I think I might have found it! It might have been floating on the internet for 10 years unnoticed. I found this old Google Site that was last updated in 2011, that links to a working download of the Successmaker program 64-bit version. Google Site Link
Unfortunately I cannot get it to work as launching the shortcut on the desktop opens Internet Explorer to what should link to a server where the school kept track of your progress. But the site has since been abandoned and is now just ads. link
This version of the Successmaker exe is from 2009, but all of the files inside were created in 2002.
However it seems to have a lot of what I remember, even some exes of the programs themselves, but I cannot get them to start by themselves.
Here are the icons for the games.
If someone can get the program to run, that would be amazing. Even just seeing these icons is super nostalgic.
I found a school webpage that was last updated in early 2008, it turns out there was a version you can install at home. Which means someone might have files sitting on their old PC.
It noted that there are two versions, a CD version with an orange envelope, and a white envelope with all the courseware on it. And a DVD version with one single disc.
My lunch menus did not have this. They were plain and just listed the lunch. Perhaps you could contact your school and see if they remember anything about that? That would be your best bet
Well my mom was actually the principal, and I asked her and she said she does remember them sending us physical menus but that that she doesn't remember whether they had any cartoons on them because she didn't really care lol. I asked my friends who went to other schools in the same district and they said that they only got unthemed white paper for their lunch menus. I asked one friend who went to the same elementary as me and he said he does remember some menus from then, but he was unsure if he remembers if they had cartoon or not. My mom said the USDA was the one who sent the menus and they're the ones who still do it under the "Square Meals" program that archived all local menus from 2014 til now per each school district.
So I emailed the USDA to ask if they did send out menus at that time and if they were ever sponsored by Kids WB or Cartoon Network, so fingers crossed they don't brush me off and ignore me.
Edit: So I found this:
So it is possible that the CN, Loonatics Unleashed, Scooby Get a Clue and Legion of Superheroes lunch menu calendars I remember could be "activity charts", but I remember them being professionally printed and only given out in the cafeteria by the lunch ladies. This Jackie Chan stuff were printouts from the Kids WB website as far as I can tell.
Edit: So I found out that it might have been from a local TV station, or that's what this PDF from 2007 might suggest?
Edit: I also found this old promotion called Rescuing Recess, which was like Get Animated. Maybe it could have been that, since my school also got Nick Day of Play stickers. Still doesn't explain the Kids WB stuff though.
Hmm, I don't recall seeing the ones you posted, but I assume those are also from around 2002/2003 because of the Powerpuff Girls movie. I also don't recall seeing the Powerpuff Girls one since it would've been released late May/June and school is out by then where I'm from.
But I suppose it is entirely possible it could have misremembered a Scholastic promotion but the only thing I can find that could possibly be promoted would be this software from 2006.
Not sure why they'd promote this, since the book fairs had tons of other software, namely tycoon simulators, edutainment and random Nick games. And I definitely do remember there being calendar and them talking about food lol.
Edit: I also remember there being a Loonatics Unleashed version of the lunch menu, so that means these menus had to have come out in Fall 2005.
Lunch menus vary by district. I think your best bet is to look up your local school district’s website on the Wayback machine. I actually did that a while ago for the nostalgia.
Having CN characters on your lunch menu is cool. I know when I was in high school, there was a time that we had milk cartons with characters. I brought my lunch from home but someone I knew had a milk cartoon with Numbuh 5. Come to think of it, this would have been around 2004 or 2005. Possibly related?
That's true, I remember that. I know for sure the milk brand we had that featured the KND was Oak Farms Dairy from San Antonio. Then they eventually changed to TruMoo. They looked like this
The back was printed in monochrome, where it had jokes or for that one instance, KND characters. I guess it could possibly be related.
Interestingly also, is that the company that owns TruMoo also owns Land'O'Lakes butter, which if you clicked the link from my previous post, sponsored that vote thing for the School Lunch thingy. (Dean Foods, based in Dallas, so maybe that also has something to do with it?)
Edit: So I did some more digging and found this flash sitemap from 2004, of all the milk brands Deans Foods distributes to based on location, so my hunch is that it's not specific to my local milk brand, but rather whichever ones Deans used to distribute it locally.
