Author: Merritt K

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Paparazzi Samurai 🌭

I’ve covered a number of different children’s properties created by Marty Abrams and his production company, Abrams Gentile Entertainment. They brought us, among other things, Dragon Flyz and Sky Dancers, Van-Pires, and Snailiens. In short, their MO was to invent toys which could injure children, and failing that, to create the kinds of television shows that would only ever exist as half-remembered dreams in the minds of adults years later until some asshole wrote several thousand words on each of them. But the stories of AGE’s tangible successes are perhaps less interesting than those of their many, many failures.

See, ever since I discovered that AGE’s site was somehow still online, I’ve had a white whale of sorts. Go to their brands page and among the listings for “Happy Ness,” “Popcorn Pretties,” and the Power Glove (far from the most bad thing here), you’ll find one for something called “Paparazzi Samurai.”

As best as I could tell, Paparazzi Samurai was an attempt to create a line of nonviolent boys’ superheroes. See, the ’90s were a brutal period. We weren’t yet making cartoons about how it was ok to have feelings or be different. Cartoons were about solving your problems with lasers, adamantium claws, and giant robots built like dinosaurs. Mainly, though; they were about selling toys.

Enter the Paparazzi Samurai. Instead of shooting bad guys, they “shoot” the truth! But there were no Paparazzi Samurai toys on the shelves of Toys R Us. There was no Paparazzi Samurai cartoon. An entry in the 1998 International Television and Video Almanac claimed that there were 26 episodes slated for production. Oh, Marty, were you ever so young and hopeful?

Allegedly, AGE produced a comic strip starring the characters for publication in an issue of “Movies” magazine, which seems to have been one of those little booklets you could pick up for free at theaters in the ’90s and 2000s. Not only can I not find this issue anywhere, I can barely find evidence that Movies magazine existed in the first place. There are tiny, indecipherable shots of the pages on AGE’s site, along with slightly more legible art of the three main characters, so the comic almost certainly existed, but it appears to have been lost to time.

I’ve stewed on this for over a year. I’ve tweeted about it, dreamed about it. I don’t think Paparazzi Samurai is important “lost media,” but something about it consumed me. Therapists tried and failed to convince me to let it go. It cost me relationships — I’d wake up in the middle of the night, hollering, “It’s TMZ for kids – Get the Picture!”

On a recent trip to New York, I sought out the office building that, according to Google, Abrams Gentile’s office is located in. “Why, there haven’t been Paparazzi Samurai here in 50 years!” The security guard, who was also a ghost, told me.

I desperately wanted to write about this… show? Comic? Stillborn concept from the mind-womb of Marty Abrams? But there just wasn’t enough to go on.

Until now.

AGE’s site, as outdated as it is, doesn’t have embedded links to YouTube for its video content. Instead, it simply presents a link asking you to download Quicktime Player. I figured that any original video files might have been lost to link rot, until on a whim I decided to poke around with Inspect Element. What I discovered shocked and delighted me: a 240p, two a half minute long live-action trailer for Paparazzi Samurai.

(Of course, then I realized if you open the page on Chrome rather than Safari, which I still use, like a total asshole, it automatically downloads the video. But it’s still not like anybody but me has ever thought to seek this shit out.)

I have uploaded the video to YouTube for posterity.

And now, let us begin.

We open, with an echoing gong, on an elderly man sitting amidst a number of candles. He appears to be of Chinese extraction, wearing a traditional changshan and rounded hat.

Samurai, it must be said up front, are not from China. And this was the late ’90s— Americans were starting to actually know the difference between China and Japan by then. But I digress. If we get stuck on which cultures Paparazzi Samurai is insensitive to and in which ways, we’ll be here forever.

“In our short time together,” our man tells us, “I have taught Felix, Al, and Maurice many things.” We get our first look at the Paparazzi Samurai here, or should I say, our proto-paparazzi. See, these warriors of photography aren’t just desperate ghouls seeking out compromising pictures of celebrities to pay their alimony bills. Neither are they, like the Power Rangers, teens with attitude.

Make no mistake: they have no attitude. They are attitude voids, into which all attitude is helplessly drawn. They are full-on dorks.

It’s hard to tell from the low resolution, but one of them inexplicably appears to be a balding, elderly man of at least 50. They have terrible posture and dress sense and lack any knowledge of personal hygiene, as the master explains.

But he has taught them much, in addition to the importance of deodorizing one’s balls. He has taught them right from wrong, good from evil. And also a bunch of photography stuff.

Here’s where I wish I had the design bible for Paparazzi Samurai, because I would love to know more about this mentor guy and why he is so invested in the personal development of three dudes he seems to fucking hate.

The textual setup is going for Karate Kid, but the fact that he’s teaching them to stealthily take photos lays bare a darker possibility where he’s convinced three socially awkward men that snapping shots of nude celebs for his personal use is actually a moral good.

Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a Morita stand-in. Or am I?

“Their mission: to expose themselves — excuse me, to expose the truth,” our guy continues.

I’m not sure how many people that line made it past in the production cycle, but regardless: it was too many. Maybe nobody knew how to say no to Marty Abrams after Van-Pires. When the guy who invented automotive vampirism tells you to put a joke in your video pitch about how maybe the three men whose superpower is taking photographs of depressed celebrities walking to the store in sweatpants also reveal their genitals to unwilling audiences sometimes, you don’t question it. You just fucking do it.

It’s like George Lucas telling you to name your protagonist “Darth Icky,” except you actually listen to him. Marty Abrams invented the modern action figure!

The master — who in this short video remains nameless — finishes explaining that through forbidden Eastern wizardry and a cocktail of untested Western research pharmaceuticals, he has created a trio of picture-taking supermen. I mean, he doesn’t come right out and say that, but it’s implied.

The Paparazzi Samurai wield great power — taking pictures of things — and are charged with an equally great responsibility — coincidentally, also taking pictures of things.

“The truth is out there,” the master says. “They just have to take a picture of it…

and see what develops.”

For an AGE production, that qualifies as decent wordplay. These are the same people who wrote the dialogue in Van-Pires, which was 95% car puns.

Anyway, it’s time for the big reveal! Let’s get a look at those beautiful boys. PAPARAZZI SAMURAI ROLL CALL:

Felix: love the filmstrip belt and bandolier and the camera belt buckle. One note, though, buddy: that is entirely too much shmeat. You look like you’re a novelty superhero created for an overly ambitious ’90s porno, which, for all I know, is maybe what Paparazzi Samurai was originally going to be.

Al, fantastic energy you’re bringing here. Really getting into the whole martial arts angle with that pose. Not getting the photography angle so much outside of the filmstrip headband.

Maurice: you’re killing it, baby! Wonderful filmstrip suspenders. The vibe I’m getting here is “rarely-picked character from a third-rate Mortal Kombat clone that everybody hates.” Perfect.

Together, these three jamokes are the Paparazzi Samurai!

Do we have a theme song? You better believe we do.

PAP-PAP-PAPARAZZI

SAMURAI

WHEN EVERYTHING CLICKS

AND YOU SHOOT TO STILL

YOU GOTTA GET THE PICTURE

OR SOMEONE ELSE WILL

COME ON

YOU ALL KNOW THE DRILL

SMILE, GET FOCUSED

THAT’S THE GREATEST THRILL

WE GOT THE FILM WE GOT GUTS

WE GOT REALLY COOL PHOTO STUFF

What kind of “photo stuff?” How about Felix’s camera belt buckle, which turns into a hundred rotating cameras.

I hear you: that’s fine for taking a 360-degree panorama of everyone’s crotches, but it’s not splashy enough. Splashy, huh? How about the same spinning camera ring… attached to an umbrella for some reason?

GOD IS DEAD AND MARTY ABRAMS HAS TAKEN HIS THRONE. HE IS THE INVENTOR OF THE MODERN ACTION FIGURE. IF HE WANTS A RING OF CAMERAS ATTACHED TO A CAMERA COMING OUT OF A BALD WHITE SAMURAI’S HEAD THEN THAT’S WHAT HE’S GOING TO GET.

You cry out for more. Give us more cool photo stuff, Marty. He has heard your pleas. No superhero is complete without a cool car, right? How about a big yellow taxi?

Sorry, I meant to say “a big yellow taxi that’s also an entire movie production crew.”

