My Chemical Romance—“Welcome to the Black Parade”

60 Songs That Explain the '90s

This episode of '60 Songs That Explain the '90s' explores the cultural phenomenon of Nickelodeon's Super Toy Run—a nostalgic 1980s-90s contest where winning kids could rampage through toy

Key takeaways

• The Super Toy Run was not just a fun contest but a deeply alienating experience that revealed social dynamics among children, exposing jealousy, shifting friendships, and power imbalances.

Main topics

• Nickelodeon Super Toy Run (1980s-90s)
• Cultural nostalgia of the CD era

Notable quotes

"Did you get everything you wanted? Yeah, and more. The boy." – The deflated melancholy in that last kid's voice.

Conclusion

The episode weaves together childhood nostalgia, cultural memory, and artistic introspection—using the Super

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:04) The Speaker 3 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 4 (0:15) The new Speaker 3 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 2 (0:36) Hello, friends. A quick note to say that 60 Songs is now available on YouTube. We made it. Success. That was easy. You can now watch full episodes of this show on YouTube, and you can also check out our new social media accounts on Instagram and TikTok, all using the name 60 Songs that explain the 90s. We have heard your cries of despair and confusion, and we have therefore embraced various popular online platforms. So watch us on YouTube. Check us out on TikTok and Instagram. I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter still under the name Harvilla, H-A-R-V-I-L-L-A, but maybe stay out of it. I don't know. We'll put all the links for these in the episode description as well. Thanks for listening and or watching, and we'll see you on the internet. Do the words Nickelodeon Super Toy Run mean anything to you? Does this phrase resonate? Did your inner nine-year-old just freak out just a tiny little bit? Because mine did. When I think of heaven, deliver me in a black-winged bird to a Nickelodeon super toy run. Speaker 5 (1:52) Once a year, two kids in America get to Speaker 3 (1:56) live out the ultimate dream. Speaker 5 (1:57) I still don't believe it. I think I'm going to wake up in about two seconds. Speaker 3 (2:00) It's Nickelodeon's Super Toy Run, a game-grabbing, toy-snagging rampage through a KB Toy Works store. Nickelodeon created it, and Speaker 5 (2:07) only Nickelodeon's got it. Did you Speaker 3 (2:09) get everything you wanted? Yeah, and more. The boy. Speaker 2 (2:11) The deflated melancholy in that last kid's voice, though. Did you get everything you wanted? And more. That's heavy. That's real. Also, the initial black and white footage of excited children really confuses me. Nowadays, when I see black and white stuff in commercials, I just assume it's a political attack ad. So Nickelodeon, the kids' cable TV channel, back in the 80s and 90s mostly, so like pre-SpongeBob, Nickelodeon had this shopping spree contest where you enter via postcard, and if you win, you get five full minutes. to run through a toy store and fill as many shopping carts as you can with all the toys you want. Either KB Toys or Toys R Us, depending on the year. They even flew a kid out to Hawaii to do this. Speaker 5 (3:04) On your mark, get set... In a Speaker 2 (3:08) five-minute rampage, Doug found toy paradise in tropical paradise. Speaker 5 (3:11) Videos, Speaker 2 (3:11) sporting goods, telescopes. He grabbed it all. He even got stuff for the kid next door. And when it was all over, Doug Speaker 5 (3:17) had bagged almost $10,000 worth of toys. Speaker 2 (3:20) Yeah, good for you, Doug. Keep it to yourself. I was crazy jealous of Doug. Dude, that would have been the best day of my whole life. Five minutes to grab all the toys you wanted. Imagine there's me sprinting down the Toys R Us aisle that had all the Transformers and G.I. Joe guys with both my arms outstretched going just scooping them off the racks and into my ninth shopping cart. But G.I. Joe guys, those are pretty cheap, though. Like three bucks a piece, maybe. That is not an economically efficient use. of my five minutes. I can't help but notice that pretty much every Nickelodeon Super Toy Run winner ends up with almost $10,000 worth of stuff. $9,000 and change. Suspiciously uniform totals year to year. I need a Moneyball-type analytics breakdown of every year, every kid, and the retail price of every item. How does one approach this situation if you're just trying to make as much money as possible in hypothetical resale value? How many 10-speed bikes can you fit in a shopping cart? Like maybe 12? I would not thrive in this environment. It's too stressful. I used to go to buffet restaurants with my buddy Tommy, and Tommy was adamant that you had to beat the buffet. Right? You pay $35. All right. Now you got to eat more than $35 worth of food. You got to make this restaurant lose money. You got to beat the buffet. So we eat high value food only. I'm sitting at the table munching on a dinner roll and Tommy slaps the dinner roll out of my hand. No bread. That's empty calories. Bread is worthless. I'm