What Was I Saying...?

Until recently, when I heard the phrase “The Big Mistake” in reference to gaming, my first thought was of the release of 4E, which I dislike intensely. But when I heard they were going to use the same system as a framework for a new edition of Gamma World, I decided it would be worth a try. After all, a lot of what irritates me about 4E — characters are a random bunch of powers that don’t really make any sense, storytelling has been systemically shoved aside in favor of a series of pumped-up encounters that may or may not be related to each other, and so on — are actually core conceits of Gamma World and have been since 1978. And though I’ve been a gamer since the Reagan administration, I’ve never actually played Gamma World before, so it seemed like a good time.

The premise of Gamma World, for those who don’t know, is that reality broke a long time ago (nuclear war in previous editions, a “Big Mistake” with the Large Hadron Collider in this one), and your characters live in the crazy post-apocalyptic world that arose from it, encountering mutants, monsters, and wacky high-tech stuff in the ruins of Ancient cities and installations. And of course, reality is still a bit wonky, causing you to mutate randomly during the course of play. It’s two parts Logan’s Run, two parts Escape From New York, and one part The Muppet Show, although you could also think of it as Fluxx: The Roleplaying Game.

The new boxed set includes a smallish (and a bit flimsy) rules booklet, a deck of Alpha Mutation and Omega Tech cards, a sealed booster deck of same (more on that below), a pair of battle maps showing several encounter locations in the starter scenario, two sheets of heavy cardstock character/monster counters, and some (smallish) character sheets. Aside from the usual selection of gaming dice, the box contains all you technically need to play, although I recommend you download the character sheet and print it at full page size. A 4E D&D GM screen might also be handy, and as I have a wide variety of miniatures, I used those instead of the counters, but that’s a personal preference.

Character generation, at least if you do it “right,” is completely random. (The game allows for you to have some choice, if you really insist on it, but has no qualms about calling you a big baby if you do.) Thus, my players ended up with:

• Lee: A gravity-controlling android with a high Charisma and a Dexterity of 4, named Downshift.
• Jamie: A permanently-on-fire cat-anthro, sort of a furry version of The Human Torch, named Blaze.
• Josh: A radioactive swarm of rats who share a hive mind, named Mick.
• Laurie: A huge human with telekinesis, named Gina.
• Me (NPC): A superfast human who can create duplicates of himself from alternate realities, named Buzz.

Due to the random generation of gear, almost everyone in the party ended up owning 5 gallons of fuel — but nobody had a vehicle aside from a couple of horses. Mick (the rat swarm) did have a canoe, which I thought would make a cool chariot pulled by the horses, but he traded it in for two rolls on the Ancient Junk table, ending up with a boardgame and a string of Christmas lights, which he actually liked much better. (“I can make them light up, see!” *bzzt*)

Unfortunately, one big problem Gamma World shares with 4E is a philosophy that “roleplaying is that boring stuff that happens between encounters,” and this is reflected in the starter scenario. A paragraph informs you that robots have been randomly bothering “the village” and so your characters are on the first encounter map because they’ve tracked the robots up here.

Um, what village would that be? Why should the characters give a flap about that? What is the world like when there are no dice involved? The game doesn’t care. Heck, they didn’t even bother to give the main “boss” of the starter scenario a name. That annoys the heck out of me, because I care a lot more about that stuff than I do about whether combat is balanced or not. So, in the two hours or so of prep time I had, I whipped up the village of Dozer Hole, including a saloon called “Let ‘er Rip” and its hawkoid owner, and even (*gasp*) came up with a working name and backstory for the baddies.

With the help of the randomly-determined gear the party was carrying, we worked out that they were a traveling band of adventurers who used to have a car, but that it underwent some sort of catastrophic existence failure. So they scavenged the fuel and are now looking for another car, which is what brought them to Dozer Hole. However, Dozer Hole operates almost entirely on a local currency called “bucks,” which the party naturally had none of. Fortunately, Kaziza (the owner of Let ‘er Rip) would extend them 500 bucks worth of credit if they’d take care of the problem of robots trundling down out of the hills and blowing up at their town.

