Jim Henson: Genius

Yesterday my wife and I finally made it to the Jim Henson exhibition that has been running all summer at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and will be closing in two weeks. It's got puppets, drawings, models, and videos from across his entire career, from the 50s to his untimely death in 1990. It was a great experience, drawing a huge multi-generational crowd where the parents were just as excited and emotional as their kids. I couldn't resist getting a photo with the oracular pile of offal that gives this blog its name (even though it was just a huge photo, not the actual puppet), as can be seen in the new cover photo. 

What really struck me seeing all of Henson's life work collected before me is how key a role he played in my childhood - from Sesame Street as a very small child to the Muppet Show (and movies, especially the first one), Fraggle Rock, and The Dark Crystal, he was a constant presence for the first decade of my life. By the time Labyrinth came out (in 1986) I disdained it as kid-stuff but I came to appreciate it later, as an adult (in no small part as I discovered that girls around my age with nerdy proclivities all adore it - I don't think I ever dated a girl who wouldn't include it on her list of all-time favorite movies). Thinking about it now and looking back, I see how much of an influence his sensibility had on me - his imagination and proclivity towards the surreal and fantastic, his irreverent sense of humor, his lack of condescension or cynicism, his work-ethic and meticulous sense of craft and artistry, and his DIY free spirit. This was a guy who loved TV and puppetry, and had a boundless imagination and hippie idealism, and spent his entire life working to bring those strands together and create something that hadn't been seen before but has become so ubiquitously and indispensably ingrained in our culture in the decades since that we now take it completely for granted - of course there will always be weird wise-cracking felt puppets of impossible creatures who straddle the line between entertainment for children and for adults.

There's no historical survey or detailed analysis here because Jim Henson isn't somebody I've studied in any sort of consciously comprehensive manner - I haven't read books about him and don't know that much about his life or his puppetry techniques or any of that stuff. I just know him through his work, and even that I know mostly on a sort of pre-conscious emotional level, remembered from the mists of my early childhood. But it has a strong pull on me, a deep inner resonance, that experiencing the exhibit yesterday really brought home to me. Encountering those felt puppets of Kermit and Grover and Beaker and the Fraggles and the gelflings and skeksis, I understood and realized how much of a presence and influence Jim Henson and his creations were for me, even without me ever consciously being aware of it, and that feels like a profound discovery - a key to a new, unexplored room of my inner self.

All of which is to say that if you were a kid in the 70s or 80s, and will be in Los Angeles during the next couple weeks (or this exhibition travels near to where you live), I really recommend going to see it, but prepare yourself to be overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia and emotion.

[TV] My Summer of Robotech

The thrill I felt watching Robotech on TV in the summer of 1985 is something I don't think I can possibly convey to anybody who wasn't there at the time.

As I've mentioned a couple times previously, cartoons in the 80s mostly weren't very good. There were a lot of de facto toy commercials (like The Smurfs and G.I. Joe and The Transformers and He-Man, and even Dungeons & Dragons to an extent), and FCC regulations for children's programming meant that the content was always very tame and there were explicit moral messages both within the stories and as ridiculous tacked-on PSAs. That meant I had pretty low standards and expectations. I watched these shows mostly in the background, while I did homework and/or worked on D&D stuff.

I was vaguely familiar with Japanase giant robots and animation - The Transformers and Voltron both started airing in the fall of 1984, ThunderCats started in he spring of '85, and around that same time a friend of my parents had visited Japan and brought back a couple of cool toys (that I later determined were part of the Gundam universe). So when Robotech started, I was intrigued enough to give it a shot, and it completely blew my mind. It was so much better - so much deeper and sophisticated, with so much more epic and complicated a story, than any other cartoon I'd ever seen that it didn't even seem fair to compare them.

The series ran for 85 episodes, which meant 5 days a week for 17 weeks, which is to say the entire summer. While most syndicated cartoons generally ran in the afternoons, from roughly 3:00 until the news at 5:00, for whatever reason our local station ran Robotech in the mornings. My mom was working at the time, so I was unsupervised (my sister was around, but she was a teenager and probably absorbed in her own stuff and glad to be left alone). I was taking summer-school trumpet lessons, and remember just having enough time to watch the show before getting picked up by my grandma (and later, after she got sick, by a friend of hers). I vaguely remember that school might have started back up a week or two before the series ended and I woke up early to watch the final episodes before going to school, which probably annoyed my mom.

