Showing posts with label 1990s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1990s. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Revisiting “The Incredible Crash Dummies” TV Special from 1993!

Taking a fond look back at a one-and-done Fox Kids offering that, for its time, had some of the most amazing CGI visuals ever seen on television. No, for real

Monday, December 9, 2019

B-Movie Review: Evil Toons (1992)

What do you get when you combine four Z-rate scream queens, absolutely terrible animation and Dick Miller and David Carradine REALLY needing the money? Why, an unadulterated camp classic from the early 1990s, of course!

Saturday, September 21, 2019

B-Movie Review: Witchcraft II: The Temptress (1990)

A straight-to-video erotic-horror staple that shows off Delia Sheppard and her enormous talents, if you catch my drift.


Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Thursday, September 5, 2019

VHS Review: Monster in My Pocket — "The Big Scream" (1992)

The beloved ‘90s toy line had its own one-and-done animated special … and yeah, much like that villainous Vampire, it sure did suck, alright

Friday, August 2, 2019

Friday, May 3, 2019

Monday, August 13, 2018

Remembering Bumper and Hubcat from "The Incredible Crash Test Dummies" Action Figure Line!

Yep … back in the 1990s, they actually marketed toys based on roadkill pets to America’s gilded youth.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
The great thing about being an old as dirt, 32-year-old “boomer,” as the 4Chan hoi polloi describes it is that, on any given day, there’s at least a 50/50 chance you’ll encounter something that jars loose thoughts and recollections you haven’t dwelled upon in more than 20 years.

 Well, just such an incident happened to me a couple of weeks back when, in the course of my normal day-to-day doings of scouring local conventions dedicated to kitschy pop cultural ephemera, I stumbled upon a relic of yesteryear I haven’t so much as given a solitary thought to since Bill Clinton’s first term of office … but as as soon as my pupils wrapped around it, a torrent of instant nostalgia washed over me.

Oh, the '90s — when vehicular infanticide was considered whimsical fun!

I know the 1990s is oft (over)celebrated as a golden epoch of juvenile consumerism, but considering the absolute insanity of child-targeted products way back when, it’s kind of hard to objectively root against the notion, too. This was a decade where there truly was no property too far-fetched to market towards kids. After all, this was the same 10-year time frame that saw explicitly adult properties like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Mortal Kombat and heaven help us, The Toxic Avenger turned into children’s cartoons, but even those seemingly beyond the pale tie-ins weren’t the absolute zenith (nadir?) of WTF kidvertising in the ‘90s. No, for my money, that title belongs to one thing, and one thing only … The Incredible Crash Test Dummies.

Let uncle Jimbo tell you young-uns a story, why don’t you? Picture it: the late 1980s. The powers-that-be want to convince the youth of America that it’s a good idea to wear their seat belts, but they want to do so in a manner that doesn’t scare the living bejeebers out of them like they did with all of those anti-drug PSAs (in which the visceral impact of seeing drug dealers turn into snake monsters and people dive to their deaths in empty swimming pools completely negated the core message of the public announcements altogether.) So the fine folks at the Ad Council dreamed up a pretty clever workaround via the creation of the aforementioned Incredible Crash Test Dummies, these wacky characters modeled after those actual crash-impact dummies you’ve no doubt seen in many a (probably rigged) Nightline consumer safety segment. Basically, each PSA was a live-action, 30-second cartoon in which spokes-dummies Vince and Larry (and a couple of supporting characters, naturally) got royally messed up in miscellaneous accidents — indeed, such was probably the only time decapitations and dismemberments were deemed suitable for elementary set viewing — with each spot reminding viewers to buckle their damn seat belts the next time they hop in their ride. (Also, I should probably note that one of the Dummies was voiced by the same guy who voiced Garfield, which made the spots all the more befuddling to us ankle biters back in the day.)

Who doesn't want their kids pretending to drive drunk into brick walls?

Of course, this is the U.S. government we’re talking about here, but according to NHTSA’s reckoning, the PSAs actually did have a drastic impact on seat belt usage in the U.S., to the point the agency just comes out and says the commercials were responsible for seatbelt usage in the States increasing from 14 percent to 79 percent since the ads started hitting the airwaves. Granted, that’s almost certainly a load of bullshit (surely, states enacting laws REQUIRING people to wear seat belts or face fines had nothing to do with the uptick in belt usage, right?) but as evident by the fact the Crash Dummies spots aired up until damn near 9/11, I guess it’s also a bit of a disservice to say they didn’t have some rule in reshaping the public consciousness when it comes to automotive safety.

 But we’re losing track of what’s important here. Long story short, the commercials became so popular that it inspired Tyco to turn the (for lack of a better term) “franchise” into a line of action figures, all of which had the same modus operandi; each toy came with a button, and when you pressed it, the figures pretty much exploded into a shower of plastic limbs. And of course, this being the opportunistic early ‘90s, you better believe the line included a wealth of vehicles and play sets (including a full fledged mini crash test center) to enhance and augment the mayhem by design. Hell, they even wheeled out this one peripheral device called “The Crash and Bash Chair,” which was effectively a bright pastel torture rack kids could use to tear their plastic toy things asunder like it was a Saw movie or something.

