I remember how I felt the first time I played Megaman X on Super Nintendo — it was both a mix of awe of the graphic upgrade from the NES Megaman series and pure auditory bliss from the continued greatness of the Megaman/Rockman musical legacy.
Then I got to the boss at the end of the first level: a purple guy named Vile that the game prevents you from beating. Only a pop-in appearance from a hero named Zero allows you to progress through the game.
Left: Vile; Right: Boba Fett
At first, I was more concerned with trying to make a dent in Vile’s health bar. When I realized that doing this was impossible, I noticed that, somehow, I was fighting a purple Boba Fett.
There’s no doubt about it, I was fighting the purple Boba Fett, not some random robot guy named Vile.
Of course, Boba Fett doesn’t exist in the Megaman universe, but apparently his Mandalorian helmet style does.
It isn’t even limited to just Vile, either. I swear I saw some guys walking around in The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind that have the Fett helmet style, as well. It sure is a popular helmet style.
Its been a rough year for Conan O’Brien. Except for that huge severance paycheck. Unemployment and the massive amount of free time that comes along with it leads to a number of things: one of them being a re-evaluation of oneself that results in an analysis of career goals. Usually joining the Empire isn’t part of those results.
This 1997 figure came as a pack-in in with Hasbro’s AT-AT (the 4-legged walkers from “The Empire Strikes Back”) toy vehicle. While it is supposed to be General Veers from the movie, it looks more like the ginger-headed talk show veteran than the Imperial officer that it is intended.
Erin and I were at Toys ‘R’ Us and went to a Star Wars display at the front of the store when something on a shelf of clearance items caught my eye. It was perhaps the most unintentionally eerie plush holiday decoration that we had ever seen.
Maybe he was supposed to look this way. Maybe Charlie Brown had finally snapped. Maybe this was some kind of cry for help.
We squeezed his foot and made the music begin and the result was just as spooky. True to Charlie Brown fashion, a jazzy piano version of “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” played. Sure, that’s appropriate for a holiday-themed decoration/toy. The clincher here was that the batteries were near death and the music sounded flat, slow, and downright bizarre.
It was clear that this toy was intentionally trying to scare everyone away from buying it. Maybe it liked sitting on the clearance rack next to some Rudolph action figures. We didn’t care that he wanted to never be purchased. Evil Charlie Brown was something so weird that we had to drop $8 and take him home with us.
The only way to make this guy not look like he’s planning to take over the world was to grab his face and give him a little face lift with my hand.
The effects were only temporary…
This Pee-Wee Herman doll, which belongs to Erin’s dad, still looks pretty good for being 20-some years old. Too bad his pull-string voice module has degenerated into utter disrepair. When pulled, the voice mechanism creates some gibberish that, while it can still be translated to “Hello! I’m Pee-Wee Herman!” sounds more like goblins or gremlins or some other sneaky little evil beast. While it lacks the deep baritone of a truly threatening monster voice, its warped voice modulation is enough to make it bother you if it popped up and pounced at you in the middle of the night.
“Hello! I’m Pee-Wee Herman!” sounds more like goblins or gremlins or some other sneaky little evil beast. While it lacks the deep baritone of a truely threatening monster voice, its warped voice modulation is enough to make it bother you if it popped up and lept at you in the middle of the night
The doll looks fine from a distance and the likeness isn’t really that bad for something made so long ago. When you get up close, its a different story…
This face will haunt your nightmares, do the crotch-pointing dance, then converse with your couch about today’s secret word.
More than a decade before Think Geek started selling plushie germs, microbes, and bacterium, there were these rubbery germ toys. These little guys were released in 1988 by Apogee Inc. and were sold individually inside of test tubes. Each germ character represented a specific ailment, from yawns to stomachache. I also think they had bellybutton lint, stinky feet, sneeze, and bad breath.
I’ve searched but have been unable to find specific information that explains which germ represents which ailment, nor can I find anything about an Apogee Inc. that made toys in the 80s. If I locate a list that identifies the germs, I’ll update this article.
All 12 known germ characters are depicted on this page. Enjoy!
The Phantom Menace was released to generally-disappointed audiences; except for me. As I look back on the film’s 15th anniversary, I’m reminded of the onslaught of merchandising. In this case, it was candy.
From the above image of the Jar Jar lollipop, it is difficult to determine where the lollipop is. After all, it appears to just be a sculpted head on a stick. Pressing the back of the device reveals the shocking truth:
No. Please, no.
That’s right, kids — the lollopop is Jar Jar’s tongue, allowing you to re-enact the part of the film where someone shoved Jar Jar’s tongue down their mouth and sucked on it. Who could forget that scene? That’s the reason why people generally hate Episode 1, right?
Last week we showed you the bizarre Jar Jar Binks’ tongue lollipop. Just in case that wasn’t weird enough for you, here’s the second entry into our look back at ten years of Episode 1.
