Millennium Princess Barbie Happy Meal

I've covered the Happy Meal in great detail with the McDonald's Millennium Teenie Beanie Baby premium, but this is a "standard" Happy Meal giveaway rather than an additional, higher-end purchase.

It's modeled after the Millennium Princess doll with the blue dress, as featured in one of the earlier exhibits, the Hallmark ornament.

For a Happy Meal giveaway, she's pretty well-made! The dress is real cloth, which I wasn't expecting, and what's more, it's either velveteen or flocked to give it the texture of velvet. Face is well-sculpted and painted, even though she's got a little bit of the judgey-eyes going on. "'Ello! I know the choices you've made, and I find them lacking."

As you can see in the top picture, she has a base that looks like part of the Times Square Millennium Ball.

A very nice little addition to the Museum's exhibits.

Coming soon...the VIDEO REVIEWS!

In hindsight, that "Millennium Vacation" board game would have made for a good video review.

No matter. I have two--that's TWO--board games to fulfill that purpose.

First up, coming later this year, will be the "Millenniumopoly" board game, produced by Late to the Sun Games.

Second, coming even later this year, will be...the Collector's Edition Monopoly Millennium game.

Latest eBay purchase: Millennium Princess Barbie Happy Meal. I think I've covered the Happy Meal as a part of pop culture a few years ago, but it might be good for a refresher.

"Millennium Vacation" board game

I got this at a Southwest Florida goodwill store in April 2016, and the pictures have been languishing in my laptop ever since! Well, no time like the present to get a move on...

In hindsight, I could've taken a better picture with my smartphone, which I didn't yet have at the time. 

Right. So, basically, the idea is, your grandparents are going to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and you and your parents have to make it "over the river and through the woods" to their place, on a great big road-trip. However, that's not going to be easy: since this is getting close to the year 2000, that means all the computers everywhere you go are going to be out of commission. Date Cards and Millennium Cards can either help or hinder you along the way.

The game has a nicely cheesy clip-art aesthetic to it, with a lot of fonts I've seen on school posters or something. Very early Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, I'd wager. As you can see, the board is designed to look like a grandfather clock, with the pendulum as the "start" space and "Grandma and Grandpa's house" as the end tile just below it, so you have to go up and down and all around. It looked...a bit of a mess, really, and the Y2K theme is all too quaint these days. 

Publix Vision 2000 Pin

Just won this on eBay for a paltry $5.

Yes, a little over a year ago I wrote a piece on the perils of going overboard with looking for 2000 stuff on eBay, but the trick is to find something unique enough to warrant buying or which I have some kind of personal history with.

Case in point, this "Vision 2000" pin. The seller wrote on the auction page that it comes from the Publix supermarket chain in Florida and that it dates to 1991.

Normally, I'd limit my focus from 1995 to 2001, but this was too intriguing to pass up. At first I thought it was some kind of green initiative. Then I did a quick online search, which led me to the 1993 issue of Computerworld magazine on Google Books, which had a feature on Publix and Vision 2000.

"In 1989, the Lakeland, Fla., food retailer embarked on 'Vision 2000,' a huge, long-term effort to boost company sales to $25 billion by the year 2000." That entailed investing around $16 billion to overhaul and streamline the grocery chain's information-services department, described at one time as "hierarchical, inflexible, narrowly-focused, slow-moving and bureaucratic." There was a tech-support department and an information-systems department (referred to as "IS" in the article--I actually had to look it up to make sure it stood for what I thought it stood for!), both of which focused on their own tasks and kept little communication between each other.

The strategy, therefore, was to merge support and systems into one department and get the employees therein to collaborate and share information and skills. With this came ongoing peer reviews. To quote (then?) IS vice-president Daniel Risener, "Peers tend to be more honest, and the employee gets a truer picture of how well he's performing and what areas he needs to improve upon."

Now, I'm not too well-versed in IT stuff, having taken only one sort-of computer class at Moraine Valley. I bring this into the Museum because it's from Publix, and I remember a lot of happy family vacations in Southwest Florida starting in the year 2000...many good memories there. Also, the "streamlining the IS department" focus of the article fits in with the advent of the Internet and the increasingly computer-driven New Millennium.

The Millennium Museum Revisited: "Ghostbusters" 15th Anniversary DVD

I'm about to touch down aboard an Amtrak train headed for Los Angeles, where I'm attending the Ghostbusters 35th Anniversary Fan Fest at Sony Pictures' backlot in Culver City, CA.

In keeping with the spirit (ha-ha) of the weekend, I will re-post the 15th Anniversary DVD review from June 2014...and, upon my return to Chicago, I'll bring the Museum forward by twenty years with the I and II 4K Ultra Limited Edition Steelbook Set, which should arrive by then.

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(NOTE: Though originally published in 2014, the main text has been "cleaned up" in the years between then and now.)

Ah, back in the days when I used custom tags...

(In case you were wondering, the banner and tag image is a little something I cooked up in Paint a few days ago. It's a representation of the animated Ghostbusters title-card from the beginning of the movie, at the moment before the No-Ghost fully forms.)