 It didn’t take long for the concerned parents groups out there to get more than a wee bit rankled about the line, considering kids were now being implored to engage in make believe vehicular manslaughter as a playtime activity. Which brings us to the thing that more or less pushed The Incredible Crash Test Dummies franchise beyond the point of no return … ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bumper and Hubcat.

Uh-oh ... better make sure that dog doesn't get anywhere near a Michael Vick action figure!
Yes, I had these two figures as a kid, although for the life of me I just don’t remember going into any store to purchase them. But even as an 8-year-old weaned on a steady diet of Robocop cartoons and Castlevania, I couldn’t help but feel something was kinda’ iffy about spending my afternoons playing with plastic roadkill.

 There really wasn’t a whole lot you could do with the toys themselves. More accessories than full fledged action figures, the zero-articulation products could be “splattered” over and over again, but that was pretty much the extent of it. Even by pre-Internet standards these things didn’t necessitate much replay value, but looking back on the how this thing was marketed to elementary-school America the whole thing becomes immensely more unsettling.

 Now, as a kid, I NEVER read the packaging of toys, and as soon as I got the suckers home the pack itself was destined for the garbage bin. Granted, if I HAD read the packaging on this particular “set,” it certainly would’ve given my playtime a more morbid ambiance, that’s for sure.

 Ah, man, isn’t it great how the back packaging lets us know how depressed the cat is and the dog is borderline retarded? Just the way that stuff is written is surprisingly cruel and cynical for something literally aimed towards first graders. And the more I gawp at that cat’s face, the more I start getting some Mason Verger from Hannibal vibes. Just eerie man, just eerie.

 Unsurprisingly, some parenting groups did indeed take offense to the idea of toys imitating pet mortality — as well as the idea of their tykes sending an exploding baby through a windshield over and over — and it wasn’t long before Tyco decided to voluntarily pull some of the dolls from store shelves. But what’s really interesting is who the loudest critic of the toy line was — none other than the Ad Council themselves, who purportedly wanted the whole line kiboshed because it sent the wrong message to children about automobile safety.

It’s a pretty big stretch to call these toys “collector’s items,” but as pieces of super-kitschy ephemera, it’s pretty hard to deny the instant nostalgic appeal of the dolls, either. Of course, I didn’t buy them when I recently re-encountered them (in fact, I didn’t even look at the price tag, knowing full well it would be preposterously overpriced), but I did relish the opportunity to take a gander at the toys for the first time in literally a quarter century.

 And that, my friends, is what life is all about, ain’t it?

...man, did the mean for this shit to read as melancholic as it does?

There’s a lot more to The Incredible Crash Test Dummies “text” than these splattered pet facsimiles, however. Even after the controversy blew over, the line continued for another year or two, to the point the line got its own CGI(!?!) special on the Fox Kids network, which served as a rallying point for the final series of Dummies action figures. Long story short, they decided to turn the Dummies into actual superheroes entrusted with the world’s fate in a never-ending war against sentient  scrap metal but … you know, we’re probably better off saving the gory details on that one for a future rainy day, the more I dwell upon it.

 Of course, the Dummies got their own comic books and video games, too, and eventually Mattel got hold of the property for a short-lived Hot Wheels line in the late ‘90s. The Wikipedia tells me the Dummies were resurrected for a series of shorts on Fox around 2004, but I sure as shit wasn’t around to see that. And considering how intellectually bankrupt the media is nowadays, it’s probably only a matter of time until the Dummies get resurrected in some new form or incarnation … and yes, odds are, they too, will demand to be described as dummies of color or trans-dummies and fight a crass Trump facsimile like every other beloved childhood reboot these days.

 But for that brief, beautiful moment in the 1990s, at least we had Bumper and Hubcat there, to remind us of a simpler, less touchy-feely time, when instead of coddling our children and indoctrinating them with a hyper-progressive tao their feeble brains couldn’t possibly digest, we instead let them be kids and do what kids do best: play with dead shit, even when said shit was plastic and loosely based on a ubiquitous public service announcement campaign.

Sigh … you stinkin’ Gen Z twerps have NO idea what you missed out, really.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Coin-Op Review: “Double Axle” (1991)

It’s basically Outrun meets Burnout with monster trucks … so why isn’t this game more widely celebrated?


By: Jimbo X
@JimboX

Let’s talk about Taito for a minute. In the grand pantheon of beloved retro game developers, they almost always get lost in the shuffle with Konami, Capcom and Hudson Soft, and that’s a crying shame, because these folks are responsible for some of the most enjoyable games ever in the history of video gaming.

Yes, most people already know they made Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble, but that’s only scratching the surface. The REAL appeal of Taito is the depth (and weirdness) of their software library. These are the same folks who gave us titles as diverse as Arkanoid and Darius, titles as nuanced as Truxton and Demon’s World, titles as entertaining as Power Blade and Wrath of the Black Manta, titles as innovative as Graffiti Kingdom and Sonic Blast Man. Simply put, these guys made a TON of great games, and pretty much all of them remain obscurities, even in this, the age of in-browser arcade emulation.

