back when it wasn't so easy to be a music fan

photo from this blog

Seeing kids these days with their tiny, candy-colored MP3 players, I can't help but appreciate how much easier it is to be a music fan today. Things used to be a lot more complicated, and er, primitive when I was young.

The main source of music back then was mainstream radio. If you felt like being cooler, you plugged into the alternative stations so you knew tunes that not many people have heard yet.

If you carried around a huge boom box, that was an inconvenience but still considered pretty cool.

The Sony Walkman was a more clever invention.

Back then, you didn't have Frostwire or iTunes. You didn't have the convenience of buying music online or downloading shareware. You listened to the radio and waited for your favorite songs to come up, and when that happened, you cranked up the volume to enjoy it. You had to suffer the random selection of the disk jockey though - an odd hodge-podge of NKOTB, Garth Brooks, Bon Jovi, Megadeth, Paula Abdul and Boyz II Men in one hour.

The only way you could affect the line-up on radio was to phone, page or fax the station. The convenience of SMS sending was yet unheard of.

Dial ... busy.
Redial ... still busy.
Redial ...

As you considered the volume of listeners trying to get their requests in, you kept your fingers crossed. If you succeeded in contacting the station, depending on the timing, you might have to join one of their dorky contests. You greeted your friends while you were at it, of course. Afterward, you would put down the phone and wait for your song - only for the DJ to turn over to the next shift. A new DJ would come in and he wouldn'tt even know about your request, so you had to go through the trouble of phoning in again.

You shelled out a hundred bucks or so (which would be around two to four days' worth of allowance for the average, middle-classs kid of the late '80s / early '90s) to buy a cassette tape which probably had only one or two tracks that you liked.

And yeah, I just remembered - they weren't called "tracks" ... I don't even know what they were called.

You couldn't press next track when you got bored with something unbearable; you couldn't shuffle for variety.

If you kinda didn't have that much money to spend on your musical interests (or were just plain cheap), you played your radio, kept a blank tape in the player, and when the DJ cued your song of choice, you pressed rec.

You borrowed a tape from a friend and did some homemade bootlegging with the help of a double-cassette. If you weren't so lucky to have one, you used two separate players - one played your tape of choice, the other recorded on a blank, and you hoped that the other people in your house would keep it down for the next 3:22 minutes.

If you wanted to share tunes with a friend, you couldn't yet transfer data via USB or Bluetooth. You couldn't rip from a CD, much less burn one. CD writers were available only to music and software manufacturers, and not yet to the average joe. Instead, using one ore more of the previously mentioned primitive processes, you a made a compilation called a mix tape.

CDs were kinda pricey then, and you bought only albums that you would consider "special", i.e., worth blowing several hundred bucks for, like Michael Jackson's Dangerous or Miss Saigon. If you had a large collection, you were probably conio.

Since CDs caused considerable damage to your savings, you handled them delicately. You didn't leave your disks lying around naked. Whenever one of your friends made the mistake of making the tiniest smudge on the underside, you threw a fit and immediately polished the disk off. If you were really fussy, you bought this near-useless plastic tong-like implement designed especially for handling CDs.

There was no You Tube. If you wanted to watch a particular music video, you turned your television to something like Video Hit Parade or Video Hot Traxx while you did your homework. You waited until something good came on. Those one-hour shows were usually frustrating in the way they only played - rather, overplayed - Janet, Whitney, Michael Bolton, and that annoying boy band with the monkey. You realize you waited for an hour for nothing.

Not many homes had cable. If you were one of the lucky ones, you tuned in to MTV and again, waited. If you didn't have cable, you hung out at your rich classmate's house just for that purpose.

On the hours that MTV was made partially available on channel 23, you turned it on for some background noise, keeping it on for chunks of hours, hoping something you liked would finally play. That's why everyone, regardless of their musical preference, would have been familiar with George Michael's Too Funky, Madonna's Like A Prayer, the bee girl in Blind Melon's No Rain. Even Rico Suave and Debbie Gibson's Electric Youth.

You couldn't Google for lyrics or tabs. If you needed lyrics but none came on the album sleeve, you acquired them the usual way - play, pause, write, play. The words would sometimes be unintelligible so you often had to make something up, and you hoped that no one noticed when you sang To Be With You at the orientation party.

