In honor of today’s hotly anticipated Apple event, a small tribute to the iPad of my generation’s youth. Rest in peace, noble Speak & Spell! I’ll never forget you, or the many filthy things I’d make you say.
The Hub
I started writing about music for money in 1987, when I was a dumb eighth grader who thought it was the height of rock-crit iconoclasm to write wordy four-star reviews of records by artists like Toto and Bruce Willis. Fortunately, I had an editor who bought into this madness, but that isn’t the point — the point is that some of my earliest writing was published just as CDs were becoming popular, and I wrote a lot of stuff about how awful CDs were (including an editorial titled — wait for it — “Compact Discontent”), but when the calendar turned to 1988, I did own one solitary, single compact disc. It was an album called New Monkees, by a band called New Monkees, which was created in conjunction with a short-lived television series titled New Monkees.
I’m bringing this up now because the New Monkees have been on my mind ever since I forced myself to sit through the first episode of The Aquabats! Super Show!, a triumph of goofball entertainment whose low-budget idiocy reminded me, again and again, of the manic, candy-colored foolishness I’d rush to tune in for every Saturday afternoon during the New Monkees‘ fleeting 13-week syndicated run. I loved it, but I was a 13-year-old boy, and thus a moron. The show was terrible.
The Aquabats! Super Show! is awful in similar ways, although I suspect the braintrust behind the show is doing it on purpose, which makes me feel funny inside: The creative team includes Yo Gabba Gabba! showrunners (and serial exclamation point abusers) Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz, whose fondness for low-budget aesthetics and silly humor is used to far greater, more innocent effect on the latter series. Aquabats! employs a superficially similar conceit, with cheap costumes, minimal sets, and Ritalin-fueled editing, but I detected a layer of gross, winking irony here that isn’t as obvious with Gabba!
As my friend Will Harris pointed out in his enthusiastic review for the AV Club, Aquabats! is a clear spiritual descendant of the sort of wacky live-action lunacy that flourished briefly on Saturday morning television during the ’70s. The difference — and I think it’s a crucial one — is that those folks were actively trying to do cool, cutting-edge stuff, whereas Jacobs and Schultz are having a retro laugh that rings hollow.
For me, anyway. But as I said before, I thought the New Monkees were awesome when I was 13, and I’m sure I’d think the same of The Aquabats! Super Show! if I were 13 now. I’m simply not the target audience for this stuff.
I wish it were more honest, and less deliberately evocative of such a chintzy era, and I also can’t pretend to understand why [old man rant] everything has to be so garish and loud and spliced up with so many quick cuts [/old man rant]. But every generation needs its stupid jokes, and as these things go, Aquabats! is utterly harmless. You may want to make sure it’s airing in a separate room, but it’s harmless.
LEGO
Continuing what seems like this week’s theme of “new offerings from the product lines of overly licensed properties,” LEGO has released shots of its new Avengers sets, timed to invade store shelves in tandem with the Marvel blockbuster on May 4.
I pooh-poohed movie tie-in hysteria in my Lorax post, but that was partly because A) the ads people seem to be most upset about aren’t super kid-targeted, and B) the movie has a message that I think is worth taking a few extra steps to spread, even if doing so requires things that seem counteractive to the message itself. The Avengers, on the other hand, isn’t about anything other than blowing stuff up — and although Avengers director Joss Whedon is a nerd king who could very well do right by the franchise, the movie’s trailers suggest it’s just more of the same CGI and loud explosions we line up for every summer, and these LEGO sets are designed purely to make kids beg their parents for new toys.
All of which is part of the price of procreating in a mass media society. But these are the product tie-ins that ring the hollowest for me. Typing about this stuff makes me feel like I need to wash my hands, especially given LEGO’s nobler origins. I know a lot of people who loathe the rather patronizing “LEGO Friends” product line, but if I could start tearing pages out of the company catalog, I’d start with stuff like this.
Take a look at full-size shots of the figures (including what might be your first good look at the movie’s villains, albeit in block form) over at Empire.