Which brings us to Double Axle, a 1991 Taito coin-op offering I never heard of until very recently.

Obviously, the game is meant to capitalize on the monster truck trend of the early 1990s, complete with a font that shamelessly rips off the iconic Bigfoot branding. And while I can’t say I’ve played *that* many monster truck-themed video games, of the scant few that I have this is easily the best I’ve ever encountered.

That’s not to say Double Axle is sans any flaws, because it’s got a couple of them — and some pretty major ones, at that. But for the most part, this is an insanely fun arcade racer that deserves WAY more retroactive reverence than it receives. It’s perfect seasonal game playing material; it’s short, it’s fast, the visuals are colorful and everything about it practically screams "it's summer, motherfucker" and that means you NEED to give it a whirl.

Now, the original arcade version had the old Turbo Outrun set-up, with the gas pedals near the bottom of the cabinet and a steering wheel mounted right there in front of the screen. Of course, since we’re emulating this shit it’s not exactly the same experience, but it’s nonetheless one entertaining ass diversion. So let’s hop right into the thick of things, why don’t we?

What's that? "Bigfoot?" Never heard of it before, I swear.

First things first, the game is short — with only five stages, you can feasibly beat the entire thing in less than 10 minutes. Of course, considering how goddamn hard the fifth and final stage is, you'll never actually know what it's like to "beat" the game, so don't you dare think this one won't give you your money's worth in terms of challenge.

 The core gameplay is very simple. Before each stage you're allotted a certain amount of money to upgrade your truck with a more powerful engine, bigger tires or nitro boosters. And from there, it's straight to the races, in which you take your lawsuit-baiting big rig on an off-road, pedal-to-the-medal destruction-a-thon against nine other jumbo-sized vehicles (which, among other rides, includes what appears to be a jacked-up version of the van from The A-Team.)

And before you ask, no, the upgrades don't really make that much of a difference on how the trucks control. Sure, the handling is a teeny bit smoother if you have the big old souped-up tires selected, but it's not like having them equipped makes you that much likelier to come in first. The engine upgrade, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't do anything — maybe it makes your ride just a smidge faster, but then again, the advantage is so minuscule as to be almost unnoticeable.

The nitro boosts, though, do come in handy, and almost work like cheat codes in some situations. Basically, if you have at least two of 'em stored up and it's neck and neck heading down the stretch, you're pretty much guaranteed the opportunity to surge in front of everybody right at the checkered flag.

So, stage one. This is a good introductory level that puts you — where else? — smackdab in the middle of the wilderness, complete with muddy bogs and old log cabins and a ton of pine trees that have a frustrating penchant for popping up right in front of you without any advance warning.

Right from the get-go you see everything that makes Double Axle awesome and a major pain in the ass. The sense of force in this game is just phenomenal; even emulating the thing with a keyboard you get a nice, palpable sense of power as you mow down shrubs and rustic, rural housing. Secondly, the racing mechanics are pretty fuckin' excellent, playing out like a mix between Outrun (what, with its hairpin turns and split-second-to-choose forks-in-the-road) and Burnout, in the sense that you can just grind the shit out of your adversaries, demolition-derby-style while jockeying for first place. That crunch as your big rig swaps aluminum with another monster truck just feels so visceral and awesome, and combined with the game's great sense of speed, just mashing the gas pedal in this one feels like a hoot and a half to experience.

But then again, the game does have its demerits, and even from stage uno they are quite evident. Long story short, the controls in this one flat out suck. Maybe you really need the wheel attachment here to play it properly, but using the basic ROM setup is like trying to use a brick for a harmonica. Turning is especially aggravating, since your truck seems to instinctively hug the edge of the road whenever you try to pivot around a corner. And since the sides of the road are almost always littered with giant, truck-stopping obstacles like boulders, pillars of ice and giant balls of magma, perhaps you can see how this presents a challenge. And by challenge, I mean "total fucking bullshit, that's what."

That's a lot of people in the stands. Looks like the trailer park is empty tonight!

So anyway, stage one ain't too bad. Basically, all you have to do is hang tight to the edge of the screen WITHOUT going off-road (which is way harder than it sounds) and turbo boost like a motherfucker as you hit that final straightaway. Along the way you'll figure out the core mechanics of the title (i.e., which rocks you can use as launch pads and which ones stall you out, just how close to the precipice of the screen you can get without falling off cliffs, etc.) and really, unless you utterly and completely suck at racing games, you should get through this one with no problems whatsoever.

Which brings us to stage two, which is really more of an extended mini-game. This is Taito's loving homage to the indoor monster truck rally, and it's easily the funnest thing about the whole game. Instead of racing an opponent, it's you and a competing rig going toe-to-toe in a contest to see which truck can smash up the most shit and it IS every bit as fun as it sounds. It only lasts about half a minute, but by golly, will you have a ball mowing down sedans and crunching tour buses like a diesel-powered Godzilla. Really, this segment alone makes the title worth going out of your way to experience ... even if you don't like racing games, this thing ought to make you squeal with delight, regardless.