I purchased this figure back in 1999 because it was the first figure of Jabba the Hutt that actually looked like him: not because he had that great realistic vomiting action that you really need in a great action figure. After all, they are called “action” figures, and there really aren’t a lot of different actions that you can play with Jabba the Hutt. Let’s take a quick look at the things that Jabba does in his film appearances:
-He yells at people.
-He laughs at people.
-He eats space frogs.
-He smokes something.
-He watches a green tentacle-headed girl dance provocatively.
-He tries to get it on with the green dancer, but she rejects him so he lets his big pet Rancor monster eat her.
-He makes Princess Leia dress up in a metal bikini.
-He gets strangled to death.
-He falls asleep during the podrace.
This leaves a lot of room for creative liberties, so this figure came with a canister of green slime and little frogs to put in the slime. To make Jabba vomit this substance, you would put the slime in his head then insert the canister below it, as shown in the image below.
Pressing the head with the canister inserted into it back into the body would force the glob up through Jabba’s mouth, making him effectively vomit it all over himself.
Yum? Does Jabba enjoy vomiting or the taste of his own vomit? If i was lying around with green slime and space frogs all over myself, I doubt I — or anyone else in my proximity — would be saying “yum!” Heck, this is in all caps, too, so its not just “yum, that was good,” its “YUM!! Oh man, that was the best vomit I’ve ever vomited! I can’t believe how green it was! And the frogs! Those frogs were so froggy!” There’s just so much excitement there.
I would show you the slime in action, but the slime has somewhat joined together into a solid blob over the past ten years. Here is that blob:
I appologize if you just replicated the action of the “Jabba Glob” figure after seeing the above blob of semi-fermented goop. You had better appreciate this photo, too, because the odor it emitted upon removal from its canister made me choke.
Here’s the figure in proper figure-collecting mint-on-card condition. First of all, did they really think that calling green vomit that’s full of little space frogs “glob” make this stuff seem any less like vomit? Let’s see: its slimey, it comes out of his mouth, and its full of pieces of food. Sounds like puke to me.
Upon closer inspection, the back of the card makes a case against the “glob” being vomit:
First of all, I don’t see why Jabba would be eating slime. He’s a rich crime lord after all, and any rich crime lord wouldn’t be eating something that looks like it came out of someone’s nose or caused some pet shop turtles to mutate into a Shredder-fighting, pizza-eating, cowabunga-ing team.
The description of how this couldn’t be vomit isn’t the funny part here. Read the last sentence. “Be sure not to eat any yourself — Glob is for Hutts, not humans!” Im sure that in today’s age of legalese and product liability the folks at Hasbro had to include this for legal reasons. But really, give me a break. Why would anyone eat this? Even a stupid kid wouldn’t eat this. I’d rather eat dirt than this. If stranded on a desert island and only given this to eat, I’d start eating the plastic container that it comes in.
This isn’t the only occurrence on the package that they designate this as not food.
Just in case you missed it the first time, you now know for sure that this disgiusting slime isn’t food.
So there you have it, the infamous “Jabba Glob” action figure in its full glory. In its defense, the figure itself was fantastic. Even though Hasbro released an updated and more accurately-painted Jabba 3 3/4 inch scale figure later on, I always found the Jabba Glob figure (sans glob) to be more fun to play with as a kid because you could squeeze his head a little bit and make his mouth open as if he was talking. They took a chance and I believe that it paid off. After all, I’m not talking about any of their more successful products ten years later, am I?
Here’s to you, Hasbro’s Episode 1 toy design team. Thanks for developing what is probably the most bizarre Star Wars action figure in the 30 years of toys from a galaxy far, far away. And no, I’m not being sarcastic. It isn’t often that you come across something so legitimate, bizarre, and hilarious that gets an official stamp of approval.
2-XL was more than a cassette player: he was my best friend on road trips when I was a kid. Some kids remember fighting with their siblings during those long family drives through nowheresville. Not having any siblings, I remember 2-XL’s programs. I was even involved in a car accident and I can still remember what 2-XL tape I was listening to (“Fun and Games”).
2-XL is a quasi-acronym for “To Excel.” He was invented by Dr. Michael Freeman, Phd. The first model of 2-XL came out in 1978 and was released by the Mego Toy Corporation, until they ceased production in 1981. During the original release period, Mego released two variations of the toy. Mego went out of business in 1983 which left 2-XL an essentially dead franchise until 1992 when Tiger Electronics brought 2-XL back with a complete redesign (commonly referred to as type 3, as seen above). For all intensive purposes, I will refer to this model by just 2-XL, since I did not own an original.
2-XL came before the age of portable digital media players so his 1992 program medium was cassette tapes (8-track tapes for the Mego versions). These tapes, when played in the robot, allowed you to listen to that tape’s program and interact with 2XL’s questions by pressing one of the buttons on his panel. Sometimes these choices were presented in the form of trivia questions so that you could test your knowledge of various topics. Other times they allowed you to make choices to change the sound of music or a story’s plot. Either way, they were a whole lot of fun and most of the programs presented a good deal of replay value. It all added up to hours and hours of educational entertainment and you can’t put a price tag on that.
Actually, you can, and it usually goes for $29.99.
