Your five most involving childhood obsessions:

2. The Beatles/The Beach Boys/Rolling Stones "Start Me Up"/Billy Squier "Everybody Wants You"/Pete Seeger God Bless the Grass/Journey "Any Way You Want It"
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/He-Man/Silverhawks/Inhumanoids/Centurions/basically any cartoon that was made to sell action figures, which I also was obsessed with.
4. Police Academy series/Mannequin/Who's That Girl/Small Wonder/Out of This World/Circle of Iron/Sword of the Valiant/Clash of the Titans/Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th etc etc etc.

Spencer is she still cute?

Title: Transformers
Log line: Giant robots are able to morph into cars, trucks and planes.
Writer: John Rogers
Agent: Martin Spencer of CAA
Buyer: DreamWorks and Paramount
Price: n/a
Genre: Action
Logged: 11/3/04
More: To be adapted from a story by Tom DeSanto, which was based on the toy line from Hasbro. Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, Tom DeSanto and Angry Films’ Don Murphy will produce. DreamWorks' Steven Spielberg will executive produce. Rights first acquired in June 2003. The project was then set up at DreamWorks in July 2004.

Not a goodies, the Goodies. As in yum yum.

encyclopedia brown
star wars
getting my foot stuck in trees somehow
getting my head stuck in stairrailings somehow
the cover of queen's news of the world (i remember this absolutely fascinating me when i was four or so).

it reminds me of the ADAM my aunt used to have (wait, she still has it!)

ihttp://www.cedmagic.com/tech-info/remote-control/coleco-joystick.jpg

oh oh oh oh:

6. Choose Your Own Adventure books

LEGO

Battle of the Planets/Star Wars

Coins with holes in the middle

Pretending to be a cat

dinosaurs
greek mythology
famous american inventors
peanuts
the atomic bomb

1. Johnny Cash - at four/five, I had Sun Sessions (first record bought) and there is a photo of me greedily hugging Live At San Quentin because it was given to me for Christmas that year. I used to write him letters and drew on the postage instead of buying a stamp.

2. HORSES. Prohibited by doctors from riding, I instead followed Triple Crown racing, collected Breyer models and caned Walter Farley/Marguerite Henry/Anna Sewell. My damn dad had also left us to go look after saddle horses for showjumping friends so when we did see him it was FARM! HORSIES! If you LOVED me you'd BUY one! Horse drawing contests every fucking day in second and third grade (I won a statewide art thing with a horse drawn when I was 10).

3. Little House: entire class of girls built forts in woods, traded virtual horses for 'currency', bought sunbonnets and lunch pails at Fort Snelling (class trip place where every day is 1825) and there was even a rush to acquire Empire-waisted muslin girl's dresses. Plaits/French plaits a must. Went trick-or-treating with best friend as Laura Ingalls, me as Nellie Oleson. Can sill do a reasonable "Pa! Pa! I'm BLIND, Pa!"

4. Anything medical. Planned to be a doctor and cure cancer. Read medical books for idle pleasure from about the age of six.

These will have to tie for fifth:

Rabbits/Watership Down. It's basically Tolkein for people who care little for elves and shit. Had rabbit, Muggs, who could be trained to ride on my sledge in winter and in bike basket in summer.

Mythology. Greek, Roman and Egyptian, later very useful for correcting teachers being sloppy with Odyssey.

Religion: never had one and went shopping for God information at various services attended by families of friends, even the Jesus freaks a few doors down who my mom thought were in a cult. Told Christian Scientists I was going to med school (I was).

Witches: thank you, Elizabeth Montgomery. Decided to check out Wiccan books from library at 10 when friend's church group leader started giving the class a bit of Satan talk (not the hands-in-the-air Jesus People, these were Free Evangelicals). Formed coven for about six weeks with recruits from church group.

Ghosts. Wished we lived in haunted house with nice ghost gifted in the intelligent conversation department.

The books I remember being most obsessed with were by Susan Cooper - Mum thinks it's hilarious that on one holiday I spent a very sunny fortnight holed up in the caravan with all of the Dark Is Rising Sequence. Hmm, do you see what they've done with the covers?http://www.thelostland.com/overpuff.jpg vs http://www.thelostland.com/over.jpg

Narrowly missed the cut: making radios and playing with electronic stuff (read taking apart my parents' radios and tape decks and failing to work out how to put them back again); the Famous Five (although I was suspicious of Anne's inability to do anything other than turn a cave into a house by decorating it nicely); the Narnia books; Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger; Jules Verne; my parents' 7" collection (Beatles, Stones, Who, Beach Boys, Rocky Sharpe and the Replays [wtf?], Shirelles, Elvis); TV including Friday Film Specials,Neighbours, Round The Twist (I think it was called), Rentaghost, Playaway (Brian Cant, Jonathan Cohen, Floella Benjamin... in fact anything with Floella Benjamin in). And dinosaurs.

