The Wonders of Glow in the Dark
Ever since I was quite young, I’ve had a fascination with
objects that glow in the dark. It is a love affair that has spanned about 2
decades, multiple houses and many an unnecessary purchase.
My earliest memory of glowing items stems from when I was 7
or 8 years old. My parents had bought me a set of glow in the dark stickers in
the shape of stars, which were intended to be stuck to your bedroom ceiling.
The packaging came with images of constellations, to provide suggestions on how
to replicate the night sky within the confines of your bedroom. As I recall, I
followed a few of them, then promptly continued with (clumsier) patterns of my
own design. 
I don’t remember exactly how things went down that evening
when the lights went off, but I’ve got little doubt that it was quite
spectacular. A starscape on my roof? INCREDIBLE! Close your eyes and imagine
it. Isn’t the effect impressive?
Since then, I’ve been quite hooked. I wouldn’t call it an
obsession – but there have definitely been a few things that I’ve bought over
the years almost solely because it glowed in the dark. One of the main ways this showed up was in my late primary
school years, when a fad for “Glo Caps” went through my school. Glo Caps were
very similar to POGs – small cardboard circles, stamped with an image of a
character or a scene from a TV show or movie.
There was also an associated game you could play; there were
a number of variant ways to play the game, but most of them involved stacking a
pile of the things together, then hurling a large plastic “slammer” at them to
win them from other people. As with most playground games, cheating was rife
and playing “for keeps” was quickly shut down by teachers, just as it had been
a number of years before when marbles were all the rage.
Nonetheless, illicit "for keeps" games would still take place,
usually among close friends who wouldn’t dob each other in – or sometimes older
kids who wanted to take advantage of a younger kid with an impressive collection
of the things. In hindsight, it was somewhat similar to an underground gambling
ring.
One of the most interesting things that the Glo-Caps exposed
to me was the existence of a red glow.
Red glowing (and blue, for that matter) items are reasonably common now, but in
the mid-90s most of us were only familiar with the traditional yellow-green
glow. They glowed a colour that was somewhere between pink and orange, and it
was an experience that I treasure even years after the original Glo-Caps have
long since been lost to history. They certainly didn’t hold their charge or
glow nearly as brightly, but they were impressive nonetheless.
There was a particularly cool TV ad which depicted a kid
with an entire room full of the things; I had hoped to find it and post it
here, but YouTube seems lacking. If anyone knows of it, please feel free to
post it in the comments.
Strangely enough, I don’t think “real” POGs caught on around
the Central Coast; I knew a handful of people who had them, but most of my
childhood friends preferred Glo-Caps and their chip-distributed companions,
Tazos. Possibly it was connected to the extensive amount of licensed characters
featured on them – Glo-Caps not only had the lure of glow in the dark, but
featured large Simpsons and Disney sets. Among other designs, Tazos featured
Looney Tunes and when the 1997 re-release of the original trilogy took place (much
to my excitement), Star Wars.
For a more comprehensive overview of POGs, Glo Caps and
Tazos, check this link out. http://wayninginterests.wordpress.com/tag/glo-cap/
When I was eighteen or nineteen, I decided that it was time
to make my roof glow again. The reasons behind this are fairly unclear to me,
but I was super-keen on the early-noughties remakes of Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles and Transformers at the time, so I suspect that it may have had
something to do with wanting to relive my childhood. A year or so before, I had
also bought a glow in the dark wolf t-shirt (which was as awesome as it sounds.
Sadly, it has also been lost to the sands of time), and that may have also
played a part.
As I remember, stickering the ceiling followed a fairly
similar pattern to the one it had more than a decade earlier. Follow a few of the
constellations on the box, and simply wing the rest. When I was finished, it
certainly wasn’t the Sistine Chapel, but I was happy with it. Sadly, no photos
are known to exist of this particular phase of my bedroom.
For a number of years, things went pretty quiet on the glow
in the dark front. Between late ’05 and early ’09 I lived in a number of different
sharehouses, and putting stickers on the ceiling of a rental property is
usually frowned upon. After a year back with my parents, it was off to Sydney
to live in a number of different rentals again. During my phase of heavy comic
collecting (’06-’08) I had Flash and Green Lantern shirts that glowed, but the
glow was secondary to the character logos.
But the interest was revived in a small way after my then-girlfriend (and now wife) returned from a trip to America in early 2012. She had brought me back a model dinosaur skeleton – a T-Rex, easily my favourite of these extinct but magnificent creatures. This was pretty cool in and of itself, but its coolness factor was instantly quadrupled when I saw those four magic words on the box – “Glow in the Dark.”
Image from Amazon.com
It certainly hasn’t been an onslaught of silly novelty
purchases since then, but I do get a little thrill whenever I see that
something glows in the dark. A few months ago, I found myself searching for
Robocop merchandise, and discovered that NECA had released a “Night Fighter
Robocop” to coincide with last year’s 25th anniversary of the film.
It’s totally unnecessary, and would probably be looked at all of twice before
it went into the cupboard…but I sure did give some serious thought to clicking
the “Buy” button. Examine the picture and decide for yourself.
Photo from Figures.com
One item that did make it to purchase stage was a Super Mario
baseball cap. It’s noticeably too small for my head, but that hasn’t stopped me
from wearing it numerous occasions – and of course, pointing out that it glows
in the dark to all and sundry.
(Really, I should give it to someone who will be able to fit
their head into it properly, and let them enjoy its magnificent glow.)
Exactly why I enjoy glow in the dark stuff remains something
of a mystery to me. It’s got a vaguely sci-fi feel to it, I suppose, but I don’t
think that quite covers it. Readers are welcome to provide their own
hypotheses.
And T-Rex? Well, he sits on our mantelpiece, doing battle
with a model ship that a friend gave me when I moved to Sydney in 2010. It
doesn’t look quite as awesome as you probably just imagined – a glowing
skeleton Tyrannosaurus Rex fighting against a Dutch trading ship from the 16th-19th
century is quite the mental image, after all. But I still like to think it’s
something of a centrepiece in our loungeroom.