I never collected all of the 2-XL tapes since I had grown past him before they stopped releasing tapes a few years later, but here are the 15 of the 43 confirmed program tapes that I have and what I remember about them.
“World of 2-XL”
This was the tape that came with the toy. You could always identify this tape since it was the only one that was white, as opposed to black. It was a sampler that contained all sorts of different things.
“Voyage to Outer Space”
“Storymaker”
This was essentially an audio version of one of those “choose your own adventure” books that kids read in elementary school.
“African Safari”
“Batman: Carnival of Crime”
“Batman: The Sizzling Scheme”
“Chaos in Jurassic Park”
“X-Men: Ghosts That Haunt Us”
“Food Facts and You”
“World of Science”
“Fascinating Facts”
“Sports World”
“Monsters, Myths, and Dinosaurs”
This was by far my favorite tape since I’ve always been a fan of all three components of this tape’s title.
“Amazing World Records”
“Planet Earth”
Virtual pets were all the rage in the late 1990 and have kept a small presence in the toy market since. To most people it would seem that all of these “product of the year” fads always suffer the one-hit-wonder phenomenon: they pop up out of nowhere, sell a gazillion units, then apparently disappear into obscurity. Most of these products fit this description. The Furby later spawned the Shell, which as far as I can remember, was a commercial flop. I don’t even remember seeing commercials for these let alone seeing them in the stores yet somehow my mom was able to find one on clearance at Target for $2.50.
I remember these things as being mostly a “girls toy” and that I’d never be caught dead with one of them. Toy manufacturers must have have realized this and came out with a series of “boy virtual pets” as shown above.
The Tamagotchi pets were by far the most popular of this genre, but they seemed… kind of pointless, really. Why just raise a virtual pet when you could enhance a video game? Thus Nintendo released “Pokemon Pikachu,” the first add-on peripheral for the Pokemon series of Game Boy video games. Pokemon Pikachu was essentially a pedometer combined with a virtual pet. By eliminating the need for monotinous caretaking, Pokemon Pikachu focused more on fitness by tracking steps taken and converting them into a form of virtual currency called “watts.” These watts could be transferred over to the Pokemon video games and turned into items.
Back in eigth grade there was a guy in my class that was sort of an annoying rival. He would always come up to me and brag about all of his recent video game achievements in that kind of condescending way that makes you feel like he just looked stuff up on the internet and is claiming to have accomplished something. I remember seeing him with it one day and thinking “what a loser, walking around with a girly toy.” He might as well have had a doll, for all I cared. Then I read about them in Nintendo Power Magazine and realized that I was missing out on valuable items! (Of course, I later found out how to hack the crap out of the game with a Game Shark and get all of the items without working whatsoever)
So, I went to the store and picked up Pokemon Pikachu. I took it to school for 2 days before realizing how I probably shouldn’t have bought it.
When Pokemon Gold and Silver came out in 2000, Nintendo again released the Pokemon Pikachu, this time rebranded into the Pokemon Pikachu 2 with a color screen and compatability with the new games. This time around I was in high school and while I did play the crap out of Gold and Silver I never bothered with the Pokemon Pikachu 2 (which I got here on clearance for less than $5).
Nintendo brought the concept back AGAIN in 2009 with the re-release of the Gold and Silver games on the Nintendo DS, again rebranded as the “Pokewalker.” It made sense back in the 90s to make Pikachu the exclusive character to the portable unit since he was by far one of the most popular characters, but now that there are nearly 500 species of Pokemon characters in the games it makes sense to allow any character to be played as a virtual pet–and that’s exactly what Nintendo did.
Before Nintendo released the Pokemon Pikachu, Tiger Electronics came out with Star Wars virual pets. As far as I’m aware, the R2-D2 and Yoda were the only made in this like. Abandoning the “take care of this thing or it will die” model of Tamagotchi, these pets offered up something different. R2-D2 acted like a virtually-useless sidekick robot and Yoda trained your Jedi skills. I can’t remember ever using these for more than a week and, admittedly, were only purchased back then out of Star Wars completionism.
There we have it: a look back at a few of the more boy-oriented virual pets of the late 1990s. In retrospect, they were somewhat innovative but leave the bad taste of shame in your mouth for having spent money on them.
Remember that psycho guy in Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom that runs the cult? It would have been nice to have an action figure of that guy. In fact, he’s really the only character other than Indy himself that I wanted an action figure of, but it never happened.
Hasbro even produced Temple of Doom figures as the last batch of their 2008 Indy figure line, but they were so scarce that most collectors–including myself–never saw them.
Join me as I investigate the causes of why I can’t get my hands on a Mola Ram figure in this investigative look back to 2008’s Indiana Jones action figure collection.
I initially wrote this article in April 2009 and held off on publishing it since I figured it was too hardcore for what I normally write for “Flashback,” but I felt that since I’d devoted so much time to it back then that I’d publish it for anyone that might be interested.
Take a trip down memory lane: 2008! Where are the Temple of Doom action figures?
I know it is a little soon to “flash back” to something that happened two years ago, but I couldn’t wait. This needed to be done.
