1. The Adventures of Gamepro – Gamepro hit the stands in 1989, the first big magazine aimed at covering video games of all systems for kids. Nintendo Power was the only real competition for kids at the time, and although it only focused on Nintendo games it was a pretty stiff competitor. Both magazines featured comics, but while Nintendo’s comic was a series of one-offs relating to a specific Nintendo property Gamepro went the serial route, creating “The Adventures of Gamepro”.
The story is basically that this kid, Alex West, beats an unbeatable game and gets sucked into the TV and becomes the superhero in the game, conveniently named Gamepro. Sounds an awful lot like Captain N the Game Master, if you ask me. Regardless, the artwork was pretty good for such an artificial idea – they could have slouched a lot more than this, but they didn’t and that’s saying something:
The magazine lasted much longer than the comic did. Shocker, there.
2. Jim Henson’s Wilkins Coffee Ads – Check out some early Jim Henson puppetry with these Wilkins Coffee ads. It’s neat to see how roug the characters are with each other. Basically, the pre-Kermit character kills the other guy a few different times throughout the series of commercials. A different era, indeed.
He tries to slice the guy’s throat in the barbershop one!!!
3. Duck Tales Plushes – Enjoy this ad for Duck Tales plush toys, created by a team of people who have apparently never seen the cartoon:
4. Lend a Hand on the Land – Found this great poster over at Two Men and a Little Farm, from the WWII era asking citizens to help their farmers out since so much manpower was being sent to the front lines.
The Agricultural Camps were stations set up so civilians could help with the harvests. Beautiful poster.
5. Pete Rose Kool-Aid – This is just weird. Kool-Aid Man and Pete Rose playing future baseball on a distant planet with a bunch of kids and a couple of rockin’ guitar players. I can’t even.
-ds