The Disney Adventures Archive

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Peter Paltridge

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The Chaos God anthology RULED.
They would run better Gargoyles comics; that was just an introductory "guidebook" of sorts.

Let's talk about the scary stories. I don't know how far most of you go back, but I'm the fogey who bought Issue One with Rick Moranis at the newsstand....

The first winner was "Mr. Tilmore," chosen by Vincent Price. It was about a kid who made summer money mowing lawns for his crazy neighbors. There's an old man who just sits at the window reading a paper, and the kid eventually discovers he's dead and just a skeleton, and his wife thinks he's still alive.

The second was "The Picture Perfect Brother," which didn't make any sense and was not scary in the LEAST. It even had a somewhat happy ending. I think the kid who played Pugsley in the Addams Family movie picked that one...shows how much he knew.
 

J. B. Warner

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I have the issue with the TaleSpin part of that story, but I never thought much about it. The comic really combined the Disney Afternoon shows together? Did we get any crossovers between any characters then?

The characters didn't cross over - it just told the tale of how the Chaos Medallion entered the lives of the characters in all five shows. I think my favorite part was chapter three "Spookus Ex Machina", the "Goof Troop" story where Solego possesses Pete's new car (Goofy tries to exorcise the spirit by driving a stake through the hood).
 

Dynamite XI

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Let's talk about the scary stories. I don't know how far most of you go back, but I'm the fogey who bought Issue One with Rick Moranis at the newsstand....
There was one story (and I won't go digging in my collection to try and find it), judged by R.L. Stine, that had a girl renting a pencil from her teacher with her own eyeball as collateral.

The author didn't use bad prose, but the story itself wasn't flat-out scary...just more on the creepy side. Still, I rather enjoyed it as a kid.
 

mobo85

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The great Heidi MacDonald had this cool little interview with Sparky Schulz. (I loved this about earlier issues of DA - they had these random little nuggets EVERYWHERE in their pages.)

It's interesting to note the reference to calling Sparky up- Even though he was one of the most famous cartoonists on the planet, Schulz kept his phone number listed in the local phone book and apparently would talk to fans who called him. (According to his authorized biography by Rheta Grimsley Johnson, there were often calls from youngsters which typically went the same way: "Are you really the guy who draws Snoopy?" "Yes. Do your parents know you're calling?" Click.)
 

J. B. Warner

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Good news, everyone! Thanks to the magic of eBay, I'm gradually rebuilding my Disney Adventures collection! I placed bids today on over 30 issues from the mid-to-late '90s, and it only cost me around $20 overall. With any luck, I'll have lots more to share in the future. But until then, here's August 1995!

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This was around the time that they began phasing out the "celebrity with an animated Disney character" format for their covers that had prevailed since November 1990. The format languished through the '90s, but by the 2000s, it was completely gone. Shame, really, 'cause it was a cool concept.

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Good ol' DA Buzz! Always fresh and up-to-date with... Wait a minute, that Slang Patrol looks familiar.

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Was The Indian in the Cupboard a Disney movie? I can't think of any other reason why they'd give it two pages in Ticket, other than corporate synergy. On the next page, they did the same thing for an interview with Dinh Le, who played the little Vietnamese kid in Operation: Dumbo Drop. In fact, this issue is full to bursting with interviews, and my guess is they were running out of space for them all.

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I really like this Twizzlers ad. I seem to remember eating these Pull 'N Peel Twizzlers at one point, though I can't recall if I preferred eating the strands individually or just chomping on the big ropes.

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Once again, the celebrity on the cover only gets two pages. This is the only time you'll see the words "Power Rangers" and "Academy Award" in the same sentence.

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In the "Too Long; Didn't Read" Department, there's a brief article on Apollo 13 that segues into a really long article on the real Apollo 13 mission. I must have been the only kid who wasn't really all that interested in the space program.

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Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco enter the Great Teammates Hall of Fame! Only to be forcibly ejected ten years later when everyone found out how much juice they pumped into their biceps.

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Well here's history in the making for ya. I wasn't sure what to think about Toy Story when I first read this page - I didn't think computer animation could be any better than what I'd seen on "ReBoot". Shows how wrong I was. (I just wish I still had the November 1995 issue where they talk about the movie at length - they had interviews with all the principal voice actors and everything. It's on eBay, but the current bid is $31.50, and I'm not that desperate.)

