Author: Merritt K
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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’!
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Fucking Day: Man2Man Alliance 🌭
Younger readers might not know this, but there used to be more than six or seven websites. People owned their own domains, and when I say “people,” I mean human beings with names like “Steve” and “darklady89,” rather than demented flesh golems named “Elon” or “Mark.” They would open up Notepad, write some crude HTML, and put their unfiltered thoughts about Hostess Fruit Pies or bad children’s art online, and then they would go outside without a combination GPS/game console/internet browser/insanity inducer on their person. Some of these sites experienced an early version of what we would call “going viral.” At the time, that meant that they talked about them on the radio or you got an email about them from your uncle who worked in IT.
Today, it’s exhausting and soul-draining how the internet provides us constant information about the innermost thoughts and beliefs of strangers around the world, but in the early 2000s, it was novel and exciting. We craved these windows into the unfamiliar and could subsist on a single page of text and images for several months before moving onto the next Hampsterdance, Hello My Future Girlfriend, or what have you. Meanwhile, a modern user of social media is exposed to over a dozen Time Cube-level events in an hour of scrolling. Well, today I’d like to talk to you about a site that can more or less be described as “a Time Cube full of dicks.” Welcome to Bill Weintraub’s Man2Man Alliance.
The first thing I need to tell you is that all of the title text on this site is actually made up of images. That’s fine, people used all kinds of hacks like this in late ’90s web design. We were making it up as we went along, papering over our little failures with animated GIFs advising visitors that our pages were “under construction.”
Another example: Bill Weintraub either didn’t know how to use padding or thought of it as an effeminate, anti-masculine practice, so the actual non-image text runs all the way from one side of the page to the other. Ironically, this makes the site more readable on modern mobile devices than on desktop computers, because monitors have gotten a lot wider since 1999. Looking at the Man2Man Alliance on my 1920×1080, my eyes are bouncing back and forth across three good-sized phalluses worth of visual real estate. It feels like I’m doing EMDR, but the D stands for dicks. In the Man2Man Alliance, the D always stands for dicks.
Two dicks rubbing together. The banana tango. Sword fighting. A hyper-exclusive sausage party. Yeah. We’re building a coalition on the strong foundation of genital mashing for the mutual satisfaction of both participants, or a 1980’s third grader’s idea of what gay sex is.
But you don’t build an entire worldview — much less a website — simply because you’re into slapping meat. You do it because you believe that hog on hog action is the only responsible, ethical, and masculine way for two dudes to fuck.
We’re celebrating stuff now! We’re exalting things! Goddamn, I feel like I’m playing Magic: The Gathering. How about Frot: The Stiffening. Is that anything?
There are a lot of quotes, scare and otherwise, in that block of text. Bill’s rejection of sexual identity labels is one of many ways, as we’ll see, that he was ahead of his time. But lest you think he’s some live-and-let-live, easygoing kind of guy who just wants people to break out of the boxes that society puts them in, he is very much not that. He hates that.
Can you imagine Thor getting fucked up the ass? Iron Man? Captain America? Spider-Man? The Hulk? The Vision? Imagine it. Imagine it now.
If you imagined it, you have failed the first test. Anal sex is wrong, and The Vision would never take part in it. It is unclean, unpleasurable, and would reduce the masculine and vital The Vision to the role of a wretched and pathetic woman.
Bill Weintraub is not a conservative Christian commentator hollering about “the gays.” He is a man who has openly had sex with other men, who at times seems to have considered himself to be gay, and who created and maintained an entire website about gay sex for over three decades. That said, he does agree with the right-wing maniacs who are obsessed with the concept of anal sex.
The problem is, these guys think that all man-on-man action is anal, thus unwittingly bolstering the might of the gay power brokers who compel all men attracted to men to do butt stuff. To this, Bill Weintraub responds, “show me where in the Bible it says you can’t jack off two dicks at the same time!”
See, technically, lying with a man as a man lies with a woman means fucking him in the ass, because that’s the analogous act to penis in vagina sex. Playing word games with the Bible was a pretty popular pastime in the 2000s, when terms like “abomination” got thrown around on Fox News left and right and smirking atheists responded with passages about shellfish and mixed fiber clothing. Bill has intrigued me and I would like to learn more about his sexual and religious philosophy. Let’s check out the article “What Sex Is” to learn more.
