Post-Weekend Review

I am sure you have all been dying with anticipation to hear what I thought of the Green Lantern movie. It was … fine? Actually it was pretty good by me, but your mileage may vary. The good news is that my predictions were largely correct, in terms of my personal fandom and general attitude towards the whole escapade were more than enough to overcome the critical objections I had become inescapably aware of. The bad news is that I really needed that fandom and attitude to counter the objectionable stuff, because yeah, the critics weren’t just being cranky, it was to one extent or another all right there.

Spoiler Alert, of course!


The more I think about it, the best analogy I can come up with for the GL flick is the movie Highlander, which is a sci-fi film from the early 80’s which is much-beloved by many a geek (myself included) despite the fact that it suffers from a host of problems, from slightly off-kilter acting to plot holes you could drive a truck through. But it also has Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery and a crazy-fun villain and a bunch of bitchin’ swordfights and a soundtrack by Queen. So, too, with Green Lantern: the acting hovers around passable and the story convolutions are pretty easy to nit-pick, but there’s a hilarious-creepy bad guy and the power ring stuff is rad. Maybe all GL was missing was Freddie Mercury, alas.

(Incidentally, before I get any further I want to back up to a point I made on Friday about the movie not doing itself any favors by having four villains. It actually, really, only has two, and it’s a minion/boss relationship, which makes a lot more sense for a tight narrative. Hector Hammond is the more grounded bad guy, and is the aforementioned hilarious-creepy one, while Parallax gets to be the abstract-cosmic-threat-to-life-as-we-know-it which gives the climax a bit more epic grandeur. Krona isn’t mentioned by name but, in the Green Lantern movie version of things, he actually becomes Parallax, so … yeah don’t even worry about parsing that, just trust me. And Sinestro is in the movie and is awesome, but whereas the trailers led me to believe he would go from ally to enemy within the movie – a transformation which comes right out of the comics – they are apparently saving his fall from grace for the sequel. On which more below.)

So yeah, Green lantern has some pretty serious flaws. It has gaps of internal logic which a decent steeping in comicbook lore could help bridge over, but would probably leave a novice scratching their heads. On the other hand it has some other inconsistencies which might not even occur to the average moviegoer but might stick in the craw of a longtime fan of the comics. So something for everyone!

It’s got to be just about the wonkiest superhero movie I have ever seen. Green Lantern, in the comics, is like a fifty-car pile-up of crazy sci-fi ideas which accreted over the course of five decades, with later writers trying to sort out and make sense of (or make less embarrassingly cheesy) the tenets put forth by early writers who were just cranking out sci-fi gibberish for kiddies and thought that a shark-man with an “invisible yellow aura” was plausible enough to at least serve as a good antagonist for one month’s issue. In translating the world that evolved out of all those comics to the screen, the script overseers took great pains to explain all of the systems-within-systems that allow Green Lantern’s universe to operate. They probably over-explained.

They may have also over-themed. There’s a lot of “fathers and sons” at play in the GL movie, which of course is a subject near and dear to my heart. There’s also “willpower and fear” which of course is the primary metaphor in the comics, too (not for nothing did I make that my blog post title on Friday) and a bit of “power and responsibility” not to mention “legacies and mentors” – all good stuff, all totally appropriate to the character, but maybe a lot of ballast for one movie.

In a lot of ways it all comes down to the climax. In order to save Earth from Parallax – a gigantic space-wraith who eats souls, or something like that (it’s a bit more complicated in the comics and the movie explanation is a bit lacking) - Hal Jordan lures the entity into space, specifically near enough to the sun that the sun’s gravity is all but completely inescapable. Jordan stays just outside the inescapable point but pushed Parallax past it by projecting a giant hand from his power ring and knocking Parallax backwards with a good right cross. When the credits were rolling, and my buddies and I were waiting for the post-credits easter eggs, I informed my friends that the movie really delivered everything I could have possibly wanted in a Green Lantern movie because “Hal Jordan PUNCHED the bad guy INTO THE SUN with a GIANT GREEN FIST.” And as those words were coming out of my mouth, I thought to myself, “That sounds incredibly stupid!” And also awesome. But Green Lantern is known for punching things with giant green fists, and if we’re going to do blockbuster dumb fun sci-fi stuff let’s just go ahead and turn it up past 11. So the movie gave me a Green Lantern I very much recognized and had him punching alien fear-monsters INTO THE SUN. I was a satisfied customer.