A couple of skill checks in the book provide a little more information, but not much. There are raiders in the hills; the robots are products of “Stupendico” (Kid-Tested, Mom-Approved!). A while back some people came around Nameless Village asking about robots and were rebuffed. If I’d had more time to flesh out this part, there could have been a lot of wacky fun interacting with the colorful postapocalyticish eccentrics of Dozer Hole — but the book didn’t provide any and I didn’t have time to come up with ‘em. So we breezed over this bit and went right to the first encounter (and by extension, right to the first fight).

I won’t detail what they found in the mountains to avoid spoilers, but Gamma World is powered by the 4E engine, so combat, apart from being just a hair sillier, felt pretty much the same. Lots of random shifting, lots of trying to figure out some kind of power to bring to bear instead of doing a “basic attack,” and so on. Although one improvement here is that doing a basic attack feels less like “a turn wasted” in this version; I think this may be because there are fewer powers generally (and no feats at all).

There is also a lot less fluctuation in hit points; although you can still take a Second Wind, there are no Healing Surges — and no cleric — so for the most part hit points go in only one direction: down. This means you have to be a lot more careful about surviving any given encounter (and take your second wind as soon as you’re bloodied), because there’s no healer to pull your bacon out of the fire. On the other hand, you regain all of your hit points whenever you take a short rest, so assuming you stay up longer than the bad guys do, you’ll be fine at the beginning of your next encounter.

“Treasure” is awarded in the form of draws from the Omega Tech deck, representing high tech stuff you find either on your dead foes or lying in the corner of the room ignored. Omega Tech tends to be stuff that alternates between being very useful, or blowing up in your face, such as the little buddy robot Downshift found, which follows him around and shoots at his foes, but if it misses his foe shoots at him instead. (I used a miniature of K-9 from Doctor Who for that — it seemed appropriate.) At the end of an encounter, any piece of Omega Tech you’ve used has a certain chance of breaking, although some of them are salvageable as less-powerful permanent versions of themselves. The idea is that you will gain and lose and gain and lose Omega Tech cards a lot over the course of the game.

Similarly, Alpha Mutations (powers which are things like growing an extra pair of limbs, or suddenly developing laser beam eyes) change at the start of every game session, during every extended rest, and can theoretically change during the course of the game if there’s some triggering event (referred to as “Alpha Flux”). The powers are on cards, and whenever Alpha Flux occurs, you discard your current one and draw a new one.

Players can (and the WotC marketing department hopes they will) create their own personal deck of Alpha Mutations or Omega Tech by buying booster decks — and is anybody surprised by this? There are rules as to how a personal deck must be built, so you don’t just build yourself a deck of nothing but Fusion Rifles over and over, but it does allow you to create a themed deck that will work with your character. If you’re a psychic, for instance, you might build a deck heavy on psionic mutations. Of course, if your character croaks and you then roll up a timeshifted seismic, all those psi cards are going to be less useful. But given that it would probably take three or four booster packs to build a workable deck, you’ve probably got spares to reconfigure with.

So! What’s the overall impression?

The Good

If you’re an old-school gamer, you are probably already familiar with Gamma World, or at least familiar enough to know if you’ll like it or not. Jamie, who is an old-school GW player, says that it works much better with “a more modern rule system,” and certainly the inherent weirdness of the setting is the only thing that can make 4E work for me. The fact that the critters are on-level compatible with those from D&D is a big plus — all you need to do to create a funky new mutant for your characters to face (since there are only two modules announced and they won’t be out for months) is pull something out of a 4E adventure and re-skin it with more psychotropia added.

The Bad

The starter scenario included is, in a word, weak. It’s a super-linear dungeon crawl designed to escort players from fight to fight with no background to speak of and almost no flavor at all. Considering how wild, crazy, and awesome the world is described as being, this is a very lackluster way to introduce people to it. The rules are 4E nonsense, but the world is also nonsense, so it fits. I will say that although the idea of booster decks of cards is a very blatant “Actual Game Sold Separately” mechanic, it doesn’t bother me because the game is perfectly playable without it and the constant fluctuation of powers and gadgets is part of the world. I can also see how, if you’ve been playing a while, seeing the same cards over and over would quickly get tiresome. Whole splatbooks full of nothing but new origins for players who don’t want to be another mind-reading hawk-man would not be out of line for a hardcore group.

