Archive / Confirmed YKTS 2

Confirmed things from "You Know That Show" were moved here, and are going to be archived here.

To repeat: This is where we store the answers. If you want to ask about a show you kind of remember, the place to do it is at You Know That Show.

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Advertising

• A commercial from the 90's that's set at a loud rock concert: the band is playing a fast unintelligible hardcore punk-ish song, and one audience member gets up on stage, climbs an amp and attempts to stagedive. Then, just as he's making the jump, the vocalist abruptly stops his unintelligible screaming to shout "Goodnight!", the song ends, and the audience starts pouring out of the venue, leaving the poor guy to fall to the ground. I was too Distracted by the Shiny to even remember the general type of product that this was supposed to be advertising. It may have been a shoe commercial, as I think there was at least one prominent shot of the would-be stagediver's footwear.
  • It was a shoe ad—for Airwalk. Good commercial.
    • 6/17/10 - Yes, I just plugged "airwalk commercial" into youtube and it was one of the first things I got. The song is actually pretty cool too. Thanks.
• This troper has been going crazy trying to find evidence of a commercial that she's absolutely POSITIVE existed, and wants to show it to people to prove that she's not crazy: it's a beer commercial, actually a series of beer commercials, about cops/detectives chasing down a giant penguin that keeps stealing the beer that's beeing sold. I can't remember anything of the beer's name except that it was called "Ice-Something". The biggest thing I remember is that the penguin thief has one line each commercial, which goes something like "dooby dooby doo" (he's singing). If anyone can tell me the beer name or point out the video somewhere (I tried to look for it on You Tube and failed), I'd love you forever.
  • Lucy, you love me long time? It was Bud Ice. Here are some links, but I don't claim they all work.
    • ...I love you. You're my new best friend!
    • You never call, you never write...
• I can't seem to remember exactly what game I'm having trouble thinking of, but the ad I'm thinking of was for a game on the Playstation I think was made by Square Enix (then Squaresoft), and it shows two guys fighting, then one of the guys gets his head cut off, but apparently, this wasn't supposed to happen, however, as the director yells "Cut!" and the now-headless combatant starts complaining.
  • It's a commercial for Legend Of Dragoon.
  • That's it! Thank youthankyouthankyou! (btw, I'm surprised it's actually not a Squaresoft game after all...)

Anime and Manga

• [24-September-2010] I remember seeing bits and pieces of this movie from when I was about six, and it involved anthromorphic frogs. It may have been Western Animation, but I feel it more likely is an anime. I think it was a children's movie, and I think it involved a bumpkin frog boy trying to win the heart of a frog princess. The only scene I clearly remembered (which gave me nightmares), was a flashback of the frog boy's time as a tadpole. His tadpole brothers and sisters were eaten by larger fish as his parents helplessly watched and he escaped.
  • I'm not entirely certain, but it sounds like it could be The Brave Frog.
  • It most certainly is! You made my day, good sir or madam. Thank you so much.
• [23-September-2010]I am looking for a Magical Girl series where the protagonist was a red haired girl that transformed into a pig with super powers.
  • I'm pretty sure this is Super Pig.
  • Yes!! it is !! Thanks a lot
• [20-September-2010] So, the premise of this one anime is about cooking. I think it's shounen, but I can't tell - anyway, I only know in this one episode this one guy challenges the protagonist (boy) to a fight involving cooking. Apparently, he puts a star on his wrist for every chef he's beaten...anyway, the challenge is to make something with three types of eggs...and eventually they all try to figure out what kind of eggs were in there...and something about rice wrapping. And I think the boy won. Oh, and this might be Korean, but I'm very sure it's Japanese.
  • Could it be Cooking Master Boy?
  • YES IT IS. Thank you.
• [17-August-2010] I can't remember what it was called... It was a shounen series that involved a boy coming home on his birthday and playing the new video game he got, then being transported to the world in the video game. One of the creatures was a yellow creature that bounced, and had a big eye. For the first few episodes, the boy also had no shoes.
  • I didn't watch it, but could it be Monster Rancher? It has a big yellow one-eyed bouncing thingy.
    • Yes, that was it! Thank you so much!
• Alright. For years I've been trying to figure out what the anime was. I saw it back when I was about 6, I think, being a nosy little sibling sitting at my brother's door, watching a little bit of one of the animes he'd been given for Christmas. So I only know a clip. What I remember was a girl and a boy, in an almost cave-like area. They find a crystal, and the girl touches it- and it starts driving itself into her chest. The boy is trying to pull it out but it goes in, and then falls out the other side. It cuts off for a bit there, but the next thing I remember was that they were in another, almost temple-like cave. A third person in the party, if i remember right it was sort of like a cat, gives the girl an earring it found. She puts it on... and her butt starts glowing. Or at least there's a light coming from her skirt. And then some sort of giant rock monster-thing pops out and sticks her in it's eye. I really hope that I actually saw this... I was told it might be an underground anime.
  • If I had to guess I'd say Nadia The Secret Of Blue Water, but that doesn't strike me as particularly likely. That said, an iffy suggestion is better than no suggestion.
  • That is definitely from Final Fantasy Legend of the Crystals: Wind Chapter. The butt-glowing (at about 9:10) part was what I remembered most about it.
    • [15-Aug-10] Yes! That's it! Thankyou very much!
• An anime movie about a group of boys of varying ages (I think there were thirteen of them, because I think I remember the Finnish translated name of the movie being "Thirteen Boys". Maybe. It was Something-teen Boys). The boys are stranded on a desert island. One of the oldest, Donovan, is a Jerkass. There was also an overweight boy named Baxter. At one point, they find a letter from a girl, and get all excited, but then they find out it was written by one of the younger boys, and for some reason Donovan gets all pissed off at him. Then they randomly find an adult woman on the beach that had apparently been washed ashore. Then an adult man shows up (I think he might've been a pirate that had hidden a treasure on the island or something). The pirate attacks the boys with a knife and wounds Donovan. The boys defeat the pirate by literally dogpiling on top of him.
  • Welp, found it on my own. Juugo Shounen Hyouryuuki, "Fifteen Boys Adrift". Oddly enough, it's been published with bad Finnish dubbing, but the only version I remember is an English version with Finnish subtitles. Hrm.
• Ok the show I can't find is kind of like Tale Spin, but instead of Baloo the pilot is an anthropomorphic tiger. He gets assignments from a mysterious professor to collect treasures around the world with his seaplane and 1 or 2 (can't remember) sidekicks. They would go to Machu Picchu or the Aztec pyramids and be chased by some evil scientist with a big machine (in the Aztec themed episode the machine was a giant flying serpent) who would also try and take the treasure. The pilot would sometimes fixate the steering wheel/stick with bamboo while he was fighting the bad guys. Anyone have a clue?
  • I think it was called Montana, after the protagonist. And the bad guys had a Mr. Fixit called Nitro.
    • [13/8/2010] Sweet that's it. Googling Montana Jones gave me the show I sought.
• Saw just one episode of this in the early 2000s, so memory very fuzzy. It some sort of a Magical Girl type of show. The protagonist was a girl with short, orangeish pink hair. Aside from her I can't remember there being many more major female characters, but there was a whole bunch of bishonens. There may have been some sort of a snow theme going on. The setting was very fantastical and a little surreal. Something about a castle, or a boarding school(??) or something. (No, it wasn't Utena.)
  • Sounds like Pretear. (It's basically a Magical Girl Unwanted Harem version of Snow White.}
    • [04-Jul-10] It is Pretear! Thank you!
• There was this early anime and manga series that featured a red head (long hair) female supernatural detective, with a scrappy sidekick. It was humor based for the most part, and I think a running gag was that the sidekick is really horrible in fighting. There was also a female android who occasionally helped them on cases, and a dark haired female villain. Ring any bells?
  • Ghost Sweeper Mikami?
    • [07/12/10] Yes it is, gracias~
• I'm trying to remember the name of an anime I partially watched on Hulu some time ago. It was about a man with white hair, and I believe one eye. He wandered around Japan, encountering spirits who were affecting the mortal world and solving the problems they often accidentally inflicted on people. It was very laid back and non violent.
  • I'd put my money on it being Mu Shi Shi.
  • [06/21/10] Bingo.
• Okay, there was this Anime (or at least an Anime-esque cartoon) I saw in the late eighties/early nineties. All I can remember was that it involved some sort of motorbike gang on big one wheeled motorbikes on the planet Venus (or possibly Mars), which was being colonised, and one of the gang fell in love with a blonde girl from Earth. I think there was an evil general with a moustache involved too. If anyone has any idea what this is, I'd be very grateful.
  • Unicycle combat motorbikes plus Venus probably equals The Venus Wars.
    • Bingo, and available on youtube too, thank you! 16/jun/10
• I remember seeing this animated movie when I was a kid about this group of adventurers or something that all had some bizarre powers. There was a guy who was super fast and had to wear a left boot on his right foot to keep himself slowed down to normal human speed and there was an old bald man who wore a hat all the time because when he took it off an icy wind blew off his scalp or something. It wasn't so far back as to be in the middle ages or anything but there was castles and royalty and stuff like that.
  • It was called the Six (Seven?) Who Went Far In The World. It wasn't a movie it was an episode of the anime show about Grimm's Fairy Tales. Look up a list of old Nick cartoons and the show will be on the list, definitely. Don't know the date, but if you look up the show you'll probably find it.
    • That's it all right, thanks. [06/03/10]
• This might be a Western Animation, but I really can't remember. It's about this girl and she has a dog...whose name is Junky, I believe, or something along the lines of that. So this girl has this cute older tutor guy who she has a crush on, except that he's got a fiancée. So the girl wishes that her tutor could like her back, and I believe it's her dog who grants that wish. And so the tutor wants to share cake with her or something and the fiancée goes up to the girl — in the rain, I think — crying and saying she hopes the tutor will be happy with her. And the movie's name might've been Junky, but I can't find a thing about it online and I was hoping to ease my mind.
  • I think the dog's name is Junkers, actually. What you described sounds familiar. Pretty sure I saw it on You Tube.
  • I know this one for almost for sure, because we had it in a lot at a library where I used to work, but I had to search for the exact title. The only anime with a wish-granting dog called Junkers or Junky I can think of is Junkers Come Here, but I don't know enough of the plot to know if the scenes described are in it, so I can't be completely sure.
    • Thank you, that's it! [05/31/10]
• An OVA that I recall seeing maybe 10 or more years ago, and it revolved the main character who wanted to get revenge on a person named Barbarossa, another detail I remember is that they used beam blades or something similar to light sabers. I'm not sure either but I recall it was called something like "Genesis Earth Defenders", but a search of that on google doesn't return anything.
  • Googling for anime ova barbarossa, the first hit is something called "Genesis Survivor Gaiarth". Might that be it?
    • Yup, it's the one [04/24/10].
• I've been racking my mind for ages about this. This is a series of kind of surreal Japanese animated shorts (aired on television), done in 3D animation and isn't in your typical "anime" style. The main character lives in a junkyard, he's kind of lean, with a stubble. He's the only human character. There is voiceover, but no dialogue. The main gist of each episode seems to be the main character trying to help something he comes across (sometimes with stuff he makes from pieces he finds in the junkyard). The three episodes that I've watched (involving a parrot, robot and a giant fish respectively) all had Downer Endings. In particular, the plot for the episode with the fish was something like this: the main character got a huge fish, ate it, saw the fish's baby in the pool and felt bad. So he started bringing donuts to the baby fish. Eventually, he brought donuts by the cartload. The baby fish grows to a huge size, the size of the original fish he had caught. One day, he falls into the pool, gets "eaten", and then wakes up. A giant grinning cat has caught the fish, saving him, and the cat is eating the fish, and the episode ends with the main character sobbing. (The giant grinning cat might have been a recurring character). Also, for the episode involving the parrot, it wanted to return to the jungle but dies in its cage at the end. I think the title may begin with "Mr. ...", but don't take my word on the title.
  • Mr Stain On Junk Alley?
    • Yes! Thank you! Guess I was right about the title at least.
• An anime that I am positive has an article on this wiki. A shapeshifting mech with a pilot crashlands on Earth. The pilot is killed, and the mech is forced to take on a form resembling the lead girl and learn about Earth.
  • [3/1/10] Found it on my own accord ^{* Thanks for nothing, guys. T_T}:Figure17
• Something that has an article on this very wiki. I got to it for some gender-bending trope. The image featured a brown-haired girl, probably with a white shirt and red shoulders. That image linked to the show's article, which had that same image.
  • I immediately realized what you were talking about, but it took me a few seconds to hunt it down on the wiki, as I couldn't remember the title either. Unless I'm way off, it's Otome Wa Boku Ni Koishiteru, linked from Wholesome Crossdresser.
    • Actually, no. The character in question only fits the "genderbending-based trope" part, but the character doesn't match the physical description at all.
    • Well, to be fair, they match it somewhat — they have light-brown/dark-blonde hair, and an outfit with red in it. I had assumed you had flipped the red shirt with bare (white) shoulders in your memory into a white shirt with red shoulders... but even then, that was the one part I doubted. Let me dig some more and see if I can hunt it up. * A few moments later.* Okay, I just ran through Trans Gender Tropes (what the index is called now), and either the article is no longer on that index, the image is no longer on that article, or I was actually right. Ruling out the last option for now, I'll have to turn this over to someone else — I have no idea what series you're talking about if it isn't that one, and I doubt I could find the picture from such a vague description to figure it out from that.
  • No Bra?
    • [2/24/10] Jack freaking POT!
• Some 1990's-era anime where one kid gets snatched by people with a giant flying pirate ship. There were adverts for it in multi-episode Pokemon VHS's that were like this◊. The advert included a shot of another kid holding out his hand with the camera quickly panning away. It may or may not be Castle In The Sky
  • Sounds like the first Ranma 1/2 movie.
    • [1/16/10] Yes! A quick Youtube search shows that this one's it! The trailer had the kidnapping, the pan-out shot...the guy who posted this even said "Does anyone remember seeing this at the end of their Pokemon VHS?"
• A movie or maybe a series. I remember that it involved a flying ship (maybe a pirate ship). The protagonist may have been a kid who lost his/her parents in an accident. Also it may have involved a large corporation (the bad guys I think). I'm being rather vague...
  • Not sure, but the description reminds me of Sora Tobu Yuureisen (ANN link), if maybe because I watched it a month ago (it's available on DVD where I live).
    • I think that's it! Thanks! Do you know where I could watch it (either subtitled or dubbed in either English or Russian)?
    • It is licensed in Russia (info link); seems to be available online here (Russian dub), although you might have access problems; otherwise just search around for it in Google, it must be somewhere out there...
• There was an English-dubbed miniseries, might have been Cartoon Network. Humanity was at war with genetically engineered creatures of many different shapes. A lot of them could live in water, there was a lot of water travel in general. Much of the Earth was devastated. There was a female creature who was sympathetic and originally came out of a giant robot that had been tearing up a city while broadcasting a message. There were more who looked like her and there was a human man who got close to her. The scientist who started the whole mess lived on an island with some of his creations, one of which was tree-like. He had originally been doing a project for development of the ocean floor (can't remember if it was for food or habitation) but he didn't want to increase humanity's arrogance. A human woman wanted to kill him, and he asked her if that would make her pain go away. She said maybe it would. They disagreed on who had attacked first. A male upright shark-like antagonist was interested in her tears but then realized they were only saltwater. Earlier than this, a creature like a giant whale or living ship got a sad death scene where it recounted its experiences - playful dolphins of the north or south, something else of the south or north, etc.
  • Blue Submarine No 6.
    • Thank you so much! Typing in remembered lines of dialogue to Google was no help at all. Which surprised me because kind of a big deal was made out of it when it aired.
• Either a pilot episode or animated film, it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with some sort of virus wreaking havoc on everything. The opening scene had a female placed as the new person on a squad sent out to find surviving plant life. Shortly after, they find a plant, pick it up in suitably millitary fashion, with plenty of staticy voices and people shouting. Later, in the underground base, our possibly still unnamed female seems to be infected by whatever it is that forces everyone above the surface to wear hazardous environment suits. She got strapped into a table, despite her protests, and then it all faded out. That seemed to launch the rest of the plot into action, but This Editor doesn't remember much.
  • Sounds a lot like a slightly mangled memory of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within.
    • I was doubtful at first, but around the 8 minute point, when Aki's life-o-vision pans down towards the 6th spirit, I knew it was what I was looking for. Thank you, my memories will finally be at ease.
• It's not something I am remembering, but I would like to know the name of this anime.
  • Katekyo Hitman Reborn.
    • That was quick. Thanks!
• I'm trying to remember the name of this suh-real anime movie my friend and I rented once. Neither of us had any idea what was going on in it, but it was a hoot... There was this guy, and he may have been a swordsman or something. He had a dog who was very Courage The Cowardly Dog-esque. He accidentally wandered into a town of ghosts or something, which looked kind of like Las Vegas, and he befriended a ghost woman, whom he fell in love with. Then this ghost hunter started chasing him around, and he had this giant flying mech that looked like a rice pot (Really), and he started out as their enemy, but they befriended him. He was fighting some other guy, and they were kind of like Those Two Guys. The rice pot one had a Heroic Sacrifice. The swordsman-or-whatever-type fellow (I get the feeling that he also may have been a peasant) tried to help the ghost girl meet her boyfriend, a singing sensation giving a concert in this town, only he was actually some form of Satan and he was going to destroy it all. (Again...) Then they tried to reincarnate together by riding a Soul Train, only that got mixed up too, and he thought he lost her, but he found her again... and the two ghost-hunting rivals slash Those Two Guys got reincarnated as brothers. There was LOTS of Conspicuous CG. What the heck was this movie?! I'm certain I'm not just making it up!
  • Yeah, I remember it too. The two guys that were fighting; one of them was like a "samurai warrior-mecha pilot", whose mecha was made of wood; and the other guy was like a "sage of the clouds and thunders". The ghost girl who fell in love with the protagonist worked for some kind of witch in the beginning. And I remember that the "soul train" had a some kind of "memory-erasing-hammers". If the couple was able to reincarnate without the hammers hitting them, they will keep their memories; and they succeded. Someone please give us some light about the name of this WEIRD anime movie!!
    • A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation
    • YES! Thank you! I thought the name had "ghost story" somewhere in the title, but I was so unsure I didn't want to mention it.
• Anybody know the anime at 0:59 and 1:10 in this AMV ?
  • That's definitely Princess Tutu.
    • Whoops, didn't see your answer. Thanks!
• There was an anime I read about a while ago, which involved two girls who get trapped in the past/Trapped in Another World and become shrine maidens (priestesses in the English) for opposite sides in a war. I know it sounds a bit like Fushigi Yugi, but I don't think it is, because the description featured two girls, and also sounded quite a bit darker, including an implied rape.
  • ... Okay, I've looked into it, and it is Fushigi Yugi. It's just that the summarizer I read it from chose such a bizarre set of plot elements to emphasize and to gloss over that I instead thought it was something entirely different that happened to share a few tangential plot elements. I am keeping this here as a cautionary tale about the dangers of summaries that choose really weird plot elements to focus on. Also, it helps to get the order of events right — the summary made it sound like the two girls both entered the Other World at the same time. In FY, this is only true for a very, very brief incident at the very start of the story — after that, Miaka is alone in the book, and her friend doesn't show up until partway through. (Not sure exactly how far "partway" is, only having read the first volume so far)
• This fan vid based on Yume Nikki has been bugging me for a while. I'm almost certain it's based on the opening to some existing anime, but since I can't read Japanese, I have no idea what that could be. Can someone tell me if this is based on another anime's op, or if it's just a really well-made amateur production?
  • Never mind, I found out for myself: It's Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. (I did some blind poking around with regards to the lyrics of the song, guessed that the repeated phrase was "Bure bure bure" [though I was clueless on the meaning], checked what came up on Anime Lyrics, and sure enough...)
• I saw this years ago, late at night, so sorry for the bad description. From what i remember it involved 3 girls, possibly siblings, piloting mechas. pretty sure they were color coded red, green and blue, but im also sure that yellow was involved (maybe a hair color?) And an episode might have involved a clone or a twin or something fighting the blue one, but i cant possibly be sure.
  • It sounds like Magic Knight Rayearth. pics for reference. Did they have swords and spells, and a white rabbit with a gem on its forehead? If so, then that's it.
    • Yeah, thats probably it. Thanks.
• This might actually be Western Animation instead, but anyway...a show where a girl was journeying around with the protection of three male characters, one of whom I think was pretty humanoid, and one of whom was a cat creature (I think). Pretty sure the girl was the last of her kind, her kind being humans IIRC, and they were journeying toward some special place. There were these I think seven or eight Evil Overlords they had to overcome, one of whom was an insect monster. They actually ended up only taking out about three of the overlords, because it turned out that the last overlord was actually the combined form of her three protectors. When this came to light, everyone lost their memories for some reason and the humanoid protector become a petty thief. I distinctly remember a vendor saying "buy one get one free" and him stealing an apple, saying "I'll take the free one!" Also, when they were going up against the insect monster, a shapeshifting minion of it (also an insect, probably a praying mantis) impersonated a human girl to gain the trust of the main female character, and there was a bit where the main female character was locked up in the insect fortress, but it could have been the shapeshifter. Eventually a Spot the Imposter scenario occurred. The only other thing I can remember properly was one of the heroes in the final episode or thereabouts being squeezed by the Big Bad, who announced "I think I'm going to have a crush on you".
  • This is most definately Shinzo.
  • You're right. Thank you so much!
• It was a series I watched dubbed on New Zealand television sometime around 2001 or 2002-ish. I think it was about a world where the humans had been wiped out and some other alien race populated it. There was one human girl left whose father (I think) put her in a chamber where she slept for a really long time, aging only a few years from a little girl to a teenager, and the rest of the humans were already dead by the time she woke up. A couple of these aliens were helping her look for a land that's rumored to be a sanctuary for humans or something. I remember this one part in particular where a bad guy turned her to stone and dropped her in acid and her friends had to find a way to rescue her before she dissolved.
  • Also Shinzo
• A cartoon I remember seeing a long time ago when I was young — may have been a movie on VHS. Was about thieves and police and detectives and such, and I think all the characters were dogs, but they might have been a mix of animals. Was a scene where the thieves stole their target using a hot air balloon, prompting one of the detectives/policemen to ask to be pinched because he must be dreaming. Someone complied, and it was painful. Sounds a bit like Meitantei Holmes — which is actually what brought it to mind enough to make this post — but from what I remember, had a decidedly Western animation style — possibly continental European.
  • Could it be that you were watching " Moi Renart" ? Renard with a D is fox in french, Renart is an anthropomorphic fox, and a Robin Hood kind of thief with a knack for outlandish, over-the-top schemes and impersonation. Here is the video of the generic in original french [1]
    • The art style doesn't seem to line up with what I remember — although it's been so long ago my memory can't be relied upon too much, I could have sworn it was more of a simple, distinctly Western style and less early Animesque — and I can't find any mention of it being dubbed in English — which the thing I'm looking for definitely was. Also, although this doesn't exclude Moi Renart, it would've been late 80s or early 90s, for any other guesses.
  • Road Rovers?
    • Sorry, but definitely not. Was more mundane and not a superhero series, and would have been quite a bit older — several years, at least.
  • Long shot, especially since it's not that mundane and they aren't dogs, but Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers?
    • Definitely not, sorry. I'd definitely remember if it was that.
  • It took me a while to remember the name of the series, but are you thinking of Dog City?
    • Pretty sure not, but I think I'll be looking into that one now.
  • Sounds like Sherlock Hound to me.
    • That's the best guess I have thus far, but that would require me to be misremembering the art style — as Sherlock Hound is just the English distribution name for Meitantei Holmes. Given how long ago it is, that's hardly impossible, so I'm just going to assume that's it unless someone else comes up with a good guess.
• A manga series I read from about volume 2-5 of about a vampire that is mostly stuck in a sort of Sleep-Mode Size form. He gets out of the sleep mode size for fights, but I don't recall if it had something to do with the human girl he was with as of volume 2 or so (she nursed him back to health at one point, possibly when they first met, in a flashback, in the chapel[?] mentioned below, or some combination of the three), or if it was that he could only go full-scale when something like the bloodlust of a fight was upon him, or what (I couldn't get volume 1, so missed out on that). Part of it, he has to crawl through the snow with lots of Clothing Damage, and hides in what I think was a chapel from either sunlight, wolves, or both, and ends up covered with a Modesty Satin Curtain. Around volume 4 or 5, I think, but it could have been earlier if they were playing around with flashbacks, was an enemy who either controlled magical killer vampire puppets, or was herself a vampire who controlled magical killer puppets. The main character (vampire) was rather Bishounen, and tended to get a lot of fanservice as well as the emotional content, so it was probably either one of the few series targeted at girls with a focus on fighting, or a series aimed at both the male and female teen demographics (and possibly pre-teen, I don't recall the rating). For years I thought the title was Chibi Vampire, but that's Karin under a different name, and I really think it's not Vampire Doll either, but the article (if it ever existed) is gone, so I can't double-check. (Edit: It's not Vampire Knight either, but the drawing style of the pages inside [that is, not the covers] is kind of similar.)
  • This reminds me of what i've read here about Chrono Crusade, only it's about demons instead of vampires...
    • No, definitely not Chrono Crusade (apart from a more angular drawing style, the characters don't even synch between the two series), and the guy was definitely a vampire.
  • It is Vampire Doll: Guilt-Na-Zan. I cannot believe it took me this long to think of The Other Wiki, and when I checked it there it was a close enough match with the premise to go through the One Manga archive, the Volume Four Characters and Splash Page was definitely from the series. If Vampire Doll still doesn't have a page, I'll start preparing one to upload as soon as I can.
• An anime that aired on Fox Kids (or maybe Kids WB). The good guys were colored Dinosaurs animated with Conspicuous CG (I think they were cybernetic but maybe that's just the way the CGI looked) who fought other Dinosaurs (who were colored grey), they were helped by young kids that gave them power... or something. One episode I remember was a clip show where The Dragon and a generic mook went in an empty movie theater and watched clip of their failures.
  • Could it be Dinosaur King?
    • No, the show I described is older (around late 90's, early 2000's, back when the block had this logo).
  • Dino Zaurs
    • [2/22/10] Yup, that seems to be it. Thanks!
• I haven't actually seen it, but I read the description of a sci-fi show where the crew are on a space station and battle against monsters or something, but there's a catch: their funding comes from a tv network that films their battles and uses it for reality tv. Thus, not only must they do battle, but they have to do it dramatically and accept "suggestions" from the network, lest they lose funding.
  • This almost sounds like Starship Operators. In that show there are no monsters involved and the space station is a spaceship whose crew are basically La Résistance, but there's the bit about them being funded by a TV network in it.
    • [09/17/10] Bingo; that's it.
• Um... a mecha anime (i think). The protagonist is an Ordinary High-School Student who suddenly traveled to a dimention with giant robot battles. there was romance. busty chicks. attempting to go home. the our world and the other dimension merging. the protagonist who got into the enemy base said that he was in a field trip and got lost. yup. that's all i can remember.
  • Sounds like it might be Parallel Trouble Adventure Dual, but I'm not sure.
    • thankyou

Comic Books

• Where does this page◊ come from?
  • Flash #217, by Geoff Johns.
  • [4/17/2010] Yes- that's it, thanks. X3
• An European comic about a Jerkass boy who is transformed into a tiger-striped kitten and separated from his family (I think they were moving away?). There was a white cat with a green bowtie that travelled with him and didn't believe he used to be a boy.
  • Billy the Cat.
    • [2/24/10] That's was fast. Thank you!
• An educational children's comic book starring a talking mammoth and the scientists who thawed him out after he was frozen in a glacier. He told stories about his pre-frozen life, his mammoth and caveperson friends, and their wacky antics that all seemed to have some relevence to the present-day drama.
  • This sounds very much like the educational children's animated series Cro — perhaps it had a spin-off comic book?
    • That seems to be it. Weird - there's next to no information about the comics, of which there were apparently only two small books. But that's it, thanks!
• I remember reading one of my Dad's Batman comics where there was an epidemic going on, and people were bleeding rather gruesomely from every orifice. I'm thinking someone among the bat-family caught it, possibly Nightwing. I also seem to recall that the virus in question was Ebola. What was the name of the storyline?
  • Batman: Contagion.
  • [4/17/10] Yeah, that's it! Thank you!

