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Nerding Day: Singles Ward
Category: NERDING DAY
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In the 1990s, gender roles in American toys were much more rigid and inflexible than they are today. With few exceptions — board games, Slip ‘n’ Slides, misplaced handguns — there were Girls Toys and Boys Toys, and never the twain should meet. Girls played with Barbies, The Littlest Pet Shop, and all things fluorescent pink. Boys played with Transformers, NERF guns, and all things gross and grimy. This presented a problem for the enterprising toy merchant: your product would likely only ever target half of all children. Unless, that is, some beautiful genius found a way to market the same gimmick to both girls and boys. And folks, our friends at Galoob and Abrams/Gentile Entertainment — yes, the Van-Pires people — did just that.
Like you knew at first glance, Sky Dancers and Dragon Flyz were toy lines advertising cartoons and vice versa. Sky Dancers — the girl version — premiered first, with the toys launching in 1994. Dragon Flyz, the flying Toys For Boys, came in 1995. Both toy lines got animated series in 1996, courtesy of AGE and the Gaumont Film Company, meaning they have that particular French cartoon look of the 90s. You know what I’m talking about, right? Like Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century or Night Hood, the show that’s best known as “the other animated series based on the Arsène Lupin books.”
The concept of selling two different gendered versions of the same gimmick to boys and girls didn’t start with Sky Dancers and Dragon Flyz, of course. Polly Pocket was invented in 1989, and Mighty Max — the boy version — was introduced in 1992. But the fact that Sky Dancers and Dragon Flyz were two separate product lines might be the single strongest piece of evidence for how deranged the ’90s were about gender. I mean, we’re talking about toys that fly. They could have made them Disney-esque cartoon characters, or hell, just birds! Who doesn’t love birds? Even in the ’90s, birds transcended gender.
But for reasons best known to the amphetamine-snorting marketing execs of that decade, instead of something like that we instead got two paradigmatic toy/cartoon lines, one about dancing and friendship and beauty for girls and another about fighting and dragons for boys.
Of course, “birds” probably wouldn’t be as compelling as two separate shows about men and women with helicopter necks. Both Dragon Flyz and Sky Dancers got 26 episode runs, which is far more than either of them deserved. Is anyone nostalgic for these shows? Well, if the YouTube comments are any indication, then yes. God, if you ever want to get really depressed, browse the YouTube comments on old cartoons or commercials. My generation’s brains have been permanently damaged by the deregulation of children’s television in the ’80s.
Anyway, Dragon Flyz inexplicably opens with a siren, followed by a nuclear bomb going off and destroying a major metropolis. I’m sure I didn’t see this as a kid, because it would have seared itself into my memory. It’s as close as you could get to doing the nuclear bomb scene from Threads in an opening to a ’90s kid’s show. (Warning: do not look this up.)
Immediately after the city has been reduced to ruins, we go into a montage of dudes with wings flying around, riding on dragons, fighting guys, and so on. It makes a decent try at rad, but Skeleton Warriors this emphatically is not. Its opening theme song doesn’t even have lyrics. If a cartoon hasn’t shrieked its name forever into every corner of your mind by the time it’s started, it did something wrong.
Apparently, there was a “great cataclysm” in the 40th century, scouring most of humanity from the face of the Earth. To escape this unpleasant state of affairs, humans somehow tamed dragons — which I guess existed? — and fled to the skies, where they built a giant hot air balloon city called Airlandis after the worst possible name for a helicopter tour company.
Meanwhile, the polluted surface is ruled by “Dreadwing,” (played by Jonathan Davis, who also voiced Tracula in Van-Pires) a sort of dragon man who also rides dragons. Fucking everybody rides dragons in this show, that’s the whole bit. It probably would have been called “Dragon Riders” if AGE’s lawyers didn’t think it would get them sued by Anne McCaffrey.
The Dragonators (aviators + dragons, natch) spend their time flying around looking for Amber, a resource found on the surface that they need to power their floating city, and fighting Dreadwing and his ridiculous minions. It’s pretty typical ’90s cartoon fare, with not a whole lot to recommend it. But there are a couple of fun storylines throughout the 26 episode run, like when Dreadwing finds a bunch of pre-Cataclysm ballistic missiles and tries to use them to wipe out humanity, or when Dreadwing puts the Dragonators on trial for crimes against mutantkind. On the whole, though, it’s pretty boring. Dragon Flyz isn’t the kind of show you’d rush home to watch after school — it’s the kind you’d see on a summer afternoon when it was too hot to go out and there was nothing else to do, and even then you’d probably rather page through some old Garfield books or find a second misplaced handgun.
Sadly, the Sky Dancers cartoon does not take place in a shared universe with Dragon Flyz. How sick would that be, though? If it was about humans trying to preserve pre-collapse knowledge through dance? Instead, the show follows students at the High Hope Dance Academy (no relation to Brendon Urie) as they and Queen Skyla defend the “Wingdom” from Skyla’s jealous brother-in-law, “Sky Clone.”
Here I feel the need to point out that “Sky Clone” is not a clone, it’s just an awkward half-pun based on Cyclone I guess, but that’s already an air thing! It’s the kind of totally unnecessary wordplay we’ve come to expect from a Abrams/Gentile production, though. Remember, these are the people who named a character “Van He’ll Sing.” Then again, they also gave us a car vampire named “Tracula” with a son named “Alucart,” so I guess it’s not all bad. Just mostly bad. Like 99% bad.
