September 11th, 2007

’Shop ’Til You Drop

The newlyweds/my quartet-mates have both rehashed their versions of our collective barbershop experience on their blogs.

Here we have Andrea’s “Our Super Secret Surprise!” and Jerry’s “The Chronicles of Harmony-a” and “Barbershop?”.

All of these are great reading if you’ve ever been involved in anything like this, and include elements of the process I completely neglected to mention when I wrote about it.

Tags: Friends, Music | No Comments »

September 6th, 2007

I’m Really More of a Bomb Man

Discussing the television programs of our childhood is quickly becoming a favorite passtime of my generation. We are capable of wiling away hours on the finer points of Transformers, Rainbow Brite, and (my personal favorite) ThunderCats, over pint after pint beer. It seems everyone my age has at least a working familiarity of shows like this. Some of us can recall all the characters names. In a lot of cases, we can remember the basic plot and even exact dialogue from certain episodes.

While I’ll leave the question of why we’re all holding on so vehemently to the past to our respective therapists, I’m guessing the near universality of our experience occurred because, when we were in our youth, technology had progressed far enough that everyone had access to a TV, but it had not reached the point where cable and video games and the internet were providing the variety of entertainment options we have today. The result? Now, whenever I find myself enveloped by folks ages 23–32 — be they close friends or people I have just met — we can launch into a conversation about which Care Bear had the rainbow symbol on its tummy, with everyone instantly on the same page¹.

The one exception that I run into, again and again, is when I bring up this particular animated series that I watched when I was six or seven. I remember it coming on in the afternoon, on the same channel that stuff like Scooby-Doo did, meaning others my age must have caught it. Granted, I’ve refrained from asking many of my fellow children-of-the-80s about this particular show, as my memories of it are not ones I’m comfortable recounting with just anyone (in person, anyway). For one thing, I only actually saw this show two or three times — my mom discovered me watching it, decided it was too violent, and (despite my protests) put it on the household “do not watch” list early on — and this limited viewing makes my recollections a pretty hazy. And then there’s the fact that all I can relay about this show was that I saw giant robots defending a city from malicious attackers, and that one of these giant robots was a woman whose breasts were missiles that shot out of her chest.

Even I have to admit, that sounds like a bizarre mash-up that was formed entirely in the mind of a young boy, just becoming aware of how cool both missiles and breasts were, in their own ways, but possessing only peripheral knowledge of how either of these worked…. Well, you can see how this little trick would make an impression, anyway.

Interestingly, I don’t believe I thought there was anything weird about this concept at the time. Seemed like a logical place to house some heavy artillery to me. Over time, of course, I’ve realized this was a really odd, and kind of disturbing, notion, and I’ve shared this surreal vignette with some confidantes to get their take on it. Their initial reaction is always to look at me like I am a nutjob. Occasionally someone will take a short respite from this to try and help me figure out what show this could possibly have been. But no one ever seems to just know what I am talking about. The giant-robots-fighting premise frequently takes us down a road to the ever-present Voltron. I saw Voltron a time or two in my youth, before Mom deemed that one too violent, as well. For a while, I was convinced this boob-launching robot was from Voltron, as I remembered her being piloted by a Japanimated girl sitting inside her somewhere. But, as it happens, all the places where kid’s shows of yore are rehashed are crawling with Voltron experts, who’ve never hesitated to let me know I’m mistaken. After this dead end, everyone gives up and writes my description off as a cough-syrup-fueled dream I’d mistaken for reality.

Well, all you naysayers and doubting thomases, feast your eyes on this.

That, courtesy of this site, is a still from a show called Mazinger Z (Original run: October 2, 1972–August 13, 1973. Studio: Toei Animation. Number of episodes: 92). That lovely giant robot, firing off her ta-tas at full force is “Aphrodite Ace.” According to Wikipedia, Mazinger Z was “a manga series” about “a gigantic Super Robot…built by Professor Juzo Kabuto as a secret weapon against the forces of evil, represented in the series by the Mechanical Beasts (mecha used for evil purposes) of Dr. Hell.”

I can think of several people, right off the top of my head, to whom I would like to say: suck on that. A-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Ahem…. And now I have only two things left to proclaim:

1. If the internet existed solely see that I got my retribution in this matter, it would have been a worthwhile endeavor.
2. Please do not ask me about the search results for “missiles+breasts+giant+woman+robot” that I had to sift through before finding that website. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to talk about the stuff I saw.

Thank you.

–

¹ Cheer Bear.

Tags: Recollections | No Comments »