FlamingText

Warm Memories, Cold Storage

  When I was a little kid my parents were very concerned about what effect exposure to the sex, violence, materialism and all-around bad values presented on television would have on my impressionable young mind, so they severely curtailed and monitored my TV intake. Mostly, I was allowed to watch Sesame Street. As I got older, the list expanded to include the Wonderful World of Disney and a few other things, almost always with some kind of adult supervision. Content and duration of programs were carefully tracked, mostly by my mom. Time limits were strictly observed.

  As I got older the standards relaxed somewhat but there would still be shows that I was not allowed to watch. I think it was all pretty well-intentioned, although in hindsight some of their choices of what programs were verboten seem pretty hilarious. The Love Boat comes to mind. I think I understand what it was about this show that bothered my parents, but upon watching it in reruns years later I had to laugh at the realization that they were trying to prevent their child from being transformed into a seventies-era swinger. Considering how I ultimately turned out, I think I can be forgiven for wishing my parents had let me watch a little bit more Love Boat.

  But years before the Love Boat Lothario-Prevention Plan was implemented there were the dark, dark years of the Violent Cartoon Prohibition, which resulted in the unfortunate Speed Racer rationing incidents that plagued my early after-school viewing. One of the principal effects of this prohibition was to send me to my friends' houses to "play" during the crucial viewing hours between 4PM and 6PM (school's out and dinner time, respectively.) The fact that "playing" was an activity we all enjoyed while sitting motionless on couches and chairs inside, or that my friends had cable TV (at the time this was not nearly so common as it is now) were details that I generally declined to share with my parents. I'm not sure what age I was when I realized that withholding incriminating information was the best method for circumventing authority, but it ended up being one of my more crucial revelations.

  During these illicit TV-watching sessions I was able to get my fix of the kind of action-oriented wish-fulfillment fare that I found so sorely lacking in the Disney and Little House on the Prairie crap my family always watched. A lot of the shows I remember were serialized, like Speed Racer and Batman, which made it necessary to be over at my friend's house to "play" every day at 4PM for a week or two, depending on the storyline. I think as a result I saw a lot of story fragments, plotlines wherein the hero gets imprisoned in some diabolical trap from which he must escape in the next episode; except I frequently would never see the next episode. This might help to explain why so many of my memories of shows from that period are so intensely disturbing. These were probably the first shows I had seen where Bad Things happened to the characters on a regular basis. Not Little House on the Prairie bad things either, like somebody gets sick or there's a really hard winter or something. These bad things were more like, say, getting cut in half by a giant buzz saw or frozen alive into a giant sno-cone. You know, Bad Things.

  Now obviously the formula of any cliff-hanger type serial is that episodes end with the worst possible thing in the world happening to our protagonists, or so close to happening as to render the outcome a fait accompli. The tension created by that event is relieved at the top of the next episode with the protagonists escaping from the not-so-inevitable-as-we-initially-thought outcome, only to somehow work their way into an even worse situation by the end of the program. At the end of the series of episodes, good triumphs over evil and everything turns out okay. In theory, the young viewer internalizes a little lesson about the importance of persevering against adversity, facing one's fears and standing up for what's right. But the most important lesson imparted by each and every one of these programs: Don't miss our next exciting episode!

  I say this from personal experience: ignore this last one at your own peril. While other kids were internalizing the intended lesson that it's always darkest before the dawn, I guess I was internalizing the message that it's always dark. And then it gets even darker. These shows with their convoluted plots where terrible things occurred with frightening regularity and stubbornly refused to resolve themselves by episode's end held me utterly transfixed. They may have given me nightmares, but in spite of that or perhaps because of it I kept watching. In that strange way that memories of childhood dreams fuse with actual childhood memories I have at times been uncertain if the image stuck in my head from those years originated in a dream, a TV show, or an actual memory that's somehow been distorted by time and distance.

  One such source of troublesome memories is a show of which I have only the vaguest of recollections. It was a poorly-dubbed Japanese live-action import called Johnny Sokko and his Giant Robot. It featured the titular Johnny Sokko as the protagonist, who, through his radio transmitter watch, issued instructions to a 100-foot tall steel robot (who for some reason had the head of a sphinx.) Giant Robot, for his part, was pretty much devoid of personality, never speaking and acting only when explicitly instructed on what to do by his diminutive human master. Upon being issued a command, the Giant Robot would do a weird salute that looked to me like he was karate chopping his own chest, as if to signify "I hear and obey, master." It usually went like this:

Johnny Sokko: "Giant Robot! Use your finger missiles! FIRE! " (Johnny did a lot of shouting. He seemed very excitable.)

Giant Robot: CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! Whoooooosh—Ka-Boooom!

Johnny Sokko: "Giant Robot! Use your eye-lasers!"

Giant Robot: CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! VVVVZzzzzzzappffvvzzzz!!

Johnny Sokko: "Giant Robot! Fly me to Tokyo!"

Giant Robot: CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! (Giant Robot picks up Johnny Sokko in his hands and they fly to Tokyo at supersonic speeds.)

And so on. It's pretty easy to see why this show would appeal to a six-year-old kid. That first command alone ("Giant Robot! Use your finger missiles! FIRE! ") opened my six-year-old mind up to heretofore unimagined possibilities.