Fanfic

• A Mega Man X fic I read years ago on fanfiction.net, the only things I can realy remember about it were the ship (Axl X OC), and the cool wedding vows at the end
  • [5/11/2010] I found it myself, it's here if your interested.
• I'm pretty sure I read about this here, but it must've been before The Great Crash. It was about an organization that basically assassinated Mary Sue self-inserts. First chapter had the protagonist taking out a Street Fighter SI; in later chapters they went to DBZ, Ranma, NGE, and so forth.
  • The originators of that style would be the Protectors Of The Plot Continuum, which is easily Googlable last time I checked. The original authors only did Lord of the Rings, but there's an excellent chance you read one of their spinoffs or imitators. The PPC, fortunately, do love their imitators, so their links page may be a good lead.
    • I'm pretty sure the "targets" in this story were parodies, instead of being from pre-existing fics. Forgot to mention, this was a round-robin story, although I couldn't find it on the Improfanfic site. The main page had a picture of a gun at the top, and the assassins were hired by in-canon characters (for instance, Gendo requested the Evaverse assassination). It also never actually described the universes as fictional, or used the term "fanfic" of "Mary Sue."
    • That would be "Self Extraction", from the Improfanfic spinoff site Indie Madnesse.
    • That's the one. Thanks!
• A Pokemon fanfic where there's some psychic pokemon in the Abra line that tries to invert the world—with humans being kept in balls and battling for the amusement of the pokemon. It ends with pikachu killing that leader, and then killing Ash, after each one had given a speech on why their cause was right. It was...dark. I read it around a decade ago, I think.
  • I found it on another site. For those who may be interested, its here: "Value"
• This troper recalls reading a Digimon fanfic about a sweet-tempered Gazimon who worked for Etemon but all the other Gazimon teased him because he was sensitive and kind. At one point, I think I he gave Etemon a present of some sort. Can't remember what website it was from but I found it on Google years ago. 2002, maybe? Cute fanfic, but now I can't find it at all on Google!
  • Nevermind, I just finally found it on Google through Fanfiction.net. The Gazimon is named Patch and I clearly remember a Forrest Gump vibe from him. It's called "Monkey Business" http://www.fanfiction.net/s/412941/1/Monkey_Business

Film

• Typical teen movie, but maybe someone will recognize the story. I saw it back in 2004 on TV, and back then it was a "first time on TV" thing, so I'd guess it's post-2000.
  The main plot involve Alice, Bob, Carol and Daniel (names I made up just now, two guys and two girls) in the lead up to their high school prom. Alice and Bob are childhood friends, as are Carol and Daniel; the former two are nice guys, while the latter two are The Libby and a Jerk Jock. Bob is smitten with Carol and Daniel wants to score with Alice, so the two guys agree to be The Cyrano for each other. Along the way Bob realizes he loves Alice and tries to expose the whole thing to her, but she doesn't believe him and stops speaking to him. It all comes to a head on the prom night; Bob takes the stage and plays a song for Alice on his accordion (which was his father's and Alice had mentioned earlier she liked when his father played it). Alice and Danny end up in a hotel room together, but Alice is suspicious and asks Danny a question which exposes him as a fraud. She ties him to the bed and goes back home, where she's reunited with Bob.
  There are numerous B-plots throughout the movie, but I just remember two; the first involves a star lacrosse player joining the shool choir to score with a girl, but he ends up liking the choir (and the girl) so much that he decides to skip his most important game to partecipate in the choir's recital; the second involve a nerdy prankster who, is heavily hinted, is only trying to get people to aknowledge him, trying (and ultimately succeeding) to crash the prom by opening up the swimming pool beneath the gym the prom's at; he's then apprehended by a cop who turns out to be the Legendary High School Prankster and who counsels him on the direction he wants to take in life.
  ...Yeah, that's a lot of detail. Unfortunately the one detail I can't remember is the movie's title.
  • The pool underneath the gym floor means it was filmed at Beverly Hills High School. The Wikipedia page for that offers Whatever It Takes among a few films shot there. If that's not it, you can try searching IMDB or elsewhere for that filming location.
    • [9/28/10] Confirmed by questioner.
• A movie set in a video store where it turns out one of the videos has subliminal mind control messages that make people act like zombies. At one point the main characters uncover a 50's b-movie with a similar plot (I think rather than vcr's the film-within-a-film used some sort of deliberately zeerusty funky looking portable projector). I don't remember much else other than that I saw it on TV once, and it looked pretty low-budget.
  • This question is old, so I hope you come back some day to check this. I came across a low-budget 1988 movie called Remote Control today and remembered your description.
    • 9/25/10 - That's got to be it, thanks.
• I'm not sure if this was a TV movie or what, but there was this man and woman in the jungle of a fantasy-India like world, and the man draws a circle around the woman to protect her while he's gone. He warns her to not give her necklace to anyone but him, or the circle will lose it's protective qualities. She agrees, but then gets tricked into giving it to this giant alien-insecty dude (maybe like the Dr. Smith monster in the Lost In Space movie?) who imitates the guy's voice, kidnaps her, and takes her to his palace which has lots of ancient-greek looking columns instead of walls. Then all I remember is the first guy running like a gazelle to the marble palace thing to try and rescue her, perhaps with some sort of bow and arrow or spear or something. I know I saw it on cable in the early/mid nineties, but nothing else.
  • You may be thinking of the Alfonso Cuaron movie adaptation of A Little Princess. The Rama story is used throughout the film and is one of the most memorable aspects. If it's not it's definitely got to be something related to the Ramayana, which might help in your search.
    • [09/14/2010] Yep, that's definitely it. I don't even remember anything else about the film, including the main plot, but having just watched the whole thing, that's definitely it. Man, I thought I might have dreamed the whole thing up for years. Thanks so much!
• There's this b-horror movie I saw in the 90s I've been trying to remember for years. The only things I really remember, are people trapped inside of a house due to bugs surrounding them outside. At one point, they throw a human dummy outside to try distract the bugs, and immediately afterwards, the bugs throw a fried chicken on a string through the window. Seriously.
  • [09/05/2010] Found it myself. "Bugged!" 1997, by Troma. Thanks for nothing!
• A collection of avante-garde film shorts, which I think were all by the same filmmaker. (I don't check this folder much, so if you have an answer, send a PM to Feo Takahari.)
  • One has humanoid figures made of three different types of things—the only type I remember is "food." They move side-to-side via stop-motion animation, and attack each other in a rock-paper-scissors order, with each dissolving into its component parts to brutally smash parts of the other. After several rounds of smashing each other they become near-identical sculptures of humans.
  • Two clay heads face each other, and each interacts with the other in various ways by sticking objects out of its mouth—one sticks out a pencil and the other sticks out a sharpener, one sticks out a shoe and the other laces it, and so on. One of them starts screwing up and sticking out the wrong object for each situation, and they start taking revenge on each other, slowly breaking down until each has collapsed into a gasping heap.
  • Two non-anthropomorphic pieces of meat encounter each other and mime sex acts with each other, then are put in a pan and cooked. I remember one of them uses a reflective pot as an improvised mirror to gaze at itself.
  • Two clay figures, one male and one female, stare at each other across a table. They kiss, and their mouths merge; the male puts his hand on the female's breast, and his hand is absorbed into it. They combine into a single writhing mass on the table, in which parts and faces can occasionally be seen, but though it's sexual, it's far from sexy, as the fingerprints remain in the clay, making them look pockmarked and diseased. They separate, and leave behind a little piece of clay, evidently an infant of their kind. It rolls over to its mother and nuzzles her breast—but she doesn't want it, and in irritation she flicks it over to its father. He doesn't want it either, and he flicks it right back to her. Flick, flick, flick, until they start throwing it at each other's faces in increasing anger, eventually forgetting all about it as they tear each other into bits.
    • [09/04/2010] According to Paddymcpaddy, it's Dimensions of Dialogue.
• A movie I caught a few minutes of on Comedy Central a few years back, never found out the name of it. The plot seemed to be about several parties all individually deciding to rob a particular bank. Took place in a semi-desert town, maybe Nevada or California. One of the characters was a hunter or a tracker, and lived in a tent out by himself. There was also a woman who worked as a clerk or something at the bank, and decided to steal everything to get back at her boss.
  • The movie you are looking for is Scorched.
    • [08/24/10]That's the one. Thanks!
• On three seperate occasions I have watched this B-movie that used to come on the public access channel. It was about a group of American soldiers in WWII who befriend an furry alien. The soldiers protect the alien from the Nazis, who want to exploit its technology. Notable scenes include the alien making a halogram of an attractive woman for one of the soldiers to dance with, another soldier punching out Hitler while being interrogated, and a final battle where the soldiers fight the Nazis with the help of more aliens, except that these aliens are blue and humanoid as apparently only the females of their species are furry. Every time I watched this movie, it always started with a scene showing the rest of the soldiers escaping into the forrest while the rest of their unit gets killed, I never saw the opening credits that revealed the title.
  • This is Zone Troopers.
    • [16-Aug-10] Yes, it is! Thank you!
• I know someone must know this movie. It was some coming of age thing about this overweight teenage boy. He is bullied, I think people think he's gay (because some family member of his is?). But he has a crush on a popular/pretty girl who turns out to be really friendly. I think they go to prom together and the girl reveals she is bulimic. I think they start going out after that. He wears this purple tux to prom that came from his mentor of sorts (I think), it had a note like "Here's to you, Superman." If it helps I think it's based off a book or short story.
  • The first Google result for purple tux movie is Angus, which seems to match your description.
    • [8/14/10] Thanks, that's it!
• This is such a long-shot because I only remember one tiny detail, but I saw it when I was very young and it's been bugging me for years: I vaguely remember a woman in an interrogation room (I think she was crying, or at least very distraght.) The part I really remember is that outside the room, there were several vivid and colorful infrared screens showing her face on them. I don't know why, but the image always stuck with me.
  • It would depend on when you were "very young", but if it was in the mid-'90s, it might be True Lies.
    • [08/13/10] THANK YOU SO EFFING MUCH! :D It's been bugging me for a decade! My parents used to watch a lot of old B-movies when I was little, so I was afraid it was one of those and I'd never find it again. \o/
• A barely remembered opening scene: Under a red sky, a man in a white robe and a man in a black robe sit on opposite sides of a third character caked with mud, whom they address as mother. The man in the black robe urges her to awaken now, while the man in the white robe advises her to be patient and wait for the sun to rise. Cut to a scene elsewhere of a man and a woman having a conversation; I think they were on a cruise ship.
  • Sounds like this: Artemis '81
    • [10/08/10] That's it! Thanks!
• This one was a movie I remember seeing in the mid-90's in school. It was aimed at kids. It started with a kid talking to his/her father about their mother when she was a little girl, and the dad (or dad-like figure) says something to the effect of "Your mother was no girl." Cut to past, and we follow the adventures of kid's mom (an extremely boyish-looking girl with a bowl cut, if I remember correctly) and her best friend, who may have been the dad-figure. This took place way out in the country, in a tiny rural town. I also vaguely recall the best-friend-figure being Native American. This movie may have been based on a children's book. Any ideas?
  • Sounds like Friendship's Field, about an extremely boyish girl (changes her name from Iris to Ira, short boy's haircut, etc.), it starts much the same with the little girl and her dad clearing out the attic when they find her mother's bagpipes, ("I though only boy's played the bagpipes" "Oh well, your mother's not a girl"), but her best-friend was the child of Mexican migrant workers, not Native American.
    • HOLY CRAP. You have just solved a 12-year-old mystery. Thank you.
• It's either this or Film, but anyway, it involved someone saying "Share and share alike" in a really menacing pirate accent. I realize this isn't a lot to go on, but that quote keeps popping up in my brain at the oddest moments, and I want it to stop.
  • Might it be Muppet Treasure Island?
  • Never mind; I, the OP, have found it. It's a really menacing overblown Irish accent, and it's from the George Hearn version of Sweeney Todd.
• A comparatively recent American movie about a former two-time president who moves to a small town and runs for mayor, going up against a local plumber whose only distinction is as a pie-eating champ (and at the same time competing with him for the love of a local woman.) The president's politics are never mentioned, but we learn that he had a very high approval rating and that he was the first president to be divorced in office (he calls his wife "the Wicked Witch of the West Wing," and says she took everyone from him except his title of president.) The president thinks he's a much better golfer than he really is, because Secret Service agents hide in the trees beside the course, and when a ball goes into the trees they throw it back out so it looks like it bounced out. (This leads to his challenging the plumber to a golf game, and when his ex-wife shows up and orders the agents out of hiding he finds that he's completely outmatched.) In the end, both say they'll vote for the other because they're unfit to lead the town, but the president winds up voting for himself anyway, and the election is Decided by One Vote. The president feels guilty and nearly withdraws, but the plumber falsely claims to have voted for himself as well, because he feels the president is better suited to the job. The plumber, on the other hand, is the one who gets the girl.
  • Welcome to Mooseport
    • [28/07/2010] Thanks!
• This movie was the first Downer Ending I ever saw, so it left quite a scar. It was about a man that became involved in some kind of conspiracy and a couple he knew was part of it. I'm not sure if the protagonist's wife was killed in the course of the movie but I remember that near the end it was only the guy and his 1-2 years old baby. At the end of the movie he learned that the conspiracy was going to detonate a bomb in a building, I'm not sure if it was were he worked, but he hijacked a van and rushed to the building, went in ignoring the security and found the vehicle where he thought the bomb was. When he opened the vehicle, he found nothing and realized that it was all part of the conspiracy's plan and that the bomb was in the van that he hijacked. Mid-realization the bomb exploded, and the epilogue showed that he was considered the responsible for the bomb and that his baby was adopted by the family of the couple that was into the conspiracy. Then I felt down like for a week. I saw that movie on TV around '95 and I saw it dubbed into Spanish, so the only thing I can say is that it wasn't oriental and it felt like it was made in the 80's. Sorry for the Wall of Text.
  • This sounds exactly like Arlington Road, except that was made in 1999.
    • [28/07/10] I saw the trailer, and yeah, that's it! Must have misremembered the date. I could never forget that bad guy (now I know he's Tim Robbins), he was so creepy in that movie. How odd that it reached television so quickly, but that's the one, I'm sure of it. Thanks!
• A hamster (or similar) is in its cage. The creature starts to twist, and finally explodes, having a gory and horrifying death. That's all I can remember.
  • Sounds like the opening to Hollow Man. (A rat gets eaten by an invisible gorilla.)
    • [18/05/10] Yeah, that's it. Thank you!
• It's a movie where a girl is born as a "crack baby" (I think they used that term) because her mother was on drugs. She seems to have strange powers; I can only remember the scene when the girl is at school, holding a dead pigeon and rocking back and forth. The pigeon came back to life. This movie might be from the nineties or even eighties, not sure.
  • I'm positive that's Bless the Child from the early 2000s.
    • [07/01/10] That's it! Thanks, it's been bothering me.
• There was a weird fantasy movie shown on cable in the mid-80s or thereabouts. The ending shows a dwarf and a normal size guy walking down a road. The dwarf complains that they can't get back to wherever because they used up all their magic. The normal sized guy picks the dwarf up and carries him on his shoulders, and the dwarf says 'This some strange magic'.
  • There was another scene near the end of the same movie set during some big festival in a magical kingdom where people jump (or are pushed, I can't remember if it was voluntary or some kind of sacrifice) into a big pit and emerge as humanoid butterflies(?) and eventually a big bald gray head emerges from the pit and spits pixie dust on the crowd.
  • The Great Land of Small
    • [6/29/10] That was it exactly, thanks. I looked the movie up on You Tube and it's even weirder than I remembered.
• And another barely-seen film on TV from when I was a kid! I only saw the end or so, but this one featured a world through mirrors that you could access with "mirror berries", and the villains were huge, vaguely King Dedede-esque flying penguins who made tea out of people.
  • Could it be the Romanian children's film Magic in the Mirror? Or Magic In The Mirror: Fowl Play?
    • [06/15/10] Looking them up, it looks like it's a slightly distorted memory of one of the two.
• There is this really weird film I saw in tv when I was a kid, circa 1991-93. It was a chase sequence of a man in a truck tailing a guy driving a car. The film was probably made in the eighties or late seventies. The weird thing are that: A- The chase sequence lasted for more or less half an hour (if not more, I just got this part) and B- There was no dialogue, NOT A SINGLE WORD. In the end, the truck flips off the highway and crash badly. Or was it? I really don't remember what happens, it can be the car the one it flips, for as much I remember. Anyway, the film ended with one man (I can't remember which one) crying at the side of the road, while the truck/car was in flames. Credits roll. Mindfuck ensues. Really strange. That's all I got.
  • It's Duel.
  • [07/06/2010] You are right. And made by Steven Spielberg, no less! Quite a surprise, I shall watch it again.
• Well, I don't have much, but for those SF genre sawy, I salute you! It was a Sci-Fi film. I saw it between 1990-1993, but since it was a TV broadcast in Argentina, it must be quite older; I'm almost sure it was from The '80s or even the seventies. It wasn't a B-movie, I remember the FX were pretty good, or at least reasonable for its time. It featured a desperate spaceship crew. They have this menace on board, pretty much like Alien. I remember particularly this scene: a guy or gal gets in a duct, and something starts to chase him/her along the duct. The rest of the crew is encouraging him through radio and see his/her advance in a screen that features a green dot beeping as it moves. It suddenly appears a red dot. Beeping increases, they start to panic, close shot of the guy/gal in the duct crawling desperately, the red dot reaches the green dot in the screen; and that's it.
  Way further in the movie, two survivors finally finds the creature. It's an egregious example of starfish alien, a pink pale jelly-like blob with a small mouth and a series of tentacles made of the same blob-thing. The thing is sentient, and they are able to communicate with it. As they talk (I think that through a computer), they both understand that all was a big misunderstanding: the alien says it was attacked on sight by some random crewmen and it just held its grown and defended itself. Hope that's enough. Please, help me! This movie has been haunting me since I was at least seven, absolute Nightmare Fuel!
  • It was called Star Crystal. Not as scary, for This Troper, but I was twenty when I saw it ;)
  • [02/06/2010] Made Of Win, my friend: indeed it is. For the record, I was only 7, and a sensitive child, and... ok, I always have been a chickenshit, I have to wait till 15 to see Alien 3, and I had to mute the TV to make it a bearable experience. Yes, I'm ashamed. Good thing this is anonymous. Thanks a bunch, and cheers from Buenos Aires! Keep up at the good work.
• Okay, this one is an old shame. Something I saw on VHS around the turn of the century, but it was clearly from the 70s or 80s. Set in a private school, where some of the students get involved in witchcraft. The climax of the film involves the girls holding some naked ritual (The film is not pornographic; it's just a B-horror movie with a nude scene) and summoning satan. And then things go badly for some reason, and one of the minor characters gets, quite literally, run through with Satan's gigantic, razor-sharp phallus. Then the girls mostly run away, except for the ring leader who jumps into Satan's arms, professes her love for him, and gets taken back to hell. The ringleader girl looked a lot like Clea Duvall, but given the period of the film, I can't imagine it was her. I'm pretty sure this isn't "Satan's School For Girls", which I gather is close.
  • Found this one via an exhaustive IMDB search. It's called 'Little Witches', and is from 1996, not the 80s. The girl who looked like Clea Duvall was Clea Duvall.
• This film starts with an airplane which flies though spacial anomaly and anyone who was awake when it when though disappeared leaving every thing they were wearing in a pile on their seat, including one pacemaker. When they landed at the airport they found that no one was there and every thing was stale literally and figuratively. The most memorable thing was these giant fuzzballs that ate every thing that appeared near the end. Apparently they're in an old moment in time and the fuzzballs recycle it, or something.
  • The Langoliers.
    • [06/02/10] Thank you!!!
• A family-friendly drama released in the eighties about a guy and his sentient Macintosh computer, represented by an Einstein-esque face on the monochrome screen. Towards the end, the computer is infected with a virus that's slowly overwriting the AI, causing the AI to glitch and the screen to slowly getting filled with random data. Slight Nightmare Fuel, because the AI was portrayed fairly sympathetically.
  • 1988 remake of The Absent-Minded Professor. This trailer has an appearance from the computer about 40 seconds in.
    • [05/27/10] Yep, that's the one. Thanks.
• A horror film that was made by Disney/ran on Disney Channel. All I remember is one scene with a girl standing in a room surrounded with mirrors. There's either a ghost or a distorted reflection talking to her in all of the mirrors in a creepy voice. Mid to late eighties or before. May possibly be based on a Sweet Valley Twins book, unless I'm completely making that up too.
  • I think this is The Watcher In The Woods. I was trying to find the same film just yesterday after remembering a different part. These two reviews helped me confirm it.
  • Yes! Thank you.
• This is something I want to add to the Good Girls Avoid Abortion page, but I can't for the life of me remember the title. It's about a kindly housewife in post-WWII England who goes around performing illegal abortions by pumping a mix of, IIRC, hot water, soap, and alcohol into the woman's uterus. Unfortunately, one of her patients almost dies from ensuing complications, and the protagonist is found out and arrested. The movie is entirely sympathetic toward the protagonist, and the issue is treated as being thoroughly gray rather than plain black or white.
  • Vera Drake
    • [4/20/10] Yes, that's the one! Thank you so much!
• A film with either Eddie Murphy or some look alike as a scientist. Looking through his filmography didn't help. It opens with a dream sequence where the scientist is about to marry his girlfriend, when a manifestation of a split personality pops out of his rear-end (or the other side) and starts wreaking havoc. There's another scene where the scientist uses some kind of spray to make fireflies form a message "Will you marry me". The main thing about the movie is that the scientist extracts this split personality from himself. Later on, something happens that causes chemicals to be spilled, and the split personality is able to grow a physical body for himself.
  • Could it be the sequel to Eddie Murphy's The Nutty Professor, entitiled Nutty Professor II: The Klumps? Here are the IMDB and Other Wiki's pages on them~
    • [3/29/10] That seems to be it.
• A film or TV miniseries that was shown in my Kindergarten class near the end of school, early 1990s (so it was probably made some time before that). A girl who has ADD/ADHD (or a very quirky personality) has a bunch of disjointed misadventures dealing with her family, school, and peers. She wore her pajamas to school (under her clothes), She imagined if her school bus was a fire engine (nothing to do with the plot, she has ADD after all), she dumped some kind of household chemical (or paint) into a sink that she and another kid was playing in and it turned both their hands blue. That last part resulted in the other kid's (grand)mother/aunt getting pissed off at her and she ended up struggling to hide her hands from her parents, until she gathered the courage to show them. Those are the only few scenes I remember, I wasn't paying attention that much myself (also the movie wasn't very interesting to me at the time).
  • A few of these details sound a lot like stories I remember from different books in the Ramona series by Beverly Cleary - there doesn't seem to have ever been a movie based on the books, but there was a short-lived tv series in 1988, maybe what you actually saw was a few different episodes of that in a row.
    • [3/1/10] Thanks much, this had been bothering me for years.
• Saw a trailer for a Touchstone film that's gonna be released on DVD and Blu-Ray soon. It started with a man listening to the car radio, then suddenly a car crash. That's all I got before the guy with the remote control fast-forwarded through it. It was shown during a Mythbusters episode revolving around ricocheting bullets and tree catapults.
  • [2/14/10] Found it on my own accord. Googling "Touchstone Bruce Willis" turned up Surrogates. Then I saw that film, and it had that specific scene.
• The film was Babylon Five: The Lost T.... I don't really know what completes the word, but it's the one where there's a prisoner who at one time is floating in his cell, with flames everywhere. There's also talk about him getting exorcised. And secondarily, there's the line "He's the President. If he wants two Starfuries, give him two Starfuries".
  • Haven't seen it myself, but there is only one movie with a title of the form Babylon 5: The Lost * , and that's ...Tales.
    • [2/13/10] Kinda figured this. That was the only think my searches came up with. Looking up that quote more directly confirmed it. Thanks.
• Some alien horror movie from the late 80 or early 90, I saw it when I was a kid. There was this white ice cream-like stuff that fell from sky a company found it in a crater, collected it and sold it as dessert (this was The Twist) and it was extremely popular and I think also extremely addictive; and it killed people in a gruesome manner (the alien thing came out of the people). The hero was a reporter guy or something in that type, investigating the stuff with the help of an atractive woman and no one else.
  • Sounds like The Stuff to me.
    • [1/09/10] That sounds about right, yes I think this is it. Thank you! I've been wondering for years!
• A live-action horror/fantasy where the protagonists are a small boy and girl (the girl's older, I think) possibly siblings. There's one scene where the girl's watching (either through a window or on a security camera) as the boy is in some kind of danger, and notices that he doesn't have his glasses and worries that "He can't see without his glasses!" Another scene (might not be from the same movie, but I think it was) has the boy touch some kind of monster, and then looks at his hand to see that an eye has appeared on his palm, and he gouges the eye out with a shard of broken glass, screaming and crying as he does so. Total nightmare fuel, and I have no idea where I saw it.
  • The 1987 Stephen Dorff movie "The Gate"?
    • Well that's definitely where the eye-on-the-hand came from, and from the synopsis it looks like that's where the rest of it came from too. Debating whether to watch the movie sometime and risk getting the same nightmares all over again... Thanks!
• I only remember one scene from this movie that took place near a fireplace. A man and his dog freeze into ice and both shatter. Then, like the more recent THX vanity plate, but minus the lightning, the pieces melt and the resulting puddles merge together. A few scenes later, there was some kind of mog in a jeep/buggy rolling through a desert.
  • That's in Hot Shots Part Deux. It's the Saddam Hussein-like villain and his pug, and I believe they turned to liquid memory metal like the Bad Guy in Terminator 2.
    • Yeah, that's it!
• A film about aliens and a disease that's apparently spread by touching magic rocks, and every one else on earth has touched the rocks and are now waiting for aliens to come and do... stuff ... and one of the protagonists touch the rock because one of the other protagonists is already infected and he wants... to show solidarity or something.
  • I think I know what film you're talking about, and it may have been a Made-for-TV Movie since I only saw the second part. The rock had a small pointy end on it through with it infected those who touched it. Also, by the end there was something that in my eyes, looked like a concert scene...
    • Yeah, and I think that was about the alien ship arriving or something...
  • Pretty sure that's Robin Cook's Invasion.
    • You may be right. Thanks!
• A little like The Lake House, except the time difference was a lot bigger. One was in modern times and one was in the 18th or 19th century, and I think the girl was the one in the present. They sent letters to each other by putting them in a roll-up desk.
  • I was actually coming here to ask about the same movie...I think. Except in the movie I remember, the guy was in the modern day, and the girl was the one in the past. The guy was engaged(?) and had bought the antique desk for his new house or as a wedding gift or something? Oh, but only the girl could send letters by putting it in the desk...she wrote a playful, wishful letter to her "future sweetheart" or something along those lines, and he found it hundreds of years later and, on a whim, wrote a letter using the old style of ink and postage, and sent it at a post office that had existed when the girl's time was. She actually received the letter and left him another letter in the desk, and they communicated that way. At one point I remember the guy had a bit of poetry from her and tried to show it to a poetry expert, saying a "friend" had written it—the poetry expert laughed it off as "old fashioned" and said it was bad and I think the guy punched him. In the end the post office he was sending letters to the girl to burned down to the ground, he desperately sent a final letter to her through the mail slot as the building burned, and she realized when she saw that the letter was partially burned that something had gone wrong. The guy eventually went to the girl's grave and found her identical (great-great-?) granddaughter and started dating her, instead. If I remember right it was a made-for-TV movie, possibly on CBS...maybe even part of their Hallmark-branded series?
    • Okay, I just answered my own question. The movie I was thinking of is the 1998 made-for-TV movie The Love Letter, which was shown on CBS. Maybe that's the movie you remember, as well?
• Okay, so this movie begins with a parrot meeting a Russian guy. The bulk of the movie is the parrot flashing back to the Russian guy about how he lived with this girl and they loved each other oh so much, but at some point the girl moved away or he got lost or something, and then he flew around the country looking for her for a while. At the end, after he's done telling the story, they go, find the girl, and now she has a daughter and they're both really happy to see this parrot. I cannot remember the name of this movie.
  • Definitely Paulie.
    • Yep. Thanks!
• A movie made in the eighties about an angel that falls to Earth (afaik, in an accident rather than a Fall From Grace deal) and is found and cared for by a guy. Pretty much a case of Batman in My Basement, except I'm not positive he knew she was an angel... though I don't remember her ever talking. Ends with the guy being hurt/killed (maybe protecting her, or in something unrelated) and angel girl gets all righteous wrath on their asses. Later, I think she revives him as a miracle. I'm not sure how it ultimately ends, but I think she left for heaven.
  • Possibly Date With an Angel?
    • Yes, thank you!
• I saw a bit of a movie on TV once, can't remember most of it, I think it may have involved Time Travel. Anyways, the protagonist was either a Fish out of Temporal Water or Trapped in Another World where the fire department only existed to get cats out of trees, and the protagonist had to teach them how to put out fires.
  • You're thinking of Pleasantville. Tobey Maguire plays the boy, Reese Witherspoon plays his sister. They are modern teens who get sent into an old black and white television series from the 50's by a character played by Don Knotts. Since it is a '50s TV series, there are never any fires in Pleasantville, and the Fire Department only gets cats out of trees.
    • Thank you, this is it!
• I've got something along the Chop Sockey lines here. The final fight between the hero and villain (the latter of whom appears to be some sort of military commander) begins with the villain giving his opponent a thorough beating. Then the hero hears his mentor's voice, telling him not to give up (and be like the water or something), at which point it looks like he's going to go into My Name Is Inigo Montoya mode and give the villain what for... except that the fight proceeds to continue for - not exaggerating - at least another ten minutes of them hitting each other and breaking stuff, coming down to the bad guy (finally showing signs of injury) having gained a sword, the hero trying to fend him off with a belt. Ring any bells?
  • Good taste in Chop Sockey - "Fist of Legend" with the man himself, Jet Li, providing the necessary belt-whuppin'
    • Confirmed! (Delay in confirmation may be due to seeing the fight again. That's a lot of fisticuffs.)
• Two unrelated movies, both late-80s-ish. Didn't see either of them, just remember well from ads etc. In one, a blond guy is (I think) an undercover cop infiltrating a GTA (?) gang. He and his gang friend steal a car, the car phone rings. Blondie answers it, says "no he's [the owner] not here right now...Who am I? I'm the guy stealing his car!" The other film is horror/sci-fi/etc.; the protagonist has a dead supernatural mentor, and each time the mentor appears he's more and more decayed.
  • That second one might be An American Werewolf In London.
    • Thanks but I don't think so. Pretty sure the movie I'm thinking of was more recent than Werewolf/London, and earlier than Werewolf/Paris. I've now seen it, and it might indeed have been American Werewolf. The scene in the movie theater is similar to what I vaguely remember. Thank you.
• I remember watching this movie when I was a kid, maybe on the Disney Channel. It featured a boy getting trapped in another world, specifically a desert island in...well, I can't remember what time period it was, but I'm pretty sure there were pirates. Anyway, he ends up running into these three adventure heroes (including a Token Girl? Sorry, my memory's a bit fuzzy on that one), and telling them he was from Los Angeles, which one of the heroes took to mean "hell" since it sounds like "lost angels". He also ended up being chased by some kind of sand shark thing, and also met a cute mermaid, who could turn into a human. I think. Anyone remember this?
  • Is it Magic Island? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113736/
    • Holy crap, yes it is! Thanks! (I knew it had "Island" somewhere in the title, I just couldn't remember the rest...)
• I think it was some kind of miniseries, I'm not sure, it could have been a movie. It was something I remember being shown in elementary school, about these people on a journey through a fantasy land, and I remember there being magical horses that were captured by the Big Bad, and locked up in some kind of tower. There was a song that went "free the horses, running wild / free the horses, free the child"
  • A Yahoo search on those lyrics turns up Free the Horses: A Self-Esteem Adventure.
    • I'm pretty sure that's it, thanks. Your search fu is better than mine.
• A movie of the Frog Prince in which the princess had an evil stepsister, and the frog was was played by a full sized man.
  • That was Cannon Films' The Frog Prince from 1986. Aileen Quinn (the title character in the film version of Annie) plays the heroine, and the evil stepsister is a young Helen Hunt! Cannon Films did a bunch of Fairy Tale adaptations from 1986-1988, called Cannon Movie Tales, and they mostly went straight to video; the Disney Channel showed them a lot back then.
    • Thank you!
• A movie I saw a couple times in school. It's basically about a school with a classroom of delinquents (most Hispanic and African-American) except for this one Meganekko black girl. The teacher was very snarky and had some kind of accent (forgot what kind, but it wasn't British) and a sense of humor.
  • Just found it out by e-mailing my high school psychology teacher. It's Stand And Deliver.
• I remember seeing a snippet of a movie on TV when I was young and my mom was changing channels. It was only for a few minutes and I think it was near the movie's ending, but it sure was memorable. There was this group of people who opened a box and spirits/ghosts rose out of it. At first they looked like lovely, long-haired (but translucently white) women and were just floating around. One of the men exclaimed, "It's beautiful!" Then the spirits become hideous and frightening in a heartbeat (I still remember their faces changing from placid to "RARRGGG, I'M GOING TO GET YOU" to this day...) and attacked the group. Viciously. Fortunately, most of it happened off-screen. There were also a man and woman tied to a pole, but they weren't attacked by the spirits for some reason (I think they had their eyes closed or something). And that's all I remember; hopefully this kind of scene is unique enough for someone to identify it.
  • Unless there's two of these — which, as you say, is unlikely — this is the climactic scene of the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
    • Turns out that it is! I should be ashamed for waiting so long to check that classic out...
• When I was a kid, I saw a cartoon movie with a wood-worm as either the main character or as a narrator. It was about a certaion ship's travel, I presume it was either Noah's Arc or Titanic. I remember that at the beginning and ending there was that wood-worm, living in a hollow piece of wood (possibly a part of that ship), telling his story to the audience. I actually remember him eat a chunk of wood. I think the movie is just like The Magic Voyage, except not. The worm was actually a worm, not an anthropomorphic beast. Is this a real movie or did I just dream up something?
  • Hmm. There is a book called "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" by Julian Barnes, which is a collection of related short stories. The first one is narrated by an animal on Noah's Ark, and we don't find out until the very end that he is a woodworm. My memory is that woodworms also figure into other stories in the book. I did some hunting on the Internet and can't find any evidence that this has ever been adapted to film. So I think this probably isn't it. So why am I writing this?
  • I've also seen this movie! I can't remember its title, but it took place on Noah's Arc. I'm pretty sure it was made in the late 80's/early 90's.
  • I'm pretty sure I know that one. If we're thinking of the same one, it was Noah's Ark, and I think it had really scary-looking termites with glowing red eyes for the villains. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name, either.
  • Original poster here, Uncle Google just found a film named Stowaways on the Ark, that might be what we're looking for, but I can't verify it.
    • Other poster here. I'm not sure if it's the movie the OP remember, but it's definitely the one I saw - I remember that dragon with the egg! Its alternative name is "In der Arche ist der Wurm drin".
    • OP here again. This is most definitely the movie I remember. I have no way to confirm it, but I'll move this to the 'confirmed' section anyway.
    • I think it's the one I — yet another replier, not OP — remember, but without seeing those termites, I can't be sure.
• A live-action film in which a boy, while leaving school, sees a giant, flying head with a long, white beard come down from the sky. It talks to him for a moment, and then he leaps up and grabs onto it's beard whence it flies away, carrying him along to a sword'n'sorcery land. It looks like it's from the 1980s, here's some scenes I remember:

