Author: Tom Panarese

Up, Up, and Away!

Superman: The Secet Years #1

I honestly don’t remember when I bought my first comic book or what that comic was.  I have vague memories of perusing the magazine rack at Greaves stationary in my hometown and coming home with an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man or Superman.  At some point, I know that I got an issue of the Batman team-up title The Brave and the Bold sometime in the very early 1980s, so that might have been it.  But Superman: The Secret Years #2 was the very first comic book that I remember buying at an actual comic book store.

Amazing Comics, which is on Gillette Avenue in Sayville, NY, opened in the fall of 1984 next to an iron-on T-shirt store named The Special-T, which is where my friends and I procured most of our wardrobe.  I am sure that I was at the Special-T buying a birthday present for someone when my dad noticed that there was a brand-new comic book store in the next building (it had previously been a junk/antique store, I believe).  It was and still is an extremely small store with barely any room to move; in fact, I think if you fit more than six people in there, you’re exceeding maximum occupancy.  But at seven years old, an entire room filled with comic books blew my mind.  Who knew that you could sell them on your own and not off a rack located between the cigarettes and the pens and pencils? (more…)

Mecha, Minmei, and a decade-long fight for the future

While I have extensive experience with superhero comic books, my experience with manga is relatively small.  I know that my local Barnes & Noble has a significant amount of shelf space devoted to manga, and that quite a number of my students are often seen walking around with Tokyopop trade paperbacks.  I once flirted with anime a little bit, but going so far as to dive head-first into that particular world of fandom was never something I even attempted.

That being said, I am sure that I’m not alone in my generation by mentioning that as a kid I had exposure to Japanese comics and cartoons through Voltron and Robotech.  I suppose I’ll get around to talking about Voltron some other time, but Robotech seemed to have far greater reach, at least in terms of manga/anime as a whole.  Of course, I think that “true” fans of the genre and the work refer to it (or at least part of it) as Macross, but considering I have spent my life being nothing but mainstream, I’ll just go with Robotech.

My first exposure to Robotech was when  the animated series ran on WPIX 11 every afternoon when I was in elementary school.  It was an enormous show that had more episodes and storylines than I could count, but to be quite honest I wasn’t interested in the plots or character development when I was eight years old.  I just thought it was awesome because the character flew around in planes that transformed into robots that looked exactly like the Autobot named Jetfire (or was it Skyfire?  There was an enormous debate between my friend Evan and myself about this when I was a kid.  Evan, at one point, even claimed that there were two separate toys and he had the other one … but never produced it).  There was a comic book series put out by Comico that retold the television series verbatim (it even had a little “As seen on TV!” box in the middle), which you can probably pick up in a dollar bin somewhere; and a toy line put out by Matchbox which was compatible with G.I. Joe (I had the motorcycle).

However, Robotech was for the most part forgotten after it went off TV and toys were relegated to that “aisle of random and forgotten toys” in Toys R Us.  None of my friends ever really got that into it and so I was kind of alone in my love of the mecha series and gave it up to concentrate on the Joes, movies like Aliens, and baseball. 

Then, when I was in the ninth or tenth grade, a new store called Bassett Book Club opened up next to K-Mart on Sunrise Highway.  The place was huge, several times bigger than the B.Dalton and Waldenbooks I used to frequent at the mall, and the first time my mom took me there, I went straight for the science fiction section to check out their selection of graphic novels and Star Trek books.  After marveling at the fact that the store had the novelization of just about every movie as well as books that I’d only seen listed in my Star Trek Fan Club magazine, the spine of several books with “Robotech” written on the side caught my eye.

(more…)

Where Legends Live

When I heard that Dick Giordano died the other day, my first reaction was, “Oh, that’s sad,” which is I guess what you’d say when anyone dies.  But then I got to thinking about who he was and the impact he had on my life as a reader of comics.

For those who don’t have more than a passing knowledge of comic books, Dick Giordano was an artist and editor at DC Comics  in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.  His most important role during that time was as DC’s executive editor/editor-in-chief, which means that he was the second-in-command at the company, working just below its publisher, Jeanette, Khan.  So, he more or less shaped DC for the better part of two or three decades.  He was, in a way, DC’s Stan Lee, as just like Stan wrote a column in the “Bullpen Bulletins” that were found in each Marvel comic, Dick wrote “Meanwhile …” a regular feature in those of Marvel’s “Distinguished Competition.”