Hold on, we’ve got to scroll past some unlicensed erotic art from 1996 first. Unlicensed, beautiful erotic art from 1996.
After an introduction in which Bill talks about how young boys think gay sex is wrestling and roughhousing and then are disappointed when, you know, sex enters the picture, he gets to an extended analogy between “heterosexual” and “homosexual” sex.
Ok, so the key thing about sex between a man and a woman isn’t the penetration at all, it’s the fact that they’re rubbing their genitals together. The equivalent form of physical intimacy for two men, then, isn’t anal sex, but frot — a term which, by the way, Bill Weintraub claims to have invented, distinct from the French-derived “frottage.”
Phalluses! You know, cocks! Dicks! Cranks, like the guy who wrote this article! Because, wait a minute, if bumping hogs is more like male-female sex than anal, then wouldn’t frotting be the real definition of lying with a man as one lies with a woman? Argh, my entire fetish-based worldview is crumbling! We need to find a rhetorical escape hatch!
There it is! I need to learn everything I can about Sensei Patrick, the man who calls pussies “squirrels” and dicks “cranks.” I’m clicking that link.
Holy shit, oh my God, I’m so happy I clicked that link! Each of these lines feels like a powerful blow from Sensei Patrick’s toned legs. “A black belt from the Bible belt.” “A dedicated beaver-banger” (text made red for emphasis). A kickboxing, dick-grinding champion of masculinity.
It’s fucking crazy that we were still doing this in the late 2000s or whenever this was added to the site. There were still men who felt like they needed to prove that just because they fucked other guys, didn’t mean they couldn’t beat ass. And besides, they didn’t do the really gay stuff. Just two members rubbing against each other, which is, again, the truest form of intimacy two warrior men can share!
There is a lot of combat sports stuff on the site. Bill Weintraub was either into MMA himself or else just realized that a lot of the guys who were fans were probably also into no-holds barred penile sparring. And evidently, at some point in the 2010s, he discovered SEO. I’m so glad he did, because it gave us pages like this:
It’s fantastic. This page was seemingly written to pull in hot young martial artists and convince them of the masculine fun and enjoyable masculinity of frotting, but it sounds like the demented porno fantasy of a middle-aged man.
Combat dude cum! I feel like I’ve heard that before…
Lawrence v. Texas ruled that state laws criminalizing sodomy were unconstitutional in 2003. That would put Bill Weintraub in his mid-50s when he wrote this desperate attempt to seem hip and cool to all of the kickboxers and BJJ young guns who typed “rubbing dicks illegal yes or no i am a karate guy” into Yahoo search twenty years ago. It sounds like Pauly Shore trying to explain sexuality to Brendan Fraser’s character in Encino Man. Major penickular grindage, buu-uuddy.
Back to Sensei Patrick, who has a fifty/fifty shot of being a figment of Bill Weintraub’s imagination like a gay Tyler Durden, which is the most redundant series of three words I’ve ever written. Patrick has a column answering a number of questions from men who would today be on Grindr insisting that they aren’t gay, just “open-minded,” but back in the dark ages were forced to send their timid inquiries to an MMA-fighting, pussy-slaying “straight” man because they were afraid that sending an email to Dan Savage would get them placed on a government list of sexual inverts.
This guy Rick wants to whet his wang against that of his friend, whom he has known for nine months. They get drunk together frequently, but Rick doesn’t know how to close the deal. Patrick opens with some sensible advice about trying to gauge his friend’s interest. Then he gets into the real, erm, meat of his advice.
Let’s recap: you want to maneuver the situation such that the two of you are alone on a sleepover, you’re wearing a nice button-up shirt (italicized and underlined because this is crucial), and play some previously-recorded WWE events to get in the mood. Once Steve Austin delivers the Stone Cold Stunner to Vince McMahon at Madison Square Garden and the object of your desire is hyped out of his mind, trick him into wrestling with you — but only after you take your shirt off because you’ve jacked the thermostat and, also, because you don’t want to wreck your nice button-up shirt.
This is a lonely and repressed gay man’s erotic daydream. If Rick followed any of Sensei Patrick’s advice, he was almost certainly murdered by a guy who escaped legal consequences via the gay panic defense. Shit, that got dark. Let’s liven things up a bit with some primo superhero frottage, buuuddy.