I never watched soap operas, but that's exactly the relationship I had to Robotech that summer - I was totally absorbed in the characters and the story and couldn't wait for the next episode to see what would happen, and when something caused me to miss an episode I was devastated (we must not have had a VCR yet - or if we did I didn't know how to set up the timer to record when I wasn't home). I remember having mixed feelings about sharing it with my friends - on the one hand I wanted to because it was completely amazing and I was totally obsessed with it, but on the other I was apprehensive because I didn't know if they'd like it as much as I did, and didn't want to hear their complaints and bad-mouthing if they didn't. My memory is that they watched some episodes but because it was so heavily serialized they didn't really know what was going on so none of them but me ever got really into it the way I did.

As everybody nowadays knows, Robotech was actually three separate, unrelated Japanese series (Superdimensional Fortress Macross, Superdimensional Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada) that American producer Carl Macek bought the rights to and decided to combine into a single series because individually they didn't have the minimum number of episodes required for syndication sales. In the decades since, a lot of anime fans have mocked and criticized that move, as well as various editorial choices made in the adaptation (censoring bits, changing and Americanizing characters' names, and so on). While they do have a "purist" point, and when in later years I watched some of the original version of Macross with its original Japanese soundtrack it did seem like an improvement over the watered-down, Americanized version. But on the other hand, that's just retrospective nerd-snobbery. Robotech was completely revolutionary when it appeared on American TV in the summer of '85, and the shockwave it sent across the minds of kids like me is in a real sense the spark that first ignited interest in anime in the U.S., that allowed nerds in the 90s to have an opportunity to see those original versions and other shows and declare them superior and scorn Carl Macek for his meddling. Nobody else at the time was going to do what he did, and if he hadn't done it, no one else later on would have been likely to do it either. Remember, we already had Voltron, and although it looked similar (big robots, big-eyed humans) it wasn't at all the same. It was episodic, and didn't have anything even close to the same level of depth of characters or story. It was just another show. Robotech felt like something different.

The bittersweet epilogue to this story is that watching that initial run of Robotech set the bar so high for me that I spent pretty much the entire rest of my childhood and adolescence hoping to come across another show that was as good, and had the same level of visceral impact, and never really did. I guess nothing ever quite compares to first love, in syndicated cartoons as much as life...

[Toys] He-Man and youthful disillusionment

Prior to discovering D&D, probably my main source of fantasy (along with movies like Clash of the Titans and The Last Unicorn) was Mattel's Masters of the Universe toys, which debuted in 1982 (truly the annus mirabilis of my childhood pop-cultural obsessions).

As toys, they weren't that great - all of the figures had the same super-muscular body, just with different heads, paint-jobs, and accessories, and I believe they only moved at the shoulders and hips - I don't think you could even really turn their heads. Nevertheless, something about them really clicked with me. Loking back, I think it was the way that all of the initial characters were all primal, mythological archetypes, more like gods than people: He-Man was Hercules, all strength and heroism, Teela was magic and wisdom, Man-at-Arms was science and reason, Stratos was the air and the sky; on the bad-guy side Skeletor was the personification of death and evil, Beast-Man was primal rage and fury and fear of the woods, and Mer-Man was the dark depths of the sea and fear of drowning. None of this was articulated at the time (I was, after all, 7 years old), but I think it must have been floating around in my subconscious. Plus they all looked really cool - sort of a kid-version of Frank Frazetta, with big muscles and deadly-looking weapons and Castle Grayskull all darkly foreboding and mysterious. This seemed like a strange, dark, violent, and dangerous world.

Anyway, I really loved those toys, probably even more than my Star Wars and G.I. Joe toys. I especially loved the little illustrated storybooks that came with them that provided details about the characters and their world. There were apparently four of them initially, but the only one I remember was King of Castle Grayskull - I must have read that thing 100 times, and a lot of the pictures are still embedded in my memory decades later.