Thius has really got me thinking. P5O is a bit tough.

http://www.cinemaposter.com/DABmatnia.jpeg http://www.cinemaposter.com/KIWsercesamotmysliw.jpeg http://www.cinemaposter.com/SWInocnykowboj.jpeg

oops xpost

I wasn't a very obsessive child, mostly I just had phases. My sister was completely obsessed with Star Trek, which I pretended to hate, and then Star Wars, which I really did hate.

I was just reminding my sister about this on messenger, and she said "those weren't obsessions, they were healthy interests!" At the peak of her trekkiedom, she had, in her own words:
"20ish regular novels, 5 giant novels, 1 audio cassette, 2 technical manuals, 1 encyclopedia, 4ish assorted books/manuals, about 15 7" figues, 2 regular foldout playsets (in the shape of a medical tricorder and a type2 phaser) 1 giant foldout playset (in the shape of a model of the enterpriseD), 1 battery powered 12" model of locutus of borg that talked and everything, hundreds of posters&clippings and almost every episode on recorded vhs, 6 double feature episode official videos and the first 4 dvd boxsets".

(1 & 2)

2. Space 1999; it was something about being lost and abandoned and the storylines about mind control and the creepy incidental music and Victor Bergman's artificial heart. Second series rubbish, of course.

3. Abba; there was a photo I got from their UK fan club (Sheep Street, Swindon) where the four of them were stood in some Swedish meadow and Anni-Frid and Agnetha's hair was sunlit from behind and it looked like some unimaginably perfect summer, unlike the sticky, headachy, forced-to-wear-shorts-to-school ones that I seemed to experience. "Name Of The Game", "Summernight City" and "Eagle" -airbrushed exotica.

4. Trains; not the steam trains everyone presumed I must be interested in, but sleek modern things and workhorse fugly diesels and the oily electrical smell of James Street Underground and Freightliners screaming through Shotton on a wet Sunday waiting for the connection to the North Wales coast.

5. Bjorn Borg; like three of the above, he was Swedish and also from outer space. I probably should've had counselling after the '81 Wimbledon final.

1) reading. i'd go through 5 -10 library books a week.
2) swimming (synchronized).
3) my little ponies. i had the stable and the castle, but not the pretty perm hair salon.
4) mtv. my dad and i spent the summer after it launched taping songs through our stereo hook-up.
5) atari 2600, especially frogger and pitfall.

HIDDEN BONUS TRACK; Constructing entire fictional football leagues, logos and full rosters and all, and plotting out the entire season.

GOOD LORD I WAS A NERD

2. UFOs. Many evenings spent Watching the Skies.

3. Telekinesis. Many afternoons spent trying to make my bedroom wardrobe move via The Power of My Mind.

4. Marine Boy.

5. Liverpool FC. The replica kit, the bedspread, the curtains, the rug, etc etc.

Star Wars (and far too much in its wake)
Stamps
Atari
Reading (includes: Peanuts, mythology in general, Tolkien, Hardy Boys, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books)
Warner Brothers cartoons

Music, though enjoyed, didn't really kick in as obsession until later

2. Choose Your Own Adventure books. I had *loads* of these books, which have all disappeared into a black hole never to be seen again.

3. Collecting Star Wars and He-Man figures.

4. Swapping Panini album stickers at school. ET, Return Of The Jedi, Indiana Jones, The Goonies etc. My mum wanted to share her children's interests and started collecting the stickers for the Panini "Royal Family album". No idea who she did swapsies with.

5. Walking through the woods. I used to spend *hours* wandering around, climbing trees etc.

Oddly enough I reread Watership Down the other week. I put it to doubters that one can enjoy both that and Tolkien. ;-)

Yeah, wtf, dudes?

2) Imminent nuclear war and/or eschatological disaster, and how to survive it

3) Why some rocks look different on the inside than the outside (quartz, geodes, others), and breaking them open in order to investigate; corollary-wise, which rocks are good for breaking other rocks.

4) Flavors of soda and chips, such as the now-defunct Cajun Spice Ruffles and 7-Up Gold

5) Robots, why won't my parents buy them for me?

7) Linda Carter, already being Wonder Woman

I forgot about this! I was also always worrying about being kidnapped and murdered, I was very paranoid.