You bought your tabs from music stores like RJ or Perfect Pitch - that is, whenever you were fortunate enough that they had something in there more recent than Bob Dylan or Don McLean. You went to Filbars and bought yourself a copy of BOP! or Tiger Beat and hope the line-up actually had the ones you wanted, and not just a Whitney Houston collection.

... Or you challenged your own skill and figured the notes out one by one.

There yet weren't many fan sites or official websites of your favorite artists. If you wanted news or gossip about your idols, you got snippets on MTV. You consulted the magazines and trusted that the stuff were up-to-date. If you wanted pictures, you gambled for the glossy spreads in those magazines, hoping after you purchase one and remove the plastic wrapper that the 'zine it isn't all just Vanilla Ice photos.

If you had some talent and wanted to pimp yourself, there were no UUC websites for that purpose - besides, you didn't have the convenience of recording yourself through digital means. You bought a blank tape, put it in the Karaoke and pressed rec while you sang into the mic. Or you got your band-mates together, set up your instruments in your bedroom and played in front of a recording cassette player until your parents complained of your racket. You sent a copy of your demo to your auntie who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a talent scout. Or you just sent one to a show like NU 107's In The Raw and hope you got noticed.

These days, almost everything you need to be a music fan is available via the www. A shot at stardom, even. Download here, listen there, tweak here, upload everywhere - it's so easy to be "musically inclined" without having to spend much.

back when there were babes in boyland

A friend whom i will refer to in this entry as Friend invited the Hubby and I to watch his gig. Friend happened to have an amateur rock band. It was at this rather decent, un-shady place anyway, so we thought there was no harm in dropping by to support him.

It might be useful to mention that Friend is a younger friend, like early-twenties, i.e., a decade delayed.

At the end of the evening, Friend and a few of his other pals asked to hitch a ride to the lot where they parked. As they crowded together in the back seat, i eavesdropped as they exchanged their thoughts on the night's other performances. They were all just amateur bands that night, seemingly playing for kicks if not for a bit of exposure. Most if not all of them were composed of guys who were in their early-to-mid twenties and /or boys who were still in college - their delusional dreams of rock stardom still fresh in their psyche.

One band seemed to have caught their attention, though not exactly in an approving sort of way: it was this all-girl rock-reggae band. The band wasn't astoundingly great, but hey, they weren't that bad. They in fact had enough chops to compare with those other (all-guy) bands. So Friend and his friends who sat in our back seat (both guys and girls) chuckled at how those band-girls even dared to be in a domain where men ruled, sort of implying it was ridiculous of them. Friend and his friends didn't even say anything bad about the music - in fact, I think they even liked the way those chicks played. Then, with the disapproval of chauvinistic old women, Friend and his friends commented at how stupid those girls were to wear showy clothes at a bistro.

I wanted to butt into the conversation, but conscious of the lack of relationship, I just thought in my head: Have you ingenue never seen an all-female rock band before? They were even pretty good. Look, they probably wore those things on purpose knowing what kind of crowd they were getting into, because chicks in bands know their male fans would want to see some skin. And you guys sound more naive then they are. Like, when were you born - Spanish colonial times?

At the risk of appearing like their grandmother in a when-I-was-your-age sort of harangue, I kept my musings to myself. It became apparent to me that these early-twenties guys - these mere kids who were born in the late eighties / early nineties - are prolly unfamiliar with the concept of an all-girl rock band. Oh, they've surely seen girly pop groups on TV, or bands here and there with a female vocalist or bassist. But probably never an all-girl ROCK band.

Coming to think of it, there haven't been many lately, and hardly any have made it mainstream. I'm trying to think of some, but the ones I can think of are either virtual unknowns or carryovers from the '90s.

Though the rock music scene has always been dominated by men, there was a time when all-girl rock bands weren't such an alien concept. Despite the fact that they never sounded as aggressive and as progressive as their all-male counterparts, chick bands were actually quite cool, i.e., they had a critically massive fan base of both males and females.

Back in the '80s were The Bangles, The Go-Go's, L7, Silverfish.

A movie called Satisfaction came out in '88, starring Justine Bateman, Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts. It was this corny chick flick about a girl band. Loved that movie, watched it when i was ten. I recall reading articles about how this or that real-life girl-band was inspired by this movie.

photo from here

In the '90s, there were the riot grrrrls. All-female acts donned their heroin chic - Babes in Toyland, Hole, The Donnas. Even those Japanese chicks Cibo Matto and Shonen Knife.

