The Mystery of the Achievement Panties - Solved
Being a child of the 1990's the television show Scooby-Doo, Where are You! to this day maintains the position of something of a fixture in which to place the era in the mind. It seems that each decade it is vogue to re-focus on the programs from 20 years before, so the 90's was filled with the 70's -- and I am told that in the 1970's the 1950's were the vogue decade (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, etc) in TV, and in the movies it was American Graffiti. But since the Scoob was on four times a day it was my after-school go-to for light entertainment!
With its very first episode, "What a Night for a Knight," the 1970's cartoon characters voiced by the distinctive Don Messick as Scooby-Doo, Top 40 radio DJ Casey Kasem as Shaggy, actor Frank Welker as Fred, actress Nicole Jaffe as Velma, and musician Indira Stefanianna Christopherson as Daphne, created instantly recognized and remembered characters. I often wonder how many Private Investigators chose the profession because of their early-morning adventures with the crew of the Mystery Machine?
Each episode of the show featured Scooby and the four teenaged members of the Mystery, Inc. gang: Fred, Shaggy, Daphne and Velma, who got around in their far-out psychedelic van known as the "Mystery Machine" for adventures that included supernatural creature like ghosts, zombies, ghouls, walking talking skeletons, and of course your average run-of-the-mill thugs, bandits, robbers, and evil humans who the gang would eventually trap or reveal, often using some pretty outrageous methods, while Scoob and Shaggy found a way to score some noshies because, you know they never admitted it or showed it on screen, but they were both total stoners.
So iconic were the crew of Mystery Inc. that whenever we are presented with a mystery to be solved here at the GU Bullpen invariably someone will say "Ruh Roh Raggy!""Look if we have one of the guys do it, we will get accused of being sexist pigs and exploiting women, but if we assign the piece to you, then we are clearly being responsible editors, and giving it to the best person for the job," they explained. The theory being I guess that a girl is the more appropriate game journalist to cover it?
Fortunately there was no shortage of volunteers to help me research the piece and the mystery -- and the boys in the bullpen willingly tucked right into the investigation, putting off the stuff they were supposed to be doing and patiently searching through image after image, because hey, they want to help out whenever it is needed, and this is just proof that we take our obligation to the readers seriously!
Our initial searches revealed some surprising results -- and it turns out that the Xbox 360 (and video game consoles as well as games) are actually a common theme for girls underwear. Who would have thought it?
The top of the search revealed a news piece from N4G entitled Xbox 360 Panties Revealed at Tokyo Game Show that turned out to be a post to the Cheapassgamers blog . The panties in question were being worn by booth babes from Microsoft's Kinect booth, and considering the reputation that the Tokyo Game Show has for booth babe uniforms these were pretty tame, comparatively speaking, but worthy of notice nonetheless. You can check out the link above for more in-depth views (uh-hem) but we would caution you to mind the NSFW tag.
An enterprising entrepreneur has set up a web store over at Cafe Press to sell panties and men's underwear with an Xbox theme, but they are not the source of the mystery panties we were investigating. Still you can find a variety of panties, thongs, and comfortable men's styles there if you know, your thing is gaming underwear.
A news piece in Joystiq from September 2009 highights the sudden popularity of gaming underwear with a shot of the shelves in a local Target Store that include Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Atari, and Xbox skivvies to name just a few.
In the process of researching the story behind the video game console Achievement panties in question we were shocked to discover that the character Xian Ho from the survival horror game Dead Island evidently does not wear panties! So even if we tell her where she can score a pair of the Achievement panties, she is not going to wear them anyway...
No comments yet. Tell us what you think to be the first.