The Ugly

The stat blocks for several monsters are wonky at best — I was transcribing foes from the adventure into WordPerfect so I could have a print-out handy instead of having to flip pages during the course of the game and I encountered badly-calculated ability score bonuses so many times that I had to double-check they hadn’t changed how those were figured. Who knows what other, less-obvious problems there were! I didn’t have time to refigure stat blocks, so I don’t know how off the numbers actually were. (The good news is, at first level at least, +1/-1 either way is probably the largest variation, so it wasn’t really an issue.) Also, the main book is small (5″ x 7″ -ish) but was clearly laid out for full 8.5″ x 11″ size — so the type is tiny and can be hard to read. On top of that, the binding is cheapy … one read-through and the spine was already broken.

Final Verdict

It’s OTT, silly fun, and is worth rotating in to your game schedule. However, at least until the modules come out, you’ll have to do a lot of the heavy lifting of making a viable campaign out of it, and if the starter scenario is any indication, you’ll still have to do a lot of the heavy lifting then. On the other hand, character development tops out at 10th level (no Paragon or Epic Gamma World, it seems), so campaigns will tend to be short and sweet, which is probably for the best. Like the MST3K mantra says, “Just repeat to yourself, it’s just a game, I should really just relax.”

-The Gneech

PS: Josh’s mini-review. Same conclusions, many fewer words.

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

I have Smashwords set to alert me if reviews of the Brigid and Greg e-book collections go up, and this morning I received a notice that there was one to see. …except, the link isn’t responding. In fact, all of Smashwords.com is unresponsive this morning.

Holy cow! My one review was so awesome it slashdotted Smashwords! This is huge! Alert the media! “Rising internet writer gets such awesome reviews he breaks publisher’s website!”

The power! The unlimited POWER!

I promise, I’ll use it only for good.

-The Gneech

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

Some twenty-ish years ago, the BBC (and by extension on this side of the pond, PBS) began running a TV series based on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, starring David Suchet as the quirky little detective.

And it was brilliant. David Suchet perfectly captured the strange mixture of warm, insightful playfulness and cold calculation that made Poirot so formidable a detective, not to mention nicely embodying Poirot’s long list of idiosyncrasies without becoming quite the grotesque that other actors had tended to turn him into in the past. Hardcore Christie purists might grumble about the way Col. Hastings, Inspector Japp, and Miss Lemon were crammed into every story with a crowbar because they were “part of the regular cast,” and there may have been moments when the series veered a bit towards being a situation comedy that just happened to have detective stories in it. But on the whole, it was brilliant. And many people, myself included, said of this series, “Man, I wish they’d do Murder On the Orient Express!”

But that was twenty years ago. Poirot had a great run in the U.K. and over here, but eventually was cancelled as all good shows must someday be. Like so many other great TV detectives, David Suchet’s Poirot moved on to the occasional “movie special” instead of the regular weekly offering, allowing them to take on Christie’s longer works without abridging the heck out of them. Unfortunately, something changed along the way. Hercule Poirot, the quirky and offbeat Belgian detective who winked and chuckled at English society, became POIROT, ZEALOUS DEFENDER OF LAW AND ORDER! And his cases went from being charming parlour games, to GRIM CRIME DRAMA.

And thus, twenty years later, we are finally presented with David Suchet as Poirot in Murder On the Orient Express … and the series that used to portray Poirot so perfectly, instead gets it all wrong.

We start on a sour note with Poirot solving a case which results in a young and promising military officer blowing his brains out, spattering gore all over Poirot’s face. This scene, while unpleasant, at least has a hint of a precedent in the actual book; the scene that follows, in which Col. Arbuthnot and Mary Debenham happen upon a woman being viciously stoned to death for adultery, not only didn’t appear in the book but is completely contradictory to the deliberately-pedestrian way in which the the book starts. Things keep going from grim to grimmer as Poirot boards the train, meets Ratchett and turns down his job offer, and various characters begin throwing religion at each other and praying all over the place. (Do what now?) And Poirot finds himself telling Mary Debenham that the woman who was stoned to death “knew the rules of her culture” and that by breaking them she invited being brutally stoned to death in the street.

Wait, what?