Edit 2: So I found pics of the KND Milk Cartons, but without Numbuh One or Two lol. Posted on the creator's blog.
Also on his site, he has a Scholastic origami fortune teller of the KND which is similar to the lunch menu I was talking about.
Does anyone remember getting a physical lunch menu in the early-mid 2000's? I keep searching and cannot find any evidence that they existed online. It was a pamphlet-style booklet with a calendar inside detailing what they were serving each day of the month. At my elementary we usually had to ask the lunch ladies since they had few, and even then they would seldom give it to us. But I remember this one specific month they gave everyone one, and it was Cartoon Network themed. This had to have been 2004-2005 because the newest character I remember seeing was Bloo, but it also had Courage, Numbah One, Grim and other characters from that era. In the back it had an origami fortune teller that you cut out with CN themed fortunes. I remembered being so enamored with it that I took it everywhere and lost it. I know it was not a local thing because in small print I remember it saying printed in California (I'm from middle of nowhere Texas.), which made me want to send them a letter (idk why, I was a kid.) My best guess as to who might have made the menus would be School Nutrition Association, because this wonderfully preserved website from 2006 seems like the type of stuff I would see on those pamphlets. link
Interestingly, my mom says that each school district has a person who sets the menu and it isn't the same across all boards. Does anyone else remember getting these menus?
Last Edit: Aug 15, 2020 1:25:10 GMT by redslam: image link broke
They still are missing a lot, like how the CN wiki is missing this bug for CN Invaded at 0:35.
Anyway I think maybe we can scour the recordings of some shows on myspleen or torrents or kissanime for some cool looking screenbugs or on-screen promos, you know, the ones that sometimes take half the screen? I remember seeing a promo for the Clone Wars (2003) on a vid of Courage but can't find it now :/ Even though not as common, channels still do some variations like the current CN Halloween one which has bat wings.
Then there's cool old animated Nickelodeon ones like these ones:
and wierd static one's like this:
As a designer, I think it would personally be fun to try and re-animate and recreate these bugs so that they're not so blurry, but idk. But yeah, does this even matter to anybody? There's even an article about a lost screen bug on q LostMedia site, where a person found the bug in the comments, linked the youtube video, but the channel the video was on was terminated, so it's lost again -> lostmediaarchive.wikia.com/wiki/Nickelodeon_Lost_Screenbug
I was browsing the Wiki about a month ago and was loving the redesign. But what stuck out to me was the logo which looked like this.
It's a neat concept by Reynard (cool design, dood) but the doodleiness was throwing me off so I just remade it in Illustrator for fun. So here are some pngs of it, if anyone has use for hi-res versions I guess?
So here is the original AI file. (But be warned, it's 89mb and depending on how good your computer is, might make it slow due to all the texturing and Gaussian blurs and clipping masks going on.) LINK TO AI FILE Here it is watered down to just the basic vector shapes. LINK TO BASIC VECTORS
Someone said it looked like the logo for an RC car company and I agree lool. Anyway, since I don't have any lost media to contribute, and I love this community so much, this is the best I could do. I'd also be down to redo any of the icons because I think it'd be fun.
So my school district used this Pearson program called Successmaker Enterprise which consisted of smaller programs that the local computer administrator would assign to you based on your grade level/progress.
The modern version looks like this:
The version I grew up with more than a decade ago had no clear characters. But what it did have, is pretty decent pixel art, and a very 90's edutainment vibe. I can't find much about the old program other than a few screenshots from a Successmaker New Zealand website, which doesn't look 100% legit. And maybe from another website or another. I know it ran on Windows XP and maybe Windows 2000. This is what the hub to get to the programs looked like:
The screenshots I can get of the actual programs are: Story Painter
Writer's Studio
Reading Investigations
Reading Adventures
There's more but these are the one's I remember primarily.
It's so weird though because I cannot find any video evidence of these programs. (Maybe I'm not looking hard enough?) I can't even find a ROM. I mean this program had to be in a ton of schools nationwide, why can't I find more proof? My mother was the principal of an elementary school, and I know they used that program until at least 2010. She said she found the disc for Story Painter once before she changed schools, but that she lost it. That really sucks too, because Story Painter was the most fun program, and is a really great time capsule of the late 90's.