"And for the length of one hour and thirty, the dullards and their ilk shall stare and drool into their uneconomical popped niblets as colorful moving likenesses of giant animated 'rowe-bots' strike and slap each other. No discernible purpose shall be evident in these goings-on."
I really tried to like Transformers: The Movie. I really did. I sort of get the appeal — the multitude of colorful characters, the bright animation, the synth Vince DiCola score. I guess maybe it works on some strange pop cultural level, if you're being generous. Still, it's a mess. A hot mess, maybe, but still a mess.
The visuals are leagues beyond what the Saturday morning cartoon ever managed to muster, benefit of a greater budget and a longer production schedule, but there isn't much more that actually stands the test of time. It's pretty easy to see the film was destined to be a cult hit (that is, horrendously unprofitable in every way), because without an affinity for these characters or the tiny toys they spawned, there's little to appeal to a broad audience.
But they tried. Transformers: The Movie is crammed with guest stars. Listed among the cast are Judd Nelson as Hot Rod, Leonard Nimoy as the evil Galvatron, Robert Stack as Ultra Magnus, and Eric Idle as Wreck-Gar. Tales of a near-death Orson Welles in the recording booth are the stuff of legend; his stint as the planet-devouring villain Unicron would end up being his last movie role, one he made no bones about disliking.
About the film, the New York Times said pretty much exactly what I just did, but with a certain degree of clout and authority that you just can't pull off unless you're, well, writing for the New York Times: "While all this action may captivate young children, the animation is not spectacular enough to dazzle adults, and the Transformers have few truly human elements to lure parents along, even when their voices are supplied by well-known actors."
But anyway.
It's 1985. You're making a movie. Aside from Judd Nelson and a boatload of tag-along toy merchandise, how else do you bring in the coveted 18-to-34 demographic?
Rock music. Lots and lots of rock music. During dialogue exchanges, during action scenes; whenever there's a lull in the Vince DiCola synths, cram a hard-rock scorcher into the cut and crank the bass. And, of course, no '80s movie desperately clawing for a piece of your box office dollar would be complete without a radio-friendly pop anthem to inject a little crossover appeal. Something along the lines of The Karate Kid's "You're the Best," or Kickboxer's "Never Surrender."
Enter: "The Touch"!
A veritable soundtrack stalwart, Stan Bush was the go-to guy for a lot of studios searching for some feel-good rock to pad out their movie montages. Never mind the fact that all of his songs sounded exactly the same — drum machines accompanied by some combination of the words "heart," "will," "glory," and "hero" — his output was nice and generic at a time when studios were eager to hop on the mass-market gravy train.
And, really, what's wrong with that, in moderation? Out of the wonton soup of commonality comes the tiny minced pork nuggets of honest-to-goodness artistic expression. That's how it works; that's how it's always worked.
Does Stan Bush's "The Touch" reach that pinnacle? You be the judge.
"Apprehend my words, and look upon the horrors to be reaped by our posterity; there shall be, far in the Future, grand palaces of light and luminosity, immense jungles of plastic and steel and glass, bombarded throughout by the florid electronic screams of 'amusement' machines. Here parents shall surrender their children to the hellish caucophony — surrender them freely, and with relief! — to pursue their own crass consumerist exploits at the Churches of 'Macys' and 'JC Penney.'"
A while ago — and by that I guess I mean almost a decade, Jesus — I wrote a tiny piece called "The Arcade of Your Dreams," where I lamented (nothing new) the state of affairs at a run-down bowling alley I use to frequent. Looking back, yes, that bowling alley was a dump and the arcades languishing there did bring to mind the abuses you sometimes see perpetrated to dogs, cats, and other animals under neglectful ownership. The only difference, aside from sentience and the capacity for suffering — and, really, is that so big a deal? — is that animals have organized groups and foundations that actively seek out their abuse and put a stop to it.
No such luck for old arcade machines. The connection may seem preposterous, and I freely admit that, well, it is — I'm just a stupid guy writing a stupid blog about stupid stuff, after all — but the neglect of aging coin-op machines really does yank at my heartstrings. They have no protectors, no advocates, no one to look after their well-being or protect them from cruelty. And they have no control over their eventual fate.