The tone of the Man2Man Alliance bounces back and forth more than a semi-hard penis ricocheting off another half-chub. It careens from early 2000s Maddox-esque celebrations of manliness to a burning desperation to seem normal, not like those assfucking gays. And again, the creator of this site is a man that most people who use everyday language and live in consensus reality would describe as homosexual.
But in Bill Weintraub’s mind, the fact that he never wanted to have a dick inside of him transformed him into a new form of True Man, one who had transcended the stultifying binaries of gay and straight, an inheritor of the masculine traditions of the ancients. And I know I’m saying this a lot, but I think it’s important to keep perspective here — this was all because he really liked the idea of two guys achieving climax through prick friction.
One of the big themes of the Man2Man Alliance is that frotting is something guys have been doing since time immemorial. There’s a lot of Greek and Roman statuary all over the page, the kinds of imagery you mostly see these days on verified Twitter profiles who post a lot about why don’t we build classically beautiful architecture anymore and also where did all of these brown people come from.
This is not mere advocacy for a sexual practice. It is a movement, a resounding cry across time. Also, I defy you not to hear this in the voice of the Soulcalibur announcer:
Bill’s warrior obsession puts him in fine company with men around the world and throughout history who have believed that contemporary masculinity has become corrupted due to the nefarious influence of feminism/non-white people/the Jews/woke/porno. As far as I see it, the main difference between him and a guy like Andrew Tate is merely that Bill Weintraub says the quiet part (about wanting to genital joust) out loud.
Actually, there’s something else that sets Bill Weintraub apart from his fellows: he believes that there is not only a vast, cultural conspiracy to rob men of their power as men, but that there is an equally insidious cabal plotting to force gay men to have anal sex with one another. Why? It’s not totally clear. Possibly to make gays seem more normal, because they have penetrative sex just like straight people? Psychiatry may be partly to blame here, as is so often the case.
I don’t know if your social circles include many gay men. Personally, I have known a number of them over the years, and none has ever complained of being belittled for not being into anal sex. I’m not saying it’s never happened, but I doubt that it occurs with the frequency that Bill Weintraub seems to believe it does. What I’m saying is, I don’t necessarily believe in the existence of a tyrannical Buttfuck Dictatorship.
Bill does, naturally. He has constructed an entire persecution complex with the Buttfuck Dictatorship at its core. Men are induced to have anal sex by pornography, social judgment, and disapproval at every turn, a pressure analogous and equivalent to the pressure to be heterosexual. He explains this in “The Story of Bill and Brett,” which is partly about how his lover died of AIDS-related illness in the 90s.
Please don’t go. Please don’t go. I’m not a monster. I wouldn’t drop that on you most of the way through an article making fun of Bill Weintraub if I wasn’t going to follow it up by pointing out that there are several articles on the Man2Man Alliance claiming that condoms don’t work and urging anyone who donates to AIDS organizations to donate to Bill Weintraub’s sexual holy war instead.
If you know anything about developments in HIV treatment and prevention over the last couple of decades, you might be wondering what Bill thinks of PrEP, a combination of drugs people can take to dramatically reduce their risk of seroconversion from HIV- to HIV+. Presumably he’d be happy about it, right? Well, here’s what Bill had to say in 2006:
PrEP is, you see, merely the latest ploy of the Buttfuck Dictatorship. Against this analist cultural juggernaut stand the Frot Men, the Cockrub Warriors, the practitioners of Heroic Homosex. Because if there’s one thing Bill likes as much as the idea of two dudes smackin’ salamis, it’s inventing six different terms for the same thing.
Bill Weintraub has spent thirty years constructing an elaborate sociolinguistic edifice around his unique sexual interests, time that could have been better spent doing almost anything else. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine to have your own little kinks — maybe you read some adventure stories as a boy that made an impact on you and now you associate sex with manly wrestling, or maybe you were startled by a clown at your seventh birthday party and you can only get hard when you hear a balloon popping. Hell, maybe you saw Ferngully: The Last Rainforest when you were five years old and you have a persistent fantasy of being shrunken down and devoured by Tone Lōc. Just as an example, I mean.
The point is, it’s not a big deal. Everyone’s got their thing, and as long as it’s not interfering with your life or Tone Lōc’s life then there’s really no problem. If it was just that Bill Weintraub was really into python pounding, then it would be pretty cruel of me to write several thousand words mocking the Man2Man Alliance. But crucially, it is not just that. Bill Weintraub does not believe he even has a fetish. Nay, it is you who has the fetish, buttfuckers!