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I remember being really ticked off that Radio Aahs wasn't broadcasting anywhere near my town. I have no idea if this behavior was justified - probably not, since I doubt it was much better than what Radio Disney is today.

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The previous issue (which is included in the lot of back issues I bid on) was all about Pocahontas, and it included the first half of a full-length comic adaptation of the film. This is the second half, and it takes up about 75% of the Comics Zone. These things were always really awkward - not only were they spoiler-riffic, they also had to cut out the songs. Note their efforts to rework "Colors of the Wind" into something that fits into three or four panels.

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The only other offering from the Comics Zone this month is another Nervous Rex story. This one, unfortunately, was completely lost on me, as I hadn't followed the comic in its pre-DA days and had no idea who Dearie was.

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"The Action/Adventure Movie Event of Summer '95". Suuure it was. (Could have been worse, though - at least it's not Cutthroat Island.)

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And here's the back cover. This was around the time that "Magic: The Gathering" made trading card games cool (this issue even has a brief article on how to play "Magic"), and everyone wanted in on it. None of them could hold a candle to "Magic", though - at least not until 1998, anyway.
 

Peter Paltridge

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"RADIO AAHS" never appeared in Portland either, and I was curious as well. The ad doesn't exactly say what it is. It doesn't even tell you how to say "AAHS." Do I say "aahhhhhhhhhs"? Do I spell out "A-A-H-S"? What do I do? What WAS this?
 

J. B. Warner

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"RADIO AAHS" never appeared in Portland either, and I was curious as well. The ad doesn't exactly say what it is. It doesn't even tell you how to say "AAHS." Do I say "aahhhhhhhhhs"? Do I spell out "A-A-H-S"? What do I do? What WAS this?

They referenced it on an episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (an episode that aired in 1992, mind you, so the station had probably been around for a while when this ad appeared), where I learned that the AAHS is basically pronounced like "Oz". As for their programming, I still have no clue.

By the way, I just bid on another lot of vintage DAs - this one contains 38 issues from 1992 to 1999, though some are duplicates of ones I already have. Still, the Toy Story issue is included in it, so I'll be sure to post that once it arrives!
 

Mini Garbonzo

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It's wonderful to hear about getting some of the issues back, I didn't know people sell magazines on Ebay.

Honestly, I never expected Jason David Frank to say anything negative about the said movie that he was working in, but "an Academy Award"? Really?
 

David Gerstein

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What are those characters' names, anyone know? They look kinda cool.
"I'm glad you asked, Doc—uh, I mean, bro. We're Ben Hare and Ravenous Raven, professional ripoffs of Bugs Bunny and Crawford Crow. Basically, we switch off between fighting with hunters and dodging Warner and Columbia lawyers—the second job is harder, so nobody wants it permanently."
 

mobo85

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Was The Indian in the Cupboard a Disney movie?

Nope. But Disney Adventures often promoted a lot of non-Disney properties in its pages- the fact that the Power Rangers (a Disney property now, but not then) got the cover is a good example of that.
 

J. B. Warner

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Nope. But Disney Adventures often promoted a lot of non-Disney properties in its pages- the fact that the Power Rangers (a Disney property now, but not then) got the cover is a good example of that.

What I find amazing is that this was the third time that the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had made the cover of DA in about a year and a half's time - they also showed up in April and September of 1994. And April 1995 spotlighted "VR Troopers", which was basically "Power Rangers Lite" if I'm not mistaken. I sense a theme...

In related news, I won all my eBay auctions! The last one, for a lot of 38 issues, was extremely close; I got into a bidding war within the last twenty seconds. Once they all arrive, my collection will be a whopping 60 issues large, spanning from May 1991 to September 1999 (yes, I got the Pokémon issue). I foresee many articles ahead!
 

Dynamite XI

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In related news, I won all my eBay auctions! The last one, for a lot of 38 issues, was extremely close; I got into a bidding war within the last twenty seconds. Once they all arrive, my collection will be a whopping 60 issues large, spanning from May 1991 to September 1999 (yes, I got the Pokémon issue). I foresee many articles ahead!