Incidentally (mercifully?), during the peak of the late-'80s/early-'90s arcade revival, some arcade cabinets were manufactured with batteries that would disable the game's inner workings when their lives came to a close. And some, the real bad-asses, the machines that didn't mess around, no sir, came with batteries that, while not explicitly designed to rupture, were highly likely to do so given enough time, and everyone knew it. They'd eventually spill their corrosive contents all over the game board and commit de facto suicide in an act of spectacular self-immolation.
(OutRun is a notable example; the mechanism whereby the game board is technologically disabled is called a "suicide battery." The leaky battery thing may just be a consequence of poor manufacturing or cost-cutting measures, but I'd like to think it was an easier, cheaper way of accomplishing the same thing.)
From the Dead Battery Society (www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/dead.html):
You may have heard the term "suicide battery" used before and wondered what the heck it meant. Several arcade game manufacturers decided it would be a good idea to put a battery on their arcade game motherboards that, when they die (and they will die), disable the game. Why they did this isn't exactly clear. Is it a way to artificially limit the lifespan of their games? Is it an anti-piracy measure? Do they want to assure that they will continue making money from the games by forcing you to send your boards to them for repair after a certain amount of time? Whatever their reasons, it sucks.
Programmed electronic suicide. Dignified, sort of, if you think about it. If only every arcade machine were so fortunate. Much worse fates were destined for the sickly residents at the Bowling Alley of the Damned. Me, from nine years ago:
Amid the devastation, I counted roughly half the machines were either not working properly or completely non-functional. Only one side of the Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 console was up to snuff, the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet was suffering from some serious screen problems, the Air Hockey table could only manage to register one player's score and not the other's and, to top it all off, the management had apparently taken a run-down Super Street Fighter II cabinet (complete with a glut of dirt, grime and cigarette burns) and hardwired it to play Marvel vs. Capcom. Ugh...
My post would end up being featured on the main Xanga page, garner about a thousand hits, and solicit over seventy comments from nostalgic twenty-somethings who, like me, couldn't stand seeing their old childhood favorites subject to outright cruelty.
Nothing much else ever came of it.
And those arcade machines? The Ms. Pac-Man with the jittery, faded screen, the Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 with only one set of working controls? No protests were held in their name. There were no rallies, no hand-painted signs, no emotional pleas of "Free Q*Bert!" and "Motherboards Unite!". At best, someone, sometime, offered the owner a few bucks and hauled them away for scrap parts. More likely they were tolerated until they became unprofitable and were then unceremoniously thrown away, replaced by one of those gaudy "Stacker" machines, if anything.
Suicide isn't always tragic.
"One would suppose there must be some great virtue in this 'beekeenae,' or 'bikini,' to make it so valuable in the eyes of the people of the Future; that it is the French who shall design it should be enough to put off the majority."
A piece on Heather Thomas from a 1984 issue of Orange Coast Magazine begins:
Heather Thomas hates being underestimated. The problem is, television has a habit of underestimating blondes, at least when it comes to brains. The common image is that of the blonde whose significant beauty is matched only by her tendency to be feather-headed. But what else is new? The Democrats are still feuding, the Oscars are still handed out in April, and Tommy Lasorda still thinks God is a Dodger fan.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is an intro.
To be honest, though, Heather Thomas didn't really need an intro. At least not to any adolescent male thumbing through his mother's Orange Coast looking for tasteful bikini photos. (There are none — none of Heather Thomas, anyway — though there are two blondes seductively hawking HC Formula shampoo on page 26.)
Okay. I get it. Frown if you must — and somewhere, somehow, I know my ex-girlfriend just telepathically caught wind of that last sentence and is now judging me as I write — but believe me, in the world of clandestine male stimulation, there are worse places to go to for a little gratification than a glib, pretentious Bible of yuppie West Coast consumerism.
Taking a little detour at the self-serve station might even be considered commendable if you're holding a copy of Orange Coast. At least you're using it make the world a nicer place. If only for yourself, and only for a few minutes.
That's more than the editors of Orange Coast ever did.