In the first episode of Sky Dancers, Skyla reveals to her students at dance school that she is the Queen of an invisible cloud kingdom and trauma dumps on them about her dead husband. She then enlists these kids to fight against Sky Clone, because her kingdom is apparently populated exclusively by people less useful in a fight than random dance academy students. And so, Skyla empowers her diverse group of pupils with the ability to fly along with an assortment of other superpowers. One of them gets cloud magic, another gets control over time, and of course they gave the Native American kid power over “wind, rain, and magic.” It’s kind of like Captain Planet only with dancing instead of environmentalism, and the kids are defending a tiny, alien kingdom full of pacifist fairies instead of their own planet. So I guess it’s not really anything like Captain Planet at all, which is sort of what I’m saying: no matter how uniquely insane the show gets, it never manages to feel like anything other than a bad knockoff.
Despite always feeling like a bad imitation of something, there’s definitely more meat on the metaphorical bone in Sky Dancers than Dragon Flyz. The boys got their 27th show about fighting while girls got a superhero dance school in the clouds. Unfortunately, they really cheaped out on the animation, a fact made extremely obvious by how it’s supposed to be a show about dancing, the thing they almost always decided was too expensive to draw. Plus, most storylines again boil down to protecting a magic glowing rock. One of the Sky Dancers, “Slam,” is voiced by James Michael, the lead singer of Nikki Sixx’s side project Sixx:A.M, whose Wikipedia page strangely doesn’t mention this.
Oh, and remember how Dragon Flyz doesn’t have an opening theme with lyrics? Well, Sky Dancers has THREE, presumably because girls like music more than boys. Also, while Dragon Flyz only had a generic instrumental for its opening, I should note that it did have lyrics for its end credits, and they are fucking incredible. You need to listen to them in their entirety, but let me just break off a little piece of flavor for you: the song opens with a man soulfully intoning “In the future all of us shall know / Men once walked upon the Earth below / And now we fly at mega height / Long live Airlandis, Flight is might!” Incidentally, “flight is might” is one of the Dragonators’ catch phrases. The other one, which also features in and appears to be the title of the song, is simply “Maximize!” Sure.
So the shows were nothing special, almost aggressively nothing special, but the toys definitely stood out on store shelves. Dragon Flyz and Sky Dancers are functionally identical, differing only in their theming. They consisted of characters modeled with wings which sit atop launcher bases — though the Sky Dancers look a lot more natural, en pointe on swans and pods of dolphins, whereas Dragon Flyz awkwardly straddle their dragon mounts like they stole them from He-Man.
The launchers have a ripcord attached, which, when pulled, fires the character into the air. They then spiral through the air before landing softly on the ground. Again, the Sky Dancers look a lot more elegant — their wings are attached to their arms, allowing their entire bodies to spin. Conversely, the Dragon Flyz have their wings awkwardly sandwiched between their heads and their bodies, so when they’re launched it’s just their heads that whirl around.
It’s a neat idea for a toy, and it was evidently pretty successful for a while. They made tons of these things throughout the late 90s, with a couple of different Dragon Flyz lines and dozens of Sky Dancers. There were mini-Sky Dancers, Sky Dancers Happy Meal toys, even horrific animal-human Sky Dancers hybrids.
There’s an obvious problem here, aside from each horse Sky Dancer harboring an actual demon: in the hands of children, Sky Dancers and Dragon Flyz were effectively miniature weapons platforms.
In 2000, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and Galoob Toys announced a recall of Sky Dancers after 150 reports of injuries. The injuries included scratched corneas and temporary blindness, broken teeth, a “mild concussion,” a broken rib, and “facial lacerations that required stitches.” Thankfully, neither me nor my sister was ever injured to such a degree by these ballistic ballerinas, but I do recall at least one incident where our Sky Dancers were taken away from us after we enlisted them in a sibling civil war.
As for Galoob, they settled with the CPSC for $400,000, denying they had violated the Consumer Product Safety Act. Oddly, I can’t find any information about a similar recall of Dragon Flyz. Maybe Dragon Flyz weren’t on store shelves long enough to trigger a recall, or maybe they were more safely designed. Or maybe — conspiracy time — parents and the CPSC simply expected boy toys to hurt people, while the same injuries from flying ballerinas were seen as surprising and unacceptable. Here’s what I’m saying: it’s sexism that girls weren’t allowed to cause temporary blindness and mild concussions with Sky Dancers.
Dragon Flyz crashed and burned, but Sky Dancers were retooled and put back on the market in the 2000s. There was a game based partly on the show for the Game Boy Advance in 2005, nearly a decade after the show came out, which seems weird until you realize there was a game based on Gumby for the handheld in the same year. Seriously, think of a children’s TV series and there’s almost definitely a shitty platformer based on it for the GBA.
Like it was for a lot of things, the sad GBA game was the last gasp of the franchise. And so, until such time as the Hollywood IP milking machine sees fit to make a live action Sky Dancers/Dragon Flyz cinematic universe, we say goodbye to our winged friends. We will always remember them as the toy line that somehow caused more documented injuries (among girls) than Snailiens.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John McCammon, who is innocent in the rotary blinding of 76 curious, stupid children until proven guilty.