The movie was unnecessarily complicated and bizarre in many ways, but I realized that Green Lantern comics could be described in much the same way. I’m fine with the latter, and thus I’m fine with the former. But I’m sure it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and Green Lantern isn’t going to be the next Iron Man or The Dark Knight. I just hope it does middlingly well enough to get that sequel made, because man, they REALLY worked hard to lay the groundwork. The sequel at least would have way fewer exposition info-dumps because it would simply build off all the info-dumps in the first movie. And as I mentioned above, it would be about Sinestro’s fall from grace and that would have some heft to it because of Sinestro’s strong performance in the initial chapter. Ah well, time will tell.

My buddies, none of whom are fans of GL to the same extent as I am, all enjoyed the movie to various extents, or at least acknowledged the charms alongside the flaws. (Incidentally they all would probably say they like Highlander, too.) And after we spent a few minutes discussing the flick and comics in general, we agreed that we would meet up again in a month or so to see the Captain America movie. So no 3D superhero movie fatigue for us! I’m lucky to have a circle of friends who not only are into the same kinds of geeky things as I am, but also know how to let themselves just enjoy things and derive simple pleasures from them rather than tearing everything down for not being good enough. I tend to think that’s a win-win.

Willpower and Fear

Here at last is opening day for the Green Lantern movie! And I am trying not to be prematurely despondent, but I cannot help but notice that pretty much across the board, the reviews are Not Very Good.

What’s dragging down the critical reception, it seems to me, are elements which fall into three broad categories. At the very least, I can come up with mental counter-arguments for each of them, so that’s something.

The first one is simple superhero movie fatigue. Thor came out in May and was surprisingly well-liked. X-Men: First Class just opened a couple weeks ago and did all right, too. Now it’s Green Lantern’s turn, but it is inherently harder to be third in line and still impress. (Not to mention this all might be exacerbated by the entire past decade of Spider-Mans and Iron Mans and Fantastic Fours and Batmans and Hellboys and Transformers et cetera.) I’m not unsympathetic toward professional movie reviewers who trudged into Green Lantern thinking “gah, another comic book flick” but for me, Green Lantern isn’t just another comic, it’s my all-time favorite. So I don’t anticipate a similar familiarity-bred contempt in myself.

The second critical objection is what I’ll call SF BS OD, or sci-fi backstory overdose. (You may have thought I was going somewhere else with that “BS” part, which was not entirely unintentional.) Apparently the movie crams in a ton of exposition and universe-building and I get how that can be very off-putting if not downright confusing. But, again, going in as a GL fan means I already know the convoluted evolution of the Green Lantern Corps – which, not for nothing, was something that was definitely not laid out wholesale in the first issue of the comics. Originally GL got a ring from an alien and started doing superhero stuff. Slowly, literally over years of publication, they elaborated the situation of where the ring came from and introduced Hal Jordan to other Green Lanterns from other galaxies, as well as his enigmatic bosses the Guardians who lived at the center of the universe. And just like any other comic book superhero, Hal acquired villains at a rate of about one per issue. From what I’ve pieced together via the trailers, there are FOUR canonical GL villains in the movie (Krona, Sinestro, Hector Hammond and Parallax) as well as the entire Corps and the Guardians and so on. You could generously call the scope of the movie “ambitious” or you could put it down as “a big, loud, botched mess.” It’s possible I’ll be disappointed by the fact that none of these cool elements from the GL comics get the attention or depth I’d like to see because they’re all competing for screentime, but I definitely won’t be so lost and confused that I throw my hands up in disgust.

Thirdly, there’s Ryan Reynolds, whose cocky smarm can apparently ruin a movie for some people. But I like the guy, so once more, I think I’m safe there.

(Incidentally there was a fourth criticism I ran across where someone scoffed at the Hal Jordan in the movie as a total rip-off of Tom Cruise’s character Maverick from Top Gun, which thus diminished the film to a remake of a 25-year-old not-so-classic, plus about a billion CGI aliens. It’s true both Hal and Mav are pilots, and both are cocky lotharios who nevertheless fall in love with female boss/superior, and lots of other similarities but … man, that’s who Hal Jordan was in the comics from the get-go in the 60’s! The question is not “Did the GL film clone Top Gun?” but rather “How did I never notice before that Top Gun totally jacked the main character from Green Lantern?” Weird.)

Whether the movie is bound for box office glory or doomed to crash and burn, I’m going to see it tomorrow night with some of my buddies. So as I said, I’m trying to keep the dread and despair to a minimum and just take what the flick offers. My consolation thought is that if the movie bombs, then even on the new budget necessitated by two kids in daycare I should be able to acquire a whole pile of licensed GL swag when it goes on super-unpopular clearance.