With stage three it's back to our usual racing set-up. This time around we're racing in the outback or the Arizona desert or the wastelands of Africa or some other place you'd never want to travel in a million years. Structurally, it's more or less the same setup as the first level, except harder, with more obstacles (including friggin' tornadoes that just show up halfway through the level), windier roads, thicker bogs (which can be avoided by using the old side-of-the-road-hugging technique discussed earlier) and some REALLY steep cliffs that, at times, feel almost impossible to navigate without falling off of at least once. By the way, every time your truck falls off a ledge, it explodes and magically re-materializes a few seconds later ... albeit, driving WAY slower. Get blown up three or four times in a race and your ride basically becomes a worthless hunk of junk that can't make it over an anthill, so, yeah, try not to do that, OK?

Stage four is another glorified mini-game but my goodness, is it another outstanding glorified mini-game. It's the same idea as the monster truck rally stage (you versus another driver compete to see who can run over the most stuff), except this time around it's taking place as you drive THE WRONG WAY DOWN A HIGHWAY. Yep, that's right, this is a game that simulates mass vehicular homicide, and it's every bit as hilariously/disturbingly fun as it sounds. Granted, the hit collusion seems a little off (sometimes you get a nice crunch and you can feel the drag against your truck, other times the game doesn't even bother registering the Toyota Corolla getting smashed under your front tire) but for the most part? This is some SERIOUSLY entertaining stuff right here.

Yeah, the cameo appearance from the Hindenburg didn't make much sense to me, either.

Which brings us to the game's fifth and final level, which I can telly you right now is EXACTLY why this game isn't celebrated as a lower-tier arcade classic ... or even remembered at all, for that matter.

This time around you're racing in an icy village, and if you think having eight-foot-tall tires welded onto your ride will help you one iota as you trudge through they snowy tundra, THINK AGAIN. Unless you hug the ever-loving shit out of the edge of the road you're going to be pirouetting across the screen, constantly bumping into other drivers OR the bajillion ice sculptures just left there in the middle of the raceway. Needless to say, this might just be the WORST-designed stage in the history of racing games — to the point I'd call the stage LITERALLY unwinnable.

Problem No. 1 is the draw-in. Towards the final straightaway, there's this section where you have to drive through a tight squeeze of rock formations. The only problem is the game is faster than the draw-in rates, so instead of being able to weave in and out of the obstacles like Space Harrier, you LITERALLY find your truck ramming into giant boulders that just pop up out of thin air. Of course, the same fate befalls the other drivers, too, so it's kinda' like a final grinder before the checkered flag. It may slow down the game considerably, but it does make the last hurrah way more dramatic; indeed, this is a rare game design (well, glitch, actually) that makes it possible for first and last place to switch positions in just a matter of seconds. And yes, sheer, blind luck is the only factor in play here — skill, be damned straight to the fiery pits of hell.

Get ready, because you'll be seeing this screen over and over again.

And that leads us to Problem No. 2, and this one is quite literally a gamebreaker. The final stretch of the race is a saunter up a steep, icy cliff, with NO barriers to prevent your truck from flying off the sides. Folks, this part of the game is literally — not figuratively, not creatively, not symbolically, not metaphorically — IMPOSSIBLE. Maybe you'd have a better chance with the actual wheel peripheral, but with a good old QWERTY keyboard there's no way you can navigate this one without either falling off the edges or driving so slowly that all the other trucks lap you and you lose by default (by the way, you HAVE to finish in the top three in each race to move in. Maybe I should've told you people that earlier, eh?) Think I'm joshing you? Go onto YouTube and try to find a full play-through of the game. It doesn't exist because NOBODY can find a way to get up that friggin' ice bridge. For all intents and purposes, the game hits an unplanned kill screen as soon as the section begins, and not even spamming your nitro boosts will be enough to get you over the hump. There might be another stage after this one, but like fuck if anybody using MAME will ever see what it looks like.

So, yeah, if you can overlook the fact the final stage of the game is a broken piece of fucking dog shit that is impossible to win, Double Axle is actually a pretty fun little coin-op undeservedly left to the miasma of early 1990s nostalgia. Really, had Taito spent a little more time on the title they could've made it an undisputed classic, or at least a game worthy of an extended home port. Really, this thing *could* have become a Road Rash-like franchise, and let's don't pretend like this engine would have been a natural fit for a REAL video game adaptation of that old Monster Wars TV show. And lord knows it's WAY better than that cruddy Bigfoot game Acclaim released for the NES, so if nothing else, at least it's got that going for it, I suppose.

Maybe Double Axle ain't an all-time classic. OK, scratch that ... there's NO WAY it can be construed as an all-time classic. But what it is, however, is a game that's way better than it probably had any right to be, and with a bit more polish and fine-tuning, could've ended up as one of the best arcade racers of the early 1990s.

But for everything it is (and isn't) it's still a forgotten relic of yesteryear that's very much worth rediscovering. Even as a mere curiosity piece it's more entertaining than a good 70 or 80 percent of the crap that was glutting up the arcade market at the time, and it's pretty fun being able to play a game that was effectively giving us Burnout — with monster trucks, no less — a good decade before the first real Burnout game got released.