It all began under my “Temple of Doo” article as an explanation as to why I was amazed that Wal-Mart was advertising for Temple of Doom action figures. It quickly began to expand to over 5 pages, so I had to move it to its own special section here in “Flashback!”
Let’s begin with what I was saying in the “Temple of Doo” article:
“I was excited at first when I saw this label because I had been eagerly anticipating the release of the Temple of Doom action figure line. Not only was it my favorite of the films when I was a child but this wave of figures contained the one figure that I had been waiting for since the launch of the line, Thugee cult leader Mola Ram (the guy that pulls the guy’s heart out in the movie). At first I didn’t even notice the strangeness of the error on this tag and began searching vigorously through the nearby pegs of action figures, none of which were Indiana Jones. In fact, there weren’t any Indy figures around and the peg that this tag was on was filled with Batman action figures that had hadn’t sold.”
My disappointment over the lack of the Temple of Doom figures led me to re-examine the label to see if this was actually advertising for the elusive Temple of Doom wave as well as some from the first Indy episode, 1981’s Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The problem with this batch of figures was that there was little-to-no quality control on them, which ultimately resulted in horrible paint jobs on the faces of the action figures. Some of these paint jobs were so egregious that the figure’s eyes were painted half on their brow line, causing them to be downright silly figures at times.
This lack of quality control turned a majority of line into what is known in the action figure collecting community as “peg warmers,” meaning that the figures stay unsold on the pegs that they are hung from for product display for so long that they “warm” these pegs. A common example of a peg-warming figure is always a topless fat guy, such as Malakili, the Rancor keeper from Return of the Jedi. Remember this guy? Yeah, you probably don’t. Here’s a page about that guy: http://www.rebelscum.com/POTF2malakili.asp Its a bit outrageous to assume that kids are going to want to buy a figue of a topless fat guy that kind of looks like Colin Mochrie from TVs Whose Line is it Anyway? when they could instead buy someone cool like their 15th Luke Skywalker or 20th Han Solo.Maybe Hasbro actually did something right with the Indiana Jones figure collection and avoided topless fat guys. They could have made the topless (but not very fat) German mechanic that Indy knocks into a plane and splatters, but they didn’t. (Side note: they actually did produce this character in the Indiana Jones Adventure Heroes minifigure line, which is pretty much targeted explicitly at kids. Go figure).
It was a big shame that a line that had such potential was struck down before it even was released in it’s entirety by a near-total lack of quality control. I don’t know how these ended up so badly while the quality in Hasbro’s Star Wars brand had been stellar for nearly 15 years virtually across the board.
Wendy’s was somewhat of a treat for me when I was young. There was only one of them near my house and I didn’t go there very often, but I remember that going there was extra special. We would always bring home a large chocolate Frosty and stick it in the freezer all day so that by dinnertime I could have it nice and frozen. I still find it hard to have Frostys any other way to this day.
While their fries aren’t anything to write home about, I remember that their hamburger buns tasted better than the ones on the ones on the Happy Meal hamburgers and this was something I took notice of. I also liked how their toy premiums were usually abstract things that weren’t from the latest movie or cartoon show. While I loved those kinds of toys as well, Wendy’s toys worked great for imaginative play and that’s where these aliens came in handy.
If you notice their waists, you might see a joint. The aliens were made of a soft plastic and could be popped apart at the torso and you could mix-and-match the aliens. I thought this was a fun concept as a kid and had made numerous flip-type books where I would mix-and-match various monsters to make vampire werewolf mummies.
The purple alien was my favorite because he seemed to fit in better with my other toys and seemed like a nice guy. The orange guy was usually his jerky friend and the yellow guy was silly.
I would build space ships out of Duplo Legos for these aliens and go on adventures around the house galaxy. Good times.
The moral of the story: fast food isn’t all that bad. Sure got me up and running around.
Hasbro released a line of action figures of all of the characters from the first “Mortal Kombat” video game circa 1994. I can’t quite tell for sure because the date stamp on the figures all say 1991, because their bodies were, for the most part, recycled from G.I. Joes. However, most of the heads were original (I’m wasn’t a G.I. Joe collector so I’m not sure what all was recycled) since they attempted to at least make these look like the characters.
The line consisted of all of the characters from the game, except for the secret character, Reptile. This breaks down to Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Raiden, Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Sonya Blade, and Kano. The two boss characters, Shang Tsung and Goro, were also released, though Goro will not appear in this article because he came in a multipack that I never could find in stores.
I used to keep these figures in a box together when I was a kid but somehow they got separated, which means that Liu Kang, Raiden, and Johnny Cage will not appear in this article unless I can find them at a later date. While Shang Tsung appears in this article, the figure is actually the movie version and not the game version. Upon reviewing some photos of these figures from other sites, I seem to recall that I owned the game Shang Tsung. He too is missing.
Sub-Zero
Sub-Zero has always been my preferred character in the “Mortal Kombat” franchise because I hate memorizing moves. Even after not playing these games in over 15 years, I still remember all of this dude’s moves (which is the reason why I have, and continue to, totally suck at “Street Fighter” games).