A) copying maps from books onto large-scale posters (South America, Africa)
B) drawing maps of fictional countries, city street systems, and school building layouts
C) starting a club where all the neighborhood kids' code names had to follow the format [OPPOSITE SEX NAME + NAME OF COUNTRY], e.g. Abby Belgium
D) AUSTRALIA

2. Reading (Encyclopedia Brown, Choose Your Own Adventure, even some Babysitters Club books I actually *ordered* from Scholastic Book Club, though with some embarrassment)

3. Beginning at age 10, and lasting most intensely through age 12: baseball and the history and statistics thereof

A) the 1989 Chicago Cubs
B) designing a simulation game with dice, which allowed me to pit AL and NL teams against each other (a later version used fictional teams and a calculator's random number generator)
C) baseball cards
D) wanting to start a baseball-oriented magazine (though getting no further than the cover design)
E) Earl Weaver Baseball computer game

4. Sierra computer games (King's Quest, Space Quest)

5. Drawing

A) caricatures of fictional people that I would then provide vital statistics for (name, age, occupation, etc.)
B) comics (in 4th and 5th grade, I drew a comic called "Old Timers" featuring an elderly married couple named Frank and Bertha -- among the infrequent topical strips was one announcing the 1988 election results)

Literally any money I had went to the Scholastic Book Club, it was sad.

Was anyone else's favorite mythology book D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths? Just Checking.

This was immediately my thought (yes, had it, loved it, still own it). As they did one for Norse myths as well, this could be the explanation for the fascination. Both those volumes were astonishingly well done, a perfect entry point.

7. Girls (I never had a "girls are yucky" phase, ever) (in third grade, I wrote a romantic fantasy about a girl I had a crush on)

8. Wanting to be, if not an artist, an actor or TV host (!) of some sort (impressions I did in fourth grade: Ronald Reagan, Joan Rivers, Julia Child)

I suppose Scholastic doesn't have to worry much about money these days given one J K Rowling.

1. horses. unlike suzy, i was allowed to ride. oh pierswah.i loved you so. if only i learned how to spell your name. i also drew horses all the time. had books full of sketches i did.
2. barbies and cabbage patch kids. i had loads of both. i used to love making clothes for them, cutting their hair and all that.
3. kalamazoo institute of arts. from age 5, every saturday all day was spent at the KIA taking classes in everything. i loved it.
4. local theater. did tons of cheezy musicals in school and with the local drama group.
5. reading. especially roald dahl, beverly cleary and enncyclopedia brown. my parents had us trained to take a book with us anywhere we went, so my brother and i both read a lot.

i feel so girly girl with the barbie and horses thing. i can't believe i'm the only person that i've noticed that admitted to loving barbie.

You people were paranoid!

Occurs to me I definitely forgot to mention a sixth and seventh -- astronomy, as a general area of study, and 'the news' -- I was watching ABC network coverage from when I was seven or so and had regularly watched news broadcasts even earlier.

1. Being run over by a snow plough/a snow plough crashing into our house
2. Being forced to eat sausage stew at school lunch (this was a very real fear, my parents had to call my school so I could go home on sausage stew days)
3. Being abducted by aliens while sleeping
4. Being killed by burglars while sleeping
5. Bigger kids rubbing snow mixed with dirt in my face in the winter

Making customised slip covers for my Piers Anthony Xanth collection.

Trying to choose which fictional character I would marry when I grew up.

Copying illustrations from mythological textbooks (me too!).

Trying to get my hair to behave like Anne's on the the covers of my TV series tie-in Famous Five novels.

Being weirded out by sex scenes from my parents' 70s pulp sci-fi.

http://images.comicbookresources.com/oddball/fannyhillman-back.jpg

OTM. I had my first kiss from a girl at age 5. (She moved away in high school and is now some kind of research biochemist in England.)

Anyway...

1) Star Wars
2) Transformers / Gobots / Robotech / Voltron (basically anything involving giant robots with shape-changing abilities)
3) Men At Work (the Aussie pop band)
4) Synths, drum machines, and sampling (someone played me Twilight 22's "Electric Kingdom" when I was 9, thus setting the tone for the next two decades of my life.)
5) Archie Comics (I had boxes of those damn Double Digests)

The weird thing about 1) & 2) is that I'm not any kind of sci-fi fan in my adulthood. I like Douglas Adams, and I shell out to see the new Star Wars flicks because I'm a sucker for punishment, but that's it.

this might help:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/g/goodiesthe_7772865.shtml

God, I'm older than the rest of you. ::laughing::

- Strawberry Shortcake dolls
- Trixie Belden books, Famous Five books, books, books, books
- Those little Disney read along with the 45 'turn the page when Tinkerbell rings her bell' books. Also my Shaun Cassidy record. Shut up.
- Setting up my sister's surfboard on her bed and climbing on, pretending I was a hot shit surfer chick. I fought crime, too. This lasted until she gave in to my repeated and endless demands to teach me to surf.
- Swimming. I was a swimmin' fool. I secretly hoped one day I would turn into a mermaid. Or an otter. I didn't really care which.