It’s a glorious Nerding Day miracle, for today we celebrate the three pillars of nerding: Christianity, High Fantasy, and Virginity. You may remember author and champion of unfucked holes, Jennie Bishop, who wrote The Princess and the Kiss. It was a story about a princess saving her first kiss for marriage written like an allegory, but it actually was about saving your first kiss for marriage. In 2004 she wrote a version for boys, only this time it was definitely an allegory. Maybe. Let’s see if we can learn the rewards of a pure heart in The Squire and the Scroll.
As a frequent reader of religious texts, I don’t find Christians to be good at allegories or symbolism. Mostly because you never know when they’re going to call those things “fundamental truths.” Plus, Christian art tends to be nonsense because they usually take existing creations with their own metaphors and meaning and change one of the words to “Jesus.” For example, “Jesus” but it’s the Frasier font or “Jesus Christ in a pot, that’s some wet ass pussy.” This book suffers from that shit, absolutely, but I don’t think Jennie Bishop would be a good author even if she dedicated her life to normal books. To be clear, no one is capable of crafting a good fantasy story around selling virginity to men. But this dim, crusader-brained dingbat? She is a confused baby left to die in a hot car full of typewriters.
Jennie dedicated her book about never, ever having sex to her husband, who has his own inside-joke, fantasy-themed virginity catchphrase. Sorry, that was a wordy way to put it; sort of like an author writing a 27 word dedication when they could have simply said, “I CUT OFF YOUR NUTS, RANDY.”
Randy, this is catastrophic. The first time he sheepishly asked his wife if she came, she said, “Not only did I not do whatever that is, I am going to dedicate my life to making sure no one else experiences this. I don’t care if it takes years, I will find a way to tell even children you can’t fuck.”
So once upon a time, a king was in charge of a magic lamp that kept everyone in his kingdom pure. Jennie mostly means celibate, but I get the idea she’d be okay with any way you wanted to interpret the word “pure.” This joyful kingdom doesn’t have any good falafel carts or jazz clubs, is what I’m getting at. I don’t know why I’m being cute. Hey, Jennie. You missed responsible sex education and hit Christofascism, you smooth pelvised monster.
With all the storytelling skills of a gorilla caught skipping sign language class, Jennie explains how an evil dragon stole the kingdom’s purity. Does this mean, on leathering wings and with dreadful magic, it fucked each and every person? Or did it merely fly around announcing that fucking was possible? Maybe none of this is allegory and it really was a magic lamp. I admit I have no idea. Jennie is building this story backwards from a religious certainty that her idea of “purity” is important, so none of it is really coherent or convincing. I only know this is about virginity because of the book jacket, promotional materials, and the author’s lifetime of public advocacy against sex. Without all that, I’d interpret this as a dragon stealing, like, the kingdom’s ability to say “Merry Christmas” or their zoning restrictions against drag performances. This feels like a medieval retelling of Footloose, except I don’t think Jennie agrees with Kevin Bacon about who the bad guys were in Footloose.
A lifetime of not being fucked and also not understanding metaphors means Jennie makes a lot of very horny, unintentionally funny word choices. This isn’t the best example, but when the brave knight and his pure, pure squire acquire their first treasure, she says they “split the underbrush” and “found a bag of wool” which is exactly how C.S. Lewis would describe your first time going down on a satyr. I just realized I haven’t talked much about the story. Let’s catch you up.
So the squire lives his life by the commands of a purity scroll. It’s the same scroll everyone in the kingdom is meant to live by, but he’s the only one who takes it seriously. He and the knight are attacked by evil, lustful whispers and he remembers the scroll’s First Command: “Listen only to words that are pure.”
You’d think this would mean ignoring temptation. However, Jennie is a Christian and sometimes her metaphors are literal, so this command means to take the wool out of your inventory and use it on your ears. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything that this desperately unfucked author had the heroes overcome their first obstacle by stuffing each other’s holes.
After hiding from the sexy noise, the two pure adventurers find a shield outside a cave. “These are helpful,” explains the man who didn’t pack any shields for his dragon fight. “This reads like a novelization of a point-and-click adventure,” explains the man who noticed these virgins are finding items and then using those items at the very next location.
In the very next location, they are tempted by evil gems. The squire remembers the scroll’s second command, which is now referred to as a rule: “Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you.”
Do you know what this means? It means Jennie got so lost in the parable that her instruction manual for purity is no longer a way for the reader to live their life, but an extremely specific set of instructions for the characters to survive this one adventure. This kingdom has built itself around these commandments and the second one is only useful for getting through its evil gem cave.
By the way, the knight doesn’t care. He’s already spending the money. He’s like, “Kid, I have done way worse things than look at cave faces.” Is this a metaphor for anything? I guess in context it probably means he’s going to put his dick in one of their mouths? I’m… hmmm. No, I don’t think I’m kidding. This is a sincere interpretation. Anyway, he of course dies horribly.
Driven mad by the beautiful toothless mouths of the cavern, the knight denounces the teachings of the scroll. The shield he picked up turned out to be a nightvision shield, which is suspiciously lucky. I highlighted the words “fought to stop his horse, but to no avail,” which is suspiciously how Tolkien would describe a Hobbit trying to keep a boner under control.
“I have noticed the scroll in my belt, and I’m grasping it tightly,” is how Robert Jordan would DM a cosplayer.
