My parents never got “kids” magazines for us. We had Golden Books, and if we wanted periodicals it was newspapers and popular science/mechanics. My dad worked for a Hearst newspaper, so lots of Hearst publications in the house.
@cspwal i loved when that day came! man, i can still feel that weird thin paper in my mind. and occasionally we even got the traveling book fair thing for RIF.
@jerk_nugget Can confirm that they still use that same thin paper. But the Scholastic book catalog doesn’t seem to engender the same excitement in today’s kids. Is the book selection crappier now, or is it just that I didn’t realize how crappy they were back in the day? Who knows.
@mamajoan that’s too bad. i don’t have kids or any close relationships with little ones so i can’t be sure. i definitely remember there were some crappy ones, but that’s true of everything, heh. i feel like there was often at least a few things i “had” to get, but maybe it’s the rose colored glasses. i should ask my mom, she may remember better since she was the one doing the ordering!
(did recently order some kids books though actually - a former classmate of mine from college is quite a talented illustrator and now author for kids. pretty cool! her name is julia denos & her book is called “swatch.”)
@cspwal Yes… so much this. I remember excitedly searching the 2-4 pages for the newest Goosebumps or Animorphs book. That was how I procured most of my reading material when I was in grade school.
Those lurid mens magazines that hung from the wire along the wall of the news store. We usta sneak one out back while waiting for the papers to come. You know gestapo sex slaves and and stuff, the stories were never as good as the cover art. I actually saw the original magazine that Vonnegut described in Killgore Trout’s shop.
My older cousin’s comic books were as close as I came to periodicals. I chewed through library books by the wheelbarrow load, and our encyclopedia set was a family favorite, but no magazines.
A tie between Cricket and New Moon, though I never had an actual subscription to either - and my tiny local library didn’t carry them. I would get a few second-hand issues every so often…but now I can’t remember where I was getting them from!
As an early teen dad used to sneak me his men’s mags. Usually Playboy, sometimes Penthouse, and occasionally the rare Hustler. Oh, how that one was coveted.
@jqubed Wow! I thought WR died long before then. I got it in '50s/early 60’s. I can’t remember it being offered to my kids. But there is a lot I can’t remember.
Comic books ARE periodicals, eh? Boy’s Life was the only one the parental units shelled out for - Mad and Spiderman came out of MY pocket. Highlights and Ranger Rick were things they had at the pediatrician’s.
I still remember getting my little brother to buy my first copy of Playboy. I’m still not really sure why that worked, the newsstand guy may have been a little nuts.
before even looking at the answer choices i thought “highlights, definitely” but i also loved nickelodeon magazine and was a subscriber and…i don’t recognize any of the other answer options.
actually once i helped my friend cut out tons of dog pictures from one issue of nick mag and we put them all over her parents house - like she covered each individual button on the remote with a tiny cut out dog from this magazine, in efforts to get her dad to cave and let her get a dog. i feel like that’s also where we got the idea to do this but i’m not sure.
i also remember something like…you had a binder and you would get sent these folded pages about animals to put in it? they were glossy, somewhere between a nice magazine page and actual cardstock, and folded open. for instance one might be facts about a panda. anyone? anyone? bueller? maybe it was just a wwf thing. (wildlife, not wrestling.)
@jqubed i did look that up (i learned my lesson after an incident a few days ago where i asked someone what variety “those yellow pear shaped tomatoes” were called and was told “yellow pear”) as it sounded like a good fit, although the name didn’t ring any bells, but alas it wasn’t it.
these were individual fold out binder pages that were pre-punched to add to your special binder that came as a set, not magazines. (but they were sent via some kind of subscription service.)
@moondrake my partner (who’s about ten years my senior) said the same thing. i loved it. really appealed to my desire to collect and organize, and i recall being really into jungle animals for some reason. i loved all kinds of tree frogs, and had a poster of tigers, and several panda WWF stickers. i was most interested in learning about orangutans and had more than a few stuffed primates.
also, the american girl doll catalog. back when there were only a handful of dolls and they all had historical outfits/accessories and came with books.
“Jack and Jill” was the only kid-mag that came to my memory mind when I read your question. But because it wasn’t listed, I first thought that (a. it really doesn’t exist and I hallucinated it, or (b. it was published only a few years during my childhood (the fun 50s) and the young whippersnappers at meh.com never heard of it. But…when I googled J&J, it was there and is even still being published. However, since no one else has mentioned it, “Jack and Jill” must be truly somewhat mediocre.
