Author: Slanted Fish

Hello! I'm Slanted Fish, the editor-in-chief and creator of the Poptropica Help Blog (PHB). I'm a writer, Hong Kong native, and Christ follower. My Poptropica username is slantedfish 🐠 Don't forget to be awesome!
Pop 5

Pop 5: Inspired Islands

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans! This is a guest post written by Poptropica community member Crazy Peppers, who’s here to share about Poptropica islands shaped by popular culture. Enjoy!

pop5 inspired

Hey! It’s Crazy Peppers here with a second guest post on the PHB (I also recently shared a My Place in Poptropica story here).

I’ve noticed some similarities between storylines from Poptropica islands and other stories in pop culture, and I wanted to do a post highlighting some of them. So, here’s my “Pop 5” list of islands inspired by outside influences!

#5: PoptropiCon Island

Poptropicon twitter 2

While the plot of this island is pretty original, the setting and characters feel heavily inspired. PoptropiCon isn’t just any old fan convention—its logo bears striking similarity to that of San Diego Comic Con!

As for the characters, the Mighty Action Force parodies many Marvel and DC heroes and villains we know: Elf Archer is Hawkeye, World Guy is Captain America, Gold Face is Iron Man, Teen Arachnid is Spider Man, Dirt Claude is Clayface, K-Man is Superman, and Omegon is Ultron. Also, Stan Ditko could be a cross between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

Check out the PHB’s PoptropiCon Island Guide for more interesting trivia.

#4: Shark Tooth Island

shark-tooth-museum

This island is like the movie “Jaws”: there is a shark threatening a town, and it gets stopped with a special formula. But here there’s also a tropical island, a medicine man, and an ancient temple—none of these are in Jaws, so that’s pretty neat.

Shark Tooth Island also gives us a stranded boy, a professor, and a very special boy (RIP Shark Boy). Castaway Island, where the boy and prof are stranded, even has Wilson the volleyball from the movie “Cast Away.”

Check out the PHB’s Shark Tooth Island Guide for more interesting trivia.

#3: Crisis Caverns Island

crisiscaverns25

Crisis Caverns bears quite a bit of resemblance to “Journey to the Center of the Earth” by Jules Verne. In both stories, you enter the earth’s crust through a cave, encounter strange creatures at the core, and have to get out before a volcano erupts. There are differences, of course—for one thing, in Crisis Caverns, you’re at a state park.

Check out the PHB’s Crisis Caverns Island Guide for more interesting trivia.

#2: SOS Island

sos7

This island has traces of both the book Moby Dick and the movie “Titanic.” First, the resemblances to Moby Dick: there’s a guy named Ishmael, a white whale and a captain who does not like the white whale. As for “Titanic”: there’s a big ship sinking from an iceberg crash, and people need to be rescued.

There is some originality, too: for example, a bonus quest where you need to clog the oil leaks from the ship. That is not in either Moby Dick or “Titanic.”

Check out the PHB’s SOS Island Guide for more interesting trivia.

#1: Escape From Pelican Rock Island

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Like SOS, Escape From Pelican Rock also appears to draw ideas from more than one source. This time, it’s a combination of the films “Escape From Alcatraz” (based on a true story) and “The Shawshank Redemption.”

For the former, we have Bay City/San Francisco as the setting, with a high security prison on an island, much like the former Alcatraz prison. You escape with rafts and twins in tow, with a dummy of your head resting on your prison bed. It’s also like “The Shawshank Redemption” because you were framed for a crime you didn’t commit and sent to prison for it.

Check out the PHB’s Escape From Pelican Rock Island Guide for more interesting trivia.

Well, there you have it, folks—a list of the top 5 most inspired islands (in my opinion). What do you think? What else would you add to this list?

And, cut!

Hope you enjoyed this guest post by Crazy Peppers!

The Poptropica Help Blog welcomes interesting Poptropica insights from anyone in the Poptropica community with thoughts to share. You can find some tips and guidelines on our Write for the PHB page. We also encourage sharing blog posts on the PHC.

If you have an idea for a PHB post, write it up and send it in!

Contests

Announcing the 9th Sp00py Halloween Costume Contest Winners!

Slanted Fish

phb 9th hallo win

B O O, s p 0 0 p t r o p i c a n s !

It’s here: happy Halloween!

You know what that means (at least, you should if you’ve been paying attention to the PHB in the past month)—it’s time to unveil the winners of our 9th Annual Sp00py Halloween Costume Contest!

This time around, we had two categories you could enter in: Poptropica Original, and the newer Poptropica Worlds. We received tons of awesome entries (admittedly mostly for Poptropica Original, which still looks to be the more popular game).