The only thing the squire has left is his well-grasped scroll, so he’s about to die of thirst. He comes across a filthy pond of dead fish and wonders if his faith has any tips. It does! The third rule of the scroll is “Keep the unclean far from your lips to guard the wellspring of your life.” I think the author is trying to say we shouldn’t even do mouth stuff, but her writing is so elegant it can also refer to not drinking from a toxic fish graveyard.
The boy, mindful of the allure of temptation, finds a flask of water labeled PURE and immediately drinks it. It’s possible this could be dumber, but I’m not sure how. The scroll, a nonsense document of no help to anyone in or out of this story, is being praised by its own author for being useful and wise. So far we’ve learned to only listen to, look at, and suck on pure things. This is how a hungover girl finds her way out of a fraternity basement, not any kind of philosophy.
The squire comes to a fork in the road. The dry way is fine, while the wet way is obviously quicksand. Using the wisdom of his virginity scroll, he chooses wet. And he gets rock hard. There’s no official rule in the scroll for this, but if there was it would be “Always bet on wet.”
The actual fourth rule is “Breathe only that which is pure,” and whether you think I’ve been fair to this stupid fucking book or not, I think we can all agree this is no longer any kind of metaphor. How would a prospective virgin even use this in their sad life? Do you avoid perfumes? Moist feet? Wafting pubic scents? Speaking of disgusting, the squire enters a yawning chasm to pluck a rose and stroke his parchment. This is all gross. This is how George R.R. Martin would smell a panty.
Luckily, the squire’s plucking and sniffing gets interrupted before he loses the fight to stop his horse. It’s the dragon offering him a deal. He’ll give the Lantern back, but the boy will have to… I guess in the context of this story, give up his virginity.
Okay, so I hope I’m wrong. I hope I’ve fundamentally misunderstood something. But this is a story about resisting sex until marriage. The scroll represents the boy’s purity and the dragon represents temptation. And the dragon is saying “give me that sweet virginity and I’ll give you the lamp.” The boy says no, but then… does? He takes the scroll out of his pants, it transforms into a sword, and then he plunges that sword into the dragon’s body. That’s unambiguous. That’s fucking. That’s how any good dungeon master would describe dragon sex.
This is the hard, wet climax of the story and our hero is whipping out his virginity to penetrate temptation with it. And it cannot possibly be what the author intended. This woman set out to explain why celibacy is important, never did, and accidentally killed her purity allegory with an underage boy’s penis. Everyone knew going in she was going to fail, but this is a true wonder. This is like an orthodontist leaving for work and mistakenly eating a box of diarrhea in a dimension without teeth.
The boy’s sword goes flaccid after he pulls it from the spent dragon, a detail Jennie included to make sure we understand: it was his dick and they fucked. And we don’t make it three sentences before someone is on their knees in front of him, begging for that sweet purity. I’m not crazy, right? This is horny as fuck. This is how George R.R. Martin describes what his characters are eating.
For saving the kingdom and becoming a man, the squire is given a virgin. This isn’t a metaphor or any kind of lesson, Jennie just doesn’t know when to end a story and truly believes a woman is an appropriate prize. This might also be nothing, but the knight is back on his knees again, yearning for those turgid words of purity.
The slow death march of this story’s denouement continues, and we learn that the squire has started a whole virginity club to protect the kingdom against future horny monsters. These men are dedicated to the rules of the scroll, which again, are four pointless clues for navigating a trip to see the dragon their boss fucked to death. This kingdom’s entire philosophy makes more sense as a warning label on toilet cleaner.
We’re still going! On the merciful final page of the epilogue we learn the squire’s virgin wife knew how to please him because she fucked by way of the scroll. Let’s go over the rules one last time. Don’t listen to anything gross, look straight ahead, don’t put anything gross in your mouth, avoid inhaling toxic fu– oh my god oh my god, I’m fighting this horse to no avail! No avaaaaaaaail!!!!
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Clementine Danger, the gem-eyed cave skank.
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Nerding Day: Cursed Worlds 🌭
Blue Comet Comics brought you pure and earnest lunacy from writer, artist, editor, and owner Craig Stormon, whose mind was forever trapped in a labyrinth of his own making. If you’ve ever watched a rambling maniac drift too close to a bank entrance and get tased by security, Blue Comet Press tells his side of the story. The one with electric lizardmen and kidnapped money princesses.
I already covered their premier title, L.I.F.E. Brigade, which was canceled twice by the only person involved with it: Craig Stormon. I didn’t tell you it was only one small part of a shared comic book universe. A universe made of canceled and abandoned titles, reboots, reworks, and the occasional abortion. There are foundational pillars of this universe that can only be found in comic books that never existed. Luckily, I found the Source Book.
Yes, it’s actually called Cursed Worlds. It’s like Craig Stormon saw through the veil of time into this article where I made up a joke title for his life’s work, then asked the Chrono Master for one small revenge.
We begin as all Blue Comet titles do: with a cramped wall of unhinged white text.
I was going to hack this up into sections and discuss each part, trying to make sense of it all, but I recognize a mind trap. The day I understand this is the day I die in a flying machine of my own design, trying to prove the world rests on the back of a big turtle.