Puyi

Right, so where was I? Ah yes, the big wedding which was the reason and purpose of our excursion beyond the far banks of the mighty Mis’sip.

The wedding was utterly lovely, fittingly so for a brother-in-law and sister-in-law I could not be happier for. Granted, I really didn’t get to stay for much of the ceremony and we bailed pretty early on the reception, too, all owing to the demands of wrangling a two-month-old and a thirty-three-month-old, but between the parts I did experience and the general vibe I picked up on all weekend, everything was optimal.

And, honestly, the little guy and the little girl were optimal, too, by which I mean they did everything my wife and I could have asked or expected of them over the course of the entire weekend. In the case of our infant daughter, that simply meant not shrieking for the entire flight and/or the entire airport-to-hotel interstate drive in either direction, and also not vomiting (or worse) on the bride or anyone else nicely dressed, and generally rolling with the crazy schedule in constant motion that we kept to. But the little girl isn’t the type who ever shrieks for more than five or ten minutes before calming down, and she’s not particularly barfy either, and she’s proven so far to be generally temperamentally mellow. So we hoped she would just be herself, and she was, and all was well.

(The one possible exception to this praise of the ideal infant would be that, on the flight from Minneapolis back to DC, the little girl managed to fill and overflow a diaper about an hour before we were due to touch down. Princess Pooty-Pants is at that nursing stage now where she will go days without any bowel action and then void everything massively and messily at once. So of course she did that at 30,000 feet. Probably something to do with cabin pressure. My wife, who was holding the baby in her lap for the whole flight, of course had to deal with the unpleasantness in situ, which I tried to make up for by being the one who rushed the little girl to an airport bathroom once we landed and proceeded to strip her, clean her lower half as much as baby wipes could manage, and put a new diaper and backup outfit on her. Still, all in all, small price to pay for otherwise angelic near-perfection.)

The little guy had slightly more functional responsibility since he was the ringbearer for the wedding ceremony, and he absolutely nailed it. Insofar as “it” entailed allowing us to dress him up in a tiny tuxedo and corral him in the back of the church as the ceremony got started, then send him with the pillow and (stand-in) rings down the aisle to deliver the rings to the … groom? Best man? I was the one standing in the back of the church to start him on his way, and it was hard to see from there. Wearing the tux didn’t bother him, and he was willing enough to hang out with me until go-time, and once I scooted him on his way he walked straight down the aisle, pillow held perfectly level with his chest in both hands, not too fast and not too slow, with much appreciative aww-ing from the guests in the pews. (And from me. I don’t usually cry at weddings but watching my boy do his thing brought me pretty close.) The only flaw in our plans for preparing the little guy, which involved my wife showing him YouTube videos of ringbearers so he got the gist as well as making sure he got a dry run during the wedding rehearsal the night before, was that all of our focus was on bearing the rings down the aisle. Not so much with what he should do after that. We assumed post-fulfillment of duties he would make a beeline for either his mother or his pop-pop, but instead he opted to march right back up the aisle, creating a two-way traffic situation with the processional of bridesmaids. He wanted to get back to me, as it turned out. Whoops.

Once the ceremony really got going, the little guy and I slipped down a side aisle to sit with my wife and the baby, who was promptly handed over to me so that my wife could perform the first reading. At which point the little girl got slightly fussy, so I stood up to remove her from the middle of things, figuring the little guy would just stay in his seat playing with the cars that were waiting there for him. Ah, but no: with mommy at the lectern and daddy in the back with baby sis, the little guy decided to stretch his legs a bit. He walked through the middle of the wedding party, up towards the lectern, and proceeded to climb around the balustrades surrounding the musicians a bit. A bit disruptive, but thankfully mostly in the cute way that ends up being one of those little touches of chaos that makes the wedding memorable. When my wife had finished her reading she escorted the little guy to me (by then I had decamped to the church basement where the little girl could fuss to her heart’s content) and then returned for the rest of the ceremony; the groom being her brother and all, she certainly belonged in a proper seat at the ceremony. Fortunately it was not an interminably long ceremony and we were all reunited soon enough.


