You Can Watch It All On TV

Michael Silverblatt, host of the NPR radio show Bookworm, was once so moved by Walt Whitman’s poetry, he read it out loud for 5 hours. That’s both amazing and very strange. I myself have never been affected like that by anything I’ve read. Granted, Michael Silverblatt is sort of a drama king, and he also loves reading probably more than anyone else. But still, looking back on everything I’ve read in my life, I can’t say anything has me moved to action. But, watching Saturday morning cartoons definitely did.

Like a lot of little kids, I watched Saturday morning cartoons religiously. I say religiously because it was almost like a weird spiritual experience for me. I would get totally immersed into the story and the action in these cartoons. During the commercial breaks I would have to run around the room in circles because watching this stuff had seriously energized me. I really wanted to leave the room and “play” as my Mom ended up naming it. But I to stop myself. I had to wait and watch all of my shows first.
Fox Saturday mornings had the best shows from around 1992 to 2002. Once ABC lost Sonic The Hedgehog, and CBS lost Bump In The Night and Ninja Turtles, Fox was the place to be.

The classics: Batman The Animated Series, X-Men, Spider-Man, Power Rangers, Big Bad Beetle Borgs, Goosebumps, The Tick, Masked Rider, Sam & Max: Freelance Police, Mystic Knights Of Tir Na-Nog, Digimon, Beast Wars/Beast Machines, Flint The Time Detective, and Big Guy & Rusty The Boy Robot to name a few.  Yes, sir, that’s 10 years of quality Saturday AM cartoons. See, during those years, Fox had so many good shows licensed that they had a solid run from 9 AM to Noon. And, I would watch that entire run. That was all the TV I’d watch for the week. My parents didn’t let me have videogames until ’99, so this was my major stimulation I guess. At 12, Football would come on, and I’d turn off the TV. I’d leave the room with a head full of stories and colors and monsters and space ships and superheroes and adventure, energy, and I’d go “Play”.
“Playing” was me taking all this energy and doing something with it. I would run around and act out stories I created. These were generally amalgam stories, taking bits and pieces of all the cartoons I had just watched, and then books I had read and basing characters off of . I mean, I acted everything out. Every character’s part. I did every sound effect and many different voices. I was both the villain and the hero in the fights. I had many different series, and I would do my own Saturday morning cartoon run of an episode of each. I had tons of plots in my head. Again, these were all sort of ripped off of what I had watched. And still today, I come up with stories that way. I read once that Quetin Tarantino is like this. They call him a “collage” filmmaker. Maybe that’s why I like his films so much. Well, except Death Proof, but I can hate on that in another piece of writing.
The first time I did this “Playing” was when we lived at my grandparents. My dad was away a lot. He worked most of the time, fixing planes for the Air Force. For most of my life, my Dad’s been away a lot of the time, working for the Air Force. Basically, I was just living with my Mom and my two Grandparents. I remember watching Fox one Saturday morning. It must have been 1994. I remember watching X-Men The Animated Series and Spider-Man. See, my Saturday morning obsession was also what brought about my comic book obsession and interest in heroes and villains many years later. I can remember the episodes of both shows clearly. I think there was an episode of Power Rangers on, too, but I can’t recall what happened on it.
On X-Men, our heroes were beamed up to another by Mojo, an intergalactic reality show host (this idea was pretty ahead of it’s time: Survivor, what I consider the start of the current reality show craze first aired in 2000). Mojo is a disgusting creature, he’s a giant fat slug kind of guy who is so obese he needs robot spider legs to move around. Mojo has a device that can somehow create situations and he teleports you into them. He makes Rogue and Beast fight aliens in space, he makes Cyclops and Storm do a Miami Vice style cops action thing, and Jean Grae has to fight a bunch of robots in a city. Aliens watch this reality show to see if the X-Men can make it out of these situations alive. Of course, they want to see the X-men die. But, the X-men don’t, and they escape. They make it back home, and Mojo attacks them there for screwing up his ratings. For some reason, they fight him in The Savage Land, which is an island on earth in the Marvel comics world where dinosaurs still exist (and there’s a whole lot of other weird stuff there, too). Needless to say, they beat Mojo, but we know he’ll be back…

“Mojoverse” Part 1.