Reading this is like listening to an over-sugared 8 year old explain the plot of a fanfiction about a Minecraft modding community’s lore. It’s a confusing and rambling tale four times removed from something that never interested you in the first place. Some of the sections are hyper-focused, like the complete backstory of a telepathic robot who plays no part in the overall story, while others seem vitally important but are abandoned entirely. “Strangely enough, the dinosaurs had also returned.” is the sentence Hemingway wrote when Fitzgerald said he couldn’t confuse the fuck out of any reader using only six words. Fitzgerald won that bet, because it took seven.
Craig Stormon runs out of space during the jacket copy, after having filled the entire inside cover with Dr. Bronner’s style pleas for a diagnosis. 
“Nevertheless,” Craig Stormon froths, his eyes pointing different directions. “Windraven is 300 years old, while M’Lady Doom is 200 years old, both having battled-”
“Craig, hold on,” you say, buying time for police to break through the barricade. “This is the synopsis for an introduction, I don’t know who any of these people are.”
“THE SAME SPEAR THAT KILLED JESUS CHRIST,” Craig Stormon screeches the last words you’ll ever hear.
The characters he’s most excited by today are X-187 and his enemy, Deathrow. Both are ripoffs of Deathlok. It’s kind of like Being John Malkovich but for gun cyborgs who are out of ideas.
This was 1994. Death Row Records was basically a household name. “Cop Killer” and “Deep Cover” made 187 the go-to number for anyone whose preferred AIM handle was already taken. Craig Stormon stole someone else’s half-a-Robocop, filled the entire comic with it like an Oops! All Cyborgs! edition, then gangsplained his readers three times in one paragraph.
And all of that is a stat. X-187’s measurements are: 7 ½ feet tall, 370 pounds, and street gangs spray-paint 187 over the names of rival gangs!!!
Here’s Deathrow’s breakdown:
Craig knew nitrous made you go fast, but he didn’t know anything else about it. Now we’ve got a real chill cyborg with the giggles. It’s important to note his dick is bulletproof and also full of knives, and that the cowboy spurs do nothing. That’s all very funny, but really consider the turn that happens in that bubble. He hired Rich Bonk, the name of a man who is very used to getting dunked on by the universe, and had him draw every mistake of the 1990s in one character. Then Craig erased it right in front of him, just so he could show him how it was really done.
He hired an artist solely to spit in his face, then wrote that down and published it in the Source Book as one of four vital facts you need to know about Deathrow.
Then he hired a third artist!
To do to him what he’d just done to Rich Bonk!
“Bonk me,” Craig Stormon told Henry Martinez. “I need to feel the humiliation I inflict on others, it’s the only way I can get off. Bonk- hold on, let me get Rich in here to watch. Now BONK ME, MARTINEZ!”
Anyway, we’ve already forgotten that we did X-187, so he gets introduced twice.
If you leave a lunatic alone without stimuli they’ll get caught in feedback loops. It’s why Mario Lopez has to repeat all his questions about Pet Judge while Gary Busey keeps turning his name into increasingly offensive acronyms. This is what happens when nobody checks in on Craig Stormon for an afternoon. Now X-187 is a test tube baby with a nuclear skeleton, built by the mafia. We started off at Deathlok minus a few things, yadda yadda skip a few pills, now the evil cyborg can only be killed by the same weapon that slew Jesus Christ.
There’s only one tool in Craig’s mental garage that breaks these loops, and it’s drawing hot girls.
That’s not a joke. Pay attention: You’ll see when shit starts to spiral in a Craig Stormon title, the next page will be a mostly naked woman whose powers are “tits,” whose weaknesses are “too much tits,” and whose origin story is “had tits.”
Again, I am not joking.
It’s a telling look inside the life of their creator, who I assume is not welcome back at any coffee shop in his neighborhood with an attractive female barista. WAIT we need one hasty fact about the barista not related to her looks so the critics can’t call us sexist. Craig Stormon is not welcome back at any coffee shop in his neighborhood with an attractive female barista who is also an expert at knife throwing……….
Oh, oh fuck.
Craig just tried to steal the holocaust. He really thinks he can take the holocaust away from the Nazis and give it to Danzig’s fursona. It would be so hard to explain to Craig why he wasn’t allowed to do this. You’d be all “if you change the entire reason the holocaust happened – even though demons are also really bad, so you’re still saying the holocaust was bad – you’re diminishing the real anti-semitism that caused this real genocide. There’s this whole world you’re making here that nobody really understands, and I get that you’re carried away with your cool details but you can’t-”
And Craig would be all-
Haha he named his only female team the Iron Cupcakes. And he explained that, even in fiction, they fucking hate it.
That’s not supposed to be a mask. In Cursed Worlds people age from the top down. Oldness works on lightning rules. Notice the odd space after “bionics ,” like something was blotted out there. I have a theory that Craig Stormon never knew what a draft was. I’m not being snarky – I actually mean I don’t think he’d ever heard of the idea. You’ll see those blank spots pop up all throughout Cursed Worlds, it’s like you’re watching him independently invent the concept of revision in real time.
Oh, I almost got out of here without pointing out his name wasn’t Dr. Mangla, that’s a professional wrestler.
Fats Oldstein is what I’d call Rush Limbaugh if I wrote for Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2004 and saw no incentive to take pride in my job. I’m not sure what “drug rites” are, but I do know you need a professional psycho who can only be killed by Christ to get them.
