Nerding Day: The 1988 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film🌭

We will never be free of the tyrannical, coke-addled grip of the 1980s. I have come to believe this at the core of my very being. Certainly, I’m not helping by writing about shit like Captain Power and Star Crystal. But this is bigger than me.

Nostalgia is supposed to be on a 20 to 30 year cycle. In the ’80s, Americans built retro-style diners. In the ’90s, there were bell bottoms and That 70s Show. In the 2000s, we had ’80s club nights and gritty film reboots of Saturday morning cartoons. And then in the 2010s, when we should have seen the return of flannel and POGs, we had… ironic ’80s action movie parodies and Stranger Things.

Now, in the 2020s, we’re still going back to the well. Why? As in so many cases, it can’t shoulder all of the blame, but 9/11 is at least partly responsible. As boomers and Generation X age into doddering remembrances of the good old days, more and more Americans yearn for the imagined security of the ’80s. Decades of popular media produced by these generations have even convinced younger people that the 1980s were a totally rad, neon-soaked era when you could get in your sports car and drive all night long to the smooth sounds of city pop.

But if you ask anyone who was there, is honest with themselves, and wasn’t a businessman getting rich by bulldozing youth centers at the time, the 1980s were a pretty terrible decade. Sure, a lot of people could afford to buy houses, but evangelical Christianity was becoming mainstream, the twin forces of Reaganism and Thatcherism were crushing the working class, and table salt was about as adventurous as a lot of people got with spices.

“Oh, but the media,” you cry.

Listen to me: for every Star Trek: The Next Generation, there was a Manimal. For every Indiana Jones, there were ten Hamburger: The Motion Pictures. Oh, and everything was mostly just kind of brown, not bathed in fluorescents. That’s what Sean and Robert tell me, anyway. I am 25 years old, fr fr no cap.

But I’m going to come out and say it, braving cancellation by my fellow woke zoomers: some things were better in the ’80s. Cars looked more interesting. McDonald’s fries were probably tastier before they stopped cooking them in hot beef fat. And then there were the Oscars.

Look: I’m not talking about the awards themselves, the judging, or even the quality of Hollywood productions versus today’s. I just mean that they were more of an event. Today, the Oscars vie for eyeballs in a world where distraction has never been easier to access, and are best known for producing moments like “Will Smith slap,” “Adele Dazeem,” and “time Ellen Degeneres took a picture with celebrities.”

In the ’80s, they were a part of the monoculture — you watched them because they were on. You didn’t watch the whole thing, of course. You’d get up and grab a Bill Cosby-endorsed New Coke during Film Editing or Production Design. But if you did that in 1988 during the Award for Live Action Short Film, you would have missed one of the most incredible things to ever happen on live television, and I’m including 9/11 and Ashlee Simpson on SNL.

We open on Pee-wee Herman at the podium, a year into Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Paul Reubens was essentially a kid god in the latter half of the ’80s — a manic avatar of chaos, a being with the whims of a child granted the autonomy of an adult through some dark thaumaturgy. He’s about to announce the nominees for Live Action Short Film when a PA bursts onto the stage, whispering something into his ear.

“We’re on live TV, ok? Get off the stage,” Pee-wee responds. The man is undeterred. Pee-wee chides him to a peal of laughter from the crowd.

“Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know exactly what’s going on, I’ve just been informed that the monitor upstairs shows a giant robot mechanical monster is smashing its way down the street outside directly towards this theater,” Pee-wee explains. “I am so sure!” More laughs.

“And now, our first nominees.” Much like our national security apparatus, he was warned. And he chose to ignore those warnings, a decision which was punished in much the same way as it was back in 2001. An explosion ignites behind Pee-wee.

He turns to investigate as the set burns away, revealing…

ED-209 from RoboCop.

“Give me my Oscar, or I’ll tear your head off your body,” it demands. In modern terms, this would be like if… huh, pretty much every blockbuster action movie this year was a remake of or sequel to an ’80s property. That’s probably fine and doesn’t speak to a pathological aversion to risk-taking on the part of the leadership of our highly-consolidated industry. Anyway, I guess it would be like Immortan Joe threatening to tear Blippi’s head off? Try to imagine that, only with the looming threat of nuclear war.

Specifically, ED-209 wants the award for Sound Editing. Pee-wee jokes that ED-209 is being a poor loser, which I assumed meant that RoboCop must have lost out in that category to another movie. But I looked it up and, in fact, while RoboCop lost Best Sound to The Last Emperor, two sound editors who worked on RoboCop received a Special Achievement Award for sound effects editing earlier in the night.

So what are we supposed to assume here? The audience is too coked out to care, but here in the 2020s where cocaine is mostly fentanyl and gasoline, we know better.