WE’RE THE GOOD GUYS OF COURSE

WE’RE THE PHOTO FIGHTING FORCE

WE DON’T HURT NOBODY

BECAUSE WE GET OUR KICKS

EVERYTIME THE CAMERA CLICKS

Right! It’s easy to lose sight of in all of the camera puns, but the whole idea of Paparazzi Samurai was to create a non-violent superhero team. They don’t solve problems with their fists, they—

They immediately fuck everything up by using their fists?

Here’s what happens: the Paparazzi Samurai somehow hear Steven Seagal steal a little girl’s ice cream cone in a park. They burst out of the woods, and Felix does a bunch of flippy karate nonsense before palm striking the ice cream off of the cone, essentially escalating dessert theft into a midday park brawl for no goddamn reason.

But don’t forget, they have cameras!

They take their shot, and…

I didn’t cut anything out here. The Paparazzi Samurai pull out their cameras and snap a picture of the ice cream criminal, at which point he is instantly bound and gagged (with film, natch) while the unattended child is left sitting atop his helpless form, ice cream restored to its rightful owner.

What are we to assume here? The simplest and most logical explanation is that, blinded by three simultaneous flash bulbs, the villain was stunned and quickly hog-tied, after which the Paparazzi Samurai went and bought the girl a new ice cream cone. But there’s another possibility, which is that they’re so good at taking pictures that they can actually alter reality to suit their whims. Both scenarios are somehow more stupid than the other.

And is that really the stakes we’re going with? A girl had her ice cream stolen? Not to get dark here, but of all of the possible outcomes of a strange man interacting with a child in a New York City park, that’s got to be one of the best ones you could hope for.

The thing is, camera-wielding superheroes isn’t one of those concepts that’s doomed from the start, like teens who turn into car monsters and fight space alien car vampires. Maybe one week they head to a conflict zone to document human rights abuses, and another they’re looking into political corruption that goes all the way to the top! Really, there’s countless possibilities.

Hell, they could have had a crossover with Van-Pires where they were trying to prove the existence of Tracula and his minions but were frustrated again and again by the fact that, as vampires, they didn’t show up on film!

Instead, they wave their cameras around midtown Manhattan while doing martial arts stunts, punish a strange man for stealing ice cream, and no third thing.

So, fine, not the best proof of concept. And sure, Paparazzi Samurai was basically a nothingburger of an idea topped with madness and confused Orientalism, but it was arguably more of a premise than many of their properties, which were just first drafts of wordplay that somehow made it to production. Van-Pires, Snailiens, things of that nature. They were riding high in the ’90s! They should have been able to pull it off.

Well, I did some digging and discovered they filed the trademark for Paparazzi Samurai in 1996. Maybe something happened around then that convinced them the premise of a team of “non-violent” paparazzi superheroes was a bad idea?

Oh. Oh no.

Imagine, if you will, Marty Abrams coming into work one morning, high on the success of Dragon Flyz and Sky Dancers — the lawsuits for the injuries they caused are still years off. Imagine him looking forward to a bright future, a world in which non-violent photo-taking superheroes displace the Power Rangers as they had done to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in turn. For the first time since his fraud conviction in 1982, things are really looking up for old Marty.

And yet, he’s surprised to find the mood in the office glum. Is Debbie out with the flu again? Did Steve’s pet turtle die? He sees the headline on the newspaper his assistant leaves on his desk.

His future comes crumbling down around him.

On August 31, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in a car crash in Paris. The cause of the crash would be the subject of countless conspiracy theories, but is generally believed to have come about due to a combination of her driver’s drunkenness and close pursuit of her vehicle by overzealous paparazzi.

The many worlds theory postulates that all possibilities occur in parallel universes. If this theory is true, then there is a world in which Princess Diana did not die in that car crash. In that world, Paparazzi Samurai was made. It might even have become a huge success.

In that world, people speak of Felix, Al, and Maurice in the same reverent tones as we speak of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. Paparazzi Samurai has been rebooted a half-dozen times. Abrams-Gentile still occupies that midtown Manhattan office space. A different world? Certainly. A better one? That is left as an exercise for the reader.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Kyle Campbell, aka Blast Off, leader of 1986’s hottest new cartoon astronaut squad, the Immortals!

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Mascot Week: Izzy’s Quest for Olympic Gold

What are the Olympics? Are they a celebration of the highest peaks of human achievement in athletics, a reminder of what dedication and hard work can achieve, a venue for friendly competition between the nations of the world? Or are they a corrupt institution whose visitations upon their host cities leave naught but ruin in their wake, an excuse for the freak outliers of human physical ability to fuck each other senseless every few years at the taxpayer’s expense? They’re all of those things, but more than that, they are one of our primary sources of new mascots.

Olympic mascots began simply. In 1968, Grenoble’s “Shuss” was created in a single night. He is a little man on skis with Olympic rings painted on his head. That was good enough in the ’60s, when mascot tech was still very much in its infancy.

Later mascots were mostly based on animals native to the host country of each year’s games. Sarajevo got a wolf, LA had an eagle, and, ten years ago, Sochi gave us a trio of creatures including a rabbit with oddly sensual eyes.

But, in an inverse of the classic Air Bud setup, there’s no rule that says an Olympic mascot has to be a dog, or a bear, or even a sexy rabbit with children strapped to her feet. An Olympic mascot can be anything. It can even be nothing. It can even be Izzy. God help us, it can even be Izzy.

Created by John Ryan of Atlanta firm DESIGNfx, Izzy was originally known as “Whatizit.” He was revealed to the world during the closing ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona games with computer-generated visuals, in what must have seemed to contemporary audiences to be as real and frightening as a train pulling into a station was to audiences in 1895, the dumb assholes.

“Now you’re probably wondering who that is,” one of the announcers says.

“What is it?” Another replies.

“Exactly.”

Yes, Whatizit’s introduction was a half-hearted “who’s on first” routine over footage of a costumed version of the character dancing to jazz music.

The commentators are barely even feigning interest or pleasure in this abomination. And who can blame them? It’s the end of a grueling Olympic summer and they probably just wanted to go home, but first they had to pretend to an audience of millions that this thing wasn’t a crime against god.

“It’s certainly different,” one says. “I wonder what the other suggestions were,” another adds. “I guess we should give some credit to the man that submitted the winning entry,” they finally concede. All of this is polite television broadcaster speak for “I hate and fear this creature on a pre-rational level, and should I happen to find myself alone with it my body would bludgeon it to death with no conscious action on my part.”

Everyone hated the Whatizit, but Atlanta was bound by Olympic law and the fact they’d probably spent a lot of money on Whatizit-branded merchandise already. They did the only thing they could do: they solicited suggestions from the pure hearts of children to imbue this godless being with a soul.

Whatizit was renamed Izzy. He grew a nose and eyelids and a vast, dark void within his maw, replacing his grim, toothy smile. He went from this:

To this:

Is this an improvement? Well, let me ask you this: did Newt Gingrich ever shake hands with the Whatizit before he was Izzy?

After his glow-up, Izzy started showing up everywhere: merchandise, video games, even a thirty-minute cartoon in 1995. For years, this cartoon was thought to be “lost media,” an oddly impactful phrase to apply to an animated special about an Olympics-obsessed sneaker-wearing mutant. But unlike the Library of Alexandria or a kind of creepy commercial for a Manila flower shop featuring an Enya song, Izzy’s Quest for Olympic Gold was rescued and restored to humanity’s common store of knowledge when someone discovered it on a VHS tape in their dad’s garage in 2020.

This was no fly-by-night cash-in, either. The voice cast features Tress MacNeille, Rob Paulsen, and Jim Cummings — that’s two of the Animaniacs plus 50% of CatDog. The animation is passable, too. But what kind of story do you tell about an amorphous blue merchandising opportunity designed by committee to represent the spirit of the Olympic games? I’m glad you asked!

First, we need to talk about parallel universes. See, within the Olympic torch there resides another world whose inhabitants are responsible for keeping the spirit of the games alive during the years when there are no Olympics scheduled. This realm is called “The Torchworld” and is always referred to with the definite article. The creatures who live there are known only as “citizens of The Torchworld.” Do they know about the existence of the earthrealm, where the Olympics take place? They do. It’s on their TV news.

Do they crave to transcend their role as mere vessels for the Olympic spirit and to seize the glory of the games for themselves? At least one does, and his name is Izzy.

Of course, we wouldn’t have a story if it were as simple as that. And so, Izzy’s father — and nearly every other character introduced after him — tells Izzy that citizens of The Torchworld do not participate in the Olympics in “the world above.” It simply isn’t done. And that kind of makes sense, because if Izzy is any indication then The Torchworldians seem capable of feats of transformation that would likely give them an unfair advantage against beings constrained by the laws of physics and biology.

