between 'its' and 'it's' even to this day, not even for a bag of Hello Kitty Salisbury Steak! You think you'd learn after six million attempts - but NO! God bless Microsoft spellchecker!

I guess it's just one of the side effects of living in the 21st century. That and the third arm. Oh wait, that's just me!

So, don't worry. None of us are perfect ... and you get paid to not be perfect. So keep on being a phony writer, you're the best damned one on the net!

REPLY: Kind words like this are the sort of things that make me send people surprise boxes of heart-shaped candy. Good luck with your books, Carl!

Chris writes: I was reading your G.I. Joe articles/rants, and I saw where you said you'd like a larger baroness. Will this do? Just thought it would make your day.

REPLY: That's the best person-dressed-like-Baroness picture I've seen, no doubt. Usually, the girl in the photo would have a wart growing out of one of her eyes, a hideous scar shaped like a Teletubby, or icky neck veins. Still, I can't help but feel that the real Baroness wouldn't have purchased decorative fake trees from Ikea.

Stupid Jessica Roberts writes: I've been to your website and I think your book, "How To Make Flibbers, Etc" is perfect for our stores. We work hand in hand with the largest stores in the country, plus thousands of small to medium sized specialty businesses stretched across the U.S. If you want the opportunity to sell your book through major retailers like Barnes and Noble, Borders, Amazon.com, Waldens, Target, QVC, HSN, etc ... plus the other 51005 gift stores, 16826 book stores, and over 24000 mail-order catalogs...check us out at http://www.bulkworks.com

REPLY: Thanks for your interest in my book, "How To Make Flibbers, Etc", Jess! I appreciate your interest! One small problem though - that's a Dr. Seuss book. I just reviewed it. I thought that was pretty clear, what with the huge scanned pictures of the author's name and logo in the original article. Tell you what, I'll sign a lifetime contract with Bulkworks if you guys work on getting a better web-spidering system to spam people with. Talk to you soon!

Clint writes: i just got this pendant from a dealer on Saturday selling out for 95$ i won it on ebay for 38$ dracula dirt soil pendant thought it was cool deal ive been looking around on the net and checked out ebay. sure thing there it was. placed my bid and won their is another guy who has one for sale if your still interested

REPLY: Clint, you seem like a good guy, but I think you might want to contact Stupid Jessica Roberts and see if she can find you an editor. Thanks for the info though, I'm glad those pendants with dirt from Dracula's Castle still exist!

Read my original article on the subject here.

Tony writes: Hey Matt - Loved the story of the "vending machine adventure" On your suggestion of maybe a Homies like set for all the demographics....love the idea, we can have the Beverly Hills Homies with all white boys and playmates in nice expensive cars or LBC Homies with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and all their rapper buddies or maybe even a series with all the Jewish people in my neighborhood in the Wilshire District of LA.

REPLY: I know I'm gonna walk into a Wal-Mart one day, pass the vending machines, and see a small cardboard teaser sign reading 'Crackas' staring up at me. I can't wait.

Alstan writes: Hello, I am conducting a project for school on the relationship between the size of websites and the amount of traffic they receive. If you would please send me the average daily page views for x-entertainment.com, I would be much obliged.

REPLY: I seem to get a strange e-mail like this at least once every two weeks. I dunno, on a weekday average X-E gets over 8,000 unique visitors and over 11,000-12,000 with reloads to the main page. If you count the entire site, with people landing here from search engines and what not, it's far higher. Yesterday, over 25,000 different people hit some part of the site according to my logs, totalling out with over 75,000 different pages accessed in the day. Comparatively, the site is doing very well for what it is, but it certainly isn't the 'traffic champ' as far as privately owned and operated websites. I'm pretty sure Something Awful does more than double that 25,000, and of course, Fark gets 140 trillion hits a day. Still, if you consider X-E a 'nostalgia/past media site,' I'm pretty sure we're second only to Yesterdayland in terms of popularity. I guess that's a cool feat, but I still should've been a doctor or something.

Last one for today, I'm tired of formatting all these e-mails...

Another Matt writes: Ok, I have a question for you. Do you remember, I would say it was in the mid 80's, McDonalds happy meal transformer toys, where the burger, triple cheese burger, milk shakes, etc, turned into people? Well, they sort of turned into people. Just wondering if you remember those, I know I had the whole collection of them when I was younger.

REPLY: The closest thing I know of is this:

They're the McDonald's Transforming Happy Meal toys. I doubt they're were what you were talking about, but thanks for giving me an excuse to include a picture of plastic hot cakes with this update.