In the local scene, we had KeltsCross (which later evolved into Pinup Girls), Tribal Fish, Fatal Posporos (lead vocalist Kris Gorra later fronted for the new Eraseheads). An interesting one to note is death-metal act Cherry Bomb - yes, death metal, screamo galore.

Rock acts today are mostly these guys who wear too much eyeliner and gook in their hair (and most of them sellouts who have lost their characteristic sound - but that is for a whole other entry). Lady musicians seem to prefer divalicious soul or sexed-up, thechnofied dance these days. Oh well, whatever rakes in the money, right?

my fave (classic) music videos

To pass the time while waiting for the Hubby to fetch me, i thought of making a list of my ten favorite (classic) music videos.

I thought of embedding clips for everything, but i later decided against it.

So anyway, here goes, in no particular order:

1. Let Forever Be
   Chemical Brothers
   
   
   
   It's like a kaleidoscope, it's like a psychosis, it's like a morphine-laced nightmare. I absolutely love the way visual elements fold up, tilt, or spill into the following scene. I love its philosophic take on adult existence. The choreography rocks too.
   
   
   
2. November Rain
   Guns n Roses
   
   
   
   Rumor was that the MTV featured actual stuff from Axl Rose's wedding to Supermodel Stephanie. But that probably isn't true because it's too cleaned up.
   
   Melodramatic and haunting, it's like a 9-minute, 14-second mini-flick on love and loss.
   It of course has the GnR-video trademark of a wild-haired Slash and his guitar against an arid landscape.
   The most baffling bit is probably the one where this long-haired guy crashes into the wedding cake - I mean, why the heck did he do that?
   My favorite scene is the one which showed a bouquet of red roses on a grave, their color draining out into a bloody puddle.
   
   
   
3. Jeremy
   Pearl Jam
   
   Jolting and disturbing, it recreated the real-life event that the lyrics of the song were based on, the public suicide of highschooler Jeremy Wade Delle.
   
   I remember watching the 1993 MTV VMA on channel 23; Jeremy won a top award. Eddie Vedder and the guys received the trophy with their video star (i believe his name was Trevor) joking, "He's still alive!"
   
   After a wave of campus shootings in the 1990s, the airing of Jeremy was banned in certain US states and in Asia. Good thing I got to see it before the ban.
   
   
   
4. Deep
   Nine Inch Nails
   
   Lemme just say that it's a fave not because i like it. The fact is I don't actually like it, but I think it's deviant and brilliant. It - like most of the other NIN vids - is a twisted but artistic nightmare sequence from someone's dark, dirty mind. NIN videos are usually too explicit in lyrics and visuals, thus a lot of them are banned in certain areas. They have their particular flavor: unsettling, profane, shocking - but not always in a blatant way. Its more like they cause viewers to do a double-take, wondering "Did i just see that"?
   
   
   
5. Take On Me
   A- Ha
   
   Take On Me was groundbreaking in its day with the animation and rotoscoping. Of course it probably seems like a joke now compared to the more recent videos that employ more advanced techniques.
   
   I remember seeing it for the first time as a kid and being enthralled by the visual story (a love story, of course!) as well as with the then-fresh, then-cutting-edge treatment.
   
   
   
   
6. Smooth Criminal
   Michael Jackson
   
   MJ had this flair for narrative music videos with kickass dance moves. This is just one of them that makes you applaud and say, "More! More!"
   
   
   
7. Black or White
   Michael Jackson
   
   Gotta love the creative cut-to's and wipes as one scene shifts into another. There are just too many delicious visuals, that one would need several viewings to savor it all.
   
   One of the most engaging bits is the part toward the end of the song, where solos of people of different races were shown one after the other, but in such a way like one morphed into the next. When i watched Black or White again recently (in memory of the late great MJ) I noticed that that scene included Tyra Banks - i never noticed her before, because though she was already a supermodel then, she wasn't readily recognizable yet. There were other cameos too - a prime-of-his-life Slash, a pre-drug habit Macaulay Culkin, et al.
   
   
   
8. Remember The Time
   Michael Jackson
   
   Dangerous might have been Jacko's golden age, and Remember The Time was the trophy. More celebrity cameos, "magic", and dance steps that look good only on MJ. Or Janet. It was a big deal to pinoys back then that the costumes tailored for this music video were made in the RP.
   
   
   
9. Janie's Got A Gun
   Aerosmith
   
   
   
   Forget the rockstar-performance scenes though.
   