The fact that basically everyone was happy to indulge the little guy in his dais-traipsing wanderlust is representative of his entire extended weekend with his extended family, which my wife and I had seen enough of by about the mid-point to start referring to him as the Little Last Emperor. There was the fancy outfit, and the small-but-momentarily-center-of-attention role in the ceremony, but there was also much cooing and fawning from all corners, flower girls and bridesmaids to great-aunts and old friends of the family. (Uncles too, for that matter; even dudes are not immune to the little guy’s charms.) Additionally there was the constant showering of gifts. My wife and I bought him a few new toys and DVDs to keep him occupied on the plane, in the car, at the hotel, etc. but there were also “congratulations on being a new big brother” toys from relatives who hadn’t seen us since the baby’s arrival, not to mention new-to-him pool toys at the hotel pool (where he got to swim at least three or four different times) and other playthings at other various locales around the scheduled events. Plus basically subsisting on nothing but his very favorite foods (chicken nuggets and quesadillas) for five straight days. He was living the life!

It’s not that my wife and I were particularly troubled by any of this. We think the kid is pretty nifty and certainly would never object to other people treating him accordingly. We had already concluded that it made perfect sense to bribe the little guy into good behavior, or keep him so distracted with shiny new whatsits that it never occurred to him to misbehave, or however you want to characterize it, so if other people wanted to pile on the loot, no harm there. If anything it was all simply a matter of degree, and perhaps a growing sense that maybe these fundamentally sound ideas were escalating out of hand. But mostly it was safe and fun to joke around about the little guy becoming a pampered, spoiled little despot because we didn’t actually think it would happen. (It didn’t, if three days back home and back to close to normal are any indication.) Also we didn’t have the time or energy to do anything else about it but laugh.

So, in the end, a premise fraught with potential peril turned out to be 99% smooth sailing. Nonetheless my wife and I have sworn to each other that we are never, ever travelling again.

(For some value of “never, ever” which probably correlates to about a year, year and a half.)

Springtime In Eternia (2)

We now interrupt the recounting of ceremonial family gatherings and travelling travails to get back to matters of fundamental importance: hyper-scrutinizing the Masters of the Universe toys.

PART TWO: THE CONTRARIAN

I’m not sure if I could have worded my polling e-mail better, or if this is just indicative of human nature, or what, but I was a bit surprised by the way that all of the respondents focused entirely on the “starter set of He-Man figures” part of the question, generally to the exclusion of the “for my son, whom you all know, and who will be all of 3 years old in September” portion of the hypothetical. Then again maybe it’s just me, since I’m the one most likely to answer almost any question with “It depends …” followed by an exhaustive elaboration of circumstantial interpretations. This isn’t the first time I’ve solicited input to clarify my thinking, only to find that my thinking is a bit out of step with everyone else’s from the get-go.

One of the primary shapers of everyone’s List of 7, as I kind of alluded to last Wednesday, seemed to be a sense of balance. He-Man and Skeletor are arch-enemies, and they each have a right-hand man (Man-at-Arms and Beast Man) and both factions have token females (Teela and Evil-Lyn) so you can set up a pleasingly symmetrical configuration of six figures right there. The seventh slot reveals a bit more about whether you think good guys or bad guys are more fun to play with, or cooler; there’s also an element of creating “heroic odds” by having three good guys face off against four bad guys which I think influenced more than one list. But overall, three-on-four notwithstanding, there’s a role-by-role point and counterpoint thing going on.

And that certainly makes a lot of sense to me as both a geek and a gamer, which (not at all coincidentally) a lot of the buddies I posed the question to also happen to be. Among that group we’ve invested countless hours on computer strategy games and tabletop miniature games and paper-and-dice roleplaying games (and even fantasy sports leagues) to have finely honed senses of game balance that practically allow us to reverse-engineer new systems whenever we encounter them. We have an ingrained aversion to lopsided victories. We disdain conflicts where the outcome is a foregone conclusion. In all those aforementioned games there is just as much narrative involved as elements of skill and chance and thus we expect certain plausible victory conditions for either side, making the endgame that much more exciting to move towards.

Fair enough, but we’re all grown-ups who got into those aforementioned games as adolescents. Here’s the thing about the little guy: he has absolutely no concept of balance. On more than one occasion I have had to stop myself from buying him more magnetized train cars (not engines) for his Thomas the Tank Engine set. I feel like he needs them because he has three Thomases, two Percys, and a James, which makes for six locomotives total, but only four cars for those locomotives to pull: Annie and Clarabelle the passenger coaches, a generic luggage car, and a caboose. That kind of imbalance makes me grind my teeth, I admit with zero pride. But not only does it not faze the little guy in the slightest, he will make long trains that consist of Thomas pulling Percy pulling another Thomas pulling James pulling the caboose and think that’s about as marvelous as modes of transportation get. Fundamentally, that’s the difference in the playtime mindset depending on whether we’re talking about the mind in question existing in a state before or after a logical worldview takes over.