In this land, the boy meets a child king and a girl, they look into a talking well, which spouts prophecies. a dark age begins and the boy is thrust into it, he eventually meets the evil lord/wizard responsible and slays him.Most of the film revolves around a sword acquired by the boy from a smithy hiding in a mountain to prevent the forces of darkness from getting the sword. Upon getting the sword, the boy tries it on the smithy's anvil, and cuts straight through it in a single stroke.Around the start of the film, the boy sees a sentry atop a fortress shoot a crow with an arrow, the crow falls to the ground, dead. Later in the film, after the boy has killed the villain, the crow's corpse turns into a young girl and comes back to life.Except for the second point this one screams The NeverEnding Story 2 to me. Parts of the description seem like it's part one and two mixed together... But with what little info available, that's what i seeOriginal poster here. I've seen the first three Never Ending Story films many times (1st was always one of my favorite movies, 2nd was mildly stupid, 3rd was a travesty,) and that's definitely not it.Some things are not quite right ("the dark age" was actually another country) but it's Mio, My Son, based on the Swedish book with the same name by Astrid Lindgren. (And since the movie was dubbed here, I didn't realize until looking at that link that the Big Bad was played by Christopher Lee.)Good god, this is it! I never would've found it in a trillion years!

• I am searching for an old (1970-ish) Kung Fu type movie that I absolutely loved. It involved 5 (I think) dudes, each of which had a different animal fighting style (Frog, Cobra, etc.). They each would stalk one another and get into individual battles (for rulership of the kingdom or something), culminating in a big final battle where they all ganged up on one dude who supposedly had only one weak spot that no one could find. They put this dude in an Iron Maiden, but it still didn't work. The weak spot was behind his ear (I don't know why). Please help!
  • Google suggests Five Deadly Venoms.
    • That's totally it! Thanks.
• There was a made-for-TV-movie on ABC Family a couple of years ago, about a 20something woman who had invented an imaginary perfect boyfriend, and then started falling in love with a real-life guy and was torn over whether to give up the imaginary boyfriend entirely. The imaginary boyfriend was British and had curly ginger hair, I think, and I remember something like a scene with him in a freezer, possibly? I think the movie had a song-lyrics name, but I can't for the life of me remember it.
  • The Nostalgia Critic just reviewed "Drop Dead Fred" which sounds a lot like this- the only exception being that Fred is far from a perfect boyfriend! But other than that, it seems to fit...
  • Netflix keeps suggesting this movie Everything You Want for me, which sounds like what you describe.
    • Everything You Want is definitely it!
• A Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits (of the nerd/loser archetype) challenge a bunch of jocks to a drinking contest. Most of the movie consists of parodies of the Training Montage—drinking tankards of actual animal urine, going to secret underground drinking contests, learning the Forbidden Secret Technique...etc. One of the characters was a nebbish Jewish kid, and he gets a Crowning Moment Of Awesome in the last contest by channeling his "Jew Rage" or somesuch.
  • Beerfest?
    • [05/28/2010] Indeed it is! Thanks!
• Okay, I recall watching a few minutes of some movie late at night about a killer piñata... It was under an Indian curse or something, maybe it was worshipped by them or something, and it attacked a group of white campers down by a river at night. It was probably a B-movie, but anyone have a clue?
  • Piñata: Survival Island maybe, can't be too many killer piñata movies out there.
    • Oh, sweet merciful Jesus, I'm laughing so hard I think I pulled something. That's gotta be it. I vaguely recognize the beginning as seen here, and like you said... bit of a niche market. Thank you~! [6/02/10]
• I think this one is based on a Stephen King novel or something? A mother tries to cure her autistic daughter who keeps making designs of a soaring spiral staircase by building a gigantic one herself. The girl starts climbing the stairs, there's a harrowing scene when the structural integrity of the construction fails, and the girl is cured. Anyone?
  • House of Cards (the 1993 version) — http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107148/.
    • [07/07/10] thnx bro!
• A writer arrives at a village in order to finish his novel, but soon discovers that he can't leave the village because there's a crazed AI controlling it. The AI apparently intends to shape the village into an utopia and is inviting artists from all around the world to contribute to it. The movie ends with the protagonist still a prisoner and him trying to suggest a newcomer to leave the village while he still can.
  • Black River. (Based on a story by Dean Koontz.)
    • [07/07/10] Thank you, my man!
• There's this film about shady bookmakers and their mentally challenged friend, it was probably made in the late nineties or early to mid noughties. The bookmakers were being chased by some cop named Iggy. I remember an italian-american being killed with a brick while sitting in his car while his "friend" was shot down by the mentally challenged man, who held a small pocket gun Gangsta Style while doing so. I also remember some slur about Rain Man and Kermit the Frog.
  • Found it myself, it's Lesser Prophets from 1997!
• The only thing I know about this film is this one scene in an ad I saw where a fat old man in a suit crosses his arms over his chest and falls backwards out of a window. I'm guessing this is a reference to the old urban legend of investors jumping out of windows during the Wall Street Crash of 1929, based on the decidedly old-timey feel of the movie, but it's none of the films creatively titled "Wall Street" that Wikipedia offers me.
  • The Hudsucker Proxy, maybe?
    • I'm not the one who asked, but the description doesn't match.
    • [09/23/10] That's actually exactly it — my memory was just playing tricks on me. Thanks!