But in the end, it came down to these sp00ptropicans… (hover over each costume to view their names and creators! note that untitled entries were assigned names):

🎃 Top 6 Poptropica Original Halloween Costumes! 🎃

Now these are definitely trick-or-treaters you would not want to deny at your door! But that’s not all. Take a look at the customization capabilities these creatives have come up with over on Poptropica Worlds:

👻 Top 6 Poptropica Worlds Halloween Costumes! 👻

There were so many more amazing entries from Poptropica Original that we just had to feature a whole bunch more. So here are 9 honorable mentions of costumes we thought were pretty sp00py, too (click to view in full size):

🍭 Honorable Mentions 🍭

As we announced in our post about the contest, in addition to being featured here, each of the winning costumes will also be immortalized on our Costumes page! The prize for our honorable mentions is simply the honor of being featured here.

ALSO! We recently reached out to the Poptropica Creators about our contest, and they agreed to sponsor it with one-month memberships for each winner. So, if you were a winner, look out for an email from us and let us know your username so we can pass it on to the Creators for your membership prize!

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Halloween competition! We’re all sp00ped out from looking through your sp00py suit-ups, but we’re amazed by all of your creativity. Congrats to all the winners! If you’d like to check out everyone’s entries, browse the comments section of the contest post now… before it’s too late.

👻 † Happy Halloween from the PHB! † 👻
🎃☠️🍭🤡😈👹👽🍫🎃

Store

Halloween costumes on sale in Poptropica Worlds!

Slanted Fish

Hey sp00ptropicans!

Halloween is just about upon us, and if you haven’t assembled a freaky costume for your Poptropican yet, now’s the time to do it. From now through Halloween (October 31), the store on Poptropica Worlds is having a sale on 8 spooky costumes.

halloweenSale

The costumes receiving a discount are:

  • Vampire Boy and Girl
  • Midnight Ninja
  • Goth Cheerleader
  • Pirate Boy and Girl
  • Fairy Queen
  • Skyhawk Warrior

Every costume piece is currently 5 coins off, and sale prices end on Wednesday after Halloween. So, make the most of it and get those costume parts now, on Home Island of Poptropica Worlds!

Our Halloween Costume Contest is now closed at this point, but we can’t wait to reveal all the winning entries tomorrow, right here on the PHB! As an added bonus, we’ve been in touch with the Poptropica Creators, and they’ve agreed to sponsor our contest by awarding a one-month membership to each winner. So, be sure to check back tomorrow to see which costumes are the sp00piest of the season! 😉

<・)))><<

Advertisements, Social Media

Iris Ray, you can stay—with Dave and the Batcave

Slanted Fish

Hey Poptropicans! It’s Slanted Fish, popping in with the latest.

First, the Poptropica Creators released a new video introducing “6 Cool Side Characters” from Poptropica Worlds! Check it out:

And the six cool cats to be featured are…

  1. Captain Scuttlebutt, who lets you spin the daily wheel on Home Island
  2. Ranger Rick, who’s pretty attached to his bottle of glue 😉
  3. Hazel and Beatrice, the elderly ladies stuck in Crispin Cave — although I don’t think “Be-a-trees” is the conventional pronunciation, Poptropica’s Beatrice is probably unique enough to go for it if she wanted. 🐝🌲
  4. Maynard, also known as Weird Barn Dude
  5. Charlie, who really loves her cat Whiskers
  6. Iris Ray, whose color-changing clothes make her not so much a creeper who hangs around in front of your house all the time, but who adds to the cool factor

Those are some pretty solid choices, although, hey—Hazel and Bea-trees are two characters, not one! Anyway, who else would you add to the list?

That’s not all: it looks like our mystery narrator (who may also be the mystery blogger, and who we’ve been calling Gentle Lion which is his character’s name in the videos) has a new name: Dave. Take a look at the video description:

dave poptropica

Well, it’s good to finally be introduced, Dave!

It also looks like Dave (or Gentle Lion if you prefer Pop names) will be doing more videos for the YouTube channel, along with Stephanie, since both have recently been pretty active on there. (And doing pretty well, I might add!)

The Creators’ Blog has been all back to Captain Crawfish lately. Captain Crawfish also confirmed with the PHB over Twitter DM that he’s “running this stuff for the time being.” Not sure how long that will be, but Poptropica’s recent tweets have been on top of their game lately, so this seems like a pretty good arrangement!

Over on Poptropica Original’s Home Island, there’s an ad for The LEGO Batman Movie! (It’s been out for months, but still, it’s a good one.) Head inside the Batcave and talk to Batman to help him stop the Joker.

Your task is to help build three Batmobiles, and you’ll be given 20 seconds to complete each one. Simply drag each piece to where it belongs, noting the shape of each part as you hover over them until you find the one that matches.

