#childhood media

[jahodenka-angrestovka]

Pojďte pane, budeme si hrát (1965 - 1973, Břetislav Pojar, Miroslav Štěpánek), 1. série - Československo (Czechoslovakia)

[gonerboy]

The little girl with the hat!! I used to watch her cartoon so much!! What's her name?

This one?

She's Madeline!

A cartoon based on a children's book series about a little girl that lives in a house in Paris that's covered with vines. It's an adorable show that I used to watch with my siblings all the time, and I still have most of the songs memorized word for word! 😅 

They're remarkably catchy, and the show has a charm that sticks with me to this day.

[weirdgirljulia]

There is this anime movie I've only watched once in my life but that lives rent free in my head ever since, and that was like 5 years ago.

So basically is about the MC (no idea if they were a boy or a girl) who has a... i think at the start they were friends but there were romantic intentions.

So the MC's love interest takes them to meet their family wich is composed of many different and colorful characters and they live in this old classic japanesse home. Also there's some subplot about some kinda metaverse thing and things happening there, and I distinctly remember one of the family members was a younger girl that was in a closed dark room with a computer and some fans/other cooling device.

One of the family members was a firefighter or paramedic, maybe there were two different characters idk.

So this uncle/distant relative comes with some kinda of legal fuckery to take the family home for himself out of spite 'cuz he's kind of an asshole and nobody likes him.

Remember that subplot about the metaverse?? Well it comes somehow (a huge part of the plot is blurred or gone from my mind) and so the MC, the younger computer girl I mentioned and I think the love interest too had to beat up some kind of virus or hacker wrecking havoc in there, and also the family has to get fans and coolers and such things to keep up with the super computer they are using for that.

In retrospect maybe the uncle/other relative wasn't trying to do anything bad and was just kinda around but nobody liked him, I don't remember wich one was it.

Also I distinctly remember it was not from Studio Ghibli. There's a movie on netflix wich is about some kind of digital world too but is about something different and the artsyle is different from what I recall too.

So that's that, it bugged me a lot back then that I couldn't remember it, specially since other movies like Kiki's Delivery Service or The Return of the Cat I did found out (both those two, and Spirited away I distinctly recall beign aired in the same channel back then).

I know my following is little but if anyone got any lead I'd be the most grateful girl ever.

[izziessogay]

the wife is listening to Sia, I'm watching Harry Potter... depression times are for engaging in problematic comfort media

[ablatheringblatherskite]

no I didn't cry when I first watched Up because I was FIVE 😭.

[rememberwhoyouwere]

[The Lion King, 1994]

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Had to piggyback off this cute post with an even cuter one, one of my favorites from when I was little. Bert tries to give his nephew Brad a bath but then Ernie balks at the lack of bath toys:

There’s nothing cuter than baby muppets.

Obviously this is an adorable bit but I'm so struck by how different this is from so many little kid shows today like.......the muted colors. no background noise. no sound effects. you can literally hear Jim Henson breathing between his lines. Ernie is talking very slowly, meandering, letting the kids digest the info. it's a full minute before you get the payoff of it all. man

[xx-b34utiful-dr34m3r-xx]

Fk it, dropping all my Bitstrips comics

Because I want to clean out space on my computer, obviously.

For those of you who don't know, Bitstrips was a comic-making site that existed in the 2000s and shut down in 2016. It had quite a versatile (in my opinion) character builder as well as a comic maker which I haven't seen in any other comic making site. It had this whole little social aspect (comments, followers, putting other people in your own stuff) incorporated in it as well, and I really enjoyed using it! Bitmoji is its successor, and I could care less about it (I absolutely hate that it's incorporated into Snapchat, a platform I also hate, and I'm just annoyed that I also I see it everywhere - even in real life, in PROFESSIONAL settings).

Sometime in 2018, Bitstrips actually reached out to me (I think via the email I registered when I signed up) and sent me all the comics I created on the site so I didn't have to actually go in and screenshot/archive anything before it shut down! I can only hope other former Bitstrips users received the same thing...

Another reason I felt like dropping this is because I joined Bitstrips in 2014, literally a decade ago. Felt like recognizing it for what would have been my account's ten-year anniversary, you know?