And then again, I think there’s a third approach, too, staking out some middle ground. It’s also fairly resonant with an age between two and thirty-seven, say eight years old or so, which is of course the target audience for He-Man to begin with. Somewhere after the sheer joy of things (like trains) in and of themselves and the compulsion for orderly verisimilitude (like Dungeons and Dragons) there’s the kind of play that tells an exaggerated story. If I went back and asked my buddies how long they thought He-Man could hold out defending Castle Grayskull by himself against Skeletor’s minions, I’m sure I would get some interesting, deeply considered answers. But if I asked an eight year old the answer might likely be “Forever! He’s HE-MAN!”

So I admit, when I posed the question I was hoping someone would note that I said in the premise that the little guy already had Castle Grayskull and needed figures to go with it, and that said someone would suggest a rousing game of He-Man versus All Comers and fill out the remaining six slots with Skeletor, Beast Man, Trap Jaw, Tri-Klops, Spikor (he’s covered in spikes!), and Tung Lashor (snake/man with extensible plastic tongue!) or whatever other baddies would make for maximum chaos. At the very least, the thought crossed my mind.

On the flipside of the same token, though, I also thought it was at least possible that one or more people might suggest the seven best good guys and leave it at that, arguing perhaps that Skeletor, Beast Man et al would be a little too scary-looking to put in the hands of a toddler, or furthermore that toddler playtime should be all about sharing and caring and friendship and teamwork and not so much with the face-punching. But no one took that approach (not that I wanted anyone to, as opposed to my general desire for some outside-the-box thinking on the composition of He-Man adventures) and I suppose that really is a case of the toyline’s inherent function. Thomas the Tank Engine is great for teamwork and life lessons. Masters of the Universe is designed for evil monsters and almost-as-monstrous heroes bashing each other with swords and axes. Right tools for the right job and all that.


Still, I wasn’t given any ringing endorsements of the more obscure, later-generation characters like elephant-headed Snout Spout, which is a shame given my love of things which evoke mighty Ganesha. Or it would be a shame, if I were going to allow the poll results to comprehensively dictate my inevitable acquisition of secondhand MOTU figures for my kids, which let’s face it, there’s no way. My household will end up with a weird menagerie of Eternians, in fact maybe even weirder than a random sampling of both the originals and later additions to the line. I mentioned above a proclivity amongst my friends for reverse-engineering certain games, and that could come into play here, too. But that’s another post in and of itself, and I do have a couple more Wednesdays (at least) to fill here, so I’ll pick up with that point next time.

Little Red Impala

As the days leading up to our big family trip to Iowa for my brother-in-law’s wedding dwindle to mere hours, I confessed to my wife that I found the whole prospect more stressful than I had been previously letting on. We had set aside the entirety of last Thursday as a travel day but it still seemed like there were a lot of moving parts and pieces that had to line up: getting up on Thursday morning and finishing packing while orchestrating the usual fulfillment of toddler and newborn needs, getting everyone and everything in the car by a certain time and driving to the airport, parking in the long-term lot and catching a shuttle to the terminal, checking in densely-packed luggage and two separate unwieldy car seats, getting to the gate, surviving the flight, hopefully being reunited with our luggage and car seats in Minneapolis, and also hopefully making good on a rental car reservation there. And I acknowledged, peremptorily, that there was nothing to it but to do it, and beseeched my wife not to worry too much or take it personally if I seemed distracted or otherwise less than my usual, carefree self. But I also promised that once the car seats were installed in the rental car and we were on the road for the final leg of the journey, my anxiety level would go way, way down. From that point on (especially compared to the effort required in getting to that point) it would be a piece of cake.

To my pleasant surprise, all of those interlocking steps clicked together like clockwork (facilitated in no small part by the fact that we deliberately padded our schedule for the day to arrive at the airport with ludicrous amounts of time to spare) and nothing untoward had happened by the time I was being walked around the section of the parking garage where the full-sized rentals were kept and told I could have my pick. I opted for the red Impala because I thought it would amuse the little guy to ride in a car that was the same color as his hero Lightning McQueen. (I thought correctly.) Armed with the directions I had cribbed off teh interwebs earlier plus a free map from the rental car company, we set off to drive about 200 miles and change starting at about 5:30 in the evening.