Remember, this is a guy who talks about anal sex the way homophobic pre-teens do. This is a guy who took the iconic ACT UP “Silence=Death” and turned it into this:
This sucks, man. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Bill Weintraub’s official position on sucking dick is that it’s not as bad as the dreaded practice of the analists, but it isn’t as honorable as frotting. I mean, if you’re sucking a dick, what are you, a woman? A pathetic, UFC-despising woman?
“Typical vaginized 20-somethings” is a hell of a phrase from this letter writer, who identifies himself as the “Naked Wrestler.” Let’s see how Bill Weintraub responded.
Um, notice how if his “man-hating” boss had said something completely different, say, a racial slur, rather than expressing her feelings about combat sports, there would have been consequences? CHECKMATE, VAGINIZED ANALISTS!
The Man2Man Alliance is the kind of site you could spend hours on, depending on your taste for Bill Weintraub’s manic alternation between furious masturbatory fantasies and angry rhetoric about anal “sex.” Hell, I didn’t even talk about the fiction — I mean the writing Bill intended to be fictional, like “Cockrub Warriors of Mars,” rather than all the stuff about the Buttfuck Dictatorship.
When you realize that this stuff sits right next to diatribes about how he’s being persecuted for engaging in shaft on shaft combat, you start to wonder whether maybe it’s all the same thing for Bill. Talk to any sex worker and they’ll tell you the same thing: there are countless men out there into something they’ve convinced themselves is the weirdest sexual interest in the world and nine times out of ten it turns out to be a garden variety foot fetish. But a lot of these guys don’t want to be open about their whole deal: the shame is part of the excitement. Maybe that’s why Bill Weintraub invented the Buttfuck Dictatorship. Maybe he was never an angry, fearful, judgmental man at all — maybe the entire Man2Man Alliance was just a sexual prop for him, a way to convince himself that what he was doing was nasty and awful and wrong so as to generate the frisson he needed to achieve satisfaction.
Or maybe he’s just an asshole, which according to his worldview, is the absolute worst thing I can call him.
Sadly (?), the Man2Man Alliance closed in November 2023. Bill Weintraub has made himself unavailable for correspondence, is no longer accepting donations, and will not update the site with new articles. But does this mean the battle of the righteous Frot Men against the insidious Buttfucking Dictatorship has been lost? No, says Bill Weintraub. The struggle has only just begun.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Good Satan and His Hot Witches, whose spinning frottledriver takes off 65% of any cockrub warrior’s ejaculation bar.
“Play the hits,” they say. Nobody wants to hear your new material — they want the stuff they grew up on. So be it, I say to my trio of muscular, younger men as I begrudgingly rise from the bed we all sleep in together. It’s been eight weeks since mama wrote about some forgotten ’90s bullshit, so go crank some ’90s in Fortnite for a couple of hours while I crank out a few thousand words about, sorry, this says “an American cartoon based on a real-life famous Japanese magician?”
Well, in the words of my close personal associate Super Mario, “here we go.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Saban Entertainment in possession of a Power Rangers, must be in want of two dozen more. We know that Haim Saban and Shuki Levy went fucking nuts in the 90s. We have the proof. Creating the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles went to their heads. It was a simple formula: intersperse existing Japanese action show footage with scenes of badly-paid and worse-treated American actors talking to a robot with an anxiety disorder. It was perfect. It defined a decade. You might even say it was a kind… of magic. Mightn’t you? For the sake of the premise of this article, please visualize the words “I agree” in the 1-900 HOT DOG Psychic Terms of Service before continuing.
“Hi, I’m Amy Jo Johnson, but most of you guys probably know me as Kimberly, the Pink Power Ranger,” Amy Jo tells the camera with a little shrug.
Watching this now, thirty years later, is it a Zen-like acceptance we detect in that statement, or else bitter resignation? There’s no way of knowing. Does it matter? The entity that is Saban Entertainment has already claimed her life for its own dark purposes. It is no longer enough that she fly around in a pterodactyl Zord, or shoot a bow on the rare occasions the Power Rangers use their weapons, or turn all evil and sexy and… sorry, what was I saying?
Oh, right. Amy Jo Johnson is introducing Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic.
