Microman - Prog rock icon.

So, when I was a kid, like a thousand years ago, Star Wars was, as they say, The Shit. Yes, of course I had those. Hugely upstaged by the Star Wars toys were a weird line of toys imported from Japan, called (in the U.S.) "Micronauts". They could not have been more different from the Star Wars toys. Star Wars was gritty and, uuh, "realistic".  Since nobody does crazy like Japan does it, Micronauts were surreal and very disco.

Image found at...
http://tokyotoybastard.blogspot.com/2016/06/for-love-of-microman.html

Everybody had chrome heads and bodies made of translucent colored plastic, but some had diecast metal parts. The design was all over the map. Also, while Star Wars figures only had four joints (shoulders and knees), Micronauts were articulated like G.I. Joe, with a central elastic band holding all their limbs on. Knees, elbows, wrists, ankles, and head all moved, and lots of the articulation points were ball joints. They were downright floppy. You could also take them apart and combine them in different ways.

The bad guys were always comparatively huge, and looked like they were built from other robots.

So, Micronauts were the trippy alternative to Star Wars. A few weeks ago, I trolled FaceTube to see if I imagined them, or if they actually existed. Turns out I wasn't crazy! Here's a commercial from the American market that launched the line.



But in their native Japan, Micronauts were called "Microman". And guess what? Their commercials were way, way better...



In the above clip, shortly after the guy shouts "STRONG BREAK!!! ROBOTO-MAN!!!!", the music starts. My eyes got all big. What the hell is this? It sounds like a Mini-Moog and a drummer who uses cocaine as non-dairy creamer. Fuck yeah. This is prog rock and no mistake. It's also the perfect weirdo music for a freaky line of space toys like Microman. At the end of each commercial in this clip, it ends with the logo and and a gravely-voice guy singing "Mee-koh-ru-MANNN!" Bad. Ass.

So what's the logo at the end of the commercial? I can't read Japanese, but it probably says Microman.

Image found at...
http://www.microforever.com/25threscuem25x.htm

Well, we do know that the Japanese use a special alphabet to allow them to phonetically spell out anything that otherwise won't work in their natively pictographic written language. Here's the Katakana chart they use to pronounce stuff like, for example, English phrases like "Microman", or "mee-kokh-ru-man".

Each syllable in Katakana consists of a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound (ko, ru, me, etc.) To pronounce a consonant without a vowel after it is generally not how their language works. There is, however, a syllable for the lone letter "N", fortunately. Realizing this, it explains why, when a Japanese person tries to pronounce "ice cream", it comes out as "ai-su-ku-re-mu". Any time an English word ends with a naked consonant, force of habit makes a Japanese speaker tack on a vowel. Listening to the different takes of the "Mi-koh-ru-man" singer, you can hear him trying to sing "man" pronouncing it a little different sometimes.

So, let's verify the that the Microman logo actually says "Microman", using the available Katakana syllables. The page I got the logo from (http://www.microforever.com/25threscuem25x.htm) names the graphic as "microman rescuelogo".

So, "Microman Rescue Team". It looks like, for the last word at the bottom "team", they switched back to standard Japanese Hiragana. Google translate was able to shed a little light on how that may work, but maybe there's someone out there who actually understands Japanese that can straighten it all out in the comments?

Anyway... the music. Early 70's prog rock. Love it. The first thing I thought of when I heard the music in that commercial was Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Compare the Microman music to Eruption, side 1, track 1 from ELP's 1971 album, Tarkus. I'm not calling it a ripoff, but rather, they're cool and fun in the same way. You can't go wrong with some analog synth.



And look at the Tarkus album cover. That's practically an action figure right there. Part armadillo, part tank. When I was a kid, I would have played with a toy like that for sure.

A friend of mine said the Microman music sounds like Gentle Giant, another prog band form the early 70s. Their song, Alucard, sounds kind of Micromaney...



As one commenter on the FaceTube Microman video says...

You're damn right he does.

So, after all this, maybe you've decided you're enough of a weirdo to want a Microman shirt? I sure am. So, we've made two. You can pick the shirt type and color, as always. And, don't forget to adjust the size and placement of the graphic if you want.

This one is the much-analyzed Microman rescue Team shirt. Nobody will know what the hell your shirt is. Cool.

https://shop.spreadshirt.com/PhilAreGo/microman+(micronaut)+rescue+team?q=I1015262946

This one is just a neat picture from the package of Death Mark, presumably an evil Microman enemy (or an Acroyear, in Microman parlance) whose part robot, part airplane, all weird. We vectorized him in Adobe Illustrator from these box images (see below), and yeah, that took frikkin' forever. Sheesh.


https://shop.spreadshirt.com/PhilAreGo/microman+death+marck?q=I1015308511

Image found at...
http://www.microforever.com/deathmarck.htm

The New Toys for Christmas, 1964.

