Rocketship Weird Retro Captain's Blog - Weird Retro

Retro Gaming: Cho Aniki (1992)

6/8/2015

Cho Aniki which translates as "Super Big Brother" is bizarre video game from Japan. The game gain cult status from its surreal graphics, wacky humour and homoerotic overtones. The game is essentially a side-scrolling shoot-em-up, where spend much of the game semi-naked, with other semi-naked muscle men, fighting more semi-naked and oiled-up muscle men. There are pyramids of semi-naked men, rocket powered dildos, and an end of level boss that fires a giant man shaped penis out of his robotic cod-piece. You really can't make this stuff up, and that's all just a brief explanation of the weirdness that is Cho Aniki, that actually spawned a whole series of sequels.

The first game debuted in 1992 for the PC Engine system. The game's many sequels and spin-offs later appeared on the Super Famicom, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and PlayStation 2.

The game is an example of what the Japanese refer to as "kuso-ge", meaning "shit game". In fact it's classed as a sub-genre, known as "baka-ge", which translates as "idiot game".

How To Have Cybersex On The Internet!

3/8/2015

This video clip from 1997 first popped its head up on the Weird Wide Web last year. Originally a brilliantly funny instructional video found by the curators of the Found Footage Festival Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, in a Minnesota thrift store, on an old VHS tape. With the bad fashion of the presenter, her sudden unexplained appearance topless, and hysterically delivered dead-pan lines like, "I’ll show you how to reach a cybersex climax. We’ll also visit others who have mastered the art of one-handed typing." It's a gem of a find.

Literally the most unerotic video about sex you may ever see. The delay in her typing, and the response, in typing lines like. "I'm very horny and I'm looking for some good cybersex are you interested?" To which our pervert at the other end of the dial-up connection replies, "Yesssssssssss" is classically creepy 90s chatroom/cybersex foreplay.

Desert Storm: Send Hussein To Hell (1991)

13/7/2015

From the first Gulf War era, comes this jingoistic one shot piece of war propaganda. The comic is a ramped up, pumped-up, version of other military propaganda comics that have been published in the past. Oddly to off-set the over-the-top nonsense of the main story, the back cover features a Rocky and Bulwinkle parody, called "Iraqi and Abdulwinkle"!

Retro Gaming: Action 52 (1991)

1/7/2015

Considered one of the worst ever carts produced for the NES, Action 52 (containing 52 games) was originally released at a storming $199 price tag in 1991. It quickly became absolute proof that more is not better. The unlicensed unlicensed video game compilation was developed by Active Enterprises for the NES, released on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive in 1993, and although advertised, never actually made it onto SNES.

The cartridge was famous for many of the games being heavily bugged, and some that didn't run at all. The company tried to turn the main game Cheetahmen into a franchise, by releasing Cheetahmen 2 as a stand alone game. Unfortunately, that too has since made its way onto many a worst game ever list. Gaining a cult status, as it was never actually released. Although a few copies were leaked in 1996, make it a much sort after piece of vintage gaming history.

Apparently the people at Active Enterprises were even further deluded about the product they were pushing. On the release of Action 52, they proclaimed in press releases that there would be Cheetahmen action figures and even a Cheetahman Saturday morning animation series. Neither of which materialised.

As part of the marketing of Action 52 there was a competition to win $104,000 by completing level 5 of the game Ooze. However, this was later found to be impossible as the carts that had been released at the time crashed after level 2 of that game. The game also actually had 6 levels as opposed to 5, with the ending giving the player a code to send to Active. Needless to say, Active Enterprises never did any more games, and slipped into retro gaming history.

Clowns For Christ!