Part 2

And Part 3

The episode of Spider-Man was the start of the “Venom Saga”. Venom is a symbiote, an alien species that bounds itself to you, and makes you a monster, basically. The symbiote gets on a space shuttle headed back to earth, and attacks the astronauts on it. This causes the shuttle to really go off course and head for New York City. It crashes into the Brooklyn Bridge, and Spider-Man rushes to the scene. He manages to save the astronauts and get them out of the ship, but the Venom symbiote (which now looks like just harmless black sludge) gets all over Spidey. That night, he has a dream that a big sludge monster eats him, and when he wakes up, the Venom Symbiote has bonded with him. It turns into a black costume for spider-man, and makes him a jerk to everyone, but a lot stronger and able to shape-shift (which is a superpower I’ve always wanted, by the way.)

“The Alien Costume” Part 1

“Alien Costume” Part 2

When the cartoons ended that Saturday morning, I was really amped up. I ran into my Grandparents’ living room and starting acting out my own story. I ran around barefoot on the fuzzy, red carpet floor for hours. Constantly going back and forth past my Grandfather’s statue of Cortez, my Grandmother’s collection of ceramic elephants and navigating around the furniture. I didn’t see any of these things, though. What I saw was my story:

New York City. Four kids, I don’t remember what I called them then, but I’ll name them right now: Aaron, Valerie, Sam and Eddie. Valerie’s dad, we’ll call him Dr. Battler, is a scientist who invents all kinds of cool gadgets.
Anyway, we open and Eddie and Sam. They’re running from bullies. The pretty harmless kind of bullies that were all over TV in the 90s. And we hide in the dumpster. The bullies leave us alone, but Eddie and I find something interesting in there: a weird black rock.
Aaron is hanging out with Valerie, these kids are teenagers, they’re in 8th grade. Aaron and Valerie are probably going out most likely. She’s showing him all her dad’s cool inventions. Eddie and Sam show up over with the black rock and show it to them like: “Hey, check this out! A weird rock!” Dr. Battler walks in. He’s got his white labcoat on and is wearing safety goggles up on top of his head, and he has eyeglasses on. He says:
“Darn it, Liz, I told you not to come down here and mess with my inventions!” You have to say “Darn”. It’s TV for kids, after all. Then Battler sees the rock Evan’s holding. He says, “Woah. Where’d you find that?”
“In the dumpster,” I say. Liz’s dad walks over.
“It’s cool, right?” Says Evan.
“Hmm.” He says. “Can I see that for a moment?” Liz’s Dad picks up the rock. He inspects it. “I think this is from space.”
“Really?” We all say at once.
“Yeah.” He says. “This might be dangerous. I’m glad you brought it here, guys. I want to run some tests on it…”
The kids go upstairs, to the kitchen. They forage around in the cabinets, trying to find snacks. Dr. Battler is down in the basement, in his lab. His lab is in the basement. Her dad has placed the weird rock underneath what resembles a giant heatlamp. He puts on his safety goggles and pushes a big, red button. The heat-lamp device beams a multi-colored lazer down onto the rock. Dr. Battler walks over to a computer has and starts reading a whole bunch of data that’s being displayed on it. After a moment, the computer starts to freak out, and so do the lights in the lab. The rock starts to glow and then to emit a huge, black energy field throughout the entire lab. Suddenly, the rock transforms into a giant black goo monster and it grabs Liz’s dad by the throat. Dr. Battler’s struggling with the goo monster, he’s screaming at the top of his lungs.
The kids upstairs hear this and they run down to the lab. The black goo monster I holding Liz’s Dad up and yelling in some kind of ancient language. The energy in the lab has changed, it’s a maelstrom of purple electricity surrounding the monster, getting brighter and brighter. Then, it gets so bright, it’s just a giant flash.
The next thing the kids know they’re standing in the jungle. The goo monster and Liz’s dad are nowhere to be found. They’re back In prehistoric times. Or maybe a time even farther back than that. In later episodes we’ll find out the goo monster has been to Earth before, and he’s taken them back to then.
For now, though, we’re at the cliff-hanger, and we’re supposed to be like: “Woah!” What’s gonna happen now?”

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