I'm yapping. TLDR, I'm posting links to comics I made on a site I was a part of ten years ago that happens to be nostalgic to me. Feel free to read and cringe along with me.

If for some reason you can't see any of this stuff, Postimages (the image-hosting site I used to upload everything) probably hates your wifi network - I know for a fact I had difficulty accessing stuff I uploaded on this site using a more public network compared to my own personal home network. Can't really help you with that, sorry.

Also, if you see anything scribbled out in black...... I'm ashamed to admit I referred to myself by my real name on the site. -_- In hindsight, I kind of deserve that shame as I picked a pretty cringy username.

CLICK READ MORE FOR THE LINKS!

→ Remixes (think of this like reblogs/video responses, where someone would make a comic and you could "remix" it and put your own spin onto it)

→ Cosmic Club THE SERIES (a series based off a concept I had featuring alien girls themed off the planets of the solar system. This series was never actually finished and I was working on Episode 1, Part 3 when the site announced it was closing)

→ Cosmic Club EXTRAS (stuff I had originally made to be a part of the series itself, but once I started actually making series comics with a story behind them, these just became one-offs)

→ It's All About Moi (a little series thing I made later in my Bitstrips career, meant to feature things specifically relating to myself and my friends)

→ Original Characters (the "Sugar Rush OCs revamped" comics are WIPs that I was making right when Bitstrips announced they were closing)

→ Prima Ballerina (a series based off of characters and concept I came up with when I was like, 9-10 years old. A girl aspires to become a ballerina. It was never actually finished and was on hold by the time the site announced it was closing)

→ My Little Pony (don't judge, this fandom occupied my childhood for a good long while)

→ Theme of the Day comics (Bitstrips would post a random theme/word/concept each day, and users could submit comics related to said theme. There was definitely a lot of competition to see who could submit their comics the fastest, as those would tend to get seen earlier and thus voted up into higher rankings. I definitely tried to be one of the first people to post my comics, with varying results lol)

→ Random assorted comics

[saltysirensongss]

Meaningful Childhood Media: a Reflection

The ocean and I have always had a love-hate relationship. From a young age I was obsessed with the water, from swimming classes to lakeside day trips, I simply couldn’t get enough, my fingers in a permanently wrinkled state. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where things went wrong but if I had to guess I would blame the Persian New Year. Every spring I was allowed to choose out a half a dozen live goldfish from the store to bring home and display on our Haft-Sin. As per tradition (which no family member could explain) the goldfish is meant to do a little roll at the beginning of the new year. And roll they did… I witnessed an insurmountable number of goldfish pass in varying degrees of horrific ways from slow fades to suicidal leaps onto the living room floor. Before I knew it I had developed a fear of goldfish which slowly but surely evolved into an irrational fear of all fish. I stopped eating fish, I stopped walking by the fish sections of pet stores and I forced our family to switch to plastic fish for our traditions. What I couldn’t shake however, was my fascination. 

A traditional haft-sin table setup

I remember the day we downloaded netflix. It had become available to stream on the Wii in late 2010 (Nintendo) and I, aged 8, convinced my mom that it was absolutely necessary. I was told we would only have it for a month, meaning as long as it was free to us. I don't remember what options were available to me at this time but being a little water obsessed kid I was drawn to two particular shows which some could argue represent the two ends of the media spectrum: H2O: Just Add Water, and River Monsters, both of which as their names imply were ocean related. 

I consider H2O: Just Add Water one of the most influential shows of my childhood. H2O tells the tale of three Australian teens who unknowingly find themselves cursed with the ability to turn into mermaids. Cleo, Rikki and Emma were forced to navigate their highschool years without ever touching a drop of water which as you can imagine put them in plenty of high stake situations. Situations that I would recreate both alone and with friends. This show provided us with endless hours of imagination fodder both in and out of the pool. This was a show that all my female friends and I watched avidly, but my friends didn’t all have netflix so it became a show that they would come over to watch. My permitted screen time was restricted to two episodes a day so the selection of which episodes we would watch would become colourful debates in themselves where we would discuss the show in depth and advocate for our preferred storylines. 

Just three mermaids hanging out

My minute amount of screen time paired with the fact that we were one of the few families I knew to be subscribed to an SVOD makes me believe my parents were better off than they let on as both are common traits of higher income families (Rideout et al.)  which is probably why they let us keep Netflix after that first month.

