As I pulled up in front of the shop, I had to recheck my directions. It was a dingy little

hole in the wall, stuffed with two-in-a-dollar general and a computer repair shop. It looked

like it had just existed here since the creation of the first VHS tape. The windows were covered

in thick yellow paper, and the outside was caked in a film of old dirt. The sign on the

door said open, but it was barely visible through the dirty window. There was no way this

place had what I wanted. When I was a kid, I remembered watching a show on cable called

Children of Man. As a kid, the premise of the show appealed to me. The show was about kids

living on an island out in the Pacific, trying to survive day-to-day trials. The producers

had gotten 40 kids from all over America, ages 10-12, and dropped them off with supplies and

instructions on how to survive. The host, Chris Manzworth, was a survival expert, and he

would create challenges every day for the kids to complete. There were four teams of 10 kids,

and the winner of each challenge got something cool for their area of the village. I watched

the show religiously as a kid every Saturday night, right after the Simpsons. The show would come on,

and I would be enthralled. I always imagined that I was on the island with them, surviving day-to-day.

The challenges were also neat too. They had the kids gotten clean their own meat, dig wells by hand,

build rafts with a raft race, and make aqueducts so their village could have running water.

It was a neat idea, but the show just stopped after eight episodes. No new episodes came out,

and the station never gave a reason. This was before the internet, and there was no way to check

for updates online. So the show slipped off into obscurity, and my 10-year-old self just forgot

about it. I remember the show again a few years ago, when Mom sent me a box of my stuff from the

attic. There were a couple of old VHS tapes in there, and between Batman and the animated series,

and the teenage mutant Ninja Turtles, were eight tapes with handwritten labels that read,

...