More morally troubling, any average male with a sensitive disposition will tell you, is endeavoring to tickle your pickle...with a Christmas catalog. (*Gasp!*) Yes, men do that. (And by men I mean teen boys ages 12 to 17, roughly speaking. It's not an exact science.) So let's get over it. End the stigma. Be the solution.
But the mind still chafes. Yes, there is an underwear section and yes, Sears does sell bikinis, even at Christmastime, but that doesn't change the fact you're looking to slake your libido while a haloed Jesus, or a puffy-cheeked Santa Clause, stares disapprovingly at you from the front cover. Are those judging eyes meant for you? Or the spoiled little brat down the street who'll ask for, and duly receive, that $129.99 GI Joe U.S.S. Flagg aircraft carrier on page 421? Wasn't Jesus pro-masturbation? I forget. It's a long book.
What would God think? Does he make an exception on his Naughty List for male teenagers, to whom he saw fit to give gonads and testosterone and working pudendum, while all but guaranteeing they'd never get to use any of it by also giving them whisker mustaches and sweaty underarms and a face so scabbed over with acne it looks like post-WW2 Berlin?
...I don't know how we got here. But I'm sort of glad we've arrived. How about you?
Anyway. Here are some vintage Heather Thomas pinups from the early 1980s. Ms. Thomas is more than a just great set of tits and some bangin' ass cleavage; women are not the sum of their jigglies. But Ms. Thomas's jigglies are some of the loveliest on record, and look especially good sheathed in a pink bikini "of such brevity she courts pneumonia," as Orange Coast Magazine puts it.
And be sure to click on the pics for a larger look (you perv). It was a hassle creating the lovely diorama you see above, mainly because I'm pretty dense and HTML is about as user-friendly as a hockey puck in the groin.
So let's appreciate.
"There shall be a man born, many years anon, a warrior unlike any our world has birthed. Hundreds of thousands shall congregate to witness his destructive deeds; he shall breath wonderful new life into the stout-hearted, beef-caked art of fisticuffs; and he shall entertain and enthrall, even as years later he confuses and alarms. He shall bear the name 'Ty-son,' and in the vernacular of the Future-Man: he shall kicketh monumental ass."
Mike Tyson was the supercharged, larger-than-life heavyweight knockout machine the boxing world had been looking for since the late 1970s. The sport's top prize had splintered then, and the heavyweight championships (plural) had become a revolving-door spectacle of loose chins and loose decisions. Tyson debuted in 1985 and won twenty-seven straight fights, railroading sixteen of his opponents in the first round.
Then he KO'ed Trevor Berbick in November 1986 to become the youngest heavyweight champion in history, at age 20.
Now Tyson was a household name. His monikers, "Iron" and "Kid Dynamite," graced billboards. His face was plastered on magazine covers. He appeared on TV touting Diet Pepsi as "the undisputed champion," accompanied in print ads by a real catchphrase for the ages: "While heavyweight champ Mike Tyson doesn't mind sharing his title...don't ask him to share his Diet Pepsi."
And, of course, he lent his name to one of the Nintendo Entertainment System's seminal game cartridges.
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, with its exclamation points, its million-dollar endorsement, and its own 8-bit version of Iron Mike as the final boss, would have sold scores of copies even if it had been a complete travesty from title screen to end screen. Lucky for us, the game wasn't a catastrophe like so many other NES sports titles. (Some would say there are too many to count; I'd say there are eleven — Ring King, Slalom, Winter Games, John Elway's Quarterback, Dance Aerobics, Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball, Championship Bowling, Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf, World Class Track Meet, Skate or Die, and Skate or Die 2: The Search for Double Trouble.)
In fact, Punch-Out!! isn't just okay. It isn't merely good compared to the average NES sports title. It's a bonafide, guaranteed, one-hundred percent, no-buts-about-it, wham-bam-thank-you-Sam C-L-A-S-S-I-C, one of the greatest 8-bit games ever released, and one of the few NES games that can still turn the average adult gamer into a sweating, trembling, cursing pile of spent childhood dreams and leftover testosterone.
It's no surprise many still consider it the quintessential boxing game.
