Remote Control Tarantulas

and other 90s nonsense

According to this diagram, this spider does not have a forked hipster beard. Those are the chelicerae, which house the fangs and venom glands on the underside. The spiky-haired ‘legs’ in the front are pedipalps, or “foot feelers.” I don’t know where the recharge port is.

Chloe the Wonder Dog is Dead

I may or may not have more to say about this later, but for now just enjoy this silly thing that I had in my back pocket for just such an occasion.

Night Man (1997)

At the age of 61, Glen A Larson, who had produced some of my favorite shows as a kid, including both Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, tried his hand at modern-day superheroics, based on a Marvel comic book by Steve Englehart.

Yes, Johnny, exactly.

You’re in tune to the frequency

of evil.

Now, I loves me some superheroes, and ten years before I had been all in on Stephen J Cannell’s gently satirical The Greatest American Hero, which fairly successfully combined paranormal tropes (UFOs and psychic powers) with superhero-style crimefighting. William Katt and Robert Culp had a pretty good love/hate good cop/bad cop dynamic, and Connie Sellecca was totally believable as the solid, competent, long-suffering girlfriend. They even got Andre the Giant as a guest star.

Night Man, on the other hand, is an incoherent mishmash of tropes, from the you only use 10% of your brain thing that makes neuroscientists foam at the mouth to the psychic arms race between the US and the Soviets (which was, unbelievably, true!!!!!) to a crate full of conveniently non-lethal super-weapons. Keep It Simple, Stupid does not necessarily apply to superhero origin stories (I’m looking at you, Wolverine!), but it definitely does to pilot episodes. You don’t spin it all out at once.

Saxophone player and martial arts instructor Johnny Domino just happens to be playing professionally on the trolley bus where there’s a bomb being sent to assassinate the Secretary of Defense at the Millenium 21 communications conference in San Francisco. He gets hit by some crappy CGI lightning and develops psychic powers “a hundred generations ahead” of the rest of humanity, just in time to accidentally read the bomber’s mind as she is leaving the bus and walking across the street to her limo. The side effect of his ESP is that he can’t sleep, which in real life drives you insane within about a hundred hours.

• Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Towards Psychosis with Increasing Time Awake

See what I mean? Oh, and his dad is a disgraced ex-cop whose hobby is listening to the police scanner.

How did this last two seasons? While the live-action competition was not great, superhero animation was entering a golden age, starting with Batman: the Animated Series in 1992. Night Man was ranked above Superboy, so that must have been awful.

I will have to check out the sweet Manimal crossover they mentioned, though.

Also a Glen Larson show, from about 15 years earlier. Lasted only 8 episodes.

Jonathan Chase was a player character in this convention game I played.

Memento mori

How come nobody ever shapeshifts into invertebrates? A crime-fighting octopus could be so cool.

Ultraviolet (1998)

This, on the other hand is smart, understated, just generally well-written (at least the pilot was). Good cast, too — Jack Davenport from Coupling, Idris Elba from Luther (one of my wife’s favourites) and every other damn thing. It does look its age, though, fairly low-res by today’s standards.

This is one of those that attempts to ride the science/magic line. Vampirism is like a virus. Most of the hunter team has been bitten at one point, but there’s a treatment, involving shining a laser pointer on the bite mark. The hematologist who runs the lab tells Davenport’s character that crosses and holy water may depend on a placebo effect. That’s orders of magnitude more rigorous than Blade.

Magic: the Gathering

As I sit here typing this on an 89 degree Saturday afternoon, a couple behind me are playing some collectible card game. I played the very first CCG, Magic, when it premiered in the early 90s. This couple has three important differences from my gamer crowd at that time.

1. They are not in their early 20s.

2. They are not white.

3. One of them is female (that’s 50 percent!).

The people playing games at that time were not yet cosplayers, or LARPers, or dramedians. White Wolf’s Vampire (now owned by Paradox Interactive) was barely a thing and had not yet drawn those people (many of them women) into the fold. Anime (aka Japanimation) was likewise a niche market at that time. Manga? What’s manga?

In other words, we were unredeemable nerds.

Magic landed like a bomb in the comic collector community. Wait, it’s a fun game and it’s collectible? Wizards of the Coast sold out their first print run in a little over a month.

• https://www.thegamer.com/magic-gathering-creation-history/

• https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-twenty-five-year-journey-of-magic-the-gathering

Unlike comic book companies, who always, always get greedy and flood the market with inferior product, popping their own bubbles, Wizards of the Coast has carefully tended their bubble, monitoring the speculators in the secondary market without getting sucked into their hype (most of the time). They actively limit speculation by putting a 2-year time limit on tournament play for any particular card. Now they’ve got an online arena where people can duel around the world.

I’m not immune. I bought a few starters, back in the day. Got a Keldon Warlord in my very first one. That deck later blew out of my friend’s Jeep and got run over. I still played with it.

Middle-Earth: the Wizards

It was another CCG that really captured me. While Magic’s inventor Richard Garfield says, “Magic is closer to roleplaying than any other card or board game I know of . . . Each player’s deck is like a character,” he is in my view mistaken. MEtW does a much better job of telling quest-like stories, full of adventure, triumph, and tragedy.

In MEtW, you play one of the five Wizards, gathering resources to be chosen the leader of the Free Peoples in the coming war against Sauron the Dark Lord. Everyone plays Sauron, because he’s way more powerful than any one of the five Wizards. Your deck has to consist of equal numbers of copper-colored Resource cards like the One Ring below and black Hazard cards that can hurt your opponents (or yourself, if you play them badly).

There are multiple ways to win:

• Gather the most resources (on your own turn);

• Kill or corrupt your opponent’s Wizard (during their turn);

• Dunk the One Ring at Mount Doom (on your own turn).

This is most definitely not the card that some rapper paid $2 million for. I found three of them in a box of boosters I bought on eBay about twenty-five years ago and gave two away as Christmas presents. A true Tolkein nerd might make a joke about Galadriel’s hairs, but that’s creepy and stalker-ish.

First you build a party of Characters, which cannot at first include a Wizard. Finding your Wizard early is a big advantage, but the balancing factor is that he can’t die if he’s not out on the table (my friends play rough). Doing anything requires moving across the landscape of Middle-Earth, visiting Sites where your resources can be played. Many of those sites are inherently dangerous, defended by automatic attacks consisting of Spiders or Orcs or even Dragons. Your opponent also has black Hazard cards that can hurt your party, or delay them, or modify the automatic attacks at the Sites.

If this sounds interesting to you, there is likewise a free-to-play online site, maintained by volunteers instead of a for-profit corporation. There you can join a worldwide community of players and collectors for this out-of-print game. I am not currently a part of that world (though on the map, I notice a couple of names near Greensboro, so maybe I will follow up on that IRL). I still have a few cards, and I played once over Christmas break last year, a three-person game with one novice player which took about five hours (a big difference from Magic). There are solo-play rules as well, but I’ve rarely done that. Writing is my solo play.