(more…)

The montage of your memories

Being a high school yearbook adviser, I have one of the more peculiar positions among the people in my building.  Sure, I get to teach my staffers about photography, layout and design, and some aspects of journalism while playing with some really cool toys, but I also have a certain amount of power.  Because when you think of it, I–and the 10 or 15 people who are on my staff from year to year–control the memories of the student body.

Oh sure, when you graduate high school the memories that you have are your own and nobody else’s and nobody can actually go back and change history to suit their needs (with the possible exception of the Texas Board of Education), but when you leave high school it’s very likely that you leave holding a yearbook.  That yearbook is the last vestige of those four years, something that will sit on a shelf or be tucked away into a box until one day when you come across it while moving or glance at it while looking for your copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being or dig it out after talking to a long lost friend.

What’s inside of that book are, of course, the memories that the yearbook staff has carefully crafted for you.  And the further away you get from high school, the more you find yourself agreeing with the masterminds who spent hours upon hours poring through candid photos, crafting captions, and going blind to make sure every element on the page was laid out perfectly.  Oh, you may have laughed at how much bullshit was in the book when you got it (or as I liked to call it, “fabricated memories you can cherish for a lifetime”), but when your 15th anniversary is around the corner, you will look through the book and say, “Yeah, I remember that!”

(more…)

Let off some steam, Bennett!

John Matrix -- the ultimate badass.

In one of my classes today, I was covering the end of Frankenstein.  If you’re unfamiliar with the novel, it doesn’t end as spectacularly as most film versions.  As Mary Shelley writes it, Victor Frankenstein dies from a prolonged sickness brought about by the anguish of dealing with the monster he created and what that monster has done to his life by murdering those around him.  Then, the monster shows up and tells Captain Walton (to whom Frankenstein was telling his story) that he has no reason to live either and will go commit suicide.  Surely enough, he ventures out into the Arctic ice presumably to die.

As I was recapping this for my students and we were discussing what parts of this scene represents, I went off on a little bit of a tangent as to what Frankenstein would be like if it were a 1980s-era Schwarzenegger movie (with Schwarzenegger as the monster).  Walton, probably played by a relative unknown although this would be a great part for a Cobra-era Stallone, sees the monster run off.  “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he screams before telling his men to turn the ship around and follow the monster while he goes below to suit up.

A few moments later, Walton comes back armed to the teeth and says, “It’s payback time.  THIS IS FOR VICTOR!” and starts opening fire with a vast array of automatic weapons (which I realize were not invented in 1816, but this is a motherfucking action sequence so you can suspend disbelief).  The monster is gunned down in a hail of bullets — I think I compared it to the scene in Predator where Jesse Ventura gets his guts blown out and Bill Duke mows down half of the Amazon in rage — and there is a heroic song by Stan Bush or 707 to take us through the closing credits.

Of course, this never did happen and will never happen, but it is a testimony to how my mind has been warped over the years by viewing too many action movies.  That’s not an unusual thing, of course — every boy in my generation had at least one G.I. Joe figure in the 1980s and at some point before we left elementary school we graduated from Star Wars and cartoons to R-rated violence and gratuitous bloodshed with a high body count.

For me, it started when I was in the fourth grade with Commando.

(more…)

And you say … “Stay” ….

When I started this blog about a month ago, I expected to delve into those things in popular culture that I inexplicably like; however, I didn’t expect to get personal this quickly.

Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories’ “Stay (I Missed You)” came out in the summer of 1994 on the soundtrack to Reality Bites (a film that is my go-to film for any day which I have off from work and nothing to do — “Stay” plays over the closing credits) and hit #1 for a few weeks in August, when both the song and the video, which features Loeb walking around an empty apartment while emoting the lyrics, were more or less inescapable.

This wasn’t a song I was supposed to admit to liking.  I had spent the majority of my high school career trying to fit in with my friends’ love of heavy metal–in fact, at least a few of my friends from high school are still hard core Metallica fans.  I owned just about every Metallica album up to that point, plus had B-sides and rarities on mix tapes made from imports that my friend Brendan had spent an inordinate amount of money on at Middle Earth Records in the Oakdale shopping center.

Needless to say, rolling up at anyone’s house with this song on my Walkman would have been a huge mistake, kind of like the time I left a Righteous Brothers cassette in and someone grabbed my Walkman out of my book bag, listened to it for a moment, and gave me a look that said, “What the fuck is this?”  But I’ve always had a love of music that wasn’t total aggro and didn’t threaten to blow out my eardrums with every single distortion guitar chord.