Literature

• I am trying to find this nonfiction book about a zookeeper/zoo vet. It's an adult book, and I remember the basis of three chapters: One was about trying to get pandas together to mate, one was pretty anti-Animal Wrongs Groups (in a logical manner), and one was about sick elephants who didn't eat after they got better until they started to eat balls of bread during a "game" (...maybe typhoid...?)
  • [9/26/2010] Found, nevermind tropers. XD It's "Sailing on Noah's Ark"
• A story I loved when I was younger (almost twenty years ago), but only barely remember now - the main character was a little girl traveling in another world with...two or three companions, I think. One of the companions was a man who thought he was the best disguise artist ever, but everyone always recognized him (until the end, when he wasn't wearing a disguise and no one recognized him.) Another companion was a man who fought ghosts, using a stick from a tree that kills said ghosts. The main plot was to save the ghost-killing tree from these two men who wanted to burn it down. I also recall a room full of glue or wax or something that burnt away in fire, and a monster that was just a giant mouth who challenged them to a tongue-twister contest.
  • Rebecca's World by Terry Nation. (The same Terry Nation who created the Daleks.) The way I remember the end is that everybody still recognises the disguise artist when he's not in disguise, and in fact nobody realises he isn't in disugise, because he looks much the same as always. (Rebecca tells him that he should wear this disguise more often, because it suits him better than any of his others.)
  • Ooh, I do think you're right, but I have to be sure. It's not in the library, but I've had the luck of finding it on Amazon for much less than usual - when it comes in, I'll let you know! I've been looking for this book for years!
    • [9/25/2010] Yay! That's right! Thank you so much - you made my birthday.
• I'm looking for a YA book that I read about two years ago. A girl discovered her stepfather was (somehow secretly?) prescribing depressed teens a drug that was ultimately causing them to hallucinate and commit suicide, or something to that effect. I think specifically, one of the teens jumped off a roof because he was hallucinating that he could fly? In an effort to keep the girl from telling anyone, her stepfather framed her for using drugs so that he could convince her mother to send her off to some rehabilitation center that I believe was in Mexico. I think she was handcuffed in the back of a van to be taken to the place and tried to use her cellphone but got it taken away. As far as I can remember, she eventually staged a break out, snuck back across the border, and convinced her (male) friend to dress up as a waiter so they could sneak into an event and reveal her stepfather's deeds in front of a large group of people. I think the title was something like _____ing Point, or at least had Point in it. I tried searching for Breaking Point but I've come up with nothing, so I may be wrong on that. I think the cover was red/orange and had a palm tree on it, with an effect to make it look like breaking glass.
  • I'll bet money it's Shock Point by April Henry.
    • [9/17/2010] That's it! Thank you so much!
• A recent sci-fi short story, probably American, set 20 Minutes into the Future. The male lead speaks English, the female lead doesn't understand a word of it, and they communicate through an automatic translator on her high-tech phone ("It's from Finland.") The phone apparently turns his speech into poetry, but her speech is rendered in normal idiomatic English. I think someone tries to kill them both.
  • "In Paradise" by Bruce Sterling. She's Iranian.
    • [09/14/2010] Thanks.
• Another one from Cricket magazine. There's a woodsman guy and his wife, and they don't have any kids (I don't remember if they can't, or just don't.) The man is walking around the woods, when he finds a golden cocoon. He takes it home, and his wife puts it in a cradle by the fire. The next morning there is a baby girl in a golden wrapping with purple eyes in the cradle. She grows up, but she can't touch this plant for some reason. She ends up doing so to save her father, and turns into a butterfly. Any ideas? Even just the issue of that Magazine would be nice. X3
  • "Idalia: Butterfly Child" by Ila Rae White.
• A kids book I vaguely recall from primary school, all I can remember of it is that it was set in the Alps (or possibly the Pyrenees) and a child put one of his (or possibly her) slippers outside one christmas eve and a little kitten crawled in to keep warm. The child thinks the kitten is a gift from Saint Nicholas.
  • Yes. This book is called "Treasures of the Snow" by Patricia St John. 27th August 2010
• Young adult series aimed at girls. It was about this girl who found out she was one in a series of clones. I think she had extra strength and stuff because of this, but had to keep it hidden from her family. There was an organization or something that was trying to get her back to do what ever she was cloned to do. There was a clone boy who she had UST with. I THINK, but am not sure, that the series starts out by explaning that all these kids are getting diseases that you normally wouldn't get until you were old. Like arthritus, high blood pressure, hardened arteries, etc. And eventually dying of like heart attacks and strokes. This might be a different series I read around the same time though. I also remember there being a scene where she and her friend were trying on clothes and her friend tells her she's moved to an (OMG!) B-cup bra, and protagonist girl was jealous/insecure.
  • Replica?
    • [08/27/10] YES! Thank you so much! I guess the other bit was from a different series then. Seriously though, you are amazing anon.
• OK, this one will be hard. I'm looking for a short children's book that was read to my class in kindergarten, involving a young girl who's picky about food, and somehow winds up at the Forge des trois sorcières (lit. "Smithy of the three witches"). It was the first story I ever heard where witches were not Always Chaotic Evil.
  • "Forge des trois sorcières" seems like it would be a useful phrase to Google on. I tried it myself, but not knowing French I couldn't interpret the results.
    • [ 2010-08-01 Medinoc ] Thanks. Would you believe Google wasn't nearly as helpful when I tried a few months/years ago? (and didn't bother to try again)
• This was a paperback fantasy book I checked out of the library about...ten years ago, I think. It begins with a young man who's been hospitalized by some injury, and he's also the prime suspect in a murder. The thing that put him in the hospital is the same event when the murder took place. He can't remember whether he did it or not, and I think he had inherited some money from his rich father who had recently died. He ends up getting transported to this fantasy land, but I can't remember much about the book beyond that. I don't think I ever finished it. There might have been another plot about a girl who was from the fantasy land and who was training to be a priestess (maybe?), or I may be just getting two different books confused.
  • OP here, I actually found this myself after much searching and wondering if this book ever really existed in the first place, and it does! I'd gotten much of the plot mixed up, but it's Past Imperative by Dave Duncan.
• A book that was essentially an Adventure Game in book form. It had both illustrations and text, but was heavier on the illustration part. The plot was something about a kid finding a mansion on an island and having to outsmart the eccentric family who live there in order to find a treasure. One of the puzzles involved having to beat the high score on a pinball game - they had a diagram of the machine itself with a key telling how many points you'd get for hitting each bumper and you had to find the exact path for the ball that would result in a higher score than the top one. Yes, the plot sort of sounds like Maniac Mansion without the b-movie trappings, but I'm sure that it was a book, and one with no connection to the game.
  • Escape from Blood Castle?
    • 8/10/10 - I definitely recognize the scene and the art style depicted in the paperback edition's cover, so yes.
• A young adult novel, or maybe a YA short story. The main character is a kid who really wants the hot new video game console, but his parents won't get it for him. He decides to steal it, but rather than just shoplifting he comes up with kind of an elaborate plan: First he writes out a message threatening the store and telling them to leave the console near the bathroom at a certain time so he can pick it up. Then he takes his portable tape recorder to the mall, gets patrons to say each individual word of the message (claiming it's for a school project), edits the results together, then rigs one of the store's stereos to play it when they open. I specifically remember he had seperate people say "bath" and "room" because he decided if he made someone say "bathroom" they'd think it was a prank. If I remember correctly, in the end he got the console, felt guilty about it, and returned it, but still got in trouble.
  • I think I know this one! The Computer That Said Steal Me.
    • 8/10/10 - The Other Wiki's description of the plot is pretty much the same as I remember, complete with the method of making an audio ransom note, so that has to be it.
• Like many entries here, it was either a children's or YA novel. The main character was a kid who had dyslexia, although I didn't know what that was at the time. His older brother steals a painting worth a million pounds, and hides it in a laundry bag or something. When the younger brother finds it, he has a series of misadventures trying to keep it safe. He meets up with a bunch of strange characters, like a band of squatters who call themselves angels, some criminals who want to hold the painting ransom, an artist who's able to make a perfect duplicate of the painting and lives on a boat, and a bunch of kids who call themselves pirates. The book took place in London, and the kid liked to call people 'blokes', so it was probably an British book. I remember thinking he wasn't very bright...
  • [08/06/10]Found it by googling "painting worth a million pounds". Me and my Million by Clive King. (I'm the OP)
• The cover had a rider atop a horse with no front legs. This becomes a prominent character.
  • Found it on my own accord: John Dough and the Cherub
• A cheap sci fi novel with a very pretty cover, jungle leaves and little brown critters peeking out through them. A big mining company finds a planet, verifies that there are no intelligent beings living there, and starts digging up their minerals. The local squirrels are intelligent, however, and have to try to convince the miners to stop doing whatever. The little critters are nauseatingly adorable and the bad guys are motivated by sheer greed, nothing else. One scene has the company executive get irritated with the peon miner yattering on about the squirrels and kills one of them. Then later for no reason whatsoever, the executive decides they are intelligent after all and that makes him a murderer, so he kills himself. I'm actually looking for the cover, the (lack of) plot made my head hurt.
  • Sounds like H. Beam Piper's "Fuzzy" Stories. is your cover one of these?
    • [7/12/10] Yes, that's it! Thank you!
• Young adult novel where two young girls find out they have psychic dreams, albeit ones that generally rely on some sort of visual pun rather than directly showing what will happen. In one of the dreams, a classmate is seen boarding a plane with a plate full of jello, then the plane crashes. As it turns out, the girl in question was in a plane crash on the way to playing a concert with her cello. Later one of the girls is trying to find out what happened to her father, and dreams about him riding a flying metal disc around a futuristic race course. It turns out he's become a radio disc jockey. When one of the girls first discovers the power, there's a gag where someone tells her she's psychic and she gets offended, confusing it with psycho.
  • I, too, have read this book, and the lone detail I can recall is that the shared dreams happened every nine nights.
    • [07/08/10]: Original poster here - I found it, it's The Dream Book by Meg Wolitzer. The fact that one of the girls was called Danger Roth suddenly popped into my mind, so googling that phrase lead me to the Amazon plot summary.
• A fantasy book, part of a series. The book's title is a single word, which sounds sort of Italianish and is the name of a notorious highwayman in the story. The main character is an innkeeper's daughter who finds his mask and keeps it secret, but I think uses it eventually. The inn is in a small village in a remote place (in a forest?) and the country is in turmoil which ends up affecting the village. I think the main character's name is Beryl and that ends up being a plot point which ties back to a previous book in the series which involved someone in her family (her grandmother?). I remember her family nagging her about when she'll get married (I think her younger sister wanted to, but couldn't until she did) and her being sort of matched to a young man in the village while she was considering being a spinster. I don't think the actual highwayman shows up until later in the book, and I think it has something to do with the political turmoil but the details of the plot are fuzzy. I might even be conflating details from the whole series into the one book. I thought it was written by Diana Wynne Jones, but none of her series seem to match.
  • Jackaroo, first book of a four-book series by Cynthia Voight.
    • [06/30/10] That's it, thanks!
• I'm looking for a science fiction book. There's a society in which every family is allowed only two children and they hold a lottery where the prize is an extra child. One of the main characters is a girl(?) who was the lottery child of a lottery child of a lottery child, so she was genetically predisposed to being lucky. I think there was also some sort of alien who wanted to manipulate this trait to his advantage.
  • Have you checked the Population Control trope page? Several of the examples there mention lotteries.
  • It sounds rather like the backstory for Teela in the original Ringworld, by Larry Niven. Earth's population is indeed controlled, there is a lottery to allow extra breeding, which was created by highly paranoid aliens to breed a luckier human. Does that sound like the one?
  • [6/29/10]That's it. Thank you both so much!
• Thought I asked about this already, but it was so long ago that it might've been lost in The Great Crash. Short story, might've been in Analog (definitely read it in some magazine of the sort, probably read it in 2004 but also probably a back issue), about a guy who invents a machine that can temporarily remove spoilers from someone's memory. A friend is interested because he had wanted to start a theater focusing on classic movies; he tests it with, among others, A Night at the Opera and Star Wars (when retrieving the chip with his memories of that one on it, he finds two chips and a note from himself saying to watch The Empire Strikes Back before restoring his memories). The machine goes into production and is initially successful, but then reports of the machine erasing more memories than it was supposed to come out.
  • That would be "Spoilers," by Shane Tourtellotte, from the July/August 2002 issue.
    • [6/37/10] Thank you so much. I've been looking for this one for years.
• A picture book I read in the first grade. It was a dark fairy-tale about these kids whose mom goes off to buy some food for them. Before she goes she tells them not to talk to any strangers and/or let them into the house. The kids ignore her advice and let some evil witch (or it could have been a raven, I can't remember) and the witch takes them to her house and turns them into food items (I think at least one kid was turned into a custard.) The mom comes back with her groceries and is told by a bird (possibly a hawk) what happened to her kids. So she goes to the witch's house (taking the groceries with her) and is told that she can reverse the curse if she can guess which kid was turned into which food. She does this by remembering which kid asked for which grocery. She gets it right, and they all live happily ever after.
  • Might that be Heckedy Peg?
    • [6/21/10] Why yes it is! Thank you!
• I read this book in my high school library circa 1979, so it's at least that old. It's a book, probably British, about a magical umbrella (although I think they called it a bumbershoot)which, if you open it while your looking at a book, will take you into the world of the book. It was obviously an attempt at introducing a wide variety of English literature to the readers. The characters went into the world of Gilbert and Sullivan (wherein the title character of The Sorcerer became an ally), Flatland, and an early draft of Sherlock Holmes, wherein the detective was named Sigerson, along with other differences. I believe the villain may have been Moriarty. I've been searching for decades, and cannot find it.
  • This is, without question, The Incredible Umbrella and its sequel The Amorous Umbrella by Marvin Kaye. The main character, J. Adrian Fillmore ("Gad, what a name!"), bored with his life as a non-tenured English professor, buys a magic umbrella that whisks you away to whatever world you happen to be thinking of when you open it. He eventually renames himself John Phillimore, and becomes without realizing it the subject of one of Holmes' famously unsolved cases ("John Phillimore, who went back into his house to retrieve his umbrella and was never more seen in this world").
    • 06/16/10- Thank you , thank you, thank you!
• A YA Fantasy novel published no later than 1988 or so; the main character, a boy about YA-novel age, sets out on a journey by taking his "journey-bag" and going to the banks of a river called "Tilseth" to wait for...some kind of boat. Around him are skeletons of generations of boys for whom the (boat?) never came. This creeped me out, so I can't remember whether I finished it or not.
  • Outside the Gates by Molly Gloss (1986)?
    • (5/28/10) DING! DING! DING!
• A book I read in middle school: It was a scifi book taking place in the distant future. I remember dolphins being extinct, and because of pollution, the sky was an odd color, and rain was dangerous to be out in. I remember a character making a comment about a sunset in an old movie... For some reason, the main characters were able to see creatures(that normal people did not see) that would come to a injured/dying person and assumed these creatures were killing them. So, they made it their goal to destroy these creatures. It turned out that they were actually creating more of them by trying to destroy them, and that these creatures were actually helpful: they were taking the people's pain away, not killing them. I also have a vague memory of racecars...
  • Eoin Colfer's The Supernaturalist?
    • That's it! Thank you so much; I've been looking for that one a really long time.
• This book was in the children's section of my library, although it may have been a YA. The protagonist takes a standardized test in school. He gets a perfect score, which is impossible since the questions are far beyond human capabilities. Some MIB take him out of school and explain that there's actually a secret test within the test, to measure the population's luck quotient. Only someone with a significant luck factor could score above a certain number — which makes them too powerful and a threat to the emperor. I think they're in a hovercar over a body of water, and the MIB tell the kid they're going to kill him and make it look like an accident. The protagonist uses his miraculous luck to escape but he can't go home without endangering his family. He winds up joining a circus and learning space karate. At one point he bursts out that his luck has only brought him horrible things, and if he were truly lucky he wouldn't be lucky at all.
  • Starluck by Don Wismer
    • [4/4/10] Thank you! Looks like it's out of print, unfortunately, but it's definitely what I'm thinking of.
• A Young Reader's novel tied in to Star Wars. It was probably part of a series, all of the books in that series had part of a corner depicting Yoda holding a book with "Read, You Will" on it. This particular book was about Anakin at the Boonta Eve, except here, he loses due to his podracer breaking down.
  • This page has a picture of a "Read, You Will" bookmark with a list of books on the back. Do any of the titles ring a bell?
    • [4/1/10] Turns out it's Anakin's Fate.
• There's this folktale and I swear I've read at least two retellings of it... The protagonist (I don't remember which gender, but I think a woman) comes to a feast with a mysterious bag, and everyone wants to know what's inside it. She first tells them a dream she had. In it, she follows her suitor (?) out of his room and through the woods, and somewhere along the way he turns into a wolf and loses a paw. As she says this, she pulls a severed hand out of the bag and throws it on the table, and all the guests turn on the suitor, who was also present. I think one version implies that the story-teller orchestrated the whole thing to get rid of said suitor, but that might have been my imagination.
  • Okay, I found the original fairy tale, which is called The Robber Bridegroom and is by Grimm, but I can't find the version with the wolf. I think it was in a collection of retold fairy tales, but I'm not sure if they were by separate authors or the same person. One other thing I remember is that this wasn't written in the traditional plain style of fairy tales. I think it starts with someone greeting the protagonist at the door, and unlike the Brothers Grimm version, the readers aren't let on that the contents of the dream actually happened to the protagonist until the end when she pulls out the severed hand. Any help?
    • "The White Road" by Neil Gaiman, in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears.
    • [03/20/10] Yes, thank you. Man, that was a good story.
• A kid's/YA book. The frame story is a blind harpist arrives at the court of a queen who famously rules from behind a veil and only members of her court are permitted to hear her speak. The harpist begins telling the story of a boy who was orphaned by a fire and helped by the citizens of his village until...something happens to him and he changes over night from kind of a simpleton to the smartest guy in the village. He starts living in a cave with his animal friends and adopts an orphaned baby girl, whom he names Ekho. Meanwhile in the capital city the tsar is dying and his only child is a daughter and women cannot be tsar. Somehow the boy/man (the story takes place over a number of years) is called in to resolve things. I actually remember quite a lot about this book; just not the effing title.
  • The Phantom Queen by Ven Begamudré.
• This one is a children's picture book. The main character is something of a nerd, and he manages to grow/breed/find this plant. He grows the plant, and he's able to make all sorts of things from it (it's good food, it makes comfy clothing, you can use it dye cloth, etc.) Eventually all these people turn to him becasue now he's super-special-AWESOME due to this plant. It's called "Something-landia" IIRC
  • [3/9/10] Neever mind- find it, it's called Weslandia.
• This was a novel about a slave-boy (or some kind of serf) who steals a dragon's egg and raises the dragon. I remember it was a plot point that his name has two Ks in it, because that was a sign of said servanthood. It may have been by Mercedes Lackey or Anne Mc Caffrey or something, but I'm not sure.
  • The Pit Dragon Chronicles by Jane Yolen. Jakkin is a bond-boy, meaning he has to save up to purchase his freedom. He steals a dragon egg and raises the hatchling out in the desert, planning to enter it in the dragon cockfights and earn enough money that way to buy himself free.
    • [3/1/10] That's exactly it! Thanks so much :).
• I remember reading a book a few years ago... It was about a brother and sister, both teenagers (I could be off though) and they had the ability to meet characters from drafts of books who didn't make it into the final cut, and the plot was they had to help the... sort of spirit of Sherlock Holmes' brother. I think the sister was named Victoria, but I don't remember the other names.
  • Is it possible that it's Double Trouble Squared by Kathryn Laskey? Though some of the details would be off. It's not Sherlock Holmes's brother, but in fact the original "Sherlock Holmes", who the author rejected to created Sherlock Holmes, and their are two sets of twins, the older ones (the age you described) are named Liberty and July, and the younger ones are named Charly and Molly. It ends with the twins solving the mystery, and giong to a men-only club to explain it, so the girl dresses up like a boy so she and her brother can present the answer to the mystery.
    • [2/24/10] Yes, that's it. I should reread that, but yeah, that's the book.
• It's a 3-4 novel series about Fantasy Counterpart Culture Britain which is at one point invaded and reformed by Fantasy Counterpart Culture Rome, which each book being about a descendant of a previous protagonist. Their identifying characteristic is having blue and green Mismatched Eyes (You Fail Biology Forever), as well as inheriting a sort of shapeshifting sword that turns into whatever type of sword the wielder knows how to use (or something like that).
  • Could it be the series by Adrienne Martine-Barnes that begins with The Fire Sword? The details kind of maybe fit if we assume that one or both of us has a fuzzy memory. (Although I don't recall that the was anything odd about the protagonists' eyes; but I don't recall that there wasn't, if you see what I mean.)
    • Sorry, that's not it. Some additional details: at one point in the history, the counterpart Rome turned counterpart-Christian (except I think the counterpart-Christ was female). In the first book, the protagonist's childhood sweetheart becomes a total nympho who whores herself out to passing travelers, after he leaves his hometown. In the last book, there's a rebellion to kick out counterpart-Normans, and there's a group of 200 musketmen who fight with the innovative tactic of using well-crafted hunting rifles or muskets and actually trying hit people. Oh, and in the second or third book we learn about this guy who united counterpart-Rome under an empire becuase of his great generalship because he was a mathematician and therefore could do logistics better than anyone else.
  • [2/17/10] Original poster, here, it's the Rigante series by David Gemmell, thank you reddit!
• May be a short series of fantasy novels found in the Young Adults section. Main character is a powerful female mage in a world where this is unheard of. The MC has a large extended family that is rather fond of her which I remember thinking was rather odd, perhaps distantly related? Demons exist, they feed off of the magic mages have; you can control them if you know their true name. The magic could be stored by not using it. The MC was captured/betrayed near the end of the book. They did something to her mind so she didn't remember who she was and was turned into some sort of sex slave/idiot before a demon that she knew the name of slapped her out of it. I think there was also a little girl who was possessed or could control a demon that was there as well. A powerful side character had the title of Crow or Raven. Part of some tribe or nation that didn't like fighting and after the book was over he went into temporary exile. I think it's part of a series because they made references to something the MC had done in the past that made her famous.
  • [2/3/10] Nevermind, found it. It's called Fire Angels with the prequel being called Mage Heart.
• A children's book about a girl who has a sickness and wants to be cured. A wizard/magician (It might actually be a normal doctor or something, I don't know) comes in to help. Most of his/her suggestions result in, for example, the girl having white-and-striped skin. At one part, the girl is told to imagine herself as "one with [her] room", and she literally becomes one with her room, windows for eyes, a couch for lips. This is reversed and she is somehow cured.
  • I know this one! Not the title, but I know the story. She loved lima beans but never ate them because her friends didn't. Then she became a chameleon, like, she would turn red, white and blue when she was saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Then various cures were tried, but it didn't help. The last one was the one where she merged with her room. Then she was given lima beans by an old woman and went back to normal.
    • We're talking about the same book. Now we need to know the title.
  • It's A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon.
    • Bingo-rama!
• A daughter of a prostitute, raised to be ugly (or just fat..) and smart. Her mom dies, she finds a magic ring that lets her talk to animals. Travels for two years will a boy, a bear, a dog, and a pig that's really a dragon. She falls in love with the dragon. The book is split into two, the second part being about another girl who finds the ring and an egg and must return it to the dragons. Oh, and something about a small figurine that used to belong to Buddha.
  • I think this was Mary Brown's Pigs Don't Fly and Master of Many Treasures.
    • That's it! Thank you!
• A children's book that may ormay not have had pictures. It was a fairy-tale style story with a girl and her three sisters seeking shelter in a giant/ogre/whatever's castle. The ogre's wife lets them in, but they needed to hide because the giant would eat them. It reminded me vaguely of jack and the beanstalk in that respect, but there was a part when the girls were escaping that they needed to cross a bridge. The bridge was a single strand of hair stretched across a canyon or moat. The two older sisters were much too frightened to cross, but when the youngest tried, she found that the string was an illusion and there was actually a sturdy (if invisible) wooden bridge beneath it. She winds up carrying her sisters across, but gets caught by the ogre-giant herself. He asks her what she would do to someone who broke into her house and stole from her, and she replies that she would lock the theif up in a sack with a cat and dog and beat it mercilessly. So of course he intends to do this to her. She somehow manages to trick the wife into going into the sack, and he winds up beating his wife senseless, and- and- and- That's all I can remember. Which is probably why this is bothering me so much. Any help?
  • I found it myself. Not the book, but the scottish fairytale it's based off of, 'Mollie Whuppie'.
• A dystopian novel (set in Britain?) where society is divided into urban and rural groups. The protagonist's dad is some kind of mechanic or electrician and dies in an accident (later revealed he was part of a resistance, and was killed), so the protagonist crosses the fence and goes and hangs out in rural-land for a while. The rural people are very Old South, and have a very, very wide zone of 'personal space' you aren't supposed to enter. Eventually the character is (threatened with?) having something done to his brain to make him non-rebellious. There's also a war in China that, it's implied, is only kept going by the authorities because having a war on makes it easier to maintain control. Oh, and the urban people are kept entertained by blood sports.
  • The Guardians, by John Christopher
• A book I read in elementary school, which sticks in my mind because it was such a blatant example of Death by Newbery Medal. This kid's grandfather was sick and he was going to lose the family farm, so to get money the kid decided to enter himself and his dog into a sled race that had a large cash prize for the first place winner. On the last leg of the race, within sight of the finish line, the dog dies. The racer in second place, who carries a gun and was made out throughout the story to be a major bastard, stops and allows the kid to finish the rest of the way on foot, winning the race.
  • Stone Fox is the most likely possibility. There could be others but that one's considered a YA classic.
    • Yes! That's the one! Thank you, kind sir.
    • You're quite welcome. Make sure it's added to the page for Death by Newbery Medal if it isn't already there.
• Science fiction novel, early '80s I think. I mostly remember the cover art (hardcover edition, possibly first). It was blue, and had two small figures in space suits. The title font was a very obvious rip-off of the Star Wars lettering, right down to the way an S connected to another letter. The title might have been "Lords of [something]," but I'm not sure. The >story involved a high school student from a backwater planet (I think the planet was named Jasper, or something close to it), who is roped into taking an aptitude test and finds himself drafted into the Galactic Navy or whatever. A few scenes I remember are a) in an early scene, a robot school secretary (?) calls him a "miscreant" and then defines the word; b) he questions a sign in the school saying "Learn from your elders and do not question them," wondering how you can learn without asking questions; c) late in the story, characters are communicating using very sensitive microphones in the form of small stick-on patches on their throats, and must be careful to whisper so as not to deafen one another.
  • This sounds a lot like Michael Kurland's "The Princes of Earth".
    • That's it! Thanks.
• A short story set in a Latin American banana republic with a strongman leader. It was probably a real political setting, but I was too young to know at the time and I can't remember now. The narrator is a barber who sympathizes with La Résistance, and a high-ranking military officer comes into his barber shop for a shave. The bulk of the story is the narrator trying to decide whether to slash the man's throat with his razor. In the end he doesn't, and the officer thanks him, pays him, and tells him, before leaving, that he knows about the narrator's revolutionary affiliations and wanted to see if he would do it. He says something about knowing that it's not easy to take a life.
  • Almost certainly, ''Just Lather, That's All'' by Hernando Tellez.
    • Certainly is! Thank you.
    • You're quite welcome! It just rang a bell for some reason — I had to google to find out the name and the author, but I remember reading it as a kid, too.
• Another YA book for the list, about a computer game where whatever happens in the game affects the lives of the people playing it. The main characters first notice something strange about the game because whenever someone different is playing it, the player character looks like them; a skeptical member of the group rationalizes that the game must have a rotating set of character designs that are just general enough that someone playing the game can identify the character with themselves.
  • I don't recall that specific scene, but for what it's worth my automatic first association for "YA book about a computer game where whatever happens in the game affects the lives of the people playing it" is Gillian Rubinstein's trilogy: Space Demons, Skymaze, and Shinkei.
    • Skymaze appears to be it.
• Children's novel where the protagonist gets a tooth filled and the filling picks up radio. He gets it in his head to bite a chain link fence and picks up the radio communication of an alien invasion force. He silences the filling by putting his tongue on his tooth.
  • I'm pretty sure this would be Fat Men From Space by Daniel Manus Pinkwater
    • Since I didn't mention that I later remembered some discussion of eating all of Earth's hamburgers and donuts and the like, I'm going to call this confirmed.
• Yet another YA book. This one took place during the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The main character (who I think was a novice priest) had accompanied the conquistadors to the Caribbean islands, but after seeing their treatment of the natives, he began to have doubts about their mission. Eventually he defected and began helping the Indians. The only other things I remember were that it was a multi-volume series, and that the chapter numbers were done in Aztec (or Mayan?) numerals. If anyone can track this one down for me, I'd be much obliged!
  • I recalled this too, and, after some searches, I can say it's almost certainly The Seven Serpents Trilogy by Scott O'Dell (The Captive, The Feathered Serpent and The Amethyst Ring). You might recall the protagonist's name, Julian Escobar.
    • Holy crap, that's it! I figured I was never going to find that one. Well, it's off to the library... Thank you, TV Tropes!
• Famous travelogue from the early 20th century. The title ends with with a Gun and a Camera. The first part of the title is something like Preposition (Through, Into, Across, Down...) Place Name (an exotic location, which I'm pretty sure was in Africa). The title has been parodied to death, but I can't seem to find the original online. The Googles do nothing.
  • Possibly something by Martin and Osa Johnson? It sounds familiar...
  • That's the right genre, but I'm looking for a book. The Johnsons seem to be known mainly for their films.
    • Osa wrote a number of books. J. Erah Onurb, Through Deepest Africa with Gun and Camera (Pasadena, 1912) shows up in 12 hits but they're all copies of the (supposed) bibliography of a book on Bantu mythology that's hosted on a public domain books website owned and operated by one John Bruno Hare, (how coincidental) so the whole entry may very well be a copyright trap.
    • That's close enough. Onurb's book, if real, may be the earliest, but I was mainly trying to find titles in that pattern. Now that I've gotten rid of the superfluous indefinite articles, I have plenty to choose from. Thanks.
• A children's book involving two girls who are best friends and make up stories and things. I remember at one point they were recovering from colds and that made it difficult for them to hear, and one of the things they made up near the end had a mermaid in a glass cave, or something like that.
  • OH MY GOODNESS! I KNOW THIS ONE! The book you are searching for is The Witch Family, by Eleanor Estes.
    • That's it, thanks!
• I'll know what it is as soon as I hear it, but a series of fantasy books where the titles are named after chess pieces. I think it went in value, so pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen, king.
  • The Belgariad, starting with Pawn of Prophecy.
    • Yeah, but the rest were: Queen of Sorcery, Magician's Gambit, Castle of Wizardry, Enchanters' End Game. Queen and Castle could fit, and End Game sort of could, despite not being a piece, but I don't see where Magician's Gambit comes in.
    • As an alternative to Bishop, perhaps?
    • The word gambit is used in a lot of chess tactics.
  • As it happens, the Belgariad entry was just launched yesterday.
  • Yes, that was the one. Danke.
• Not sure if this is even enough information to go on, but a couple of kids... an old lady... art, valuable art... by Michaelangelo? Or something to do with the letter M on a statue... now that I try to remember, I think the bad guy was male, I think it took place in the lady's house... I'm not sure but I think the old lady was rich (but then again, she might not have been, it's been... I don't know how long, because I don't even remember when I read it)... based on how sketchy my memory of it is, I read it a long time ago, probably some time before... hmm, probably before 2002, probably several years earlier, but maybe then and I just forgot. The statue was important. I don't remember whether... were they trying to find it? I think the end had the kids see an "M" on the statue and know this was it. I think it took place at night, but I don't trust my memory enough to say that for sure.
  • Sounds to me like you're looking for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg, published in 1967. A couple of kids run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, where there's a new statue. No one knows for sure who made it, but the kids notice the M when they're poking around after hours and develop the theory that it's a lost Michaelangelo sculpture. The "rich old lady," Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, is the previous owner of the piece, who the kids go to see, to try to confirm their theory.
    • It's been adapted to screen I think at least twice, either or both of these was made-for-TV. In one of them Mrs. Frankweiler was played by Lauren Bacall.
    • Thanks to both of you who responded! I was worried I didn't have enough to go on. You rock.
• Another short story collection, but one short story in particular. A boy (or girl, I forget) is staying at a ranch house that used to belong to their grandfather. There's a lemon tree in the yard. In one room, the protagonist finds an old fox skin. Somehow, the protagonist ends up feeding the old fox skin "lemons," and it makes the fox start to come back to life. First it gets a new tailbone, and it proceeds from there. Every day, the protagonist feeds the fox a new lemon, and starts to wonder what he/she would find if he cuts open a lemon. In the end, something happens to the last lemon, which would have had the fox's eyes in it. The protagonist brings the fox a lemon from a different tree. The fox comes back, but instead of regular fox eyes, the fox has huge, brilliant blue eyes — which are highly implied to be like the kid's grandfather's, since he was also buried under a lemon tree. What WAS this story? I remember it really vividly, but there is no way in hell I'm Googling fox lemon story.
  • 'Grandad's Gifts' by Paul Jennings
    • Ha! Thank you! This has been bugging me for ages.
• I'm looking for a children's sci-fi novel I read as a kid; it was quite old (probably written in the 80s or earlier), and it was set in a society where the water supply contained drugs to make the citizens more docile and obedient and people were given alphabetical names by year (i.e. the protagonist and everyone born in his year had names starting with the same letter). It opens with the main character and a bunch of other people working in the fields, when he drinks from the uncontaminated river and thus gives the drugs a chance to get out of his system; slightly later, a nurse-type-lady attempts to forcibly inject him with some fresh dope, but he escapes somehow. That's all I can remember, sadly.
  • Could this be The Awakening Water by G. R. Kesteven?
    • Yes, that's it! Thank you! ^_^ Now I just need to find a copy, since it seems to be out of print...
• I'm pretty sure this is a famous one but for the life of me I can't remember the title. It is a pre-teen novel, about a boy whose father travels to Mars and sends back carrier pigeons. While away, the boy lives inside a large mall. Here he befriends a hunchback rat and their are electric moths in the vent system. The only other part I remember are security guards chasing the boy at night and ultimately end up spitting in honeycomb ice-cream at a shop. Possibly Australian
  • The Prince of Kelvin Mall by Australian author Michael Stephens.
    • Bingo, cheers mate
• Here goes. An educational show from Britain, about a group of kids and a dragon. Had a song with the lyric 'look for words inside other words' and a section on the difference between safe/unsafe. The villain was a crow-man-thing who turned people into puddles of goo by clicking his fingers. Was adapted from a book.
  • Through The Dragons Eye, one of the many Look and Read series
    • Excellent, thank you
• Kids' or YA novel series, at least three books, at least 7 or 8 years old. The most distinctive image I have of it is of a mysterious man, possibly some sort of agent, who uses a weapon disguised as a pen that, when "clicked," shot lightning or electricity; the man dies or is somehow unable to continue, so he gives the pen to one of the protagonists. I think the protagonists were two kids or teens, one boy and one girl, on the run from some sort of evil conspiracy. They may have had some sort of power. Some of the leaders of this conspiracy might have been old, mostly dead bodies or disembodied brains/souls kept alive in tubes, but I'm less sure about this - I might be getting this aspect from somewhere else.
  • Found this myself. I'm pretty sure it's the Extreme Zone series.
• This was a new Young Adult Sci-fi/Fantasy novel I read in the late 90s. There was a girl who woke up in the middle of the woods with no memory. A computer-like voice was programmed into her head which gave her definitions and told her that she was being chased by a flying Ambulance which would normally heal sick people, but in fact wanted to kill her because she'd escaped from somewhere. As the novel progressed, it became apparent that this was a futuristic Earth, where the original humans had been forced underground to escape excessive UV radiation and been replaced on the surface by genetically modified humans. Later in the novel, the heroine met the last remnant of humanity - a pasty white boy with no immune system who had spent all his life on a life support system being forcefed knowledge about the history of the earth by a computer. Soon after telling her everything, he commited suicide. And there was also a slave market and a bronzed slave dude she fell for in there somewhere.
  • I have a feeling this is Scatterlings by Isobelle Carmody (first published 1991).
    • Yes, that's it! Thank you.
• I read a book of short fantasy stories a while ago, and I remember it saying that some of them were excepts from longer novels. Unfortunately, I only borrowed the book and didn't write any names down. Anyone know what books these are?
  • The protagonist of one book was a young girl and a talking frog. The frog had, at one point in time, been the familiar to a powerful witch, but he had since been separated from her, and was now passing the time trying to teach a little girl magic. The frog seemed to get quite exasperated with her, but she loved him completely. She also had to keep him a secret, naturally. In the excerpt I read, he tried to teach him how to fly.
    • That sounds like Glubbslyme by Jacqueline Wilson.
    • That's definitely it! Now that you mention his name, I remember it exactly.
  • The second book (apparently from a series) involved a teacher and his students. The teacher Had Lots Of Free Time and frequently got into supernatural hijinks with his students. I can't remember if he taught at a Wizarding School or not; he might have. In the excerpt (which was a full story) I read, they were visiting a haunted castle. However, the ghosts (who were nice) were fed up with tourists always traipsing around in their castle, or the castle was about to be bulldozed, or something... at any rate, the teacher and the students teamed up to help the ghosts.
    • The situation sounds like Mr Majeika, but I don't remember that particular plot.
    • UPDATE: By what can only be described as an extremely convenient coincidence, I managed to find the exact same story collection on a trip to the local library, and checked up on the story. The actual plot that I mis-remembered involved a castle that wasn't haunted, but the owners sort of jokingly hoped that a ghost would move in. Mr Majeika and class were visiting, and it was a Wizard holiday but he couldn't celebrate it. So the wizards sent a very shy ghost to visit him, who, naturally, ended up choosing to haunt the castle.
• Some sort of children's mystery series. It took place in a world where all animals were sentient (i.e. human stand-ins), but whether or not they were anthropomorphic was left extremely vague, and despite civilization the description of their movements suggests they might not be. The main character was a gecko, and the three books I can remember reading involved 1) a snake (inherently evil, Redwall style) robbing the school cafeteria, 2) a zombie epidemic (no, not that kind of zombie) where all the students were becoming mindless, which turned out that a new student's family had been living off the stolen increased allowances of their victims, and had used (modified?) video games to enduce the zombie-ness, and 3) where the hard-ass principal suddenly started being nice, but was actually an imposter, a crime boss escaped from prison and bent on convincing the school board to set up a "vocational school" for teaching kids to be thieves.
  • I can help you with that one. These were the Chet Gecko mysteries. I don't know what the author's name is, but search for Chet Gecko- one of the books was called "The Chameleon Wore Chartreuse" and they were written in a very amusing 50's private eye knockoff way.
    • Yeah, that was it! Thanks.
• A book I read about an underground high-tech city in the year 3000. There were two teenage brothers in a family, one of whom rediscovered the surface world by going to the surface despite taboo and warnings. He also found a tribe of people who survived the nuclear holocaust of 2000 (*cough* The Great Politics Mess Up *cough* ). The other went to work fixing things in the thermal energy plant, and discovered a race of subterranean humanoids from well beneath the surface. Not sure when it was written, and it made no actual refference to the Soviet Union, but it looked pretty old when I borrowed it from the library in 2002.
  • The City Underground by Suzanne Martel.
    • Which was originally published in French as Surreal 3000.
    • I can't find a picture of the book with that exact cover, but I do remember the people from the city had been genetically engineered to not have hair anymore, and I did see a cover where a bald character emerges from a cave... I'm going to say this is confirmed, since the title seems familiar too.
• I don't remember a whole lot about this book, except that it's a young adult novel about a boy who somehow obtains a magic ring that turns him into a wolfman(or something similar) when he puts it on. Or something like that. Not entirely sure, but I feel like he couldn't control the transformations because he couldn't take off the ring, or something.
  • Is it the one where he buys the ring and turns it once for slight monster-ish appearance, twice for a bit more... and he's not supposed to turn it three times, no one ever has, but he does and gets stuck and even when he manages to get it off, he transforms every now and then anyway for daring to turn it thrice? (I don't remember the title of this one either, though...)
    • The Monster's Ring, by Bruce Coville.
    • Yep, that's it. I remember the "twist it once..." rhyme clearly now.
• Okay, what I have is obscure but pretty specific. So here goes... A children's book with puzzles and stuff in it, possibly part of a series. Two kids, possibly siblings, are going to visit their uncle. They're on a train, which I know was pulled by this locomotive, which I remember thanks to it having that very distinctive shape. Anyway, the train goes through a tunnel, and suddenly it's in the Roman Empire. It stops in a train station that is itself styled like it was native to the ancient time period. After they get off, a messenger gives them a parchment and either rings or pendants, not sure which. The parchment is the first puzzle, and the only one I can remember. The answer is either that you have to read right-to-left or up-to-down to decode the message. That's all I remember. It was new-looking when I looked at it in the school library, but this was back in the late 90s. It was a thin book, too, about as thick as a computer mousepad for a quick-to-find example.
  • Thin children's book with puzzles and stuff in it, possibly part of a series: I'm thinking Usborne Puzzle Adventures. The Other Wiki says there's a UPA with the title Time Train to Ancient Rome. The cover shows a distinctively-shaped locomotive. If, after all, this isn't it, I shall be astounded.
    • Yup, that is definitely it. Funny, the train looks a bit different then I remember...
• A short story I saw at the bookstore within the last year; I think one author wrote all the stories for the book, but it may have been an anthology. The narrator is a girl whose annoying younger brother, 7 or 8, starts doing magic. Eventually, the two of them go visit an older magician who tries to abandon the pair back in time, and then when the sister gets back to the present anyway, he tries to recruit her but she shoots him down. The family may have been Vietnamese-American. The story might have "My Brother the" Witch? Wizard? in the title. In the author's notes on the story, he mentions that he might one day work the story over into a novel.
  • Okay, I figured it out on my own through extensive use of Google. It's a short story called "El Regalo" in a book called "The Line Between," by Peter S. Beagle.
• A little girl gets a pair of glasses that let her turn things into other things. She turns a book into a chocolate cake, but it still tastes like a book. She also brings a mop to life and gives it the personality of a teacher of hers.
  • I'm pretty sure it's Miss Osborne-the-Mop by Wilson Gage.
    • That's it! Thanks.
• A fantasy novel. I didn't get too far into it, but there was a horrible war coming, the three main characters were women and at least two of those were from the same family, and the youngest one - I think her name was something like Shellyra - was big into stealth and spent her establishing scene weaving like a drunk avoiding the creaky places in the floor of her palatial house.
  • I think that's called Tiger Burning Bright? It's by Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey all working together, anyway.
    • That's it! I wanted to say the title might have had something to do with tigers, but I thought it might have been a conflation and omitted it.
• A young adult book about a 5th or 6th grade student who accidentally enrolls in a poetry class during summer school because he misread it as pottery class and thought it'd be an easy A. The story itself is mostly a framing device for a set of irreverent poems about typical preteen concerns that were supposedly written by the main character for the class. One poem was a series of increasingly elaborate and ridiculous excuses for being late for school (including that his family were druids, it was "stonehenge day" and they spent all morning trying to catch a goat to sacrifice), another was about trying to convince his parents to give him a later bedtime (one couplet was something like "I told them that it's 2 A.M. before Steven goes to bed... of course he looks like something from Night Of The Living Dead").
  • That's "The D- Poems of Jeremy Bloom" by Gordon Korman, author of the Macdonald Hall series.
    • This is correct - I instantly recognized the cover once I looked it up and everything.
• A children's book, if not part of the Dr. Seuss cannon, then in the same vein. I think the plot involved someone on a ski slope trying to impress a girl (or was it the other way around?) with a series of increasingly elaborate Nice Hats. While I can't quite remember how it was resolved, I distinctly remember it culminating in an extremely long (and extremely Nice) stocking hat.
  • Go Dog Go?
    • Yes, that appears to be it◊. I might be remembering the "ridiculously long hat at a ski slope" bit from somewhere else.
• A young-teens book with 1. A fictional story about an East (?) German kid who delivers something to a hacker, said hacker teaching the kid about hacking who - after getting into a restricted U.S. site "disappears". Said kid is investigated by intelligence agents and "swears off" hacking, followed by 2. A "factual" epilogue filled with information about "mysterious deaths" of hackers, viruses, etc.
  • Internet Spy (also The Internet Incident) by Ian Probert, part of the Classified series of mysterious-but-supposedly-true-stories for impressionable young readers. (You didn't ask, but I found it shallow, poorly written, and — knowing something about the case that inspired it — not especially concerned with factual accuracy. In Googling to confirm the title and author, I note with sadness but not surprise that the series' idea of "true stories" also encompasses Area 51, Discovery at Roswell, The Philadelphia Experiment, and Encounter on the Moon.)
    • Thanks! - I remembered the others, but only saw those other ones mentioned on Deary's website. This has been gnawing at me for months.
• A book I learned of On This Very Wiki; about superheroes, written from the villain's POV. He goes by the name of "Doctor [something]" and he's very Genre Savvy, although he keeps losing to the heroes. It turns out that one of his earlies experiments also gave the Superman equivalent his powers. Villain also had a girlfriend, who it turns out is a time traveller and who joins the Justice League equivalent at one point.
  • Soon I Will Be Invincible? Didn't read it, but found it on the wiki too. With "Dr. Impossible".
    • Yep, that's it. Thank you.
• A book of horror stories, most likely written for young adults... I don't remember much about it but there is enough to convince myself that I didn't imagine it, but not enough to do a google search. One of the stories I remeber very distinctly involved a posessed desk and a boy getting his hand attacked with a stapler because of it, and the other involved a shed where Bad Things happened because of a child being taken out there and beaten or abused. My brother borrowed it from a teacher when he was in fourth grade and I was in second, and it gave me nightmares for years. He says he doesn't remember the book, and I remember just enough to drive me nuts, so if you think you know what this book is, please tell me!
  • I actually found this one myself through Google Books-Totally Haunted Kids: True Ghost Stories by Bruce M. Nash.
• Sci-fi novel, probably written for the 10-14 age group. I can't remember much of it and probably have several details wrong, but anyway. This kid somehow comes across a glove that was special in some way, but I forget how. Probably gave him special powers; the more I think about it I believe that's what it did. And everyone in the town he lives in is acting... strange. And then it turns out that everyone, him included, is an alien. And they /all/ have these gloves. I'm almost positive that it had the word "Dark" in the title somewhere.
  • A boy with special power? The word "Dark" in the title? You might be looking for The Dark Is Rising
    • He'd have to be mangling it awfully badly. I admit I never got around to finishing it, and it was a long time ago when I read it at all, but it was much more supernatural rather than aliens. Nothing about gloves, either.
  • Original troper here. I found it. It's called The Dark Side of Nowhere.
• Children's or adolescent book, like age 9-13? Around the year 1992 I guess, about 3 siblings that were possibly trapped in a museum? But not a normal type of museum, but like a really cool/weird place where weird things happen. I picture a red cover, and black and white drawings inside, and I believe it was 2 brothers and a sister, or at least 2 boys and a girl. I remember the word "abode" used a lot... like maybe the museum or even book title was called "The (something) Abode"? And when they were locked in this weird museum place, there were weird instances like rooms that turned into other rooms... or weird staircases... or weird closets and ladders! And possibly different dimensions! Really cool geometrical/futuristic/puzzling things like that.....
  • Could it be Scared Silly by Eth Clifford and George Hughes? It's two girls and their father, but it takes place in a museum, and there are rooms that do things like turn upside down. (A disclaimer: we owned the book when I was a child, but I've never actually read it.)
    • [2/14/10] WOW!!!! You found it! I can't believe it. You're wonderful. Can't thank you enough.
• This troper's got two books. The first one is about (I think) a post-nuclear Earth where many animals have mutated and there's a tyrannical government. The main character is a girl who has a webbed left hand, thought to be caused by whatever mutated the animals. I even remember a discussion in a classroom where they talk about the human "mutants" being taken to a place (can't remember what's it called) and the teacher about to say "Unfortunately-" then stopping. Anyways, the girl goes beyond a fence that they're not allowed to go for fear of getting attacked by a certain kind of animal that's a mix of ape and bear. She befriends one of these creatures and later runs away because of the governmental laws, I think because she has the power to tell the future by drawing with her webbed hand. She also hides with a group of people who used to be Mexicans, and she helps a little girl overcome her shyness towards her by brushing her webbed hand against hers, fingers closed so not to scare her. I even partly remember the name, Where the Rushing Thrush Sings or something like that. There's a bird surround by prairie-tall grass on the cover jacket, and I remember the Arc Words being that if a certain bird sings (hence the title) something good would happen or the Earth would heal or something. This happens at the end of the book, and there's a Sequel Hook. I remember so much of this book, but I'm not sure of the name and I definately do not remember the author's name.
  • This sounds like The Hermit Thrush Sings by Susan Butler. Main character is girl named Leora, webbed left hand, the Institution, and so forth.
    • Oh My God, that's it! Thank you, I've been wanting to read that book again since I was in middle school.
• Anyone know of a YA book that was something like this little African boy and a baby giraffe talking with each other? Like, I think the kid could talk to animals or something, and I think they were being shipped off to somewhere.
  • Was it "The Warm Place" by Nancy Farmer?
    • Yes! Thank you! [6/2/10]
• [06/15/10] There are 3 kids, 3 girls and 1 boy. One of the girls has clairvoyance, I think it was clairvoyance. Anyway, she took a test because some people suspected she had ESP. She was supposed to tell whether a card that was flipped backwards was black or red. She said the complete opposite of what she saw each time, but the testers told her that they knew she had it since the odds of getting it 100% wrong are the same as getting it 100% right. The second girl had an amazing dancing ability. She had a teacher who I think was compared to a black swan. But maybe that part was from a different book. I think the first girl (with clairvoyance) was jealous of her sister and while the sister is walking down some stairs, the girl wishes she'd fall and she does. It turns out that she is paralyzed now, and the girl is horrified that she could have done that to her sister. It turns out the sister was actually anorexic because of the pressure put on her by her teacher and fainted. The brother has a wonderful gift for music; he has perfect pitch and can play songs flawlessly. The first girl touches a picture of her dead grandmother and the grandmother tells her that she gave her and her siblings those gifts.
  • I know the book you mean. I could have sworn it was by Lois Lowry, but I just checked her bibliography and it's not listed, so I guess not. I'm still pretty sure it's by Lois something.
  • I, myself, was looking for this exact book, and was about to post here, myself. However, I found it! Then, I happened to notice this request, which sounded rather familiar. The book is A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan.
    • Oh! Thank you!
• [06/15/10] This is a story in part of a collection of short stories that I adored. Or maybe it wasn't but I'm pretty sure. Anyway there's a girl who has a special necklace and the wind gives her one raindrop each year to put on the necklace, which give her magic powers related to water. She solves people's problems by using this necklace's powers. One day it's time for her tenth raindrop which she'll use to solve a drought, but the wind drops it on purpose (forgot why). She cries and one of her tears falls on the necklace. The tear serves as the tenth raindrop and she is able to solve the drought. I think the cover of the book was blue.
  • I think I know the story you mean. Is it Joan Aiken's A Necklace of Raindrops?
    • Thank you!
• [06/15/10] A book with Flowers in the title. This is after a huge world war. There's a man who finds the last flower on earth and wants to care for it. He does and then a woman comes along and cares for it too. They fall in love and repopulate the earth. The human race goes through the ages again and then there's another war with only one flower left. I read it while in the Library of Congress. I probably got a lot of details wrong but I know it had an orange cover and minimalist art.
  • James Thurber's The Last Flower
    • Wow I got a pitifully large amount of stuff wrong. But that's it alright.
• [06/15/10] So there's a boy who finds a shop that wasn't there yesterday and buys a dragon's egg. He reads that the dragon likes milk and feeds him milk. The dragon gets bigger and bigger until he has to send the dragon to a dragon realm on midsummer's day, or night or something. His father says it's funny that midsummer's day is actually the first day of summer while the boy is looking up when it is in the newspaper.
  • Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher?
• [06/15/10] This is a series about a unicorn, I only got to read the first book but this girl falls into this magical realm and there's a unicorn that she finds there. I think it was a male. Sorry that wasn't much help.
  • That sounds like Into the Land of the Unicorns...
  • It also sounds like it could be Unicorns Of Balinor.
    • It was Into The Land of the Unicorns, thank you for the help!
• [06/15/10] A book where a group of kids find a coin that can only grant half of a wish when you make one. For example if they wished for a shoelace they'd only get half of a shoelace.
  • Half Magic by Edward Eager?
• [06/15/10] This is a children's series about a girl who has to solve problems in a magic garden. She has a charm bracelet, and I forgot what the charms did but the bracelet let her into the garden. I think she lived with her grandmother.
  • This one sounds like The Fairy Realm series by Emily Rodda.
• [06/15/10] Sucky description, sorry. This was a children's book which has many stories about unicorns in it. I think there was also information about unicorns. It mentioned alicorns.
  • A Glory of Unicorns...?
• [06/15/10] This guy turns invisible one day, I think it was from a defective heated blanket. He has to adjust to being invisible. I think he dresses up like a Middle Eastern woman when in public because of course their whole body is covered practically, or that was the way it was in the book. He met a woman who also had the same invisibility issue. I think he finds a cure but she wants to stay the way she is.
  • This sounds like Things Not Seen- though admittetdly, it's been a while since I read it, sorry.
    • Strong agree— this is definitely Things Not Seen by Andrew Clements. It has two sequels.
• [07/14/10] This kids' book-sort of a hybrid of a picture book and a comic-was about two kids and five or six dinosaurs and I think it was published in the 80s or early 90s. I think the dinosaurs were a superhero team; one was a pterosaur who wore a blue and white striped leotard-thing, and there was a tyrannosaur who was always introduced with "last but not least: T-Rex!" In one book, the team got framed for...something in a plot that involved nailing the pterosaur's leotard to a bridge in Venice.
  • You remember the Swampees! They were a Stock Dinosaur Five-Man Band who lived in a hidden valley,fought crime, and had their own version of the Planeteers called the Swampee Scouts. Their archenemy was Doctor Crocodile or Doc Croc or something like that. You're remembering the one where the they organized a Swampee Scout exhibition of the world's treasures and the crocodiles stole all the stuff and set it up to look like the Swampees did it. Or possibly the one where they had their own version of the Olympic games and the crocodiles rigged the games or did something and set it up to look like the Swampees did it. I loved those books, but damn did they get a little repetitive.
• A YA novel (I think. It was in the YA section at least) where there was some sort of magic that turned people into winged maneating bloodsucking monster things. At the end of the book there is a single girl still affected by the curse and this is somehow affected by a magic amulet she's wearing. She remains marginally intelligent and knows not to eat humans.
  • Monster by Christopher Pike. The "magic" is a lake infected with viral DNA from the planet that's now the Asteroid Belt.
• The books I'm looking for are a currently published Urban Fantasy romance series. In fact, they were advertised on a Google ad on this very site. It involves a woman whose sister is murdered, and she finds out vampires are involved, then gets involved with them herself. She constantly refers to her pre-vampire knowing self as her "pink self". There are at least three books in the series.
  • Found it! It's the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning.[9/15/10]
• A Choose Your Own Adventure book in the style of the Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy. The player character is a lowly servant in the palace of the empress of the galaxy (a fat sluglike creature) orbiting Jupiter. S/he is dispatched on a sudden whim of the empress to find the last toaster in the universe. Stuff happens. The main villain is an alien conman/gangster who tries to trick the player into helping him usurp the throne. In the good ending option the player is feted as a hero, until the empress declares that she desires boiled eggs.
  • Plotbusters: The Cosmic Toaster by Clive Gifford.