Alas, things went downhill from there pretty quickly. The second and subsequent waves of toys got more gimmicky with lots of moving pieces and increasingly lame concepts, like the guy whose head spun and had three faces - one good, one evil, one (?) - or various figures with spring-loaded fists, or (a particular low-point) a guy who was covered with fuzz and smelled like a pine-scented air freshener. The little booklets also changed - they became mini-comics with a different style of art and (so it seemed to me at the time) cheesier stories. I lamented that it didn't seem as cool and dark anymore, but stuck with it nonetheless.

And, of course, anyone who was a kid in the 80s knows where the story went from there. In the fall of 1983 the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon premiered and it was just lame as hell. He-Man was no longer a Conan-esque barbarian hero, but was the alter-ego of wimpy and effeminate Prince Adam (who was, literally, He-Man in a pair of pink tights) and his pet tiger was also a wuss, and there was some comic-relief "thing" in a floppy hat, scarf, and oversized shirt with a big O on it called Orko that made no sense at all, and all of the bad guys were totally hapless and goofy, and nobody ever got hurt and there was always an explicit moral lesson at the end. Of course all of this was totally standard-issue for 80s cartoons, especially those based on toy franchises, and a lot of people a couple years younger than me seem to have a strong nostalgic connection to this series, but it felt like a huge betrayal to my 9-year-old self. He-Man was cool - it was dark and violent and dangerous, and the show wrecked that and turned it into garbage.

Luckily, right about that same time I discovered a new outlet for my dreams of a dark and violent fantasy world in D&D - and then watched over the next few years as it too grew increasingly sanitized, kiddified, and lame. Which is how I learned as a kid that nothing good lasts forever, so you need to hold onto it and cherish it while it lasts. Live in the moment, and accumulate a store of great memories that you can look back fondly on later. Good advice for a kid dealing with changes to their favorite toy franchises, and (I'd suggest) for life in general.

Flint Dille and Pimm's Cups

Flint Dille is an interesting character in 80s pop-culture. He's part of the family that owns the IP rights to Buck Rodgers, he's been involved in a ton of shows and games and media ventures over the years including, most famously, the Transformers and G.I. Joe cartoons from the 80s, and he was a good friend and writing partner of Gary Gygax when Gary was living in Hollywood (c. 1983-85). They co-wrote a series of "choose your own adventure" books (that I haven't read) and a screenplay (or possibly just a treatment) for a Dungeons & Dragons movie, presumably intended to replace the really dreadful screenplay TSR had commissioned from Oscar-winner James Goldman (excerpts from which can be read here (trigger warning: it's total garbage)).

Last year, Flint posted a bunch of excerpts from his in-progress memoirs to his Facebook page. One in particular (that I'd like to link to directly, but can't find, so I'm going with a cust & paste version that was re-posted here) stands out in my memory:

PIMMS CUPS

Somewhere in 1985, I threw a bunch of G.I. Joes and Transformers into a box and took the winding drive to the D&D Mansion. The idea was to see if it would be possible to make a miniatures game with Joe and the Autobots fighting Cobra and the Decepticons. The sand table was made for inch-tall (25mm) miniatures, so the scale was all wrong. We’d have to play this game outside.

Sometimes life all comes together in a perfect harmony. Disparate elements come together to a larger whole. Try as I might, I can’t pinpoint exactly what month or season it was. Say what you want to about Los Angeles, the weather is constant -- any day is ‘impromptu adventure day.’ There’s a reason the Movie Business moved here from New Jersey. But more to the point, weather won’t help me remember when this happened. 

I do remember the lawn, the tape measures and Gary and I. There were other people around, I just can’t remember who. I have to think that John Beebe, Joey Thompson, Donna and Penny, maybe Ernie and Peggy and possibly some Sunbow types (I can’t remember). That might have been the day Frank showed up. I can see him looking on the game stuff with amused distant fascination. And I can’t quite remember what triggered it, other than that it was the most natural thing in the world and it felt like that day when you were a kid and you decided it was time to build a fort.