like, dude, you need to calm down. I take a sip of Dr. Pepper. Tommy slaps the Dr. Pepper out of my hand. No soda. That's empty calories too. Go grab some crab legs. Beat the buffet. Okay, okay. I lack that killer instinct. I fear I would have paralyzed myself trying to defeat the Nickelodeon super toy run and somehow I'd have ended up owing Toys R Us money. Grudgingly, I must admit, I'm better off living vicariously through these people. Speaker 5 (5:50) See? Speaker 2 (5:56) Almost 10,000 bucks. Again, suspicious. That rundown is from 1991. Quick question, where'd you get a human skull? Yo, I must have overlooked the KB Toys human skull aisle. Back in 2015, the AV Club interviewed a couple mid-90s super toy run winners, including Doug, and it's legit fascinating. An article written by my friend, Mara Eakin. It turns out that you can't spend the whole five minutes going in the video game aisle because you'd make too much money and it would look boring on TV. Also, your typical nine-year-old kid does not have the upper body strength to even do that because the toys are too heavy. So the kid would just go. I imagine Karl Marx watching some Little League punk pancake himself trying to gullwing the remote control car aisle. It's a rich text. In that AV Club article, the winners talk about how their friends and classmates treated them differently. Once everyone found out about the super toy run, you get kids outright asking for toys or just acting super weird and obsequious. Suddenly, even the bullies are refusing to hit you during dodgeball games, etc. A lot of jealousy and cattiness. Kids are dicks, basically. One of the winners. Andrew Moose, 1995, Sacramento. Andrew says, quote, It also helped me figure out a lot about who my close friends were. The people who were close to you beforehand, before any of this happened to you, if it was still unchanged afterward, you knew. It's the kind of life lesson that sticks with you as you learn about people's intentions as you meet them and think about what possible motivations people might have. when they meet you. End quote. Yikes. This kid spends five minutes in a toy store and he walks out talking like Drake. But no, I'm sure that's true. Sincerely, I bet that whatever you may have imagined, the lived experience of a super toy run is bizarre and uncomfortable and profoundly alienating. So it's for the best that the closest I ever got. personally to doing a super toy run was in 2006 when the Lincoln Center Tower Records in New York City had a going out of business sale and basically all the CDs were five bucks. And trust me, that was plenty weird enough. Speaker 2 (8:45) That's the cool little circus-type opening riff to the song I'm about to talk about. A remarkable cocktail of whimsy and pompousness in that little riff. No, you sit up a little straighter, but you also somehow recoil instinctively. You are suspicious. You're like, uh-oh, something really bizarre and uncouth is about to happen. This shit is going to be both awesome and ill-advised. It's like your ringtone. when your most toxic high school ex calls you out of nowhere 10 years later. We'll talk about this song in a second. I just wanted a little musical thing there. Okay, in 2006, I'm living in New York and Tower Records goes bankrupt. Tower Records, the once monolithic international record store chain with iconic U.S. locations coast to coast from Hollywood to Manhattan. Growing up in the 90s, back in the peak CD era, back when CDs cost $17.99 a piece and everyone loved it, and therefore the recorded music industry was going to be booming forever. Back then, in LA especially, Tower Records is a cool, vital part of music history. Sure. But Tower Records is also definitionally a chain, a monolith, a corporate bully, an existential threat. to cool independent record stores like Other Music, that was a cool New York record store, or Empire Records. That's a movie. But now it's 2006, and we're post-Napster and mid-iTunes and pre-streaming era, and somebody could... Hypothetically, download 80 gigs of classic Tropicalia records off the illegal torrent site oink for free, and the music industry has imploded, and yeah, oof, even Tower Records is out of business now. Sorry, guys. My bad. Tower Records is functionally holding a going-out-of-business sale, and so I toot on up to the Lincoln Center store on the Upper West Side, because I ain't ever been there and it's about to be too late, and pretty much all the CDs are $5. Holy shit. Unlimited $5 CDs. Oh, look, here's the 1974 album Cantar from Brazilian singer and Tropicalia icon Gal Costa. Oh, weird. Actually, I don't need to buy this CD because I already downloaded this record from somewhere, though I forget where exactly. Oh, that's too bad. Nonetheless, this song is called Lagrimas Negras. That means Black Tears. I think you'll soon find that this song is thematically... Appropriate. Speaker 5 (11:34) I just Speaker 2 (11:52) dig that song and thought you should hear it. Those lyrics are in Portuguese and translate roughly to, he is the astronaut of longing with a mouth all red, black tears fall, flow, and hurt. Thematically