Post by craughsk on Apr 23, 2022 3:34:02 GMT
Hi, I’m shy and not much of a talker, but hunting down lost media is something I enjoy doing and hearing about, so I thought it was worth poking my head in here. I’ve done a fair bit of hunting over the years, mostly for things I know I’ve seen or heard about but can’t track down. I haven’t had many successes, but some have been interesting little journeys, and I thought people might like to hear about them.
Fizz & Martina’s Math Adventures (some success finding):
This was a series of educational programs one of my teachers in elementary school had us do in the late 90s. They consisted of a video and a packet of worksheets; the video would be 20-minute animatics following the characters Fizz and Martina, and would pause periodically for the class to analyze how to use math in their situation. Originally these were on VHS tapes, produced in the early 90s, but they were rereleased on CD-ROM with a flash-based player in the early 2000s.
The animation was done by Tom Snyder Productions, which later became well-known for the show Home Movies.
My memory of the videos is that they were very charming and had some more sophisticated sensibilities than you’d expect from educational media in the 90s. The characters are vaguely creaturelike, all of them different from one another. The stories also ranged widely; in one, Fizz joins his school’s AV club and they produce an exaggerated film noir show, while in another, Fizz and Martina form a rock band and go on tour across a post-apocalyptic wasteland infested by vampire robots.
There doesn’t seem to be any video online of these, and in the years that I’ve watched for any of them coming up for sale on various marketplaces, I’ve very rarely seen them come up, and never the VHS releases. There was a junior chapter book as well, which is much easier to find.
90s vehicular combat game (no success):
When I was in highschool in the mid 2000s, someone told me about a game he had won a championship in, which he said used decommissioned military flight simulator booths to run a sci fi vehicular combat game. He said that players choose a vehicle and race back and forth along a track about one kilometer long, and get points by colliding with other vehicles to deal damage, based on kinetic energy transfer.
I looked it up at the time based on that description, and I found a document from 1997 about that championship, listing the person who told me about it as the winner. Later though, I could never find that page again, or any other information about the game. Probably five or six times over the last ten years I’ve gotten the bug and spent a whole evening trying to hunt the game down, by searching every combination of descriptors I can, and going through lists of vehicular combat and racing games, and I’ve never had any luck at all.
I could easily contact that person, and I probably will one of these days, but I’m very anxious about reaching out to people from that time in my life, especially with a strange question like that.
80s computer game about robots? (no success):
I was in speech therapy throughout elementary school, and there were several recurring activities we would do in one of the speech “classes,” mostly just things to do that would require us to practice making the sounds we had trouble with. One of those activities was a game on an old computer, probably an Apple IIGS, because that was what the computer labs had, though this was just in the classroom. In the game, you build a robot, and then either do an activity or just watch the robot you built do something. It would say “pick your head,” “pick your body,” “pick your nose” (to the kids’ amusement), and a selection of options would go across the screen on a conveyor belt. I only have the vaguest memories beyond that. I’ve also spent a few evenings over the years looking for this one.
Garfield green screen video (no success):
I grew up in Muncie, Indiana, the town arguably most famous for being where Jim Davis founded his company and published Garfield from. The downtown had Garfield banners on lamp posts, he was on signs, the town commissioned statues of him for events, and so on. It wasn’t till I was an adult that I learned that this was not, in fact, normal.
The state capitol, Indianapolis, famously opened the biggest children’s museum in the world at the time, and while I was in elementary school, Muncie founded its own, though naturally much smaller. Also largely funded by Paws, Inc.; while not every exhibit and activity in it was Garfield-related, most at least had decals of the characters on them. The somewhat groundbreaking one in 1996, though, was a booth where kids could stand in front of a green screen, and an animated video would play, and (pretty poorly) greenscreen the kid into it. In the video, Garfield gets sucked into a computer, and is then in a faux sidescroller game made up of circuit boards and electronic components, being chased by what I remember as being giant computer chips. There wasn’t really a game involved, but you as a kid would run along and pretend to jump over or dodge things. In my memory it was a fully produced video with voices by Lorenzo Music, but I don’t know how accurate that is.