And if anybody out there has video evidence of a human player actually BEATING this game's fifth level, somebody give me a heads up ... that is, if alien super-beings haven't already recruited him for a position as intergalactic general, naturally.

Friday, June 1, 2018

VHS Review: 'Dorf Goes Fishing' (1993)

Yep … people actually paid $19.99 for this crap back in the day.


By: Jimbo X
Like all bygone eras, people tend to overly-romanticize the 1990s. Sure, the decade certainly had its finer aspects (Sega, Dunkaroos, actual NHL coverage on ESPN, etc.) but by and large it wasn’t that much different from the modern world we inhabit today.

Yes, mobile technologies have changed the way we work, communicate and navigate the world around us, and people do seem to be considerably fatter than they were 25 years ago, but beyond that? Daily life was practically indistinguishable from life in 2018. You woke up, you had coffee, you watched TV for a little bit, you went to the office, you fielded phone calls, you complained over the printers not working right, you sat in traffic for an ungodly amount of time, you went home, your wife yelled at you for working too long and you usually fell asleep while watching reruns of Good Times, or, if you were feeling a little more cerebral, after reading five pages of the latest Tom Wolfe novel.

You see, our pop cultural uber alles hivemind wants us to remember the 1990s as Jurassic Park and Nirvana and the Super Nintendo, while conveniently glossing over the fact that (ironically) 90 percent of the decade’s commercialized entertainment fodder was downright stupid. For every Pinkerton and Gunstar Heroes, you had about 15 Snow albums, 24 Chester Cheetah video games and, at last approximation, around 87 or 89 TV shows starring Matthew Lawrence … not to mention the deluge of Power Rangers imitators, half-baked Mortal Kombat klones and — dare I say it? — the plethora of releases from Enya, Kenny G and, heaven help us, fuckin' Chant.

Long story short, there was a lot of suck in the 1990s, and you 2000s-era babies who thought it was a golden epoch for all things don’t even KNOW what kind of crap you (luckily) missed out on. You kids want to see what the 1990s was REALLY like? Unplug the Playstation and toss that Crash Bandicoot disc in the garbage, there is NO singular pop cultural product that TRULY demonstrates the core essence of the decade more than this pile of magnetic-tape-powered dookie we’re looking at today called Dorf Goes Fishing.

… I don’t even know how to begin this one. There’s really no way to explain this to anybody who didn’t grow up in the 1990s, so I already feel like I’m having to teach you Chinese arithmetic in Roman numerals. Still, it’s my job as a writer to at least try, and well, here goes nothin’.

Tim Conway is this comedian guy that had a shtick where he got on his knees, socked shoes over his patellas and pretended to be a midget. Sometimes they’d stick his legs in holes so he could lean forward and backward all crazily-like, but for the most part? That was his entire gimmick. And yeah, I know he was on The Carol Burnett Show, but do I look like somebody who would even remotely care about such nonsense?

Anyway, Conway’s character Dorf somehow managed to star in his own series of straight-to-video specials, and trust me, advertisements for those things were nigh inescapable in the mid-1990s. It seemed like commercials for Dorf Goes Fishing aired every hour or so on The Weather Channel, and I recall one Christmas in which no less than three members of my family received copies of the video as gifts. Come to think of it, I seem to recall my grandpa having a VHS copy, although I’m not entirely sure he ever removed the factory plastic. Regardless, we never screened it at his humble abode — even when the cable went off.

And after rewatching this relic for the first time in at least 25 years, I understand why — a static, grey scrambled screen actually is preferable to the product itself in this case. But hey, don’t take my word for it — how about we relive the wonder and the splendor together, readers?

The video begins with Tim Conway extolling the therapeutic benefits of fishing — and of course, his fishing line keeps fucking up on him, because THAT IS COMEDY.

...but when I whack my wife over the head with a cooler, all of a sudden it becomes "domestic abuse" instead of slapstick.

By the way, is Tim Conway alive or dead? Eh, I'm too lazy to Google it. We join Dorf as he reminisces on the first time he went fishing next to a sandy cove. And yep, he's falling back and forth and side to side because, good golly, is that ever hilarious.

Next, we cut to a skit about how a caveman (also played by Conway) discovered fishing. By the way, the segment is narrated by Conway, who is using a crappy Italian accent, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Man, this production values are WAY lower than I remembered. As in, the actual stock of the video is just barely above cable access quality. Also — with that bush mustache and parted hairdo, Conway does indeed look a lot like Hitler. 

Anyway, "Grunt the Caveman" tries to use all sorts of inventions to fish, including a bow and arrow and a big stick with a rock tied to it like a baseball bat. Then he gets slung into the wild blue yonder by a computer-generated palm tree. Yep, this is CONSIDERABLY lamer than I remembered, and I honestly didn't think that was possible.

Now Dorf is giving us a primer on what wardrobe to wear for a fishing trip, complete with some of the worst greenscreen effects you've seen ... well, probably ever. Oh boy, just wait until he tries to put the fanny pack on ... it's a goddamn laugh riot. Oh, and I hope you like jokes about Dorf accidentally punching himself in the lips while zipping up his jacket ... because they use that gag TWICE.

