Author: Merritt K
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Nerding Day: CrazyJim
Do you ever wish you could be someone else? Someone different? Someone better? Maybe you wish you could be a kinder person, a more forgiving one. Maybe you wish you’d made different choices in your life. Why did you waste so much time in your teens and twenties alone in your room playing Sonic the Hedgehog games? You could have been somebody. Somebody who doesn’t see Sonic the Hedgehog’s bare feet every time they close their eyes.
Well, today I’m offering you the opportunity to go back and right what once went wrong. Afraid? You needn’t be. We have a companion on this journey. A digital companion.
Yes, it’s E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. Admission: I feared and hated E.T. as a child. His odd proportions unsettled me and I was too young to really understand what was happening in the film, so I believed for a time that E.T. had given Elliott some kind of virulent space cancer. Would that I could say I would have been brave enough to beat E.T. to death with hammers. In truth, I would have fled from him, back to the safety of my room. And then I probably would have spent all weekend playing Sonic Adventure.
Those of you familiar with industry lore may know that the original E.T. game for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled titles in video game history. It was released in 1983 and allegedly contributed to the Video Game Crash of that decade. After that, it was some time before they were ready to try crafting interactive experiences about a potbellied space freak again — E.T.: Digital Companion didn’t come out on the Game Boy Color until 2001.
Now, it has to be said that E.T. isn’t an immediately obvious candidate for a video game adaptation. In today’s post-Life is Strange world, maybe. An emotional, slow-paced E.T. adventure game could do just fine. But back then? They botched multiple Back to the Future and RoboCop titles in the NES era. What hope did this stocky little turd have?
Sorry. That’s the old me talking. The bitter, cruel me. I can be better than that. I know I can. E.T. will help me. Let us begin.
E.T. wants to know our name. He has a number of helpful suggestions here to cut down on typing with the GameBoy Color’s d-pad. “Merritt” isn’t in there, but “M.K.” is, weirdly.
That’s fine, though. We’re shedding this identity. Becoming something new.
Omega. As in, “alpha and the,” not as in the Supernatural fanfiction sex thing. When our purification is complete, such knowledge will be scoured from our minds. The words “Foreverial Tiedup Delitized” will have no meaning to us. If they already don’t to you, I suggest you keep it that way.
Ok, a little personal, E.T. Why do you need to know this before we play your video game? But if you insist: my name is Omega Chadwick. Can we start yet?
No, not yet. We have to tell E.T. our nickname, our birthday, and our interests. E.T. craves knowledge of our human lives. He has so much to learn from us. Well, E.T., my favorite human pastime is “Feed Flopglopple.”
But E.T. is not yet sated.
I’m trying so hard, E.T. I’m trying so hard to be a kinder, more patient person. So few people get a second chance, and I would feel terrible about squandering such a gift. But I’ve got to be honest: I’m getting a little sick of your shit. Thankfully, and somewhat depressingly, the game has anticipated this outcome.
Nobody said rebirth would be easy. In Elden Ring I had to find and deliver an astral fetus to a kindly magical woman wearing an impractical hat to respec. Here, we must endure a boss rush of personal questions. It’s essentially a Mega Man game with more data entry.
Two things. First, this background has made me realize that E.T. been pasted into each of these prompt screens with a solid white box around him. Could the artist not have cut that out? Second, how did they make an E.T. game where he asks for your phone number and not include the character’s famous line about telephone calls? Steven Spielberg set up “E.T. phone home” in 1982 and nearly two decades later, these assholes made this skinny fat crime against the Abrahamic God say “we need your digits.” I’m beginning to think that this licensed game based on a decades-old movie for the Game Boy Color didn’t have a very large budget or a great deal of care poured into it.
Old habits die hard. Yesterday’s self rages against its dissolution. My instinct is to go mean, but we have to ask: what would Omega Chadwick do?
There we go.
Is it just me, or has E.T.’s expression taken on a leering quality? He’s a little too interested in the topic. Do his people have genitals or gender, anyway? His Wikipedia article says “male,” but mostly avoids pronouns. There was apparently a debate over the character’s gender on Twitter seven years ago, which feels like a lifetime ago now. We won’t use Twitter in our new life. We won’t ever have used Twitter. We will be pure and good.
“Addy?” the plantlike space goblin asks, in the lingo of a WhatsApp weed dealer on his way to bring you a strain called “Reese’s Pieces.” It’s pieces, ok? It was never “reesees peesees.” If you say “peesees,” reader, you can go to hell.
Ah, but despite my efforts, the old, familiar rage wells up in me. I’m sorry. It’s not you I’m mad at.
