This console generation, more than any other, looks back at its predecessors with an incredible amount of nostalgia. There’s never been quite so many ways to play the games of years past as there are currently. Even most handhelds can play games from their prior iterations via digital downloads. The Nintendo 3DS has a way to do this and the PlayStation Network allows for downloads of PSOne Classics.

But over the past two years, and it seems like more of the same for the near future, retail versions of remastered collections have begun cropping up at an ever-increasing rate. Just off the top of my head, there’s been The Sly Collection, the God of War Collection, and the recently released ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection. That’s just counting Sony. Microsoft’s Halo: Anniversary, Nintendo’s Star Fox 64 3D, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D are part of the same trend.

With the rise of high-speed cable connections, dial-up modems have all but died out and the ancient practice of singing along to their strange songs has died with them. However, for those of us who lived through those dark days of the early Internet and still here the haunting screech of 56K modems in our dreams, the site Bleeoo has arrived.

Like a veritable Alan Lomax of the dial-up era, Bleeoo lets users record their impressions of modem screeches and publish them online for all to see. There’s only a few offerings thus far, and none of them sound like the rhythmic 56k wail that I remember, so clearly more people need to get involved. If you came of age playing MUDs or waiting 20min to download a 3mb file, it is your solemn duty to log on to Bleeoo and sing a modem screech. We cannot let this valuable piece of our culture die.

(via Bleeoo, original image via James & Mary Bilancini)

Just in case you’re not into science cheerleaders, we’d like to present a cute guy singing almost thirty kids cartoon themes from your childhood while accompanying himself with some epic acoustic guitar skills.

/target hat

/off

(via Geeks are Sexy.)

The year was 1991. Metallica‘s Black Album had just been released, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was dominating the box office, and the children’s TV network Nickelodeon aired the first episodes of three animated series — Rugrats, Ren and Stimpy, and Doug – collectively called “Nicktoons.”

Rugrats proved to be quite successful. The adventures of the show’s inexplicably loquacious infants spanned nine seasons, launched two spinoffs and three feature films. Likewise, Ren and Stimpy‘s often crude and outlandish toilet humor helped cement its status as a cult classic for adults and children alike. But the third show, Doug, didn’t manage to make quite as big a mark on the hallowed halls of animation history.

This past weekend marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jim Henson, and there really aren’t any words to describe the effect that his art has had on the lives of people all across the world. Sesame Street, the longest running children’s show in history, is still teaching the ABCs; the Muppets are enjoying a resurgence on YouTube, a medium they were practically born for; and even Fraggle Rock is out on DVD and has its own comic series. Disney, after a six-year indecisive lull, is finally making good on the Muppets as a brand.

A new Muppet movie, ambitiously titled The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever, is in the works, and I have high hopes for Jason Segel‘s writing. There are many ways I could give tribute to Mr. Henson, but I’m pretty sure that the video montages, nostalgic reminiscing, and philosophic treatises are already out there for the Googling.  So I am going to talk about the Muppet movies.  The good ones, and the not so good ones, and what differentiates them.  Here’s hoping the next one is among the former!

Nostalgia warning: Darkwing Duck is back this June. BOOM! Studios, who already publish numerous Disney character comics through their BOOM Kids! imprint, are bringing the terror that flaps in the night back in a four-issue miniseries beginning in June. The announcement was made yesterday at the Emerald City Comic Con.

Ian Brill, writer on the miniseries, promises lots of villains:

“Darkwing has such a great rogue’s gallery, I couldn’t pick just one. By the time you get to the end of the first issue you’ll see four, and then there are only going to be more as the series progresses. All the villains’ lives have been changed, too. There have been big changes in St. Canard and everyone’s dealing with them in their own way. This series has the familiar characters you want but given new situations that we hope gives a sense of vitality to the stories.”

Read on...

For a friend’s son’s birthday, the right honorable Noah Dziobecki rewrote and re-illustrated the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon.

You can find a free PDF of the entire book, and instructions on how to craft it into a bound copy for yourself own little one, here.