   I've been fascinated with the way '90s Aerosmith videos seem so much like trailers for real movies. This one kinda left me wondering what really happened and kinda wishing there really was a movie.
   
   
   
10. Crying
    Aerosmith
    
    Crying is so mid-90s: tatts, a navel piercing, oversized blazers, babydoll dresses worn with boots, plaid long-sleeved shirts, straight-cut jeans, one-length haircuts. Alicia Silverstone. Stephen Dorff. Aerosmith.
    
    It featured an already popular-among-teenage-girls Stephen Dorff and a pre-hollywood Alicia Silverstone. And guess who too: a then-obscure Josh Holloway.
    
    Silverstone starred in a few Aerosmith MVs, and it was said that those videos launched her career as an actress (well, it seems she needs to try doing music videos again). She was also in Amazing and Crazy, the latter with a yet-unknown Liv Tyler (who was then not yet known as the daughter of frontman Steven Tyler).
    
    

Well, that was fun. I should do this music-video reminiscing thing more often - with different categories next time of course. Maybe "my ten fave classic rock videos" or "ten really funny dance videos from the '80s". This is good, for now.

back when we were clueless

photo from imdb

Just the other night, i put Clueless in the player for the nth time. I kinda like it as background noise while i work. It's one of those flicks that I "watch" at least once a year, particularly when I'm bored or depressed, because it's so light and upbeat and slightly nostalgic.

To tell you the truth, i used to hate Clueless when it showed here in 1995. I was seventeen then, around the same age of the characters in the story. Aside from our age bracket, there was not much else I shared with Cher, Dion, Tai et al. I rolled my eyes at seeing the trailer; i was certain it was shallow and hollow. A friend who actually saw it (and whose intelligent opinions I valued) confirmed my suspicions and said it was the sort of movie that would make your brain cells commit suicide.

As a teenager who was expected to see this movie about teenagers produced by an adult who has probably forgotten how it actually is to be a teenager and thus talked down to his target audience, i just abhorred Clueless. I thought it was a horrible misrepresentation of our generation - it made such a big deal of the shallowness of a '90s teen. It even showcased exaggerated costume-ish fashion.

Whatever!

I don't recall ever watching it at the cinema, but i must have watched it somewhere because I knew enough to compare it with the TV series. Imagine that, someone came up with the bad idea of a Clueless TV series. I managed to catch a few minutes of it with my then-little sister, and we both thought it was even dumber than the movie. It was short-lived of course.

Just a few years ago though, when i was already a working, earning adult, I caught Clueless on cable. I didn't mind watching it, given that the alternatives on other channels were blah B-movie action flicks. And here's the twist: I actually found myself liking it this time. I still thought it was silly, shallow and a poor misrepresentation of the '90s teen, but its youthful, nostalgic appeal made it so bright and shiny to an overworked, underpaid adult who used to be a '90s teen. Perhaps i no longer found it so offensive because I didn't feel so assaulted by it anymore?

I used to think it as stupid as its heroine, but I can now see how smart it actually is. Aside from the fact that it's based on Jane Austen's acclaimed classic, Emma, it's got its sensible points. It's a satirical social commentary of sorts, intentionally exaggerated, intentionally silly-fied. Though the characters are so clueless, the script is actually witty and cleverly-written. And though its far from an accurate depiction, it somewhat crystallized the 'tude of teen-hood in the mid-'90s. It even spurred a whole new wave of jargon that people from five to thirty-five still use today.

I can't ignore the soundtrack either. Though some songs were from the mid-'80s (proof that it was produced by someone who was young in the '80s), the rest are just so 1990s. The Cranberries, Radiohead, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Jill Sobule - those hits in my college playlist that conjure memories of those years when things were so much simpler, when it wasn't so bad to be so clueless.

back when i first wore leggings

I'm really glad leggings made a comeback from the late-'80s. I practically jumped at this old-returning fad 3 years ago, buying myself a couple of pairs to wear with babydoll dresses.

Leggings are comfy and stylish. They're the next best thing to jeans, and I could think of reasons why they're better.

I used to love wearing them as a pre-teen too. I would wear them practically anywhere - to a soiree, to the mall, to church, to Saturday theater club rehearsals, to amusement fairs. Back then, leggings were worn with oversized tops. They used to come in in bright (as in really bright) colors and funky geometric prints.