(more…)

Don’t wake me up if I’m dreamin’

The original lineup: Matt, Tiffani, Sly, Jenny, and Tony

You know, I was all set to write about something else (specifically, Commando) when of all people, Jimmy Fallon completely knocked me on my ass.  More specifically, he inspired me … and while you probably don’t know much about me, I will tell you that I am not easily inspired.

Last week, Jimmy Fallon reuinted the cast of California Dreams.

I cannot express how awesome this made me feel when I was surfing around the internet last night and came across the reunion video.  Watching it, I get that there’s a huge joke going on here — Fallon is definitely doing this for the silliness of it all (oh, and because he couldn’t reunite the cast of Saved By The Bell) and when they are performing the cast has a “Man, this was so lame” look on their faces.

And yeah, when it was first on television back in the early 1990s, it was kind of lame.  Airing on Saturdays in the late morning (around noon or so, I think) after SBTB, California Dreams was the story of a group of teenagers that had a rock band.  In fact, the show was created by Peter Engel, the same guy responsible for SBTB, who probably saw an opportunity after the show became popular and aired that Zack Attack episode.

(more…)

Catch the RAGE!

You know, when it came to toy commercials in the 1980s, very few of the toys advertised actually delivered on their promises.  This is to be expected — after all, there’s a certain amount of deceit in advertising and kids are pretty gullible.

Take the Nerf turbo football, for instance.  It was black and pink and had aerodynamic grooves that were supposed to help you throw a perfect spiral all the way around the world, or at least according to the commercial.  I didn’t expect to be able to throw it that far, but I did expect it to improve my spiral.  Alas, it didn’t–to this day, my football throws still look like shot ducks.

The Orbi, on the other hand, was one of those rare toys that lived up to its potential.  It came out in the late 1980s and was a heavy rubber orange ball with plastic “wings” that had two ribboned flags on their ends.  You grabbed the ribbons, swung it around, and then flung it through the air.  It sounds like it was based on some sort of medieval weapon.  But, you know, neon colored.

(more…)

Comin’ on like a MEGAFORCE!

Are you man enough? A comic book ad for the film.

In some ways, I think that my fascination with the odd, often terrible things in popular culture starts with Megaforce.  I get the feeling that few people know about this particular film and if there are people who do, I would be hard pressed to find some serious fans.  It was a total misfire of a film when it came out and hasn’t at all better with age.

I first saw Megaforce on television when I was a kid.  Well, to be honest, I saw the last ten minutes of it.  Megaforce was one of those movies that netowrk affiliates would show when there was a hole in their schedules on a weekend afternoon because someone else was airing a baseball or football game and we weren’t in the era of all-golf, all-the-time on Saturdays and Sundays when Notre Dame isn’t playing.  Saturday is still kind of a wasteland, but back then it wasn’t half bad because you could every once in a while come across The Breakfast Club or Better off Dead on WPIX if your mom hadn’t chased you out of the house already.

It was fine, anyway.  Most of my Saturdays were spent at friends’ houses or having them at my house to play Nintendo until mom threw me out of the basement with some sort of speech about playing outside.  And if she wasn’t effective, the television was effective because this wasteland of programming would bore us enough to death to cause us to go outside and play wiffle ball in the backyard, eventually getting half of our balls caught in our huge elm tree.

The first time I remember seeing the end of Megaforce was on one of these random Saturday afternoons.  Tom Hackett and I had just switched off the Nintendo and rapidly turned the knob on the cheap Sharp Linytron television to see if we could find what was on the ten or so channels my house actually got.  The images flashed by very quickly with a thip-thip-thip-thip so I don’t know how we saw the movie but we wound up landing on channel 7, WABC, and spent the next few minutes watching this guy on a soupe-up motorcylce.  He was being chased by bad guys and tring to board what looked like a huge cargo plane.  His compatriots were urging him on, and after a few moments, he figured out how to work what was obviously an experimental flying feature on the motorcycle, then flew through the air.  Overjoyed, he hooted and hollared until he landed on the plane.

We sat dumbfounded.  The credits rolled.  Then, the guy who was obviously the villain came on the screen and that hero uttered one of the best lines in movie history: “I just wanted to say goobye and remind you that the good guys always win.  Even in the Eighties.”

(more…)