What a fantastical universe, full of demons and time travel, living comets and mafia cyborgs. Let’s meet the poor everyman trapped in the middle of it all-
Detective Hank Blood is from the porn parody True Boned, and he only exists so Suckie Stackedhouse can say “ah always wanted tah know what it’s like tah suck… Blood.”
If your name is Hank Blood and you apply for a transfer to homicide you no longer get to act offended when killer cyborgs attack your city. I hate to say anybody’s ever asking for it, but you did not have to leave the house named like that, Detective Hank Blood.
I’m starting to think you guys might be confused about this perfectly reasonable comic book universe. It’s really quite simple: the mafia’s genetically engineered nuclear skeleton and his nemesis, a career robo-psycho who takes double damage from the baptized, assisted by time traveling double superpowered space mercenaries-
You know what? There’s a little comic book short here that will explain everything.
Oh, right. The war they’re referring to is Vietnam, so all of this happened in the 1960s. Does that help?
You’re wondering who Arthur is. Haven’t you been paying attention? Think back to X-187’s stat sheet…
That’s right: street gangs spray-paint 187 over the names of rival gangs.
I guess Arthur has a personal vendetta against Deathrow, even though X-187’s origin story is that he was grown in a tube by the mafia. Ignore that! Deathrow explodes through the ceiling – not the skylight, the ceiling – to specifically assassinate this child.
Dang. That’s actually a really hard-hitting panel. The silhouette sells the horror of it. It’s an artistic choice that says the death of a child is something we shouldn’t see, but still shows enough of the taboo to sell the emotional impact. It’s really effective.
That’s because I cut the panel right before it.
The comically oversized cannon, the cartoonishly tiny boy, the sweat droplets universally used to signal “WUH OH!” This is a Bugs Bunny murder.
But at least now you understand the plot of X-187, right? Hold on, Craig really brings it home-
This explains less than nothing. It takes things you thought you understood away. Look at that presumptuous little ‘FINI’ in the bottom corner.
“The saga begins,” Craig Stormon says, fighting a stray dog trying to eat his last pencil. “Now we’ve set the hook, all we have to do… is reel ‘em in.”
“I quietly resent you for stealing my life energy and no woman can live up to me,” the stray dog says in his mother’s voice.
“FUCK YOU FOR BEING RIGHT, MOMMY DOG,” Craig Stormon writes, another brilliant comic book idea already coming to life.
You met Windraven in L.I.F.E. Brigade, where I joked that she was a psychic Indian who got telepathy powers from space, making her a triple psychic. I was playing with the idea that all ‘90s comic books thought Indians were innately magic. I thought I was playing.
She fucking, hold on. She fucking what?
She’s an immortal Indian from the 17th century who invented the atom bomb? It was pretty crazy when you took a genocide away from the Nazis and gave it to the demons, Craig. It’s way crazier that you took the A-Bomb away from the United States government and gave it to the people they genocided. There are problems with writing this. I understand that. I fundamentally know you can’t do this, but it’s so weird there’s absolutely no precedent I can use to explain why. Craig Stormon actually invented a new form of racism here. He might have a patent.
Okay, let me try to wrap this up:
An Indian woman (already twice psychic because she’s from two different tribes and they each have their own kind of power blast) taught herself how to be immortal and then invented the atom bomb so she became a superhero to make amends and traveled to space where she got powers again, only to come back to a destroyed Earth (because strangely enough, the dinosaurs had returned) after a nuclear war which was engineered by aliens, so she and her team had to time travel back to modern day to help the mafia’s nuclear skeleton avenge his kid brother (who only died in his mind) against an enemy cyborg hired to steal “drug rites” from LA street gangs (they spray-paint 187 over their rivals), who are in league with the holocaust devil and his earthly avatar, an extremely horny woman (powers to be specified later; extremely horny), forcing the good guys to find the spear that killed Jesus Christ which is the only weapon that can destroy psychopathic drug cyborgs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh, oh my god. I’ve ruined myself. I set out to use a maniac’s ill-advised comic press to understand his broken mind, and now I do. I regret this wish, Chrono Master! I see the World Turtle and it hollows me! Let me undo it, I will trade you whole decades!
Take us out, Craig Stormon.
This shared universe, which only exists because the psychiatric field in the 1980s was a disgrace, is best accessed through L.I.F.E. Brigade #1-3. Or wait, no Rough Riders #1-3, which was just L.I.F.E. Brigade but the Lone Ranger joined up. No, maybe it starts with Deathrow. Fuck, it actually sort of starts with Windraven? Definitely not The (devil’s) Workshop, that’s for after! Or maybe, no actually that’s the beginning, too.
Craig can’t tell you where this starts because it doesn’t. It’s a circular universe that refers to and disappears into itself every two issues, to be canceled, retconned, rebooted and aborted over and over again as a dense network of confused nesting sci-fi tropes take over his brain like a tumor, rewiring his neural pathways into a knot only thorazine can untie.
Let’s end this the 1990s way: By having a vague muscular cyborg with a stupidly large gun call us a name.
I’m worried Craig Stormon won’t land this one-
I was wrong.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, the psychic space baby whose bones are nuclear bombs.
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Nerding Day: Skeleton Warriors 🌭
The ’90s were, as you know, the most extreme decade of all time. The day-glo colors and hair metal of the ’80s pupated and metamorphosed into in-your-face, gross-out, over-the-top action, giving us the ascendance of Nickelodeon, Power Rangers, and the X-Games. So what do you get when an experienced producer and the director of the Masters of the Universe movie launches a new transmedia franchise squarely in the middle of the ’90s? You get Skeleton Warriors, a property about evil, animate bone monsters and the milquetoast fleshy heroes who oppose them.