I still remember some of my favorite combinations:

• Aqua blue leggings + super oversized shirt with yellow pink and light blue print (my mom's) + jazzed up sneakers with neon laces
• Dark olive green leggings + button down with animal embroidery at the back (and hideous shoulder pads) + a big, black headband
  
• Black leggings + oversized white button-down (my mom's) + black slingback shoes with silver straps
• Yellow-orange leggings + orange polo shirt (my mom's) + jazzed up sneakers
• Yellow leggings + button-down shirt with watermelon print (hot pink, bright orange, yellow and green) (my mom's) + tan sandals
• Dark blue leggings + light blue faux-denim shirt (again,my mom's)

Come on, it was the eighties. Flashy colors were practically a must. And back then, it wasn't uncool for young girls to borrow their mom's clothes to a party. Like what that girl in the movie Can't Buy Me Love did.

The leggings I see around these days have more basic and muted colors, lacey patterns instead of neon-hued abstracts. I noticed too that they are now made of thinner cloth - they are more sheer and more like tights - which isn't so bad, because that's just perfect for our tropical climate, except that the thin materials tend to run more easily.

I hope the legging trend could stick around; they're lot comfier than pants. Besides, I really don't look good in jeans.

back when tom cruise was a pretty pixie

photo from imdb

I just recently re-watched Legend (1985) a Riddley Scott fantasy starring a very young Tom Cruise, Mia Sara and an already-typecast Tim Curry. I must have been in fifth grade when I first watched it with my brother on Betamax. We rented it from the corner store managed by this real nice English-speaking Muslim lady. We were drawn by the way she described it - it seemed to my brother a fantasy-adventure movie (a hero + a lord of darkness + creatures + a quest), while it seemed to me like a little-girl flick disguised as a fantasy-adventure movie (a princess + a lover + a rescue, unicorns + fairies + sparkly things).

It's got this cute early electronica soundtrack featuring Tangerine Dream; it just fits well with the pixie dust and good intentions flying around.

Watching it again as an adult, I still find it to be kinda nice. I'll leave it on my list of favorite '80s flicks. I've got to admit it's way corny though. And a bit gay.

So it's not the best of its genre - not even close - though it would be redeeming to think of it as a kids' movie. It would be easier to forgive for its all dorkiness and cheesiness that way.

Then again if you think about it, it's somewhere up there among the most well-loved geek fantasy movies of the eighties, with Labyrinth, Willow, Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, Flight of the Navigator et al. Legend must be so likeable because it's so simple, so safe and predictable and um, so decent.

I recall telling a classmate about Legend after I first watched it back then. "What?," she exclaimed, "A Tom Cruise movie without any sex?" (Yes, ten year-olds can make that observation and actually know what they're talking about). I didn't know any other Tom Cruise movies then aside from Top Gun, and i wasn't even allowed to watch that.

Twenty years since, I've seen different versions of Mr.Cruise - including couch-bouncing Tom, the hardly-palatable drug-dissing one and the meltdown variety. It's kinda refreshing to see again a young Tom as the naive, everpure Jack. A romantic role that doesn't have a single hint of sex. This was small-time, pre-Top Gun, pre-stardom, pre-crazy Tom, of course. He must have been in his early twenties then; he wasn't so hot yet, but already cute. This Jack persona is the oh-so-pleasant antihero lover-boy, a breath of fresh air from the hunky, husky hero types of that day - the kind of main character that convinces me that this is indeed a little-girl flick disguised as a fantasy-adventure movie.

How cliche can you get with "kind, beautiful princess who likes loverly things"? But hey, they formula still works. I remember thinking as a kid that Mia Sara was so pretty. I sort of became a little fan but I didn't see her again until Ferris Bueller, and never again.

Tim Curry totally rocked as the lord of darkness. It would be considered a dorky role today, but what the hey, he did it justice. There wasn't much depth to it but he managed to play up an image that would conjure nightmares in little kiddies' heads at bedtime. Some geek movie buffs would say that it was his character that made the movie so memorable. I've come across some articles that say Curry in Legend was one of film's best Satans ever.

The themes of the story? True love prevails. The stuff of dreams can be real. And well, yes, good triumphs over evil, sparkly things over darkness. Stupid as it may seem now to my cluttered, discriminate, critical adult mind, I still think it's something a child can appreciate, and the child in me still thinks highly of it.

back when we wore grunge

One of the things I miss the most from the '90s is how you could dress down and still be considered cool and fashionable. I miss how getting out of the house was a lot simpler because it was acceptable to not look so put-together.