appropriate. You'll see. Okay, maybe I don't need that album for some reason, but holy crap, this should be the single greatest moment of my life. This is totally the rock critic equivalent of a super toy run. Except I walk around Tower Records that day and I feel this heavy, deflated melancholy. Like civilization has collapsed. Like I'm trapped in the belly of a dying beast and I'm helping kill it. One $5 CD at the time. I'm at a funeral. That's what it is. I have unwittingly joined a funeral parade. We are beating the buffet to death. Part of the subconscious thrill of a super toy run is watching a kid stick it to the man. Right? Back when a giant national toy store chain was a robust money printing colossus. But now here in the 2000s, forget rampaging contest winning children. Now the biggest threat to Toys R Us is, you know, private equity. And CD stores are dying too, and we killed them, and we should feel bad, and maybe we even do feel bad. I wander into the Lincoln Center Tower Records hip-hop section, and I see two friends of mine, two big-shot music writers and critics and culture writers and future podcast stars. And I go, what's up, fellas? And they turn around and they're both holding giant, towering, precarious stacks of $5 CDs. And they look at me like, oh, shit, they are alarmed at my presence. And they're like, hey, man, how's it going? There was just such a striking mixture of glee and shame on their faces. I'll never forget it as long as I live. It was as though I'd caught them raiding my refrigerator. It felt like I was approaching two raccoons that were eating giant stacks of pancakes out of a garbage can. They're like, oh, we were just, I'm holding a giant stack of $5 CDs as well. Obviously, I'm buying all kinds of shit. This is one of the best days of my life, even if it does feel unnatural and surreal and funereal and vaguely depressing. I'm on a super emo toy run. I'm on a super emo toy run that's so emo that that day I accidentally buy, for $5, one of my absolute favorite albums of the 2000s. Speaker 5 (14:50) The Speaker 2 (14:50) band is called Say Anything. That's also a movie. Say Anything are a rock band from Los Angeles. A rock band and, yeah, kind of objectively an emo band. Emo being an extra intense and emotionally direct offshoot of punk rock with multiple waves and iterations. But at its mid-2000s commercial peak, emo is basically sad, angry boys writing mean, angry songs about girls. That's what emo is. I have friends who listen to this show who get mad if I don't explicitly define every subgenre. They've been asking me what goth means for years. And I'm like, dude, I'm not defining goth. Go look it up. Say anything or an emo band. led by a reckless and fearless and filterless singer-songwriter named Max Bemis. And yeah, wow, Max just said the full name of his ex-girlfriend, Molly Connelly. And then he does it again. Speaker 5 (15:47) You goddamn kids had best be gracious with the March money you sp- cussed for. Speaker 2 (16:08) This song is called Every Man Has a Molly. Reckless. Uncouth. Ill-advised. Okay, so I would hasten to add that Molly Connolly is not her real name. And also, she maybe, hopefully, doesn't really exist. We're doing emo meta commentary here. We're taking things too far on purpose. There's a great book called Where Are Your Boys Tonight? The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion, 1999 to 2008, by the music journalist Chris Payne. And in that book, Max Bemis says, quote, Emo was always exaggerated. I'm going to fucking die if you don't go out with me. I was like, what if I took this even further and intentionally? End quote. Yeah, man. What if? Chorus. Speaker 2 (17:21) And in that book, Where Are Your Boys Tonight, the great rock critic and friend of the show, Ian Cohen, jumps in and he says, quote, a song like every man has a molly. If you approach it from a certain perspective, you're like, oh, this is everything wrong with emo. But Ian says, Max knows exactly what he's doing. He's not condoning being that kind of person. You know, that's what I hope people understand. End quote. And I agree. But also, this song, we're doing the thing. Right? You see this a lot. We're doing the thing where we identify a bad thing. Rampant, invasive, hyper-personal misogyny in emo lyrics in this case. There's a bad thing. And then, having identified the thing, we then ironically critique the thing by creating a super-exaggerated parody of the thing. But now, in addition to shrewdly critiquing and mocking the thing, we're also just doing the thing. Now, yes, we're doing a supercharged, extra uncouth version of the thing under the guise of denouncing the thing. It's a real conundrum. Anyways, I buy this Say Anything record for $5 and dude, I fucking love it. Speaker 2 (18:55) Yeah! That is the triumphant climax of a song called Belt. Belt is track one on the Say Anything album Is A Real Boy. And the record begins with a song of rebellion. It's the terrifyingly exuberant gang vocals there. The mob, the riot, the battalion, the army, the nation of millions that screams, my friends, in unison. The ironically bro-ish