Live Action TV

• A children's science fiction type programme about a family of aliens adapting to human life, from the 90s I think. There was a girl who appeared to be the youngest (maybe 12?) but seemed to be the leader - she was called X. The aliens all adopted different names - X's pseudonym was Charlotte, and her apparent mother was called Renee, I think. The aliens claimed to be from Peru (I think?) in order to account for their lack of acculturation. At one point X is asked to tell her class about Peru, and baffles them all by describing it like an encyclopedia rather than someone who had actually lived there.
  • Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left, based on a novel by Robin Klein.
    • Yes, that's it. Thanks a lot :) [08/31/10]
• A Canadian Sci-fi show aimed towards a younger demographic. Aired on YTV. The protaganist was a human boy who's last name was Bluetooth, often referred to only by his last name. Went to another dimension, or possibly into space. Was accompanied by three friends: a human shaped robot with a Dalek eye-stalk thing, a small blue furry critter who hit people with his stick, and a large frog like creature. The bad guy was very Darth Vader-esque.
  • Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension Good description, but it was an American show though it did air on YTV.
    • [Aug-28-2010] We have a winner.
• Okay, this is obscure, but, there was a TV movie (not a series) back in the mid to late 80's I think, that was done in the style of a series of TV Special Reports (you know, We interrupt this program, etc.) It was about a contact by an alien race, there was a big cover up, an entire town was found deserted (assumed kidnapped)and the aliens fired meteors at three seperate cities, one was hit, two were not, and then some country from Earth retaliated and it ended with the aliens firing THOUSANDS of meteors at us and, apparently, wiping us out. There was a big fear that due to the format it would be the War of the Worlds radio broadcast all over again. Anyone else see it, know the name of it, know if its ever been seen again?
  • Could it be something called "Without Warning," which was a TV movie about meteors striking the earth, but it turned out that there was actually an alien intelligence behind it? It was dressed up as an actual news broadcast (I think it was NBC — Sander Vanocur, who I think was an actual NBC news correspondent at the time, kept breaking into the (fake) show that was on to report on the meteor strikes. It came out in 1994. I remember very little about it, other than what I've written, but I remember really enjoying it.
    • [Aug-27-2010] I think we have a winner. I vaguely remember it being on NBC, now that it's mentioned. I thought it was really well done, but apparently you and I were in the minority, responder. Thanks much.
• It was this weird kid's show I remember watching all the time. All I remember from it was that there was this button that the characters were told not to press in every single episode. At some point in the episode the button was indeed pressed.
  • Did the kid who press the button get covered in some kind of slime? If so, it might be "You Can't do That on Television".
  • It definitely wasn't Y Cd To T. I'm too young to have seen that show. XD There were two or three adult hosts. There was no slime involved, and the button's function changed between episodes. Sometimes it teleported them to a different area, sometimes it let off loud noises and sirens, et cetera.
    • [11-Aug-10] Never mind, I found it. It's this strange show on TLC's preschool block called Skinnamarink TV. I had garbled the premise a little. But it definitely involved a Big Red Button.
• A TV series, I'm fairly sure. The episodes might have been about an hour long? IDK. On at least one day, a few years ago but definitely after 2004 or so I think, it showed an episode at either ten or eleven AM. Anyway, I only saw the one episode and it was about a couple of kids— at least one girl, and I think also at least one boy— who'd been sucked into a videogame and wanted out. There was some artifact that might help them, but they would have to walk on water to a pirate ship to get it (and the girl got caught using a power-up to do that, didn't she? That was what was on the next-episode preview). There was some safe place or other where kids hung out, but now they were in the game, it wasn't safe anymore. I think it might have been on some island or other or something. And I think the girl from the real world was blonde. (Yeah, the main characters were probably white, IIRC, but I only saw the one episode, so...)
  • Pirate Islands
    • [04-Aug-10] Thanks, that's it!
• A Musical Episode of Happy Days - I guess they were in some sort of talent show?? Howard and Marion sang "I Remember it Well" from Gigi, and Richie and Lori Beth did some kind of ballet where he was an abusive Frenchman and she was his ho girl. Fonzie also did someting I'm sure. Any clues as to episode title/number/season?
  • Possibly "Burlesque", from season seven? TV.com description
    • No, I just saw "Burlesque" and that wasn't it. Thanks for trying. Anybody else have a thought on this? (ETA: Could be it was a Dream Sequence?)
  • "Be My Valentine" from season 5.
    • [06-Jul-10] THAT'S IT! [2] [3]
  • There was a Clip Show episode with guest star Mork (He says to Orson "I did a spin-on to pay back for my spin-off") in which he shows Romantic clips from Happy Days episodes for his report on Earth Love....might this be it?
• I can't remember much about this, but I remember it ran sometime in the late 90's to at least early 2000's. The main character was this spunky, blue haired girl. The show would start (or end) with her talking to the viewer on a couch. She had two friends, who lived on a farm. One had red hair, the other I can't remember, but I know existed. I don't remember the channel, but I think it might have run in the early morning, when it was still dark out.
  • I..uh, don't remember Loonette's hair being blue, but this sounds a lot like The Big Comfy Couch. Canadian show, if you're from the US you probably caught it on PBS.
    • [05-Jul-10] That's exactly it! I guess my memory melded her blue cap and her hair together.
• This was a kids space show that aired, I think, in the mid 90s on the Disney Channel. I forget the premise exactly, but was basically a space ship crewed by young adolescents. Most distinctly, one of them is a rubber forehead alien with light greyish skin. The characters wore uniforms. I don't think that the show aired for more than about a season.
  • Could it be Space Cases? (Either way, thanks for bringing this up; it made me connect the dots between that show and the one I remember from my childhood.)
  • [07/27/10] That's the one, thanks so much. Looks like it's on youtube.
• A show about a TV show host who lived with a bunch of living puppets, who he naturally also uses as sidekicks in his show-within-a-show. So, basically the same basic premise as Scorch, but that's not what it was. One of the puppets didn't have arms, which was a plot point in the one episode I saw: A network executive comes to the main character and insists he get rid of "the one with the arms". The armless puppet, who was something of a Jerkass, initially was pleased upon overhearing this because he thought the executive meant to get rid of everyone else - the rest of the cast had to explain to him that "the one with the arms" probably meant "the one without the arms". I think in the end, the host convinced the network to keep the armless puppet in the show by claiming he was a role model for handicapped people.
  • Greg The Bunny, maybe? Were the puppets supposed to be for a children's show? Was there a "Count Blah" who the execs tried to make urban by making him "Count A'ight"?
    • I'm pretty sure it wasn't that: The puppets were supposed to be a children's show I think, but on the other hand, I remember it being a bit older than that show, it was a plot point that no one was supposed to know the puppets were alive, and the puppets were all fairly humanoid.
    • I also remember this show, but not the name. If I recall correctly, the puppets were a group of aliens who crash landed on earth (the armless puppet actually lost his arms during the crash). I think their show-within-a-show was some kind of news broadcast.
    • It was called "Lost on Earth". Here's the incredibly catchy theme song.
    • 7/25/10 This seems to be it, thanks.
• This has been bothering me for a while...it was a British kid's tv show, probably in the nineties. The opening credits showed an animated house with lots of crazy things happening in it...I think there was a giant plant taking over one floor. I know that's not very helpful, but the only real recurring detail I remember was that the main character would begin every show by going up to her room, throwing her schoolbag in, and going 'Yesss!' as though she'd got it just where she aimed it. Also, there was an episode with a parrot in it. Helpful, huh?
  • Could be the wild house (wiki link)
    • (06 June 2010) Yes! Ahhh that's been niggling at me for a long time. Thanks!
• Let's hope someone can help me with this one, despite the small amount of information. I used to watch a TV series back in the early 90s which involved a witch and some teenagers who were trying to stop her from doing something or other. There was a scene in one of the latter episodes, where she got angry with her lackey, brought her hand down on his head, causing him to blink, which according to her stripped him of all his powers. Any help will be appreciated.
  • T-Bag?
    • [05/26/10] That's it! Thanks.
• I was probably 8 years old at the most when this was on TV, so my memory is kinda sketchy. I'm not sure the exact years it was aired, but late 90s/2000. It's possible it was aired in 2001, as well, but I kinda doubt it.
  I remember being at a friends house, and I saw they had the show on tapes. When it was released in VHS, the boxes were different colors. Maybe one was yellow, one red, one green, etc. There might have been 5 videos to the set. You know if you look at the boxes of VHS tapes, and on the thin side you usually see an image at the top or bottom related to the movie? Well I'm pretty sure they had the heads of characters in the show. One of pictures on the box was of a dog, who was somewhat of a main character. I think s/he was a golden retriever, or similar. He talked. All the animals talked in the series.
  
  I only remember one particular episode, and I'll type all of what I can recall.
  
  The whole series was in somewhat of a medieval/old timey Britain (think Sweeney Todd-esque) kinda of era.
  
  There were several characters in the show. Many of them were main or reoccurring characters. During this episode, a main-character woman was put under a curse or something that made her hair continue to grow and grow, and it would not stop growing unless you chopped it with a special axe. In fact, I think that the axe was the only way you could cut it. I think it was impervious to everything else. I think that the hair would have eventually killed her in some way if it wasn't cut. I believe she had blonde hair. (It grew reallllly long. Think Rapunzel.)
  
  The special axe that would be able to chop the hair and save her life was in the woods. A crazy, blind woodsman lived in those woods, and he used that axe to chop wood each day.
  
  Two guys, main characters, went into the woods on a quest to retrieve that axe. They came across the blind woodsman, but he would not relinquish the axe. He did something to one of the guys, maybe some sort of sorcery was involved, and the guy's head and neck was now laying on a tree stump, and the blind woodsman was going to chop it.
  But, the woodsman would spare the guy's life if the other man would guess his name. His name was written on a piece of paper, and placed inside a black hat that was sitting on another tree stump behind the woodsman. The woodsman was blind, but his hearing was impeccable, and if the man even moved one step to the left, he would chop off the other guy's head.
  He had 3 (or maybe 5) chances to correctly guess the woodsman's name. He guessed once, got it wrong. The woodsman placed a short log down on the tree stump and split it in half, straight down the middle. He guessed again, I think he said the name Steve. Wrong. The woodsman chopped another log.
  A little bird came by, flew over the hat, read the name of the woodsman, then flew back over to the man who had to guess, and whispered it in his ear. The man guessed, the woodsman said, "Wrong!", and went to go chop off the other guys head. But he managed to get him to stop, saying he knew that was his name, as it was the name that was placed in the hat.
  
  I don't remember much of what happened after that, but they ended up getting the axe and chopped of the ever-growing hair.
  
  I remember watching the very last episode one night with my dad, the series finale. But it was raining where I lived and it knocked out the cable, so I never saw the ending. All I remember is the dog and a man in a barn of some sorts, and the dog 'dug up' a secret trap door under all the hay. They may have been trying to find something, or maybe getting away from someone.
  
  And that's all I know. Many thanks to anyone who tries to help me on this quest! I've been trying to figure this out for years. No luck. Thanks again. -Jessica
  • That sounds a lot like The Tenth Kingdom. Is that it?
    • May 25th, 2010 | OMFSM OMFSM OMFSM OMFSM OMFSM I COULD HUG YOU TO DEATH! Thank you so much! This is it! I even found some quotes that were what I was talking about! THANK YOU SO MUCH! This has been bugging me for the longest time. Ah! THANK. YOU.
• Japanese game show where people have to fit through holes in a moving wall that are shaped like people making weird body gestures. Almost all of them fail and fall into a pool of water.
  • Brain Wall
    • 18 Apr 2010: That's it! Thanks. Knew someone on here'd know.
• A presumably short-lived sketch comedy show I saw being advertised on Comedy Central years ago (I'd guess late 90's, but I'm not really sure). The gimmick was apparently that there were no props, sets, or costumes, and all sketches took place over a white background. The one bit I remember from the commercial was a singer yelling "Are you ready to rock???" to an invisible audience, and getting the response of "No, not quite yet!" in unison.
  • Limboland.
    • 4/16/10: Plugging that title into google led me to a 90's EW article reviewing it alongside other then-current sketch shows, and that's definitely it. Thanks.
• A kind of gameshow where the player had to navigate through the many rooms of a magical castle and always had several options on how to proceed, but was unable to see anything (helmet or blindfold?). This frequently resulted in them not getting far, then another player would have a try. A common sequence involved the player riding a dragon. May have been British, but not definitely.
  • I think it was Knightmare. I think because I haven't actually seen it apart from a couple clips on Youtube, but I've read about it on this very wiki.
    • [4/10/10] Yes, that is it. Thank you.
• I found part of a documentary/PSA on an old tape of early 1990s Saturday morning cartoons that was trying to teach kids about how commercials exaggerate and bend the truth. It was hosted by a guy who looked like Bronson Pinchot who wore bright suspenders and a tie. In particular, it focused on showing the difference between how toys look in commercials and how they really look out of the box. They also had a segment about making the Fake Food used in commercials out of stuff like shortening and dish soap.
  • I remember it was called Buy Me That, but I can't remember if it was a network TV special or cable. My gut says HBO...
    • [2/25/10] Yep, that was it. I think the recording I had was of Buy Me That 2.
• There was this show. One episode had a guy, very likely to be an alien, who does tongual contact with another person. Ther's a flash and they merge into some being that had both of their faces on opposite sides of the head. One of the victims was a bald blue female humanoid who was struggling to get out. It's probably FarScape, though I'm more interesed on this character with this ability.
  • Yes, that's Farscape. However, you're mixing things: The alien who does the tongue is"D'Argo". The tongue "attack" has nothing to do with merging heads. The head thing is called "Unity", and it's like a mental fusion, looking into each other's soul and all that. The bald blue woman is called "Zhaan"
    • [2/20/10] Ah, gotcha. Thanks.
• I remember watching a show as a kid in the early to middle 90s. It was similar to Power Rangers or VR Troopers; a series of sentai heroes who changed into costumes to fight bad guys. They also had a combining mecha; I think the giant robot had a round or triangle (or both) shield. There were 3 team members; the blue one was a girl, I think. The actors were asian. There was a human looking villain with black hair and a black costume and a black cape. There was an episode where one of the monsters sent to fight the protagonist ends up befriending the girl in blue instead, and he keeps "losing points" or something and then he gets killed/dies. The show was shown in Peru in channel 5, with a Spanish dub. Oh, and there was a recurring flashback of a guy and a girl getting killed. They wore silver suits with cute symbols on their chests (I think a dog for one, can't remember the other's). MAYBE they were astronauts, but I can't really remember. Any ideas?
  • You should have started with the Peru bit, its Choujuu Sentai Liveman.
    • YES! Thank you very much, good sir/ma'am. ETA: Whoops, after reading up I just realized that the shield bit I mentioned above came from Choushinsei Flashman. I probably created some confusion by mixing up the two shows like that. Sorry.
• An episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The second one to feature Bionicle toys. More specifically, it involved Solek on a play set of what is supposedly Voya Nui. A girl comes in with ducks and persuades John Henry he can change the rules, and this makes him become self-aware.
  • Season 2, Episode 20: "To the Lighthouse."
    • There it is! Thank you!
• This was a TV show that debuted before 2007. It had a brother and sister, and I think that the brother was in a wheelchair. They were not grade schoolers, but I can't remember if they were young adults, or still in High school. Their dad vanished, and they didn't know where he went. They end up in a room that is pure white, and from their they enter various stories/myths as characters. In the episode I remember watching, the girl and the boy enter after the woman the girl was becoming murdered her husband, leaving the girl (as the character) to take the rap. The girl-as-the-character goes to a "trial", where they call her (dead) husband to the "stand". A hawk-ish bird flies in, and it morphs to have the husbands head. The husband's-head-as-a-bird claims that the wife killed him by (I think) convincing him to stand with his foot in some sort of pot/kettle (I think), and his other foot on a bear-skin rug. She then killed him with the thing that he was most vulnerable too. Yeah, I know, I gave you a lot of details, right? Sorry- it's just kind of fuzzy. But, this has been driving me crazy, so if anyone has any ideas... I'm grateful!
  • MythQuest.
    • Thanks!
• A family of four or five, mom, dad, older son, older daughter and younger son (I think), all american (I don't remember if they were really american, but they sure looked it), blond and fresh-scrubbed, end up in a fantasy alternate dimension. One episode I clearly remember follows the story of the Beauty and the Best with the mom in the role of Beauty.
  • Otherworld
    • That seems to be it. Thank you!
• An American mystery action show, from the 1990s, about two archaelogists (an Action Girl and a male bookworm) working for a university in America. They travelled around the western world (I don't think they visited Asia...) and solved ancient mysteries á la Indiana Jones. They also had a ditzy secretary. Ran in Norway, if that helps anyone.
  • Sounds like Relic Hunter.
    • That's the one! Thank you very much!
• Show or Miniseries? This was showed to me in class around grade 5 I think? Likely Canadian, around 1992. It must have had several episodes. I think it was called something like: "THE (SOMETHING) CHRONICLES." Something like "THE NEWSPAPER CHRONICLES" or something more interesting because every time i look up that title, nothing shows up. It was a series about a young boy who worked in a library type of office and possibly put out a newspaper about mysteries or something? I can't remember any other kids though. But I do remember he had a friend.... this special type of computer or electronic-magical typewriter, that spoke to him or made a lot of old "BEEP BOOP BEEP" noises and then typed out on screen or printed out a paper what he was saying to the boy. Imagine a really really low budget "Ghostwriter".... not that Ghostwriter was high budget.
  • Sounds a bit like Read All About It, though it's not a great match. The show was Canadian, and was shown to schoolkids around grade 5. The characters did put out a newspaper ("The Chronicle"), and they had two computers: a talking video monitor called Theta and a (non-talking) selectric typewriter called Otto. The ongoing plot of the series involved a pending invasion by the evil ruler of a distant planet. A planet where everyone (except the evil leader) was characterized by an unusual speech pattern, such as speaking only in rhyming couplets.
    • I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU FOUND IT! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! You are incredible, amazing!
• I'm looking for a show with God, played by a black guy's head. I think it would have been from the '90s. American, most likely. Comedy. The line I remember went something like "I'm omnipotent", followed by the Earth kid saying "Oh, that happens to a lot of men your age." That's all I remember.
  • Sounds like the second episode of Wonder Showzen, "Space".
  • I would guess Teen Angel.
    • You'd be right. I haven't checked this page in a while, and just found it myself. If I'd known that Shepherd Book was the head I was thinking of originally...
• This kids' show, possibly aimed at the pre-K to late elementary school set (I remember it being on PBS, possibly on the same schedule as The Magic School Bus), featuring music videos for various kid's songs, and having some blue...thing as its mascot. Or main character. There might have been some pink Distaff Counterpart of the creature as well, but I could've just dreamed that up.
  • Kidsongs.
    • That's it! Thanks!
• Right then, this is quite an obscure one, but I hope some of you tropers can help me out with this! It was a British childrens' television show that I think was on CITV, back in late 1999, when millennium fever was really kicking in. It starred an Odd Couple of aliens - who might have been puppets, but could have been CGI - who travelled back in time. I distinctly remember one episode where they met Elvis. They also went back to the time of the Norman conquest and saw a bunch of Norman soldiers cheering "we are Normans... we are Normans..." as if they were football fans (at least, I think it was this show where they did that skit). After they'd gone back to whatever period of time they'd been to that week, they would report back to their boss, who was called Chronos. She had a big clock and a crystal ball, and she looked a bit like Rita Repulsa. It was very funny, with a lot of clever historical references in there - a bit like a British, live-action version of Histeria. It had a name like "Time Travellers of the New Millennium". Please help! I've been wondering about this show for years!
  • Don't worry, I found it! It was called ''The Timekeepers of the Millennium''.
• A short-lived sci fi show from the early-mid 90's. The characters were like rangers / us marshals, the pilot of the ship was female, and the way the cockpit worked the seat leaned forward so she was laying on her stomach.
  • Space Rangers, maybe?
    • That's the one!
• A TV series, probably from the 90's about a lost city in the jungle, kind of like a lost civilization untouched by modern civilization, that our two young heroes Dean and Tabo venture into after a team of archaeologists has a plane crash and the two of them are presumed dead. There they are mistakenly believed to be two legendary heroes who were destined to go on a series of quests. Dean falls in love with the beautiful princess Karma, daughter of the king. A mischievous priestess joins forces with another man from the modern world and together they make evil plans. At one point, the man and Dean both fall off a cliff, but later return. Just when Dean and Princess Karma are about to marry, the archaeologists and Dean's girlfriend Nina arrive, overjoyed to find the two men alive.
  • It's Legend of the Hidden City
    • That's it! Thanks a million!
• I think this was an Australian youth series, saw it early or middle of the nineties. I can only remember one scene: An earthquake hit the town, making a shopping mall collapse. A guy wakes up inside, badly in pain. He talks to himself and is overheard by a girl he can't see. She can't feel her legs, while trying to dig his way to her he keeps talking with her so she's calm until they're saved. Her voice sounds kinda weird, but he doesn't think much of it until he moves a rock. He heard her through a pipe - she's far below him, and there's no way for him to reach her. She asks him what's wrong, and he can't bear to tell the truth. I can't remember what his lie was, but he keeps talking to her and finds out she's a schoolmate he never noticed, so he tells her little white lies. Like how he thought she was pretty but was too shy to talk to her, stuff like that. I think it cut away here, becase the next thing I remember was the rescue team reaching him. He looks up, smiles sadly, and tells them they just missed a really nice girl.
  • This is an episode from the second season of the BBC series Press Gang, called 'The Rest of my Life'. The boy is Spike, the series' male lead; the girl is Mary Brien, who he knew by sight but had never talked to. the explosion was caused by a gas main leak, and the youth newspaper Spike is a reporter for covers the explosion in the B-plot.
    • Success! Thank you.
• There was a made for TV movie from the mid-80s about some kids that get together and build a giant snow fort and have a big snowball siege. Then part of the fort collapses and kills a dog.
  • The Dog Who Stopped The War AKA La Guerre Des Tuques?
    • That was it.
• A show with puppets, possibly fantasy-esque, that aired in 1990's on the Children's BBC. Comedic in nature, and featured an episode talking about fears, and it mentioned the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
  • I can answer this one. You are thinking of 'Roger and the Rottentrolls', specificially the clip show episode which the fine folk at youtube have here
  • That's it. Thank you for solving years of confusion and mixed up memories.
• When Fox started it's Fox Kids afternoon program block, there was a baby duck "host" who did "cute" things while a VO said...stuff. The VO, sounding early middle-aged, was supposed to be the duck talking, making wisequacks. What was the name of the duck?
  • Dynamo Duck, baby.
    • Yes.
• This was probably a made-for-TV movie or miniseries, from the mid-90s. A man witnesses several accidents which involve the deaths of many people, and notices that the same well-dressed man is present for each one. He confronts him, and discovers he's a tourist from the future, who came back to witness those events, using a Time Travel device shaped like a book. In the process he saves two planes from a midair collision, and saves the passengers of a train from a crash. In the latter event the time-traveler dies, and the protagonist acquires the book. Unfortunately, however, two enforcers from the future (a man and a woman) are after him to prevent him from saving more people and messing up the timeline. They kill his female sidekick and love interest and cause a fire (I think it was at the Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, but I'm not sure) in which the protagonist's son dies. He uses the book to travel back in time to before his love interest was killed, then tosses it away as the enforcers were tracking him through it, and races to the place of the fire to stop them. I forget how it ends, sadly. Does anybody have any idea what this is?
  • Damn it, I've seen that as well, but I don't remember what it was.
    • OP here. Found it! It's Thrill Seekers.
• Does anyone remember a show where people would go and get makeovers and then come out looking like their favourite stars, and then perform a track onstage AS these stars? One thing I recall is that there was always this segment in which the person would seem to go into the stage fog, and then come back, all dressed and prepped? And I remember one guy was Engelbert Humperdinck. Anyway, if someone could tell me what this show was called, I'd be really thankful.
  • This sounds exactly like the British show Stars in Their Eyes.
    • [1/29/10] That's it! Thanks! ^^
    • FYI there was a similar series in the US called Your Big Break
• A dying multi-billionaire forms a team of scientists to deal with various potential catastrophes and crime involving the environment. The first episode revolves around the theft of plutonium/uranium from a nuclear power plant and the billionaire forming the team to retrieve it. The team consisted of a female marine biologist, a male anthropologist (I think) who was a dark and brooding 'lone wolf' type, a male medical doctor (who was de facto team leader), a male physicist (called Dana I think and in retrospect oh SUCH a Lancer) and a former CIA operative or a freelancer (he frequently clashed with the physicist) who had his own C-130 airplane that they used as base of operations and main transport. Oh yes, the billionaire also had a blonde personal assistant who served as the liaison with the team and the doctor's love interest. I can remember bits of episodes, such as the physicist giving a lecture to the lumberjacks about how they will run themselves out of work, the doctor retrieving a key from a fish tank by using a steel tray to keep the extremely poisonous fish in it from stinging him...I've seen this in the mid 90's, ever since I've had Internet access I've been searching for any clue whatsoever that the series WAS REAL AND NOT JUST IN MY MIND! Please help.
  • E.A.R.T.H. Force
    • [2/2/10] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Unknown Troper or Tropette. This is the greatest site ever, the people here are AWESOME!
• All right, another PBS kid's show - it involved three puppets, one of which was a black guy, another one was a Spanish-speaking redhead, and the other was the Token White. They went on adventures and stuff, though the only episode I remember was one where they went to a car show (?) and the redhead conducted a bunch of cars honking "Mary Had A Little Lamb".
  • Tots TV? Although the redhead in that spoke french.
  • The redhead spoke French in the Canadian version, and spoke Spanish in the American version.
    • Was she still called "Tilly"?
  • [3/20/10] That was it! Thank you!
• I've had a quote stuck in my head forever, without remembering its source: "Either that, or [performer name, can't remember] was right, and the rhythm is, in fact, going to get you."
  • This was said by Chandler in an early episode of Friends.
    • [05/05/10] I originally thought Friends was too recent, but it turns out to be Older Than I Thought, so it's probably right.