28/6/2015

The Reverend Floyd T. Shaffer, is a clown for Christ, as part of the Clown Ministry. One of the best known "religious clowns" in the United States, Floyd started clowning in 1969, at the height of the counter-culture movement. He was a Lutheran minister when he first took to clowning, and has actively encouraged others to do the same, with books like his Clown Ministry. He founded Faith and Fantasy, nondenominational clown ministry, which taught students how to choose their clown names and characters, put on make-up and perform. There are students like John Garrett and his wife, who become "Frank and Sense," a sad clown, and his wife becomes "Ariana Springtime" a happy clown.

Apparently the Clown Ministry and Fath and Fantasy, lasted well into the 90s. It must have produced dozens of creepy clowns for Christ over the years. Where they are? Who knows! But there is my favourite clowns for Christ, I came across, not because of Rubbish clown names, or their quite frankly scary make-up (even for clowns). No for their gimmick, or Skipper, the only gospel monkey known. There are levels of wrong, in all of that, to weird to comprehend.

Cult Film Friday: The Tit And The Moon (1994)

19/6/2015

The Tit and the Moon (La Teta y la luna) is a film from 1994. A Spanish/French co-production, directed by Bigas Luna. It stars Mathilda May (the naked vampire alien in Lifeforce from the 1984 Tobe Hopper directed sci-fi horror film) as a Portuguese dancer. A young boy, who resents the arrival of his baby brother, asks moon for a tit that only he can feed from. His obsession with breasts results in him finding Mathilda's character, but she holds the attention of many men in the town. Will the young lad achieve his wish, and have her tits for his own?

The Tit And The Moon is a beautifully told comic story of love and obsession, that carefully finds a balance between comedy, sexual obsession, and the dreams of childhood. Through surreal fantasy sequences, it delicately and irreverently handles its subject matter, creating a gem of a movie that is warm and endearing while playing with eroticism and sexual fantasy.

The film is considered as the final part of Bigas Luna's "Iberian Trilogy" of films, which also include Jamón, Jamón (1992) and Huevos de oro (1993).

Retro Gaming: Bad Day On The Midway

10/5/2015

In 1995 the avant-garde multimedia and music giant eyeball wearing art collective, The Residents brought out a computer game. Bad Day On The Midway is a surreal, dark carnival of a game and multimedia experience. The game was published by inScape, who also published the darkly surreal Edgar Allan Poe game The Dark Eye, also in 1995.

The puzzle based serial killer murder mystery looks like it was spewed from the mind of David Lynch. Lynch was actually on-board at one point to develop the game into a TV series, after Ron Howard bought the rights. You start the game as Timmy, who has skipped violin lessons to go to the Midway. But you soon are able to switch characters, seeing through their eyes, becoming them.

You start the game as Timmy, and young lad who has skipped his violin lesson to go to the Midway. As you play the game, you can switch characters, literally able to see through their eyes, become them. The dated CGI is still creepy, and the characters more so. As embedded in the CGI are real live-action eyes and mouths, just to up the nightmarish quality of the gaming experience. Things twist, turn and randomly happen, and death is almost inevitable, all played out to The Residents soundtrack.

The best way to experience the game, aside from actually playing it, is to watch this video for the games intro. and the accompanying track from The Residents.

Teenage Mutant Ninja (In The UK "Hero") Turtles Watched Through 90s VHS Snow.

27/4/2015

In 1990 they released the eagerly awaited movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Or as it was called in the UK, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Apparently in among those random words being thrown together, "ninja" was way too much for the British censors.

Anyway, as a too old to know better 20 year old, I was a massive turtles fan. I had T-shirts, comic books, figures and all sorts of Turtles related merchandise. I couldn't wait for the movie to hit the cinemas in the UK, so sort out a dodgy bootleg VHS video copy of the movie. And it wasn't before long that some shady geezer offered me a blank tape that he claimed to be a copy of the movie. Of course I snapped his hand off, and ran home to bask in the glory that was the much anticipated Turtles movie experience. Erm... Well I didn't get what I expected.