He was my first rock idol! You have to start somewhere.

and, not in order of importance:
1. Knightrider, black corvettes and camaros, British accents.
2. being a completist about reading: all books and stories by certain authors or in certain genres, systematically gone through until done.
3. Cary Grant (stemming, I think, from 'Bringing Up Baby', stemming from, definitely, cat obsession.)
4. for a time, writing stories about super-animals.
5. tying string to things (stuffed animals, lego, furniture, etc.)
6. anything remote controlled.

1. DRAGONLANCE
2. THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
3. JOLT COLA
4. LEGO AS THE PLATFORM FOR TOTAL INTEGRATION OF TOYTOWN
5. USING REAL FIRE TO SCAR AFFOREMENTIONED TOYS

"The DOG cost more than you!"

(And then I'd hit him with a pot.)

2. The hour of Little Rascals and Three Stooges two-reelers on Channel 52 (Corona, California) every weekday afternoon. And the endless Herb-Alpert-over-a-test-pattern that preceded their programming day.

3. Wanting all the neighborhood kids my age to like me and respect me and want to include me in stuff like kickball games.

4. Wanting to jump into our swimming pool in the backyard from the second-story bedroom window. I never did it, but I thought about it a lot.

5. Watching the fireworks at Disneyland every night from the same bedroom window.

Anyway... I can't narrow it to 5 either, so as soon as I list 5 I'm sure I'll think of ten more...

1. My Barbie and Sindy dolls (hey come on, I was a girl)
2. the Goodies (I watched the repeats over and over, never got bored of em)
3. Dancing, and watching dancing like Hot Gossip and the Solid Gold Dancers (how did they not fall over in those stilettos?)
4. My tape recorder, which I talked into all the time, and then played back the stuff I had said into it. Which in retrospect sounds rather bizarre and self-absorbed.
5. Drawing cartoon type stories (though I never did become any good at actual art, oddly).

There's loads of others too, like mermaids, and swimming, and gymnastics, and oh! Roller skating! Yeah....

The first time I painted clear nail polish on my fingernails, I was in third grade. I had my sister's girly girl nail polish to thank for that.

My friend and I would also record plays into them, complete with sound effects.

-- Tep

Me too!

I still have some of the tapes, its so funny to listen to.

"The three pretty ghosts. One day, there were three girls lying in bed. And, a man came along, and woke them up, and stabbed them!"

(you then hear my mum in the background shout "Tracy!" in this disgusted tone)

It then went on about them being put in coffins- "two in glass coffins, and one in a special place... cuz she was important. The other two said it wasnt fair".

wtf was I on as a kid?

*sigh*

those recorders are hard to find now. Needed one for school last year and only a couple of teachers had them, guarded them with their lives.

1. Star Wars
2. Madonna
3. Having parties for my teddy bear which included forcing my mom to make it cakes
4. My Little Ponies (but NOT real horses or ponies, which I hated)
5. pouring sand in my mom's dog's mouth and making it wear pots on its head

ally: little debbie cakes. kids are stupid, they won't know.

Barbie! My sister and I had about 5 each, we were toally obsessed with them. I used to sew them outfits, and our playroom was totally taken over by them.

Sailing, swimming, canoeing, anything in the water. My neice seems to have inherited this- I took her to the beach on her 1st birthday this year, and she was all into swimming. She likes to put her head under water & blow bubbles & kick her feet.

Rah! Rah! Remy

(also, c*l*m names remind me of garbagepail kid names. sorry for derailing thread)

im not giving up on it either!

(Need to ask you a question re: Thanksgiving week, but more on that in an e-mail or something. Not tonight, am falling asleep and will soon be incoherent.)

Me? I fear I am being subsumed by the hive-mind

1) Making bases (and all that goes with it, bike rides in fields etc etc)
2) Dinosaurs! (when three I apparently corrected a grown man who was holding forth on the subject, explaining patiently that he didn't mean diplodocus, me meant brachiosaur)
3) Norse / Greek / Roman / English history and mythology wtf (I'm thinking we were a bunch of kids who thought there had to be more to life than this, see also 4)
4) Alan garner / Dark is Rising / Chronicles of Prydain (Do you SEE)
5) Girls, specifically Cl4r3 G04lby (le sigh)

I was never a Barbie girl but I played with them - my best friend in grade school had older brothers and sisters who were already out of school by the time she started and therefore had the very first Barbie, Midge and Skipper as well as every accessory possible. We were always annoyed that my Breyer horses were just that bit too small to take Barbies.

http://www.mustangs4us.com/Summer2003/CLOUD.jpg

Also, very very into Wonder Woman (you could make her bracelets with standard school Dixie cups) and Chinese/Japanese stuff like pandas.