Can't wait for your review of the Toy Story issue...I almost scanned and posted that one myself, but there was really only one thing in it I wanted to comment on, so I'll let you tackle it.

In the meantime, I went ahead and scanned in August 1994. Seemingly a bland issue, but since when is classic Disney Adventures ever bland?

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So there's Darkwing Duck with, uh, Ace Ventura as the Mask. And some remarkably unspecific teasers.

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There really is a lot of junk stuffed in this issue, but the table of contents belies this fact. In my ignorant youth, I tended to skip over most of it anyway.

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Zip Code always had the potential to be either really weird or really enjoyable. I liked their quirky layout style in the earlier issues; the background images always reflected the subject of the letters.

However, all awe right here is spoiled by the picture on the upper right, of kids sitting in a restaurant. The pic was SO ordinary and bland that DA didn't even TRY to give them a quirky background image.

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The DA Buzz! Believe it or not, Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman was actually cool once. Barney was pretty much always in the "Not" column, and rightfully so; Barney-bashing was just another part of growing up in the 90s.

I have never once used "circle of death" to describe a pizza. I do, however, still use "homeskillet" on occasion.

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And the kid creator of Metamorphon from a while back, debuting the Metamorphon costume! The dude has to be about 27 by now; I wonder whatever happened to him.

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I almost missed this one while thumbing through this issue (and that's not hard to do; my thumb kept flicking over to the subscription cards). Who would have known that Tina Majorino's second big movie role would come ten years later?

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Two pages are devoted to Jim Carrey, the subject of the cover. And it's not even a traditional Q&A interview, which is a little unusual for DA's cover subjects.

The picture on the left of Jim Carrey holding Jim Carrey has always been odd to me.

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Here's part of a thirteen page article on odd places around the USA that one might like travelling to. Courtesy dictates that I ask resident Oregonians Mars and Chris if they've ever heard of or been to this place.

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I'm willing to guess that a third of the places mentioned in this article are closed down by now. Aquarena Springs, which had the swimming pig, closed down in 1996. You haven't lived until you've seen a pig swim.

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If you read DA in the mid-90s, chances are you saw this ad more than once. You never paid attention to it, you never really were interested in it, you always skipped over it. But more than likely, it will resonate within your subconcious when you see it on here.

What really strikes me as odd about this ad is, it looks like a Reader's Digest ad, but it's geared towards kids. Kids may ask their parents to buy a lot of things, but I don't think Whiskas is high on that list, and this ad likely didn't help Whiskas' business any.

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This comes after an article about some MLB pitcher; I didn't read this section until just today. Saying that the DA staff really loved pranks is the understatement of the century; they were ALWAYS doing stories about pranks. Heck, Roger McDowell's hijinks weren't even technically a prank; I honestly think they were just filling space.

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I'm posting this because someone mentioned this Darkwing comic earlier, and the Lion King comic just looks plain biblical.

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This eight page Bone comic is exceptionally rare; it didn't even appear in Jeff Smith's "One Volume Edition" of Bone. (If anyone asks, I'll gladly scan and post the whole thing.)

Bone's original run in DA only featured the first story from "Out from Boneville", followed by this little vignette. Heidi MacDonald's Comics Zone would later on complete the entire "Out from Boneville" chapter; I remember feeling disappointed when the Zone didn't rerun this little story afterwards.

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This part of the video games section is included here for nostalgic appeal ("WOW! A Sega Genesis! WOW! A SNES!"), and because of the fact that it features random Sonic the Hedgehog fan poetry.

Eek! the Cat is a terribly underrated cartoon, but I know nothing about its SNES game.

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Card Shark might have done well in the Pokemon card era if it had continued in DA, I guarantee it. However, on its own it was incredibly boring.

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The back cover. I never associated Cap'n Crunch with goldfish, and I still don't, but this ad just seems so darn cool. From what I remember, they did a couple more of these type of ads, putting facsimiles of the Cap'n's face in other ordinary places. Not a bad campaign.
 
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Zorak Masaki

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I have a question, in that "in and outs" page, what do they mean by "Warner Bros." in clothing?

I assume they mean shirts with WB characters on them. Thankfully this was before the era where they had characters like tweety and bugs in gangsta rap clothing (no, im not kidding at all).
 