The train may stay on the rails, but this script sure didn’t. 0.o The screenwriter (or director, or whoever it was making these decisions) was so intent on making a Big Damn Point about “justice” vs. “law” — whatever that point was, I never could quite figure it out — that they were perfectly happy to twist Poirot from a likable ex-cop who did amateur sleuthing as a mental diversion into a cold zealot who cares only about The Law (in capital letters) and believes that the slightest slip leads instantly to anarchy and barbarism. On top of this, all of the charm, all of the pleasant “conversationality” of Christie’s writing is thrown completely away, leaving only a bleak landscape where what little humor there is seems like a bitter jab instead of a friendly nudge. This Murder On the Orient Express has Poirot scowling and barely able to stomach the presence of Ratchett during the job offer and essentially refusing even to speak to him, instead of the book’s lighthearted exchange of, “At the risk of being personal, I don’t like your face.” By the end, both Poirot and the suspects are all nearly frozen to death, croaking at each other in grim darkness, and the presentation of the “right” solution to the Yugoslavian police is an angsty dark night of the soul for Poirot, instead of gently handing the decision to M. Bouc, the director of the line, and “retiring from the case.”

SPOILER ALERT: In one of the most egregious twists of character, even if it is a supporting character, Col. Arbuthnot, the steadfast British officer who was so upset that Ratchett was murdered instead of being sentenced to death by a jury of twelve, “the civilized way,” pulls out a gun with the intent to murder Poirot in order to prevent him from telling the police what actually happened — thus not only perverting the character, but also the whole damn point of the story. This, to me, falls under the heading of the screenwriter (or director, or whomever), putting themselves and their own desires above the work, which is something I always resent in any adaptation.

I don’t know the motivation behind turning Poirot from light whodunnit into bleak melodrama, and honestly I don’t care. But one idea that occurred to me was that they may have done it deliberately to distance themselves from the 1970s Albert Finney version of Murder On the Orient Express. That version is a grand symphony, a tribute not only to Agatha Christie but to the glories of old Hollywood and pre-war Europe, with the Orient Express itself all but waltzing across the screen in its own exuberance. What better way to be different from its exalted elegance than to be harsh and grim, right?

Unfortunately, for all of Albert Finney’s chewing the scenery in the 1970s film, he is at least chewing the scenery in ways compatible with what Agatha Christie actually wrote. The 1970s Murder On the Orient Express is an extremely faithful adaptation; one that even Dame Agatha herself was pleased with, after a lifetime of seeing her works hacked up and generally mucked around with. (And crying all the way to the bank, it’s true.) Admittedly, that leaves the makers of the Suchet version in a tough spot: how do you make a faithful adaptation of such a famous work, without simply doing again the extremely faithful adaptation that’s already been made? The key there I would think would be in letting it ride on David Suchet, with his subtle, nuanced, warm and humorous Poirot taking the stage instead of the eccentric, french-horn-laughing, wild-eyed Poirot of Albert Finney. Twenty years ago, when I was wishing for the David Suchet Murder On the Orient Express, that was what I was wishing for. The 1970s version had everything right except Poirot himself — the new version seems to get everything wrong including Poirot himself.

C’est la vie!

-The Gneech

CORRECTION: I should mention here that Agatha Christie’s Poirot is made by ITV, not the BBC; my apologies. It’s all “British television” to me.

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

Something that pleases me no end is when somebody buys an ad on gneech.com that catches my eye and turns out to be very cool indeed. Such is the case with The Three Micahs, a blog by M.C.A. Hogarth (a.k.a. “Haikujaguar”) about the business end of creative pursuits. In an engaging and perky writing style she gives artistic types — often less-than-stellar businesspeople — useful tips for getting their heads out of the clouds long enough to actually succeed and hopefully even prosper at their vocation. My first introduction to the blog was a banner ad at the top of my own site (proof that advertising works ).

I am particularly impressed at the holistic (and pragmatic) approach she takes to the artistic life, including the necessity for most of having a day job. Far from seeing this as a curse, she spends a lot of time showing how to integrate the day job into the whole package and use it to fuel your art.

Above all, your #1 strategy: if the job isn’t working for you, start looking for a new one. This Day Job is not your career. Your goal is to make enough money to free yourself from some (or all) of your financial anxieties and to get out of the studio… not to chain yourself to a miserable existence. Remember the mindsets: I am not my Day Job, and I am allowed to choose the work I do. Arm yourself with these realizations and keep looking until you find the right fit.

