This is from a group on facebook called "I was a Kiwi Kid!" Obviously it's aimed at New Zealanders, and it made me cry the first time I read it. But with that said, some things are universal.

   
You know that you were a Kiwi Kid if you can remember these things...

Hide and seek/spotlight in the park, the corner dairy, hopscotch, four square, go carts, cricket in front of the garbage bin and inviting everyone on your street to join in, skipping (double dutch), gutterball, handstands, elastics, bullrush, catch and kiss, footy on the best lawn in the street, slip'n'slides, the trampoline with water on it (or a sprinkler under it), hula hoops, jumping in puddles with gumboots on, mud pies and building dams in the gutter. The smell of the sun and fresh cut grass.

'Big bubbles no troubles' with Hubba Bubba bubble gum. A topsy. Mr Whippy cones on a warm summer night after you've chased him round the block. 20 cents worth of mixed lollies lasted a week and pretending to smoke "cigarettes" (the lollies) was really cool!.. A dollars' worth of chips from the corner take-away fed two people (AND the sauce was free!!).

Being upset when you botched putting on the temporary tattoo from the Bubblegum packet, but still wearing it proudly. Watching Saturday morning cartoons: 'The Smurfs', 'AstroBoy', 'He-man', 'Captain Caveman', 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles', 'Jem' (trulyoutrageous!!), 'Super d'', and 'Heeeey heeeeey heeeeeeey it's faaaaaaat Albert'. Or staying up late and sneaking a look at the "AO" on the second telly, being amazed when you watched TV right up until the 'Goodnight Kiwi!'

When After School with Jason Gunn & Thingie had a cult following and What Now was on Saturday mornings! When around the corner seemed a long way, and going into town seemed like going somewhere. Where running away meant you did laps around the block because you weren't allowed to cross the road?? A million mozzie bites, wasp and bee stings.

Goodies & baddies, cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, riding bikes until the streetlights came on and catching tadpoles in horse troughs.

Going down to the school swimming pool when you didn't have a key and your friends letting you in, drawing all over the road and driveway with chalk. Climbing trees and building huts out of every sheet your mum had in the cupboard (and never putting them back folded). Walking around in bare feet, no matter what the weather.

Running till you were out of breath. Laughing so hard that your stomach hurt. Pitching the tent in the back/front yard (and never being able to find all the pegs). Jumping on the bed. Singing into your hair brush in front of the mirror, making mix tapes...

Sleepovers, pillowfights, spinning round, getting dizzy and falling down was cause for the giggles. The worst embarrassment was being picked last for a team. Water balloons were the ultimate weapon. Weetbix cards pegged on the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle. Collecting WWF and garbage pail kids cards.

Eating raw jelly and raro, making homemade lemonade and sucking on a Rad, a traffic light popsicle, or a Paddle Pop!

You knew everyone in your street - and so did your parents! It wasn't odd to have two or three "best friends" and you would ask them by sending a note asking them to be your best friend.

You didn't sleep a wink on Christmas eve and tried (and failed) to wait up for the tooth fairy. When nobody owned a pure-bred dog. When 50c was decent pocket money. When you'd reach into a muddy gutter for 10c.

When nearly everyone's mum was there when the kids got home from school. When it was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at the local Chinese restaurant or Cobb'n'Co with your family. When any parent could discipline any kid, or feed her or use him to carry groceries and nobody, not even the kid, thought a thing of it. When being sent to the principal's office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited a misbehaving student at home.

Remember when decisions were made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-mo" or dib dib's-scissors, paper, rock. "Race issue" meant arguing about who ran the fastest. Money issues were handled by whoever was the banker in Monopoly.

Terrorism was when the older kids were at the end of your street with pea-shooters waiting to ambush you, or the neighbourhood rottie chased you up a tree!

The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was boy/girl germs, and the worst thing in your day was having to sit next to one. Where bluelight disco's were the equivalent to a Rave, and asking a boy out meant writing a 'polite' note getting them to tick 'yes' or 'no'.

Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot. Your biggest danger at school was accidentally getting caught up in a game of bullrush.

Scrapes and bruises were kissed and made better. Taking drugs meant Scoffing orange-flavoured chewable vitamin C's, or swallowing half a Panadol. Ice cream was considered a basic food group. Going to the beach and catching a wave was a dream come true. Boogie boarding in the white wash made you the next Kelly Slater. Abilities were discovered because of a "double- dare".

Older siblings were the worst tormentors, but also the fiercest protectors.

Riri-kins wrote:

Any nineties kids remember the old Nick game shows like the original Double Dare or What Would You Do? My personal favorite was Legends of the Hidden Temple. Olmec ruled.

I remember all of those! Dude, Marc Summers before he started working for Food Network FTW!

Nickelodeon before Nicktoons is the definition of my childhood: You Can't Do That on Television, Special Delivery(that was pretty much my Saturday afternoons), Pinwheel, Eureeka's Castle, MapleTown (not to be confused with MapleStory.), Noozles, Today's Special.

And I remember when USA showed cartoons, especially Jem amd the Holograms. I had a Jem and a Stormer doll. They were much bigger than Barbie. Then there was She-Ra: Princess of Power. I still have the action figures in storag: She-Ra, Cassiopeia, Glimmer, Catra.

Ooooh, and both of them are available on DVD.