And when I say dress down, i mean dress down:
Ratty jeans, a tank top or statement tee.
Used-looking plaid.
Slouchy knits.
Comfy pants with a frayed hemline.
A black shirt with a band logo worn over cut-off denim shorts, unshiny worker boots or sandals with socks.
Clothes that you deconstructed yourself - not something pre-deconstructed by some designer wannabe that you bought at the mall for several hundred bucks.
If you had the confidence (like I did), you would've even worn pajama bottoms to school.

What was later called "grunge fashion" was actually initially anti-fashion. It came with the wave of grunge music (which was not originally a genre but an anti-popular rock way of making music), proudly worn by the unconvential and nonconformist. Of course you know how things catch on and become the next trend.

It was more or less acceptable to go to a party looking like a junkie. Runways even had a look called "heroin chic". Bad hair and bed-head could pass for an edgy, grungy 'do.

Frances Bean Cobain donning her late father's old getup
for a recent Elle photoshoot featuring rock icon offspring in their dad's clothes.
Those pajamas are the very pair Kurt wore when he married Courtney Love.
Photo from a random blog that didn't have photo credits, so there.

You didn't even have to wear accessories. In fact, the chunky, bright-colored jewelry that are considered hip today were fashion faux-pas. In the '90s, we thought of those loud accessories as old-fashioned junk from the '80s - baduy stuff that belonged in a Duran Duran or A-Ha music video. The in bling for the 90's was sleek, streamlined silver, and you didn't have to think much about coordination and crap because silver went with almost anything.

There wasn't that much fuss about makeup either; natural-looking was fine. Ladies donned earth colors, browns and nudes on their faces. Matte lipstick like Revlon Colorstay was the top choice. Glossy lips were icky; there was even the technique of lightly dusting your lips with face powder to make your sheer lipstick look matte. No pink lips or purple eyelids that used to be seen on outdated popstars like Boy George or Cyndi Lauper, no over-lined emo eye shadow like Robert Smith's. Unless you were a Spice Girl or Marilyn Manson.

Considering how fashion trends have cycled lately, I'm pretty sure grunge (or some elements of it at least) will be making a comeback some time soon. I can just imagine Mary Kate and Ashley in plaid baby-dolls and Doc Martens, the Beckhams in used jeans and lazy knitted sweaters.

I stopped to Google awhile and lo and behold - there's this thing going on nicknamed as the new grunge. It obviously hasn't picked up yet, since all the bright, big '80s reruns are still vastly popular. Ah well; we'll see where this goes.

back when we watched cartoons on weekday afternoons

Back when we didn't have Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network or the Disney Channel, the local stations aired animated programs every single afternoon, even on weekdays. After coming home from school and before sitting down to do homework, we could wind down in front of the Tube for some cartoons.

My favorite one was The Puppy, on every Wednesday. It was about a little brown puppy named Petey who was estranged from his master, Tommy. In each episode, Petey and his friends Dash, Duke and Lucky and a cute girl-dog have a bit of adventure at some part of the world in search of Tommy. They get reunited eventually of course.

Gummi Bears weren't just candy. They were these annoying cartoon bears who bounced here, there and everywhere.

I hated Donald Duck's nephews in Ducktales.

The Wuzzles were these cute, candy-colored creatures who were two animals in one.

There was Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, with the classic cast of characters seen also in other animated series: cute boy hero + wise mage type + strong warrior type + girl + gifted kid + runt, with the inspiring father figure in background support. The bad guys were these ugly, evil plant mobiles who always got beat at the end of every episode and reincarnated good as new in the next. This had a sci-fi setting and a glam-rock-like theme song (complete with falsetto).

Inhumanoids was another sci-fi type. The art wasn't that impressive, but it was sufficiently entertaining. Taught me a lot of vocabulary words too.

Visonaries was this cool mishmash of sci-fantasy and medieval. Troops of the two rival factions wore suits of cyber-armor with their holographic avatars on their chests. It was one of those earlier animations that were awkwardly dubbed in Filipino, producing disastrous (and hilarious) results.

I hardly remember anything from Centurions and Silver Hawks, but i remember enjoying them.

Another fave was Street Frogs, featuring hip-hopping amphibians. It alternated with Karate Kat, Mini Monsters and Tiger Sharks.