This figure didn’t actaully come with the cloth (soft goods) outfit–I took it from the movie “Frozen Sub Zero” figure and put it on this one because it’s a better figure.
Scorpion
Over the entire run of the Mortal Kombat franchise, only one character comes in second to my favorite, Sub-Zero: Scorpion. His moves were easy to use and his fatality was one of the more exciting of the first game.
This photo isn’t of the Scorpion figure but actually the Sub-Zero. Hasbro did release a Scorpion figure as part of this line, but he was one of the few figures that I couldn’t find when I was putting this article together, so I just did, with Photoshop, what the toy makers did the first time: use yellow cloth and yellow paint instead of blue. Literally. This is also what the developers did with all of the various differently-colored ninjas in the games (its a process called “palette swap”).
This figure didn’t come with a soft goods either, but the movie version did. I also had this version and it is currently lost.
Frozen (Movie) Sub-Zero
This is the movie version of Sub-Zero, which came with the soft goods outfit that I later moved to the first Sub-Zero because it looks more like the character than this one, which just looks wrong.
Sonya Blade (Movie)
Sonya’s outfit looks nothing like the Sonya in the game, but this is the “movie edition.” Gotta love those. : /
Kano
Kano is one of my least favorite characters from any of the games and was usually my go-to dummy to beat up on in. At least the figure looks pretty accurate.
Shang Tsung (Movie)
Here’s Shang Tsung… I think? Actually… I don’t know… This one just doesn’t make sense.
This is actually the “movie version” of the character, but even then, this is still a fail because they could have at least used an older actor to portray the character in the film. This doesn’t even look like the younger Shang Tsung in the film! Then again, when have movies based on video games ever been true and kind to any source material? Something tells me that the figure designers had spent all their budget or energies on creating the figures that actually look something like the characters and so they just used something from another product line. According to YoJoe.com, this was a figure called “Budo” from a cancelled action figure line called “Ninja Commandoes.”
Custom Ninjas
I used the same color swap process that I used to re-create Scorpion to create these virtual custom figures of characters mostly that didn’t exist until later on in the franchise.
First is Reptile, who was released as part of the Hasbro line, but I never owned the figure.
Second is Ermac, the red telekenetic ninja that came out in “Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.”
Third is Smoke, a secret character in “Mortal Kombat 2” that later became a playable cyborg ninja in “Mortal Kombat 3” and a playable human form ninja in “Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.” Hasbro also released an official Smoke figure.
Fourth is Rain, a ninja that controls the weather. He, too, first appeared in “Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.”
There’s a story that the developers of “Mortal Kombat 3” weren’t allowed to use any straight-up “ninja” characters in the game so instead they changed the appearance of Sub-Zero to more of a generic martial arts character and introduced cyborg “ninjas” to counteract the loss of the classic ninjas. Then, when “Ultimate Mortal Kombat” came out, the developers were able to put the classic ninjas back into the game, including classic Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, and human Smoke as well as several new ninjas including Rain and Ermac. Noob Saibot also returned as a playable character in some versions of the game. However, because he is essentially just a black silhouette of the same ninja model, I decided not to make a fake custom of him for this article.
In all, the line wasn’t a “flawless victory” but it wasn’t that bad. The likenesses weren’t very accurate and the costumes were relatively generic and representational rather than accurate portrayals, but for 1994 they weren’t too bad. I can recall lines that were considerably worse, namely pro wrestling and figures based on movies. My semi-custom Sub-Zero looks decent by today’s standards for toys of this scale and if the ninja chararacters had come this way in the first place then they would have been fantastic by 1994’s standards.
For more photos of some of these characters, including some that I don’t have or couldn’t find, visit this YoJoe.com article.
This super obese Super Mario from the McDonalds Super Mario Bros Happy Meal was the first time that I had ever been able to have any kind of Mario or video game character in a toy form aside from an early 80s plush Donkey Kong I got from a Goodwill. Video games used to not be marketed the way that they are today. Looking back, it seemed that games were marketed as games and not as general products across the market. Not even Mario had a whole lot of product back then. Sure, Nintendo put out a ton of shirts (and always has) but there was no aisle dedicated to toys of game characters in Toys ‘R’ Us. There were no websites that you could go to and import stuff from Japan. Hell no. This was 1990! The internet was used to share scientific data back in those days and not to watch videos of monkeys throwing poop at each other or zombie kids saying how they like turtles. This was why I played with these toys long into the 90s until they started putting out actual figures of these characters (which I might do a Flashback feature over).
These came out in 1990 as part of a cross-promotion for the release of one of the greatest games of all time, “Super Mario Bros. 3” for the NES. Up first is our hero, Mario.
Mario eats a lot of fatty foods, I’d assume. Pizza, spaghetti, lasagna, calzones… the list goes on and on. It looks like our hero Mario has been pigging out a bit much on them, as he required a spring with a platform to launch himself! This picture is missing the spring, but I’m sure you can imagine what the mechanism would have looked like.