She also illustrates the blog with cartoon jaguars, so what’s not to love? All my fellow woolly-headed artistic types, I heartily recommend you check it out.

-The Gneech

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

I thought about doing a spoof video of myself geekgasming as I opened the box a la Stephen Fry, I really did. But in the end, I was thwarted by the fact that Mrs. Gneech wasn’t here to operate the video camera, and that I was too bouncy to wait.

So, how is it really? Is it like a laptop? Or just an iPod? What’s the verdict?

Granted, I haven’t exactly been running the thing through its paces, but I did buy the limited 30 days of 3G access and took the thing with me on some errands, I played the first few minutes of “Sam and Max: The Penal Zone,” and now I’ve got it on the keyboard and I’m posting to my blog. So it’s not a bad little test. I haven’t tried the funkadelic “Periodic Table App” or keyboard toy — I’m looking for a gadget I will actually use, particularly when I’m at conventions. Really, that’s what I wanted it for, to replace my Old and Busted laptop with some New Hotness.

Overall, I like it. While it is heavier than it looks, it’s not so heavy as to be unmanageable. The interface takes a little getting used to, (although people with an iPod/iPhone/iWhatever already will have a much easier time) and the apps need a little more baking. On the other hand, sliding, swiping, and touching the screen quickly become second nature and it won’t be long before you’ll wonder how you managed so long struggling with a mouse.

Regarding the apps, most of the ones ready out of the gate are just iPhone apps with either a big black margin, or blown up to double size and fuzzy as all get out, so they will take some time to catch up. Stanza particularly suffers here, because if you double the size of the app, and then shrink the font down in order to get more words on the screen, they’re still fuzzy from being blown up. Guh. That would quickly give me a headache. The iBook and Kindle apps are much nicer in this regard. iPad native apps that make better use of the larger screen real estate are much better, and by this time next year there will be a lot of awesomeness in that department. (I haven’t tried out the native word processor yet; I’m not sure if I want to go that route or just write to the cloud with Google docs or something. I have yet to see how much writing on the road I’ll actually want to do.)

I will say, the shiny shiny screen can be a turnoff, especially once it’s covered in thumbprints. It’s not a deal breaker, but it is just a tad annoying.

Still, the iPad is exactly what I expected it to be — the first generation of a new and all together different type of computer. This is going to be the “pushbutton easy” machine that will start showing up everywhere — in the doctor’s office to call up patient records, in the waiting room at the doctor’s office in place of a magazine or portable game, in the kitchen looking up recipes, lying in bed and watching that episode of Doctor Who you missed last week, sitting on the tray in front of you on the plane and showing a movie you actually want to see. It’s the internet from your comfy chair. It’s your e-mail while you’re riding the bus. It’s gonna be big.

That said, I don’t necessarily recommend running out and buying one now, unless you particularly want one right now. For me, the iPad came at just about the perfect time, as I was looking to replace my laptop anyway and had the money allocated to spend. Certainly, the apps could use some time to cook, and no doubt next year’s model will have a camera and better multitasking (i.e., any at all).

But if you find yourself gazing longingly at one and you’ve got the money to spend, I say go for it. You won’t be disappointed.

-The Gneech

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

In a blog article, Mike Stackpole recommended Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, so I toddled on over to a local bookstore, flipped through it for a bit, and finally picked up a copy.

In brief, Crush It! is about turning yourself into a brand and over time make a living doing whatever it is you love to do, specifically in this case using online outlets such as blogs and social media. Using himself as a case study, Vaynerchuk lays out a working model of how to start, grow, and build on an audience, with the underlying message that the internet has made this easier to do now than it ever has been before, so JUMP ON WHILE YOU CAN! (Vaynerchuk is a man who likes a lot of exclamation points.)

The Good

A lot of “self-help” or “get-ahead” books take enough content for a ten-page article and expand it into a 500-page book costing $40+; Crush It! does not do this. Crush It! is a slim volume with a lot of white space and a very zippy writing style (one chapter is only a single word long!), which cost me ~$17 with a discount card and would have only been $10 in electronic form. And Vaynerchuk is passionate about his subject, giving a lot of no-nonsense, straight-up advice about how to get out there and make a name for yourself.