2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of a movie that needs no introduction. 1984's Ghostbusters has rightfully earned its place in the pop-culture pantheon with a tightrope act of smart-aleck laughs and effects-driven scares, an instantly-recognizable theme song, and a cockeyed take on the supernatural that pays homage to (and wittily punctures) earlier movies such as Poltergeist and The Exorcist.

Here at the Millennium Museum, we’re celebrating that anniversary by turning the clock back to 1999 with the 15^th Anniversary DVD.

The packaging itself (above) represents a complete departure from all other releases that came before. The plain, black box of old, decorated with the movie's original poster, is out the window; in its place is a splashy new cover with our four heroes in front of New York's skyline, ready for battle. This movie's tagline is their slogan, "We're Ready To Believe You;" the second movie's is "Be Ready To Believe Us."

The disc itself...now, this is where it gets interesting. I do believe that Ghostbusters was one of the first ones to demonstrate what the DVD format was capable of.  Immediately after the old Columbia/Tristar Home Video logo (before Sony Home Entertainment became the standard logo), viewers are presented with a wonderful animated menu based on New York City. Spirits swoop across the screen, Slimer whirls around Gozer's Temple atop 55 Central Park West, and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man takes a stroll down the street. A virtual camera pans up, down, and across the main map with each selection.

It doesn't stop there: This baby is loaded with extras, from the original “On Call with the Ghostbusters” documentary from '84, to all-new (for 1999) featurettes on cast and crew. The “Visual Effects Featurette” is a particular highlight. There are also trailers for GB I and II; Stripes; and Groundhog Day, as well as a full complement of concept art, special-effects before-and-after comparisons, pop-up production notes (taken from Don Shay's book Making Ghostbusters), and the movie's signature feature, the “Video Commentary,” which marries fully animated Mystery Science Theater 3000-style silhouettes to an audio commentary by Harold Ramis (co-writer and “Egon Spengler”), Ivan Reitman (director), and Joe Medjuck (producer). The video feature can be toggled on and off, and it adds a further dimension to an already highly-entertaining audio commentary. Harold Ramis, who very tragically died earlier this year, proved himself a thoroughly engaging raconteur on this commentary as he shared wonderful behind-the-scenes tidbits (the one where science-fiction legend Isaac Asimov grouched at Dan Aykroyd because the filming tied up traffic springs to mind) and a few digs at costar Bill Murray (never named, but it's obvious who he's talking about). As far as I know, this was one of the only titles to use the "Video Commentary"--even the more recent DVD and Blu-Ray sets eschew the visual part.

As for the movie itself, this is its first mass-market widescreen release. There was a widescreen/letterbox VHS version in the early 90s, but this was hard to come by and only available through specialty stores like Suncoast and Saturday Matinee (ah, the good old days...). The earliest VHS release was horribly cropped for average TV sets, to the point of cutting Egon and Winston out of the picture most of the time and ruining some of the jokes!

The remastering and color-grading is top-notch, with a crystal-clear picture that eliminates the slight “grain” and pale coloring of the earlier release. It's pretty much as one would have seen it in the movies back in 1984. The sound mixing is first-class; the DVD and 15^th Anniversary VHS alike use Surround Sound.

And now, the million-dollar question:
Why do I list it on this blog?

Considering its 1999 release, many of the extra features reference the then-upcoming 2000 celebrations, and on the '99 Featurette, Dan Aykroyd muses that the change from 1999 to 2000 might stir up some thoughtful discussions about Ghostbusters' ideas on the afterlife and things like other dimensions and planes of existence.

One thing is certain: Its fears of apocalypse, especially in the lead-up to the climax, certainly resonated. In those scenes, people of all religious faiths—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, every faith—gathered in droves to pray for the safety of this world. All the differences between the faiths were, for a moment, secondary to the doom surrounding them. That sense of unity is what the Millennium Dream is all about, the idea that the individual groups of people that comprise humanity can focus more on what makes them alike and less on what makes them different. (During the commentary, Harold Ramis proves himself more down-to-earth about the whole thing: “All that money spent on DVDs for nothing,” he wisecracks.)

As an aside, it's worth pointing out that the front cover displays the two towers of the World Trade Center. To think that such an icon of the modern world would be erased from the landscape just one year after the dawn of a new century...This release of Ghostbusters is a testament to the innocence of 1984 and 1999 alike.

STYX Two-Fer: "Return to Paradise"/"Brave New World"

Yesterday, I went to see Dennis DeYoung, Styx's former keyboardist and lead singer, for the May 4th performance at Rosemont Theater in Illinois. The tickets came from Chicago's PBS affiliate, WTTW-11--only $100 for a front-row seat!

It started me thinking: Styx has a place in the Museum for 1997's Return to Paradise tour (filmed in Chicago on the final night of the tour) and for the 1999 album Brave New World.