Created by industry veteran Gary Goddard, Skeleton Warriors launched in 1994, with the toys coming out a little before the 13-episode TV series. According to some sources, Goddard claims that he was inspired by the Conan the Barbarian live show at Universal Studios, in which the titular beefcake does battle with skeleton warriors. Hm, Goddard must have thought, skeleton… warriors… that gives me an idea!
Like the previously-discussed Van-Pires, Skeleton Warriors is named after its antagonists rather than its heroes. Unlike Van-Pires, its antagonists aren’t lame gas guzzlers but fucking cool demonic skeletons who look like the ancestors of Da Share Z0ne. The property started with the toys, developed as a line of skeletal abominations that stood out amongst the GI Joes and other standard fare of the time. And seriously, these guys looked sick.
It wouldn’t be a ’90s kids property if there wasn’t a cartoon to bolster toy sales, and Skeleton Warriors received a 13-episode run depicting an epic battle between good (which is dumb) and evil (which is skeletons). There is nothing about its intro that isn’t completely sweet:
The show opens with a giant golden CGI skull talking directly into your face, which would be badass enough, but the skull is also voiced by Tony fucking Jay. Having your cartoon open with the voice of Megabyte from ReBoot and the Elder God from The Legacy of Kain games spitting vague exposition about the nature of good and evil at the viewer is a gutsy move, and if anything it sets the bar a little too high. It kind of makes you wish the whole show was just a CGI Tony Jay skull ruminating about the balance between light and dark. Sadly, the skull dips out for most of each episode and only reappears at the end, to offer some kind of summation of what we’ve learned.
When Skeleton Warriors begins, we learn that the king of Luminicity has disappeared on an expedition, leaving eldest son Prince Justin in charge. His younger brother, Joshua, is pretty ticked off about this. In his frustration, he turns to a guy named Baron Dark, who ropes him into a plan to gain access to the Lightstar Crystal in the castle that powers the city. Really, Josh? This makes Joshua seem like a pretty gullible asshole, but to be fair to him, this is a fantasy world. Maybe dudes are named stuff like Baron Dark or Duke Crime all the time. Maybe it’s normal to be called Baron Dark in the Skeleton Warriors world.
Anyway, Baron Dark betrays Joshua because of fucking course he does. He tries to steal the crystal for himself, but it splits into two in the process. The Baron’s half turns him into a living skeleton monster, while the other half empowers Justin, Joshua, and their sister Jennifer. Each of the three gains unique powers, while the Baron becomes basically immortal and able to turn those with darkness in their hearts into unkillable skeletons like him in a process the show straightfacedly calls “skeletonizing.”
He immediately transforms his goons into a boney band of evildoers and lays siege to the city, which is already in pretty bad shape thanks to the loss of the Lightstar Crystal, which was apparently powering their entire civilization. No contingency plans for us, our easily-accessed magic crystal will keep us going forever! The party’s never going to end!
The three royal siblings flee to their uncle’s place, where he gives them all cool new nicknames and — oddly — skeleton-themed outfits. This always struck me as kind of strange, even as a kid. If you’re fighting skeletons, why are you dressing up in gear with skulls and bones all over them? Like, are you trying to reclaim skeletons from the living bone monsters who want to exterminate humanity? I guess we’ve all got skeletons inside of us, so maybe there’s something to that.
Justin is dubbed Lightstar, with the power to shoot energy beams from his hands. Jennifer, who has gained the power of flight, becomes known as Talyn. And Joshua, who can teleport from shadow to shadow and also has a fucked up zombie face because the Lightstar Crystal apparently detected that he was kind of a dick, receives the moniker of “Grimskull.”
Hey, “Grimskull” sounds kind of like Grayskull from He-Man, doesn’t it? Weird. Probably nothing.
With their uncle, who Justin decides to call “Guardian,” the three royal siblings form the Legion of Light. Together, they fight back against the Skeleton Warriors in a series of battles that involve a lot more hovercycles than you might expect. Seriously, a huge part of Skeleton Warriors is people flying hovercycles around or getting into hovercycle crashes. Again, it was the ’90s, the decade that brought us Renegade, so you can’t be too surprised that they took one of the most x-treme forms of transportation and found a way to make them even more In Your Face and To The Max.
The Skeleton Warriors cartoon is actually pretty good for what it is. Most episodes revolve around the heroes desperately struggling to gain an advantage against their unkillable adversaries while also dealing with internal strife within their ranks. One episode features the people of Luminicity wanting to execute Grimskull for his role in, you know, ruining their entire society. Another depicts the trauma of a normal man who faced the Skeleton Warriors in battle and later became one, the cowardice in his heart enough for Baron Dark to make him into one of his deathless minions.
Having your villains be essentially indestructible, able to reform themselves after each defeat, was a pretty good call narratively. It sidesteps the need for faceless rank-and-file goons like Power Rangers’ Putties, since the heroes can blow the named skeleton warriors to pieces and they can just keep coming back.