But Izzy is undeterred. He’s going to the surface world. He will bear the ridicule of his people. He will teach the world above the meaning of the Olympics, and also fear.

A couple of jocks — except, they aren’t jocks, because in this world jocks are apparently marginalized and ridiculed — mock Izzy for his interest in sporting. “Izzy the great athlete,” they call him, with the same dismissive bile a child in the 1995 world above might call him a homophobic slur. Izzy’s quick on the response, though. “And what about you, Martin?” he asks, “Are you an athlete too? Or just an athletic supporter?”

If you, like me, weren’t sure what that’s supposed to mean, Izzy called that kid a jockstrap. Which is arguably closer to a real-life anti-gay joke than the thing Martin said about him being an athlete. Also, Martin is just called Martin so that his name can rhyme with Spartan, who is his huge, dim-witted brother. Spartans are kind of Greek, right? And the Greeks invented the Olympics? Spartan is drowning, by the way.

Thankfully, Izzy paddles a log down the river to rescue him. Izzy is a “real hero” for his feat, which has less than nothing to do with his actual goal. Olympic athletes may be a lot of things, but they aren’t heroes, really — well, except for the time Michael Phelps took that huge bong rip.

The Tribunal of Elders wishes to give Izzy a hero’s reward for saving Spartan, because of course there’s a Tribunal of Elders in The Torchworld. While waiting for them, he meets Cariba, a sort of proto-Izzy who was apparently at the first Olympic games and constantly quotes historical people who were involved with the Olympics in a desperate bid to make this whole thing kind of educational.

Cariba being at the first Olympics raises a few questions: did The Torchworld always exist, waiting for thousands of years for humanity to invent the Olympics? Or did it spring into existence at the founding of the games in 776? What was it like in The Torchworld during the centuries between the end of the ancient games and the founding of the modern ones? That was the Age of Silence, and while the scars of that era show in her eyes, Cariba does not speak of it.

Instead, she tells Izzy that if he wants to participate in the Olympic games, he’ll need the permission of the Tribunal.

They agree to do so, but there’s a catch: Izzy first needs to collect the five Olympic rings, which stand for perseverance, integrity, sportsmanship, excellence, and brotherhood. You might assume, like I did, that this is actual Olympic lore. In fact, the rings “represent the five parts of the world now won over to Olympism, ready to accept its fruitful rivalries” according to Pierre de Coubertin, co-founder of the modern games. If you resurrected de Coubertin to show him Izzy, would he be aghast or delighted? Probably both, and a little aroused.

Izzy gets the ring of perseverance immediately upon repeating his intention to go to the Olympics, which is kind of like winning a prize for saying “sure, I’ll take a bong rip” when you’re offered one.

Seeking advice about how to proceed, Izzy visits his now-mentor Cariba. She asks him about his best sport, and he says all of them. His favorite sport? Also all of them. His ambitions are limitless. No human athlete is safe.

Also, Cariba is surprised to see him transform into various pieces of sporting equipment, which — hold on — isn’t something everyone from The Torchworld can do? That’s just a mutant power possessed by one particular guy?

Well, it kind of explains why Izzy is so obsessed with sports, at least. Or maybe the ability is an outer manifestation of his inner dedication to the athletic arts? Regardless, he muses that it would make things easier for him in the Olympics — but again, hold on, would it? If you’re in the middle of a basketball game and turn into a basketball, I can see how that’d be a great way to get to second base with Charles Barkley, but how does it help you win?

None of this makes any sense. It’s almost like whoever was in charge of writing this script was given a picture of a freakish blue blob and the word “Olympics” and told to come up with something by the end of the day or they’d be busted back down to writing one of the less-beloved Animaniacs segments, like that one about the cranky squirrel. Anyway, none of that matters, because Cariba tells him that using his morphing powers would be cheating.

Interesting! Are we setting up a moral dilemma where Izzy has to choose between winning through illicit means and taking a loss?

Kind of? But it doesn’t have anything to do with Izzy’s powers. Instead, Martin and Spartan try to sabotage him in the big bike race by pushing him off a fucking cliff. Didn’t they think he was a hero earlier because he saved Spartan’s life? Look on how kindness and self-sacrifice is repaid, children.

But Izzy survives and makes it to the finish line way before anyone else, winning the race. He tells the truth — leaving out the part where two children tried to murder him — and gets the ring of integrity.

The rest of the special is Izzy winning various events while Martin and Spartan try to stop him, apparently having made it their mission in life to cripple his body and dreams. They have some vague notion that if Izzy gets all of the rings and enters the Olympics, then The Torchworld will explode, but really they’re only doing it because we need antagonists and forgot to set up any real ones in the first act.

But maybe they’re onto something — Izzy’s quest is tearing The Torchworld apart, if not literally then politically. The population has split into pro- and anti-Izzy camps. Somehow, Izzy’s desire to participate in the Olympics has introduced partisan politics and sectarian violence into the peaceful realm of The Torchworld.

Entering a multi-sport competition against his now-rival Spartan, Izzy gets the ring of sportsmanship for accepting an obviously biased score from Martin, who has donned drag to take the place of a judge in the gymnastics competition. You know, people say we’ve made a lot of social progress in the past thirty years, but if this plot point aired today it would be the subject of multiple New York Times opinion pieces about transgenders infiltrating Olympic judging.

Izzy gets the ring of excellence for doing hurdles good, even after Martin jacks one of the hurdles way up in plain sight of the crowd. That’s four out of five. We’ve reached the climax, and Martin and Spartan’s concerns about Izzy’s ambitions rending the world apart are starting to be realized.

Black clouds descend over The Torchworld, snuffing out the Olympic flame. The citizens erupt into feral madness, cursing and snarling at those whom they once called friends and brothers. We have left behind the premise of a semi-educational cartoon about the Olympics and are now in the opening cinematic of a Dark Souls game.

Izzy faces off against Spartan in a game of one-on-one basketball to determine the fate of the world. But he refuses the role destiny has set out for him. He says he doesn’t want to play, conceding that his dream isn’t worth it if its realization plunges The Torchworld into an Age of Darkness.

For this, he obtains the final ring — the ring of brotherhood. His quest is complete, and balance is restored to The Torchworld. Izzy will be permitted to ascend to the world above to try out for the human Olympics.

Cariba notes that he will have to get his morphing under control before he goes anywhere, as if the existence of a blue sports monster would be acceptable to the denizens of earth but a shapeshifting blue sports monster would be shunned and hunted as a matter of course.

So, did Izzy try out for the Olympics and succeed? What country did he pledge his allegiance to? Did he turn into a basketball, and if so, did Charles Barkley find a mouth on that basketball? Well, as Cariba playfully tells us, that’s another story.

Motherfucker, that’s the story I want to hear about! I guess we’re meant to assume that Izzy was barred from competing after he punched a Cuban boxer’s head off with his prodigious (The) Torchworld strength.

That’s it for Izzy’s Quest for the Olympic Gold. Now, I want to leave you with two quotes about Izzy, the little Olympic mascot that brought more shame to Atlanta than Michael Vick in 2007. The first is from Time Magazine, which referred to Izzy as a “sperm in sneakers.” Which might explain this second quote from Next Generation magazine that said the Genesis version of Izzy’s Quest for the Olympic Rings “leaves a bad taste in your mouth.” That pretty much says it all.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Bim Talzer, the amorphous spirit of the Karate World Championship who can turn into any mat!

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Jurassic Park’s Bizarre 1990s Toylines 🌭

If there’s one thing kids loved in the ’90s, it was growing up in a country that still had some semblance of a social contract in place. If there was a second thing they loved, it was dinosaurs. A lot of people ask me, Merritt, what were the ’90s like? Well, it was basically like today except the dream job for kids was paleontologist instead of Tik Tok NPC streamer, everything was constantly covered in slime, and the average person could afford to buy a home.

Jurassic Park was more than a movie back then — it felt real, couched as it was in Crichtonian cutting edge sci-fi. We didn’t know that Michael Crichton was the kind of guy who believed that climate change was a liberal plot to undermine America at the time. We just wanted real-life dinosaurs, and Jurassic Park was as close as we were going to get.

Of course, you couldn’t have a blockbuster movie in the ’90s without toys — hell, even Terminator 2 got action figures — and Jurassic Park was no different.