The above television ad (viewable on YouTube here, here, and here) is one of the more memorable from Nintendo's "Playing with Power" era, featuring the Baddest Man on the Planet secluded in a darkened game room with a wall of TV screens and an NES hookup. Tyson has always been a bit of a nutcase — the years since his knockout of Trevor Berbick have proven that pretty conclusively, I reckon — but I never knew he was such a TV fanatic. Watching one television set apparently doesn't cut it; he's got to watch thirty-six of them. (I wonder what his bathroom looks like?)
Anyway, the spot ends with a voiceover promising kids a shot at the coveted heavyweight title, at which point Tyson swivels into view and bursts into a fit of maniacal laughter in a voice that is most definitely not his own.
Incidentally, we wouldn't see a shot of Tyson acting this normal on TV again for at least another ten or eleven years.
"The demarcations between men and wo-men will be blurred. There shall be not two sexes but one sex; a unisex. The sexes shall debate over which sex this new sex shall resemble, and the new sex him-her-self shall not know. This shall matter most urgently to those obsessed with sex."
When the Incredible Crash Dummies toy line crashed in 1993 — pun intended, and I'm not proud of it — it left behind precious few traces of its existence. As ubiquitous as Slick and Spin and Spare Tire were during their three-year peak, it wasn't long before they were swept into the dustbin and disappeared from the minds of all but a few nostalgic nerds and collectors.
Even the coolest toys of yesteryear aren't put out to pasture. As soon as the next big thing comes peaking over the horizon, whether it be action figures that talk or baby dolls that pee or baby action figures that talk and pee and say grace, the old guard is rounded up, given a stern pat on the ass, and trucked off to the slaughterhouse.
Even if that means big plans and big ideas go into the grinder.
The final two Crash Dummies figures to be released in the U.S. came bundled with VHS copies of the 22-minute cartoon pilot — a snazzy gold-and-purple version of Junkman and a new dummy named Ted, who came decked out in shades of green, grey, and black. Their card backs hinted at the release of a brand new third wave of figures that would mark the return of series mainstays Slick and Spin (now with mysterious new heavy-lifting action), and the Pro-Tek debuts of Axel, Dash, and Skid the Kid.
It never materialized. The line was cancelled before any of those new toys hit shelves. Even more peculiar, the Ted and Junkman VHS cardbacks teased the release of the very first female Incredible Crash Dummy, a lanky, beanpole-shaped specimen called "Darlene."
Turns out, this long and lanky Darlene, she of the pink and yellow Pro-Tek suit, had a checkered past. She'd been prototyped years before along with the very first Crash Dummies toys. This, from a 1992 piece that ran in Newsweek (and reproduced in its entirety right here because, damn): "In focus-group sessions, the company found that the Department of Transportation's female character, Darlene, didn't play well with little boys, who cringed at the notion of cracking up a girl. So Darlene became Daryl."
Um.
...What?
"'He still has a strangely shaped chest,' says Neil Tilbor, the former head of research and development for Tyco's boys' unit."
Well fuck me bald. He really does!
How about that? Daryl always did look and feel a little different from the other dummies. (Well, except for Pitstop, a Canadian Tire exclusive, who shares his sculpt.) No wonder! He was a boy in a girl's body!
Apparently, after two-and-a-half years spent languishing on the junk pile, Darlene, not Darlene-turned-Daryl but plain old Darlene goddammit, was finally set to make her debut alongside the boys. (Note the twin pink ribbons attached to her head, mimicking flowing hair — a neat way, seems to me, of giving a pretty genderless plastic dummy some, uh, feminine mystique.)
But like I said, it was never meant to be. Predictably, Darlene, like the newer versions of Slick and Spin, never made it out of the factory.
That seems a pretty bitter pill to swallow for all the female Incredible Crash Dummies fans. (And there were more than a few, if you'll believe the anecdotal testimony of a guy who admittedly can't recall his last meal unless he looks down at what's left of it on his shirt.) I distinctly remember being five or six years old and telling my female cousins they couldn't play Crash Dummies with my brother and I because, of course, these were "boys' toys," and girls couldn't play with boys' toys. The older of my cousins, who also happened to be about twice my size, stood her ground and barked: "Why the hell not?"
I like to think that's when the modern feminist movement was born.