Time for a brief history lesson, in which I will make a lot of sweeping generalities from a quick glance at Wikipedia: Styx begins in Chicago (the suburb of Roseland, to be exact) in the early '60s with brothers Chuck (on bass) and John (on drums) Panozzo and their neighbor and friend Dennis DeYoung (on keyboard and vocals). The three of them went to my alma mater, Chicago State University, back when it was a teacher's school. (Class of 2011, by-the-by. I still say, to this day, that Chicago State shall always be better known for three-fifths of Styx than for Kanye West.) In 1970, the band picked up James "J.Y." Young; in 1976, Tommy Shaw. They achieved their big break with the success of "Lady" in 1972...and the rest is history.

Described by YouTube reviewer Todd in the Shadows as "pompous to the point of flatulence1" (I include this quote because it made me crack up completely when I first heard it and even now cracked up while typing it!), Styx is known for a few signature radio-friendly songs: "Come Sail Away," (my least favorite song, because WLS-94.7 insists on playing it twice a day every day) "Lady," "Renegade," and, if you're very, very lucky, "Babe," "Best of Times," and "The Grand Illusion." They had a string of hit albums through the 70s and early 80s, including Grand Illusion, Paradise Theatre, and Kilroy Was Here. This last one had a grandiose tour in which the band members portrayed rebels fighting against a neo-fascist regime. Acting turned out not to be the musicians' forte, and, at the end of the tour, the band split up until 1991's Edge of the Century, the re-recording of "Lady '95" for Styx Greatest Hits*, and the Return to Paradise Tour.

(*Styx's original label, Wooden Nickel Records, held the rights to the original version of "Lady;" within a few years' time, they had migrated over to A&M Records, necessitating a new version of "Lady" for the greatest-hits album.)

Return is notable for being the first tour since Kilroy, and (as far as I know) the last tour to feature the "Classic" lineup: Dennis, Tommy, J.Y., Chuck Panozzo, and new drummer Todd Sucherman, filling in for John Panozzo, who had passed away in 1995. All are in top form, performing perennial hits like "The Grand Illusion," "Rockin' the Paradise," "Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)," "Lady," and, for the grand finale, "The Best of Times."  Edge of the Century's "Show Me The Way" gets a special place in the show for John, friend, colleague, and a hell of a drummer.

The tour was successful enough that they reunited in 1999 for Brave New World. It's an interesting album, I'll say that much. There are traces of Styx's heritage throughout, but it's steeped in that crisp, clean, mid-90s pop sound. One could easily mistake "I Will Be Your Witness," the first track, for a Backstreet Boys song. Perhaps this was deliberate: A few of the other tracks, such as "Number One," "Everything is Cool," and "Heavy Water," read as a lament for, and vivisection of, the decade. "Everything" grouses about runaway consumerism, while the more thoughtful "Heavy Water" ponders over our relationship with technology in the coming century, and wonders whether or not it will outstrip us, which the earlier track "Mr. Roboto" only briefly touched upon in 1983. There, the concern was automation and loss of jobs; here, the concern widens out to the human race's self-destruction.

Also interesting is that DeYoung gets only five songs to his name out of fourteen tracks, and one of them is an early demo for what eventually became a concept album based on Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in other words, it has little to do with the overall "Brave New World" theme).

His final original track for Styx is "Goodbye Roseland," a quiet ballad which is at once a requiem for his father, who had passed away in 1997, and an elegy for a now-unrecognizable hometown. That we all have a Roseland of our own makes the song all the more poignant.

It could also be an elegy for a now-unrecognizable band. Styx supported the new album with a tour, but, in the tour's earliest days, he contracted a viral infection which rendered him exhausted and sensitive to light. The search for a replacement led the rest of the band to Canadian singer and keyboardist Lawrence Gowan, who had already enjoyed a successful solo career in the 80s and 90s. Styx to this day tours with new material and hits from the classic Shaw/Young catalog, and DeYoung tours with his material.

As 1999 ended one century and 2000 began a new one, so did those pivotal years do the same for this uniquely American band.

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvZPaH7QIVI

A Record Book About the Turn of the Millennium

Though this one sounds similar to The Book of Millennium Records, the two could not be further apart.

A few years ago, I kept going on and on about "The Millennium is about time capsules and the preservation of history." The Record Book is a time capsule in book form.

I like the formatting: The left page of each section is for 1999, and the right page is for 2000. Surprisingly, it's intended more for older children (and teenagers and adults) than the younger ones I'd initially assumed: There are sections for politics, news, TV, and sports, things which I wouldn't normally expect children to follow (or to at least have only some vague idea about). This is most apparent in the last sections, which force some rather deep introspection: Entries include "Greatest lessons learned this year" and "Personal accomplishments."

The section "The Conversion" presumably refers to going from 1999 to 2000, but I suspect it's more of a reference to the Y2K problem. There are sections labeled "Preparations made before the conversion," "Supplies acquired," "Expectations of the conversion," "What actually happened," and "What were the effects?"

The last few sections are reserved for pictures taken in '99 and '00; descriptions of how the reader spent New Year's Eve on those years; and goals for the new millennium.

The back page lists other Millennium products sold by the manufacturer, Havoc Publishing, including a photo frame and keepsake box. The company also sold record books for subjects like weddings and pregnancies.