J. B. Warner

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I remember August 1994 well - it was the last issue I bought off the newsstand before my subscription began. I seem to recall that I accidentally tore the cover and my mom wouldn't buy me another copy because she insisted that the cover wasn't important.

Devoting an article in DA to The Mask was perhaps a mistake, as I was led to believe that it was a kids' movie. My mom was scandalized when she rented it for me and my sister in 1995 and discovered just how profane it really was. (I still thought the Mask scenes were funny, though.)

That "Bone" one-shot was great, even though I was quite lost while reading it - I was only familiar with the three installments that DA had printed in April, May, and June of that year, so I had no idea who Thorn, Rose, and Lucius were. I believe this story was also reprinted in a recent Bone artwork book.
 

J. B. Warner

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My eBay-won issues are starting to arrive. One of them is the Jason Priestley issue from April 1992, and it's my first exposure to the 128-page era of DA. But we've been focusing a lot on the magazine's glory years in this thread - I think it's time for us to take a gander at what Disney Adventures started to devolve into in the later part of the '90s. And so, here's the other issue that arrived yesterday, September 1999...otherwise known as "the Pokémon issue".

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This issue was actually quite integral to my childhood, as it's what got me interested in Pokémon in the first place. But that doesn't change the fact that it comes from a time when Disney Adventures was beginning to evolve into something a lot less cool than it used to be. There wasn't nearly as much variety in their pages as there once was. Need proof?

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Open up the front cover and you'll find this fold-out ad for Kids' WB's 1999-2000 season, proudly displaying the fact that the "Pokémon" anime was out of syndication and now rubbing elbows with Batman and the Men in Black. Unfolding the ad further revealed promotions for the premieres of "Detention" and "Batman Beyond", but I think we can all tell what the real draw was here.

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By this time, Zip Code had been renamed Mailbox, and it was a lot less fun than it used to be. DA had begun the process of asking its readers to send in responses to pointless questions - like this rather heartless example of what some people would trade for tickets to see their favorite music group in concert. I wonder if Alex W. ever apologized to her little brother after N'Sync broke up.

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Pokémon are everywhere in this issue. Here's an ad for "Pokémon Snap", which had just come out for the Nintendo 64. After I got the game a few months later, I remember seeing this ad again and saying "Hey, you can't find Caterpie in this game!"

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This is all that remains of Ticket. The DA staffers don't even have to scout for celebrity information anymore - the readers just tell them what to talk about. (I didn't scan the "Jett Jackson" comic because, frankly, it bored the hell out of me.)

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Here's the article everyone came to see. I think "Pokémon Stadium" had already come out in Japan, which explains where they got N64 models for all 151 Pokémon for this thing. Can you figure out which Pokémon is missing? (Hint: It's Tangela.)

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When I read this issue, I had only the most basic knowledge of what "Pokémon" was - I hardly knew any of the specific monsters aside from Pikachu, the starters, and maybe Poliwhirl (I don't know why Nintendo kept promoting Poliwhirl - nobody on the anime even got one until Season 3). In any case, this list helped me out a lot...

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...Although some things still confused me for a while. Note that there's no indication of evolutionary lines here, so I had to discern them for myself. I thought Farfetch'd evolved into Doduo, I thought Cloyster came out of its shell and evolved into Gastly, and I thought Gyarados somehow evolved into Lapras. (Give me a break, I was new to the franchise!)

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"Pokémon Snap" was incredibly easy - you could beat it in about an hour and a half, if not less. So articles like this that gave tips on how to win always seemed extremely redundant to me. The game only had something like four controls, so you were bound to figure all this stuff out eventually.
By the way, that disembodied Justin Timberlake head is part of a contest that was going on in this issue - if you found them all, you could win a trip to see The Lion King on Broadway. Seems like unusual criteria for such a prize, but whatever.

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Let's take a quick break from late '90s Pokémania - this is Disney Adventures, after all, and they do have certain obligations to fulfill. Like this boringly designed ad for the 1999-2000 One Saturday Morning lineup, for instance. Compared to the Kids' WB ad at the beginning, it's easy to see why this block had trouble drawing an audience.