Man, I'm starting to get motion sickness from this camerawork, and I'm not even joshing you. Well, anyway, after that segment drags on for about four minutes (no, for real), we hop back to Dorf (again rocking that awful Italian accent) and he's brought his big, fat annoying ballbusting, complaining bitch of a wife fishing with him because she wants to take pictures of their afternoon out and they bicker and complain to each other for awhile and then she conks him over the head with a cooler. Apparently, Conway and pals were just pleased as punch with that one — hence, its prominent placement in the TV commercials for the video.

An interesting aside; while the commercials for this tape featured a laugh track, the actual video cassette itself doesn't. But we DO get a lot of cartoon-quality sound effects, though, if that makes up for it.

So Dorf's wife fishes with bacon while he fishes with some high tech expensive lure. Now his accent has transitioned into a bad Mike Ditka impersonation. Then he yanks bubble gum out of his wife's mouth in a sped-up sequence, because that CLEARLY makes the act of quasi-spouse abuse all the more hilarious. Oh goddamn, we're not even halfway through this fucking thing. The wife busts Dorf's balls some more for leaving the coffee maker on and not feeding their pet bird before they left. Then we segue to a "Discount in Price $hopping Network" skit, which is a pastiche of QVC and HSN and all that shit. I have no idea why the models are wearing George Washington wigs, so don't even ask.

Another computer generated fish eats one of Dorf's weighing scales and an electric filleting knife pokes Dorf's tires out. Now it's time for a parody of an exercise video and ... goddamn, this is bad. It's basically just Dorf raising his hands up and down over and over again while his hairpiece flutters in the wind. We got some more sped-up scenes of Dorf almost getting killed using shoddy fishing equipment, complete with — you guessed it! — more primitive CGI effects. Oh, and at one point, Dorf uses a cartoon radar system to run over people in a pontoon boat and crash into some campers, all the while referring to random people as "krautheads."

We cut back to Dorf and his wife fishin' and complaining to each other. You see, the joke is Dorf can't catch shit with his high tech rod and reel, while his wife can catch a whole bunch of shit using a crappy pole. Man, that is FUNNY.

Now it's time to watch Dorf IN DRAG for a terrible Julia Childs impersonation as we take a look at a fishing cooking show parody. Jesus, this thing cannot end soon enough.

Yep ... the thing goes on for EIGHT MINUTES. This is so bad I can't even make fun of it — it's just painful. This isn't comedy, this is the opposite of comedy.

And our video concludes with Dorf fishing under the moonlight, STILL trying to catch a single fish while his wife bitches at him offscreen. Cue end credits, and mercifully, this one is, thankfully, all over.

Not gonna' lie ... I do kinda want that keychain, for totally inexplicable reasons.

Yeah, that was about as much fun as getting a rectal biopsy, wasn’t it? Needless to say, there’s pretty much no reason for anyone to ever experience this … unless, of course, the intent is to showcase just how misguided en vogue ‘90s nostalgia actually is, sometimes.

According to Wikipedia, Dorf Goes Fishing is just one of EIGHT straight-to-video Dorf specials. Yep, eight, including no less than two that revolve around golfing. There are also Dorf special about auto racing, baseball and the Olympics, if you’re so inclined, and if you are … well, here’s a relevant article you might want to take to heart. VERY much to heart, actually.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me abhor myself for having an “obscure media” obsession. There’s nothing funny, creative, or generally noteworthy about the video, and I genuinely feel miffed about having spent 40 minutes of my life screening it when I could’ve been doing something more productive with my existence. Not even getting the opportunity to eviscerate it in this post after the fact really justifies the upfront investment in this one. I hardly regret doing anything, but by golly, I honestly regret rewatching this rubbish.
Trust me — you’d have more fun watching that floating Dorf keychain sit still on a kitchen table than you will watching this video. And that, my friends, is the undisputed truth.

Friday, April 20, 2018

Comic Review: The Infamous "Leaves of Grass" Batman Story Arc!

What better way to celebrate 4/20 than a special three-part series in which Batman beats the shit out of drug dealers and the Floronic Man tries to take over the world by getting the entire planet hooked on super-weed?


By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

It's 4/20, ya'll, which means it's my proud obligation to highlight Hitler's birthday. 

 No, wait, that's not it. What's the motif I capitalize/exploit around this time each year? Oh yeah, that's right — Columbine.

 No, damn it, that's not right, either. Oh, OK, I recall now. It's 4/20, which is basically an unofficial holiday dedicated to marijuana users, who — as we all know by now — are pretty
much my LEAST favorite kind of people on the planet. 

 Considering how much stupid shit "weed culture" has given us (Sublime, Seth Rogen's entire filmography, the entire existence of Kevin Smith), pretty much the ONLY positive thing I can say about weed is that it, by default, gave us a ton of great anti-marijuana propaganda over the years, running the gamut from Reefer Madness to The Goddamn Motherfuckin' Flintstones Kids bringing in Michael Jackson to tell the young 'uns not to puff on the sticky green.