Though I never particularly cared for Garfield, it piqued my interest a couple years ago when I found out that there are a lot of people with a deep love for it, and that got me curious as to whether that video was still around. I haven’t found any sign of it. The children’s museum is still operating, but looking at their website, it seems they’ve repurposed the green screen booth as a dressup station, though they seem to be using the same CRT screen to show the results.
content warning: suicide
Darks Pandemonium (no success, some still available):
This would definitely not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in college I came across a dark ambient musician who went by the name Darks Pandemonium, or sometimes Saintantric. A few of his songs, mostly remixes (which he called “darkslows”) are still on YouTube, but circa 2008-2009 he had several albums available for order, and some songs from each downloadable for free on his website (darkspandemonium.com). His albums weren’t available at the time, most of them were from earlier. The music was offputtingly dark and disturbing at first blush, but when I gave it a chance I remember it having surprising depth, mostly in its textures.
Somewhere along the way I moved computers and lost a lot of the music I’d had at the time, including everything from Dark’s Pandemonium. When I went looking for it to download again, I found the site under construction. Looking deeper, I was saddened to see that apparently the musician had committed suicide sometime in 2010.
The website was archived on the Wayback Machine, but it didn’t capture any of the mp3 files or images. I remember the site also originally had a custom cursor, which was a grimacing demonic face that left a trail when you moved it within the browser window.
Because of what happened with the musician, I think it would be inappropriate to try and contact people to get a hold of the music.
Periodically I look around and see if any of the albums are floating around, but I would guess they were probably CDRs sold directly by mail. Searching did reveal what seems to be an unrelated band from Ohio by the same name, though spelled Dark’s Pandemonium with the apostrophe. The name comes from a Ray Bradbury book, so it isn’t terribly unlikely for two bands to have settled on it separately. The band only had one release, a 6-minute EP in 1988, titled Taunting Mr. Sunshine, and after seeing copies of it for a long time I bought one on eBay to give it a listen, and it’s some pretty nice 80s gothic rock. It’s documented online but the music isn’t available anywhere. I digitized the record, but I’ve noticed that a YouTube upload of it has been taken down before, so I figure someone still keeps track of its copyright.
Fizz & Martina’s Math Adventures (some success finding):
This was a series of educational programs one of my teachers in elementary school had us do in the late 90s. They consisted of a video and a packet of worksheets; the video would be 20-minute animatics following the characters Fizz and Martina, and would pause periodically for the class to analyze how to use math in their situation. Originally these were on VHS tapes, produced in the early 90s, but they were rereleased on CD-ROM with a flash-based player in the early 2000s.
The animation was done by Tom Snyder Productions, which later became well-known for the show Home Movies.
My memory of the videos is that they were very charming and had some more sophisticated sensibilities than you’d expect from educational media in the 90s. The characters are vaguely creaturelike, all of them different from one another. The stories also ranged widely; in one, Fizz joins his school’s AV club and they produce an exaggerated film noir show, while in another, Fizz and Martina form a rock band and go on tour across a post-apocalyptic wasteland infested by vampire robots.
There doesn’t seem to be any video online of these, and in the years that I’ve watched for any of them coming up for sale on various marketplaces, I’ve very rarely seen them come up, and never the VHS releases. There was a junior chapter book as well, which is much easier to find.
I’ve been able to get a hold of two units from this rerelease, and the book and packets for a third but not the disc. I’ve backed the discs up but I haven’t watched the videos yet - I’m waiting for the chance to watch them with my twin brother who also has fond memories of them. I also haven’t quite gotten up the nerve to put them on the Internet Archive.
90s vehicular combat game (no success):
When I was in highschool in the mid 2000s, someone told me about a game he had won a championship in, which he said used decommissioned military flight simulator booths to run a sci fi vehicular combat game. He said that players choose a vehicle and race back and forth along a track about one kilometer long, and get points by colliding with other vehicles to deal damage, based on kinetic energy transfer.
I looked it up at the time based on that description, and I found a document from 1997 about that championship, listing the person who told me about it as the winner. Later though, I could never find that page again, or any other information about the game. Probably five or six times over the last ten years I’ve gotten the bug and spent a whole evening trying to hunt the game down, by searching every combination of descriptors I can, and going through lists of vehicular combat and racing games, and I’ve never had any luck at all.
