Camp Candy

YouTube is a beautiful thing. It's quite shocking how much things like Myspace and YouTube have blown up (not plastic-explosives kind of blown up) in the past year. I set up a myspace account just because Xanga had become quite droll (apparently many more people had made the migration before I had). I found a couple of friends on there, but for several months i had little more than a few things in the "About me" category and a picture of myself. Then everyone and their brother got a myspace, and suddenly it's this thriving internet community.

YouTube's story is pretty similar.

I'm not here to give a written history on the now corporate giants YouTube and Myspace, so I'll move on.

I made a YouTube account in order to group a couple of videos together I didn't want to forget about (I guess I didn't want to just Bookmark them [yes, bookmark not favorite, Firefox is how I roll, dawg] ). I didn't expect to keep it, so I put in the first thing I though of as a name: Yoyobratch (Fake ultra-white ghetto Aaron strikes again [Yoyo as in "yo yo, wut up, dawg" and not "I love Duncan Yo-yos"). After continually adding videos, I came to a conclusion:

I was stuck as yoyobratch.

[An aside: as I am writing this I am eating a few cool ranch Doritos (the best chips created by man)and drinking orange juice. It is a startlingly great combo.]

I stumbled upon a video of the intro sequence for an old cartoon I watched as a young kid. It was called Camp Candy and, as the name suggests, it's about a summer camp run by none other than John Candy himself (pre-death John Candy [post-death John Candy wouldn't have worked out as well {though it was animated, so it would have been possible} ] ). This was one of the shows that I got up for on Saturday morning.

To be honest, as I flip through the channels on any given Saturday morning (not that that happens much [ever] ) I can't imagine anything offered to be worth getting up for on a Saturday morning. But back in my day there was quality children's programming. Like John Candy running an animated kids camp. Or the NES System's animated commercial Captain N: The Game Master.

Okay. So it wasn't amazing then either. But when I heard the intro music, oh man. I was instantly and magically 7 years old again, sitting on our old blue couch with crusties in my eyes and a Ghostbuster toy in each hand. My mom is in the kitchen, knowing not to speak to me until I was ready (I, uh, wasn't much of a conversationalist in the mornings. My only response would be "Don't look at me! Don't talk at me!") The couch cushions are sitting vertically against the couch and I am sitting on the springs in a makeshift fort. In front of me is some sort of remote control box.

Now that I think about it, this this confuses me. It worked as a remote control but was connected to the TV with a long wire. . . so it wasn't really remote, more like attached, but with a long wire so you can sit down and use it. I guess an attached, but with a long wire so you can sit down and use it control doesn't have the same ring, so it's considered a remote control. It was about the size of two bricks (and about as heavy) with a slider nob on the front. On one side of the control box was 1, and the other was 34 (back when there were only thirty-some channels, even on cable). If you wanted to watch MTV, you'd slide it to 24 and it changed the channel. Now, I know that even though it was 1989, TV's had actual, legitimate remote controls at the time. Here's my best Jerry Seinfeld impression:

What was the deal with that thing?

I digress. Hearing the minute worth of music and seeing something that I haven't seen for nearly twenty years brings back a flood of memories. And yet none of them are bad. It's easy to forget about the hard stuff , the bad stuff that you have to deal with as a kid. When we grow up, we seem to only let ourselves remember the good things. The candy, games, and fun.

What is it about this that I really miss that much?

Do I miss Camp Candy itself? Probably not, it was a mediocre cartoon. Do I miss the sleepy Saturday mornings? No, I can still do that (though I replace Camp Candy with sleep). Maybe I miss it because I know it's gone. Forever. This moment in time that is seared in my head will never happen again. Even though I may remember it vividly, I will never be 7 again in a makeshift fort and sleepily pondering the oddities of my TV remote control.

Maybe I miss it because I was really, truly happy. I didn't know any better. I hadn't yet figured out that it's a screwed-up world. People were nice and I didn't know that deep down inside, everyone's bent. I knew nothing of murder, terrorism, fraud, child molestation, or domestic abuse. All I knew was Camp Candy.

And it was good.



FUN FACT: I can bend the top joint of six of my fingers (thumbs don't count and pinkies can't). Try it with me. Stick your finger out like you're pointing at someone. Then bend just the very last joint, like your finger is a lower case r.

MUSIC SNOB: Humble Me- Norah Jones