The Tale of Two Dungeons & Dragons

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Growing up in rural Southern U.S., the entire Dungeons & Dragons brand was pretty controversial. D&D was ground zero for the Satanic panic, Christian boycotts, school watch lists, and general FUD (at some point I will need to write about how during the Satanic Panic I made it onto my high school’s “List of Students Most Likely to be Satan Worshippers”). I was a somewhat fan of D&D that tried to get some games together in a rural Texas town… with very little luck.

However, for three brief seasons between 1983 and 1985, I did have the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon to fill my fantasy gamer dreams. How on earth a kids cartoon show about D&D made it on network television in the 80s is a mystery to me. The idea of children running away from scary looking monsters surely inspired a massive number of Sunday School sermons on the evils of witchcraft, playing with magic, and fantasy in general. Wikipedia even notes: “In 1985, the National Coalition on Television Violence demanded that the FTC run a warning during each broadcast stating that Dungeons & Dragons had been linked to real-life violent deaths” (I believe those deadly D&D connections were debunked decades ago).

Somebody actually took the time to add a nice collection of all of the cartoon’s episodes on to YouTube, with the added bonus of a radio play that is designed to give closure to the series that was cancelled early. Sort of. Here is the playlist:

I recently finished watching all of these videos. I was surprised at how many I vaguely remembered from the first season, and how many I didn’t from the second and third seasons.

I might have blocked out the second and third seasons, because to be honest… it got really dark somewhere in the middle of season 2. It went from weekly fun tales of a bunch of kids and teens romping around a strange world getting out of troubled spots (usually through some bumbling mistake), to a dark exploration of the PTSD these kids faced being trapped away from home and having to fight monsters every week only to have a sliver of hope for return snatched away. Every time.

Seriously. The second half of season two started having main characters betraying the group, 8 year olds yelling and crying about wanting to go home, fights between the characters that you never saw on other cartoons, sad emotional looks from characters losing yet another hope of getting home, kids plotting to kill their enemy Venger, and so on. Wikipedia even notes that one episode almost got shelved as too dark and violent. Yikes! The last televised episode was a straight out horror themed episode that probably never should have played on Saturday mornings.

In some ways, I should have seen the change coming – because the first several episodes were the same basic plot over and over again: the episode opens with the kids wrapping up a former quest for Dungeon Master, who usually appears again and gives another easy to translate riddle, the kids don’t get the riddle, Dungeon Master disappears when they look away (stop. looking. away. already.), Eric complains about Dungeon Master, they head off in some random direction hoping to be able to follow DM’s riddle (seriously – couldn’t the guy just at least point in the right direction occasionally?), a few mistakes or mishaps happen, you see the answer to the riddle coming a mile away, the kids finally get the riddle at the last minute, they perform a few brave moves, they always have to choose to save people / sentient creatures in exchange for losing their chance to go home, DM appears and gives some obvious lesson, Eric complains, Eric does something goofy, they all laugh, end of episode.

The interesting thing about the cartoon was that the people drawing the backgrounds and creatures did an incredible job translating existing D&D monsters/backgrounds, as well as creating some creative ones of their own. As formulaic and simple as the plots and animation was, the design was very interesting and expansive.

The series also suffered from the 80s version of “diversity”: basically, almost all human characters were white except for Diana the Acrobat, a black female. But wow was she the badass of the group. She was braver than Bobby the Barbarian, but with better tactical skill than Hank the Ranger. The few times she got captured by an enemy just felt too forced.

Of course, a lot of things about the series didn’t make sense. One of the biggest ones for me was how Hank’s electric bow was an awesome weapon of power that could take out mountain sides with a single arrow, but also some how form bridges and nets that didn’t burn the feet or clothes of those touching them. Weird. To be honest, every episode should have ended early with Hank blowing up whatever bad creature got in their way. They showed it having that much power at times, but others… not so much.

Because the magic bow couldn’t be shown killing creatures on screen, it often suddenly became the electric version of Mr. Fantastic’s stretchy arm in the middle of a battle. Saturday morning cartoon morality story telling was a weird thing – very inconsistent and wrapped into everything.

But if you wonder why so many people today think diversity is a simple fix that already happened a long time ago, or that powerful weapons can be utilized safely just because the owner wielding it is a “good guy”… might want to ask them what cartoons they watched as a kid. Sometime later I will have to dive more into this aspect with cartoons like G.I. Joe.

Anyways, if this cartoon was a modern day Netflix show, you would have sworn they were setting it up for Bobby to kill Hank and Venger (the main big bad for the series) while assuming the mantle of Venger. That is how dark it was getting. Of course, it was an 80s cartoon, so all Bobby had to do was laugh about something and be okay. That also sounds strangely familiar to how some people deal with problems today.

