Slimer

Like a year ago I was walking to Blockbuster with my friend Hami to rent a Dreamcast game and I decided to stop into a dirty little wannabe super market to buy a Pepsi. As I walked towards the cooler I noticed a shopping cart full of "discount" items and other open boxed "deals". My curiosity got the best of me and I had to riffle threw it. At the bottom was a bottle of Hi-C Ecto Cooler that at this point had to be at least 10 years old.

I picked it up and it wasn't really green anymore, it was more of a grayish green and it looked like it had sand at the bottom of the jug. The label was all faded and starting to crumble from me touching it. It was marked down to $2 from $3 (Which isn't much of a deal for a 10 year old drink) and I almost bought it but I only had $2 on me and I really needed a drink of something that wouldn't kill me so I bought a Pepsi instead. But what the Ecto Cooler did do was bring me back to the early 80's and a time when my biggest fear was missing my cartoons and a time when $10 was more money than I knew what to do with. The 80's were a great time to be a kid. You had heroes like Hulk Hogan telling us to eat our vitamins and say our prayers and you had great cartoons like He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Silverhawks, Thundercats, She-ra, ALF, Voltron, Gobots, and The "Real" Ghostbusters.

And don't get The "Real" Ghostbusters confused with the total crap filmation released in '85 called Ghostbusters to cash in on the Ghostbusters movie. I'm talking about the cartoon based on the Bill Murray movie, not the one with a monkey wearing a backpack and Indiana Jones hat!

I can remember so many Saturday mornings in front of the TV with a big glass of Ecto cooler, a bowl of Ninja Turtles cereal (Which tasted like shit but was a Ninja Turtles product so I ate it anyway.) and my Super Mario Bros. Feety PJ's watching all the awesome 80's cartoons. I know what you're thinking and your right… Hi-C does not go well with cereal at all!! But I needed something to wash down that terrible Ninja Turtles cereal. I would watch the adventures of Peter Venkman, Raymond Stantz, Egon Spengler, Winston Zeddmore, Janine Melnitz and the loveable yet trouble making Slimer. I would watch as ghost after ghost would battle and lose to the "Real" Ghostbusters. Then after cartoons ended my parents would make me go outside and play so I would grab my action figures and go on the porch. I only had the actual Ghostbuster figures except for one ghost that looked like a football player and a slimmer figure so most of the time my Ghostbuster action figures were busting Skeletor and the Shredder. Then someone would always come over and ask me to come play so I would leave all my figures on the porch even though my parents told me not to everyday of my short life and I would go play sidewalk poison with all the kids from the neighborhood. Some how all of toys would still be there when my mom called me for lunch and just like every Saturday afternoon I would walk right past them cuz I didn't feel like picking them up and just like every Saturday afternoon my mom would look at me and I would know to go pick them all up before I could eat my Ninja Turtle frozen Pizza (Which also tasted like shit but again was a Ninja Turtle product so I had to eat it.) and have another glass of Ecto Cooler, which I later found out wasn't really Ecto Cooler at all.

After I drank my first jug of Ecto Cooler my mom just made green Kool Aid and filled the jug with it over and over. Either way I would grab my Pizza and my Ecto Kool Aid and I would pop in either one of my Taped off TV cartoon tapes (I wonder what ever happened to those??) or I would attempt to play Nintendo and eat without making a mess… But after a few games of Punch-Out and WWF Wrestlemania my controllers always seemed to get covered in grease and pizza sauce. After lunch it was time for more sidewalk poison (Which was scary to think about now cuz we played until after it was dark) then it was time to go in for the night. I would get into my other Super Mario PJ's, grab my teddy bear with the red bow tie and go to bed.