-dressing up my cats. some were more tolerant than others. cabbage patch kid clothes seem to fit most cats fairly well.

- building forts. we had 8 acres, most of it fields and woods, so i had many many forts around the yard. the best were inside ancient and giant lilac trees, which formed perfect domes just big enough for kids to stand up in.

- 'money making schemes'. i can't remember many of them, but my best friends and i were contstantly thinking up ways to make money.

- falling out of the hammock.

Forts: sites for our forts included the swamp, the wild-growth promontory on the banks of the creek/lake that bisected the municipal golf course, aunt's land on banks of same creek, little 'forest' with possible fox den. But really everyione wanted a hollowed-out tree thanks to reading My Side of the Mountain. We also had the Summerhouse in our back yard for playing Pioneers in.

Chinese skipping rope: in, out, side-by-side, on, off, chisel!

Four-square and two-square.

The other day I was walking thru the local park and watched this bunch of kids shove a shopping trolley down a slipperydip. It was pretty amusing. Then one of the kids said "aw man I wish we'd filmed that.... hey [so and so], did you bring your phone with you?"

Ah modern times.

I was also obsessed with Breakin, Beat Street and Krush Groove....where I got my first taste of Force MD's.

Fat shoe laces and high top Puma's.

Meaning if you didn't have argumentative families you'd like Greek myth *and* elves?

(we were not argumentative and NOT into elves and that crap) i read a lot, but that's part of the background innit. no specific books, though I read Narnia several times (prob because they were the first long books i read by myself, if Alice books are short)

apart from the gym, i was archetypal nerd/geek material. oh yes

1. Roald Dahl
2. Beverly Cleary/Romana Quimby
3. Amelia Bedelia
4. Curious George
5. Clifford
6. Babar
7. Choose your own adventures

Fuck yeah. That's why I'm editing an encylopedia right now. Goddamn yachting article.

Was it Do Bananas Chew Gum? I don't remember a "not being able to spell cute" part -- wait, maybe it's coming back now -- specifically, but it was about a kid with an LD problem of some kind (the title coming from questions a shrink asked while evaluating him), and it looks like we read the same books. Same author as How to Sink a Sub and the one about the entrepreneurial kid (his word) who sold "no frills milk" by renting a cow and selling turns milking it, stuff like that.

Yes! I didn't know anyone else who had them. Did they disappear after we were kids?

Fuck yeah, seconded, to Guiness and Book of Lists. I would read them from cover to cover. In 6th grade I moved up to the almanac. There was also this really cool book in my house called "This Baffling World", I think, that had articles about and photos of UFOs and other stuff.

Another author I was somewhat obsessed with: GORDON KORMAN.

1) Roald Dahl, especially Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny, the Champion of the World. Roald Dahl -- The BFG, specifically -- is the first "chapter books" author who was read out loud to my first grade class, and consequently was the author of the first chapter books I read myself, because instead of getting Curious George, Frog and Toad, and Dr Seuss from the library the next time we went, I looked for Roald Dahl. (I read The Great Glass Elevator before I'd read or watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is probably why I didn't mind reading Dance Dance Dance before A Wild Sheep Chase.)

2) Alice in Wonderland. When I was five years old, my parents took in a foster son seven years older than me, because they had already adopted two infants and were only eligible for fostering-prior-to-possible-adoption at that point (neither of my parents is from a large family, nor are any of their parents, so I have no idea where this urge came from unless they were just opening one box of Cracker Jack after another looking for the sailor tattoo). Foster Brother and I did not exactly get along, to say the least, except for the time my mother made him take me along to see Flash Gordon. He didn't stay with us all that long -- but the Easter he was with us, my parents, as usual, gave everyone a book in their Easter basket along with the candy; one of us got The Wizard of Oz, the other Alice in Wonderland (my younger brother got one of the Beatrix Potter books, he couldn't read yet). The best thing about FB leaving is he left his book behind and I got to keep both Oz and Wonderland. Booyah, pally!

3) Comic books, mostly DC comic books, mostly old Superman stories where he got turned into a giant super-donkey by red kryptonite; also one of those record-and-book sets about Spider-Man, in which this guy ("Draco"?) turned into a dragon by accident.