I’ve talked at length about the kinds of toys that were popular in the ’80s and ’90s, before video games more or less drove them into near-extinction and later, resurrection as high-end collector’s items for adults with treatment-resistant depression staring down the barrel of a midlife crisis in an economy where they can’t afford the more traditional cope of a sports car. Kenner was behind a lot of the biggest properties back then, stuff like The Real Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Do you not remember that last one? Alan Rickman won a BAFTA for it!

They were able to churn this stuff out partly by reusing designs from their back catalogs, but it wasn’t like anyone could tell that Friar Tuck was actually just a Gamorrean guard with Mike McShane’s head. Right?

The point is, if Kevin Costner was in it, then Kenner probably made toys of it. Yes, there were Waterworld action figures. There was a Virtual Boy game! You can still go to see the stunt show at Universal Studios! Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular has outlived the Back to the Future ride, the Terminator 2 show, and Henry Kissinger. It will laugh at all of our funerals.

If Kenner had just popped out a few plastic dinosaurs with the Jurassic Park logo on them, they would have sold. But this was a company staffed exclusively by toy lunatics, men and women whose desire to innovate in the space of children’s entertainment went far beyond admirable and became something sick and terrifying. These were the people who made the infamous 1979 Alien action figure that gave countless children nightmares, the minds who conceived of the Terminator 2 “bio-flesh regenerator.” They weren’t going to half-ass this, unlike the Terminators produced by the bio-flesh regenerator.

The main star of the show here is the dinosaurs themselves, but let’s not forget the human characters. Initial offerings included most of the main cast, with the notable exceptions of Henry Wu and Ray Arnold (due to racism), Lex Murphy (due to sexism), and Donald Gennaro (due to justifiable anti-lawyer bias). Each of the humans has their own gimmicks, which tend to divert considerably from their depiction in the film. Look, were they really going to have a Jeff Goldblum figure that lounges around shirtless or sensually explains chaos theory to a spoken-for paleontologist? They should have, but they probably wanted to use the leftover missile launcher molds from the old Police Academy line.

Let’s take a look at Alan Grant. He comes with an “Aerial Net Trap,” which makes sense. Kenner was really careful to portray the human figures as capturing and subduing the dinosaurs, rather than fucking murdering them, which fits with the themes of the movie. Dinosaurs aren’t monsters, they’re just animals. At Jurassic Park, we seek to understand and profit from them, not blast them into quivering chunks of meat.

Well, we’ll come back to this whole “not harming dinosaurs” thing later, but for now, there’s one other thing about Grant that’s worth mentioning, and that’s his other accessory. It’s a nondescript gray plastic tube. Take your best guess as to what it’s supposed to be. A tiny jail for pteranodon criminals? A dino DNA container?

Neither. It’s a nuclear smart bomb.

Look: I know this was probably the result of some executive demanding that the designers shove in cool-sounding words to appeal to kids, and “nuclear smart bomb” definitely sounds better than “unidentifiable Police Academy accessory we discovered in the warehouse,” but a nuclear fucking smart bomb?

First of all, what’s his plan here? Become dinosaur Oppenheimer and condemn Isla Nublar to a holocaust of atomic fire? Second, where did he find nuclear arms? In the action figure version of Jurassic Park, did John Hammond buy black market nukes to deter the world’s governments from interfering with his experiments? Is that why he’s missing from the toy line? Is action figure John Hammond being imprisoned in the Hague playset, which is actually just a repaint of the Police Academy precinct?

Moving on, would you have guessed there was a Dennis Nedry figure? In the ’90s, it was the closest you could get to a Newman toy, and Jerry Seinfeld would have loved this thing — no, it doesn’t come with a sexy teenage assistant — its special action is that Nedry’s arms rip off, a feature they call “dino-damage.” As a writer, I feel that this is an incredible euphemism for “a wealthy maniac genetically resurrected dinosaurs and one or more of them tore your limbs out of their sockets.”

The inclusion of Nedry over, say, Hammond is such a strange choice. I guess they figured they needed a human villain in the initial offerings, and the closest thing Jurassic Park has to one is a bumbling, greedy goon who gets killed by dinosaurs for his trouble. Sadly, the figure doesn’t capture Wayne Knight’s likeness at all, which is maybe why they took another run at him in the second series of figures. It’s still not sexy enough, damn it!

By the time they got to this second release, Kenner’s designers were already chafing at the constraints of the film. Much like John Hammond’s scientists, at this point they lost interest in whether or not they should, and became solely preoccupied with what they could. There’s still no BD Wong or Sam Jackson in series II — instead, Kenner released a set of “Evil Raiders,” a group of original characters who seemingly exist to answer the question, “what if Jurassic Park starred a stable of professional wrestlers instead of the guys from The Fly and In the Mouth of Madness.”

Plainly put, they kick ass. The greatest amongst them is undoubtedly “Doctor Snare,” a man who is dressed like a boss from a ’80s Konami game set in the old west and whose hand position and facial expression lock him in an endless sarcastic pantomime of jacking off.

Don’t sleep on Skinner, though, who looks like a more racist Don Cherry abusing human growth hormone. He looks like Hulk Hogan died laying an egg. He looks like the star of something called Turkish Aquaman.

Sadly, SCRAP DAVIS™ was never actually released. Can you imagine? A cyborg in Jurassic Park? That would be absurd. There have to be limits. Rules.

Even these bad guys, who presumably have no compunctions about killing dinosaurs for fun and/or profit, are equipped with “non-lethal” weaponry like tranquilizer rifles and “hair trigger dino traps.” With the exception of Alan Grant’s nuclear capabilities, all of the humans in the Jurassic Park toy line are just trying to get these rambunctious critters back under control.

Except.

Remember how Dennis Nedry had a “dino-damage” feature? This was also the main selling point of most of the dinosaur toys themselves, somewhat blurring the meaning of the term — does it refer to damage inflicted by a dinosaur? On a dinosaur? Both? Kenner’s toy scientists were too busy developing “realistic dinosaur skin” to care.

Here I have to state that I’m extremely charmed by the note on the collector site JP Toys, “there is no such thing [as realistic dinosaur skin] of course, since we’ll never know for sure what dinosaur skin felt like.” Well, Kenner dared to dream.

The resulting dinosaurs were encased in a rubbery material rather than hard plastic, giving them the feel of an upmarket synthskin dildos. On an unrelated note, the Jurassic Park dinosaur skin was made out of a polyester fiber rather than the more common rubber of the time, so they’re totally safe for insertion for those with latex allergies.

Why go to all the trouble of making dinosaurs with “realistic” skin? To rip it off, naturally, revealing the meat and bone beneath! This is the apotheosis of the “battle damage” gimmick of the ’80s. We’re bringing dinosaurs back to life to tear them apart again, for we have unlocked the secrets of life and have become as gods. Use your tranquilizer darts and capture nets to rip the flesh. Splinter the bone. Savor the meat.

And then there’s the Jungle Explorer, a riff on the Ford Explorer tour vehicle in the film. In a departure from the source material, the Jungle Explorer mounts a turret which can be manned by a human figure. Does it fire a weighted net? Knockout gas canisters? “Dinosaur capture glue” that looks suspiciously like realistic dinosaur cum? (There is no such thing of course, since we’ll never know for sure what dinosaur cum felt like.)

No. It fires “blood sampling missiles.”

I desperately wish I could speak with the person who wrote this copy. I know the truth — that it was likely penned in a late-night work session just before a deadline by someone who thought it sounded vaguely scientific and sufficiently non-violent for the line. Even the copy in Kenner’s catalog is noncommittal, stating “Fire the blood-sampling missile and ‘analyze’ a dinosaur’s DNA!”

The Spanish text describes the feature as a missile with “paralyzing liquid,” which I suppose makes a little more sense. Whoever wrote the Italian translation, no doubt preoccupied with languorous copulation and chain smoking cigarettes, just gave up entirely and said “it shoots-a da missile.”

But I want the story behind the story. I have a dinosaur bone-deep need to sit the writer down and ask them, just what exactly is a blood-sampling missile? Is the idea that it would fly to its target, collect a blood sample, and return like some kind of Dracula drone? The commercial depicts it blasting open the skin of a dinosaur, freeing the blood from its fleshy prison. Are we meant to infer that the JP team then samples the blood from the jungle floor?

In the broadest possible sense, I suppose that all missiles are “blood sampling missiles.”

Kenner continued to produce Jurassic Park toys throughout the ’90s. By the time the “Chaos Effect” figures came out in 1998, they’d left behind everything about the Jurassic Park franchise except the concept of dinosaurs existing. Here, they decided to just say fuck it and create their own dinosaur hybrids because they could, proving that they’d learned nothing from the film and sort of anticipating the plot of Jurassic World.