Music

• Can anyone help me find the title/artist of this song? (WAV file here)
  • You're looking for The Streets Of Philadelphia by Stanley Clarke.
    • [09/08/10] That one's been bugging me for a while now. Thanks a million.
• The song I'm thinking of is from Phil Hendrie during his Art Bell bit. No, not Abba. http://www.derfy.info/unknownsong.mp3 (my webspace) is a link; you can hear it sometimes when Phil shuts up.
  • [pre-08/17/10] Found it, myself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cESfyIsg9tU
• A song I'm almost certainly sure was used as the going away song in either American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance. All I remember about it is that the chorus of the song was either "She's on top of the world, she's on top of the world, she's on top of the world." or "She's a beautiful girl, She's a beautiful girl, She's a Beautiful girl." Oh, and the singer was male.
  • I'd imagine that song is "Suddenly I See" by KT Tunstall. If the singer was male, though, it was a cover.
    • [8/01/09] That's it! Thank you! My memory mest of been a bit muddled about the singer.
• I'm trying to remember a song I used to hear on the radio back in 2000 (in south Texas, if it matters). It was a hip-hop sort of song, and I remember the chorus that went, in what may be a mondegreen (I was 8 or 9 at the time): "We're going downtown, baby, no street in the rainforest / Boom boom, baby, you've got to let it go" followed by some nonsensical lines, if I remember right. Google turned up nothing as far as lyrics go. Any ideas?
  • [06/24/10] Found it! My sister told me it's "Country Grammar" by Nelly.
• A song about Superman, which I initially thought was called "Ode to Superman," though that title isn't turning up anything on the Internet remotely related to the song I'm thinking of, and I can't find anything about who sung it. I remember a lot of the lyrics—from the beginning to where I lose track of things, "I can't stand to fly / I'm not that naive / Men want men to ride / With clouds between their knees / I'm more than a bird / I'm more than a plane / I'm more than some pretty face beside a train / And it's not easy to be me / I wish that I could cry / Fall upon my knees / Find a way to lie / About a home I'll never see / I'm misunderstood / But don't be naive / Even heroes have the right to plead / (something I forget) / Even heroes have the right to dream / And it's not easy to be me." There's more, but all I remember is a bit about "Digging for Kryptonite on this one-way street" and a bit about "It's all right / You can all sleep sound tonight / I'm not crazy or anything." It's slow and kinda moody.
  • I'm 99.99999% sure that this is Five for Fighting's song entitled Superman, but here are some links so you can tell yourself. XD Lyrics. Youtube Video.
  • [6/14/2010] Yeah, that's it. A little embarrassed I got the lyrics wrong. Thanks!
• I never heard this song, but I did see the music video, and for years I have wondered what song could have a music video this cool. Now, I saw it only once, when I was around 7, so my memory is definitely very incoherent, and I may not have interpreted the plot correctly. It was animated. The main character seemed to be... I couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl, but whoever it was had shortish red/brown hair. The background, as far as I can recall, was mostly shades of pink and orange. At one point, shadow people descended from above and started trapping everyone in bright pink... um, either spheres or boxes. And I do mean shadow people. They were sort of vaguely humanoid shaped, and pitch black except for their eyes. I think. The main character and... some guy... were... I guess trying to fight back? But they got captured too and sent up into this... pinkish cloudy place. The main character was kind of sad and went off to sit by herself (himself)? And that's all I remember. If this sounds familiar to anyone... having the song would be nice, but even if you don't know, I'd just like some confirmation that I didn't imagine all that.
  • I found it myself. And BOY, did I ever remember that wrong. I'm surprised I recognized it at all based on how I was recalling it. It's actually the video for 'Aerodynamic' by Daft Punk.
• Does anyone know the name of the song that's 19:22 minutes into this video? I've Seen It A Million Times.... Just, it's this video that I was able to find with it in it...
  • The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss. It's use there is most likely a Shout-Out to 2001: A Space Odessey.
    • [3/29/2010] Yeah, that's it, thanks. I knew I'd seen it a million times!
• It's been driving me crazy for months. I remember reading (here I think) about a concept album revolving around a little Mexican town where somebody shoots the Devil. As he lies dying in a hospital bed, he curses the town. The only other thing I can remember is something about parents and children hiding indoors and recording, Apocalyptic Log style, the final hours of the town. I remembered the title long enough to find the tracks on You Tube, but I didn't save any of it and I'm kicking myself, because it was awesome.
  • The band is Murder by Death, and the album's called Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them?
    • [1/28/10] Thank you! The moment I read the lyrics I knew it was the right one.
• I heard this song a couple of times in the mid-to-late-90's on one local "alternative" station (and basically nowhere else, so it was likely either a very minor regional hit or just something they aired on their local music program a few times): All I can remember is that it was kind of industrial/metal-sounding, the vocalist had a pretty deep voice, and the refrain included the memorably creepy line "We like whips on the backs of scientists".
  • The group may be "The Bogmen", but that's all I could find.
    • I'd heard this name before, and remembered them being a Boston-based band (I did not specify that's what I meant by "local", but yeah), so I plugged the name into itunes... Sure enough, the song turned out to be "Failing Systems" by The Bogmen.
• Am album that teaches multiplication times tables with rap songs, with each track dedicated to a different times table. Supposedly each track was written and performed by an actual rapper (so the back cover said). The one for the 12 times table was entitled "The Dozen Rhyme", and was filled with Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion lyrics ("It's the dozen rhyme, and it doesn't rhyme/ 'cause if it did, it would be a felony"). This had to be from around the early 90s.
  • Google suggests Rock 'N Learn Multiplication Rap.
    • I really wish this had a sample of "dozen rhyme", but that does seem to be it.
    • Update: I'm now certain this is it, thanks to the video version showing up on Everything Is Terrible.
• The song in the Mondo game trailer video. If you know French better than me, perhaps you can comprehend the lyrics and search for them on Google?
  • Found this: it's Bizet's composition "Je crois entendre encore" (performed probably by Nicolai Gedda).
• I keep seeing parody videos of this ED. Two people are standing closely face to face with their palms barely touching while singing. What stands out are the butterfly wings on their heads, usually one red and one blue.
  • OP here; turns out it wasn't an anime at all but the Vocaloid song Magnet.
• In the Life season 1 finale, there's a song playing in the scenes where Crews is talking to a tied-up Kyle Hollis, and where Reese and Crews are bickering and trying to find the snake. I can't hear all the words, but what I did hear sounded like this:

"I happened to hear it from a friend, when she told me what you'd done... But everybody's right some times, and sometimes you lose, (not sure about that line, there were some others before it and I couldn't hear the end) and I will admit that, to try to make your life a better place, I'm so sorry for my bullshit."I tried lyrics sites but I haven't found the song. And I tried this site, which tells you what most of the songs used were, but it said the song was 'Who By Fire' by Leonard Cohen, which doesn't seem to match. Anyone know what it could be?

• OP here, I found it- it's called "Betrayal" by Rod Oliver.
• Heard this song a lot on the radio, haven't heard it for years. I really want to know what it was. All I can remember is the line at the end of a verse or maybe the chorus that went 'in my life' (but it could have been anything that sounded similar, like 'in my mind') and an Epic Riff after that. The song is definitely from the 60's, 70's, 80's or 90's. Could even have been from the 50's. As far as I can recall, the singer was male.
  • OP here, I finally found it! It's "Summer Breeze" by Seals & Crofts.
• Okay, so this is a rock-ish song, and part of the songs "and we'll fight to end this war". That's all, I'm sorry.
  • I immediately thought of "Brother My Brother" by Blessid Union of Souls, which was used in the first Pokemon movie. I thought it was wrong because the lyrics are actually "Tell me what are we fighting for / We've got to end this war", but I can't find anything closer by Googling parts of your suggested lyrics.
    • [4/29/2010] Thanks- I looked, and that's not it. However, I did find it- it's "Good Day to Die" by the Starship troppers.
• I saw this very surreal music video years ago in France, so I don't know if this song was only popular there or if it was imported... I can't remember it well anymore, but the music video involved a black screen with white drawing on it. A person - crudely drawn, kind of like a stick figure I think? - would be walking along, and a jagged shark-looking thing would keep popping out of the ground to accost him. The "music" was some really repetitive nonsense syllables if I recall correctly, something like "ba ba bey, mm ba ba ba mm ba bey" or something like that.
  • This reminds me of something, but that's not a music video so it's probably not that.
    • Nope, don't think that's it, though there's some similarity in the style. It was definitely a music video, and it had a much more... angular feel to it. But thank you for trying!
  • I'm pretty sure you mean this.
    • [07/02/2010] That's it! Thank you!
• I have faint memories of a song I caught once on MTV. It revolved around a really simple "na-na-na-na-na-na-naaaa" organ hook and had a really deep-voiced singer. I remember the video slightly better, because it involved the band being in a white space with balconies like a block of flats, and once the final chorus starts up they start climbing into the air for some reason one by one, the last one to go's the drummer during the song's fadeout and at the end he drops his sticks and one of them hits the floor tom. Any ideas, anyone?
  • Maybe "Christian Woman" by Type O Negative? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sMALbhJU6M
    • No, it's not that one. Like I said, the video was mostly white and had apartment blocks and the floating at the end, and the song was more upbeat. If I had to take a rough guess at what the riff sounded like in notation, I'd say something like C-A-C-A-C-A-C (long note), A-C-A-C-A-D, A-D-A-D-A-D, A-D-A-D-A-C, A-C-A-C-A-C, A-C D and repeat.
    • might it be Narcotic by Liquido? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jsj-37UrxeM
    • [07/09/2010 4:27 PM] YES! That's the one! Thanks! Video's still funny.

New Media

• Does anyone know of a web serial/novel thing where there was this guy who's roommate's/friend's (I think) older sister had some sort of magic and the guy was involved and so were other people (principal?) and there were a group and all female and it might have involved Magical Girls? ... I only read the start (first chapter I think) and filed it for reading later and kind of lost the site.
  • Just remembered a few things that may or may not be from the same thing: The main character worked(?) at an arcade and there was this arcade demon/vampire-thingy that suck the life force out of children playing but he was immune because of this blue(?) light and then there was this squad of magical girls... Or maybe I'm mixing it with another thing...
    • Ok, let me restructure that: I remember it started with a small itro chapter where it talked about heroes and ended up saying something about Magical Girls. Then we switch to the main character (whose name may have started with an "R") and his friends (two?) who were working (at least one of them worked at) an arcade (his friend had a bat on the other side of the counter). There was this shooter where a bunch of kids were playing and taking turns and generally acting like zombies. They decide to enter the game (it was one of those on-rail shooter you played sitting down inside of them, kinda like that Jurasic Park game). The tries to drain them like it did the kids but cannot drain the main character because of this blue(?) light(Symbol?) and then this Magical Girl Squad came in and defeated the deamon/vampire thing while mostly destroying the arcade... That's when things get fuzzy...
    • [06/12/10]Found out it was Magical Girl Policy at http://taralynn.sincomics.com/
• A 3D animation about a boy who can heal people who begin to turn to stone (which happens when they engage in violence) He uses his blood to heal the stone. I remember his brother was a thug who exploited his brother's power by forcing him to heal his hands when they turned to stone after beating people up...I also think the boy journeyed inside of himself and saw a stone or something... there was also a dog in it I believe.
  • Sounds exactly like "Frat the movie". [4]
    • [07/17/10] Yes! That's the one, thank you so much. :)

Video Games

• There was this game for the Sega Genesis where you played as a monster, and as far as I remember he was pinkish in color, and was possibly quadrupedal or walked curved to the point where his hands almost touched the ground. His face kinda reminded me the face of a Piranha, because he had these sharp long teeth. The only level I can remember looked like a cave filled with moss, and it had some ponds every here and there. The game had this very dark/creepy feeling to it. It kinda reminds me of Oddworld for some reason. To be honest with you guys I'm not even sure if this game exists or if it was something out of a dream I had... My memories of this game seem so blurry, and I've searched for it everywhere for years, but never found anything about it. :(
  • This does ring a bell... There is one Jurassic Park video game that is a platformer where there were two quests, one for the human character and one for the raptor. And what few I remember of the raptor's starting level could fit your description. And Wikipedia confirms that the Genesis used this version.
    • [2010-10-06] Yeah, this is it! Thanks a lot! I didn't remember the game was a Jurassic Park game, and for some reason thought it was about monsters, probably because last time I played it was when I was around 6 or 7. But as soon as I saw gameplay footage I was 100% sure this is the game I've been looking for. Thanks a lot for your help! :)
• Being really, really vague here, but I'm hoping it's good enough. A game for the SNES. Possibly NES, but the graphics that I remember seem a bit too advanced for it. At least some part of it is set at a carnival, and some sort of blue ball/sphere (for some reason I'm thinking they're made of clay, but possibly not) plays a role in the game. There may or may not be some sort of overworld map, but if there is you're restricted to set paths as opposed to freely roaming, and you move diagonally.
  • Claymates? SNES, you play as a blue ball of clay that morphs into other things, and there is an inaccessible "carnival" on the first overworld map. I dunno about the "move diagonally" part though... Be gentle, I don't play many games.
    • [09/24/10] Holy crap. Thanks so much. I see I'm wrong about the moving diagonally but that's still it. I've been wondering this for several years before I found YKTS, so thanks again.
• I recall playing an old game where you are a criminal and your goal is to commit crime to gain enough points to reach the goal you set for yourself at the begining, which the game reccomended to set to 50. To steal money, you had to solve a block puzzle where you try to get as many blocks out of an exit as possible. Escaping from cops was sort of like a game of pacman where you had to avoid being caught until a time limit runs out, or else you had to fight them.
  • could it be crime fighter?
    • [23/9/10] That's it! Thank you! I've been using that game so many times as an example of this trope and now I finally found it.
• I remember seeing it first on Dueling Analogs. It was a DS game, where two boys had to find a witch by looking for a specific mark on the bodies of their female classmates. You had to use the touch screen to search their bodies and...yeah.
  • It seems to be called Doki Doki Majo Shinpan!.
    • [21/9/10] That's it! Thanks so much.
• This one should be easy for you guys: It's a PS 3 game rated T or M that starts out on a boat at sea. There's a man and a woman, and the woman is filming the man opening a coffin or something. There's a journal inside. Pirates attack them and they shoot them off (you play as the guy.) Then an old man character comes into the story back on land. They ditch the girl and go looking for clues in a Mayintec jungle. They're led to a German U-Boat beached in the South American river. That's as far as the guy I was watching got - I forgot what he said the title was.
  • Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
    • Uncharted! Thank you!
• A train simulator where the trains get progressively more modern as you progress, starting with steam trains and finishing with bullet trains. Existed before 1994. There were runaway trains that you couldn't control, and they'd crash if they reached the end of a track.
  • You might be talking about Transport Tycoon, which was released in 1994 and allowed you to build trains starting in 1930 and ending around 2050.
    • No, this one let you build trains from the nineteenth century. I think it started in 1850. And the screenshots I found don't look like what I remember. The buildings in mine were very small and rather primitive.
  • I found it. It's Shortline.
• A PC FPS released around the late 90's/early 00's. It began with your character on some sort of floating trains with no walls. After a few seconds, you'd get a cutscene of a guy in an armor saying something and then he'd fire something from his gun. Then your character would get hit by the shot and fall in the jungle below. I think you could ride on a futuristic motorcycle, but maybe that's my memory playing tricks. I thought it was one of the Tribe game but the game I remember definitely had an elaborate single-player mode.
  • You just described the opening mission of the single-player campaign of Tribes 2.
    • Thank you for confirming my guess. When I did a Google search on Tribe 2, I couldn't find *any* info on wheter it had a single player campaign.
• It's this NES game where you control a penguin and use candy to fight dogs. It was on a 84-in-1 cart (one with 84 distinct games!) and was called penguin. The in-game title was Japanese. You can find a ROM very easily
  • Same troper. Alright, so the game is called Chubby Cherub. Seanbaby called it the 15th worst game of all time. You eat candy to not die, and are inexplicably killed by dogs. But what about the penguin?

Well, the game in Japan was a Licensed Game for Q-taro. A manga about a ghost that's afraid of dogs. GHOST. Agh.