I lived for two magazines Boys Life and Popular Mechanics(Popular Science as well, but PS went through a disastrous death phase when the politically correct crowd at Time(?) owned them.)
I was fascinated with the last page of Mad magazine where you would tri-fold it to get a completely different image.
Owl and chickadee.
Mechanix Illustrated. Especially Tom McCahill’s automotive articles.
You forgot Nickelodeon Magazine. I was a subscriber for many years. MAD? I just bought that in the grocery store when my parents weren’t looking.
@cpierce What age are you, 23?
@fuzzmanmatt 26, thank-you-very-much!
@cpierce i’m 33 and i loved nickelodeon magazine!!
My parents never got “kids” magazines for us. We had Golden Books, and if we wanted periodicals it was newspapers and popular science/mechanics. My dad worked for a Hearst newspaper, so lots of Hearst publications in the house.
“Boy’s Life” - I used to sneak it in the corner of library because I thought I’d get in trouble for reading it…since I wasn’t a boy.
@QuietDelusions Boy’s Life for me – and I was a boy. Loved the corny jokes, plus fancied myself as a young "survivalist
(Also, I guess the occasional Playboy I sneaked looks at doesn’t count as a normal “kid’s” magazine.)
@QuietDelusions Yup. Boy’s Life.
@QuietDelusions was seriously shocked Boys’/Girls’ Life didn’t make the list.
Boys’ Life plus Playboy covered everything a boy needed to know. Well, except for the illustration in Esquire showing how to tie a Windsor knot.
@QuietDelusions it says something interesting that Boys Life didn’t make the list. Not sure what tho…
@RedOak probably ‘the author of the quiz wasn’t a Boy Scout’
Cricket! That magazine was amazing. Oh, wow, it appears to still exist.
@CZug I guess Ladybug was Cricket’s magazine for younger kids?
@CZug yup - and Spider in between those
@CZug Thanks for mentioning Cricket! I thought it was forgotten forever.
Sports Illustrated Kids
Does the scholastic book catalog at school count as a kid periodical?
@cspwal Aw, man, the memories! Getting one of those was the best thing ever in grade school - at least for a book nerd like me!
@cspwal i loved when that day came! man, i can still feel that weird thin paper in my mind. and occasionally we even got the traveling book fair thing for RIF.
@jerk_nugget Can confirm that they still use that same thin paper. But the Scholastic book catalog doesn’t seem to engender the same excitement in today’s kids. Is the book selection crappier now, or is it just that I didn’t realize how crappy they were back in the day? Who knows.
@mamajoan that’s too bad. i don’t have kids or any close relationships with little ones so i can’t be sure. i definitely remember there were some crappy ones, but that’s true of everything, heh. i feel like there was often at least a few things i “had” to get, but maybe it’s the rose colored glasses. i should ask my mom, she may remember better since she was the one doing the ordering!
(did recently order some kids books though actually - a former classmate of mine from college is quite a talented illustrator and now author for kids. pretty cool! her name is julia denos & her book is called “swatch.”)
@cspwal Yes… so much this. I remember excitedly searching the 2-4 pages for the newest Goosebumps or Animorphs book. That was how I procured most of my reading material when I was in grade school.
American Survival Guide. Reagan was president when I was a kid. The Russians were coming any day.
I would imagine for some kids their favorite periodical was Playboy.
Dynamite
Those lurid mens magazines that hung from the wire along the wall of the news store. We usta sneak one out back while waiting for the papers to come. You know gestapo sex slaves and and stuff, the stories were never as good as the cover art. I actually saw the original magazine that Vonnegut described in Killgore Trout’s shop.
My older cousin’s comic books were as close as I came to periodicals. I chewed through library books by the wheelbarrow load, and our encyclopedia set was a family favorite, but no magazines.
I clicked Ranger Rick but it might have actually been The Mini Page.
A tie between Cricket and New Moon, though I never had an actual subscription to either - and my tiny local library didn’t carry them. I would get a few second-hand issues every so often…but now I can’t remember where I was getting them from!
Highlights, Zoobooks, and Mad were all ones I loved. I don’t know if I can pick a favorite.
Humpty Dumpty and Jack and Jill were the parentally authorized children’s periodicals in our house, along with Boys’ Life.