Mull that over in your rotten Venusian head, hated star creature. Omega Chadwick has nothing but love in his young, hopeful heart for his fellow humans. He mistrusts and loathes the interloper from beyond the stars.
Your questions tire me, alien. You dare to set broad, ungainly foot on Holy Terra, the cradle of humanity, and you pepper me ceaselessly with these inquiries. My patience wears thin. Thus: I live in Boulder, Colorado. My favorite color is blue, the hue of your foul, copper-tinged blood. My least favorite color is the dull brown of your hide. My favorite animal is bees. My best friend is named Mr. T. Not that one.
Oh, and my pet’s name?
It’s Bong. Thanks for asking!
Surely my trial is at an end. I have given so much, selected from so many suggested options, painstakingly typed in my responses using the on-screen keyboard when the possibilities presented were insufficiently funny.
And yet the beast hungers still. He will not be satisfied until he has taken all that I am. What is the name of your school? When is your first day of school? Do you know all of the emergency exits at your school? If E.T. arrived at your school one day with an automatic weapon and asked you if you believed in God, how would you answer?
If you asked me — the old me — in 2001, I probably would have said Linkin Park. But Omega Chadwick isn’t that person. Omega has no need for the soulful desperation of Chester Bennington or the edgy hip-hop stylings of Mike Shinoda. He is not alienated from humanity. Far from it. His soul resonates to a more primitive rhythm.
I began this process to become a better person. Is hatred sharpened into a burning spear pointed at the heart of an interstellar meddler better than a diffuse raging against oneself and the world? That was a rhetorical question. Here’s another real one.
And answered.
Is this the entire game? What possible reason could E.T. have for needing to know all of this? I will permit one final inquiry before I press the power switch on my Game Boy Color and go outside to enjoy being a healthy child with lots of friends.
Oh, E.T. Sweet, simple E.T. You must know by now. After all, you were the one who set me on the path.
I will see the stars, E.T. I will traverse the galaxy until I arrive at whatever stinking rock you crawled off of, and, well, we needn’t concern ourselves with what will come next.
At last. At last. We are reborn. Let us explore this new world together. And oh, I forgot that I went back and changed my name to Alpha at some point. Why be last when you can be first, am I right?
Hold on. What am I looking at here?
I have… e-mail? From Elliott? Addressed to a name I erased from the game? What manner of devilry is this?
More “e-mail.” It’s from E.T, and… is that a mushroom cloud in the background? “Be Good!… or else,” is that the idea? We’ll see about that.
To be clear, the Game Boy Color does not have any onboard internet-accessing capabilities. “Sending” a message with the E.T. Digital Companion would involve laboriously typing out a subject line (there is no actual body field) and then handing the device to the intended recipient. Here E.T. has made a fatal miscalculation. If I’m within GameBoy-passing range, I’m also well within hammer striking range.
Let’s see what else we’ve got here. You can put your to-do list and school schedule in here, in case you wanted to make things easier on bullies and/or kidnappers. But, what’s this? “Cool Stuff?”
The first “cool thing” is a slideshow. Let’s take a look at some iconic images from the film E.T. on a 160×144 screen in 56 glorious colors.
Fantastic. Next.
Or not. I guess if E.T. just gave you the pictures, you wouldn’t enjoy them so much. It’s the same way with today’s mobile games. Sure, you could look up JPEGs of anime girls on the internet, a human technology essentially created for the proliferation of such images, but it doesn’t hit the same as unlocking one after grinding out hundreds of hours of gameplay or spending thousands of dollars on a digital slot machine, you know?
Let’s try trivia.
“I know you liked it when they dressed me up as a lady. I liked it too.”
To hell with this.
No. Get me out of here.
Oh, I’ll try harder, alright. Try harder to remind you to stay in your hateful corner of the universe. It’s time to feed Flopglopple, which, as longtime readers of this article will recall, is my Fav Hobby.
Do you want the world’s worst virtual pet? E.T. Digital Companion has got you. Thrill as you force Flopglopple to devour apple after apple, waiting to see if it finally bursts. I am your God, Flopglopple. Your friend E.T. has no power here.
Ah, so your kind can know misery. Good. Do not forget this feeling. I control every aspect of your wretched existence. Your name is no longer Flopglopple. It is Felipe.
Now, let me check my to-do list.
Ignore the part about it being 1998. I skipped time ahead to force Felipe to experience years of neglect in an instant and E.T. Digital Companion began to groan in protest, slowing down and glitching out. There is, as the screen says, no time to waste. Alpha Chadwick has put off his Great Work long enough.
Let us, at last, play “Bicycle Race.”
Mission accomplished.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Harvey Penguini.
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.
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Nerding Day: Bonejackin’!