4) Dr Seuss, long after I stopped reading other picture books. Likewise, Dr Seuss was the only author I liked to have read out loud to me after I learned to read. My father, in my best memory of him, read Fox in Socks every night for literally months, because we kept asking for it again.

5) The Phantom Tollbooth. The older brother of one of my friends down the street was old enough to quasi-babysit us when necessary, and was cooler about it than I would have been at his age; over the course of, I don't know, a summer, a month?, he told us this wild story about this kid with a magic car in this weird Wonderland-sounding place, with a dog named Tock for a friend, and all these adventures and princesses and stuff. He'd taken The Phantom Tollbooth -- the book he told me to read when I asked him where he'd "learned the story" -- and added bits of the Oz books to it, and apparently a lot of Dr Who, which I've still only seen a couple episodes of.

The Book of Lists had a SEX chapter!

My mom taped this chapter shut in my copy, and I NEVER CUT THE TAPE.

can anyone remember a book (or, more likely, a short story) about a family of (i think) pheasants or deer (or another commonly hunted animal) that hunt people? i remember reading this, and it sounds roald dahl to me, but i haven't been able to find it since.

er, I wasn't sporty.

Oops,

Yosemite.

I remember one lunch time at school, I just sat in the adventure playground, they had these cool cube things where you could just hide from the world...anyway, I spent the time just looking at the same set of Lego instructions and catalogue.

No Ned, nor EZ Bake. My mom didn't trust us not to burn the house down.

:-( How horrid!

Remember playing "ice cream man" by turning your BigWheel upside down and spinning the wheel? I have no idea what the fuck the deal with that was, but I did it regardless.

Another one:
Sticky, multi-textured food - not just candy, but things like the gum with liquid in the middle, those chocolate cupcakes with 'cream' in the middle, tootsie pops (with, yes, tootsie roll in the middle.) Anything with something in the middle, really. Like two foods in one.

IT IS ALL COMING BACK.

Wow, I thought I was the only boy who did that! Did you read them covertly?

"No Coins, Please", by Gordon Korman. I found this at a used bookstore a few years ago, and couldn't resist picking it up - it made for surprisingly good light reading (I had a long bus trip).

Ahem, I believe I stated upthread that I owned *several* Babysitters' Club books -- which, btw, allowed me to explain Bakhtin's concept of dialogism in an advanced-level English class by referencing the Babysitters' Club Super-Specials (wherein each chapter is a different girl's diary entry). Although my prof had no idea what I was talking about, the girls in the class were enlightened and impressed.

Yet another one:
Obsession with any kind of secret passageways, attic doors, smaller than usual doors, those doors that are cut in half so either part can open independent of the other, etc. Where will they take me? Magical places? The crawlspace is not, for the record, magical.

Yes, my sister and I had a game when we were on vacation in a strange city where we would imagine where various secret doors and entryways could be hidden; eg, "That manhole is secretly an elevator to an underground passage," or "If you pull on that street sign, it opens a secret door in the side of that building," etc.

- MONKEY! The TV show that is. We used to go to the backyard and play Mokey with sticks and stuff. I always played Tripitaka so I could just sit around and be all benign *cackle*.
- Waterslides - either the full on proper kind at water parks or in a pinch, the Slip N Slide we had in our yard. Oh, the grass burns.
- the trampoline. Loved that thing. Spent forever trying to train myself out of the fear of doing somersaults. Got there for a while, then sprained my neck in gymnastics when 14, and got the Fear again.
- Merlin, Simon, Speak n Spell and all those other clunky bleepy mind puzzle electronic gizmos.

The Pearl Harbor one which is great for just the OUTFITS those dudes are wearing.

The Titanic one which is pretty much probably the basis for the film Titanic, as the review states.

Carl Macek, you're a magnificent bastard.

I liked Greek and Roman mythology and these Usborne books about greek and Roman history but I blame it all on having a failed classics major as a dad.

I was into Barbies (not getting the Barbie Dreamhouse is one of my life's major disappointments), Jem, Playmobil, Fabuland Lego, blocks, BSC books and various other series books, books of FACTS, dress up, puppets, Christmas lists from the Sears and Penney's catalog, Strawberry Shortcake, my doll house. I was rather particular about things; I hated losing parts to toys and would never ever cut Barbie's hair and would never let other children color in my coloring books.

I was also terrified of losing things down the gap in the elevator to my dad's studio.

I never got anything from any of these catalogs because my parents are mean.

I was also rather taken with all my parents' friends, they were all sort of hippie/arty.