When you’ve successfully built all three vehicles, you’ll win some prizes! The Batmobile Builder assembles a LEGO Batmobile on your screen when you press space bar, and the Batarang is a handheld bat boomerang you can throw (by pressing space bar). You’ll need to de-activate one to use the other, since both require space bar actions.

batman ad poptropica

Finally, this is our last call for you to enter our Halloween Costume Contest! You can enter as many times as you like in two categories, Pop Original and Worlds. The contest closes on Monday, October 30 and we’ll be revealing the winners on Halloween.

phb 9th hallo

We’re also still taking art (of all forms) for Community Creations! This month’s theme is Halloween, and as usual, you have up until the end of the month to enter.

community-creations-logo1

Need a little inspiration for both? Check out our list of ASGs for Poptropica Original for tons of cool costume parts. We keep adding new ones, so keep checking back!

Plus, for those of you in the know, Stranger Things—an amazing Netflix drama—released their second season this week. What does this have to do with Poptropica? Well, check out our Pop-over post for Stranger Things to find out! 👻

Stay sp00py, Poptropicans!

<・)))><<

My Place in Poptropica

My Place in Poptropica: Gentle Fang

Slanted Fish

This is the My Place in Poptropica story of Gentle Fang, who stopped playing Poptropica for a while because she felt too old for it, but returned to it for the challenge and fun she’d missed. See below for how to send in your MPIP!

mpip gentlefang

Hey everyone! I am Gentle Fang (a brilliant oxymoron of a name). I wrote a guest post back in February with a little island history, and decided to return and do a My Place in Poptropica post for fun. Enjoy!

2012 | Introduction

In 2012, I was in second grade, and was seven years old. I always loved to visit FunBrain.com, and in the website’s games there were constantly Poptropica advertisements. The characters in the pictures I saw looked pretty cool to me, so I asked my mom if I could play.

She agreed to set up an account for me to use, although I was not allowed membership to the game. Upon entering, I clicked the first island I saw: Zomberry. I was frightened by the purple zombies back then, but now I see them as nothing to be afraid of. Since I was scared, I quickly exited out of the game. Sadly, I have no idea what my old username was.

2015 | Different school, different kids

When I was in fifth grade, I moved to a new school for the seventh time in my life. I had come from a school where I was very well-liked by the students and was very close to them, so when I moved, I expected it to be just the same as the last school. However, I turned out to be very wrong.

I met lots of kids who were very different from what I was used to (in a good way), and most of them didn’t like any of the same things I did. I got very shy around these kids, and so I had no one to be around when school was over. The work was also kind of boring to me because the curriculum at my new school was behind on what it had been at my old school, so much of it was review for me.

It was out of boredom that I went back onto FunBrain one night, and once again, I saw the Poptropica ads. I thought back to second grade and the scary Zomberry zombies, and was hesitant to join. However, I decided to do it again anyway, because I figured much could have changed as I got older.

I found that I loved the game, and tried to complete islands on my own, which was a huge challenge. I had fun changing my character’s outfits and making her hair bright turquoise. I chatted in the common rooms and even copied down some questions from the chats to ask to kids at school.

I got a very positive reaction, and found that many people who I thought were so different from me were actually quite similar. I made a few friends who I am still close to today, including my friends Isabella and Caroline. I found out that plenty of kids played Poptropica, and one even showed me the PHB, so completing islands wouldn’t be so hard anymore.

It was also on Poptropica that I discovered how much I love theater, especially musical theater. I watched as Gentle Fang cried off of the stage on Reality TV Island and how she would sweat nervously in Game Show Island, and I myself became very good at acting out the very same emotions my character acted out. After fifth grade, I joined the drama club at school, which helped me to get a ton of friends.

2016 | A break from an obsession (and forming some new ones)

In 2016, I entered middle school. I LOVED IT, to say the least. I felt like I had a lot more independence, but also felt I was “too old” for some things.

For one, I felt that it was time I abandoned the pink decorations on all of my stuff and replaced it with boring old zebra stripes. I also developed a new obsession of listening to Hamilton over and over again. And, more relevant to this story, I came to think that Poptropica was too babyish for the eleven-year-old that I was and not worth my time anymore, so I stopped playing.

2017 | Why’d I ever stop?

This year, I felt I was lacking a challenge, some sort of game that would test my logic and reasoning. I realized what I was actually missing was Poptropica. I missed the challenges the islands presented to me, and I missed the fun social interactions that resulted from it. I realized that the only thing I was actually “too old” for was my own brain.

So, I decided to give myself a mental refresh, in which I realized it was dumb to get rid of things I loved so much just because I was getting older. I quickly went back to Poptropica, replaying all of the old islands and laughing at some friends’ outfit choices for their characters.

I went back to Gentle Fang and took her for a long shopping trip in the store. I had tons of fun, and I am working on my Poptropica Worlds account now. While my newer obsession of Hamilton songs continue to play in the background, I am so happy to have gone back to my older obsession of a game that brought me great joy.

Hope you enjoyed this “My Place in Poptropica” story!

If you haven’t already, we invite you to send in your own. Please include your username and a minimum of 500 words, typed with good spelling and grammar, and divided into labeled sections. If you send in your story, we will continue to post new community MPIPs!

~the Poptropica Help Blog