Released in 1995 just as the original Power Rangers series was winding down, Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic — and yes, it’s “the” magic, I checked — is located firmly in Saban’s “sicko phase.” See, latter day Haim Saban spends his time penning drunken emails to the President urging him to send Israel more guns pls, but ’90s Haim Saban was busy greenlighting literally every idea anyone brought in front of him that had anything to do with Japan, monsters, or teens. Thank whatever god you send military weaponry abroad in the name of that we never got a western adaptation of Legend of the Overfiend.
Here’s one of the emails, by the way:
Because seriously, Saban Entertainment was just doing whatever at this point: VR Troopers, Big Bad Beetleborgs, a co-production of a Creepy Crawlers cartoon with my longtime favorites Abrams/Gentile. Hell, they put Ryan Gosling on a fucking boat that was also his high school in a show called Breaker High and you can trace a direct line from that series to Kenergy.
Rather than being a cheaply-produced live action series, Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic was a cheaply-produced cartoon. It is, however, based on a real-life pop idol turned stage magician named Princess Tenko.
You’ll sometimes see the show called “Princess Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic,” but crucially the word “princess” is not in there, to avoid tainting what could be a perfectly good franchise about ancient wizards that just happens to be led by a female character with the stink of girlhood. The ’90s were not well.
In any case, it’s a deeply weird concept. Would it not have been enough to just have a cartoon about a magician and her gang of handsome boy-toys fighting mystical antagonists? Was the addition of the Princess Tenko branding and her appearance in closing segments where she performs stage magic really what pushed the premise over the top? To me, there’s only one possible explanation: someone — possibly Haim Saban himself, possibly series creator and Yu-Gi-Oh! card namesake Roger “The Executive Producer” Slifer — was desperately trying to flatter/sleep with a famous Japanese magician.
They pulled out all the stops — this introduction with Amy Jo is a full half-hour special, also featuring appearances by magicians Max Maven and Earl Nelson.
Were kids in the ’90s familiar with them, these men who appeared to be the Platonic Form of a stage magician and the oldest man alive, respectively?
Presumably, but can we get back to the whole “Guardians of THE Magic” thing? Every time I hear the announcer say that I feel an itch in the back of my brain. “The” magic? Like this is the only magic there is, and they’re the ones responsible for guarding it? I’ve never been so baffled by a definite article. It’s Izzy and The Torchworld all over again.
Amy Jo is at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. She talks up Princess Tenko as one of the most famous and mysterious magicians in the world, then tells us that if we watch carefully, we might pick up some magic tricks we can use to impress our friends. We immediately cut to Tenko on stage, a dubbed voice telling us “remember kids, I trained many years to perform this magical trick. Please, do not try this at home.”
Ok, so which is it? Am I supposed to learn how to crawl inside a folding box while flamboyant samurai dance around and shove swords into it in a clear representation of group sex or not? For a company that created the Power Rangers, one of the biggest flashpoints around violence in children’s media in recorded history, Saban is giving the pre-teen set an awful lot of credit regarding their ability to tell fantasy from reality. To make matters worse, after she completes the illusion, Tenko steps out, gestures towards the camera, and the same voiceover says “remember kids, the magic is within you.”
It feels like they wanted to get sued. It’s as if at the peak of his influence, Haim Saban was daring the powers that be to challenge him. How else do you explain the fact that each episode of Tenko ends with either a dangerous, complex stage illusion involving bladed weapons or a segment where she teaches viewers the equivalent of the old removable thumb trick? Any court would see this as de facto child endangerment. It would be like if G.I. Joe episodes only sometimes ended with a PSA about messing around with the stove, then the rest of the time demonstrated the proper technique for pistol whipping an unarmed civilian.
Back to Amy Jo, who is talking with Max Maven and Earl Nelson, the former flubbing the title and calling it, sensibly, “Tenko and the Guardians of Magic.” They try to paint Tenko as a real-life magical superhero, setting up her role in the cartoon, but they’re acting like this is all stuff that actually happened. Max tells us Tenko learned real magic from her master Hikita, and that his two other students Jana and Jason were pissed when she was named his successor, leading them to attempt to steal the powerful Starfire Gems. They got a couple of them, allowing them to merge into a giant two-headed dragon, but the rest were flung across the Earth.