Okay, now that we're done with the mail, let's talk about X-E's search engine keywords. When I finally moved the site to a new server, I received access to much better traffic logs than I'd ever been privy to. For years, the only way I could gage traffic was by shitty free trackers that were always incorrect and always broke after a given amount of time. Moving to the new server was one of the best decisions I've made with the site, because even though I'm not paying far more than I would've been if I stayed on the slow server, I'm now afforded the chance to grow the site without having to worry about its speed slowing to a crawl any time more than a hundred people are on it simultaneously. In addition, I can now see how people are getting here, what pages they're hitting the most, and what color socks they're wearing. Plus, I now know which search engine phrases and keywords they use. Here's a small sampling of the stranger ones from yesterday:

1) "ultimate warrior" - It's scary that people are actually tracking down information on this guy. I'd think that's the kind of web browsing that'd get you fired from work.

2) "tom cruise gay" - I guess I have my old partner in crime, Robert Berry, to thank for this one.

3) "cool as ice" - The web is wealthy with information. You might even find extensive reviews and pictures from Vanilla Ice's stupid movie.

4) "kool aid man" - Personally, I always thought there was a hyphen between 'kool' and 'aid,' but to each his own. Oh yeah.

5) "j lo ass" - Another one of Berry's old special exposes.

6) "corey haim" - Okay, those searches were from me. I can admit it.

7) "alyssa milano xxx" - I can't tell you how happy it makes me that people searching for that will end up here.

8) "naked wrestlers" - Why would you want to see shriveled up steroid dicks?

9) "hot and steamy" - C'mon guys, be a little more specific than that. You might end up landing somewhere unintended...

See?

10) "shannon elizabeth" - Poor kids are probably trying to find pictures of her tits. The only pictures of Shannon that you'll find on X-E are of her being raped with a carrot by a murderous snow man in Jack Frost.

11) "ghoulies movie" - I'm so proud to be the only person on the Internet, if not the only person alive, to fully review all four of the Ghoulies movies. Go me.

12) "brolli" - What the fuck is 'brolli' and what is it doing on my site?

13) "penny from pee wee's playhouse" - Oh, what the hell...

Here ya go, pardnah.

That's all for now. I'll probably be back later. Make sure you read the new Pac-Man article. Later...

Chestnuts roasted by xxxcurrymanxxx @ 11/08/2002 10:21 AM EST

Mmmmmmmm barronessilicious

Chestnuts roasted by FuriousMick @ 11/08/2002 10:54 AM EST

Brolli is is a character from Dragon Ball Z. You let someone else do an article about dragon ball z characters, way back toward when XE first started, and brolli was mentioned in the article.

Chestnuts roasted by Bright Noah @ 11/08/2002 11:07 AM EST

I believe the toyline Rob refers to is Revell's entry in the Action Figures arena : The Power Lords.
http://www.geocities.com/njkunrod/powerlords.html

Your "Adam Power" was pretty much on target.

Chestnuts roasted by Thomazinger @ 11/08/2002 11:23 AM EST

Here's something obscure: Conan the Barbarian, the cartoon. It existed, I remember seeing it. It mostly involved Conan using the name of Crom in vain and looking for a guy named Sett. His English was better in animated form, I can say that much.

Chestnuts roasted by Perri @ 11/08/2002 12:02 PM EST

I remember that Cartoon!!! It was called Conan the Adventurer and it had a talking bird(a phoenix, i think) who liked fruit a tad bit too much. A high Quality show!

Chestnuts roasted by ABBLAB Cookies @ 11/08/2002 01:03 PM EST

I remember The Powerlords. Never saw them personally, but they used to be advertisements for them on the back of a lot of my comics from the 80's. If I remember right, he had a normal looking side; than his torso could do a 180 turn to bring the blue skinned-freaky side around to the front.

Chestnuts roasted by JB @ 11/08/2002 01:05 PM EST

I used to have the Powerlords back when my family breeded pitbulls.

I left them outside one day. Found pieces of them in dog crap a while later.

Kind of cool toys, though for heroes, Adam Power and his girlfriend were hideously ugly. Not cute hideous like The Thing, but hideous hideous, like Tony Hawk's hair in Gleaming the Cube.

Speaking of Homies, the guy who creates them has a site that tells the back stories of the characters, which is hilarious. My favorite? AWB-Angry White Boy.

That site is over at www.homies.tv

Its worth a few spit takes.

Chestnuts roasted by Casey Jones @ 11/08/2002 01:37 PM EST

i would personally like to shake Thomazinger's hand for that "Power Lords" link! i almost passed out when i saw those beautiful figures again. really! i forgot how deeply embedded in my psyche they were. i also forgot how many of them i had. why did i have to sell them all so long ago?

thank you thank you thank you!

Chestnuts roasted by Hell-Mo @ 11/08/2002 04:21 PM EST

Here are a few toy lines/cartoons i remember that i wonder if others remember:

Suckerman.
Bionic Six.
Mad Scientist Monster Labs (put the skin on the plastic skeleton, put it in the vat, watch the skin bubble off the plastic skeleton).
Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors.

Chestnuts roasted by Cristofer @ 11/09/2002 02:02 AM EST

I know the Power Lords personally. They were my best friends until I stabbed one of them in the leg with a butter knife. I don't know why they got so upset, I was only playing a joke on them.