As for human characters, the Chaos Effect line only contained two: Ian Malcolm, who had become a dinosaur-fighting member of the X-Men, and Roland Tembo, reimagined as a fucking cyborg with a gatling missile launcher. Get into the Trike Dozer armed with grabbing claw, kids, we’re going to blow up some reanimated dinosaurs with Mr. Kobayashi from The Usual Suspects.

In this timeline, Tembo presumably suffered from fatal dino-damage at the hands of the t-rex in The Lost World. But don’t worry. We can rebuild him. We have the technology. Spared no expense. Ok, spared a little expense.

God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaur toys. Dinosaur toys inflict dino-damage on man. Cyborg Pete Postlethwaite inherits the earth.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mark Mahoney who comes with REAL DINO-DAMAGE and it’s ALL PSYCHOLOGICAL. Wow! He REALLY cries!

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: A Very Special Today’s Special

In the annals of Canadian children’s television, Today’s Special is up there with Polka Dot Door and You Can’t Do That On Television. While it hasn’t yet received an analog horror take on its premise like The Elephant Show (look up the theme song), it remains a beloved touchstone amongst Canadian millennials. When star Nerene Virgin died earlier this year, thousands of Canadians in their mid-30s poured out remembrances on social media, while anyone south of the border or outside of that age group likely had no idea what they were talking about.

Well, I’ll tell you: Today’s Special was a Canadian children’s series about a mannequin who comes to life with the help of an enchanted hat. Running from 1981 to 1987 on the educational channel TVOntario, it actually predates the film Mannequin and takes place more or less entirely within a downtown Toronto department store after hours. For adults mired in a perpetual adolescence by multiple financial crashes and unprecedented global crises in their lifetimes, that adds an additional layer of fantasy to the viewing experience: on top of the magical mannequins, remember department stores? Remember how beige they all were? Remember tagging along with your mom and begging to be allowed to go to the toy department to see Sky Dancers and Snailiens? No you don’t, you fucking liar. Nobody knew Snailiens existed until they started showing up on eBay.

Where was I? Oh, right. Jeff is a mannequin brought to life by a magic hat. It’s sort of a Frosty the Snowman situation, if Frosty had the body of an adult man but the mind of a child.

This born-sexy-yesterday abomination is coached on the realities of being a self-aware, living creature by Jodie, a store display creator; Sam, an ancient security guard who is also a puppet; and Muffy, a mouse who can only speak in rhyme.

Jeff’s mannequin rules are extremely specific and restrictive. His hat must be activated with the magic words “hocus pocus alamagocus.” If his hat comes off at any point, he reverts to his inanimate form, as he does when the store opens for business. And should he ever leave the store, his life is forfeit. He is, essentially, a prisoner in the store for eternity.

What happens if the store is knocked down? Does Jeff age, perhaps at half the rate of a normal person? Does he die when he becomes a mannequin? Well, he’s not sleeping — in episode seven, we learn that he’s tired because he didn’t know he was supposed to sleep in the first place. Becoming a mannequin each morning, then, is not a restful time for him. Rather, he simply ceases to be until the following night. How do we know he’s the same Jeff when he comes back? More importantly, how does he know?

These are the sorts of questions a millennial who grew up watching Today’s Special might pose in a “7 Shows From Your Childhood That Were Secretly Dark” listicle. But we don’t need to lower ourselves to that level. Indeed, we needn’t fuss with subtext at all when the text itself is so rich.

Most of the early episodes of Today’s Special revolve around basic subjects, with Jeff being a sort of stand-in for the child viewer. In season one episodes, Jeff learns about snow, pets, noses, fruit, hands, and camping. But by the time Today’s Special hit its sixth season, they were running out of body parts and natural phenomena to explain to the world’s first and possibly only male sexy baby. What was left? Well, how about problem drinking?

Most episodes of Today’s Special jump right in after the opening sequence in which Sam closes down the store and Muffy rouses Jeff from his deathless(?) slumber. Not “Phil’s Visit.” Kids in 1987 must have known something was up as soon as the opening credits gave way to Jodie sitting alone on a stool amidst the wreckage of a medieval castle display.

She looks directly into the camera and explains the cause of the disaster: a man drank too much alcohol. Then she explains what alcohol is: a special juice adults drink when they don’t find each other attractive enough to bone sober. But who was the drunkard responsible for this? Sam the elderly puppet? Muffy the lightweight mouse? Surely not Jeff?

No, it was Phil Phenelli, a photographer sent by Storemakers Magazine to document Jodie’s incredible work at creating department store displays. I’m not sure there’s ever been a scenario that speaks more to the heady excess of the 1980s, and all that without a mountain of cocaine. Probably?

Phil, by the way, is portrayed by Gerard Parkes, who is best remembered for his roles as Doc on Fraggle Rock and the bartender in The Boondock Saints. I would say that his performance here is a mixture of the two, blended with a fifth of Canadian Mist.

Phil is an old friend of Sam, the puppet security guard. The two of them served together in the merchant marine. I guess some people are just puppets in the world of Today’s Special and it’s sort of fine? It’s kind of a Muppets situation, except with schnapps. Phil produces a silver flask he’s kept from all the way back when they were sailors and Sam tells him there’s no drinking allowed in the store on account of policy. Phil seems a little disappointed, as if getting hammered in Sears was a thing people did all the time back then and this is a draconian exception.

Sam takes Phil up to meet the gang and he doesn’t seem at all perturbed to make the acquaintance of a talking mouse or a plastic facsimile of a man brought to life by a wizard’s accidental magic discharge. Muffy the mouse wants to be a photographer, so he asks her to be his assistant for the night and they all sing a little song about how great they are and how much fun they’re going to have. Oh, the hubris of man! Oh, the heights from which a toy department can fall!

While Jeff and Jodie change into different outfits for the photoshoot of the store displays (???) Phil repeatedly sneaks off to the bathroom to rendezvous with his dark mistress, liquor.

He thinks he’s being crafty, using breath spray to cover up the cheap whiskey on his breath, but Muffy catches him taking a shot and can smell it through the Binaca haze. Despite being a child-like creature, Muffy knows what booze is and reminds Phil he isn’t allowed to drink in the store.

Now things take a turn. Twisted by the devil alcohol, Phil confronts Muffy — a tiny mouse puppet — and begins threatening her.

“Now just a minute, Muffy,” he whispers, “You’re not going to tell on me, are you? You’re not going to be a snitch and tattle tale about your old friend Phil? Because I think that would be a big mistake, Muffy Mouse!”

When he realizes he’s menacing a helpless rodent, Phil backs off and takes a different tack. He explains how if Muffy tells Sam he’s been drinking, he’ll be thrown out of the store and then he won’t be able to take photos of Jodie and her display, ruining her big night. And that would all be Muffy’s fault, wouldn’t it? Phil, if you haven’t guessed by now, is kind of an asshole.

Muffy debates telling Sam about Phil’s drinking and lands on keeping it a secret for the time being, seduced by the possibility of being an assistant to a professional photographer and maybe getting her big break in the biz. But her troubles are not over. Returning to the children’s department, now ruled over by a muddled ogre, she helps Phil open a camera bag he was unable to in his crapulent fury.

Her reward? A cussing out for making him look foolish in front of Jeff and Jodie, who are surely beginning to notice something is wrong. Nevertheless, they leave their tiny friend alone again with this raging, decrepit hulk while they change into another set of outfits. The overt message here is about the dangers of alcoholism, but the secret message is that people will turn a blind eye to terrible, terrible things in the pursuit of their own selfish desires, such as being photographed for a magazine about department store displays.

Phil slurs his way through “Muffy and Phinelli (Drunken Reprise)” then tries to take a picture of Jodie’s castle display while Muffy moves a toy dragon back and forth in the shot. He screams and curses at her while she whimpers that she’s only trying to help. “If I were you, Muffy, I’d mind my own bizzis and just do like I’ve asked you!” Phil howls, his gin-fuelled frenzy rendering him more beast than man. Finally, he can take the incompetence of his assistant no longer and resolves to put the dragon in the right place himself.

What happens next is both unexpected and obvious, the fulfillment of the promise of the show’s opening. As a child, it probably would have devastated me. As a jaded adult who has seen entirely too much, it cracked me up.

Phil stumbles out from behind the camera, lurching towards Muffy in a threatening posture, then trips over his own feet and crashes like a Brobdingnagian lush into the castle, his wrinkly, alcohol-soaked bulk completely obliterating the carefully-constructed display in an instant. And what is Phil’s reaction to this devastation?