The December, 1964 issue of LIFE Magazine ran a hard-hitting expose' that blew the roof off the keenest new toys for Christmas. Reaction was immediate and strong, reverberating around the world for minutes to come. Let us look back on that article that changed everything for a few people, or didn't.

I wasn't even alive yet in 1964, but I'm the youngest of my family. So, we had some toys of this vintage knocking around the house. As you may know from previous posts, I inherited some first-gen Legos. We had some 1960s-era metal trucks, too. Therefore, I'm allowed to be vaguely nostalgic for ancient toys like these.

Blogger won't allow image uploads larger than 1600px in either dimension. So, this two-page spread is auto-rezzed to a point where you can't read the writing. We posted crops of each image at max resolution so you can see as much as possible. We're nice like that.

Hack-and-slash battles are a now-forbidden delight of childhood. Wearing your underwear on the outside of your pants, on the outside of your house NEVER was. This must be a very organized intramural mock battle of "pants versus skins".

The robot was called "Big Loo", because it would scare the piss out of your children.

Barbie and bridesmaid Midge. Pre-nup sold separately.

Would'ja Ouija?

Here's a ridiculous ad from Parker Bros. in which they encourage young kids to use a Ouija board to get "turned on". In this picture, a pair of disembodied heads and hands are finding their total soul mates.

What makes Ouija boards do their thing is a phenomena called the "ideomotor effect". Basically, you're making it move, but you think you're not. here's a fun test for that: use a Ouija board blindfolded. Have a third party (someone who's not touching the board at all) observe where the planchette moves. See if anything coherent is spelled out. Don't let any of the "users" see you place the board in front of them so they don't know if it's upside down, face down, face up, or whatever. This should prevent them from cheating by memory. Then see if it spells out the name of your future husband. Any time anybody has ever tested dowsing, facilitated communication, or automatic writing, if the test is arranged so that the subject can't see what they're doing, nothing happens. Shocking.

This is also what's going on with "water dowsing". You know... those guys who hold a Y-shaped stick and claim to find water underground? Here's a decent article about dowsing, if you're interested.

Play with your Ouija board all you want. You're not communicating with demons or spirits, and no one's going to get possessed... unless you're afraid of being possessed by your unconscious actions! WooooOOOOoooo!!!

Click for big.

Hot Wheels Sizzlers - I can't drive 655.

Heyyyyy, Sizzlers! I had these things back around 1980 or so. Aw, man.

As a kid, I always preferred matchbox cars to Hot Wheels. Matchbox had springy axles, so when you stepped on one, they would still roll straight. Hot Wheels had thicker, non-springy axles, so when they bent, they tended to stay bent.

You, sir, are an idiot.

A stepped-on car would forever roll crooked, with squatty wheels. Who knew that retards would voluntarily do this with their real cars someday and it would be called "stance"?

So, when Hot Wheels developed Sizzlers, it was enough to win me back to the brand. They looked like standard Hot Wheels, except for a little plug on the side of the car where you could charge up the tiny battery with the Juice Machine. The Juice Machine looked like a gas pump, about six inches high. It had a couple of D cells in it, and you used this to charge up the car, and it would run for maybe ten seconds. Mattel claimed the speeds were in excess of 700 scale miles per hour or something. They were silly fast, and it was intoxicating.

Unlike slot cars, the track had walls that kept the cars from flying off and knocking you unconscious. This means the cars could "mix it up" as they say, which added a delicious element of added chaos. Observe this commercial or two. The Silver Circuit set in the second FaceTube ad shows us the cost-cutter version of the Juice Machine that dispensed with any pretense at resembling a gas pump. Boooo, Mattel!

Jeez, I wish they still made Sizz....a whaaa? Well well well. They still do. And apparently, they did a tie-in with Disney's Cars franchise. Smart.

I'd have half a mind to spend ten bucks to get the Sizzlers I found on Amazon, but then I'd be in company with this guy, a grown man who likes to play with Sizzlers and doesn't use any big words. I think I need to save up for a new roof or something. Rose, your bloom is off of you.

Click for big.

Blow-A-Tune - Low hanging fruit.

The Research and Snark department dropped this picture on my desk months ago, and I've stared at it a number of times, but never posted it. Sometimes the jokes are so obvious, it feels cruel and lazy... like I'm being a bully. But, I'm a busy man, and I need to purge this demon so I can get it out of my inbox and sleep at night. Blow-A-Tune, you're going in! May FSM have mercy on the dank, empty chasm that serves as my soul.

