This guest post was written by our very own Todd Kelly (but he remains RTod in our hearts).
I grew up in a neighborhood packed with kids during the years just prior to Star Wars. Invariably, that meant that we would all get together each day and play one of three things: Superheroes (where I got to be Batman, mostly because no one else wanted to be the person with no super powers), Star Trek (we boys rotated each time between Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Chekov and two security crewmen to avoid fights), and Giant Monsters. And for that last one I was always Gamera or I didn’t play.
Oh, Gamera.
It’s hard to put into words just how much I have loved Gamera in my life, because the love affair is an odd one. For one thing, it’s not a constant thing. I can go years without even thinking of Gamera. But then something will trigger my memory, and it’s like running into that hot, popular guy or girl from junior high school you had a crush on 20 years later. Seeing them as an adult you suddenly realize both that they were actually always a little gross, and that you’ll still always kind of have a thing for them.
When I was six I loved Gamera because he was a friend of children, and protected them in between bouts of fighting other monsters and destroying Tokyo. As a ‘tween inL.A., twice a year a local TV station had a Gamera marathon. This was awesome, because it always meant four or five of us sleeping over at someone’s house and watching bits of Gamera in between making crank calls, confessing crushes and making a TPing raid at midnight. In college during the obligatory ‘bad movies’ phase I discovered that Gamera movies were truly,utterly and delightfully bad. And then years later I had the joy of watching MST3K skewer Gamera movies that were instant classics; the Gamera episodes remain the best work Joel and the ‘Bots ever did. (I could watch the Michael Feinstein cabereting the Gamera song every day for the rest of my life and I swear it would never grow old.)
Loving Gamera has other fun benefits. Unlike King Kong or Godzilla (the MLK and Malcolm X of giant monsters), most people have never heard of Gamera (he’s probably more like the Dick Gregory of giant monsters). That means whenever you talk about Gamera you usually have to explain the entire Gamera concept; watching people’s faces when you do this after a few martinis is always fun:
“No, he’s a turtle, right? But his main weapon is that he breathes fire through his tusks. No, no, he is a turtle, but he has tusks. Sorry? I don’t know why he would have tusks, no. And he walks upright. Sometimes. Also, when he pulls his legs in fire shoots out. No, the leg fire isn’t a weapon – the leg fire is strictly for flying. Oh, and when he flies sometimes he spins around really fast. But not all the time. And he kind of does a bouncy turtle dance when he’s happy. And he sometimes eats adults but not always, but he would never eat a child, and actually he has these creepy relationships with various little boys dressed in really short shorts. What? No, I’m not making this up…”
Good times.
What about you? What’s that movie or book that you know you should be ashamed to even like, but somehow feel proud to love?
When I was a kid, like 2nd grade, Detroit’s TV50 had a half hour devoted to Japanese Children’s Television. Specifically: Two Shows.
Ultraman
Johnny Sokko and his Giant Robot
Ultraman was Monday/Wednesday/Friday and Johnny Sokko was Tuesday/Thursday. This distressed me because I enjoyed the fights and the bad guys and the basic storyline of Johnny Sokko oh-so-much more than Ultraman.
After I moved away from Michigan, it wasn’t until I got on the internet until I found another person who remembered either.
And doing some quick wiki work tells me that Ultraman had 39 episodes and Johnny Sokko had 26.
I never saw the TV show Johnny Sokko. But when I was a kid, they did have a movie that played on channel 9 sometime called Voyage Into Space, that was basically a montage of different episodes, starting with the first when Johnny accidentally gets the robot to resound to only him, and the last when Giant Robot sacrifices himself and blows up in space. This last bit always made me cry as a kid.
Also, the kids in my neighborhood all used to do the various arm crossing movements that Giant Robot would inexplicably do as a kind of pre-anything warmup.
When you think about those shows (and Godzilla and Gamera), you’re bound to spend some time on the guys who spent hours in makeup and costume to get ready to engage in mime.
And I’d rather spend time with those special effects than with CGI, I tell you what.
Heck i like Gamera movies myself. I do love me some Godzilla though. I’ve seen every movie, multiple times. And not just years ago, I’ve seen them recently. 50’s B sci fi movies are special to me. I watched so many as a kid and was utterly captivated by them, that i can still milk that sense of wonder to enjoy them.
I’ve been been doing bad movie riffing on the web via IRC for a couple years. Try to explain to people watching gruesome painfully bad movies just to make fun of them. If they know MST then they usually get it but other then that its easier to explain watching hyper-violent Japanese
x- rated anime then bad movie riffing.
… try explaining “I Quit My Job to Riff about Bad Movies”.
In 2008, during a meltdown.
(yes, some people are Insane. Others are merely goadable)
I love to watch bad movies. Gamera, Godzilla, etc.
But I think the one I would be most ashamed of is buying, and watching from time to time… the He-Man cartoon. I grew up on that and loved it as a kid, and there is still something amusing in the sheer awfulness of the cartoon now. I can’t wait to watch these with my son.
In second place would be the Gotcha Men (aka. G-Force or Birds of Prey). I bought all of those too, but it does not hold quite the same campy level of bad fun for me.
I could never get past Skelator’s voice.
Thundarr the Barbarian vs. He-Man.
Discuss.
Thundarr was one of those category of shows (Buck Rogers was another*) that was aimed at kids of an age that could do enough math – and math that would work out – to be scared that Worldwide Apocalypse was inevitable sometime in your twenties.
*and though a creature of an earlier generation, the math in Star Trek, a staple of afternoon UHF reruns, was similar.
Thing that always weirded me out about Thundarr was that his sword could dut anything inanimate, but acted like a bunt weapon agains anything alive. Weirdest thing in that show…
But I did love that one. How about the Herculiods? Loved that show too. Of course, today feeding your animals “power pelets” would most likely get you thrown in jail.
The Herculoids were pretty cool. I liked ’em better than Space Ghost.
Space Giants (aka Ambassador Magma). Rodak vs. Goldar & his electronic space family, Gam and Silvar.
The kid turned into a *rocket*. That was awesome.
ohhhh that was a good one.
Don’t know if I’m mashing up something else, here, but I remember some of the bad guys being some sort of artificial construct (basically people with blue nylon stockings over their heads), wherein they melted if they died.
I was 7, so I’m probably misremembering this. But it was creepy.
It’s not particularly geeky but, as a kid, I was absolutely entranced by the 1980 film version of Popeye with Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall that played pretty regularly on The Movie Channel.
I bought the DVD for cheap recently and watched it for the first time in 20 years or so and while it seemed to aptly fit the description of fiasco, I still have an awful lot of fondness for it.
I say thee nay.
The music was wonderful.
The script was light and fluffy.
It had some interesting morals (“wrong is wrong, even if it helps you”).
What kid does not love turtles? I still collect and build Gamera models and have tortured my own daughter endlessly with Gamera marathons. If you truly want to add a guilty pleasure go buy the 90’s reboot of Gamera and watch the special features on the “Advent of Legion” DVD that was put out by ADV. There is an alternate version of the movie called “Lake Texarkana Gamera” that is dubbed in West Texas accents. I still cant watch it without my stomach hurting from laughing.