Rare Bits

The internet lives and dies by top “insert number here” lists. Really. Only pornography can compete with the sheer volume of lists on the web. (god forbid anyone merge the two together. Nerds everywhere would flock to that website like Mecca.) Not being one to swim against the current of the popular idiom (today), I’ve decided to tackle one myself. You know the title, so here goes nothing:

#5: Many, Many Yo-yos

Obviously, the whole thrust of this list is to demonstrate the effect that these toys had on my adult self. We all were influenced by the way we played as children – drawing in particular has defined my personality since I was a toddler. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t be extended to the toys we played with — and I’ve played with lots of Yo-yo’s. I’m not terribly good with them, mind you — but I love playing with them. I have precisely three tricks in my repertoire: Around the World, Rock the Cradle, and Walk the Dog. But man, do I have fun showing them off while I saunter  to work. Nothing occupies a bored mind quite like a yo-yo. Every year or two, I have to buy some fancy new one with ball bearings and some transformative feature and rock the shit out of it until the string breaks and my $20 toy flies off into the street, never to be seen again. So they make the list mainly on the strength of being a toy I still regularly play with. 

#4: A Lack of Transformers

I grew up pretty poor, but somehow I still had more than my fair share of toys. However, Transformers weren’t one of these. They were all waaaay too expensive for what was a normal sized toy. Who wouldn’t balk at a twenty to thirty dollar price tag in 1984? My mom, that’s who. I can’t say that I blame her, considering that we ate pretty well. Yeah, I had some go-bots, and one of the really little transformers –but once you played with Optimus and his trailer there ain’t no going back.

So I did what anybody else would do in my position. I obsessed over giant robots — I drew them in my notebooks and made friends with anybody who had a decent sized collection. I still hadn’t gotten over it by the time I was old enough to hold down a job, and Transformers had just been rebooted as Beast Wars, so, I bought the new toys for my nephew. And then played with them myself because he was four and couldn’t handle the brain-melting difficulty of transforming a flying silver wolf into a robot. Ultimately, I just bought my own, and now I have a box full sitting in a closet. They’ve kinda started to bore me. But for a decades long obsession, transformers makes it to number four.

#3: Masters of the Universe

I probably had seventy percent of that picture. Castles included. Like I said, I was poor — but these were my guys. My number one toy. If you were my uncle in 1985, you knew damn well what to get me. That’s right, Castle freakin Grayskull. I must have been good at looking sad or something.

All of the swords, sorcery, laser guns and flying metal bird ships had some weird after-effects on me. I spent most of sixth grade reading an endless series of Conan the Barbarian novels. Junior high is a blurry haze of various fantasy and science-fiction books. I used to spend my weekends from morning to midnight reading (I was very popular). And I still draw overly muscled men with bad anatomy with little to no provocation. For some reason I think it’s awesome.

And now I make a webcomic where a scientist feuds with a magician. Thank you, He-man.

#2: Various Horrifyingly Inaccurate Dinosaur Toys

I’m a bit of a nerd for dinosaurs, and have been ever since that one episode of reading rainbow. I spent age five until age fifteen absolutely convinced that I would be a world famous paleontologist. Then around ninth grade I decided artist would be a better profession, and promptly spent over ten years working in grocery stores. Awesome judgement.

All this dino-love boiled over into a reasonably sized collection of t-shirts, books, and of course — toys. Unfortunately, dinosaur toys were, and still are, a dicey proposition in terms of scientific accuracy. And I damn well knew what those dinosaurs were supposed to look like. I was a serious proponent of the warm-blooded dinosaur theory as a youngster. I knew deinonychus had a bad-ass hooked claw long before that pygmy velociraptor was a part of the pop-cultural consciousness. And brontosaurus is NOT A REAL DINOSAUR. Stop selling me it’s toy.

So I was stuck with my bright red, walleyed, fat, upright, three fingered t-rex. At least it had a mouth you could shove star wars guys into. But I wouldn’t hesitate to correct anyone who got a fact wrong about any dinosaur. I’m not nearly as big a prick as I was as a seven year old, but I still obsess a bit much over accuracy. And am equally as likely to throw accuracy out the window in favor a particularly cool looking monster. Thank you for teaching me about hypocrisy, ugly toy tyrannosaurus.

#1: The Nintendo Entertainment System

C’mon, you knew it was coming. And for those of you who think that this doesn’t qualify as a toy, keep in mind, it was originally packaged with a toy robot so it could trojan horse it’s way into the toy aisle when it was released in america in 1985. Video games weren’t exactly a sure thing at the time, having undergone a big time crash just two years earlier.

Even though I didn’t get mine until probably 1988 or 89, I had already spent countless hours playing with friends and relatives. When I finally had my own, it was like an explosion in my head. I got a subscription to Nintendo Power soon after, netting a free copy of Dragon Warrior in the process. This only reinforced an already He-Man sized love of anything with swords in it. Every game I played was an epiphany, even the horrible ones. Bad games then were like cheap booze. Yeah, rotgut vodka sucks and you’ll feel terrible later, but you can still get drunk, and that is good. I know video games have warped me in many, many different ways. I’m writing about them right now. I can pull a book of game art off my bookshelf from a specific game that shall remain nameless, and tell you how I spent a decade in it’s thrall. Alright — it was Final Fantasy IX. I didn’t have access to the european cartoonists that I love now, I only had super-deformed monkey kids. And little girls with horns. Oh crap.

Actually, I designed her before that game came out. So I’m safe.

Later,

Jason