Luigi, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a body–it was sculpted into a cloud or something! This was a pull-back toy that went… fast… I guess. I don’t know. I never really played with Luigi. He looks a bit like a genie or something.
Now these were great. The Koopa Paratroopa (left) and Goomba (right) were common enemies that Mario needed to squash, so I think that I must have gone to McDonalds several times during their available weeks because I have 5 or so of each of them. Every time I clean the basement, I swear that I find another one of them.
The Koopa jumped when you squeezed on a pump that was attached to his shell and the Goomba did backflips when you pressed his head down to his feet and let the suction cup attach to the circle there. In all, not bad for a fast food toy.
Action figures of topless fat guys usually don’t fly off the shelves (barring, of course, if they ever made a fat, topless Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson action figure), so its only natural that most people probably have no idea who this action figure is of. It doesn’t reallly matter… because he looks like Colin Mochrie’s (from TV’s “Whose Line is it Anyway?”) bizarre, Rancor-keeping doppelganger!
In the Star Wars universe, our fellow here is known as Malakili, Jabba the Hutt’s Rancor keeper in Return of the Jedi. Remember that guy that cries when Luke kills the epic Rancor beast in Jabba’s palace? This is that guy. Kids love that guy. You know, all your friends were playing with the Cobra Commander and Megatron and you had this guy. You poor bastard.
This figure has had three different versions over the years: an original from the 80s, this figure here from the late 90s, and a new version from 2009 (sometime I’ll update this article with pictures of that version). This is the late 90s version.
It really doesn’t matter who this character is: the bottom line is that this kind of figure doesn’t have a whole lot of child appeal, so these kinds of characters are thrown into collectible figure lines as collector fan service and often wind up as “peg warmers,” which I discussed at length in my Indiana Jones figure retrospective, because collectors don’t need to buy multiples of them and kids tend to avoid them.
There isn’t a whole lot that I could say about this movie that hasn’t already been said perfectly by somebody else. The movie flopped like a fish on land, gasping for air, knowing its about to die but unable to think about anything else other than “am I going to be cooked with teriyaki glaze or lemon butter?”
Rather than talk about the movie, I’ll discuss the toys. For what they were, they were actually pretty decent. I actually remember them more fondly than the film. The likenesses were pretty good for how old they are, plus Mario and Luigi — aside from the lack of Luigi’s ‘stache — look like the game characters except that the colors are reversed. Below are the Mario and Luigi figures from the movie line next to newer figures that are true to the characters.
The movie unsuccessfully attempted to rationalize the nonsensical dream logic of the Mario world. Mario and Luigi came with flamethrower gun accessories that blasted fireballs attached to a stick so that the projectiles never left the weapons. Koopa also came with a similar “devo” gun like he had in the film. No–the gun didn’t play Devo–then it might actually be good. The filmmakers also justified Mario and Luigi’s super jumping ability with super jumping boots, but the figures lacked any kind of jump ability but you can see their hydraulic boots in the picture above.
The next entry to the “what were they thinking!?” file is the Goomba. Pictured above are the movie goomba (left) and a paragoomba (right). The only difference between paragoombas and regular goombas is the regular goomba lacks wings. This doesn’t matter. Neither of these guys look anything alike! Goombas are mindless henchmen, so why does that mean they should be big, burly, trenchcoat-clad goons? Goombas are supposed to be awful! Movie goomba has to be seven feet tall! This big green behemoth could pummel Mario just by yawning! Look at the guy cockeyed and you’d be paste on the wall! The only similarity is a big, wide mouth, and yet they managed to screw that up and take away the goomba’s trademark bottom jaw fangs!
For the record, I’d have given the movie goomba pants. Just saying. That’s something I just don’t need to see.
Next up is the big boss man himself, Koopa. There really isn’t a whole lot to say about this one. Why bother making the villain a full-blown turtle man when you can give him a crazy slicked-back series of tiny mohawks?
Growing up, I always knew Bowser, who is shown on the right, as Koopa. He was always referred to as Koopa in the TV show and I remember manuals and books calliing him Koopa. Then I started hearing the title “King Koopa,” so I figured that was just his titular name, like how kings are named. They’re never referred to by their last names, so why on earth would I think that “Koopa” was anything other than this character’s first name?
Then came all of this “Bowser” business and I was confused. Was his name Bowser now? Was this even the same character as King Koopa? It turns out that this character was technically named Bowser, King of the Koopas (the “Koopas” being a name for his various turtle-like underlings), so “King Koopa” was just a nickname for him being the king of the Koopa enemies. This name business became even more of a problem with Princess Peach. Today we know her simply as “Princess Peach” or simply “Peach” but when I was a kid, everyone and everything called her “Princess Toadstool.” I figured that Toadstool must be her last name because that would be a terrible name to give a girl. Then everyone started calling her “Princess Peach” in the late 90s and while I knew this was the same character as the Princess Toadstool that I grew up rescuing, it has baffled me why nobody brings up the Toadstool part of her name. Is she actually named Princess Peach Toadstool? That sounds about right to me.