Obsessions at the mall: Sullivan's department store toy department and the rolls of stickers at the front of the Hallmark store.

1. microwaving dough

Not only do I know what you're talking about, I probably read every single one of those Sunfire romances! The really bad thing is, early this summer I saw a huge lot of them for sale really cheap on ebay and in a fit of nostalgia decided to bid on it. Now I have a huge stack of them sitting on my bookshelf and I feel very silly. If anyone wants one, I'd be happy to send them off.

YES YES YES!

i loved those. aside from the titanic, the others i remember were about the great depression - one featured a girl who went from oklahoma or wherever to hollywood and became a movie star, and another one was about a girl whose wealthy family lost everything in the stock market crash. the stress was so awful that her father had a stroke, further complicating their poverty.

what about the CHEERLEADERS series?

I somehow missed out on the Sunfire books but was a big VC Andrews fan.

what else did I like? hmm purple, stickers (loved the pickle and grass scratch & sniff), records, heavy metal magazines, playing school.

Creating elaborate rollercoasters out of building blocks and hotwheels track for marbles to roll around on.

Setting up war scenes with those plastic green army guys, especially putting them in a fake fireplace to pretend that they were getting burned alive.

Drawing designs for "traps" where say a rollercoaster would suddenly go through a trapdoor and all the riders whould have to jump out before it crashed and make their way through an elaborate maze of torture to win a bunch of money.

Playing dj/singing along with my dad's and sisters' records.

runner up: my carpentry set

Horses

Reading - in 3rd grade I decided I would read every book in the town library and got very obsessive about it. Also, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and the Happy Hollisters.

Bobby Sherman (Mr. Jaq thinks this is "cute" and has given me quite a collection of albums and singles in picture sleeves of Mr. Sherman in his black leather pants, adorable hair in his eyes and pouty lips. I'm over it now.)

totally. when I was in Seattle last I went to the U. of Washington bookstore specifically to revisit the shelf where I first found his books, but they had - boo - remodeled the interior, depriving me of the experience.

the trampoline. Loved that thing. Spent forever trying to train myself out of the fear of doing somersaults. Got there for a while, then sprained my neck in gymnastics when 14, and got the Fear again.

I've got medals and shit for trampolining. I competed at national level! The thought of doing backwards somersaults fears and amazes me now, yet I could tuck and pike, forwards and backwards, with the best of them once.

2. occult stuff - Tarot cards, astrology, witchcraft, etc.

3. my numerous childhood fears, most notably robots, quicksand and dinosaurs (all of which roamed free in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin...)

4. ballet and anything dance-related.

5. reading - it started with the Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books in the attic, then moved on to Choose Your Own Adventures, VC Andrews, Stephen King, and from there to this ridiculous booklust for numerous subjects, both fiction and non

Prince: circa Purple Rain
Running as fat as I could in the field behind our house (I think it might've been Olympic training)
Lego (especially space station ones)
My older sister's Judy Blume books
Cutting / pasting pictures out of magazines (don't dare call it scrapbooking!)

Baseball: Either playing or listening to games on the radio during the Yastrzemski / Mantle years. Baseball cards were pretty big stuff. The duds went to my bike, clipped to the fenders with clothespins to rub against the spokes making motorcycle sounds.

Da Beatles

Snow forts, sledding, skating and the wintry stuff. Not shoveling though, unless it meant a day off from school.

Lee Cailler, Leslie Smith, Nanette Elliot, Nancy Bartlett, Nancy Thomas. I guess I knew there was something going on , but damned if I knew what.

HELL YES THANKS was the obvious reply. So she totally bought it for me. How cool.

I don't know if Remy still reads ILE (?) but he should really try SCUBA diving.

I used to play Monkey with my friends as well. We always fought over who would be get to be Monkey. I often ended up as Sandy, which is interesting as the Sandy side of my personality seems to be the dominant one.

classy.

1. my society of MARBLES and their very intricate friendship networks and coolness heirarchies!
2. gouging skin off my arms and legs to make SCABS! to the point of staging "accidental" falls in front of my parents so as to blame the scabs on that (don't think it worked)
3. climbing my favourite TREE and all it's associated pretend scenarios
4. JESUS/ THE BIBLE including secretly delivering my secret homemade evangelical pamphlets to neighbouring letterboxes on my bike
5. RUNNING

2: Batman: is a reasonable and unorphaned childhood the only thing preventing me from being you?

3: The end of the world and its imminence and how it probably won't be anything like Gamma World.

4: What is this berry/leaf/piece of bark and is it edible and could I live off of it after a nuclear war (cf. #3)?