There was a gigantic oval stretch of grass and some foliage created by the drive around the DDEC Mansion. I would have liked more terrain, but it was a good enough battleground. I don’t remember how long we discussed exactly how far a Joe gun could shoot or what the destruction power of Megatron in Gun Mode would have, or how long, in game terms, it would take for a Transformer to transform, but it was a matter of minutes. Usually, with this stuff it's best to jump in and figure it out as you go. Planning has a funny habit of making things not happen -- especially things like this which are done for the pure fun of it with no practical outcome in mind. It's important to note that nobody thought this should be a product or if somebody did suggest we make a massive miniatures game together with Hasbro, the talk disappeared like the smoke from our Camels. That wasn't the point. In fact, the point was that there was no point. I’m not going to declare that the best stuff happens for no purpose, but I’m tempted to. I will say that breakthroughs and ‘Perfect Moments’ often happen when there’s no practical purpose for them and nobody is trying to engineer them.

What I do remember was that at some point there were people holding trays of Gin and Tonics or Pimms Cups or some other British Imperial Drink and we were moving figures around fighting each other. We had to use tape measures, because the distances were far too long for yardsticks or rulers and I’m quite sure nobody was all that concerned about millimeters or even feet. The battle had begun.

It was a quintessential ‘80’s moment, but it felt like something out of a Merchant Ivory film of the day. Mansion. Exotic Environment. Civilized people. We were like bored ExPats or British colonials wiling away the remains of a day. I’d give a lot for a picture of it, but maybe the image in my memory is probably better. It hard for my mind not to insert people in period uniforms and fan chairs (I think there actually was one) and silver trays (I think there were) and probably Wellington’s Victory playing on a hybrid boom box cassette player of the day. Don’t think I had a portable DVD player yet. Napoleon and Wellington had nothing to do with Optimus and Megatron, but it somehow fit. The ‘80’s were a time when things fit together that weren’t supposed to.

It's not important exactly what scenario we created or who won or whether we even finished a game (It’s unlikely, there’s something disturbing about actually finishing a game), but that there was this moment when Transformers, G.I Joe, Chainmail and D&D all came together in glorious harmony. There are few things I like more than when things all harmonize, when irreproducible moments occur. They happen in small windows... Small windows of opportunity. This had to be 1985. There were clouds on the horizon for DDEC. TSR was bleeding money and sharks were circling. But that day, there was no trouble. The world was a symphony. 

I won’t say that it was all downhill from there. It wasn’t. But we’d reached the top of some mountain and for just a moment, I could see whole possibilities in the world that I’d still like to see realized.

There's a few different things I like about this story. One is that it's just a fun bit of reminiscence, well-told; a nice little scene. Another is that this is totally the kind of stuff my friends and I used to do as kids - set up large-scale battles in my basement or out in the yard using our G.I. Joe and Transformers toys and then play them out, including improvised dialogue. In those days we just called it "playing with toys", but looking back if we'd been trying to sound impressive we could have credibly called it "free kriegspiel" or "quasi-Braunstein" or whatever. So it's kind of funny to me to read about a bunch of adults doing pretty much exactly the same on the lawn of a Beverly Hills mansion. Third is the way this story intersects with the legend of Gary Gygax's Hollywood tenure, which is all coke-fueled hot tub shenanigans and fiddling away on the company dime while unsecured debt was piling up and people were getting laid off back in snowy Wisconsin. Yes, Gary's lifestyle in those days was pretty extreme, and that generated a lot of resentment among the fans and other employees at TSR that is still festering over 30 years later, but for all that he was still, deep down, a kid-at-heart who loved playing games with his friends, and I like knowing that. And, last but not least, is the "what if" thought about how, in some alternate timeline where Gary and Flint's sister (Lorraine Williams) were able to get along and work together, that maybe TSR and Hasbro might have struck some sort of deal to actually produce a set of G.I. Joe/Transformers wargame rules, and how awesome 11-year-old me would've thought that was.

[TV] [D&D] The Dungeons & Dragons cartoon

The Dungeons & Dragons cartoon (that aired Saturday mornings on CBS from 1983-86) has always drawn a lot of hate from fans of the D&D game. Part of that is understandable - it really wasn't very good, even by 80s Saturday morning cartoon standards - but as much or more of it I think comes from the notion that the show was so "kiddified" compared to the game - the main characters were all modern-day kids transported to "D&D Land," nobody ever died or even got hurt, there was the annoyingly cutesy baby unicorn, etc. - which adult fans (and, probably more pointedly, "adult" teenage fans) resented. I know that's how I felt about it at the ripe age of 10.