The fucker says…

He tells Muffy to get away from him and he sits alone amidst the rubble, turning once again to his secret lover alcohol for comfort. It’s a truly wretched sight, this senior citizen guzzling Old Crow out of a steel flask on the floor of the children’s section of a department store.

When Jeff and Jodie arrive in their new outfits, Phil blames the destruction on Muffy. Here his anti-mouse bias comes out, when he tries to claim that he couldn’t work with her because of her species — it was just too much of a problem, he says. No, Sam tells him, Muffy isn’t your problem. Alcohol is your problem.

Now the entire Today’s Special crew bands together for an impromptu intervention. Being told you’ve got a drinking problem by a puppet you served with in the merchant marine has got to hurt. And getting this look from a naïve living mannequin man?

Phil has brought ruination and sin into the Garden of Eden that is the children’s department of this magical Toronto department store. He must be wondering how his life brought him to this moment.

Alcoholism was recognized as a disease in the mid-1950s. But if you thought there was going to be any discussion of Phil getting help or suffering from addiction, you’d be wrong. No, the blame is laid squarely on this old man’s shoulders. None of these people know what he saw on the sea, and they dare to judge him.

Muffy desperately wishes she could make him stop drinking, but Jodie tells her she is powerless in this respect. Only Phil can choose to stop drinking, making alcoholism seem like something people just decide to get into one day, like SCUBA diving or Jeffmancy.

Still, Muffy’s hopes are briefly raised when Phil tells everyone that he’s going to try and stop, believing that this means he’s going to get better soon. But Jodie once again brings them crashing back down to earth. It won’t be soon, she tells the mouse, and it may be never. Some people can get better from a drinking problem and some people can’t. It’s all up to Phil.

Hurray for personal responsibility! In the words of Ivan Drago, if he dies, he dies.

Phil hobbles to the exit and takes one last look back at his erstwhile friends and the remnants of what could have been, all washed away in a flood of bottom-shelf bourbon.

He leaves in disgrace and we dissolve back to the opening scene of the episode, where Jodie sits on her stool reflecting on the evening’s events and how important it is to speak up when something is wrong. Her dreams of appearing in a magazine have been crushed by a doddering old souse, which perhaps explains why she seemed to care so little whether he got help or not.

The writer of “Phil’s Visit” was Jed McKay. He wrote on a number of episodes of Today’s Special throughout its six seasons, including “Butterflies,” in which the cast learns about the concept of mortality. To paraphrase Principal Skinner, the kids have to learn about death and drinking sooner or later.

In retrospect, one of the weird things about this episode is that nobody ever really explains to Jeff what alcohol is. Sam, Jodie, and somehow even Muffy already know. Did someone explain it to Jeff offscreen at some point in the past? Has Jeff ever illicitly gotten drunk within the confines of the store? Does he go on from this episode still not really understanding what was the matter with Phil? It’s impossible to say.

Roll credits over wreckage. Cue slow, sad version of Today’s Special theme. What have we learned? The lighting director was Alf Hunter, or possibly the show’s assigned Alf Hunter was named Lighting Director.

Phil never got clean. House mice only live for about five years. Dreams crumble to dust.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Rion, who is not an Alf. Who only loves cats to pet. Who has all the proper paperwork to prove Negative Alf status.

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Black Tokyo 🌭

In the world of sexual tabletop roleplaying, games exist on a continuum with The Book of Erotic Fantasy on one end and FATAL on the other. Essentially, do you want to frolic with elves and pixies or do complex math to calculate whether or not your character can fit something inside of them? Black Tokyo, a roleplaying game supplement for the D20 system created in 2008 by Chris Field, sits much closer to the “roll for anal circumference” end of the spectrum, with one important distinction: this one is in the Japanese style.

Black Tokyo opens like this:

Fuck you, “Call me Ishmael!” Go to hell, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard!” “Pussy. Cock. Cum.” is officially the greatest opening of any work in the English language. These are the essential ingredients, are they not? To reduce the complex sociocultural matters of human sexuality to three nouns is no easy task, but Chris Field has studied the blade — specifically, the prehensile dick blade — for years. In this volume, he will share the fruits of his labors with us with the generosity of a patient and giving lover. But just what does a hentai roleplaying campaign entail?

That’s right: we’re here to fuck in a non-discrete fashion. I really can’t blame him for that typo, though, because literally everyone on Craigslist Casual Encounters seemed to have trouble with it too. If you find yourself making the same error, “discreet” means you won’t tell anyone about Black Tokyo. “Discrete” refers to the kind of structure Chris Field should be imprisoned in.

Now, are there going to be any actual sexual mechanics or instructions on how to roleplay physical intimacy? Advice for how to incorporate sex into a narrative? Notes on how to set a horrific mood at the table? It’s cute that you’d think so. The entirety of Chris’s advice on actual roleplaying is “watch Wicked City. It’s that anime where a lady turns into a spider after she fucks some guy, remember that?”

Black Tokyo is what some roleplayers might derisively call a “toybook,” a tome that presents lists of new powers and equipment with little interest in developing a setting or characterization. Specifically, it’s mostly about shitting yourself to gain magic armor or turning your vag into a bladed deathtrap. But we’ll get to that.

First, for those unfamiliar with the concept of hentai, Chris helpfully lays it out:

It’s fascinating to see someone try to explain the concept of pornography like this. Like ok, so you know how in most movies they don’t show the dick going in? What I’m saying is, what if there was a kind of movie where they did that? And in this case, it’s also a cartoon. I know what you’re thinking: cartoons are kids’ stuff! Not these ones, friend. Not these ones.

Speaking of the visual arts, I regret to inform you that there are a number of illustrations throughout Black Tokyo. You’re probably picturing the kind of thing you’d see in a “How to Draw Japanese Animanga” book in a Borders in 2003. But they’re worse. They look like the kind of thing a bullied middle schooler who saw Tenchi Muyo one time might draw to impress his friends in an era before omnipresent high speed internet access rendered such abilities meaningless. “Draw us a lady holding a sword and her pussy out and kind of the edges of her boobs visible,” they would cry. “You can do this,” he thinks. He can’t.

Thank you for the assist, David Cronenberg. Another curious thing about Black Tokyo is Chris Field’s constant use of epigraphs. It’s a technique you see a lot in writers who aren’t terribly confident of their own abilities, inserting quotes from famous or quirky sources to make themselves appear widely-read. Here’s the first one:

Chris Field has read or is at least aware of a quotation by William Blake! And he used it to open a section where he talks more about how when you’re drawing something, you can draw whatever you want — it doesn’t have to be something that exists in real life.

Chris’s examples of the infinite possibilities of the human imagination are: 1. What if there was a sexy devil, 2. What if someone melted but like, erotically, and 3. What if you didn’t roll over and fall asleep right after you nutted. This is a dire omen for what is to come.

You might be wondering, though, what if someone drew something that shouldn’t exist in reality? Don’t worry — Chris is way ahead of you.

Wisely, Chris chooses to avoid the premise of sexual toddlers in his grotesque flesh carnival of the mind. But the issue of sexual violence is unavoidable in the source material, and Black Tokyo is supposed to be a supernatural horror setting, so it’s going to come up. How do you deal with that in a roleplaying environment with actual humans at the table? Modern RPGs have developed all kinds of ways to handle sensitive or potentially upsetting topics, but Chris has his own methods.

First, and this is important, you have to tell the players that by sitting down at the kitchen table with you, they are entering your magical realm of depravity. Springing a world of sexual terrors on your player group is not recommended. If they sat down for some third edition D&D and you don’t tell them that it actually stands for Defilers and Dickholes, there’s going to be trouble. Also, I know what he means, but I really wish he’d said “player characters” instead of “players” at the end there.

But how’s a game master supposed to keep track of which of their players is and is not comfortable with having their characters sexually violated? Fear not: there is a simple solution.

Yes, simply have your players draw a big letter R on their character sheets! You know, for— well, you know.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, what kinds of roles might the players be taking on? Before we get to the unique races and abilities Chris Field has cooked up for Black Tokyo, he first suggests that the reader might purchase some of his other works and offers ideas on how the characters he details in those supplements might be used in this setting. Say what you will about him, the man has hustle. (And another epigraph, this time from since-outed sex pest Warren Ellis.) Unfortunately, we’re already getting into some wildly terrible ideas here:

“I know I said I wasn’t including children in my catalog of sexual horrors,” Chris says, “but if you wanted to include them anyway…”

Sorry, but in the event that I am kidnapped and forced to run a game of Black Tokyo at gunpoint, I will allow neither the child who crafts “submissive magical playthings” nor the Israeli blademaster as player characters in my campaign. I’ll take the bullet, thanks.

