Category: NERDING DAY
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The Wonder Twins were two teenagers from the planet Exxor with amazing shapeshifting powers limited only by their imagination. They were also written by morons and drawn by Somalia’s lowest bidding animation detention center. This is a case I’ve made twice before, but I put it to you again, reader:
The following are real images from Season 2, Episode 26 of a real cartoon they showed to children in 1977. And not just any cartoon, but one that stopped every 8 minutes to give safety and science lessons.
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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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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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