 And the medium of comic books is no different. Just take a gander at "Leaves of Grass," a special, three-issue run of Batman: Shadow of the Bat from late 1996, which tried to toe a very fine line between being anti-weed agitprop and stealth pro-weed propaganda. Of course, with Warner Bros. telling the writers that they couldn't have Batman just come out and say "yeah, I don't give a fuck if you smoke pot," they kinda' had to sneak in the pro-legalization snark, all while hammering out the official D.C. party line that "drugs = fucking bad" as bluntly as possible. 

 So, yeah, you had a bunch of C-tier writers and artists given three issues to impossibly churn out sequential art agitprop anchored around two diametrically opposed perspectives. Oh, you better believe this shit is all kinds of awkward right here — in short, making it absolutely perfect reading for both decent human beings and shameful, irredeemable cannabis-junkies alike. 

 Issue one starts off innocuously enough, with this one drug dealer peddling super-weed to a high schooler. Of course, Batman shows up to bemoan Gotham's "drug war," monologuing about how some new supplier is flooding the street with GENETICALLY MODIFIED chiba that's twice as potent as regular pot but available at only half the street value. 

 Naturally, the decrease in ratweed revenue is causing Gotham's normal old drug dealers to turn on one anther, leading to a scene where these two identical blonde bimbos in ridiculously impractical leather costumes show up and beat the shit out of some Dagos while they call them "wacko dames" and "witches" as family-friendly acceptable euphemisms for "cunts" and "bitches." Oh, and the best part is their names are Holly and ... wait for it... EVA GREEN. Holy shit, ya'll ... predictive programming totally IS a thing, after all!
I wouldn't mind seeing *her* twin peaks, if
you catch my drift (and if you don't, I mean her
exposed, bare breasts.)
Next scene, some psychologist brings Poison Ivy some flowers and she kinda sorta makes some sort of sexual advance towards him, then she starts saying she can "read" a secret message in the bouquet, so — in a rare example of professional competence in a comic book — the psychologist REFUSES to hand the flowers over the Ivy and confiscates them instead.

 Now we travel to Gotham High, and Tim Drake catches a couple of kids smoking some sticky green so he admonishes them. One dude with a mullet says tobacco, booze and guns are legal and cause way more death and destruction than marijuana, so why SHOULDN'T he be allowed to puff on some Mary Jane whenever he wanted? Cue the character immediately taking a Three Stooges pratfall and calling Tim a "fascist" for not sparking a fatty with him.

 Drake talks to Bruce about the incident and he tells them to report the whole lot of them to the school administrators. Robin doesn't want them to get expelled, and says that none of them are technically bad kids. But Batman being Batman, he flat-out tells his understudy he doesn't give a shit what happens to them, rule-breakers of all varieties must be punished, god-damn-it.

 Meanwhile, those leather-clad bimbos from earlier break into Arkham while an unseen narrator gives us the quick and dirty Poison Ivy origin story, complete with a great paragraph about Dr. Woodrue's experiments turning Ivy into a woman with a "deep, never-satisfied need to dominate men." 

 Then Batman beats up a couple of more Wops and he fucking KILLS two weed dealers by ramming the Batmobile into them while in remote control mode and Commissioner Gordon wonders aloud if maybe it would just be easier to LEGALIZE the weed rather than keep going after all these damned old drug dealers.

 The two bimbos spring Ivy from Arkham, they take her to a secret bunker to show her "their boss" and Ivy tries to poison them through the pores on her arm, but before she can drop those skanks dead, a whole bunch of vines grab her, she says "you!" and ... comic's over. Well, how about that.

 Alright, issue two. The splash page reveals the person who "rescued" Ivy is none other than Jason Woodrue, who is literally just an old man's head on a tree trunk with what appears to be wooden titties. 

 Harvey Bullock and this other investigator scour Arkham for clues and even though there's a giant fucking vine popping out of the ground, they both lament a lack of "leads." Which has to be sarcastic, right? Meanwhile, Batman collects some grass clippings and we cut back to Floronic Man showing Ivy his secret basement lair. Woodrue promises Ivy $10 million for her help, and then he goes on a LONG tirade about how he had to stop Swamp Thing from killing every living thing on Earth and how he was forced to guard Swamp Thing's daughter and fucked that up so they put his head on a platter and this one fat black dude kept blowing weed smoke in his face, which apparently turned him into a weed-addicted megalomaniac.

 So he shows Ivy his secret lab, where's he growing a literal FOREST of weed. "Unlike most villains, I don't want to rule the world," he says. "I only want to get it stoned!" He says he's hired a bunch of mole-men to harvest the crops so that's reduced unemployment, and because the weed is so cheap it's stopped organized crime from getting their hands in it, so technically, he's doing Gotham a social service. Oh, and he also said he wants to get Ivy pregnant. More on that in just a bit.

 Back to Gotham High, where that one guy with the mullet is STILL talking about how great weed is. Meanwhile Batman analyzes some bat crap from the crime scene and Robin deduces it probably came from the abandoned subway system, which, as it turns out, is EXACTLY where Woodrue's keeping his weed forest. Batman goes to investigate, while Robin decides to call it a night "for personal reasons."

