Welcome to My Bedroom. 

Originally I was designing a post of how I am adult with an adult paycheck and a sense of nostalgia. It was going to explain how I began a hunt for many of the toys and fond memories that were lost over the years due to moves and toilet-pipe-leaking accidents. I planned on having said post kick off a years-long chronicle of my journey to re-acquire these things of my childhood.

Then a new realization dawned on me, I don’t need all that stuff. Don’t get me wrong, if I came across a crazy good deal on a Get-Along Gang bed sheet set I would snap it up in a second, but looking around as an adult with an adult paycheck, I really don’t need extreme amounts of “Stuff” taking up closet space for me to only look at when moving or looking for something my son to enjoy.

I decided to do the next most awesome thing, and that is bring my memories to Gremlins Online and share them with each and every reader out there. There are thousands of articles on the internet that feature my memories, all written by people with similar-era childhoods that just predate the internet as we know it.

So I now invite everyone to My Bedroom. This is a collection of my childhood, some first-hand photos of me and my things and memories, others found on adventures online. If you are anything like me, you will hopefully share in that sense of wonder and nostalgia along with me. I also encourage everyone reading this to share their memories and maybe we can help one another unlock those long-buried memories of toys and experiences.

Let’s begin with the two photos I scanned a few years ago for archiving.

First up is this far-too-serious selfie (note the camera remote in my left hand).

So here we have me posing on my Jurassic Park bed sheets with freshly-cut out Star Trek Magazine pages behind me. I only know they are fresh-cut since I had no patience and left the magazine pages all over the bed when taking the photo as you can tell. Fun trivia fact: I hated jeans. I loved corduroys, and I only wore shorts if I absolutely had to. Most of this remains the same but cords seem so hard to find.

The date on the photo of November 14th 1993 is most likely accurate, Both Deep Space 9 and Jurassic Park came out in June of that year.
Next we have my friend Patrick and myself playing Star Trek with our homemade computer consoles. We were both big Star Trek fans, and as you can barely see from my shirt I have always loved raccoons. No idea why really, but I still love raccoons. 

In fact, one of the few dear friends I still keep in touch with these days helped me conceptualize a comic called “Super Raccoons”. Basically picture Ninja Turtles but raccoons. The two main characters were Raccoony and Coonskin, and I was Raccoony, he was Coonskin and we were terrified of lawnmowers which we called “Roto-Dum-Drums” (you see raccoons don’t know the proper terminology for some things. ) I would find the comics I made but I am pretty sure they were lost in a move at some point. This is probably for the best since my art skills were horrid then and are somehow worse than that today.  Regardless, those dumb comics and pretending I was a super-powered raccoon were some amazing times in an oft-rocky childhood. I sometimes don’t think I ever expressed how much the few friends I had meant to me beyond wanting to be at their side 24/7, and I really should have. 

I had this really odd tendency to stick components together into random assorted gadgets. They never did anything but I liked to pretend something was happening. Let’s take a look at some of the random gizmos that were somehow powering my starship.

The Motion Sensor Set.

This was a staple in any of my gizmos, because it would actually click and make a digital counter readout increase whenever the sensors were tripped.
This was my dad’s I assume for when he would go take photographs in the woods, well before I was born. Here you can see one of the Army green motion detectors. The other is pretty well hidden across from us. I think we used them for lasers? Maybe sensors? Probably both.
I also liked to keep tons of books and magazines under my bed in plastic bins. You can see a copy of Stephen King’s Firestarter under there. I was a weird 11 year old.

Vtech Precomputer 1000 and “Breathing Machine”

The “Breathing Machine” as I always called it is in actually a Spirometer. I had no idea what it was actually called until today. I had a lot of various medical equipment around due to my father’s ill health. They often made my contraptions look more futuristic. I am pretty sure this was our dilithium chamber/warp core. My reasoning is because we often chucked it across the room whenever the warp core needed ejecting. (which was pretty frequently)
The Vtech Precomputer 1000 was about as close as I could come to having a reasonably working computer at the time. It let me do some BASIC programming, and play a few games, but not much else. It was our navigational console.

Retrotech did a great video recently on this device, check it out!

The NES/Gameboy Gadget.

Obviously you can see the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy that functioned as some kind of control panel, and there isn’t much to say about that beyond that I still have those.

Wow, looking at this now, I don’t think I have cleaned these in…ever. I should probably do that. They’ve been in storage for at least 20 years, and while I like having them, it isn’t like I desperately needed to break into my Real Ghostbusters lunchbox for one of the three remaining games I own these days and play them: Rocket Ranger, Predator and American Gladiators.

So there you have it.

I wish I could remember any of the games we played in my room beyond “some star trek thing” but it is nice to have a few photos that I can look back on and try to figure out what was happening rather than complete swiss-cheese brain.

Thanks for joining me on this self-indulgent journey through a couple rad childhood photos!