Looking back with a few decades of perspective, though, the intent of the show is clearer. The idea wasn't to depict the typical activity of the game - basically group of amoral mercenary adventurers killing things and taking their stuff - which would never have been considered acceptable in the context of a Saturday morning cartoon (and also wouldn't have been very interesting to watch) but rather to introduce kids who were still a bit too young for the actual game (even the kid-oriented "Basic Set" version) to the brand, and some of its key concepts and IP. And it actually does a pretty good job at that - a testament, presumably, to Gary Gygax's oversight as executive producer. The main characters are a group of six, each of whom plays the role of an AD&D character class (cavalier, ranger, barbarian, thief, acrobat, and magic-user), just like in the game. The monsters they encounter are almost all drawn from the AD&D rule books, and they look and behave pretty much just like they do in the books. Kids who watched the show and then picked up a copy of the game a year or two later would hit the ground running, with much more familiarity with the game's setting and genre than kids my age or older, who had to be taught it all from scratch, unless we happened to have seen Ralph Bakshi's 1979 Lord of the Rings movie.

Even the kids' widely-derided magic items were actually pretty close to items that could be found in the game, and presumably helped the kids in the audience understand that in D&D magic items are important and finding them is one of the most reliable keys to success in the game. Some of the items (the invisibility cloak and the shield) could come straight out of the game. Others are close enough to items in the books - Bobby's club is sort of a human-usable Mattock of the Titans and Presto's hat is pretty much a combined Bag of Tricks and Wand of Wonder in hat form). And even the last two items are easy enough to render in game-terms, and probably wouldn't raise any eyebrows if they showed up in a treasure hoard alongside such canonical AD&D items as the wand of force, rod of lordly might, staff-mace, Zagyg's Spear, etc. Provided, of course, that the players who found them weren't familiar with the show!

Energy Bow: This item appears as an unstrung composite short bow. It radiates strong evocation magic if detected. When gripped as if to fire, an arrow-shaped bolt of magical energy appears. This energy arrow can be commanded to perform any of the following functions, one at a time:

• Light (as per spell): effect persists while energy arrow is held "nocked"; uses 1 charge per turn
• Fireworks burst (as per first function of Pyrotechnics spell; range: 18"): energy arrow fired overhead; uses 1 charge per shot
• Energy blast (3-18 electrical damage on successful hit; range: as per Composite Short Bow): energy arrow fired at target; uses 3 charges per shot
• Beam of Entanglement (as per Rope of Entanglement upon successful hit; max. range 6"): beam persists while bow is held and user maintains concentration after shot fired; uses 2 charges per round
• Beam of Climbing (as per Rope of Climbing; max. range 6"): beam persists for 2-8 rounds after shot fired; uses 1 charge per round

When found, the bow will contain 81-100 [100-(1d20-1)] charges. It may be recharged with lightning bolt spells, each of which restores one charge.

XP value: 4,500
GP value: 35,000

Javelin-staff: This item appears as a regular quarterstaff. It radiates moderate alteration magic if detected. Upon command, it can take any of the following three forms:

• Javelin: 4' length, functions as an unlimited-use Javelin of Piercing; returns to its user when thrown
• Staff: 6' length, functions as a +3 quarterstaff; allows extra 1/2 attack per round (i.e. 3/2 if the user normally receives 1/1; 2/1 for 3/2, etc.); can attempt to Trip (successful hit causes opponent to save vs. paralyzation or be knocked prone); can be spun in lieu of all attacks for round which grants the user +3 AC bonus vs melee attacks and +4 AC bonus to deflect missile attacks
• Pole: 10-20' length; grants tightrope-walking and pole-vaulting abilities as an 8th level thief-acrobat (or +3 levels in those abilities if used by a thief-acrobat) as well as various other uses appropriate for a 10-20' long sturdy wooden pole

XP value: 3,000
GP value: 15,000