I had a truly profound and meaningful childhood, mostly happy and immersed in fantasy, surrounded by great things of the era: remnants of 80s culture (toys, shows, movies, video games, books) and the glorious 90s and all its touchstones.

1985-1989

Around the age of 3 or 4 I was fascinated by the Adam West Batman show. The series was shown in reruns and that's how I discovered it pre-cable TV. My first Halloween costume was the vintage Batman outfit. It wasn't long until I was smitten with Tim Burton's Batman (1989). Just recalling this movie brings back a flood of early memories. I had all the toys and remember a special fondness for the Hot Wheels version of the Batmobile and Batwing.

Other formative movies that I may not have seen as a little tyke in the 80s but felt their influence were Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, and Predator. Casting my mind back, one of the earliest childhood memories I have is seeing a poster for Predator in a video rental store window. Probably not a movie I had actually seen until I was older, but Predator would go in the pantheon of franchises I enjoyed in the 90s. I had Predator trading cards, action figures, and watched Predator 2 on VHS at a far too young age.

Sidebar: A Love Letter to the 80s

While I only lived in the 80s for a brief spell, I feel a kinship with that era because 80s pop culture and influences spilled over into the 90s. Its riches were all around me growing up. The movies on VHS I watched the most as a kid were Willow, The Princess Bride, Time Bandits, Labyrinth, Milo & Otis, Golden Child, Back to the Future, and Escape from New York. Some movies I may not have even watched all the way through until I was older, but I have vivid memories of the imagery of Aliens, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, Breakfast Club, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and Beverly Hills Cop.

Before we got cable TV, the four or five channels we had showed reruns of Magnum PI, MacGyver, Cheers, Night Court, Saved by the Bell, The Wonder Years, and so many others. These shows were regular consumption for me.

Many of the toys I got early in my life were for 80s franchises. They were hand-me-downs from relatives or yard sale pickups. So I might not have seen the older cartoons and shows of the 80s, but I had the toys for Alf, the A-Team, He-Man, Knight Rider, Thunder Cats, Transformers, Garbage Pail Kids, and most significantly GI Joe. More toys and memories stemmed from the Alien, Terminator, and RoboCop series. I can remember what it was like to know these franchises circa 1990. All the remakes, spin-offs and sequels since then have no appeal to me.

GI Joe

Nothing is more 80s than GI Joe and every boy I knew had GI Joe action figures. In addition to the original 1977 Star Wars figures, they were among the most coveted toys of my early childhood. So often I might be at another kid's house and invariably we'd pull out a box of GI Joes. I'd marvel at the ones I hadn't seen before or didn't have in my own collection. I gravitated to Cobra because I liked the bad guys. If they were sinister with bad ass-looking uniforms, I wanted them on my side. When I had a Star Wars obsession throughout the 90s, stormtroopers and the empire were my bros; not rebel scum.

GI Joe figures from the 80s were not easy to find. New lines of figures were continuously issued throughout the 80s and 90s by Hasbro. If you wanted the vintage ones from the 80s, though, you couldn't get them at Toys 'R Us. You had to go to secondhand shops and flea markets. It's hard to imagine these days, but it wasn't uncommon to see used toy stores. On rare outings to visit my aunt, my mom would stop by the store called Toy Traders. They had baskets of action figures sorted by type, and there was usually a GI Joe basket. This is how I started my collection. Naturally I went crazy for the cartoon show which I watched on Saturday mornings and also GI Joe: The Movie, which still holds up today as an excellent animated film. The opening sequence with the infiltration of the Cobra headquarters did wonders for my imagination as a kid.

1990-1993: Toys, lots of toys

This period of the early 90s is what I'd call the toy era. That is, when I wasn't watching TV or playing Nintendo, most of my cherished memories revolved around playing with toys: action figures, miniatures, toy guns, and all sorts of physical activities both indoors and out. My childhood house at Scott's Manor Court had a finished basement that functioned as my playroom on a massive scale. Different quadrants of the basement were dedicated to certain types of toys. In one area I had entire dioramas set up with all the Star Wars micromachines on separated pieces of furniture to represent the different planets. So a little table for all the Death Star playsets, one for Hoth, Tatooine, Endor, the rebel base, and Cloud City. I would have running "fan fic" stories going in my head. Sometimes I'd create elaborate sagas that fit in between the trilogy movies.