On the other hand, my parents have a small friend group of three couples that they’ve had long before me that all together managed to produce a sum total of six children, all roughly the same ages. Within this group I sadly found myself to be the only girl. Growing up with a group of boys at arm's length played a heavy influence on the type of media I was exposed to. While my school friends would come over to watch fairy cartoons and mermaid shows the first thing the boys convinced me to watch on netflix was River Monsters. River Monsters hosted by Jeremy Wade was not nearly as terrifying as the name suggests but still a complete 180 from the content I would have chosen for myself. River Monsters was a docuseries which followed host Jeremy Wade as he travelled around the world to remote locations where legends of river monsters prevailed. He would then interview locals about recent incidents and anecdotal experiences with the supposed monsters and would explain the potential species who could be responsible. As scary as this sounds Jeremy Wade is a lovely man who treated every case gently and worked hard to demystify these “monsters” with a sense of positivity I could only hope to one day achieve. Watching this show on an SVOD again played a huge role in how we consumed the material. The eldest of the boys would get to pick which episode he found most intriguing and we were all made to watch it. 

Jeremy taking a dip in a piranha infested tub to prove their innocence

While this show may have had less impact on me socially, as my school friends were far from interested, it did start me on a path of being very interested in biology. When I tell people that I like this show they often feel the need to blame it for my Ichthyophobia, however I would argue that it serves more as a form of exposure therapy. My mother in particular was adamantly against me watching the show as she considered it “not for kids”. This always confused me because my parents would allow me to consume a great deal of heavier topics so long as it was served in cartoon form, like the movie, Grave of the Fireflies which my mom brought home from the library one day having not checked the rating or synopsis, or Coraline which I was dragged to see against my will. I soon learned that what my parents perceived to be appropriate was based on “their view of childhood, rather than what children would choose themselves" (Steemers) which to them meant I was to be watching animated features. While these shows are clearly marketed to vastly different audiences I enjoyed them equally and consider both to have had great impacts on my life. I do believe that they’re not as opposite as some might believe, afterall, being a teen mermaid is pretty much as scary as swimming with piranhas. I think another interesting thing the two shows have in common is their accents. River Monsters was filmed largely in South America and H2O was filmed in Australia so I got to hear the classic Australian as well as British (Jeremy’s accent) accents on a day to day basis. Both shows gave me a glimpse of what life was like in other parts of the world which in river monsters often looked very different from my own. Television is a great resource for children such as myself to be exposed to other cultures, giving me a chance to reside in what Marshall McLuhan would call a global village (Lemish).

[digitalmemoriez]

✫･ﾟ*.2005･ﾟ✫*.

[xx-b34utiful-dr34m3r-xx]

OH MY GOD

The most vivid memory I have with this game was when I went to Hawaii with my family and I brought along this dinky little laptop thing that had (I think) Windows Vista on it. We were waiting at an airport to either go back home to the mainland US or another Hawaiian island when I got bored, so I pulled out my laptop to play some games. For whatever reason, I couldn't figure out how to connect to Wifi, so I obviously couldn't go on the internet. However, there were pre-installed games that didn't require internet to play, and this was one of them! Pretty sure I just played this for however long it took for us to board our flight. 🥴

hey! hey! purble place. i have a windows 10 rn so i cant play it *SNIFF*

[productofaritual]

It's always "omg how have you not grown up with [insert incredibly popular AMERICAN media]" maybe because I didn't fucking understand english at that time like I might not have known what Sesame Street was but have you ever seen Kouzelá školka? Huh? Cvrček55 ring any bells? No? Exactly. Piss off

[arcanegifs]

Caitvi Scenes: 29/? ↳ "Uh, careful. That's your parents' money you're dropping."

[grendel-menz]

To find some kind of idea, am I full or am I empty?

[xx-b34utiful-dr34m3r-xx]

I remember next to nothing about the Lalaloopsy one (although I do remember seeing commercials of the dolls on TV), but I VIVIDLY remember Devilish Hairdresser and Avata Star Sue.

I literally understood nothing in the Sue games but hell they were still really fun.

i remember playing these games when i was younger

I went to a bunch of old flash game websites to play most of these again using basilisk cuz flash is ded lol

[sancteye]

oh mygod Runnnn