5: Taking things apart and/or throwing vacuum tubes at things so they pop and/or breaking rocks with other rocks.

(I wrote this before looking for my old answer; the rocks and end of the world overlap.)

The following are my "five most involving childhood obsessions", inspired by a thread on That Forum. This is what I'd post on it if I still wanted to post there:

1. The '60s. Everything from that decade pop-culture wise. It was from listening to my parents' oldies radio selections, but ooh. Loved the rock music from that decade. I was aware of the Beatles/Stones rivalry and had my own stake in it (I was a Stones girl all the way). I also loved The Doors and first became aware of my attraction to the opposite sex when I heard Jim Morrison's voice. And I suspect I liked a lot of psychedelic music because of the way it made me feel when I listened to it (not by accident but by design, I'm sure), but at the time I was unaware of the chemicals behind the music. Now I'm totally, like, "EW, the SIXTIES?? Are you KIDDING me??"

2. The Weather Channel. And meteorology in general. I tried to pretend to be an on-air meteorologist whenever the "local at the 8s" came on and would read what the screen said in my most authoritative voice. I think I still know the difference between low-pressure and high-pressure systems. I also kept track of the most minor tropical depressions, learned what made a depression into a tropical storm, and a TS into a hurricane, and other things. That was one of the things I wanted to be when I was small: a meteorologist.

3. Another thing I wanted to be was a pharmacist. I would read up on a used copy of the PDR I acquired from my doctor aunt. I stared at the pills and read what they did. My parents always had to take a copious amount of prescription medication, so I would always ask them what they were taking and what it did. I've totally lost all of my old knowledge in this field, though. Sad to say, because that could be really useful these days.

4. Robert Cormier. I didn't read much in the way of fantasy books, but I did enjoy fiction that had some basis in reality, and you really couldn't ask for much more reality than Cormier. Looking back at it, I can't believe that I as a little girl made it through Fade with its accounts of pedophilia and incest, but I guess this was okay with me because I was always exposed to more grown-up forms of entertainment and so this kind of thing wouldn't have been too shocking for me.

My mom was very strict with me, but she took me to see all kinds of movies. I remember watching Wall Street and Hannah and Her Sisters before I was ten. And Fatal Attraction, too. I didn't go to see very many children's films, come to think of it. (Though I did get to see E.T. and Labyrinth many times.) I suspect this is the reason why I hate animation as a rule.

5. PBS programs. At first these were just limited to the children's programming lineup (well, "just"), but then I got to where I'd watch anything PBS put on throughout the day -- when I was off on breaks, that is. This was back during the GED telecourse heyday, so I would watch a lot of telecourses. There was this one I was particularly involved in that played out kinda like a light drama. A man who worked as a writer lived in an apartment complex where a recent immigrant to the U.S. also lived. She spoke with some kind of European accent and worked at a department store as a clerk-type person. She would regularly go to this writer's apartment and ask him to help her out with reports she had to type out, and he would teach her the rules of English grammar and syntax. This was my first experience with 'shipping, too, as I really wanted those two to get together. (And if you have any idea what that program was called, I'd sure appreciate you telling me.)

Actually, come to think of it, it was my love of PBS that got me into British comedy in the first place. I saw these little promos for Monty Python on a PBS affiliate in the late '80s and remember laughing so hard at what I was watching, so I stayed up super-late (for me anyway) to watch an episode of it and became hooked. So hey, connection. Oh, and my "I hate animation" rule was excepted whenever Sesame Street aired animation. I liked THAT.

Ah, how all of this took me back.

Editing this to add:

Fear of being kidnapped and murdered. I read someone mention this and thought, oh yes, I definitely remember this fear. Though thankfully at the time I was most especially fearful I lived in a house I was convinced was inhabited by ghosts, and I felt very strongly that those ghosts were protective ones who wouldn't let harm visit any of us.

National news broadcasts. I think this led to the above, really. I remember being a small child and having my first news-related experience be that of confusing Ronald Reagan with Donald Regan. And I heard about Edwin Muskie and Alexander Haig and Oliver North and William Westmoreland and so many other Big News Names From The Eighties.

The LIBRARY. Oh how I loved libraries. I visited one at least once a week and my little library cards always got well used. I'm still more at home in a library than I am in a department store.

Oh and Trayce: here's the YouTube link to that Butterfly Ball song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og-sZ8jvdfQ

Your childhood sounds a lot like my thirties. Maybe I'll get into string next.

Vegemite: I was into the markers too, just not as much as the Scratch-n-Sniff stickers, cause ... well, they didn't have a Fried Chicken marker.