Before I begin, I want you to understand that I have no reason to lie to you. I don’t care about alienating the companies I’ll be attacking in the following article because they have nothing to offer me.
The comic book industry I dreamed about being part of since I was a boy is dead. It’s never coming back. It will never recover.
Continue readingComments Off on When The Shill Hits The Fan
Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Idiot's Delight, Magazine Rack, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Worst Of All
Imagine you are a child in the year 1984, seeing and hearing this for the first time:
That opening theme is every bit as iconic as those of Star Wars, Indiana
Jones and Buckaroo Banzai. It isn’t just triumphant; it’s Christmas, your birthday and post-orgasm in half a minute.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned
Mistake #1: No weapon accessories.
Unless you were alive and paying attention in the 1980s, you probably didn’t know that Transformers weren’t the first toys in America that changed into vehicles. “GoBots” were.
Transformers came from Rhode Island’s Hasbro, in 1984. GoBots came from Tonka, makers of fine metal toy trucks, in 1983. That may be why Hasbro did everything right, from the start- they saw what Tonka had already done wrong. And oh boy… Tonka did just about everything wrong.
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Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Worst Of All
Mad medicine was everywhere in the 80s and 90s. There were toys and playsets endorsed by mad doctors, for use by kids. Every time you watched cartoons, you saw a skinny dude with crazy hair in a white lab coat, maniacally mixing chemicals and potions for some nefarious purpose. Under the influence of this, I created my own mad medicine man; Dr. Kill-Everybody.
Dr. K (no hair), with Fronkin Steen and Psuto Moto.
Either the trope became shopworn around 2001, or something happened that discouraged children from playing with chemicals. You don’t see mad doctors and scientists like you used to. Maybe this is a good thing; maybe the concept was subconsciously driving impressionable kids away from lucrative STEM-field careers. I don’t know.
What I do know is this. Mad doctors once flourished in our society, even though they were annoying, and generally sucked.
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Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Saturday Movie Matinee, Worst Of All
Long ago, in the Before Times, I was dating a woman with a very young daughter. I had not yet gelled as an artistic entity, and was in the process of learning that I’m really not cut out to be a father, even a surrogate one. This became apparent on two occasions. Both were attempts on my part to make a connection with a kid. Both failed hilariously.
The first was the purchase of a “children’s book”. I spent hours at Books-A-Million (down the block from Media Play) hunting for just the right one. It had to be colorful, clever, and not condescending. I refused to buy anything “kiddie”, on principle. It had to be something that enticed, thrilled, and sparked the imagination, like the books I read in my grade school library.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Girls of BIUL, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Thousand Listen Club
From BIUL III.
Look, choking sucks. I don’t have to point that out, do I? And truthfully, most toys have small parts these days, and there’s a warning about them on the package. But those clickers are long gone. They blocked a toddler’s airway better than a spoonful of shellac.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Eatable Things, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Saturday Movie Matinee
DIY stands for “do-it-yourself”. You knew that, right? It was once a point of pride in music production. People love DIY, because it lights that little bulb in the mind that signals “I can do that”.
Ideally, you should feel that way about anything people do, aside from brain surgery or bomb disposal (and you can learn how to do those). Shoot, you could change your gender if you set your mind and wallet to it, but that’s a personal matter, and not something you want to capitalize upon. Still, there’s a lot to be said for taking a grass-roots shot at an admittedly lofty goal. For example, producing a homemade movie.
Random duders from an early series of Invisible Inc. ©Matty Boy Anderson.
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Filed under Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Magazine Rack, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish
From BIUL III.
Comments Off on Disappointment: Childhood’s Elegy
Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Magazine Rack, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Worst Of All
Like the lawn dart, a true line of demarcation between Then and Now is the Thumbsucking Baby. In cartoons and comic strips of the 20th century, if there was a baby, it was depicted with a thumb in its mouth. Maggie Simpson delivered the combo breaker, in the form of a pacifier, doing infants the world over a huge favor.
Suck this.
A pacifier has the advantage of being unattached to a heavy arm, which slowly pulls at the front teeth and palate, resulting in buck teeth. Buck teeth tell the world you suck dick like a champion. Depending on who you are, that can be inconvenient. Most people correct it with braces, to prevent this assumption. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions
Previously, I remarked upon how those of us who were children in the 1980s “knew disappointment by name”, thanks to the deluge of new toy lines leaping at us from store shelves, most of them doomed to two-year lifespans and discount-bin futures. Companies were just beginning to learn how the lack of a Saturday morning cartoon could put an ugly dent in their profits. The hunt was on for the next best gimmick, the hook that would bring in the kids and establish the next He-Man or GI Joe. Not coincidentally, those lines were also infusing gimmicks circa 1987 in a losing battle to stay on top.
Transformers, arguably the decade’s most popular toys, were expensive to produce. The supply of repainted robots that comprised the line’s first few years had run dry, leaving Hasbro no choice but to design the toys themselves, an extra step that was not only also very expensive, but resulted in the far simpler Pretenders and Firecons. Few, if any, will argue that either was a high point in quality. For the uninitiated: Firecons used the same sparking mechanism as Doc’s DeLorean from Back To The Future, and that was a Happy Meal toy. (It was recalled because “kids” could chew off a rear tire and choke on it, not because of the sparks as you might assume. I have two of the worthless things.)
So it was that in 1987 Hasbro began to try some new tricks. Here is but one example of something they threw at the wall with the greatest effort, and try as it might, it just didn’t stick. Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, I give you Air Raiders.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish
BIG BOOK OF COMICS (SIGNED)
Original price was: $15.00.$10.00Current price is: $10.00.
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