Maybe about an hour into the drive we pulled off the highway to a ramp-adjacent McDonald’s for dinner. Both the little guy and I had Chicken McNuggets, his go-to (coming in a Kung Fu Panda 2 Happy Meal featuring Master Viper, no less) and something I felt compelled to order for myself because now they have buffalo-style dipping sauce (which turns out to be Not Bad For McDonald’s). My wife still had yet to surrender to the extended weekend’s motif of anti-healthful eating, so she ordered a grilled chicken sandwich, and she nursed the little girl while the little guy and I played on the McD’s jungle gym for a bit. Then we got ourselves back in the car and headed south yet again, noting in an idle kind of way that there seemed to be some darker clouds in the sky up ahead.

The dark clouds turned into the most torrential downpour I have ever seen in my life, let along been behind the wheel of a car in the midst of. So as it happened what I had supposed would be the easiest part of the trip turned out to be the hardest, as the sun was going down and the skies were letting loose a Biblical deluge and I was driving an unfamiliar car at highway speeds and yet still getting passed by 18-wheelers that threw even more water up in their wakes. As calmly as we possibly could (and under the circumstance I think we were superhumanly calm) my wife and I debated the pros and cons of pulling off the road at the first exit marked with a Lodging sign and springing for one night in a cheap motel, or pressing on to the location of our reserved suite (complete with two cribs). The strength of the arguments seemed to gain or lose merit depending on whether the rain was briefly letting up or pounding down with a vengeance, but ultimately I was the one driving, I wanted to keep moving and get where we were intended to be, and even an interruption of the music on whatever Jack-FM clone we were distracting ourselves with by the Emergency Broadcast System to describe severe thunderstorms in the area was not enough to dissuade me.

It’s not that I particularly enjoy or otherwise bizarrely get off on white-knuckle driving, but I don’t hate it enough to avoid it on principle, either. I am probably a little too stubborn for my own good sometimes. Also, the EBS bulletin on the one hand said that the thunderstorm watch was only in effect for another twenty minutes, and was referencing by name counties which meant nothing to me since I am not a native Iowan. But the point is we made it all the way to our hotel in the proper number of respective pieces. And I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Impala is a great car or anything, but in all of the sheeting rain I never felt unsafe or unstable. It was frustratingly difficult to see very far, and I knew in some intellectual part of my brain that any number of things can go wrong when driving fast in wretched weather, but that car just hugged the highway and barreled on through almost as if it just inherently believed everything was going to turn out all right. Which kind of makes it my kind of car, if nothing else.

There were other misadventures and moments of note along the course of the wedding weekend (as there always are) and I’ll get back to more and more of them in future posts, but for my first one back I wanted to start at the somewhat inauspicious beginning.

Springtime In Eternia (1)

And so, as promised, let us now begin my obsessive geek analysis of the Masters of the Universe toy line, both as an artifact of my childhood and a potential plaything for my children. Before we begin I just want to say that I nearly entitled this series “Masters of the June-iverse” given the way it’s taking over this month’s Wednesdays, but ultimately I decided that moniker was a bit problematic. Anyway.

PART ONE: THE PRIMACY EFFECT

Click to embiggen

Indulge me (as I assume you will or you wouldn’t be here) as I recall my own introduction to He-Man and his action figure friends. I want to stress it here one (hopefully) final time and then leave it to speak for itself, but Masters of the Universe started out as a collection of toys and later gave rise to a syndicated animated tv show. That’s how it went down historically, that’s how I personally experienced it, and that’s the way it’s always been in my mind: toys first, cartoon second.

So it was Christmas 1982 and I was 8 and Little Bro was 5 and He-Man was a pretty hot seller introduced earlier that year. The point in the future when Little Bro and I would really diverge wildly in terms of our tastes and interests was still reasonably far off, and really that made for kind of a golden age of childhood Christmases, in retrospect. It was fairly easy for our parents to keep things nice and equalized in terms of gift-giving: three Masters of the Universe toys for me, three Masters of the Universe toys for my brother, can’t really argue with that. That in turn was mutually beneficial for me and my brother because we could pool our respective collections (not that we were even thinking in terms of personal collections per se at that point) and have access to this deep bench of characters populating the imaginary world we wanted to play out adventures within.

My recollection of specific details in the single-digit-age years of my life is notoriously spotty, but I’m pretty sure this is how it went down: my brother and I each got a He-Man figure, which is not to say we got respective variants (because again this was MOTU’s Year One and there were no variants) but rather we each got our own copy of the exact same toy. (Told you my parents were really committed to equanimity.) I also got Stratos, He-Man’s winged ally, and my brother got Man-at-Arms, He-Man’s weapons-expert ally. I remember my brother getting Skeletor and me getting Mer-Man, but I also remember Beast Man being in the mix somewhere, but specifically that he belonged to my brother, which leaves me wondering who my corresponding fourth figure would have been.

