PixlBit

It was sort of a kids' variety show, with Bill Thompson (who played Wallace) acting as the "straight man" while Ladimir Kwiatkowsky (Ladmo) did the more physical comedy. The show was originally called "It's Wallace!" and Ladmo originally started as a cameraman before he ended up in front of the camera with Wallace. They also showed old short cartoons, and they parodied the pop culture and news of the day in a kid-friendly manner. Its last episode was in 1989. Kwiatkowski died in 1994, Thompson in July of this year.

This is a clip of Ladmo giving out one of his "Ladmo bags" on the show's 35th anniversary. The recipient was rock star Alice Cooper, who went to high school in Phoenix.

Here's Dynamo Duck:

Agree on Batman and Animaniacs. I don't have much interest in Marvel or DC myself, so that (along with the 1960s Batman show with Adam West and Burt Ward) were exceptions, and Mark Hamill was a great Joker. Those were my favorites. I also liked kid game shows Double Dare and Fun House when they were syndicated during the afternoon in the 80s. I also liked DuckTales. TMNT started off syndicated before CBS bought the series and put it on Saturday mornings, and I actually enjoyed the syndicated shows a bit more than I did when it went to CBS.

And yes, I did watch the Super Mario Bros. Super Show and the Zelda cartoons. At that time, it was just cool having Zelda cartoons on TV. I wish they'd do a Zelda series in Japan by a respected anime artist/animation studio and dub it in English for the US.

Remember in your last blog how I talked about Fido Dido bumpers? Fox had its own funny little bumpers starring a live duckling named Dynamo Duck. Apparently the footage was from a French TV show called "Saturnine le petit canard" (literally, Saturnine the Little Duck). He even got a 15-minute show on Fox Saturday mornings. Fox wrote his dialogue as a secret agent. He was voiced by Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson.

In Arizona, our local kids' TV show was Wallace and Ladmo, and I watched it a lot. It was considered one of the best local kids' TV shows out there. It was such a huge thing in Arizona that even the inmates at the Maricopa County jail call food bags "Ladmo bags" after the bags of goodies Ladmo used to give out as part of contests.

If my computer will run VC I'll get it.

I still have an Atari 130XE and a metric ton of floppies with games on them. Losing that kind of stuff sucks. I had a lot of my games stolen a few years back.

And as to quibbles over Bayonetta's sexual themes, meh. That game is fun as hell, and I'd play Bayonetta or Bayonetta 2 over any God of War game in a heartbeat. I also rolled my eyes over all the pearl-clutching over Dragon's Crown's art design.

I started with Japanese RPGs with Dragon (Warrior) Quest and Faxanadu, as well as with Ultima III, which was actually made in Texas but made a huge impression on Japan. I think that the best things people could do to try the genre would be to download some of the big PS1 RPGs from PSN, or, as stated above, pick up the DS remakes of Dragon Quest IV-VI, which are accessible.

Some Japanese RPGs are quite beautiful. Ni no Kuni and Valkyria Chronicles come to mind, and Square's RPGs are always technically proficient.

At this point, I've long since given up on professional reviewers, but I didn't really care much about them to begin with. I started losing interest in gaming magazines when they moved away from talking about how to beat games I liked and started focusing more heavily on reviews and other shit like that.

Most of the games I enjoy are 7s and 8s in the world of game reviewing. A few are 9s. Most of the 9.5s and 10s, with the exception of Zelda games, are games that put me to sleep. Of the hundreds of games I own, I can count the games I own made by EA, Activision, or Ubisoft on the fingers of one hand..

My one quibble with game review scores that's hard to ignore is Metacritic. Its weighting is skewed. Because of our years in school, Americans are used to seeing 70-79 as a "C", or mediocre, and anything below 70 as a failing grade. Metacritic does even worse: if a game site uses a school-style letter grading system, Metacritic weighs a "C" as a 50, which is a grade a student that is either mentally slow or simply completely fucked off in class gets. Sadly, Metacritic does impact the games somewhat. Fallout: New Vegas was a better game in most ways than Fallout 3. Obsidian simply did a far better job on the franchise than Bethesda Game Studios did The 84 aggregate it got on Metacritic kept Obsidian from profiting on it (the game sold very well, but Obsidian lost a bonus they really needed from Bethesda specifically because of the score) and it all but ensures that Obsidian will never work on the series again. And that's just one example. I'm pretty sure that some developers see the hostile reception their games get on MC and it kills their enthusiasm for making games that follow-up to some perfectly decent and fun products.

But I agree with the main point of your story. It's ridiculous getting so over-the-top angry over game reviews. My flip response has always been that getting angry at game journalism is like getting violently angry at Cupcake Baking Monthly or Model Airplane Enthusiast. But really, game reviews are irrelevant. What I wouldn't give for a Nintendo Power-style gaming publication that sticks with how to find every secret in good games instead of gushing over the latest annual EActubi refreshes!

No, they're officially dead as of this season. All the major networks have abandoned them by now. NBC stopped doing them in 1992.

Vs.Duck Hunt, the arcade version, let you shoot the dog.

As a matter of fact, there was a Fido Dido game on Sega Genesis.

I remember before they came with the Fido Dido bumpers they had some weird claymation bumpers on CBS.

At the time Fido Dido was on CBS, Fox had its own set of interesting bumper sequences for its Saturday morning and weekday cartoons: the Dynamo Duck bumpers which starred a live duckling as a secret agent.

It's funny how the little throwaway bumper sequences were kind of memorable. But then, The Simpsons started out as a bunch of bumper sequences on the Ullman show. :)