Another section of the basement was for my fantasy/sword & sorcery figurines where I'd use castle playsets and accessories taken from AD&D fantasy-themed board games. I had another section for setting up and building Legos. And then an area to spread out all my GI Joes and vehicles. Often I'd just have a pile of action figures mixed and matched as my fancy suited, creating little stories and vignettes that transcended the actual franchise lore itself. In other words, Predator action figures comingled with Terminator, RoboCop, He-Man, and GI Joe. I stretched my imagination to make it work.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

What boy growing up in the 90s didn't love TMNT? The movie came out in 1990 but it had the dark, gritty look of an 80s neo-noir. This is one of the first movies I watched on VHS along with Ghostbusters I and II. I was a little confused by the plot and character interactions, and sometimes disturbed by the violence and dark subject matter for a kid's movie. But it didn't matter because the rest of the film was perfect for a kid; like an extended music video with ninja turtles kicking ass and eating pizza! Of course I had plenty of TMNT action figures and vehicles, I played the Nintendo and arcade video games, I dressed up for years as the turtles for Halloween or birthday parties. "Cosplay" didn't exist as a term back then but basically that's what I did. While my interest waned once the third movie came out, the Saturday morning cartoon and the arcade game were major staples for me.

Star Wars

I was a diehard Star Wars fan. Although I wasn't around to enjoy it in the late 70s and 80s, its legacy was going strong in the 90s. The video games, toys, comics, and prevalence of all things Star Wars was inescapable as a kid. Its hold on me and the sheer amount of Star Wars toys and games I owned made it the most significant franchise of my childhood. Every day for years I played with Star Wars toys, rewatched the movies, drew pictures of stormtroopers, played the video games on NES, PC, and N64, looked at picture books and Expanded Universe comics, read Star Wars Insider magazines, collected trading cards, and I even had life-sized cardboard cutouts of Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and a Storm Trooper. My first computer game was Star Wars: Dark Forces and I love that game to this day.

Strange then that by the late 90s I abandoned Star Wars and lost interest entirely. I hated the prequels. I guess that's when an apathy for Star Wars began. 30 years later under Disney it's really sad to see where it's gone: soulless and uninspired. When I think of Star Wars, I remember what it meant in that fertile and self-contained period between 1977-1998 when our frame of reference was the OG trilogy and the expanded universe.

Sword & Sorcery / High Fantasy / AD&D

I think what shaped my interests and aesthetic preferences the most as a kid was fantasy stuff: anything Dungeons & Dragons, TSR, 80s sword & sorcery, mythology, all the fantasy movies and video games I was exposed to. It might surprise the reader that Tolkien had no direct influence on me at all. I didn't read Lord of the Rings or know about it until the Peter Jackson movies came out. No, for me the worlds of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, video games, and Warhammer felt like comfy shoes. They cultivated a vigorous embrace of fantastical creatures and motifs found in collectible card games and RPGs. Seeing Willow early on did much of the work. This movie was the central influence for loving fantasy. I watched it dozens of times.

Second to that is a book featuring the art of AD&D that my dad gave me probably in 1990. It was a life changing book. Looking at famous illustrations by Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson, Jeff Easley, and Clyde Caldwell opened a new world for me of escapism into fantasy worlds that felt so awe-inspiring. This book left a deep mark and solidified a lifelong passion for art.

In addition, there were other influences that fueled my attraction to dark fantasy: the Fantasia sequence featuring Night on Bald Mountain and the battle with skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts. Whenever those movies came on, these scenes were moments to anticipate with relish. I remember when a first grade music teacher showed Fantasia to the class; me and other boys begged the teacher to fastforward to the end. Likewise, the rare times a movie like Jason and the Argonauts was shown on TV, I only watched it for the skeleton army scene. You have to understand that the amount of media with this kind of content was scarce in the early 90s: no internet, no cable, and fantasy was somewhat underground, confined to fiction and tabletop hobbies that weren't very popular yet.

Books

Every child should grow up with books. They were a regular feature of my childhood. Anything with illustrations of traditional high fantasy, skulls, weird and spooky things, or forests in a fairy tale setting always fired my imagination. A book like Creepy Castle with no text was all I needed. Likewise, I'd spend hours with a Where's Waldo book open, pouring over the dense and detailed sea of little figures. An early and influential discovery for me was finding a hardcover book of Beowulf in the elementary school library. It contained woodcut illustrations that left an indelible mark on me. They were so mesmerizing I ended up taking the book to a Kinkos to be photocopied; I still have those printouts in a plastic sleeve today.