• Once as a kid I distinctly recall reading a video game magazine, and it had a code or trick or glitch that one could use on one of the old, Genesis-era Sonic games (possibly Sonic 3). When sued supposedly it yielded a picture of a darker, monstrous version of Sonic with the title "Sonic the Human Hedgehog". It was also possibly called "Dark Sonic" by the magazine. It is NOT the Dark Sonic from Sonic X, I know that much for certain, nor is it one of the later games in the series–this was Genesis, definitely. Maybe Sega CD, now that I think of it, but no later than the Sega CD. It may have been a joke or a hoax, but still I would like to know if it was real or not and if it was real, a link to some information would be nice. So far, I've tried searching for Sonic the Human Hedgehog and so far I've come up with fanart of a bishonen version of Sonic...which, while nice and cute and all, is NOT what this was. This was like the sonic version of Rambo: if I recall the picture correctly he was a big muscular thing, kind of scowling and with a vaguely human face, and actually less human looking than the normal sonic as a result, if that makes sense. I have no idea if this was real or not, but even if it was a hoax I'd like to know where it came from. If memory serves it may, MAY, have been Game Pro magazine.
  • That's an Easter Egg from Sonic CD. Check here.
  • [pre-08/17/10] Ah yes, thank you, that's it exactly. Thanks much!
• There was this game I remember playing in the computer lab at camp about eight years ago. It was multiplayer, where all the computers in the room could play against each other. Each player was some sort of fighter ship...thing, and we had to shoot each other down in this maze-like thing within a set period of time, and there were powerups which were like different kinds of squares hanging in the air, and there were also different maze-arena-things and different play modes (the only one I can remember is "Fox and Hounds", which was basically played like a game of tag). And all the graphics were pretty basic — the arena looked the same no matter where you were in it, and I think the ships were just solid triangular things in different colors. I've been looking everywhere for the game, but it's hard when I remember it so vaguely...
  • "Descent" maybe? Or "Terminal Velocity"?
    • I searched the titles, and they're both way too detailed (plot and graphics) to be the game I'm looking for. Sorry. (Possible clarification: The one I remember is very similar to the description of "Maze War", but that's not it either.)
    • I think I remember the game- I know the name began and maybe ended with an A and it was for the Mac. I don't remember the game modes though... I know there was a single-player campaign and a part where you had to attack an enemy fortress.
  • Super Maze Wars. You'll need to emulate an ancient Mac in a program like Basilisk or Sheepshaver to play it on a modern Mac or PC.
    • That's got to be it! Thank you very much. [8/9/10]
• This was some PC game from the 1990s, which I don't remember all that much about. However, I recall that in the intro you saw a guy running over a mountain and after that a huge mushroom cloud. I am pretty sure it wasn't a 3D rendering, but a more traditional, "pixel-art" type of intro animation. The intro had a rather dark overall appearance. I don't remember what kind of gameplay it was, it may have been a first-person shooter, but I'm not sure. I've already ruled out C&C Tiberian Dawn and Duke Nukem 3D.
  • This sounds like 66.html Zone 66. A top-down free-scrolling DOS airplane shooter. Did the intro have anime-style art and a guy taking off in a plane? The full intro is here. Look familiar?
    • Thank you. [8/9/2010]
• A children's video game from either the late 90's or early 00's. It takes place in some big house or mansion, where a lot of demons and monsters live. The 'main' screen is in the foyer, and you can click on doors to go to the next room. All I can remember is a kitchen filled with wierd food, and a big door in the middle of the foyer, out of which, if you click it, a train comes out and nearly runs you over.
  • Is this it?
    • Could be - it looks familar. Thanks! [7/27/2010]
• A pc-based sci-fi adventure game, similar in style to Space Quest. You play as a guy...doing stuff. All I really remember is at the end you break the fourth wall and are inside the computer, and have to solve some puzzles where you fix the circuits inside your computer. I'm pretty sure it was freeware or open source.
  • Is it Out Of Order by Tim Shafner? The protagonist has a green morning rock on during the whole game.
    • Yes, that's it. Thanks.
• I rented a Genesis RPG where you were a hero out to save the world by rediscovering lost technology. At one point, you have to track down and recruit a wizard type (who if I recall wore a blue cloak and hood) to join your party, and he provided you with a hang glider he invented. Also, when you tried to visit the king without an invitation, the guards would say 'Even though you are , you can't come in without an invitation' if you were high level.
  • Was it Traysia?
    • No, but you spurred me to poke through Moby Game's listing of Genesis RP Gs and I found it: it was called 'Sorcerer's Kingdom' [6/14/2010]
• I played a PC point-and-click FMV adventure game at my cousin's house in 1996 or so about trying to find ghosts hidden in a mansion. At one point, there was a puzzle where you had to click on different spaces of a chessboard or something to spell 'ghost', and you could also find a tape recording of a medium asking a ghost about his life, and he speaks with a rough Cockney accent. There was also a narrator who would pop up occasionally to comment on your progress who looked like the Tall Man from Phantasm.
  • I admit to not playing the game myself, but parts of this sound very similar to the 1996 game Clandestiny, which was made by the makers of The7th Guest.
    • Close, but no cigar. I don't remember seeing any cartoon characters, it was all live action.
    • Aside from that and 7th/11th... uh... maybe Realms of the Haunting? Or the first Phantasmagoria game? (None of these seem to have that "ghost" puzzle in any form, though.)
    • Confirmed by the original poster: it was called 'Ghosts' and the narrator was played by Christopher Lee himself! [6/11/2010]
• An edutainment game for grade schoolers (at least at my school) where you have to save a princess, and you're in a space ship. You collect crystals by solving problems, and then fly through space. IIRC You had special circles you "warped" through... In Space. Sorry, but that's all I remember! ^_~
  • It sounds like it was most likely one of the Math Blasters games, but I can't be more specific than that.
    • I found it, thanks~ XD [6/11/2010]
• An edutainment game for grade schoolers (at least at my school) where you're a dog (or there is a dog- there is definitely a dog involved), and aliens are hanging around. You find the aliens, and answer math problems to beat them. Bones figure in somehow.
  • I am pretty sure you are talking about Troggle Trouble Math: video link.
    • Yep, that's it, thank you! [6/11/2010]
• An edutainment game for grade schoolers (at least at my school) where you're detective (in boxers, IIRC- no pants), and there are evil robots infesting a school. You have to go and take pictures of robots after answering questions, and figure out which robot is really the Big Bad. Also, I think there was a time limit- maybe midnight? I played it on the PC, but...
  • I think it's Midnight Rescue!
    • YES! [[6/7/2010]]
• Some weird English translated eroge I played aaages ago. The protagonist is some kind of young space navy officer with a cybernetic arm (or leg, I don't remember exactly) assigned to some space/moon base. Predictably, it's soon revealed that there's a virus going around that makes everyone very horny. The wooable girls included a red/pink-haired girl whose selling point was that she'd just turned 18, a green/blue-haired Robot Girl, the base's Christmas Cake chief and some ice-cold senior officer and her lesbian lover who had been spreading the virus around.
  • You didn't hear it from me but Critical point
    • [05/30/10] Thnx bro!
• Bear with me people, but I can clearly remember a game where you are a chef. In space. Battling aliens with cooking utensils (no really). IIRC, the game was called Pann'd and was rated 17+ . I played it anyways at the age of 6.
  • Isn't it actually called [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PO'ed PO'ed?]]
    • [6/1/10] ZOMG! I'd remember that cover anywhere! Thanks a bunch!
• An old Win 3.11 game. In it there was a literal bookworm who had lost a bunch of letters from his books, and it was your job to go get them back by navigating many platforming levels. The 3.11 program icon was probably the Mona Lisa, and I think you could choose what gender you were playing as but I'm not certain on that.
  • Word Rescue
    • [5/30/10] Yep, thanks.
• This one's vague, so bear with me. It was probably a puzzle game of some sort, most likely for the Nintendo 64. There was a circular lobby with a kind of futuristic command center-y theme, and the one level I remember was a bunch of blocks stacked up vertically that you had to run on, kind of like that one platformer level in Super Mario Sunshine.
  • That wouldn't be Loderunner 3d/64 would it?
    • [5/27/2010] Yes! That's it! Thank you so much!
• A sequel to a Russian space sim made somewhere around 2003-4 for the PC. One of the feature I remember is that you could get in prison and train a cockroach to bet in cockroach races. I think it was bundled with its prequel in some markets.
  • It's not exactly a sim, but I'm 100% positive it's Space Rangers 2. It has a text adventure system, with a prison and roach training in said prison.
    • That is it! Thank you!
• I once played a Mega Man spinoff game on the P Sone at one point, but now I;ve forgotten the title. It was about one of the antagonists from the Mega Man games (A girl) whose uncle or something is being held for ransom. She then has to move across the land, stealing and looting and causing merry mayhem in a mech, in order to raise the cash to buy back her uncle. She had little lego-like robot helpers, and one of the first levels involved looting a town, sending the robot helpers inside buildings to steal things and avioding a policewoman who complained about sleeping in. Any help would be much appriceiated.
  • The Misadventures of Tron Bonne.
    • That's it! Thank you so much!
• What is this◊ and where does it come from?
  • The logo in the top corner is Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, so it's probably concept art from that.
    • [2/17/10] Looks like a match. Thanks.
• An arcade game with 3-D characters hovering in some kind of translucent box. You could move them around and some characters could put things in mid-air, like this one Old Master guy who put those Tao cards all over the place.
  • If we're thinking the same game, it was also released for the PSX (sorry, can't help further).
    • That's not a lot to go on, but it sounds like one of the Psychic Force games.
    • Nice work! I knew I could count on you!
• Old Apple I Ie game, we're talking 70s, 80s, so lol graphics by today's standards. You went from castle to castle, and they were all different colors; each color was a type of difficulty; black being the worst. You could get a number of items, like a gun, or poison, or rope. Certain monsters were weak to certain items. I remember the Genies were the worst monster, and touching their lamp meant one would automatically attack you. Oh, and there were these Bottomless Pits in rooms that would kill you instantly if you entered their room unless you instantly used a rope. I remember the last castle always being the largest black castle in the game; and I think the goal was to find a crown or something.
  • Is it Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress?
    • Yes! That's it! Thanks!
• An old, sorta-Roguelike, dungeon crawl RPG. I only remember it for its strange classes that determined what you could identify: knight, fighter, sage, alchemist, and "Jones".
  • Dungeon of Doom.
• A PC adventure game, with a contemporary setting, beginning in a "hole in the wall" office. "You Bit The Green Weenie" was the standard Have a Nice Death message; one way to get it quickly was to try to steal the keys from the boss, who would open a Trap Door under you. One of the later deaths (after the typically annoying Copy Protection) may have involved being eaten by a circus lion.
  • I am 100% certain that this is Les Manley And The Search For The King.
    • That seems to be it. Thanks!
• A Nintendo 64 game, possibly a Platformer. The main character was some kind of alien creature, IIRC... They were sort of like Yoshi, with a long, sticky tongue. The tongue could be controlled independently of their body. Other than that, all I really remember is that one level was a Level Ate.
  • I would bet that's "Chameleon Twist".
    • Wikipedia seems to confirm with my memories. Thanks!
• A PC rpg set in a vaugly spanish, vaugly roman fantasy setting. The most distinctive feature I can remember is that when you died the gameover screen showed a bloodred skull with fangs and a laurel wreath.
  • Golgo 13's Japanese logo has a skeleton with a crown of thorns, and the original version of "The Professional" had an opening with an image like the one you described. well, sort of. Don't know if it's connected, but...
    • It was Quest For Glory V.
• A PC game from the early '90s. The protagonist was an alien child who had been separated from his parents (or something along those lines), and had to leave his saucer and wander the landscape. He was a sort of bipedal frog with a tuft of red hair on the top of his head.
  • Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure
  • Yup, that's it. Thanks!
• An old DOS puzzle/adventure game with a top-down view. May or may not have been black and white. For the last level, you had to find three pieces of armor and assemble them to build a knight, which if memory serves you then controlled with levers or buttons on the floor, in order to defeat the boss. It came with a level editor.
  • It wouldn't be Think Quick! by any chance?
    • That it is! Hot damn!
• I think this one might just be a mangled remembrance of King's Quest IV, but I want confirmation whether it is or not... and if it's not, of what it is. It was an adventure game, starring a blonde girl who I think was in a blue dress. I never got to play it, but from watching and hearing others play it, I remember a part where they kept trying to cross a river and ended up dying, and their needing to collect a lute. I think it would've been in the late 80s or early 90s.
  • Sure sounds like Kings Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella to me.
    • Since I've never found anything else that sounded right, I'll just assume it was that. Especially since I seem to remember the kids who were allowed to play it calling it King's Quest. I could've sworn the graphics were a bit better, but it's so long ago that my memory or perspective may just be skewed.
• Relatively old computer game, which is to say, Windows 95-era. In fact, it may have come bundled with the OS itself. First-person science-fiction adventure involving time travel. Protagonist wears a bulky (blue?) suit of some kind. Game-over screens feature a sepia-toned picture of the protagonist's fate, such as a close-up of fingers sliding off a cliff or being dragged away by guards. Memorable moments include evading dinosaurs (mostly if not entirely in shadow) in the past, an inexplicably funny scene in the future (and on Mars!) of a robot walking down a hallway intersection, turning to look at the camera for a second, then continuing offscreen, and... I forget exactly what was happening, but it was kind of trippy and had to do with the aforementioned topic of time travel. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
  • "Windows 95-era" and "First-person science-fiction adventure involving time travel" make me think of The Journeyman Project, but I don't remember the game in detail, so I don't know if the rest of your description matches.
    • Lessee... yes! That's it! That's totally it! Thank you!
• I read about this game in an old gaming magazine near the beginning of this decade. A kid gets trapped in a mall overnight, and there's a monster of some sort on the loose. The kid has to set traps while avoiding the monster in order to catch it or something like that. It was most likely for the Gameboy Advance, but it may have been for one of the less popular portables.
  • Could it be freeware PC game Mall Monster?
    • I'd say yes, except for one thing; the graphics on that PC game are too high a resolution! The game had very pokemon-esque graphics as far as I can remember. Maybe they updated it? Oh, well. My memory has proved to be terrible as seen in my other question (The one that was One Piece Mansion), so... yeah.
• Same troper as the mall monster question; I also remember reading about another game in a magazine around the same time, this one probably for the Game Cube. You had to build a hotel or apartment or something, and these little Animal Crossing-esque animals would move in. You could apparently shift the rooms around, which you had to do sometimes because some of the animals would play loud music or others would need absolute quiet. Not sure if it was a puzzle game or a business sim, or possibly both.
  • Sounds like a somewhat distorted recollection of PSX puzzle game One Piece Mansion. Obscure, but quite good. More on it from That Other Wiki.
    • Wow, that is it. I must have a really bad memory. :P
• A sega genesis/megadrive rpg similar to pokemon and final fantasy.The hero travels around an overworld map before entering locations which include his modern day home city, a huge tower with some kind of priest or guru living at the top and an ice-cave location containing two yeti-like bossess. The player has several Mons with differant functions including one that would carry him across water and a clam which projected lightning from inside its shell.
  • Parts of this sound like Crusader of Centy, although that game was more of the Soul Blazer style. Quite a bit of ranting about that one over on the Broken Aesop page.
    • Finally got around to checking this. It is Crusader Of Centy.
• The game I'm trying to remember may have been for the Windows 95 or 98. It involved a man (and I think a strange animal companion) helping you with puzzles on a Floating Continent. There were about 4 different games: a Rebus puzzle, a sporting event where you had to place people in the right seats, a game where you had to land an aircraft (biplane, zeppelin etc.) correctly, and sort of a mystery solving game.
  • Aha! It was actually in Floating Continent. Turns out it's "Sky Island Mysteries".
• Okay, there's a Genesis RPG I remember reading about in a magazine once. I know almost nothing about it, and all I can remember is mention that it was supposed to be an early-adopted for the six-button controller, and had a Magic Versus Technology plot.
  • Sounds like Technoclash, which involved wizards blowing away cyborgs in Las Vegas in a post-apocalyptic future.
    • This looks to be it. I could have sworn the magazine characterized it as an RPG, which Technoclash very much isn't... but everything else lines up. It even seems to have roughly the same visual style I remember from the magazine screenshots, although it's been so long that's not very reliable.
• Mario (and maybe Luigi) starts a hero group. They recruit Samus Aran, Crono, (Magus?), (Kirby?). I know that Samus and Crono had sex in the webcomic. They recently traveled back in time to stop a treasure from being stolen. I de-faved it after it was on hiatus because the author decided to move to a new house.
  • Never mind, I found it. Heroes Inc.
• Game made with RPG Maker, but not a traditional RPG. A medival city has been sieged for months and when a general finally gains entry to it, it turns out everyone but a young boy died of a strange sickness. The general hugs him, and gives him an item to time travel and stop the tradegy from happening. The rest of the game let's you travel to a specific time - spring (basically before anything bad happened), summer (the siege starts), autumn (the effects of the siege and the sickness) and winter (the present) - while trying to find out what went wrong. There where some nice twists like the Xanatos Gambit and the meaning of a gravestone.
  • Is it Sunset Over Imdahl?
    • YES! Thank you so much, I've been dying to replay it.
• A PC game from the... mid-90s? It had early 3-D style graphics. You were in a hovering car, and you had to go through labyrinths. In a "capture-the-flag" fashion, you had to find flags hidden in the maze. There was another car of the "opposite team" also looking for flags; you had to get all your flags before they did. The game had some platformer elements (you could jump, I think) but it was all done in first-person view.
  • I remember it, should be this: http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hover/
    • SCORE! Thank you, Mystery Troper!
• A Dreamcast title, Darker and Edgier Zelda-type game, possibly with some platforming elements. Player character looked like a barbarian, may have been of some nobility; I seem to remember the game hinting that you could control a different character in the New Game Plus, though we never got that far. Involved fighting goblins and the Big Bad was a large dragon. May have in fact had the word "dragon" in the title. Included a goblin character who survived two great battles simply by talking to the player character and high-tailing it out of there before the massacre; he said he was going to retire to a life of pig farming after the third such encounter.
  • Could this be the game you're thinking of?
    • Nope, sorry, that's definitely not it.
  • Well, when I hear Dreamcast Zelda Clone, I think of Elemental Gimmick Gear, but I never actually played that, so I don't know if it would match up at all.
    • Nope - the art style was attempting to be realistic. Good guess, though.
  • Record Of Lodoss War? The main character was a red-haired swordsman who turned out to be a resurrected king.
    • No, wasn't a dungeon-crawler. Beginning to wonder if I dreamed this game up, but my dad also swears up and down that he remembers it.
  • I've never even owned a dreamcast but from the clues you gave I'm pretty sure I've tracked it down: Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm. It was titled Dragon's Blood in some markets.
    • flsdkhfjkhsekjhfesbd YOU FOUND IT!!! :DDD I knew I hadn't dreamed that game!
• A Playstation 1 platformer starring a young brother and sister, who travel through various worlds to save a bunch of creatures (possibly called 'Winks') from nightmare-derived monsters sent by a villain who looked like Ebenezer Scrooge in a nightgown and cap getup. The gimmick was that the kids could change into different outfits which gave them different abilities by jumping into magic toyboxes. The demo contained the default costume (pajamas and armed with a candle) and a ninja outfit.
  • It was of course 40Winks. I'll leave this in for the benefit of others.
• An old PC game; a 2D fighter with transforming animals and a mad scientist taking over the world who is obsessed with frogs.
  • That sounds awfully familiar, though I can't place the name, either. By any chance, did it have an opening cutscene or similar where the scientist picked up one of his frogs, then ended up squashing it into goo during his maniacal ranting?
    • Yes, yes it did!
  • Battle Beast. The transforming animals bit got me on the right track and the final boss is apparently named Toadman. This must be it.
    • God Bless You, You Black Emperor!
• I'm trying to remember the name of a game that I played on the school computers in elementary school. The plot was that sometime in the future dinosaurs (specifically raptors) had been cloned, made sentient, and had their own futuristic society. The PC was a raptor that had been sent back in time to the end of the Cretaceous. You had to collect the eggs from the other dinosaurs to bring back to the future for some reason. It was set up like a third person shooter, your main weapon was some sort of laser gun, and you had a jetpack you fueled at volcanic springs and could use to fly around for a bit. Apart from the enemy dinosaurs, your main obstacle was the time limit before the meteor hit and started the extinction; the game would count down to it and gave you a Game Over if it ran out. This was sometime in the mid to late 90's or so. Does anyone remember this?
  • That sounds like Pangea Software's Nanosaur from 1998.
    • Definitely. It came free with iMacs for a while, and the sequel comes with newer Apple computers.
    • Yes! Now that I see the name there I remember it perfectly. Sweetness.
• Ok, this was an old N64 game with something to do with Aliens. It's sort of like Resident Evil 2 but... Anyway you start fighting these aliens there's one I remember in particular that crawls on the ceiling. It plays out with one on one battles, then your teammates start turning against you and you have to fight them.
  • Mmm... Hybrid Heaven, maybe?
  • [26/04/10] Yes thats the one. many thanks
• An isometric squad stratergy game, could have been RTS or TBS. Featured a bunch of scientists and space marines trapped in a space-base infested with green lizardy aliens. Obviously inspired by Aliens. The features that stick in the mind were that characters could pick up random bric-a-brak from the environment to use as weapons (spray cans, tools etc.) and that the aliens would sometimes divide into two by fission, at which point one of the humans would yell IT'S MULTIPLYING in a very hammy manner.
  • try enemy infestation it sounds about right.
• A PS 2 turn based RPG(Most likely a JR Pg).It starts out with a boy(Teenager?)talking to his friend about the airplane the friend had made.The friend tells him to go to this far away city using the airplane.Once he's in the air he noticed that the airplane is flying low, a woman(Older Sister or Mother)Pops up from the "trunk" of the airplane and then they crash into a forest.During the forest dungeon they come across this strange woman in a hose pulled carriage.
  • Sounds an awful lot like the intro to Grandia 3 to me, although it's the protagonist Yuki who built the plane in that.
    • [8/18/10]Thank you it was Grandia 3 Definitely.
• This was an IF game, which I played on the Mac but may also have had a PC port. At the beginning of the game, you are in a spaceship which is about to crash on an uncharted planet. You can't stop it from crashing, but you can survive the crash and explore the planet, find a bunch of Lost Technology artifacts, and eventually escape in another ship. The other things I remember about it were: Fairly early in the game, you are required to issue the command PISS or else you die of a ruptured bladder (but then it never comes up again). Somewhat later you are captured by a beautiful princess, who kills you unless you summon a sea monster to eat her. And there was a mysterious black rod that I never figured out how to get. Any ideas?
  • "Forbidden Quest" by Pryority Software
    • [8/21/10] Yes! That's it! And you've also clued me in that I *didn't* have a damaged copy. According to that site, they deliberately left some scene descriptions out of the in-game text, referring you to "Artext print #N" (which would have been in the box, if I hadn't had a bootleg copy) instead. I assumed this was an error message at the time.
• I remeber that this is a Free Ware Advance Wars fan game for the PC. It has no coumpter to fight. You could build Ooziums. It also has a wiki.
  • That sounds like Custom Wars to me.
    • [8/25/10] Thats it.

Webcomics

• A comic about two gamers hanging out on a couch. The guys were a heavy set clean shaven guy with black hair and a skinny guy with brown hair and a goatee. Generally just joked about videogames and there was one story arc where the guy with brown hair got in a battle with their evil couch.
  • It's all confused memories, but I think of ptitle5f061mdv and Mac Hall. Except for the weight part.
    • I know for a fact it wasn't ptitle5f061mdv or Mac Hall.
  • Hijinks Ensue?
    • Nah, it wasn't that either.
  • Ctrl Alt Del? I remember a heavy set black-haired guy and a skinny browned-hair guy. I also remember the brown-haired guy setting fire to a couch.
    • No, it wasn't Ctrl Alt Del either.
  • Sounds like Slackerz.
    • That isn't it, either.
  • Could it be Robby and Jase from Pv P?
    • Nah, it's not Pv P. The guys in the comic I described are the primary characters, not side characters like Robby and Jase.
    • [7/1/10] Just found it myself, it's the comic at ActionTrip
• I can remember absolutely everything about this webcomic, since I read it recently, except its name, or any character names that would actually help me find it again. It's about a family, currently consisting of an elementary-school girl, a high-school boy, an older cousing who takes care of them, and their grandma. For a long time, it had an A plot about the girl, a boy she was annoyed by, and the boy's older brother, with a B plot about the boy's friend trying to make him cosplay... but recently the Cosplay bit became the A plot. Throughout, there's been a C Plot about the grandma, time traveling Ben Franklin, and a strange creature with magic nipples and an udder with magic teats who cleans the family's house goofing around when they're supposed to be figuring out how to keep all of time from being destroyed by a mysterious threat. ... No, I swear to God, this is actually a real thing.
  • [06/19/10] Turns out to be My Golden Siggy. First result for "Benjamin Franklin" if you restrict Google search to The Webcomic list, and second result overall for "Time Traveling Ben Franklin" on Google. Would've figured that part would be more common.
• I recall a webcomic that I believe was titled something like "How Not to Draw (Make?) A Webcomic." Several different authors/artists produced webcomics showing what not to do and at the bottom of the page a few editors explained why it was wrong to do those things. I remember vividly one comic that had stick figures. One of the stick figures randomly sprouted wings near the end. I think it was on the old comicgenesis site, but I may be wrong.
  • How Not To Run A Comic
  • [06/03/10] Correct!
• A single comic that had a bunch of descriptions of people with individualized quirks, ending with a statement about the writer/narrator never having met any of these "normal people" he'd heard of. May have also had a line about how he probably wouldn't like them much if he did meet any. May have been linked from this site.
  • WEIRD?
    • Rawk. Thanks!
• A Furry Comic similar to Peanuts where one of the first story arcs involved a battle of the sexes and probably a water balloon war. Can't remember any character names in particular. There were also about 2 or 3 different neighborhoods in the comic.
  • Nevermind. Found it. It's Precocious
• A band find an alien creature, but they have no idea how to communicate with it or whether it's intelligent, so they ask everyone they meet to help, but everyone assumes it's a promotion for their band and ignores them. In a one-off page, either a character or the author talks about being humiliated by a teacher in elementary school for saying something they knew was a fact (either that slugs were animals or that the water in rain came from the sea).
  • Possibly this? (First page is here.)
    • Thanks. I owe you one internet.
• A one-panel strip about a mad scientist. One of the strips had as its joke, the scientist having made scallions rap.
  • Ashfield
    • That's it, thank you! I just wish it had actually updated since I stopped reading.
• A webcomic in which a monster hunter in the modern day is killed... and her soul ends up in the body of a comatose little girl — exactly why wasn't clear yet when I read, except that it was unoccupied.
  • Soul Chaser Betty?
    • Really, really good guess, but unfortunately not it. I will have to read that one, though. For more details... monster hunter was female, and was killed in combat with vampires. Fluff surrounding it suggested that the soul that properly belonged in the little girl's body would hang around like a ghost, and that monster groups were run like corporations, but this hadn't really shown up yet at the time I read.
    • I asked around elsewhere, and someone else knew it. It's Celadore, which has finished since I was reading it, although there's a Part 2 in the works.
• I saw a comic in the local independent newspaper the other day, but I forgot to make a note of the title. The strip had an old woman and an old man talking. The dialogue went, as best I can remember, "You know the problem with kids these days? They wear clothes. Clothes that are stylish now, but would have looked bizarre when I was young." "And they do things. Things that aren't exactly how I would've done them." "* Zoom out to show giant slugs riding skateboards and the like.* I can't say I'm fond of how they all mutated into giant slugs, either." Anyone know the name of the comic?
  • Thingpart 192.
    • It's so blatantly what I was talking about that it goes without saying, but for the sake of closure, I thought I'd just confirm that that is, indeed, the right comic.
• A webcomic about video game RP Gs with art about the same quality as in Adventurers! (and it is not RPG World). The only comic I can remember is that the two-person party was up against an army of Bards, and the screen got flooded with "Hide" command boxes. I can partially remember another comic taking place in the middle of a battle where both members had emotion-affecting status effects, and the one inflicted with Sadness was sniffling in the middle of her dialogue balloon.
  • Haha, wouldn't you know it? I started another Google search shortly after posting this and discovered it's The Doom Army.
• A Boys' Love webcomic with one of those random two-word titles that sounds like it's been badly translated from Japanese (though the artist's explanation was that it was very late at night when she came up with it). Manga-style art and a very down-to-earth slice-of-life kind of story: it's just about two high school boys. The POV character's a bit of an emo kid, the other is sort-of-kind-of a jock; they get pushed together on class projects and reluctantly develop a friendship/romantic attraction. For some reason I didn't bookmark it (d'oh!) and the story had just got up to the point where the emo kid had finally figured out that the jock liked him liked him, but they hadn't kissed yet. There was a point where they were both at a party and the POV boy kissed his best friend (more out of curiosity than anything else). The jock saw this and punched him in the face. POV boy jumped to the conclusion that the jock liked his friend... until the friend gently suggested that he wasn't the one the jock liked.
  • Honeydew Syndrome, I believe, also referred to as 'Honey Syn'.
    • Correct!
• A SMBC comic where a kid goes to get an eye test. He sees a bee, and says "bee." On the eye chart, of course is an "E." They think he was horrible vision. Hilarity Ensues. I've searched for it, but can't find it. Anyone got a link?
  • I think this◊ is what you're looking for.
  • You got it! Thanks so much. Good to know its Perry Bible Fellowship. I have no idea why I thought it was SMBC. I even had it memorized in SMBC drawing style. Weird.
• A webcomic about a girl and her mushroom. I think the girl was named Julie, and I know the mushroom was named Bello. Art style was such that everyone had empty black pits instead of eyes. Characters had a guest appearance in Questionable Content that sent up that art choice, and the artist, I believe, did some guest strips for Catharsis and the art for one of the Dumbrella convention comics.
  • The comic was called "Okay Pants". Unfortunately, the main site seems to be down, and the comic seems to be over. The artist's work can be found here.
    • [1/21/10] Definitely the right one.
• Webcomic in which "God", such as they were, was a young girl. The Universe/Earth was, in their world, some weird little creature which they'd gotten as a hand-me-down from their older sister. Then it ate them and they ended up exploring around inside it. I may be getting some of the details wrong. I read about it once a long time ago, then found a comic that seemed to be it, then never got a chance to read it before losing it. x.x;
  • Sounds like Acid Reflux. It's been Orphaned for nearly four years, but it's still a good read.
    • [1/21/10] That's definitely the one I found. I can't be sure it's the one I read about before finding it, but how many webcomics with the premise "God is a girl and got eaten by the universe" can there be?
• This one was an Animesque fantasy comic that's probably been defunct for at least a couple of years. A shy young man pushes his crush, a willowy blonde (Sarah, I think?) out of the way of a car and is rendered comatose. He wakes up in the middle of the ocean and is rescued by a pirate ship and its colorful crew. IIRC, there was a brunette girl, a big guy with a taste for very strong alcohol, and an engineer with a robotic parrot. Also some kind of grim swashbuckling Bishonen pursuing the main cast. Halp?
  • If it isn't Eidolic Fringe I'll eat my hat.
    • [4/3/10] Confirmed, that's the one. Thanks a lot.
• There's a webcomic where this girl was staying at a relatives house, I think it was her aunt or mother or something, and she falls asleep at the base of a tree. When she wakes up she has been shrunk down to miniscule size. She climbs to the top of a plant and finds she cannot get down. She is then rescued by a red-haired, male, topless fairy who makes criptic references to fairy politics. For some reason she refers to him as "apple boy".
  • Might it be this one?
    • 09/18/10 Yep, that's the one. Wow, that was fast.

Western Animation

• A Cartoon from the early '90s at the latest, but probably older. It is about a unicorn/pegasus that is the last or nearly the last of its kind, I think. It's not "The Last Unicorn." I remember the scene where either the baby unicorn/pegasus scene grows up and protects the rest of the cast or a mama unicorn/pegasus does it. I remember a scene toward the end. The bad guy has... headphones and two minions named woofer and tweeter. I really don't think I'm making this up.
  • Unico and its sequel, Unico in the Island of Magic, and it was an anime.
    • 10/10/10 That's the one, thanks.
• A series that got turned into picture books. There was a boy and a girl who were friends with these talking animals in the woods, like a bison and a hawk/eagle bird thingie, and every episode they would get into a moral dilemma that would require a story from this big book owned by the bison ( who wore glasses). I think the girl was named Annie and one episode involved them racing bicycles and then she spills the cakes she's supposed to deliver and the bison tells her the story of Icarus.
  • I was looking for this too, and some googling reveals the show to be Adventures from The Book of Virtues.
    • [9/14/2010] That's it all right. Thanks!
• Some TV series that aired on the mid to to late 90's, which could have been based on a comic book. The plot was that a race of green humanoids guy was trying to invade Earth, but the main character and a group of other rebels (one of which was a Fiery Redhead) fought them. The good guys had a big blue spaceship they used to travel between dimensions. One part I remember in the first episode is when one of the alien guys (who has a blue helmet) gives a gun to an abducted child and tell him to clean the counduits of their spaceships. There was also another one when the good guys get assaulted by a two-headed fire-breathing dinosaur; a short clip of the dinosaur was included in a PSA here in Québec.
  • No idea of the title, but think I see exactly what you're speaking of. The Big Bad's daughter was in love with the hero, wasn't she? And the worst of the bunch was not her dad, but The Dragon. I think it's the same series as the diving helmet one below still on the unconfirmed page.
  • For some reason I am thinking Bucky 'O Hare and Dino Riders.
  • Might be the 1996 animated Flash Gordon.
    • Oh wow, that is it, didn't expect that. Thank you!
• I have two five minute shows that played between the longer shows in the 90s. The first was probably on YTV and was basically this orange cat telling elaborate stories, and I think it was shown as still pictures, like a book. I don't remember any specific episodes, but I do remember that every episode ended with the narrator/cat starting to tell a new story and then saying "but that's another tale for another time". The second was for sure on TVO, and it had a thin girl who wore a green dress, a fat boy who wore blue overalls and a bunch of animals telling their own versions of fairy tales, and part of the theme song goes "Romeo, Juliet, how romantic can you get?"
  • Not sure how old this question is, but Googling those lyrics for your second cartoon comes up quite quickly with someone answering Zoey and Charlie on a forum now.
  • The first one you described... could it be Max the Cat?
    • Zoey and Charie is definetley right, Max the Cat sounds about right...I'll go with it. Thanks! [09/07/10]

