Why Is Captain Power Standing On My Desk? - RTOTD #821

Day 821

I really wish that the 1980's would have saved some of it's boatload of comic-book-like fictional cartoon and tv show and action figure characters for the 90's. It would have helped prevent the "everything is a fucking anime!" thing that's been going on for the past 15-20 years.

I only thought about that because I came across an old toy that had as a kid back in the 80's. Captain Power. Does anyone even remember captain power? I only have a vague recollection of him but he's about eh same size as a GI Joe, so I think I let him be the awesome future soldier that would come back to prevent COBRA from taking over the world in the epic basement warfare scenarios that I would often orchestrate on a regular basis.

I'm pretty certain he was one of those "let's make up a character and then make a toy of that character and then make a tv show of that character so that we can use one to sell the other but not really certain which one sold which one" things that happened all the fucking time in the 80's. And to be honest, he got lost in the shuffle of the heyday of the Transformers and GI Joe and MASK and a dozen or 4 other tv/action figure-hybrid sales/rating model marketing campaigns of the same era.

And then the whole model died on the vine for a little while and was replaced by a comic book speculator bubble. Not because of lack of quality (though the quality did certainly suffer) but because of over saturation. Or maybe those reasons go hand-in-hand. Mattel and Hasbro and ToyBiz and all the other ones kept pumping new material out into the market but didn't really give any creative behind it. Honestly, it wasn't much different than 90's comics. It was "hey, this shit looks cool that I just drew/designed... let's make a new franchise" and instead of investing the time to actually build that franchise, they just kinda say "oh look, I drew another cool thing. Another franchise!" and on and on until there were 74923953 new fucking franchises without a single coherent story behind them.

And that's where it all fell on it's face. GI Joe and Transformers in the 80's were huge hits because someone actually told some stories with them before moving on to the next 83 franchises being launched that week. And once there was a significant number of stories out there for people to reference and kids to enjoy, the sales just kept going.

Although a business plan of "grow it every quarter to sell people another half dozen versions of Snake Eyes" is one I still don't understand. A kid still isn't dumb and can't play with all (legitimately) 66 different costume variant versions of Snake Eyes at the same time. He only plays with 1 because there's only 1 Snake Eyes. And 1 Duke. and 1 Road Block. No matter how cool that other version of him is, they still know inherently that they can only use 1 of them in that particular battle.

But I got off onto a tangent there. The point I was making was that the other 9234945921 franchises like Captain Power that were launched at the same time didn't really HAVE any story. They had a little bit, but at least with Captain Power, I was always confused at how it was supposed to work. As a kid and now.

See, the thing that happened was that you'd get this action figure and with the toy came a VHS tape. And some sort of gun thing. The action figure had a hole right thru his chest and you were supposed to do this thing where you'd play the VHS tape and stick the gun into the hole on the back of his chest so that it would shoot out thru the clear plastic window in the front. And then the VHS tape was supposed to be some sort of video game.

Except that even as a 7 year old kid I realized "something here doesn't make sense... it's a VHS tape. Even if you don't play the "game" and just press play on it, the same things show up on the screen. The same video game "blam" noises happen and nothing changes whether you play the game or not. Because it's a vhs tape and it's not fucking interactive. And it couldn't be. You can't do a choose-your-own-adventure VHS tape without fast forwarding to certain times or changing to another VHS tape but that's essentially what this was. Or what it was portraying itself as.

And see... when even a 7 year old can tell that you're insulting their intelligence, that's a bit of a problem. And your "franchise" is going to fail.

I guess I got off topic a little just because I got into a little rant. But what I'm saying was that there were like 9000 of these fucking things created in a few year span that all fell flat on their face because there wasn't enough thought put into it ahead of time. They totally could have tried holding onto a couple of those ideas for the 90's when they totally fucking lost any ounce of creativity. And just imported Anime cartoons and made a bunch of confusing card games.

Then again, now that I think about it... how the fuck did Duck Hunt work? It wasn't VHS, but still... that's going to bug me now.