But Chris Field, it must be said, is a rarified kind of roleplaying pervert. He isn’t content to just lay out the stat bonuses you get for fucking your grandmother without intellectualizing a little. You get the sense that he’s kind of defensive about… all this.

Putting aside the serious, real-world issues of rates of reporting, arrests, and convictions that obscure the day-to-day reality of violent assault, Chris describes Japan with all of the confidence of an anime-obsessed foreigner who visited once and feels that as a result, he truly understands the mysterious character of the nation. Basically, Black Tokyo is The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, except the sword is a penis.

But let’s get into the real meat and potatoes of Black Tokyo: the crunch. The section on “Hentai Feats” opens with a quote from Saul Williams, so we’re off to a great start. First up, we’ve got Barbaric Rage:

What’s hentai about this, you might ask? Well, the first thing to note is that not all of the abilities in Black Tokyo have anything to do with sex. But in this case, there’s more:

Chris Field wrote, “While in your sexual rage state,” then had to continue that sentence, noting the bonuses a character receives while seething with incel fury. The more I think about it, actually, the more this is a little too real. Can we get a picture of the world’s least erotic blowjob to lighten the mood? We can.

Thank you again, Mr. Cronenberg, master of the grotesque. Next up, we’ve got “Black Fatherhood.” It’s not what you’re imagining, don’t worry. Race is one of the few ways Black Tokyo doesn’t get weird. It’s actually about using your unborn demon babies to manipulate their mothers. Chris puts a Camille Paglia quote in here, and I have to think that even she would feel a little weird about that.

Now, I know I just said Black Tokyo leaves racial dynamics out of the proceedings, but there’s one exception. The feat called “Bodywalk,” which Chris describes as “one of the most fearsome hentai no judo abilities” lets you teleport between people’s bodies. There’s a catch, though:

Is hentai no judo a racist form of invented sexual martial arts? Scholars have debated this question for centuries, but alas, we must move on. We must now speak on the ancient and erotic power of shitting yourself. We’re definitely going to need you for this, David Cronenberg.

Maybe I’ve just never sought this kind of thing out, but making poop armor doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that happens in hentai. Critically, soiling yourself is a full round action, which you might think means you can’t do anything else while you’re doing it. However, a quick look at the D20 system rules indicates that while taking a full round action, you can also take a five-foot step in any direction as well as perform free actions, which include dropping prone and speaking. So you could, in theory, announce your intentions, take a single step, fall over, and piss and shit all over yourself to activate your pee pee doo doo armor.

A bunch of the feats have to do with incest, which seems to be a preoccupation for Chris. There’s one where you can do a Freaky Friday with a family member (if you have sex with them first), there’s another that gives you and a family member a stat boost (if you have sex with them first), and finally, a feat that lets you “forge a mystic bond” with your immediate family (if you watch them crank off first). Hm. I’m going to need some art of one of Santa’s elves fondling a diseased Smurf to continue.

Thanks, Chris. And to Mr. Cronenberg for giving us a full, unobstructed view.

Let’s get back to hentai no judo. I promised you prehensile dick blades, and prehensile dick blades I intend to deliver.

Certainly the power of the Phallic Spear Technique is formidable. But practitioners must be cautious. Maybe you can see where this is going.

Yes, your weaponized cock remains vulnerable to amputation. In the D20 system, Wisdom (WIS) determines your “common sense, perception, and intuition,” which is a weird stat to tie to how hard your hog gets. Arguably, those high in common sense would see the immediate issue with swinging their unit around in battle. It is written: those who live by the dick blade shall die by the dick blade.

Phallic Spear Technique not enough for you? Take the “Misogynist Blade” feat!

So now it’s not enough that guys need to have big dicks. They have to have a “brutal combat phallus.” Much like Chris Field’s flexible battle shaft, male sexual standards are getting out of hand.

Things have been pretty phallocentric so far — what does the world of Black Tokyo have to offer female characters? I’m glad you asked!

Vaginal tesseracts! Now we’re talking. No more awkward conversations after you do the deed — just become a sexual Kirby and hoover up your discarded lovers into a non-dimensional hell. And that’s not the only yonic magic Black Tokyo has in store.

You gotta hand it to Chris Field sometimes. “You have made your sexuality a weapon of mass destruction” is an extremely powerful phrase.

Other feats include giving birth to demons, petrifying your lovers with sexual fluids, and reverting the fools imprisoned in your internal pocket dimension into fetuses. But it’s not all pussy stuff. There’s one called “Womanly Suffocation” where your tits melt and choke the life out of a rival hentai no judo practitioner.

And then there’s “Painted With Seed,” an ability that lets you gain stat bonuses from being nutted on. Sure, fine, right? That’s probably the least bizarre thing we’ve seen so far. That’s what you might think, until you realize that Chris thought up specific bonuses for each body part someone’s man milk lands on. Again, maybe you’re thinking I just mean face, tits, or ass. No, I mean 11 discrete body parts.

Look, I know you want to do it inside, but could you finish on my hands? I’ve got to do open heart surgery later.

Moving on to character classes, Black Tokyo gives you seven to choose from.

All the greats are here: demon hunting cannibal, necrophiliac ghost hunter, unstoppable psychic monster. I fully expect that all of these have already been modded into Baldur’s Gate 3.

The “Death Womb Seductress” can crawl around like a spider and turn her vulva into blades, which Chris explains can be used as a natural weapon in combat.

Look — you can attack with your vagina dentata while standing up. But that doesn’t mean you should.

Here Chris also commits the error common to so many men making jerkoff material: not knowing what a uterus actually is. Is it the hole? Can a dick go in there? Hentai scientists aren’t yet certain, nor is Chris.

As for the other classes, the Freudian Oni wields a violent sex offender tulpa, the Flow Witch does magic by squirting, the Harem Mage creates sentient slave women, the Devil Heart Hunter is just kind of boring, the Sacred Pleasurer does mystic yoni spells, and the Ghostkiss Investigator is Dan Aykroyd in that one part of Ghostbusters. Also, Chris uses a Jenny Holzer quote to introduce it.

What’s left? Equipment, miscellaneous non-horny spells, things of that nature. There’s a piece of gear that’s just The Guyver but what if it was one of those sex eggs you have to bust into to activate it.

Lastly, we’ve got a bunch of monsters and worldbuilding notes, such as they are. Some of these are based on actual Japanese myths, but don’t let the names fool you into thinking these are authentic reproductions — Chris has added some of his own secret sauce.

Take the “Akaname,” a yokai that supposedly licks the grime and scum from bathroom floors if they aren’t regularly cleaned. In Black Tokyo, he is essentially a kind of poop vampire.

There’s also a slime monster, like in a conventional fantasy roleplaying game, but it’s made of cum.

“Vicious male semen.” There’s another one of those magical phrases never before uttered until Chris Field sat down to bang out Black Tokyo.

Speaking of, you might be aware that different kinds of dragons have different kinds of breath weapons in D&D. Red dragons spew conventional fire, white dragons breathe icy winds, and Black Tokyo’s “storm dragon” exhales — come on, you know by now.

Cum. It’s cum.

Somehow, we’ve made it this far without mentioning catgirls. Chris has been so intent on weaponizing incest and feces that he’s lost sight of the classics, the erotic tropes that have endured for decades. What if a woman was also kind of a cat, widely considered to be the sexiest of all domestic animals?

Gaze upon the beauty of the Nekomusume and thank whatever god you pray to that existence can contain such wonders. Cronenberg, you’re on hole blocking duty one last time.

Ok, I cheated. That’s actually the mystical kitsune trickster. Still, pretty erotic, right?

We’ve seen a lot of strange stuff in Black Tokyo. We’ve witnessed a man fascinated by Japanese animated pornography attempt to create detailed rules for devouring someone whole with your cunt. We watched as he awkwardly tried to explain that actually, all of this is good for society, if you think about it. And we’ve seen him quote William Blake, Veruca Salt, Mark Millar, NOFX, and more. But surely he wouldn’t go so far as to quote himself in his own book like some kind of early 2000s message board user, would he?