The Peach nomenclature was an even worse problem in the Mario movie. To understand this issue, let’s have a brief Mario history lesson.
The NES launched with Mario’s first adventure as Super Mario, “Super Mario Bros.”, in 1985 in Japan and 1986 in the US. In this game, the princess was called “Toadstool” and the villain was “Koopa.”
The official Japanese sequel to “Super Mario Bros.” came out in 1986 in Japan under the title “Super Mario Bros. 2.” The US never saw this release until “Super Mario Bros. All-Stars” for the Super NES. Instead, we got a reworking of the game “Doki Doki Panic” with Mario characters added in place of the Middle Eastern-themed characters. The Japanese Mario 2 was identical to the first Mario, except that it added death mushrooms and had much more difficult levels. It also introduced Luigi as a slightly-different character than Mario by making him jump higher but slide more on the ground. Again, our Princess was “Toadstool” and our villain was “Koopa.”
The US saw our Mario 2 release in 1988. As this was not a “true” Mario game, it ended up having a different villain, “Wort,” and had no princess to save. Instead, Mario and pals were trying to escape another world.
1990 (1988 in Japan) saw the release of “Super Mario Bros. 3” with “Koopa” and “Toadstool” again. Super Mario Bros. came out that exact year with, again, “Toadstool” and, finally, “Bowser.”
Rewinding a year, 1989 saw the release of “Super Mario Land” for the Game Boy. In this game, Mario had to rescue a princess named Daisy from a villain named Tatanga. She was not the same princess as Toadstool, but a princess of another place called Sarasaland.
Not the same princess. Not the same villain. Not even the same world.
Yet, somehow, the Mario movie named princess Toadstool “Daisy.” Maybe the movie’s writers and producers were confused because she had never been referred to as “Peach” outside of Japan (where she had ALWAYS been known as “Peach”) until 1993’s “Yoshi’s Safari” (she continued to be referred to as “Princess Toadstool” in 1995’s “Super Mario RPG). However, Daisy had been, and never was implied to be, the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom! She was the princess of Sarasaland! Worst case scenario, she would be called “Princess Sarasaland” or even “Princess Game Boy.” Honestly, I just don’t think they cared about any relation to the source material, considering also that Yoshi looks like a baby velociraptor in the film! At least they didn’t make HIM evil. That would have been a nightmare. I can see it now… Mario crawling around in a kitchen a-la “Jurassic Park” avoiding an evil band of rampaging red, green, and yellow Yoshis, pissed off at their years of being used as a sacrafice and all-around horse by Mario and Luigi!
Next up are movie’ Koopa’s bumbling cousins, Iggy and Spike, who are roughly based on two characters from the Mario games. By the term “roughly based on,” I imply no connection to any specific character, as in the case of Mario in the movie being connected to the Mario in the games. Iggy is actually one of Bowser’s children in “Super Mario Bros. 3” and Spike is an enemy that hurls spiky balls. Neither of these two turtle-like Koopa enemies look or act anything like the characters in the movie. In fact, Spike is a generic term for an enemy type and not a specific individual Koopa underling. It baffles my mind why they would use the name of one of Koopa’s children from the game but not another, considering that Bowser had seven children and six of them were males! What, were Lemmy, Roy, Larry, Morton, or Ludwig all unacceptable names, or did they just go with “Spike” because it sounded more “punk” to fit the movie’s goth-punk-industrial late 80s dystopic atmosphere? Why were they Koopa’s cousins? Just because Koopa wouldn’t kill his own cousins? Then again, this is the very same Koopa that was terrorized by a tiny — gasp — Bob-Omb, it wouldn’t surprise me if he would keep these morons around.
This whole Koopa relations discussion brings me to a really interesting point. Bowser’s kids appeared in a few other (craptacular) Mario games in the early 90s and then went away for nearly 20 years until “New Super Mario Bros. Wii,” where they return as henchmen to Bowser and not his children. The “Koopa Kids” or “Koopalings” were never implied to be related to Peach. I always just assumed that Bowser had some kind of wife that was either dead (ouch) or had left him because of his obsession with Peach (logical). Perhaps that’s why after “Super Mario World” the Koopa Kids just disappeared–maybe Mrs. Koopa was sick of Bowser’s creepy Peach obsession and took full custody of the kids.
What is there to make of the Koopa Kids from the “Mario Party” games? Who are these guys? They look just like Bowser, Jr. but there are several of them, each with a unique color scheme like the NinjaTurtles! What is going on here?!
Also weird is the implication that Bowser is really named Morton, as one of the Koopa Kids is named “Morton Koopa, Jr.” If this is true, is Bowser REALLY named “Morton Bowser, King Koopa”? What a bizarre name. Unless, of course, the Koopa Kids were adopted children. Even then, where did they go from 1990 until 1999? If they aged out of being kids, why did they suddenly return AS KIDS in “Super Mario Bros. Wii”?