Chestnuts roasted by Dustin @ 11/09/2002 04:41 AM EST

I too remember Power Lords...well, being scared of Power Lords. I was like Ralph Wiggum with the mailbox flag when I flipped Adam Power's face around...probably because an older "friend" said the blue side would eat me.

Chestnuts roasted by Nemesis @ 11/09/2002 10:39 AM EST

I remember those Transforming Happy Meal toys!!! I had the hotcakes one...it transformed into a robot pterodactyl. If my memory is correct, they date back to about 1991.

Chestnuts roasted by Jeffrey @ 11/09/2002 05:33 PM EST

There were actually two Conan cartoons. The first was Conan the Adventurer and the other was...I don't remember, but it involved Conan looking after a group of kids. Hmm...having a hard time finding any information for it on-line so I'm starting to think maybe I made it up. *looks around some more* Oop! Here it is! Conan & the Young Warriors!
http://www.toonarific.com/c/conanandyoungwarriors.html

I don't remember the Power Lords at all, but I do remember having all of the transforming Happy Meal guys. Yes, all of them. There were 2 waves of toys, if I remember. Or maybe the second wave was the same with a different mold for the french fries, because I remember having two different toys for the fries. And looking at the picture, it seems there are 3 variations on the fries. I guess I meant two different robots in the red box. The Hot Cakes guy was part of the second line too, if I remember.

Oh, and here's the magical mystery of "its" vs "it's." "It's" is used only when you're contracting "it" and "is" while "its" is used as a posessive noun. Examples: It's a wacky day in Eternia today. So wacky that the wolf-bat that just flew by didn't even realize its wings were on fire.

So yeah. There you go.

Chestnuts roasted by Elefish @ 11/10/2002 03:37 AM EST

brolli is a dragonballz character, i think rob wrote an article entailing how every characters name sounds like a vegetable name, brolli = broccoli , etc. i've been reading this site for about 2 years, it keeps getting better! thanks for the hours upon hours of entertainment.

Chestnuts roasted by danoslayer @ 11/10/2002 07:19 PM EST

Ah sigh i love this site soo much it makes me smile a lot it reminds me of my youth which is still what i do yep thats me

i still have billions of ninja turtles and old video games that i visit often
ne ways cudos to the mcdonalds toys
oh and an idea for a little blip do one on that wierd 80's space girl show "Out of this World"
eh may be well thanks ne ways

Chestnuts roasted by cozmo @ 11/11/2002 03:30 AM EST

Matt: Thanks for giving it a shot. I appreciate it, and even though you weren't able to answer my question, by posting it here I was able to get the answer.
Everyone else: Thanks for all the info on Power Lords. I can now go to my grave knowing that I have solved life's greatest mystery.

Chestnuts roasted by rob @ 11/11/2002 09:37 AM EST

Whoa... I remember those transforming McDonalds toys. I had about 300 of the Hotcakes pterodactyl (or is that pterodon?) and a bunch of the hamburger dinosaurs too. Those were the days, when I could entertain myself for hours with plastic, McDonalds food-themed transformable dinosaur toys. Nostalgia at its best.

Oh, and Matt, you're not a phony writer. I'm an English major and I've learned a few new words through your articles. One of my good friends commented that he couldn't believe you weren't getting job offers up the wazzu (he didn't say that, but "wazzu" is funny, like "jazz-ercise" or "asswagon").

And the difference between "it's" and "its" is that the former is a contraction of "it is", whereas the latter is used to indicate ownership... I'm pretty sure.....

Chestnuts roasted by Night_Trekker @ 11/11/2002 10:47 AM EST

I remember conan the adventurer and I've seen web sites on conan and the young warriors. Conan the Adventurer was really cool. Conan's quest was to undo the spell of living stone cast upon his family by driving the evil serperent men back into another dimension and vanquishing their leader, the cruel wizard Wrath-Amon. He was accompanied by Snagg (A viking), Zula (a Wasai prince), Jezmine (a circus performer), and Greywolf (a wizard). To answer someone's question above...conan did have a phoenix named Needle who lived in his shield who loved to eat pomegranites. Conan was also accompanied by his horse, Thunder, and his friends' horses. Zula's was a tan color and Thunder (conan's horse) was black. The one thing that conan and his friends and conan's horse had in common was they all had star metal weapons. Thunder's horseshoes were star metal in case you're wondering...how could a horse have a weapon? I know all about Conan, so if u have any questions...just ask. Oh, and does ne one have conan eps on their computer or know where to download them.

Chestnuts roasted by Conan Fan @ 06/28/2003 05:29 AM EST

HOLY SHIT! I remember those transforming McDonald's toys! Thank you so much, I'd forgotten all about those things, but I LOVED them! Those were some of my most beloved toys ever.

Chestnuts roasted by Evan Talbott @ 08/22/2003 10:10 AM EST