Cartoons, etc.

When I was a kid, the purpose of my existence was threefold: to watch cartoons, pretend I was a superhero and play with my G.I. Joe action figures. Everything else in life was incidental. I woke up at 5:00 am every Saturday for my weekly cartoon marathon, but my two favorite cartoons, Transformers and G.I. Joe, were on after school five days a week. Every day at 3:30, school would get out, and mine was the second bus stop (after Shelby Green). The bus would drop me off at my driveway at approximately 3:46 every day, whereupon my sister and I would run down the drive, into the house, up the stairs and into my parents’ bedroom. At the foot of their bed is where the black and white 13” television was. As quickly as possible, I’d turn the set on and rotate the top knob to “U.” The bottom knob always stayed on 17, which was Fox, the only UHF station we got.

If we had made good time, there would still be a commercial or two before the show that had started at 3:30 came back on. We were resigned to always miss the first half of that program, which was fine in the early days, because it was either The Addam’s Family or Thundercats, neither of which I particularly liked. My two favorite shows took up the 4:00 and 4:30 timeslots.

It can be said without question that Transformers was the better show. A fundamental problem with G.I. Joe was that, since they couldn’t show blood, basically nobody could aim. Since Transformers didn’t bleed and if they got shot they could just get fixed by the mechanic, Transformers had a lot more violent action. Transformers also had weird electronic voices, which were mostly cool but occasionally annoying. The major flaw of Transformers, I thought, was Bumblebee, an annoying yellow Volkswagon who talked incessantly. Almost as annoying was Starscream, the airplane with the chalkboard voice that was always messing up the bad guys’ plans my trying to mutiny.

In both the G.I. Joe and Transformers universes, the bad guys were decidedly more interesting than the good guys. All the Autobots, the good Transformers, transformed into vehicles, whereas the Decepticons, the bad Transformers, turned into all kinds of interesting stuff- my favorite being Soundwave, who turned into what we used to call a “Ghetto Blaster” and contained four cassette tapes which turned into a robot, two Pterodactyls and a dog. The leader of the Decepticons, Megatron, turned into an awesome gun, while the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, turned into a lame semi.

G.I. Joe tried very hard to make all of their characters annoying. Both the good guys and the bad guys consisted of a bunch of bumbling idiots. The plots usually consisted of the bad guys, who were terrorists, messing up their own plans due to their extreme incompetence. The best good guy on the cartoon was Lowlife, and both he and I had a crush on Zartan’s sister Zarana. Watching G.I. Joe was often frustrating because I came up with way better plots and dialogue with my toys in my bedroom than they did on the show.

G.I. Joe action figures and vehicles were easily my favorite toys. Except for my birthday and Christmas, I had to buy my G.I. Joes myself. I studiously saved my $2 a week allowance and the “flag points” from the G.I. Joe boxes, which you could send in for mail-order special offers. I spent countless hours devising plots, drawing maps, choreographing fight scenes and creating dialogue for my G.I. Joes. I wanted to be just like the ninja Stormshadow, and later, Zartan’s brother Zandar, when I grew up. Stormshadow was bloodbrothers with Snake Eyes, who was one of the few cool good guy Joes. On the cartoon, Snake Eyes didn’t talk, but he did in the comic books. When I played with the toys I always reconfigured which were the bad guys and which were the good guys to put more of the cool characters on the winning side (keeping the twins Tomax and Xamot as bad guys so as to give the bad guys a chance), although they did eventually make this easier for me to justify by making Storm Shadow a good guy in the comics and toys. I also beefed up both sides by adding my Star Wars action figures to the G.I. Joe universe. Around fifth grade, after my brother’s friend Steve made me aware of what really happens in war, I completely abandoned the intended premise of G.I. Joe, and in my world Beach Head, Snake Eyes, Stormshadow, Main Frame, Zandar and Zarana were a team of spies who gathered information on every other action figure I had, only killing when necessary.

I didn’t have very many Transformer toys, but I did spend a lot of time making Transformers out of Legos. When the idiots who ran FOX decided to switch the line-up so that Transformers came on at 3:30, I was extremely upset. At my mom’s suggestion, I wrote a letter of complaint to the station, but to no avail. From then on, I could only watch half of Transformers during the school year, and I was forced to sit through a half-hour of Thundercats, in which every character was a complete moron. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of staying at a friend J.J.’s house in fifth grade and seeing, for the first time, Transformers on a color television. I was absolutely blown away by how much cooler they looked in color. Imagine my confusion when J.J. wasn’t even interested in watching the show! Another time, I got in trouble for something and had to choose my own punishment. Thinking of the worst thing I could possibly endure, I chose to not be able to watch G.I. Joe for a week. But when I relayed this horrible punishment to my classmates, they scoffed at such a feeble and silly penalty.