Of fucking course he would.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: KNM, who is a titty vampire. Just a good old fashioned titty vampire, like we used to have before all you kids got weird with this stuff.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Bots Master 🌭

Set in the far-future year of 2025, The Bots Master presents a world where humanity has invented a legion of roboslaves to cater to our every whim. These machines are the cybernetic creations of Ziv Zulander (ZZ for short), robot wunderkind and all-around radical dude. Or as Toolzz explains in the intro,

“Yeah! Well he can’t fade us!

He forgot about the Boyzz and the guy who made us!

Ziv Zulander, master of Boyzz bots!”

But it turns out that his boss, Lewis Leon Paradim, isn’t happy with being the richest person on the planet. LLP wants to rule the world, to be worshiped and beloved by all. His evil plan? Use a new kind of computer chip to make the global population bend to his will. Ah, the wild premises that cartoons came up with in the ’90s!

The brainchild of DIC head, Jean Chalopin, and Toy Biz CEO, Avi Arad, The Bots Master sees ZZ and his kid sister “Blitzy” wage a secret war against his ex-employer to prevent him from using his “Krang chips” to take manual control of every robot in the world. It’s weird because like, they built all of those robots anyway, so if that was their plan all along you’d think they would have just included that functionality to begin with? I mean, it’s also weird because they’re called “Krang chips,” which sounds like something Shredder would eat in the Technodrome.

Also, the show was directed by a guy named Xavier Picard, whose mother named him after the two bravest men she ever knew played by Patrick Stewart.

So: a teen genius fights against an evil megacorporation with his army of wisecracking robots — it’s a solid premise, but it needed something else to set it apart. “I’ve got eet,” Chalopin, a then-43-year-old white Frenchman, thought, “we will include le hip hop!” Seriously, the theme song opens with two rollerblading robots saying “greetings from the street boyzz” and then rapping about corporate sabotage and man’s unlimited lust for power.

This influence pervades the entire series. It was 1993, ok? Executives everywhere were trying to be hip with the kids by slipping rap-inspired aesthetics into their entertainment products. Remember Rappin’ Mike? The Ninja Turtle figure with this bio?

I’m sorry for putting you through that. But it gives you some sense of the relationship mainstream white culture had to hip hop in the early ’90s. That is, it didn’t understand it at all and also wanted to suck the life out of it for sustenance. The Bots Master was essentially mandated by law to have a black rapping robot who rollerblades and sounds like that one Transformer from the Michael Bay movies. Come to think of it, I’m not actually sure whether the rapping robot actually being painted black makes it better or worse than like, a gray or yellow robot. At least the Asian robot isn’t painted yellow, I guess? Yes, of course there’s an Asian robot.

Can we talk about these robots, though? ZZ allegedly invented them to be “young playmates” and named them the “BOYZZ” with two z’s, because the ’90s were a hipness arms race that drove all parties involved to extremes that would horrify contemporary observers. BOYZZ is allegedly an acronym for “Brain Operated Young Zygoetopic Zoids,” a series of terms that sounds like it would get you placed on an FBI watchlist if you Googled it.

The BOYZZ are all fully self-aware and autonomous individuals, yet were constructed to perform exactly one function. One of them plays golf. That’s his whole thing! He was made to be a golfer. He has one arm, and it’s a golf club. He is incapable of doing anything besides playing golf, yet he has the personality of a human male.

 

Is it torment, to have a sense of oneself as a unique being yet be constrained to the narrow design of one’s creator? Or is it bliss to revel in the fulfillment of one’s obvious purpose for existence? That’s a question I leave to the robotheologists.

Anyway, back to the BOYZZ. Some of them are construction workers, some of them play sports. One of them is a doctor. One of them is a cook that didn’t even get a name, he’s just called “cook.”

A bunch of them are disembodied heads built by another robot, whose entire existence amounts to sitting on a shelf and watching TV.

In one episode, ZZ invents a mother robot called Momzz the Mother BOYZZ. Besides having an extremely bizarre name, she looks like this, has a personality based on the DNA of Napoleon Bonaparte (because that’s a thing they can do in the future), and dies almost immediately.

But the absolute worst of the bunch is D’Nerd. He’s an extremely puntable robot with a TV screen for a head whose gimmick is that he always gives the dictionary definitions of words.

It’s unclear whether he likes doing this or can’t help himself, but either way, he makes Alpha 5 from the Power Rangers look like Joe Cool. His existence, like that of unknowable deep sea horrors, stomach cancer, and Ricky Gervais comedy specials, is proof of a not merely uncaring but actively sadistic creator.

None of the BOYZZ were built for fighting, except for Ninjzz, who has a lightsaber and is the only robot in The Bots Master that ever gets to do anything cool. The rest of them were just sort of drafted into ZZ’s guerilla war against RM Corp. That means we get a lot of tennis robots spiking grenades and construction robots dismantling their opponents, but it also means ZZ has essentially drafted an army of robo-child soldiers.

And just who are their opponents? Mostly they’re soulless robots voiced by the old text-to-speech program Dr. SBAITSO (“PARITY ERROR”). And what’s weird is that their creator and the archvillain, LLP, is just… nothing.

He’s barely ever involved in the action and almost never gets to do any fun monologues. He’s more of a hands-off kind of guy, I guess, leaving things up to his lieutenants Doctor Hiss and Lady Frenzy. Doctor Hiss is… well, just look at him. You can probably figure out his whole deal just from that.

I’m kidding, of course. He’s a by-the-numbers Starscream, not a rampaging pervert. It’s not like I could show you a screenshot of him fucking a giant robot dog to the astonished glares of onlookers.

As for Lady Frenzy, she’s a sexy evil lady. It’s a tried-and-true archetype, and one that has no doubt planted the seed for femdom kinks in many young minds throughout history. But Evil-Lyn, the Baroness, and their ilk have absolutely nothing on Lady Frenzy. Her voice actress, Janyse Jaud, sounds like a phone sex operator who suffers from a psychological condition where discussing her nefarious plans makes her uncontrollably aroused. Maybe that’s why she’s doing evil stuff all the time.

She’s insanely horny for ZZ and isn’t afraid to use her smoking hot body and absurdly breathy voice to advance her goals. In one episode she bribes an old bank manager and all but promises she’s going to fuck him until his heart explodes if he does what she wants. And she’s genuinely annoyed when the guy turns her down because his heart belongs only to money.

Lady Frenzy is a particular type of fictional woman, one that never achieved the heights of a Shego from Kim Possible or a Poison Ivy from Batman. But though her name may not be as well known as those objects of forbidden noid-doodle desire, she has inspired a truly impressive level of devotion amongst millennials who can’t really draw but desperately want to see her in a diaper. Google Image Search “Lady Frenzy” and there are multiple results for this kind of thing on the first page by different people. It was enough that it made me wonder if it somehow came up in The Bots Master proper, but the closest I got was an episode where ZZ gets a mind-controlling necklace that hypnotizes her into working for him.

There’s also one where the robots kidnap her while she’s asleep as a “present” for him. You know, normal kids’ TV stuff. You couldn’t make this show today, because of DEI. DEI, of course, stands for DIC Entertainment Industries, the holding company sitting on The Bots Master IP.

You’d think this one would be one of those shows that got maybe twelve episodes, but believe it or not, they made 40. That’s more than Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling, Kissyfur, ALF: The Animated Series, Captain N, and Hammerman, the cartoon where MC Hammer is granted superpowers by a pair of magical talking shoes. Jayce and Wheeled Warriors got 65, though. Good for him, the little bastard.

The big gimmick for The Bots Master — aside from an endless parade of acronyms — is “lazer time.” Of course it’s spelled “lazer,” because they sure as fuck weren’t going to miss any opportunity to shove another z into this show.

When ZZ calls out those two special words, viewers were supposed to put on the 3D glasses that came with the Bots Master toy line. Rather than the classic red-blue ones, these are basically single lens sunglasses and work with the Pulfrich effect. That means that these segments thankfully don’t look like blurry garbage if you’re not wearing the glasses, but for it to work it requires constant lateral movement — so for five minutes in every episode, the world starts whirling by like the background layers in an early ’90s Sega Genesis game programmed by someone who’d just discovered parallax scrolling.

In fact, the Pulfrich effect was also used in the video game Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D in the very same year. Jim even kind of looks like ZZ…

The game was made by a French developer, too. What was in the water in France in the ’90s? I’ll see if I ca– oh, apparently they had a Mad Cow outbreak in France around then, so maybe, uh, that. Now we just need to figure out the Lady Frenzy diaper thing.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ken Paisley, the robot designed solely to enjoy Skyline chili. Torment!