television

Go Lionbot Force! Wait … that doesn’t sound right.

The Matchbox-produced lion Voltron. According to the package, he's the "king of the space jungle."

In your childhood, I guess there are phenomena and there are milestones where toys are concerned.  And then there are flash in the pans, those toys that are insanely popular for most of a school year but get shoved to the back of a toy closet by the summer.  My first experience with a flash in the pan was Voltron.

 In a couple of weeks, I’ll talk about the cartoon series that spawned this particular toy, but it’s worth mentioning that I only know what voltron was because an early episode was on at my neighbor’s house one afternoon when I was in the second grade.  I didn’t know what the cartoon was, just that five robot lions that formed a much larger robot were pretty kickass.

 Soon after watching those first few episodes of the lion Voltron (the vehicle Voltron came later), my schoolmates and I were compoetely hooked.  We played Voltron just about every day and very often I was Keith or Lance and on at least a couple of occasions, my friend Lori wore her hair like Princess Allura.

Still, the tie-in toys alluded us, which was weird considering that every single cartoon we watched in those days was essentially a 30-minute toy commercial.  Even some of the movies—Star Wars, for instance—had a toy line.  But nobody, when those first few shows aired, owned a Voltron.  That’s probably because we never saw television commercials for Voltron toys.

In fact, I would not come across any toy related to Voltron for the better part of six months, when I would be at a local stationary store, Sayville Card and Gift (which may have been known as Unique Cards and Gifts at the time), browsing through the toys while my dad was two doors down buying Chinese food, and spotted something called “Lionbot.” 

But what was inside the “Lionbot” case was a die-cast metal Voltron lion.

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Don’t wake me up if I’m dreamin’

The original lineup: Matt, Tiffani, Sly, Jenny, and Tony

You know, I was all set to write about something else (specifically, Commando) when of all people, Jimmy Fallon completely knocked me on my ass.  More specifically, he inspired me … and while you probably don’t know much about me, I will tell you that I am not easily inspired.

Last week, Jimmy Fallon reuinted the cast of California Dreams.

I cannot express how awesome this made me feel when I was surfing around the internet last night and came across the reunion video.  Watching it, I get that there’s a huge joke going on here — Fallon is definitely doing this for the silliness of it all (oh, and because he couldn’t reunite the cast of Saved By The Bell) and when they are performing the cast has a “Man, this was so lame” look on their faces.

And yeah, when it was first on television back in the early 1990s, it was kind of lame.  Airing on Saturdays in the late morning (around noon or so, I think) after SBTB, California Dreams was the story of a group of teenagers that had a rock band.  In fact, the show was created by Peter Engel, the same guy responsible for SBTB, who probably saw an opportunity after the show became popular and aired that Zack Attack episode.

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