The sad thing is, the series was cancelled before the third season was finished, so we never know if the children got home. Well, I should say we never knew if Dungeon Master quit using them to fix his problems long enough to let them go home. I had thought it would be cool if they found a way to open a permanent door home – maybe through Presto the Magician finally learning to use his hat right. Dungeon Master would call them when there was evil to fight, they would go fight it, and get home in time for dinner.

Several people did record a series finale in a radio-show format for the DVD release in 2006. I’m not sure why they didn’t just make a cartoon in the 80s style – it wouldn’t be that expensive in the 2000s. But, oh well. This radio show featured the children actually getting the chance to choose if they wanted to go home or stay…. but it ends before they choose. Argh!

Apparently this was on purpose as they were trying to set-up a new format for season four. So I will just pretend that they were going to go with with my version of the “permanent open door” concept.

So many things and problems with North American 80s culture have been touched on here, so much more to unpack with those issues, so many obvious influences on the problems in the world today. I am sure I will get to that. But I also still have fond memories of playing Dungeons & Dragons cartoon characters with family and friends when we would get together and play make believe. Thankfully we didn’t do the dark parts.

Voice of Baceprot: Hijab-Core Funk Rap Metal from Indonesia

Voice of Baceprot (also abbreviated as VoB, meaning “noisy” in Sundanese) is a metal / rap / funk band from Indonesia, often referred to as Hijab-Core because all three members are teenagers that wear Hijab head coverings. Their lyrics are mostly in Sundanese (their native language), with a few lines of English as well.

In addition to breaking all of those molds, the really amazing fact about this band is that they had not even heard of heavy metal music until their school teacher introduced it to them fairly recently. They loved it and started learning instruments.

As you can see from the video, they didn’t just learn their instruments… they dominated them. That is some serious power behind how they play all of their instruments. Lest you think this is just a gimmick or trick of the camera, they can also pull off their impressive skills live as well:

I don’t totally know what exactly they are singing / rapping about, but it appears to be they are talking about equality and social issues, which is a brave thing to do seeing they are children of farmers from conservative Muslim rural areas Indonesia.

But for those of that grew up on 80s heavy metal, which got a bit stale and repetitive every time a new sub-genre hit it big, bands like VoB are a breath of fresh air. Metal didn’t die here in the U.S., of course, but interesting to see it being kept alive (and totally shredding) by teenagers on the other side of the world. They have a Facebook page that seems to be the best place to keep up with their new music (they only have a few songs so far – looking forward to more).

In Search of the Mighty Orbots

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Some time around 15-ish years ago, I started noticing there were a large number of websites dedicated to various toy lines, television shows, cartoons, and other aspects of the past decades (especially the 80s and 90s). Sometimes it would be an entire website dedicated to one specific thing, other times it would be larger areas like “early 80s kids cartoons” or whatever. These websites had been around for a while, I just had not noticed too many of them before.

So I looked through these sites, reminisced about the past, and remembered many, many things I had forgotten about my childhood. I also started remembering obscure things that weren’t on some of these websites… and that I couldn’t remember what they were myself. A few quick web searches helped me pinpoint names of some. But others still eluded me. I soon developed a short list in my head of stuff I was trying to remember, but couldn’t quite discover online.

For a few years, I really couldn’t find anything on any of the items on this list. Well, considering I would only do a search once or twice a year, that is not saying much. But I was just missing too many details to really pinpoint many of them.

Finally I had a random connection on one item that seem to start a string of obscure memory discoveries from my childhood.

I had a somewhat vague memory of a cartoon that was about 5 or so smaller robots that joined together to form a larger robot, but it wasn’t Transformers or Voltron or any of the other more popular cartoon/toy lines that most people associate with the concept (“Combining Mecha” is the technical term). In fact, I didn’t remember there being any toys associated with the show at all (a really rare occurrence). All I could vaguely remember was that we would watch the show and then go outside and play like we were the robots from the show, usually singing the show’s theme song.

Then finally I saw a word in a list of obscure “Combining Mecha” shows: Orbots. Sure enough, once I knew the title, I found all kinds of tribute websites and even the catchy theme song on YouTube:

And sure enough, it was a one season show with apparently few toys connected to it… which ironically got cancelled because of some dispute or lawsuit from the makers of Go-Bots (they thought the idea was too close to theirs).