• A direct-to-video Christian series about a couple of archaeologists and a Middle Eastern Tagalong Kid who get caught in a sandstorm in some ruins. This sends them back to Biblical times, where they witness various stories from the Good Book. That's about it, really.
  • The Greatest Adventure Stories From The Bible?
    • [09/02/10] Yes! Didn't even know it had a trope page.
• A show that came out in the late 90s or early 2000s (the latter is more likely). I think it was a European (Italian?) production, and it featured three little sisters who went on these adventures. They were triplets, but they each wore distinctly-coloured clothes so as to tell them apart. There was also a witch involved somewhere.
  • Probably The Triplets.
    • [08/19/10] That's the one, thanks.
• An animated movie. A female seagul is flying with her group, when she dives in some oily water and gets covered with it. She makes it to land, landing on a person's front lawn. An ally cat finds her and wants to eat her, but she asks him to instead take care of her egg. When she dies, the cat takes the egg to his ally cat friends. The egg hatches, and the cats take care of the young seagul, teaching it how to act like a cat, and saving him/her from a crazy gang of sewer rats. Name please?!
  • That's Lucky and Zorba! I can't belive I'm not the only one that remembers this movie.
  • To be more specific, the title is The Little Seagull and the Cat, a.k.a. Zorba and Lucky in some markets.
    • [8-Aug-10] Yes! Thank you!
• A movie I watched in the mid-nineties, this kid goes to this magical world, and upon entering this song happens with this fat lady who swings him around, I remember clearly we thought it was funny when his face got buried in her cleavage. All the residents of the world are celebrating his arrival for some reason, and they warn him not to open some ginat door, but a frog in a hot air balloon convinces him to, and when he does open it, this fog with eyes comes out. This all happened in the beginning, I don't remember the rest.
  • The Marshmallow Hell page says it's Little Nemo and it's Japan-made.
    • [14-Jul-10] That's it! Thank you so much!
• Okay, the show revolved around a... magical cap. Yep that's right, I'm pretty sure it was red. Essentially a kid is bestowen the power of this cap and/or he had to protect it. There was an anthropomorphized middle-height male chicken/bird that served as the old mentor. The series was very tongue in cheek if I rememember correctly. There was an episode featuring THE aliens (xenomorphs), another with zombies... probably from the early 90s.
  • Mighty Max.
    • [07/19/10] That's exactly it! Thank you very much my good chap.
• This one's really bugging me, it's an aquatic themed show where one of the main characters, a scientist, becomes a black/white merman whenever he's submerged in water. It also featured a female villain from an evil organisation who I think had short red hair and had an eyepatch. Before you ask, it's not Tigersharks.
  • I think this may have been called 'Prince of Atlantis', or something similar.
    • Yes! Thank you so much!
• An animated show about some sort of adventurers; I think they were on a ship. There was this creature character that looked kind of like a large monkey with long, red fur, a beak, and wings.
  • The Pirates Of Dark Water
    • [07/04/10] Yes, thank you!
• A cartoon about vampires that ate tomatoes. I think that the first few episodes were a "history of our vampire family"-type story told to the main character. Should be easy to find from the description, but I couldn't find a whiff of it anywhere. Thus, probably never aired in america.
  • So I guess this isn't Count Duckula?
    • Op: It sure isn't.
  • Ketchup Vampire?
    • Thank you for the answer! As for whether this is the show I remember from my youth... Maybe. I can only find some german pages offhandly mentioning it and some youtube videos. Is there any wikipedia-type page about it? Although considering there probably isn't another cartoon with the same premise, I'd say this is most likely it (as long as it's a series and not a movie).
    • If you Google for "ketchup vampires", there's several pages with plot descriptions and pictures from the series. Here is one. Here is another.
    • [07/03/10]Ah, I googled for "ketchup vampire" instead. Guess this is as confirmed as it'll ever be.
• Alright, this is an animated, slightly Animesque movie I used to rent from Famly Vdeo years ago. The main characters are some form of forest rodent, either squirrel or chipmunk or something similar, and they're heading north on a journey to find some forest that supposed to be paradise for them. One of them, the girl, was actually a pet when the male character met her, and her name was "No-no." I also remember a song where the male character starts singing "We're almost there, No-no" to reassure her as they travel along a stream on a make-shift(?) boat. There was also a bird (crow or owl or something) that (kinda) helps them out along the way that, when they've pretty much given up hope, tells them their destination is a "Hop, skip, and jump away." There's also a scene where the male lead is trying to imitate a flying squirrel, despite not being one, while in a cage at a zoo(?). I'm 70% certain the name has "Enchanted Forest" in it somewhere.
  • Ah, that would be The Enchanted Journey I remember watching that one many many times as a child.
    • [6/21/2010] That would be it! Thankyouthankyouthankyou. * Adds to Wishlist*
• I do not remember much about this animate TV show, but I think it aired on Teletoon late 90's, or early 00's. It took place in Africa or someplace similar, but the only character I remember is this woman who turned into a gazelle at night. I vaguely remember an episode where she was swimming out of a underwater cave, but didn't make it out before the day ended and got stuck when she turned into a gazelle. Another character created an air bubble underwater so that she could breathe.
  • This reminds me a lot of http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_et_Leuk_le_liA8vre (no idea if this ever had an English title), only she turns into a gazelle at day.
    • [6/19/2010] Wow, I really don't remember much of this show, but looking into it it looks like this is it. Sorry for mixing up day and night, it's been a while since I've seen the show. Thanks!
• Okay, here's an odd one... I remember a show called "The Willie Bits" or something to that effect (no, it's not a porno, despite the Unfortunate Name) about a bunch of gnomes (dwarves?) that... did stuff. I have found no evidence that such a show ever existed, but I swear it does. It came on Nick Jr, I believe. Can someone confirm the shows existence, or am I tripping something fierce?
  • You're thinking of The Littl' Bits, one of the more obscure parts of Nick Jr.'s original line-up. It was an adaptation of an anime, like Maya the Bee.
  • [6/16/2010]Thanks
• I remember an animated film with a subplot about a witches mirror breaking and the shards being scattered everywhere. One of the pieces fell into a child's eye and turned them evil.
  • The story is The Snow Queen. There's probably been more than one animated film of it, but that might narrow it down enough to find the one you're after.
    • [05/31/10]Thanks, that's it.
• The show would have been late 80s, early 90s (though it might have been a movie?) I have trouble remembering it clearly, but there was some kind of super powered teddy bear, in space. I believe he had a friend with light yellow/greenish skin, or it might have been a guy in a spacesuit.
  • Super Ted is a super-powered teddy bear, and his best friend is an alien astronaut whose skin is yellow with green spots.
• This may sound strange but I'm positive this exists, and I haven't been able to find it via Google. It has a zookeeper trying to keep an animal called a "rubber-necked kangalope" or something inside a cage. It's kind of like a Tex Avery cartoon.
  • "Two For The Zoo" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C01-leeavKU
    • [5/4/10] THAT'S IT. Thanks so much!
• where does this come from?◊
  • Looks like the villain of Avenger Penguins, Caractacus P Doom.
• Okay, this is a weird one, so bear with me. The show is a live action/cgi animation with the premise basically Power Rangers meets Transformers. The heroes were humans, but at night they could become car-like robots. At least one villain was a car/robot vampire. I think the heroes also had some kind of motorbike with a dog like personality. I think it aired on UPN in the US, but don't hold me to that.
  • Van-Pires. Synopsis per Wikipedia: 'The Van-Pires synopsis and its stories center on a group of human teenagers who protect and defend the world from evil anthropomorphized junkyard vans and vehicles known as the "Van-Pires" by transforming into robotic anthropomorphized cars, calling themselves the "Motor-Vators".'
    • [4/7/10] That looks right. It's been a while, so I wasn't entirely sure.
• A movie about big cats — I think they were lions. The heroine was a lioness, whose name I can't recall. In this world the lions were afraid of fire, and called it "The Red Tongue" (at least, that's what the translation said. I was a little kid when I saw it and I don't know what language it was). The lioness found a burning branch and called it "her creature". By the end she was fending off the antagonists with fire and said something about "living by the rules of the Red Tongue".
  • Ratha's Creature? I thought I was the only one who remembered it! It was produced for CBS's "Storybreak", which was kind of like a kids' variety show with animated adaptations of books, so it's a little obscure. You Tube it!
    • [4/6/10] Yes, that's it! I had no idea it was originally a book series. Thank you!
• I remember this cartoon from when I was a little kid. It was about this family of anthropomorphic bears who lived and traveled in a seaplane. I remember the villian of the show being some sort of wolf who in every episode tried to track the family down. I'm pretty sure that at times the wolf flew a biplane, or some kind of open cockpit plane with a propeller.
  • The characters reminds me of Talespin, but that would be assuming you got the story all wrong.
    • [4/4/10] Thanks, much appreciated! And you're right, I did get the story wrong.
• An animated kids show I remember seeing a couple years ago about a group of talking dinosaurs (who I think were actually all dinosaur toys coming to life when no one was looking). In the one episode I saw the dinosaurs decided to pretend to be in Greece during the time of the ancient Olympics, but also decided to treat a female brontosaurus named Patsy as royalty and dub her Cleopatsy. She quickly decides actually participating in the games looks more fun, runs the marathon, and wins. In a particularly adorable moment, they put a laurel on her head, it slides right down her neck, and she happily exclaims "I like necklaces!".
  • This sounds like Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs which does indeed feature an Apatosaurus named Patsy.
    • I looked up the show online, and that looks like it's it, thanks.
• Okay, so this one is a little weird- I know the show, I'm jsut looking for a specific episode. The show: The Magic School Bus. The episode: The one where the bus turns into the Enterprise. Any ideas?
  • There are only two where the bus turns into a spaceship, and in Explores the Solar System, it looks more like the Space Shuttle than the Enterprise. So it must be "Sees Stars" that you're remembering, even though that one isn't really completely Enterprise-like either. Here's the first six minutes or so; just enough to give you an idea of what the ship looks like.
  • Actually, there was a third episode where the bus turns into a spaceship. The episode where it looks like the Enterprise, with the kids wearing Star Trek uniforms, is called "Out of This World" and the lesson was about comets, asteroids, and meteors.
    • [3/12/10] It's "Out of This World", thanks~!
• A CGI cartoon NBC with a courtroom scene. This episode aired sometime on 1/23/10. There's a pigtailed girl with glasses alongside a cat/fox and the judge is a big chicken. The unusual thing is that the cat/fox is apparently trying to plead guilty. At one point the judge yells "I object" and the girl says he can't object because he's the judge, then the judge admits he simply wanted to say that.
  • It sounds like it could be 3-2-1 Penguins, since it's fully CGI and stars a pigtailed girl with glasses. The episode in question apears to be 12 Angry Hens.
    • [2/16/10] Yep, that's it. Thanks
• A movie/TV special about a nerd (IIRC named Wendel) who kept getting bullied. Until some other kids decided to help (or play a prank, I couldn't remember) by giving him a potion they got from a store that sells supernatural items. Soon after, they find some of the bullies heavily beaten (or killed) and later it is revealed that after Wendel drinks the potion, he turns into a Werewolf (or some other monster). There was a scene where he faced a street thug (I think) and said something along the lines of "Get out of here or I'll drink this." To which the thug was not intimidated but told Wendel to humor him. He later regretted it.
  • This really sound like one of the stories on Tales from the Cryptkeeper, most specifically the "Hyde And Go Shriek" episode.
    • [2/24/10] Yes, that was it! Although I could've sworn that the animation quality was better, stupid Nostalgia Filter.
• When I was a little kid in the early 90s, I had two video tapes with fairy tales cartoons. Each tape probably had like three or four cartoons, but I only remember one of each tape - "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats". The latter had a scene with the little goats skiing down a grassy hill using some kind of boards (or carpets. I'm not sure). The youngest goat didn't quite make it and his brothers laughed at him - of course, when the wolf came he was the only one who escaped. When Mother Goat came home she fed the wolf with a chilly pepper before putting rocks in his stomach. The cartoons had an opening theme, but all I remember is "la-la-la-LA, la-la-LA".
  • I don't have a title, but did the one with the Ugly Duckling also have Ali Baba and the Red Shoes? And was the logo of the publishing company sort of balloon-themed?
    • There was Ali Baba but no Red Shoes, and I don't remember the logo.
    • That guy was thinking of the anime fairy tale releases from Children's Video Library, but the ones the original person was talking about were "My Favorite Fairy Tales," another series of anime, but dubbed by Saban and released by Hi-Tops Video. (These are not to be confused with "Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics", either...)
    • Yes, that's "My Favorite Fairy Tales" all right! I searched for clips in You Tube, and felt like a little girl again. Thank you!
• I remember a cgi sci-fi kids show that aired on aust. tv in (i think) 1997-2002, the plot centered around these aliens having to find the control rooms to hidden engines on their home planets so they can get away from this death star ripoff that consumes planets for fuel,the main charaters were: a prince made of lava with a flame mohawk, a ice/crystal princess and her dad(?) she looked like thor from stargate but made of ice, two people made of rock, the girl was named Jade, a short guy that looked a bit like a cross between a bat and a lizard, he had a pet carnivorus plant and they traveled in his ship, and the villaness was a bit like a cross of the borg and Drej queens, please tell me if you know what i'm talking about :).
  • Shadow Raiders. (Or possibly War Planets: same series, different Market-Based Title.)
    • [2/1/10] Yes! thanks :D now, to find dvd's...
• A page on this website, I can't really remember what it was, but it I don't think it was any of the Crowning Moments (not, not even Awesome, and it had a couple of folders (three, I think), about the Justice League. In one of them, it talked about Flash, and how he was able to get info where Batman(?) and someone else couldn't, by beaing nice, and promiseing to play darts with the guy in jail.
  • HeartwarmingMoment.Justice League
• One about a bureau for alien dealings (there was the word bureau somewhere in the title). It was kind of awesome and military styled. There were some aliens which seemed to have 2 faces, 1 on the head and one on the chest, both with a wide grinning mouth and a lot of teeth. Bureau of something-something... URGGHHH. It's all SO very sketchy!
  • I got it. Bureau of Alien Detectors.
• I think this was western animation. It was some sort of sci-fi fantasy setting mildly stole...-inspired by Star Wars, there was a Luke, A Han, a Leia, and a female C 3 PO in love with Han. It looked rotoscoped. The gimmick of the hero was that he carried a bladeless sword that only cut the evil. Oh, and I remember the main villain doing a Darth Vader At The Beginning of New Hope to the Unlucky Childhood Friend of the hero.
  • Starchaser: The Legend of Orin?
    • [1/26/10] Yes, that sounds about right. Thank you!
• This was an older cartoon. It had a girl named... Well, I actually don't remember her name, but she was an orphan, and she was trying to buy her freedome. And there's a scarecrow who comes to life and gets a magic feather, naming himself as "Feathertop". There's also a talking mouse, and vreepy guy who wants to marry the orphan, dancing and "13 pieces of silver." If anyone remembers the name, I would be grateful. X3
  • The Scarecrow?
    • [1/24/10] Yes, that's it. Thank you~!
• An animated film that focused heavily on Martin Luther King Jr. It started with a group of kids visiting a library or a museum. The woman running it has a compulsion to rewind/adjust/fix a clock at some interval. It turns out that doing so turns the various pictures into Portal Pictures that take the kids into the past. They go through one of them once and come across a young, baseball-playing King. When they go back to their time, and their school (Which is named after King) have a class showing a live-action historical documentary about King. The kids can be seen inside the video thanks to careful Roger Rabbit Effect. One of the students notices the kids' presence. They go back to the library/museum with another student tagging along to prove it's real, where they realize that the clock starts it all. They yell "It's time traveling time!", which the newer kid finds annoying. This time, they take King back with them to show him the impact he made on the world. What King sees is the impact his absence had on the world. First off, the school has a different name (which King himself lampshades), and a girl was completely quiet around the protagonist. They decide to put King back to his own time, which fixes everything. If you went to Lawton Chiles Middle School for the 2007-08 school year, you most likely saw this movie.
  • Our Friend, Martin?
    • [1/21/10] Bingo
• Erm.. Sorry, but this troper doesn't remember much abou this show, only that there was a girl (with black hair?) and she had a friend who had a buffalo head, nad they learned Important Life Lessons (or something).
  • Adventures From The Book Of Virtues?
    • Holy crap- yes! Thank you- I'm didn't hallusinate it!
• I'm pretty sure this was Italian. Basically a crossover between Bambi and Lion King, only Bambi and Simba were orphans, Simba had two sisters and they all grew up in the jungle. The animation wasn't too good, but it still stood out to me because it had continuity. Halfway through the series, Simba and Bambi are told they're the rightful respective kings of the jungle and the forest, and they both recive magical powers from the Ursa Major. Those powers manifested themselves on the chests in the form of the Big Dipper - Simba had stars, and Bambi had leaves. After this they started to grow up and left with their friends on quests to find their true loves and reclaim their thrones.
  • Simba: A king is born.
    • That's it! Thank you :D In case anyone else wonders, the original title is "Simba: E' Nato Un Re".
• Okay, I actually think I know the title to this one, but it's too vague to properly Google. This was a Christmas special that aired on the USA Network sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. It was animated and dealt with Santa's Elves, preparing for Christmas. They basically looked like ordinary children, and wore floppy red hats. I don't remember much about the plot (some typical emergency that threatened Christmas or some such), but I do remember that there were Trolls. These were depicted as (I think) shaggy white furred creatures with big blue noses. They were mostly savage monsters, but I think the elves found a baby troll and peacefully returned it to its parents at one point. I'm pretty sure the special was actually called "Elves" or something similar.
  • I think you want A Christmas Adventure, which was produced in 1987. Unfortunately, there's almost no online info about it beyond the video cover and people searching in vain for a copy.
  • Found it. It was an anime called Mori no Tonto Tachi. Pretty much as obscure as it gets. Even the internet barely remembers this one, all that can be found are enough screenshots to confirm that it's the one I'm looking for, and a German version of the intro on Youtube.
• I vaguely recall a series that was shown on fox or UPN or something about aliens. It had a magic glove that only a certain family could wear that enhanced Psychic Powers. There was also a Hover Bike and a space shuttle launch to the moon. Any body recognize it?
  • Sounds to me like Invasion America.
    • Thank you my friend, let us rejoice.
• Okay, it was an animated movie about talking cats. See, these two little kids (a boy and a girl) were giving their fat, lazy, utterly dull cat a funeral, complete with cardboard grave. Then, later on that night, they hear a bunch of noise and go see what's up. Turns out, a whole lot of cats and a few other animals have turned up for the cat's funeral, because it turns out he was some sort of celebrity in the animal kingdom. Everytime the kids tossed him outside, he'd go off an have adventures (though I cannot remember for the life of me what exactly they were. I think a monacle and a top hat may have been involved). I think the movie was just the mayor-animal-thing recanting the tales of the cat's adventures. When the kids wake up the next day, they go inside and tell their mom, who says they must have been dreaming. When they look back at the gravemarker, instead of their crummy cardboard one, it's a fancy stone one. End of Movie. Does anyone recognise it?
  • This is Famous Fred (based on the book Fred by Posy Simmonds). IMDb link.
• Holy crud, yes! Thank you so much!
• I remember seeing this cartoon five to eight years ago about this little orphan boy with cartoon-orange hair and a liking of American history. His name was Erwin or Edwin or Darwin or something along those lines. He was friends with a constantly facepalming (male) robot and a (slightly?) idiotic Big Guy. The big guy wore this black and white costume and a yellow visor. They all had to travel to the past to "fix" history; something happened in the past to dissuade historical figures like Ben Franklin and the Wright brothers from doing what they were supposed to to make the present day like it should be. I'm pretty sure it was a comedic edutainment cartoon (with a bunch of anachronisms). I recall one episode where Betsy Ross had persuaded Washington and his army to become pacifists and tye-dye obsessed. Eventually, the three leads manage to get Betsy Ross to make the American flag (and here is where I actually say wtf instead of simply thinking it) using tye-dye. Another episode entailed orange-hair kid getting sick, so the robot and the big guy didn't take him with them to fix the Declaration of Independence. They soon realized that they needed Orange-Hair Kid's help, but one of the two was adament about letting OHK rest. Eventually, OHK somehow got to the right time period on his own, inspired Thomas Jefferson by basically reciting the Preamble, and promptly passed out.
  • Time Squad!
    • Yes! Thank you.
• This one has been bothering me all day. It's a cartoon I definitely know, but I don't know which it is because of the episode in question. So, some characters are on a Fantastic Voyage into someone's body. Somewhere in the head, they find the source of the person's ills. They do some stuff and mess around with it, and suddenly it turns into a puppy with bug eyes. The person being invaded suddenly has those same puppy eyes. The characters try to drag the puppy out, but they drop it as they go out. This is definitely from some sort of well-known show, but I can't pin down any era or even network the show may have been from. Nothing on Fantastic Voyage either.
  • Found it! Dexter's Lab, episode Fantastic Boyage. Man, that episode creeped me out as a kid.
• I must have been around 11 when I watched this (I'm 21 now), so details are sketchy. It was an animated series that aired outside the kiddie TV slot here in South Africa - instead, it showed in the same time slot you usually find soaps and drama series, due to the violence and swearing: people bleeding a little, the occasional "shit!", etc. The show had a similar visual style to Batman of the Future; a sort of hybrid of classic Western comic-book animation and anime. It was set (at least initially) in or near Roswell, and dealt with paranormal themes, including aliens and their technology and possibly other mythic creatures (werewolves and such). The one part that sticks out most prominently is that the protagonist received (from an older man) a motorbike (presumably incorporating alien technology) that had the ability to fly - its wheels would rotate so as to be parallel to the ground, and exhibit some anti-gravity effect.
  • I'm pretty sure you're referring to Invasion: America. It was broadcast in prime-time here in the States in the summer of 1998 on The WB, and was hyped up to be a new dramatic series. It didn't last beyond its first season/series.
    • I think that may be it! Thank you so much for giving me some closure. :)
  • It sounds to me like you might've watched episodes of Invasion America and Roswell Conspiracies and mistook them for the same show. I don't know how similar they are visually, but they seem similar in concept.
• I don't know if it's a movie or part of a series - I think it's a movie because it was was pretty long, more than an hour. It was about a professor who built a time travel/dimension travel machine (I'm not sure) shaped like a scorpion - I remember the tail. Three characters used the machine - a girl (maybe the professor's daughter), a boy and a robot. The robot was shorter than the humans (kinda shaped like a keg) and had a big key on its head, like a spring you have to turn to make it work. There was also a group of bad guys - one of them was a woman.
  • Time Bokan? (You may have seen it under the name "Timefighters in the Land of Fantasy")
    • Yes! It was "Timefighters in the Land of Fantasy". Thank you so much!
• I won't sleep well until I find this! The show featured a host/storyteller (who looked like he'd just dug himself out of his own grave) would usually sit behind a desk with a book and introduce the next story/episode to be shown. I faintly remember one episode of a teenager who owned a beautiful muscle car and had really "bonded" with it. As it turns out, the car is alive/haunted and after loosing in a race with a couple of bullies, the car is forced off a cliff and wrecked beyond repair (to the teens utter grief). But the car manages to get itself up and then seeks vengenance on the perpetrators (t.i. the bullies).
  • Sounds like some variation of Tales from the Crypt.
  • Bingo! It's actually Tales from the Cryptkeeper, the cartoon version. Thanks a million! And that episode is titled A Little Body of Work.
• A Western Animation where a Kid Hero is asked by a magic talking Piglet, possibly called Pinky, to rescue its mother who is being held hostage on an island by her secretary, who is a Black Cloak. One arc featured them getting sidetracked to help some mermaid types. Shown in England
  • The Magic Adventures of Mumfie!
    • You have solved a puzzle of fifteen years. Thankyou.
• A cartoon that was similar to Captain N The Game Master, but with more generic characters and taking place in the real world. The characters were, I think, a boy, a cop with high-tech gear (maybe a robot/cyborg?), a shaman that had to fight a dinosaur or dragon, and The Scrappy, a pacman clone that ended every episode with a gag.
  • The show was The Power Team, an animated segment on Video Power, one of the oldest, if not first, Video game-related shows(By which I mean the show was about games in general, as opposed to the Animated Adaptation of a game). The characters were Max Force, supposed to be Player 1 in NARC, of all things (serious Adaptation Decay there), a dude from the game Arch-Rivals, Bigfoot(The monster truck), and Kwirk.
    • That's the one, thanks for your assistance. Talk about obscure, huh?
• A cartoon from the year 2000 or so where two small aliens in a much-too-small aircraft sail around space, which is conveniently small, and land on planets that are even smaller. I recall the show's prominent use of neutral colours, particularly green and brown, and far from realistic art style. Every episode, the pair would sail in from space to land on a new planet and have wacky adventures: this let the producers hit the Reset Button each time. One episode, the pair found themselves on a Planet of Hats, and one, I think, almost became mayor...
  • Are you perhaps thinking of Kaput and Zösky?
    • Yes, that's it. ^__^ Thanks a million!
  • When I read your description, I tought of Plasmo, a claymation show.
• The title of a single animation short (possibly by Terrytoons). A french storeowner is trying to get a pothole fixed in front of his shop. Because a parade goes by (daily/weekly/yearly?) where the garbage department is the last entry. Every time the parade goes by, this pothole ends up filled with smelly garbage, and the shopowner has to shovel it out ('de-gust-ing!'). He is working his way through the French bureaucracy, and has to pantomime the whole parade to every civil servant he encounters. Don't remember how this ends. Old, probably from the 60's.
  • woops, found it! That cartoon is called LA PETITE PARADE and it's a Paramount Modern Madcap cartoon from 1959. It is considered a cult favorite.
• A cartoon which featured a kid going back in time with some characters. It was Intangible Time Travel (I think) and everything was Deliberately Monochrome ("back in time means black and white" one of the characters explains). Later they went inside the kid's brain with the kid somehow still with them and then they all went down his throat into his stomach. That's all I can remember.
  • Sounds like you got drunk, watched an episode of The Magic Schoolbus, went to bed, and had a nightmare.
  • Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue.
    • That's it! We even have a page on it.
• A series of short cartoons, shown on Cartoon Network in... the late 90's? Perhaps early 2000's? Anyway, they involved a pair of cavemen; one short and manic and one tall and more sophisticated. I think they were proposed alongside several other cartoons to be a new CN original series; they didn't make it, but were popular enough to get a few more shorts. I remember it in particular for this line: "Let's call it a 'Wheeeeeee!' 'cuz it's fun!"
  • Except for the part about being on Cartoon Network during that period as a series of shorts, this sounds exactly like the caveman segments from the The Terrible Thunderlizards — which, variously, was its own show, or a backup segment on Eek! The Cat.
  • I'm pretty sure it had to be CN, because I remember the original Billy And Mandy short playing alongside it.
    • So it might have been part of their "Big Pick" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Network%27s_Big_Pick ), making it likely to be Longhair and Doubledome. At least, what I can see is that that's about two cavemen discovering "science" and changing the world.
    • That's definitely it! Thanks!
• A standalone animated short that started with a fat, broadly Italian-accented man sitting at a table with an egg on it in the middle of a blank white room (actually, everything in the short was really just an outline with no color). He starts amusing himself by tapping on the egg with a spoon and repeatedly shouting something along the lines of "anybody home?". He then starts tapping on it harder and harder, until he eventually crushes it. Moments later, it becomes apparent that he actually was inside a giant egg himself, as the room begins to shake, cracks begin to form in the walls, and a distant voice starts shouting "Anybody home?" at him (it actually still sounds like his voice despite clearly coming from outside). This troper believes it was aired on Nickelodeon in a block of cartoon shorts, or possibly just between shows.
  • The Killing of an Egg
    • My memories distorted things a little bit (most obviously, it was someone from inside the egg yelling "hey-a who is it?" at the man, rather than the man asking "anyone home? to the egg), but that's it. Interestingly, the man's body actually looks like a yolk, which is something I apparently get at the time. Thank you... for, um, allowing me to relive my childhood nightmares.
• Looking for the name of a claymation series I used to watch a long time ago, can't remember much about other than it was a crew of different aliens on a space ship, one was an engineer with a long head who fixed the engine by smacking it with a giant hammer, another character was a woman with large eyes and butterfly wings (who could fly in space). Anyone got any ideas?
  • Lavender Castle?
    • Thats the one, thanks!
• This is an animated made-for-TV movie (or miniseries). The basic plot is that humans are in the middle of colonizing another planet (99% sure it's Mars). The colonists are attacked by the native Martian wildlife — large pods with three tentacle-like legs that are two or three times taller than the adult humans. Some children find a much smaller life form that turns out to be intelligent, and knows (or is taught) some rudimentary English. It tells them that the large Martians are intelligent also, and that they're just defending their homes from the invading humans. So, it's up to the children to stop the two sides from killing each other. At the end, it turns out that the little one is actually the larval form of the big ones, and that the children will be dead of old age before it emerges from its cocoon. The last scene is an adult Martian on a picnic with some human kids, telling them that their grandfather was a good friend.
  • You're thinking of Fox Kids' Animated Adaptation of Robert A Heinlein's Red Planet.
    • That's it! Thanks!
• There was a short musical cartoon from the 1940s-1950s or thereabouts that was shown on either Cartoon Network or TNT in the early 90s. It was about a fistfight between a Russian and a Turk that ended with them both falling into an ice-covered lake and being frozen solid. The reason it stuck in my head all these years was because the song that played through the cartoon sounded like the closing theme from Actraiser.
  • The song is probably "Abdul Abulbul Amir" by Percy French; knowing that, I should be able to find the cartoon... yes, here we are: "Abdul The Bulbul-Ameer", short cartoon by MGM, 1941. On Youtube here. This link will let you listen to what's widely regarded as the definitive version of the song.
    • That was it exactly, thanks.
• I remember some cartoon from a few years ago. I think it was one of the ones on that Kablam! show. It starred some boy, some nerdy girl that I think had glasses, and I think a beige, floating, R2-D2-shaped robot. I remember one episode of it had the main characters enter some kind of bowl-shaped world of the future, or something. I think the humans had hoverboards. And they entered some building that had a bunch of robots similar to the beige one, but larger and with different colors and expressions. And I think there was some chair with arms coming out of it that trapped the main characters into some kinda closet. The aforementioned nerdy girl started plugging a bunch of kitchen appliances into the wall sockets, making the place, as the nerdy girl put it, "...blow a fuse!". This apparently shut down the robots, and the main characters escaped or something. Oh, and I think each episode had some kind of music video right after it.
  • Wait, nevermind, I found it myself. It's Chalk Zone. My memory really distorted that...
• Okay, this one's CG animation shorts that may or not be serial — really, I'm not sure. There were several kinds of creatures formed by pebbles or goo living in outer space, except it had gravity(and it pointed down). There were some creatures, for instance, formed by green goo with three goo feet jointed by springs that were eternally climbing a huge brick wall. There was a humanoid pebble-creature that once found the edge of universe(well, the edge of screen at least), and when he passed over it, he came by at the opposite side of the screen as a female. There was also one short where one of the pebble-humanoids and one goo-tripod-creature teamed up to get out some sort of funnel. Oh, and I think it's French, and used to be aired during commercial breaks in Locomotion.
  • This troper now officially hates you because she knew exactly what you were talking about but couldn't remember the damn thing's name anymore. So she obsessively researched the world of french animated shorts to find it and if we are talking about the same series it's called F.A.E.L.L. (Formes Aléatoires En Légère Lévitation) (roughly meaning "Random Shapes in Slight Levitation"). Definitely obscure but there are some pictures on the creator's website.
    • Yay! And it only took... almost an year! =D
• A TV show, where one episode, the main character, a boy, goes to school with no clothes on, but is painted to look like he's wearing clothes? I think some bullies or jock kids made him think that it looked completely convincing. Anyway, at the end of the episode it starts raining and he runs home embarrassed. I kind-of-sort-of want to say it was Doug, but I really don't think so.
  • This is probably just one hell of a coincidence, but the Grand Finale of Camp Lazlo revolves around Scoutmaster Lumpus convincing everyone to wear painted-on clothes instead of real clothes to eliminate time doing laundry, only for the plan to unravel when it starts raining.
  • I think the show to which the original poster was referring was called Nightmare Ned, which ran on ABC's Saturday Morning Block in the late '90s. It revolved around a boy who would have vivid nightmares every night. One such nightmare was one where, yes, he cam to school with no clothes on and painted them to simulate the effect.
    • I believe that was it, thanks! [06/15/10]
• Okay, so I think it may have been an animated Halloween movie. One of the characters, a kid, gets taken away in an ambulance and turns into a ghost. And then there's a traditional Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, and at one point some kids recreate a castle by stepping into midair and having stones rise up to meet them.
  • I'm pretty sure that's "The Halloween Tree". Fantastic movie.
    • YES!!! You're my best friend in the whole world comma Tropers category. [6/28/10]
• Animated film I watched on TV when I was a kid. I think (THINK) it was a European film. These three kids (one was ginger, one was blond, I think the third was kind of fat) sneak into some museum or warehouse or something and find this magical gold plate. Said plate then transports them to this pirate world. Swashbuckling adventures ensue as they try to get back home as well as figure out the secrets behind this gold plate. There's also a pirate woman who makes friends with the blond kid, they have a scene in a hot air balloon. And the fat kid cheats a load of pirates out of their belongings by beating them at games of Snap. Hope my brain hasn't completely warped the details here.
  • "Pirates of Tortuga: Under the Black Flag"
    • That's the one! Thanks buddy. [07/15/10]
• An old cartoon...may have been claymation or something in that vein, but it was about a bird and a fish who lived beneath the ice of a vast sea, and they fell in love. The bird finally threw himself downwards towards the water to be with the fish, but crashed into the sheet of ice. The short ended with the fish floating beneath the bird's broken form, unable to reach him. It broke my heart at the time, and I've looked for it for years.
  • It doesn't quite fit exactly, but some of the elements sound like The Owl who Fell In Love with a Goose.
    • Perhaps you're thinking of Breaking The Ice.
    • That's it! Oh, you glorious person, thank you so much. To think it had a happy ending all this time, too! [7/30/10]

Other

• * An off-Broadway play. In real life, a major search engine provided anonymized data on all the searches its customers had made, and one was found to have searched for a bunch of things like "Beauty And The Beast porn" and "Beast raping Belle." The play was an extrapolation of what that fellow's life must have been like. I remember it was named after his user number, but I don't remember the number.
  • User 927. The blog link comes from Wikipedia's article on the AOL search data scandal.
    • [07/22/10] Thanks!
• Taken from here:

  Ye Olde Luke: This is going to sound strange, but I remember seeing a page on this wiki where you could post things like movies or books where you remember some part of it, just not the title. And I can't find that page again. I thought it was called something along the lines of "There Was That One Show" but nothing's coming up.

  Yamikuronue: You Know That Show I believe.

  Ye Olde Luke: That's it! Thanks! : D

• A Web Original series set in the Half-Life universe about two rebels escaping from City 17 before the Citadel explodes. It had live action actors Chroma Keyed into scenes from the game, and was advertised on Steam at one point.
  • Appropriately enough, what you're looking for is called Escape from City 17.
    • [4/1/10] That looked to be it
• An article on the Magic The Gathering website where the designers talked about how the characters in the Legends set were inspired by their Dungeons And Dragons characters, and included stats for one of them. I can't find the article again, despite looking all over the site.
  • https://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/arcana/47 This it? A lot of the stuff got rearranged when they changed the site.
    • Yes. Now, if you can find that article where Mark Rosewater talks about Mirage and mentions rutabegas...
    • Is this your card? Or this?
    • I went and found both of those after asking, but yeah.