ED-209 rises to its full, menacing height and says that it is giving Pee-wee ten seconds to comply. “Help, where’s RoboCop?” Pee-wee howls, “You can never find a RoboCop when you need one.” He wasted his last ten seconds on that bullshit and ED-209 opens up with twin fucking miniguns at a beloved children’s entertainer.

And then Pee-wee does the impossible: he flies.

Well, kind of. To use a then-contemporary reference, he does what Mario did when he had the raccoon tail in Super Mario Bros. 3: he launches himself into the air and then just sort of loses momentum and grabs onto the rafters, making himself a fully-exposed and completely stationary target. It’s very magical yet so much dumber and worse than ducking.

If you ever needed an example of how anti-sex and pro-violence Americans are, consider how the time Paul Reubens was caught jerking off in a porno theater became a scandal and cheap punchline for years, but the time that he was menaced by a robotic killing machine has been relegated to our cultural memory hole. We have forgotten the very unusual one and still remember the one where every single thing went as intended.

All is lost for Pee-wee. Or is it?

We cut to a camera in the aisle. RoboCop marches into frame.

Thunderous applause sounds as ED-209 continues spraying Pee-Wee and the crowd with 20mm depleted uranium-tipped death. RoboCop takes aim with what appears to be an NES Zapper with an attached Quickshot Scope. He depresses the trigger, emitting a digitally painted-on laser that streaks across the stage, missing ED-209 by a mile and presumably putting a golf ball-sized hole through the night’s host, Chevy Chase. He may have gotten it from the wrong source, but by all accounts, he had it coming.

“Alright, RoboCop!” Pee-wee exclaims. ED-209 is still blasting at him, ignoring the much larger threat of the robotic police officer about to shoot its mechanical dick and balls off. ED’s tactical awareness has been distorted by rage, which is an important lesson in priorities for us all– police are more dangerous than weirdos.

RoboCop fires again, this time going wide to the left. If he is not aiming for Chevy Chase, his targeting systems make no sense. Finally, in appropriately ’80s Nintendo game logic, his third shot does the trick.

There’s no blast of sparks like from the first two, just a little puff of smoke as ED-209 slumps over. It’s as if the beam transmitted not destructive energy but a perfect, painful knowledge of all of the embarrassing things it had ever done or said, e.g. trying to kill Paul Reubens over a niche Academy Award.

Pee-wee thanks RoboCop and in a voice that definitely doesn’t belong to Peter Weller, RoboCop replies that it’s safe to continue giving the award. He does a little fist pump before wandering away, leaving the cast of Knot’s Landing to their befuddlement.

Descending back to the stage, Pee-wee announces he’ll be right back to present the Oscar as soon as he changes out of his pants. He doesn’t do that, though — he just goes right on with the nominees, presumably with piss and/or shit coating the insides of his tuxedo trousers.

You can tell it’s a minor category, because they don’t even cut to the producers in the audience as Pee-wee speeds through the titles of their films. The winner is a movie called Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall. I’m not goddamn kidding:

So why does any of this matter? Well, it doesn’t — not really, not in itself. But the truly weird thing to consider about the time that Pee-wee Herman was almost killed at the Oscars by a giant robot before being saved by RoboCop is how fleeting a moment it was back then. If you stepped out to zap some Micromagic fries during the presentation for Live Action Short Film, you might never have seen it until it was uploaded to YouTube over a quarter of a century later. If your friends talked about it around the water cooler in the office the next day, they couldn’t tell you to just pull up a clip on Twitter. You literally had to be there, barring the existence of contemporary sickos who were taping the Oscars.

The fact that there was no international, always-on, hot take apparatus means that, like so many other strange artifacts of the past, this incident was left to age, fermenting in the wine cellar of harebrained live TV stunts for decades.

Had Twitter existed in the late ’80s, RoboCop saving Pee-wee Herman from ED-209 on live TV might have been a fun moment for a day or two. It probably would have spawned some discourse about whether RoboCop is truly subversive or else in fact props up the institution of the police. And likely there would have been a fair amount of art of RoboCop and Pee-wee Herman having vigorous sexual intercourse. But after that, these events would have quickly faded from our consciousness.

What I’m saying is that there are only so many RoboCops saving Pee-wee Herman from a deadly robot at the Oscars left in the past for us to discover. There are only so many movies from years gone by that never should have been. Only so many Paparazzi Samurai. And certainly, that number may seem overwhelmingly large, but it is finite. Each one of these objects is a gift from a time before humanity had a limitless ability to deride its own creative efforts in real time with strangers around the world. Treasure them, my friends.

Oh, and Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall? Pretty good. You can watch it on YouTube, so I guess that’s a point in favor of 2024 versus the 1980s. David Rasche is in it. You know, from Sledge Hammer? Again, I’m 25 years old and don’t know what that is.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Nicholas Lovino.