  Johnny Sokko, for his part, did not use the Giant Robot to take revenge on bullies or to impress girls, as I no doubt would have done in his position. On the contrary, Johnny was completely altruistic in his robot-usage, which was lucky for the Planet Earth because in every episode the evil Gargoyle gang would unleash another fearsome giant monster on the world (well, Japan) as part of their relentless quest to conquer our planet and make it ready for colonization by the Gargoyle emperor. The planet Gargoyle had mastered interstellar travel, but their civilization had apparently never developed atomic weapons or other WMDs, choosing instead to focus exclusively on giant-monster development. Which produced mixed results, frankly. The only monsters I really remember were a giant Triceratops that shot freeze rays out of its horns, and a sinister plant that started out as a coconut-sized seed pod and rapidly grew to be big enough to destroy most of Tokyo. I have a very clear memory of the Giant Robot, helplessly pinned in the enormous vine-tentacle of the deadly plant monster as the episode came to an end. I never saw the next episode, but I can only assume that it began with the Giant Robot being crushed into scrap metal and then went on to tell the story of how the Earth was summarily conquered and all its inhabitants pressed into perpetual slavery by their cruel alien overlords. But of course, I can’t be 100% certain that’s how the story resolved itself. It just seemed like that's where it was going.

  Johnny worked with an Earth agency called Unicorn, which as far as I know wasn’t an acronym for anything. Unicorn was tasked with protecting Earth from hostile aliens, sort of a Department of Homeland Security with a special emphasis on giant monster attacks. The only effective response that the best minds at Unicorn had ever come up with to counter the constant string of monster attacks was to send Johnny Sokko and the Giant Robot to defeat them, although really it was the Giant Robot that did all the heavy lifting. But since Johnny was the only person that Giant Robot would listen to, they were a package deal.

  I once read an interview with Stan Lee where he outlined the key differences between the Marvel superheroes he created in the sixties and their DC predecessors. One of the standards of the superhero form up to that point was the Teenage Sidekick: Batman had his Robin, Green Arrow his Speedy, The Flash had Kid Flash, etc etc. The idea was that young readers would identify with the sidekick and imagine themselves in his place, envisioning themselves accompanying the heroes on their adventures and joining in the battle against evil. Which seems like a pretty good theory until you realize that the main function of these characters, plot-wise, was to raise the stakes of conflicts by constantly getting captured and held hostage. So not only did Robin undercut Batman’s coolness by appearing beside him in an impractical costume that could best be described as “festive,” but he was always endangering Batman by getting captured and strapped to giant buzz-saws. Which made Batman seem irresponsible for involving a minor in his vigilante crusade knowing full well the dangers involved. But then again, the exact nature of Batman's relationship to his teen-aged "ward" was always a bit hazy to begin with.

  Stan Lee decided to do away with the sidekick convention and instead create characters that his readers identified with in a more direct fashion. He reasoned that young readers didn’t want to hang out with Spider Man while he fought crime, they wanted to be Spider Man. This is also why he loaded his characters down with so many problems, realizing that teenage readers would more readily identify with an awkward science nerd who struggled to pay his rent and usually didn’t get the girl than they would with a godlike alien from the planet Krypton who lived by himself in a fortress at the North Pole carved out of solid ice. This proved to be a highly successful gambit for Lee, and the tales of his angst-ridden, conflicted heroes with their “real-life” problems succeeded in drawing in older readers who had outgrown their Sidekick Years.

  It’s plain from the description of Johnny Sokko that Johnny was more of a Teenage Sidekick than an actual hero. He was basically helpless on his own, and he was forever getting captured or losing the watch that controlled the Giant Robot. But I remember that the show had the intended effect on me as a kid, which was to involve me in the fantasy of what it would be like to have my own giant robot to boss around. As time passed and I left my own Sidekick Years, Johnny Sokko was forgotten and I moved on to other equally unrealistic but perhaps more nuanced wish-fulfillment scenarios. When I thought back fondly to the years of the Giant Robot it was mainly to scratch my head and wonder “What the hell was that show? Did I really see it, or just imagine it?"

  Now when I think back to it, I realize that I no longer harbor any desire to be a Johnny Sokko. The Giant Robot was where it was at. Not only could he shoot lasers out of his eyes and missiles out of his fingers, but when there were no monsters around to fight, he lived in a missile silo, slumbering in power saver mode, waiting to be activated to fly into atomic-powered jet-propelled action. There are few fantasies more appealing to me these days than that of being able to lie dormant in the downtime between planet-saving sessions. Hitchcock once called movies life with all the boring parts taken out, and that perfectly describes the life of the Giant Robot. Because it's those hours and days between adventures that really do you in. If I could just rest peacefully while I waited for some hyperactive kid with a radio wristwatch to wake me up to go fight a giant space-plant, that would be fine with me.

  I guess that’s what Superman was doing in his downtime. Sitting alone in the Fortress of Solitude, staring a hole in the wall while he waited for Jimmy Olsen to activate the emergency signal watch. Dreaming of endless giant monsters to fight, earth-bound asteroids to deflect, and world-ending catastrophes to be narrowly averted. Dozing off dreaming of his last dim, happy memory of his mother and father as they swaddled him in a blanket and tucked him into the escape rocket.

Posted by flamingbanjo at December 16, 2005 07:27 PM