This kind of shows how different things were before the Internet. We know that television shows, music groups, movie franchises, etc will go on hiatus after a season or tour or movie release or whatever. Today we tend to still hear a slow to drowning stream of updates, tweets, and news bits from all types of artists and entertainers even during these cyclical down times. We know when they are and aren’t working on new songs or seasons or material or whatever. We all know the minute that our shows are cancelled or renewed. Its all pretty standard now.

But back in the 80s? Stuff would go on hiatus after a season finale and never be heard from again. Sometimes you would hear in the news that a prime-time show was cancelled. But a cartoon like the Orbots could stop go off the air over Christmas holidays or summer vacation or whenever, and just never come back. You might not even notice it because there was a whole slew of new cartoons capturing your attention.

This is pretty much what happened with the Orbots. We watched the last episode of Season 1, probably went out to play as our favorite Orbots, and then filed it all in the back of minds for the next season. But that new season never came, and we got distracted so much by new cartoons that we never pulled the old memory out, and then decades later i am trying to wrack my brain to figure out what that one show that one time was called….

Of course, there were shows that people knew were cancelled and they tried to write in and change minds of the studio executives and all of that, but you have to wonder. Did our current disposable culture of always focusing on the new bands and new movies and new entertainment get trained in us as children? Possibly so. Does the fact that so many of these cartoon shows are just vague memories without a specific title in our minds just reveal that we were trained to focus on the new shiny object as they came out? Maybe, maybe not. But still, its kind of weird that we just forget about something like that – possibly for the rest of our life – without a trace of a flag in our mind that something we used to enjoy immensely is now gone.

Nostalgia Culture and the Worship of the Past

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So you might have noticed that there is a sort of revival of all things 80s in current pop culture – thanks in no small part to books like Ready Player One and television shows like Stranger Things. Now it seems like the 90s are starting to get their nostalgia turn. I have kind of wanted to blog about the 70s, 80s, and 90s for years before they made a comeback, but never got the chance. Now it seems a little cliche to jump on the band wagon, but that is what we did back then anyways, right?

As many people have noted, things like Ready Player One are really more about celebrating middle class white 80s culture. That was why I have been putting off blogging about any of it – there were many problems and issues with assigning “the 80s” to one specific sociocultural group. In a lot of ways, that is what the 80s were all about. We thought we had solved things like racism, sexism, and hatred just because we had recorded “We are the World”…

Of course, we never really asked anyone outside of white middle class culture if that was really the case. We just knew we had. And yes, it was “we” that recorded “We are the World,” because we often saw ourselves as somehow cosmically part of anything that “we” liked. Even if we never actually even bought the song and just taped it off the radio.

There were always those downer alternative/goth/industrial kids… but what did they know? Oh, we were about to find out the hard way when they rose to the top in the 90s.

Still, its not to say that I can’t both reminisce about the past while also recognizing it as problematic. I was a kid in the 70s, in junior high and high school in the 80s, and in college in the 90s. I kind of got all three decades at about the right age (at least in my opinion).

Today, that hopeless sense of “didn’t we fix this already?” that is left over from the ashes of the 80s is probably what drives a lot of people my age to push back against any kind of movement to fix anything now. Which is weird – we were the kids that took a pseudo-punk / heavy metal attitude of “middle finger to the authority figures” so seriously in high school and college. It was always “adults” and “the man” that was causing all the problems by not listening to all of our solutions in our art and music…. until we were the adults and the authorities. Then it suddenly became the “kids these days!”

When I think back to 80s, I often remember an average Saturday in the summer, when I tended to sleep in until my Dad started mowing the lawn. I would wake up with the sun shinning in the window and bask in how “solved” the whole world felt. My generation had figured out how to perfect music, movies, television, sports, you name it. We were even generous in letting the older generations enjoy success if they were still “good.” Aerosmith, Robert Plant, Cher, Robert Redford, Aretha Franklin, and many other older stars and artists from the past were still in our top charts and top movies and so on. At the end of the 80s, as hair metal tamed down into blues metal and early rap toughened up into street rap, we thought we were just perfecting culture. We were sure it would all carry on for infinity after a few more years of getting it all… right.

Then the 90s happened. And that was a whole other story.

But you see, this was the sense we had in the 80s. We were perfecting everything. We were sending food to Ethiopia, right? We were solving the problems. We kept the nukes from launching just by watching War Games gosh darn it!

Yeah, we were naive. Not all of us. But the white suburban kids you usually see idolized in Stranger Things now? That was me. Well, without the cool supernatural stuff. And we were naive about the problems brewing in other parts of the world as well as on the other side of town until it slapped us in the face in the 90s… or 00s… or 10s… just like many of the kids in Stranger Things were oblivious to the problems lurking around them until they found themselves face to face with something… other.