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Back to the Kanto region we go. This comic adaptation of the episode "Clefairy and the Moon Stone" originally appeared in Nintendo Power, but saw a reprint here over the course of three issues. This was actually my first exposure to the "Pokémon" anime. I had previously heard the name Team Rocket mentioned online, and until I saw this, I thought they were a rap group. (I swear I'm not making this up.)

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The other big attraction in this issue is a five-page excerpt from J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", which was just about to be released in America. This issue has a lot of firsts for my childhood - this was my introduction to the Harry Potter series too.

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Gosh, more Pokémon crap! They got the games, the anime, the trading cards - they didn't miss anything in this issue. No wonder I became so enamored with the franchise after this.

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Okay, let's talk a little bit about this. "2 B A Master" might just be the most embarrassing piece of Pokémon memorabilia that I own, and I can guarantee that I'd never buy this today. In addition to the complete PokéRap (which most people love but I just find to be "meh") and that mind-numbingly dumb "Team Rocket's Rockin'" song (Eric Stuart can sing, but not in his James voice), it also contains "Misty's Song", the most blatantly PokéShippy thing ever made, which still confuses American-only viewers to this day. This is a big part of why I made the jump to the Japanese version of the show.
Okay, enough of that rant...

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...It's time for another one. This is one of those stupid "Super Music Action Ready Team" comics, and a prime example of how far the Comics Zone had fallen since the departure of Heidi MacDonald. All those great comics based on the Disney Afternoon shows? Reprints of Jeff Smith's "Bone"? Excerpts from "Simpsons Comics"? All gone under the editorial management of Steve Behling. Instead, we get Justin Timberlake teaching mole people how to dance. Whee.

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Oh man, I would have loved to own that Iron Giant figure on the right. Considering how badly (and unjustly) The Iron Giant bombed, I'm sure I can still find them in great supply somewhere.
 

Peter Paltridge

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My eBay-won issues are starting to arrive. One of them is the Jason Priestley issue from April 1992, and it's my first exposure to the 128-page era of DA. But we've been focusing a lot on the magazine's glory years in this thread - I think it's time for us to take a gander at what Disney Adventures started to devolve into in the later part of the '90s. And so, here's the other issue that arrived yesterday, September 1999...otherwise known as "the Pokémon issue".



999_02.jpg

Open up the front cover and you'll find this fold-out ad for Kids' WB's 1999-2000 season, proudly displaying the fact that the "Pokémon" anime was out of syndication and now rubbing elbows with Batman and the Men in Black. Unfolding the ad further revealed promotions for the premieres of "Detention" and "Batman Beyond", but I think we can all tell what the real draw was here.
Batman Beyond premiered before this.


This is all that remains of Ticket. The DA staffers don't even have to scout for celebrity information anymore - the readers just tell them what to talk about. (I didn't scan the "Jett Jackson" comic because, frankly, it bored the hell out of me.)
I was going to scan it myself to show how confusing it is. I still don't know what it's about.


Back to the Kanto region we go. This comic adaptation of the episode "Clefairy and the Moon Stone" originally appeared in Nintendo Power, but saw a reprint here over the course of three issues.
That was really disappointing, as I already had that Nintendo Power issue and I thought they'd make something new.


The other big attraction in this issue is a five-page excerpt from J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", which was just about to be released in America. This issue has a lot of firsts for my childhood - this was my introduction to the Harry Potter series too.
Wow, I don't remember that one. There is NO WAY DA would have gotten an exclusive like that in any year afterward. After Azkaban came out, Harry became huge.


Okay, let's talk a little bit about this. "2 B A Master" might just be the most embarrassing piece of Pokémon memorabilia that I own, and I can guarantee that I'd never buy this today. In addition to the complete PokéRap (which most people love but I just find to be "meh") and that mind-numbingly dumb "Team Rocket's Rockin'" song (Eric Stuart can sing, but not in his James voice), it also contains "Misty's Song", the most blatantly PokéShippy thing ever made, which still confuses American-only viewers to this day. This is a big part of why I made the jump to the Japanese version of the show.
Okay, enough of that rant...
Misty's Song was real? I thought it was just a rumor.

Of course you know they adapted some of those songs into "Pikachu's Jukebox" on the show. "Team Rocket's Rockin" isn't that bad with the visuals attached...and a 45 second run time.
 
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