The unauthorized ones were any Marvel Mag we could beg, borrow, or (no, we didn’t steal any) otherwise get our hands on.
As an early teen dad used to sneak me his men’s mags. Usually Playboy, sometimes Penthouse, and occasionally the rare Hustler. Oh, how that one was coveted.
World Magazine from the National Geographic was in the house, and written well for kids.
Tie between Weekly Reader and the Sears catalog. (You know the section.)
@heidiporn I assumed I was the oldest ‘girl’ hanging out on meh until you said Weekly Reader. ☺
@tngrannyd You’ve got “granny” in your name, so you may have me beat.
@tngrannyd Oh, I forgot about Weekly Reader, but I’m pretty sure we got that sometimes, so it must’ve survived at least into the '80s/early '90s.
@heidiporn I was “granny” at 37 but it is now x 10.
@jqubed Wow! I thought WR died long before then. I got it in '50s/early 60’s. I can’t remember it being offered to my kids. But there is a lot I can’t remember.
Comic books ARE periodicals, eh? Boy’s Life was the only one the parental units shelled out for - Mad and Spiderman came out of MY pocket. Highlights and Ranger Rick were things they had at the pediatrician’s.
I still remember getting my little brother to buy my first copy of Playboy. I’m still not really sure why that worked, the newsstand guy may have been a little nuts.
I liked Zillions, but only had a subscription to Boy’s Life.
Muse.
The periodical of my favorite kid? I don’t really play favorites with my children. Kind of a weird question.
before even looking at the answer choices i thought “highlights, definitely” but i also loved nickelodeon magazine and was a subscriber and…i don’t recognize any of the other answer options.
actually once i helped my friend cut out tons of dog pictures from one issue of nick mag and we put them all over her parents house - like she covered each individual button on the remote with a tiny cut out dog from this magazine, in efforts to get her dad to cave and let her get a dog. i feel like that’s also where we got the idea to do this but i’m not sure.
i also remember something like…you had a binder and you would get sent these folded pages about animals to put in it? they were glossy, somewhere between a nice magazine page and actual cardstock, and folded open. for instance one might be facts about a panda. anyone? anyone? bueller? maybe it was just a wwf thing. (wildlife, not wrestling.)
@jerk_nugget I remember those individual binder pages! I had some animal facts…and a bunch of Star Trek ones.
@jerk_nugget I think i remember commercials for the animal magazine on Nickelodeon. Was it Zoo Books as @RiotDemon mentioned?
@jqubed i did look that up (i learned my lesson after an incident a few days ago where i asked someone what variety “those yellow pear shaped tomatoes” were called and was told “yellow pear”) as it sounded like a good fit, although the name didn’t ring any bells, but alas it wasn’t it.
these were individual fold out binder pages that were pre-punched to add to your special binder that came as a set, not magazines. (but they were sent via some kind of subscription service.)
@jqubed update: I FOUND IT!!
glob bless google. it was called "wildlife fact file."
this was the binder:
and here is an example of one of the pages that would go in it (collect them all!):
@jerk_nugget That looks really familiar. I think maybe I found it in a library as a kid.
@moondrake my partner (who’s about ten years my senior) said the same thing. i loved it. really appealed to my desire to collect and organize, and i recall being really into jungle animals for some reason. i loved all kinds of tree frogs, and had a poster of tigers, and several panda WWF stickers. i was most interested in learning about orangutans and had more than a few stuffed primates.
@jerk_nugget I’ve always loved animals. A lot more than I like humans, truth be told.
@moondrake can’t argue there.
also, the american girl doll catalog. back when there were only a handful of dolls and they all had historical outfits/accessories and came with books.
Odyssey, 'cause I was (and am) a nerd.
“Jack and Jill” was the only kid-mag that came to my memory mind when I read your question. But because it wasn’t listed, I first thought that (a. it really doesn’t exist and I hallucinated it, or (b. it was published only a few years during my childhood (the fun 50s) and the young whippersnappers at meh.com never heard of it. But…when I googled J&J, it was there and is even still being published. However, since no one else has mentioned it, “Jack and Jill” must be truly somewhat mediocre.
I lived for two magazines Boys Life and Popular Mechanics (Popular Science as well, but PS went through a disastrous death phase when the politically correct crowd at Time(?) owned them.)
"Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang"
3:45 mark
Origin story here:
https://acculturated.com/daily-scene/spy-vs-spy/