Bowser Jr. has taken over the “Bowser’s offspring” role in the modern Mario games. Did Bowser disown all of his “Koopa Kids” and “Koopalings” children? If so, that must have been a lot of paperwork. If Bowser apparently has a child named after himself in “Morton Koopa, Jr.”, what would this make the modern “Bowser Jr.?” They aren’t the same character, as they both appear as two different characters in “New Super Mario Bros. Wii”! Therefore, wouldn’t “Bowser Jr.” technically be named “Morton Koopa, the Second” like how Michael Jackson named two of his kids “Prince Michael”?
Additionally, Bowser Jr. calls Princess Peach his mother. Did Bowser convince Bowser Jr. that Peach was his mom so that it would encourage him to assist in his own personal obsession with capturing the princess? I’d certainly hope so, because it would blow my mind if what Bowser Jr. claimed was actually true. I’ve also heard that Bowser Jr. knows that Peach isn’t really his mom but would like her to play a maternal role in hise life. Why? She isn’t evil like him and his father are. We already know there are female Koopas (Wendy O. Koopa) so why doesn’t Bowser Jr. want an evil turtle mom? Is he THAT enamoured by Peach? That’s slipping into Norman Bates territory right there.
What would blow my mind even more is if Nintendo intended it to be this way, considering Nintendo’s history of cleaning sex and violence out of their NES and Super NES games. I’d think a little blood splatter in “Mortal Kombat” is way less disturbing to children than the horrifying revelation that Princess Peach somehow had a relationship with Bowser. Just typing that made me cringe a little bit. Yuck.
If that was somehow, disturbingly, true, it might explain why Peach seems to get kidnapped so much. You’d think that after Mario returned her in the very first Mario game that she would be okay. But no. That Mushroom Kingdom security is terrible as she just keeps getting kidnapped. If you look at “Super Mario Bros. 3,” the king of every world was somehow turned into an animal by Bowser, so its not just Peach’s castle that has horrible security. Every castle in the entire kingdom has such a lax security protocol in place that Bowser can just walk right on in with a bunch of worthless little fangy goombas and turn the king into a little animal. It usually takes a super powerful wizard to do something like that in video games and Bowser falls short on being a wizard.
Plus, its a little weird that all Mario gets for rescuing Peach anymore is a cake. Say that, hypothetically, I rescued a princess. I’d assume that her family would be so pleased that I’d get a huge cash reward. At the least I might get knighted or something. Mario has never been knighted! Poor guy. I bet they knight Toads all of the time. What a scam, Mario. What a scam.
The only other logical reason that I can come up with for why Bowser might want to kidnap Peach is to hold her at ransom. If this was a true scenario, I’m sure that we would have seen some sort of reference in one of the games by now where Bowser demands a massive sum of gold coins from the kingdom.
Perhaps Bowser wants power, clean and simple. That is often the sole demand of video game villains, but what power would Bowser have to gain from Peach? She’s not really that powerful. True, while she was the best character in “Super Mario Bros. 2” because of her gliding jump ability, she’s far from being powerful enough to kidnap for the sole purpose of gaining power. That’s more of a scenario that you’d see in a Zelda game (“A Link to the Past” comes to mind). In those scenarios, its always obvious.
Maybe its just because we need someone cute and generally helpless to rescue. I’ve read various interviews about the Mario franchise and the purposeful lack of a heavy plot like you’d find in a Zelda game because the game is what it is: dream logic and free-association that results in, simply, a fun game experience. Its been a rock-solid formula that’s worked well both commercially and gameplay-wise for over 25 years. Mario is more than just a character and icon: he’s one of the few survivors of a bygone era where games were what they were: simple fun that didn’t need to make sense. Those classic games didn’t need deep stories, cut scenes, explicit and boundary-pushing mature content — they were pick-up-and-play fun that people of all ages could enjoy.
That’s the only conclusion that I can realistically reach. Bower kidnaps Peach because he can and because there would be no game if he didn’t. It just sort of bothers me that, when a playable character, Peach is usually one of the more useful characters (“Super Mario Bros. 2,” “Super Paper Mario,” “Super Princess Peach,” and “Mario RPG” come to mind) and that, even with these abilities, she winds up being captured. Maybe Bowser is just trying to do the whole “if you can’t catch Spider-Man than catch his girlfriend” scenario. It was actually refreshing to see the stereotype turned upside down with Peach having to become the hero and rescue Mario in “Super Princess Peach.” That’s exactly the kind of thing that I’d expect to happen. Bowser should come after Mario because Mario is, for the most part, his only enemy. I think that he enjoys watching Mario attempt to stop him and overcome his various obstacles and underlings. The only evidence that I have to this is that, when faced with a common enemy, the two become begrudging allies (“Super Paper Mario,” “Mario RPG,” and “Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story” come to mind). If these two can become a team without literally trying to kill each other every 10 seconds, even after 25 years of rivalry and Mario’s neverending success streak, then Bowser certainly isn’t some kind of psychopathic megalomaniac set out for wold domination. Then again, he did act pretty psycho at the end of “Super Mario Galaxy,” so who knows. Maybe this is all a big non-existent split timeline like how there are multiple Links in the Zelda universe. Who knows.
Originally posted 25 August 2010.