 So Woodrue is drawing Ivy's blood, which he plans on using to create an army of Ivies ... or some shit like that, it's hard to remember, really.

 Batman goes into the tunnel, and as Batman oft does, he beats the shit out of poor people who have turned to illegal activities as the only means of keeping themselves financially solvent. Then, one of Robin's dorky friends tries weed for the first time, and for some mysterious reason, it makes him go CRAZY as a motherfucker.
Villain tries to take over world by making
everybody relaxed through chemical means;
therefore, Batman must electrocute the
motherfucker and cut his fucking head
off three pages later.

 Cut back to Woodrue and Ivy. Floronic Man says that with his army of Ivies, "hemp will rule the world," and that's when the two leather broads drag in a DEFEATED Batman ... which, of course, is our cue to end the issue.

 Time for the third and final installment of the story. Tim's buddy is having a super-dope freakout and thinks an alien/dinosaur hybrid is going to eat him, while Floronic Man gives Batman the old overly-long villainy lecture about how his weed is going to save the world (complete with the unseen narrator giving us a whole bunch of Wikipedia-like quick facts on the chemistry behind and the historical cultivation of marijuana) and then Poison Ivy kisses Batman and she turns on Woodrue and apparently Batman is under Ivy's control and she commands him to beat the shit out of Floronic Man, because she's good at three-dimensional chess like that.

 Except Batman isn't really under Ivy's spell, he's beating the fuck out of Woodrue just because he wants to, ultimately deep frying him on an open electrical grid and DECAPITATING the motherfucker. All the while, the narrator keeps droning on and on about how Ben Franklin grew weed and the "tabloid press" rallied to make hemp illegal, ultimately concluding with a quip about how 400,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana possession - which to me sounds like some Ava DuVarney quality shit, but I'm too lazy to do the fact checking on recreational drug stats presented by a 25 year old comic book.

 Then Tim goes to check on his friend at the hospital and the doctor, for no reason whatsoever, tells him that marijuana DOES have medical use for treating M.S., but good luck getting funding for it when all those punk teens like him are smoking it while watching Rick and Morty.

 Then Batman gets into a fight with those two blonde dominatrixes from earlier and he KNOCKS THEM THE FUCK OUT with one punch each and it's fucking great. Then Ivy makes off with Woodrue's loot, and Batman can't do shit because apparently Ivy hocked a time-release poison into Bat's mouth when she snogged him earlier and now he's paralyzed for about an hour.

 Afterwards, Batman runs into Commissioner Gordon, who says that while Floro's weed was on the streets, muggings and armed robberies were down but mental hospital visits spiked 20 percent. Then Tim gets his opportunity to lecture the class on the ills of weed addiction and everybody in the class claps for him after he says "I want my mind in the best possible condition - the way it's meant to be" — complete with a downright goofy final panel showing Tim with his head down while a ghostly silhouette of Robin flutters behind him, with the caption "Sometimes being a hero just isn't enough." Yeah, a pretty shitty way to end the arc, TBH. But on the plus side? Apparently, the next issue had The Ventriloquist in it, and come on, who doesn't fucking love The Ventriloquist?
Not since Viva Knievel have I seen an anti-drug speech so moving and eloquent...

 In case you were wondering (and fuck it, I know none of you were wondering), the writer of the arc is a dude named Alan Grant, which I'm pretty sure is also the name of Sam Neil's character in Jurassic Park, which I guess is kinda' funny. The penciler was David Taylor and the inker was Stan Woch, and if you give a damn that David Taylor and/or Stan Woch worked on this series, congratulations on being either David Taylor and/or Stan Woch and absolutely nobody else in the universe.

 All in all, I thought it wasn't a bad little arc, to be honest with you, fam. Yes, it was cheesy and corny and felt compromised as all fuck, but the writing was mostly solid and the thing was just tongue-in-cheek enough to avoid the holier-than-thou pitfalls of most anti-drug propaganda from the epoch. They at least tried to approach the issue of marijuana use from both sides, with Tim Drake representing our conflicted Hegelian synthesis, so to speak. I guess you could argue that all of the other characters came off as painfully one-dimensional, but eh, it's a mid-90s D.C. comic that wasn't published under the Vertigo banner and wasn't called "Hitman" or "Major Bummer" — what da fuq did ya expect?

 Of course, outside of the incredibly iffy attempt to "delicately" tackle what was then a very polarizing social issue, there's not a whole lot to say about the "Leaves of Grass" arc. It's not bad, it's not good, it's just a weird, clumsy attempt to get as much mileage out of a hot button social issue as possible without ruffling the feathers of anybody on either side of debate. You can certainly go an entire lifetime never reading it and being 100 percent satisfied with your life choices, but if you squander an hour or so churning through it over your next couple of shits, it's no big loss, either.

 I hate to use such a base term, but this series truly is what it is. You know exactly what to expect heading into it, and you get EXACTLY what you'd expect to get out of it.

 Still, you gotta' give D.C. a little credit here — they certainly handled the perils of substance abuse angle a lot better than Marvel did when they turned Captain America into a fucking meth addict for a single issue. That's for damned sure.
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