Watching this man with Vegeta’s hairline casually talk about the magical powers of the Starfire Gems to summon animals and turn people into dragon monsters is the quickest way to understand the insanity of an entire decade. But it gets better: Earl Nelson then claims to have some gems “from the same region of Japan” as those bestowed on Princess Tenko. Is he about to summon an ancient demon?
Yes, if by “summon an ancient demon” you mean “perform some basic sleight of hand.” So is magic real, dangerous, and awesome, or is it all about trickery and showmanship? This special comes down firmly on the side of “yes.”
Finally, long after most kids have changed the channel to an episode of The Mask: The Animated Series, we learn something about the upcoming cartoon itself — presumably the reason we’re here in the first place. Princess Tenko has three friends, an ethnically diverse crew of hunks who obey her in all things. All things? I mean, probably. In the vernacular of anime, Tenko is essentially a reverse harem magical girl series, complete with spinning transformation sequences.
We’ve got the white dude, Bolt, who Amy Jo describes as “brave and handsome.” He’s voiced by Neal McDonough, a man famous for losing work because he refused to do kisses on-screen.
Then there’s the brilliant Steel, a black guy who — hey, hold on! You put a black superhero named “Steel” in your show? And he isn’t this guy?
Wild. That brings us to the Native American character, Hawk.
One guess as to how Amy Jo describes him. It’s “street-smart” and “fast-talking,” naturally. Oops, sorry — I got my ’90s racial clichés mixed up. It’s “wise and mystical,” forcing even the Wikipedia entry for Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic, one of those really long ones that was clearly written by fans who imprinted on the show at a young age, to admit that a Native American man named Hawk Windwalker has a “somewhat stereotypical” connection to nature.
“Princess Tenko descended from a ninja and a samurai, which explains where she gets her bravery from,” Amy Jo just casually mentions. Look, I know it’s the ’90s and we’re just naming random Japanese stuff because it sounds cool, but fucking what? Like, Tenko seems pretty cool and all, but can we get a show about her great-grandparents teaming up to kick ass and discovering that the greatest magic of all… is love? No, we can’t. We have to go back to Max Maven showing us an optical illusion for babies.
Oh, the gray squares are actually the same shade? Great. Maybe this counted as entertainment on a summer afternoon in 1995, I don’t know. But it fucking sucks, man. Tell me more about the ninja/samurai romance.
No dice. Tenko shows us how to lift an ice cube out of a glass of water with a loop of string. You use salt. Cool. I was learning better magic than this in the ’90s from drunk uncles at family dinners. Sure, they’d swing me around the kitchen by my ankles sometimes, but there was always a sawbuck in it for me when they sobered up and felt guilty at the end of the night.
Speaking of, we’re out of time. But before we go, the eerie, disembodied voice of Tenko addresses itself directly to Amy Jo. “The magic is within you,” she repeats, a statement that Amy Jo doesn’t seem quite sure how to react to. “Gee, I sure wish the ‘getting paid more than $600 a week was within me,” she’s probably thinking.
Were there toys? Sure there were toys. But despite the show’s gestures towards gender equality, with Tenko leading her testosterone-heavy crew into battle each week, none of the male characters got figures. Instead, we got a bunch of different Tenko dolls that were actually just altered designs from an unproduced Wonder Woman line.
As for the show itself, there were only thirteen episodes. Tenko and her guys go on adventures, collect various Magic Starfire Gems and combat ancient demons. You might expect there to be some kind of romantic tension between Tenko and the various boys, but actually, the show positions her rival Jason as her main love interest, going so far as to suggest they get married in the future. It’s true what they say: women love tormented bad boys with period-appropriate hairstyles who wield mind-controlling magic disks.
In any case, it certainly wasn’t the next Power Rangers. Do you know what was the next Power Rangers?
It was Power Rangers, a series that has run so long that a few years ago it got its own gritty comic series and video game about trauma for millennials who can’t let go, in which the Green Ranger goes mad with power and fucking kills Rita Repulsa then tries to murder all rangers across all possible dimensions. It’s kind of like Jet Li’s The One except it ends up with a guy with a ponytail banging two different versions of the Pink Ranger. Probably. Man, what was it with the ’90s and bad boys with ponytails?
Regardless, I kind of forget what I was talking about and I’m sure as hell not watching all thirteen episodes of Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic, so cue the Animal House wrap-up!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme:Michael Dillon, whose parents were a ninja and a samurai, making him a ninjurai and the victim of much discrimination.