Vaynerchuk is a classic hustler (in the Tom Sawyer sense, not in the sense of being a crook) — he’s all about finding out what people want and getting it to them, in a way that will make him a profit along the way. The archetypal merchant hero, as it were. While reading Crush It!, I kept being favorably reminded of Kerry O’Day, my own business partner (the gal behind Merchandise Maven and other such projects), who would get along with Vaynerchuk like a house on fire. In particular, when he related a story about driving a case of wine to a customer hours away late on a holiday weekend when he discovered his staff had screwed up the order, I immediately thought, “Yup! That’s Kerry all over.”

And in Crush It!, Vaynerchuk turns this “Kickass Schmoozer and Customer Service” mind to the world of blogs and social media, giving concrete and well-thought-out advice on how to turn things like WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter into the launchpad for your own career. His own enthusiasm also rubs off in the text, so if you’re flagging at the end of a long day and needing a little booster shot to keep you going, it’s a good place to look for that.

The Bad

Of course the problem with a work like this is that, by its very nature, it’s ephemeral. While the core lessons of making yourself your own best product and your own best salesman are timeless, the particular vehicle he’s chosen to talk about in Crush It! is an always-changing field of technological change driven by both innovation and marketing. Sure, Facebook is hot right now — but in two years, if previous social media lifespans have been any guide, everyone will be somewhere else that hasn’t even hit the radar yet. At which point, the chapter in which he lists specific strategies on getting the most out of Facebook will be yesterday’s news.

Vaynerchuk knows this full well and is the first to tell you so; he also keeps driving home the point that the methodology of Crush It! is simply one path to take. “Be true to your DNA” is one of his core rules, whether that means being a texty-sort of blogger (like me) or more of a video-star blogger (like him). So once you get the underlying truths, the specific path you take doesn’t matter as much.

The Ugly

If I had to pick one thing that put me off a bit in this book, it would be how much of it Vaynerchuk spends, particularly at the beginning, telling his life’s story. A very standard “by your bootstraps immigrant makes good tale,” he goes into great detail about his father’s liquor store, which led to his own development as a wine expert, combined with his own adventures as a teenage baseball card dealer, which led to his status as big-time wine store owner and online wine guru, etc., etc. I understand why it’s there, and of course I’m painfully aware of the role this very book plays in Vaynerchuk’s promotion-of-self (and by extension, now my own role in his promotion by reviewing it) … but purely as a reader this is where I found myself tempted to say “Get ON with it! I picked up this book to learn how to toot my own horn, not to listen to you toot yours!”

This takes up roughly the first 2/5 of the book; and while it does have value as part of the big picture (teaching by example, essentially), it takes a long time getting there. It would have felt like less of a digression if Vaynerchuk had found some way to push it back and put a bit more “let’s talk about your needs”-type info near the front. On the other hand, it does establish Vaynerchuk’s bona fides as somebody who knows what he’s talking about, having lived it, so it may be that in the front is the only place it could go.

The Bottom Line

Crush It! is definitely a “right place at the right time” kind of book. If you’re looking for a handbook of self-promotion, particularly through online media, as well as a primer on how to get out there and hustle, this definitely should have a spot on your bookshelf, whether physical or virtual. And, since it is so economical, both in terms of price and wordcount, there’s very little overhead to going out and getting a copy. The price of two lattés for the electronic version, or three-and-a-half for print, it’s money well spent on useful advice. I don’t quite see it as the career bible that Mike Stackpole makes it out to be, but on the other hand for people who’ve never seen Kerry in action, I’m sure it’s an eye-opener!

-The Gneech

Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.

When I was a kid, I had an 8-track tape that had an episode of "The Shadow" and an episode of "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy" on it. (Or, as the announcer put it, "Jack Armstrong! Jack Armstrong! Jack Armstrong! The Aaaaaaalllll-American Boy!")

The Shadow is familiar to most people I imagine, but if you're not an old-time radio enthusiast you might not know ol' Jack Armstrong. Jack was a clean-cut teenage football player who, by virtue of his globetrotting adventurer Uncle Jim, would go on all kinds of amazing adventures around the world while exhorting "all you fellas and girls" to eat Wheaties ("with lots of milk or cream and topped with your favorite fruit"). In a lot of ways, "Johnny Quest" was basically "Jack Armstrong, the Animated Series," if you see what I mean.

( I don't remember much... )