I miss my Pog collection. D:

Okay. Eureka's. Motherfuckin.' Castle. Also, Skinnamarink. Anybody remember that one? I remember almost nothing about the show itself, except the theme song, the elephants dancing on a spiderweb, and that there was a guy with a pedobeard.

Skinnamarinky dinky dink, skinnamarinky doo! I! Love! You!

Annnnnd Clarissa Explains it All. She was my freaking hero when I was a kid. I wanted to be her so badly. Now I look back and think "man, not with those clothes." I always thought she was so much older then me when i was a kid, but now I look back, and I'm like... dude. She's...what. 12? Crazy.

All That. The original cast, before they added all those dumbasses. Lori Beth Denburg kicked major buttcheeks. Also, The Adventures of Pete and Pete. What I would give to have that whole series on dvd -instead of just half. Thanks Nick. God, my childhood was full of so much awesome.

Though I have since lost most, if not all, of the knowledge I once had about it, in first grade I knew how to troubleshoot the OS side of an Apple IIe. (Anybody remember those? Only ran if you stuck a 5.25" floppy disk in the drive and booted the system.) Only if I couldn't fix the computer (or have determined it to be most likely a hardware problem) would the teacher call the repairman.

In junior high I would routinely delete COMMAND.COM from my English teacher's MS-DOS 6.20 computer. He was damn lucky my computer was a MS-DOS 6.20 as well. Pssh. The poor piece of shit only had four megs of RAM and a twenty megabyte hard drive.

Good times...

BioKraze wrote:

Though I have since lost most, if not all, of the knowledge I once had about it, in first grade I knew how to troubleshoot the OS side of an Apple IIe. (Anybody remember those? Only ran if you stuck a 5.25" floppy disk in the drive and booted the system.) Only if I couldn't fix the computer (or have determined it to be most likely a hardware problem) would the teacher call the repairman.

In junior high I would routinely delete COMMAND.COM from my English teacher's MS-DOS 6.20 computer. He was damn lucky my computer was a MS-DOS 6.20 as well. Pssh. The poor piece of shit only had four megs of RAM and a twenty megabyte hard drive.

Good times...

It terrifies me, that I likely knew more about computer programming in 1991 than I do now. Just because you basically had to programme the damn thing every time you used it. And I was about...nine. Er. Oh, Windows 3.0, wtf...

Is it bad I hate absolutely everything to do with the pop culture from my childhood? Even the stuff I liked back then.

My big childhood thing: Making skirts out of palm fronds and bow and arrows with bamboo shoots. I did this well into middle school.

Oh yeah. Sonic. And that superancient 'game' where you were a tank in a 3D space made of boxes on a black background. Also the tennis game along the same graphical lines. And Oregon Trail.

...I seem to remember my childhood as a series of games I played alone in my room. (That's not whining, I was so not a people person as a kid.)

SkiFree was a real trip. I still have a copy. And you can evade the Yeti for about three or four seconds, tops, if you ski at about a east-and-southeast angle.

Anybody remember Chip's Challenge? For those of you who remember, did you ever legitimately clear the level "TOTALLY UNFAIR"? For that matter, was "FIREFLIES" the last level you completed...?

- <3ANIMORPHS<3 WERE SO SHIT FUCKING CRAP AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Batman: The Animated Series.
- The fifth grade Pokemon craze. As much as I look back on it and sigh now, it was like being part of the Barack Obama hoard for when I was young. Everyone collected and everyone could relate.
- D.A.R.E not to do drugs taught us that marijuana will make you end up EXACTLY like "Reefer Madness" characters.
- Bill Nye the Science Motherfuckin' Guy.
- Summer Disney premieres.
- The Spice Girls and coordinated dance routines at recess.
- Third grade sex education.
- Go-Gurt.
- Massive love for Oregon Trail. I loved that game so much that I bought the modern version, which I still play to this day.
- Gameboy.
- Mr. Rogers. Kind and gentle, but the man had balls of iron. He managed to get the Nixon administration to approve funding for PBS and stood up to one of the harshest senators to defend public services to children (and actually succeeded). Most people don't know it, but Mr. Rogers was a real life Mr. Smith who went to Washington and won.

Check this out. It's incredible, and one of the only times I've been truly inspired by politics: Mr. Rogers rips the Senate a new one...nicely.

Katzenklavier wrote:

Third grade sex education.

Ahahaha! That cracked me up. I was one of those third graders who actually had to say "Teacher, may I go out?" because I felt like puking after watching the mini film about how babies were made. *laughs*

Reading through this was a nostalgia trip for me... but nobody has mentioned Alex Mack yet, so I have to. She was my first crush, I think.

Guess what's coming to DVD?

I was freaking addicted to that movie when I was four.

I remember when you wanted certain songs and you didn't want to pay for a CD yourself, you get your double cassette recorder, get some blank tapes and borrow your friend's CD or cassette and copied it that way.

I remember when the main appeal of watching anime when it first came out was that the anime movies were full of blood, guts, swear words sex, violence and tentacles because uptil then the only animation you have seen was Disney or Saturday Morning cartoons.

And you didn't used to care if they storyline was faithful to the Japanese original or not either.

When I was young, if a boy who watched any show (anime or otherwise) with a teenage girl as the protagonist was treated as a sissy boy. (Thank God I was still a girl back then)

To be fair, when I resaw most of those 'girly' shows in reruns, they did seem rather lame compaired to 'girly' shows these days.