Joke #1 - The kids. The bills. The dead beat ex-husband. Some days,  the only thing that got Judy out of bed was her Playskool Crackadoodle.

Joke #2 - The Blow-A-Tune simultaneously teaches children the joys of valuable life skills like turning things and blowing through things, as well as the equally fulfilling activities of deciding to stop turning things and not blowing through anything. Available this fall.

Joke #3 - The Fisher-Price Drinky-Toot plays any one of five different songs while simultaneously measuring your child's blood alcohol level with a 1% margin of error. Available this fall.

Joke #4 - The Blow-A-Tune comes with ten song disks, with more available at your local music store. Wagner's Rings of the Nibelung will be sold as a special 120 disk set, with each disk measuring nine feet in diameter. Financing available.

Joke #5 is a bit racy, and comes from Sue. Shew! Can we open a window, please?
When you find a child's true talent, it's a parent's obligation to nurture and support. At least she won't be on the pole! 

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.    -Mgmt.]

Tiny Tears - Cherish the tears.

Like the "Disappointment" plate of last week, this ad for "Tiny Tears" addresses the human mother instinct that delights in the misery of children. She cries like a real baby. One would think that, when you sat down to design an idealized child, the first thing to go on the cutting room floor is the wailing and leaking of various fluids. Guess not. I'm a shitty mother.
Remember when Marge Simpson was feeling aimless and bored? I think it was when Homer got a job at GloboChem, and all Marge's chores were taken care of by the robotic wonderhouse they lived in. I could be wrong though and I can't be bothered to look it up. (By making all information easy to find, the web has made any act of willful ignorance a demonstration of supreme laziness.) Anyway, Marge felt like nobody needed her any more. So, she eventually wandered into Maggie's room, where the baby was sleeping peacefully. Marge poked her once, twice, and thrice mightily until Maggie woke up crying. Marge immediately picked her up and comforted her: "Oooh, you poor little thing! Mommy's here!".

A girl's innate desire for a simulacrum of an inconsolable weeping baby is frikkin creepy. Here's another cartoon reference. This ad reminds me of the South Park episode in which Eric Cartman, having finally broken the spirit of Scott Tenorman and making him cry, drinks his tears, calling them "delicious". Maybe they could have shown the little girl consoling the doll, instead of apparently delighting in the simulated tantrum? It looks evil.

The ad claims the doll cries REAL TEARS. Huh? Are the tears just water, or saline solution? Did the American Character Doll corporation somehow harvest actual tears from crying children? How did they store and distribute the refill tears to the customers after the initial tear supply that came with the doll ran out? I think human tears may qualify as bio-hazardous material, and as such, would be subject to strict regulation regarding their sale and distribution across state lines. The world must have been different in 1950.

The doll's face is a little odd. First, the eyebrows look like they're carefully plucked, or maybe drawn in with an eyebrow pencil. I think infancy is a little early to begin imposing these kinds of gender roles on a child. I'd cry too if I had my eyebrows pulled out as a baby.

Second, the mouth is almost too small. She looks like King Henry VIII, who died of about a hundred different things, including kind of being a jerk. The irony is that I doubt old Hank ever shed a tear in his life. However, resembling him is definitely something to cry about.

Also, I need some kind of joke about the irony of King Henry looking like a baby, when a male heir is the one thing he had so much trouble making. Maybe a joke about him buying the Tiny tears doll and having it beheaded. Gotta get the staff to come up with a joke or something about that.

Lego Week Pt 5 - Primordial Legos

These are pictures I scanned from a booklet that came with a set of Legos my older brother must have gotten in 1967. The first Lego set came out in 1961, and as early as '67, Lego had focused on making Lego train sets. Man, when I was a kid, I wanted that thing so hard I could taste it.

But, it was not to be, mostly because my folks earned an honest living, instead of being tied in to the Danish mafia. You know... the Forbrydelsen Gruppe. I can't imagine how else a family could afford to support such a lavish Lego habit. Legos cost roughly $97 per pound. I don't know how to guess what the street value of this kid's train set is, but it's more than his dad's life is worth.

There were very few specialized parts back then, and the rectilinear limitations of Lego construction lent themselves very well to the type of architecture that predominated in the 1960s. It just so happens that this is the kind of architecture that I really like - all clean lines and orderly rows. Actually, maybe it's not such a coincidence, since I'd been staring at this booklet since I'd been able to see. Notice the little cars with metal wheels. I never had those, but I still want them today.

There are the blue plates that pass for water in Lego land. A boat with wheels? That's so lame, I think boats aren't even worth building. Check out the kid that looks like George Liquor's son...