I could easily contact that person, and I probably will one of these days, but I’m very anxious about reaching out to people from that time in my life, especially with a strange question like that.
80s computer game about robots? (no success):
I was in speech therapy throughout elementary school, and there were several recurring activities we would do in one of the speech “classes,” mostly just things to do that would require us to practice making the sounds we had trouble with. One of those activities was a game on an old computer, probably an Apple IIGS, because that was what the computer labs had, though this was just in the classroom. In the game, you build a robot, and then either do an activity or just watch the robot you built do something. It would say “pick your head,” “pick your body,” “pick your nose” (to the kids’ amusement), and a selection of options would go across the screen on a conveyor belt. I only have the vaguest memories beyond that. I’ve also spent a few evenings over the years looking for this one.
Garfield green screen video (no success):
I grew up in Muncie, Indiana, the town arguably most famous for being where Jim Davis founded his company and published Garfield from. The downtown had Garfield banners on lamp posts, he was on signs, the town commissioned statues of him for events, and so on. It wasn’t till I was an adult that I learned that this was not, in fact, normal.
The state capitol, Indianapolis, famously opened the biggest children’s museum in the world at the time, and while I was in elementary school, Muncie founded its own, though naturally much smaller. Also largely funded by Paws, Inc.; while not every exhibit and activity in it was Garfield-related, most at least had decals of the characters on them. The somewhat groundbreaking one in 1996, though, was a booth where kids could stand in front of a green screen, and an animated video would play, and (pretty poorly) greenscreen the kid into it. In the video, Garfield gets sucked into a computer, and is then in a faux sidescroller game made up of circuit boards and electronic components, being chased by what I remember as being giant computer chips. There wasn’t really a game involved, but you as a kid would run along and pretend to jump over or dodge things. In my memory it was a fully produced video with voices by Lorenzo Music, but I don’t know how accurate that is.
Though I never particularly cared for Garfield, it piqued my interest a couple years ago when I found out that there are a lot of people with a deep love for it, and that got me curious as to whether that video was still around. I haven’t found any sign of it. The children’s museum is still operating, but looking at their website, it seems they’ve repurposed the green screen booth as a dressup station, though they seem to be using the same CRT screen to show the results.
content warning: suicide
Darks Pandemonium (no success, some still available):
This would definitely not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in college I came across a dark ambient musician who went by the name Darks Pandemonium, or sometimes Saintantric. A few of his songs, mostly remixes (which he called “darkslows”) are still on YouTube, but circa 2008-2009 he had several albums available for order, and some songs from each downloadable for free on his website (darkspandemonium.com). His albums weren’t available at the time, most of them were from earlier. The music was offputtingly dark and disturbing at first blush, but when I gave it a chance I remember it having surprising depth, mostly in its textures.
Somewhere along the way I moved computers and lost a lot of the music I’d had at the time, including everything from Dark’s Pandemonium. When I went looking for it to download again, I found the site under construction. Looking deeper, I was saddened to see that apparently the musician had committed suicide sometime in 2010.
The website was archived on the Wayback Machine, but it didn’t capture any of the mp3 files or images. I remember the site also originally had a custom cursor, which was a grimacing demonic face that left a trail when you moved it within the browser window.
Because of what happened with the musician, I think it would be inappropriate to try and contact people to get a hold of the music.
Periodically I look around and see if any of the albums are floating around, but I would guess they were probably CDRs sold directly by mail. Searching did reveal what seems to be an unrelated band from Ohio by the same name, though spelled Dark’s Pandemonium with the apostrophe. The name comes from a Ray Bradbury book, so it isn’t terribly unlikely for two bands to have settled on it separately. The band only had one release, a 6-minute EP in 1988, titled Taunting Mr. Sunshine, and after seeing copies of it for a long time I bought one on eBay to give it a listen, and it’s some pretty nice 80s gothic rock. It’s documented online but the music isn’t available anywhere. I digitized the record, but I’ve noticed that a YouTube upload of it has been taken down before, so I figure someone still keeps track of its copyright.