And Baron Dark’s crew has some real choice weirdos, too. There’s Shriek, the token evil lady who maintains her crush on Lightstar even post-skeletonization; Doctor Cyborn, who I was disappointed to realize is not called, as I thought, “Doctor Cyborg”; and Aracula, a man-spider who we later learn is a member of a whole race of man-spiders who hate humans. There’s a lot going on in the Skeleton Warriors world.
Midway through the series, the Legion of Light learns that they can de-skeletonize people. Some are glad to be freed of Baron Dark’s control, but his core minions, when reverted to flesh and blood, crave a return to their skinless state. And why shouldn’t they? They have skeleton parties where they dance and feast — whether they get anything out of the latter act or if it is merely a grim parody of life is left to the viewers’ imagination. Skeleton Warriors really wants you to know that while being magically stripped of your skin and organs is agony, being an evil skeleton freed from both flesh and the limitations of human morality feels fucking great. And must we not endure pain to taste true pleasure?
The whole thing is brought to life by some solid voice acting, too: Jennifer Hale (Commander Shepard from Mass Effect) is Talyn, Jeff Bennett (Dexter’s Laboratory, Gargoyles) is Lightstar, and Philip L. Clarke (Doom 3) is Baron Dark. You kind of wish they’d gotten Tony Jay to voice Baron Dark, but maybe he was too busy menacing Mainframe at the time. The point is, we flesh-users really blew it by ignoring this show.
And Skeleton Warriors wasn’t limited to just a TV series and action figures, oh no. Like the creator of Balloonatiks, Gary Goddard was dreaming big — though that’s perhaps understandable, considering he was peddling living skeletons instead of balloon superheroes. There were Skeleton Warriors comics, trading cards, lunchboxes, t-shirts, housewares. There was a Skeleton Warriors video game for the Saturn and PlayStation 1, which featured CGI graphics closer to the look Goddard had wanted for the show itself and a soundtrack by none other than Tommy “I Was On MTV Cribs” Tallarico. And yes, there was a Skeleton Warriors float (though that word might be generous here — it was a little rocket-shaped car) in the 1994 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, alongside other pop culture icons of the era like Sonic the Hedgehog, Lamb Chop, and Kenny G.
At this point you might be like, “Ok, Merritt, Skeleton Warriors was a minor footnote in ’90s pop culture history. It seems fine, and certainly a lot better than the crap you normally cover here. So why are we talking about it?” Well, remember what I said about the character Grimskull earlier? That his name sounds an awful lot like Grayskull, the name of the castle in He-Man? I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
See, Skeleton Warriors wasn’t Gary Goddard’s first rodeo. He co-founded Landmark Entertainment Group in 1980, and it was a pretty successful operation, creating a number of rides for Universal Studios. Goddard also created a few other shows, including the ’80s series Captain Power. He even has a directing credit to his name. What movie did he direct? Why, the live-action adaptation of a massively popular ’80s cartoon and toy franchise — the 1987 box office flop Masters of the Universe.
For those who aren’t familiar, Masters of the Universe tells the tale of the heroic He-Man (alias Prince Adam) and his endless battles in the techno-magical world of Eternia with the villainous Skeletor, who, as his name suggests, has a skull for a face. So we’ve got a prince fighting an evil skeleton man in a world of technology and magic. Sounds a lot like Skeleton Warriors, huh? Or much worse, if you’re going by number of skeletons, and you should be.
Here’s my theory: Goddard got a taste of Masters of the Universe and didn’t want to let go. After the movie failed to recoup its budget, he was likely out of the running for any future MOTU projects. Besides, the franchise had basically run its course by the end of the ’80s and mostly laid dormant until the early 2000s. But Goddard still had the industry pull to do his own thing. He had the resources to realize the dream of many a geek: he could make his fanfiction real. And that’s essentially what Skeleton Warriors is: a “what if” scenario in which Skeletor gets the secrets of Castle Grayskull in the first episode and destroys the kingdom, forcing He-Man and his allies to fight a hopeless guerilla war against him.
Don’t believe me? The Skeleton Warriors theme song says of Lightstar, “he has the power!” You know who else went around saying “I have the power?” He-Man.
Not enough? Just look at Man-at-Arms from Masters of the Universe and Guardian from Skeleton Warriors, both of whom are wise, older soldier/inventor types with weird helmets and facial hair. Goddard didn’t exactly reinvent the wheel here. “Oh, I was inspired by a Conan the Barbarian live show I saw one time.” Bullshit. You wanted another shot at He-Man. This is He-Man with extra Skeletor and nothing else.
So why didn’t Skeleton Warriors succeed when its undeniable inspiration was such a cultural phenomenon? Maybe the focus on the villains left the human heroes feeling limp and uninteresting. Maybe the toys were too edgy for concerned parents, who were fine with their kids playing with violent superheroes but drew the line at the undead legions of the night. Or maybe the ’90s were just an oversaturated entertainment market and there were bound to be losers in the war for kids’ attention and parents’ money.
But at least Gary Goddard went on to— hang on, I’m being told that Goddard was a close collaborator of disgraced director Bryan Singer and was accused of sexual assault throughout the 2010s by a number of men who worked with him when they were minors, and that he “took a leave of absence” from his design firm, the Goddard Group, in 2018, which then changed its name to Legacy Entertainment. Ah well, nevertheless.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Cerril, whose very flesh is a skeleton prison.
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Nerding Day: POPular TEEN-AGERS
