Dear children of the new millennium,

Don’t think I don’t see you there, sitting around in your folks house thinking you’ve got the coolest childhood on the planet.  Sure, you guys had access to the internet like 15 years before we did, and sure you probably know more about online porn than any of the most hardcore pervs in the world out there.  But you know what?  Your childhood still sucks, and I’m about to show you why.

Your toys suck!

Yeah, that’s right, you felt that one didn’t you?  You think because you have crazy computer animated shows and ridiculous tween TV dramas that the marketing is going to be any better?  WRONG!  I bet you didn’t even know that Happy Meals used to come in an actual box that looked like a house!  Yeah, yeah, they did.  You know those toys you can get from fast food places?  Those suck too!  Yours are all plastic, filled with redundant warnings that simply point out common sense things, but you’re too dumb to know not to put small parts in your mouth, so they warn you.

Also, plastic?  Puh-lease.

When I was a kid they made our toys out of straight up die-cast metal.  METAL!  We could use our Matchbox cars in a fight if we wanted, and totally fuck another kid up (he deserved it, he said The Goonies sucked).

There were also original toy lines out there promoting cool stuff.  My Pet Monster, M.A.S.K., M.U.S.C.L.E. men, the list goes on and on.  What can you throw in the mix here to compete?  Beyblade?  Yu-gi-oh?  Pokemon? I’m sorry, you would be devoured by my toys.

My Pet Monster, badasserized

Your playgrounds are made for girlie-men.

Getting called out to the playground used to be a threat when kids did it.  That shit was straight up metal and cement.  Playground fights made New York muggings look like child’s play.  If you didn’t think that the cement and metal was bad, well how about the fact that they lined the entire playground with sharp bits of mulch and bark.  I shit you not I scratched my cornea as a kid because of that.

And you know what, we played on it and it made us tough.  Playgrounds today should be renamed “boregrounds” because there is no adventure.

“Oh Jimmy, wanna go crawl through the plastic tube?”

Jimmy, you need to tell that kid to fuck off, find a time machine and go jump off the metal spider-web contraption that probably killed 5 kids that very day.

Plastic playground equipment?  With that mental process kids will never know the joy of falling from monolithic monkey bars, and surviving a possibly fatal fall.  They will never know the joy of sliding down a metal slide that had been baking in the sun for hours, only to walk away with a charred ass.  The playground was kid street, that’s how you learned to survive.  Now kids are just too safe.

Your movies are boring.

Look at the movies that come out for kids now and ask yourself, who are they trying to entertain?  If you answered “the kids” you’re an idiot.  Kids don’t care what’s on the moving picture box, so long as it is on, all these films tailor so much of their contents for adults, because they know that they are the ones suffering.  And boy do parents have to suffer through kids movies now.

Typical kids movies of the 80s were:

The Goonies

The Neverending Story

The Labyrinth

The Dark Crystal

Those are just the big names too.  If you go back and watch these, you’ll see they are all incredibly fucked beyond belief.  We were scared into our awesomeness.  Don’t believe me?  Check out a few of these clips and imagine watching these movies when you were 5 or 6 years old.

And now this is what kids have to suffer with when they go to the theater.

See what I mean, I could barely even put that trailer in here without falling asleep.  So kids, if you wanna argue, I’ll bet my Luck Dragon that Sloth terrifies your talking deer friend that poops Hershey’s kisses.

Weak Saturday Mornings.

When I woke on that glorious day Saturday, the day for past tense sitting, there were 2 things I did.  1. Loaded up on an awesome breakfast washed down by some chocolate milk. 2. Watched the hell out of Saturday morning cartoons.

Yes, Saturday was a mystical vortex of everything amazing all crunched into one morning.  It was a great way to break up breakfast and lunch.  Oh, and not just one channel had cartoons, no every channel had cartoons.  These were the pre-cable days, so they had to entertain kids.  I mean anything after 12 turned into old reruns of b-rate action movies or Orca anyway, and by that time we were already outside beating each other with broom handles.

Kids now, pssh, they have no dedicated cartoon time.  They have no TGIF, they have no SNICK, no they have tween dramas that deal with things that no parent wants their kids thinking about.  Name me one show kids watch now that is more notorious than Are You Afraid Of The Dark? Don’t you dare say Spongebob.

No Imagination

I could do anything with a fucking box as a kid.  Seriously, that shit could go from being a car, to a plane, to a dungeon, to a fort in 5 minutes flat.  You give a kid a box now and they act like Maru the cat.

We used to play night games, where you ran around, at night, with flashlights and scared the piss out of each other.  Fuck the street light rule, we lived dangerously.  Give a kid a stick, it was magically a sword and his sibling was the dragon he had to slay.  Kids played with action figures.  We made narratives, our own sound effects, the works!

Now kids play video games.  You give them an action figure and it collects dust under the bed.  So sad.  But I mean, kids can’t even get up off their asses long enough now to not get diabetes by the time they are 5.  When they are forced to go outside they just sit there confused.  Where are the Orcs they need to slay?  What is this wondrous contraption that makes grass shorter?  We have short circuited the creativity nodes in their brain.  These kids have turned into zombies.

This is my final point on imagination, go up to a 7 year old and start playing the invisible gun game with him.  You know the one.  What happens?  That’s right the father thinks your a pedophile.  Now, walk up to another 20-something person (boy or girl) and pull out your handgun.  What happens?  EPIC INVISIBLE WAR ENSUES!

So kids, you can brag all you want about having awesome game consoles, and high tech movies to watch at your own free will.  But when it comes down to it, if you met me when I was your age, I’d kick your ass…Thundercats style.

*SNARF*