This castle is bloody fantastic. I wanted this too (duh). You'd think there weren't any curves pieces that long ago, but actually there was a pack of curved bricks you could buy in 1961 that made a rocket. Mind = blown. Kabloosh!

I'm not sure why all the tires were gray. It does, however, occur to me that in really old cartoons, car's tires were gray also, and usually had a patch sewn onto them. I'll just go ahead and associate the two until somebody confronts me with evidence to the contrary. We did have some of those flat trees, although they're not in my remaining Lego stash.

I'm sure that anybody who grew up with a specialized Lego part for any occasion will make fun of these ancient Legos and the super abstract models that one wound up with, but I like the cubism. This is probably for the same reason that 8-bit video game graphics still charm.

Come to think of it, all my gray tires and flat trees are not to be found. Could I have sold those older parts at some garage sale twenty years ago? Whay did I do that? Kids are so frikkin stupid. Ebay here I come.

Lego Week Pt 4 - Lego Town

Pictures like this make me sick. I doubt there ere many parents who could afford to shower their children with Legos in this fashion, but there must be some. Maybe employees of Lego, Inc. get them free? Maybe Legos are amazingly cheap in Denmark, the way oil is cheap in Saudi Arabia?

Anyway, I'd have given a limb (possibly my own) to have a Lego spread that occupied the whole kitchen table, as this Lego town apparently does. You could play with it for days and when you got tired of it, have every building rammed flat by a giant parrot-piloted Lego truck.

Lego town-themed sets were rarely eye-openers on their own. I'd look at them in the store and say "Yep. That's a fire station." and move on to the spaceships. However, Lego town sets were a pretty decent way to score wheels in fair numbers. A Lego fire station may have a fire engine or three, and maybe a dalmation. All the other parts were likely to be boring architectural things like "bricks" and "doors". Whee.

Lego town would have only worked for me in large masses. You'd need enough buildings to make a town square to really have some fun, in my childhood opinion. Cars could race down the streets and inevitably, a pedestrian would lose a few heads to an inattentive driver, then hide in a garage while the Lego authorities hassle suspicious looking citizens trying to locate the perp. Then some kind of car chase would happen or whatever or maybe spaceships.

Point is, the Lego authorities would have to be nearly totally incompetent for any real fun to be had. The Lego coast guard? Oh yeah, they'd have to be unfailing idiots. How well-trained could they be, having boats that sink in water? And there's no Lego water anyway... just blue plates, not that I had any. The coast guard would need to show up at the end of every Lego town adventure, to drive their boats through the front of city hall, slaughtering countless municipal employees and wasting untold Lego taxpayer dollars. Ah, childhood.

Lego Week Pt 2 - 404 Universal Building Set

The 404 set was just about the most exciting lego set I ever got. It was huge, it had lots of special parts, and it had a frikkin MOTOR! And since it was released in 1976, the 404 set made the black and yellow color scheme cool before Stryper made it gay.

The 404 set came with tank tracks, which almost made me weep with excitement.The first thing I did  was to build a tank using the motor and tracks. This was the set that introduced into my collection the "+" axle and wheels. You can see them on the bulldozer above. To my mind, this was the first hint of the now-super-complicated "technic" line of lego sets.

This set came with the first generation of minifigs, but hilariously, they were a torso, a legs piece, head and hat. No arms. No articulation.

Yerf and Horffdahl seem pretty happy with their hovercraft and crane. I don't think all the things in that picture could be built all at the same time. That hovercraft consumes a lot of pieces.

The instructions that came with this set definitely show their common origins with Ikea. No words and simple line drawings. I'm not sure what those colored dots represent, but it kind of looks like they would be numbers if not for the "Whatever you do, don't include words!" rule of Lego Inc.

A few months after I got the 404 set, I had a leap of understanding. I realized that if you put bigger wheels on the motor, it would go faster. So, when I picked up the 851 tractor tecnic kit, I took the giant wheels from the tractor (about 4" diameter), and put them on the motor, along with some absurdly tiny front wheels. It was a dragster that required a brisk walk to keep up with (The motor's remote was a wired unit.) When I shut it off to stop it, I sometimes put it into reverse by mistake, and the weight of the car combined with the diameter of the wheels would loudly grind the gears inside. This horrified me, so I chose to be more careful in the future with my precious motor.

I can't be sure, but I think the No.2 idea book came with the 404 kit. Maybe my folks gave it to me on the same christmas? I dunno, but those kids on the front are named Brint and Vivny. Brint grew up to be Adam Rich's stunt double on Eight is Enough. Vivny now curates the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art's new Linjer och Torg wing, where she performs her "Nude Danze in Cubizm" every Wednesday evening.