frat house Greek chorus going, yeah, yeah. On a whim, as Tower Records crumbles all around me, I acquire the 2004 Say Anything album, Is a Real Boy. That's the title. Is a Real Boy. It's a Pinocchio reference. You can tell it's a Pinocchio reference because the album cover is a drawing of Pinocchio's nose lengthening. Because he's been lying. Pinocchio's got a very long nose. This is not a subtle enterprise. And you guessed it. That's why I fucking love it. Is a Real Boy has extreme, try-hard, uninhibited, ultra-verbose rock opera energy. The final track, track 13, is called Admit It! Three exclamation points. Here comes a whole lot of words. Hit the deck. Speaker 5 (20:24) That Speaker 2 (20:35) is 200 pounds of emo in a five pound bag right there. We have reached bold new frontiers of knowingly toxic oversharing. Say Anything frontman Max Bemis struggles very publicly with emo scene fame, with substances, and with bipolar disorder. The agonizing mental health struggles and triumphs of Max Bemis will be the primary animating force of Say Anything's whole weird, sprawling, discomforting, er-emo, frequently awesome body of work. But this Is A Real Boy record is singularly bonkers. This song... is called Alive with the Glory of Love. Speaker 2 (21:37) And when our city, vast and shitty, falls to the axis. Yeah, he means the axis powers in World War II. They'll search the buildings, collect gold fillings, wallets and rings. Oh yeah, that all means what it means. Max Bemis is Jewish. It comes up a lot. There's a 2002 Say Anything EP called Menorah Majora. That's good. That's pretty good. Here's Max in that Where Are Your Boys Tonight oral history book. Quote, When I wrote Alive with the Glory of Love, I had just seen The Pianist or some Holocaust movie. It immediately made me think of my grandparents. What was it like to be in love during that time? The Holocaust was deeply ingrained in me from a young age. My first serious fear was people coming to my house and taking my family away. It was this apocalyptic thing I knew personally because my grandparents had been through it. I wanted to do some Moulin Rouge kind of song about that. Alive with the Glory of Love is about love in the face of the apocalypse. Let's take this as far as it can go. End quote. Not all of Max's bandmates in Say Anything were aware at the time that Treblinka was the name of a concentration camp. Speaker 2 (23:21) And what is there to say, really, beyond, oh, wow? It turns out you can say anything in an emo song and then go, yeah, at the end, and maybe it'll work. I loved this record. The grandiosity, the absurdity, the audacity. It induces awe in me, and not for nothing, it also induces profound and genuinely impressive discomfort in me. I cannot believe any of this is real. And I'm not 100 % sure that it should be. In that book, Max Bemis talks about how his mother is Jewish and Max's maternal grandparents basically disowned his mother for marrying his Irish Catholic father. And so by extension, Max's grandparents disowned him. Max says, quote, I didn't meet my grandma until Alive with the Glory of Love came out. I played it for her on her deathbed. It was a huge compliment for her to recognize me as not a mistake. I know that's so dark, but it's true. I saw she appreciated me and appreciated the music. She loved it. She cried. She said I was beautiful. End quote. Oh, wow. I read that quote and I put the book down and I just thought about that for a while. So that's the scale, the emotional pitch we're working at today. Let's take this as far as it can go. Let's take this as far as emo can go, as far as rock and roll can go, as far as any one album can go. Because that day in 2006 at Tower Records, as I did my little sheepish funeral march with a giant stack of $5 CDs, it wasn't just a funeral for a record store or a funeral for the record business. It was a funeral for the album. It was a funeral for the album as a concept, as an entity, as the default unit of musical greatness and lasting human achievement. Music is cheaper now. Music is free now, basically, usually. That's the good news. We got everything we wanted. But it turns out what we really wanted was more. Speaker 5 (25:33) My father took me into the city to see a marching band. Speaker 2 (25:42) My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 46th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, colon the 2000s. And this week we are discussing Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance from their 2006 album, The Black Parade. Dig the truly phenomenal snarl in My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way's voice right here when he sings the words to join the Black Parade. Speaker 5 (26:20) If Speaker 2 (26:23) Gerard Way did a Nickelodeon super toy run, he'd just have six shopping carts full of human skulls. Gerard Way going down the human skull aisle. Total retail price, $9,200. Ad break. Speaker 4 (26:45) The Speaker 3 (26:45) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 4 (26:56) The new Speaker 3 (27:00) Honda City isn't just made to drive,

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