I suppose it’s fairly beside the point, anyway, because my brother and I were quickly expanding our collective collection. Some new figures came into play when we were sent to my grandmother’s for part of the summer, which traditionally involved her buying us new toys to keep us from getting bored. I want to say I got a Man-E-Faces (the spinning-faced hero/monster/robot) and my brother got Faker (He-Man’s evil-clone). Then at the end of the summer we were in the process of relocating (which in itself was part of the longer process of our parents reconciling after a trial separation, so feel free to ascribe any stereotypical assuage-guilt-and-distract-kids-via-toy-bribery motives you can conjure because you’re probably dead on) and my brother got Trap Jaw and I got Ram Man. Also somewhere along the way someone got Zodac and someone got the Attack Trak vehicle and someone got the Wing Raider vehicle and someone (possibly both of us) got Castle Grayskull and so pretty much within a year or so we got almost every MOTU toy in the entire line, with a couple of notable exceptions: Battle Cat, Tri-Klops, Teela and Evil-Lyn (and I’m pretty sure my cousin, who is right between me and Little Bro in age, had all of those plus a lot of overlap with our collection).

And then for some reason we just kind of dropped He-Man not too long after that. Maybe it was the aforementioned move, which involved starting at a new school and making new friends who, as it turned out, were really into G.I. Joe and thought He-Man was a little babyish. Maybe it wasn’t even anything that conscious, and more just a factor of the production schedules of MOTU toys: we already had all the figures they had made, more or less, and I’ve always been easily distracted by the thrill of the acquisitive hunt involved in collecting, so my attention was bound to move somewhere else.

But Mattel didn’t stop making MOTU toys, so the point at which I stopped being into He-Man draws this line between a subset of the toys which I was perhaps over-familiar with and another subset of which I have almost no firsthand knowledge. I’ve become conceptually acquainted with them because that’s kind of my thing but I don’t know much about them as physical playthings.

So this was more or less the impetus behind me polling various friends about the ideal composition of a MOTU starter set for the little guy to compliment the Castle Grayskull on loan from his uncle. My brother and I back in 1982 started out with six or seven (or so, spotty recollections be damned) figures but at that moment of MOTU genesis there were only nine or so total that existed. By the end of the toy line’s run there were at least 50 or 60, so given that order-of-magnitude deeper bench, which seven would rise to the top as go-to must-haves?

Basically the same ones my brother and I started with in 1982.

I was shocked by just how uniformly all the poll results came back to me. And this wasn’t something where I cc’ed a bunch of people on the same question and the fastest person on the draw answered and everyone else started chiming in “me too, me too”. Everyone got asked separately and answered with no knowledge of other people’s suggestions, but they were all virtually identical. Everyone put He-Man number one, which I admit is a no-brainer but I was honestly curious if anyone would say “in hindsight, he is boringly generic and you might as well go with someone more fun like Mekanek or Rio Blast.” Everyone included Man-at-Arms, with a surprising number asserting he was He-Man’s sidekick (I’m not sure that’s true but I’ll come back to that). After that most people suggested Teela or Man-E-Faces. Apparently Stratos is pretty obscure and only seems quintessential to me because, as mentioned, I got him that very first Christmas. The deepest into latter-day MOTU anyone got was my wife, who kicked in a vote for Moss Man, which ironically is one of the few non-original MOTU toys that did make its way into my orbit during the brief period when I was no longer into MOTU but Little Bro still was.

For the bad guys, again everyone name-checked Skeletor, which is even less surprising because he is of course the counterpoint to he-Man but unlike the blond musclehead, Skeletor is one of the raddest character designs in any mythology, period. Beast Man got what seemed to me to be a surprising number of votes, but I think he fulfilled a certain logic of “He-Man and his sidekick versus Skeletor and his sidekick”. By the same token, Evil-Lyn got a lot of votes presumably (or in some cases explicitly) to face off against Teela.

The wildcard I very deliberately built into the question was the seventh slot, so of course it got the most varied response. Mainly it was split between Tri-Klops and Trap Jaw, though Mer-Man and Hordak (another late entrant into the series) got a vote apiece. One of my buddies gave the seventh slot to Battle Cat even though I specifically forbade animals and vehicles from consideration; his passionate insistence that Battle Cat was indispensible managed to soften my rules-lawyering heart, at that. There was also a lone shout-out to Orko the magician but perhaps the less said about that the better.

