Mai, Oh My!

My childhood is at times a little hazy. I remember “seeing” things which I still can’t prove are real or made-up.

When I was younger (and barely a teen) – I got my education and reading material from magazines like Circus, Metal Edge and Hit Parader. I would buy them in 2nd hand bookshops a couple months (or even years) after the original publish date. I remembered picking up a copy of CIRCUS magazine once and saw New Kids on the Block featured in it and was seriously What the Fucking. 20 years later it still kind of boggles me up till a few minutes ago when I found an article written in 1990 about this.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3065/is_n10_v19/ai_8914548/

In short, the New Kids on the Block boosted sales in teen magazines when they appeared in or on the front cover. The idiot at Circus Magazine thought maybe by featuring NKOTB in their “Heavy Metal” magazine, it would appeal to other teens to buy the magazine and eventually “dawdle a little bit” before moving up to magazines like CIRCUS. The magazine had one of the sharpest fall offs, a 29.3 percent drop, from 307,092 in the first half of 1989 to 217,056 in 1990. Now the WTF award goes to the publisher and editor in Chief for Circus Magazine at the time – Gerald Rothberg – for thinking this kind of marketing would work. Brave move but FAIL.