R.L. Stine's Goosebumps ignited another obsession. I collected the earliest ones from 1992-1994. In 2nd grade several kids would bring all their Goosebumps paperbacks and stack them on their desk as a show of whose collection was tallest. I won of course. Anyone in elementary school in 1992 will also remember the Scholastic Book Fair and the excitement of perusing newly published children's books with that red ribbon icon emblazoned on book covers. I know Scholastic continued beyond the 90s but I doubt it had the same freshness and appeal as it did when it was new.

Nintendo (NES)

Unlike most of my peers growing up in the 90s, my console video game experience was limited. Early on I really only had the NES and a few dozen games of varying quality. I had to go over to my friends' houses to play SNES, Sega Genesis, or PlayStation. From my earliest memories I recall the NES was the prevailing console in the early 90s. All of my friends had it. We played Duck Hunt, Contra, and TMNT Arcade game above all. I watched my cousins play Gauntlet and Ghosts n' Goblins. Others I played were Ghostbusters, TMNT, Super Mario Bros., Top Gun, and Wizards & Warriors. The latter's charming and haunting soundtrack echoes in my brain as I type. I played a lot of NES games and don't remember beating any except Contra. That was a big deal and one of the first games I got really good at. You had to be since one hit from a sprite was death and you didn't get many lives. A remarkable achievement was playing it co-op with a neighborhood buddy and we beat the game together in one sitting with no deaths.

It's difficult to explain to the new generation raised exclusively on devices and the modern games industry that the NES was only meant for occasional game time. As a kid, sitting in front of the TV playing video games was cool and a thing we could do every day, but not all day. It entered into the rotation of all sorts of activities, from playing with toys and toy guns, riding bikes, and exploring outside. After playing NES for an hour, we went outdoors for a change of scene. Still, some games captured my focus for longer periods, including Super Mario 3 and Jackal; the latter was an obscure overhead army jeep shooter. Incidentally, I had little agency with what NES games I got. They were hand-me-downs or random picks my dad got at garage sales. How else did I have Ninja Gaiden 3, Amagon, Street Gangs, Castlevania, Jaws, and Baseball?

Arcades

Having the vintage 90s arcade experience is like a rite of passage. Frequent visits to Hunt Valley Mall in Cockeysville, MD are seared into my memory. My mom would drop me off at the mall arcade with a handful of quarters while she went shopping. Hard to appreciate how spectacular the arcade atmosphere was for an 8-year-old: a throng of arcade cabinets glowing with alluring titles and graphics on screen. A cacophony of noise and yet harmonious blend of beeps, whirs, pings, and button mashing as crowds of kids and teenagers have fun.

Mortal Kombat was the real deal, maybe the most influential game of the early 90s. Everything about it was cool and unlike anything we'd seen from the Atari and NES days. Another great arcade title was Terminator 2 with its massive cabinet size featuring two rifles for controllers. The Simpsons and TMNT arcade games were popular as well. I played them all with random kids or a neighborhood friend on special weekend trips to the arcade. But the game I sought out the most was GI Joe. It was addicting. Plus, it had the best graphics of any GI Joe game; seeing all my favorite Cobra soldiers in high pixel resolution was awesome.

Power Rangers

Another tangent in this timeframe included a Power Rangers craze. I remember sleeping over at my friend's house Friday night and he told me that we needed to watch this new show the next morning. We tuned into the premiere broadcast of maybe the second or third episode of Power Rangers as it was shown in the US. It wasn't long before I had to have the action figures and green ranger sword.

Movies of the Time

When I think back to my earliest childhood years, it seems like movies were a prominent feature. It wasn't like today with a glut of content to watch. Moreover, we were selective with what movies we bought on VHS. I stumbled on a host of remarkable 80s films by rummaging through my dad's VHS collection. At my mom's house, though, we watched the latest stuff. Films made in the early 90s that got rewatched the most were: Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Dick Tracy, Ghost, The Witches, Dances With Wolves, Home Alone, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, What About Bob, People Under the Stairs, Terminator 2, City Slickers, Jurassic Park, and Tombstone.

1994-1996