So what I had been hoping to learn was where the real gems and/or the real duds were in the sets of figures that post-dated my personal experience with the line. I’m reasonably confident in my own abilities to speculate and extrapolate, and after all these are just thirty-year-old action figures we’re talking about here, but I still thought it would be valuable to hear things like or “Clawful the crab man had a spring-loaded claw that could lock him onto things in defiance of gravity” or “Two Bad, the bad guy with two heads, tended to fall apart easily because of his non-standard double-wide torso mold” or “Do not buy Stinkor, that thing really does smell like rotten eggs” or whatever. But instead what I learned is that, at least among the circle of friends I posed the inquiry to, it turns out I was the biggest MOTU fan back in the day. Pretty much everyone knew the first wave of characters best (or exclusively) and based all their recommendations on that. If I had worded the question to request 9 or 11 figures for a starter set, I have a feeling I would have gotten back a lot of lists of 7 that ended with “I can’t think of any more, sorry!” Basically everyone could speak to the minimal level of familiarity you’d expect people to show re: a highly successful toy supported by a widely-watched cartoon from the 80’s, but nobody showed otaku levels of expertise.

I’d probably be more disappointed if I suspected that everyone was just parroting existing consensus or whatever, but I had pre-empted that by asking everyone to explain their votes and everyone obliged me so I know that everyone was on the level. Everyone I polled really does seem to believe that the best-of-the-best Masters of the Universe were the ones initially released, and the entire line declined Sturgeon’s Law-like from there. According to my admittedly non-scientific sample, the optimized MOTU starter set is one which seeks to emulate Christmas 1982 pretty closely.

So, question asked, question answered, but of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as offshooting thoughts resulting from the whole enterprise. Next Wednesday I’ll wade a little further out into the obscurities and reflect a little more on what “playtime” means when you’re two versus ten versus thirty-seven.

A 1951 Classic

Today the Yankees and Red Sox are just about neck and neck in the AL East, with New York holding a one game lead in the standings (tied in wins, two up in losses) just as Boston is about to come into the Bronx for yet another rivalry-laden series. There are, mathematically, only four possible outcomes: the Yankees wind up with a four game lead; the Yankees wind up with a two game lead; the Yankees wind up two games back; or a virtual tie. Half of those options fill me with a certain nauseous dread and, frankly, only one of them would qualify as really satisfying, and of course it’s the least likely scenario. (You would think, at a very basic you-win-some-you-lose-some statistical level that all four scenarios are equally likely but try telling that to my gut.)

In any case, it’s somewhat appropriate (and hopefully a good omen) that today also happens to be my dad’s 60th birthday. In the past few years I’ve realized that one of the few defusing things I can say when people find out I’m a Yankees fan and roll their eyes and mock-retch and so forth is that I do come by it honestly because that’s how I was raised, by a die-hard fan who grew up in New York and whose own father was also a fan. It’s rare that I watch or even think about the Yankees without also thinking about my dad.

I have to confess to a small amount of guilt-driven feelings surrounding the fact that I haven’t done much to commemorate my father reaching such a milestone. I will of course deflect a lot of the blame toward my newborn daughter (who is exactly eight weeks old today!) and the extenuating circumstances of late-term pregnancy, birth, paternity leave, household adjustment and upheaval, and so on which dominated the months leading up to today’s momentous occasion. Ten years ago my life was in an almost unrecognizably different place but sadly the end results were the same, by which I mean the summer of 2001 was when my mistake-marriage really hit its death throes and I had yet to begin repairing a lot of the damage and estrangement it had precipitated between my father and me – said repair was, fortunately, not that far off by then but not in time for dad’s big 5-0. Ten years before that I was in high school when my dad threw himself a big 40th birthday bash which he graciously allowed my Little Bro and I to invite our own friends to, which of course meant I left the actual feting of my father in the hands of his friends and mutual relatives while I immersed myself in typical teenage drama-nanigans. The decade prior, summer of 1981, I was not quite seven and Little Bro was almost four, and I’ll be ding-danged if I can remember any fanfare surrounding my dad turning 30 at all.

So I’m not exactly the best son in terms of divisible-by-ten birthday recognitions! Maybe I should make reservations now for June 2021 at the steakhouse inside Yankees Stadium to make sure the old man has a heartfelt happy birthday from me when he turns 70.