Now watching bootleg videos through a snow-storm wasn't that unusual in the 80s and 90s. But this, this was a total blizzard. I literally sat through the whole thing, with random turtle like shapes ghosting across the screen, while following the action purely via the soundtrack. Which was surprisingly good. What did I do after it ended? Probably shouted "awesome" and ran around bragging about how I had a bootleg copy of the movie. That people then begged to borrow, and I lent out begrudgingly. How did they react? They reacted by shouting "awesome", and trying to either buy it off me or tape-to-tape copy it with two VHS video recorders wired together... True story... And you try to tell kids today about how a "cam" version of a torrented movie they downloaded off the Weird Wide Web isn't that bad a quality! No chance!

Saturday Morning Mind Control And Church On Sunday Looney Tunes!

26/4/2015

Back in 1980s and 90s, there was a rise in paranoia from the right-wing Christian fundamentalists, that kids TV shows were the work of Satan. That characters like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-Man and the Care Bears were brainwashing kids to fall under Satan's command.

And one the top crazies peddling this utter nonsense was an author called Phil Philips. Who claimed after he "studied over a thousand hours of cartoons", that they were full of occult messages and satanic practices. His book Saturday Morning Mind Control, published in 1991, was just one of fanatic Phil's works of raving religious lunacy. He had previously published Turmoil In The Toybox in 1986, which argued that the Smurfs, He-Man, Care Bears, My Little Pony, Cabbage Patch Kids, Mighty Mouse and Rainbow Bright are all the devil’s toys concocted in the deepest layers of hell to lead our children to doom. (Actually he may have a had point with Cabbage Patch Dolls.)

He followed that up with Halloween And Satanism (1987), then Saturday Morning Mind Control (1991), and finally Dinosaurs: The Bible, Barney, and Beyond (1994). An indictment of the evil nature of the big purple singing and dancing demonic dinosaur.

Turmoil In The Toybox attempts to claim that toy makers purposely use pagan symbolism in toy design. My Little Pony unicorn? Pagan! He-Man? Totally pagan, no question! Yoda and Darth Vader? Big bad pagans! Barbie? A godless pagan worshipping slut! Now rational people can laugh and poke fun at Phil's crazy Christian ravings, but there must be plenty of brainwashed fundamentalists out there who fell for his idiocy. Chucked out all the plastic, turned off the TV and shoved a copy of the Bible in little Johnny's hand. As later copies of Turmoil claimed it had sold over 135,000 copies.

Right-On Race Relations Board Games That Got iT Horribly Wrong.

9/4/2015

Tackling race relations issues through the medium of board games, on the one hand seems a perfectly reasonable if a bit touchy-feely liberal way of educating people about social issues. However on the other hand, it's a potential recipe for cringe inducing disaster. Involving embarrassingly naive stereotypes, there games that have been produced with all the right intentions, but have ended up being nothing short of shocking examples of how something as simplistic as a board game cannot in anyway express the deeply complex issues of race relations, or being part of a ethnic minority group within society.

Life As A Blackman: The Game (1999): Apparently game designer Chuck Sawyer wanted to express through this game his own personal experiences as someone from a minority group, trying to make their way through corporate America. So what do we have? An insight into what it's like to young and black in America? Not quite, it's more a game littered with black conservative Christian stereotypes of African-American culture. Like a Crosby Show reworking of Boyz N The Hood of board games. In the game players must make choices between good and evil, or between the church and a life of crime.

And that's only the start of how "black and white" the attitude of this game is. Players all start as 18 year old black males either in Glamourwood, Black University, the Military, or in the Ghetto. Church provides strength and guidance. Crime has consequences, and while lucrative, it also leads to frequent encounters with police and ultimately, prison. The first person to reach the Freedom space at the top of the board wins. The game attempts to deliver its political message through satire, that falls flat, and just ends up as a litany of racial and social stereotypes. Who the game was supposed to be aimed at is an utter mystery.

Black & Whites (1970): You'd think a game first published in the respected journal Psychology Today in March 1970, would have delivered a carefully considered game with a social conscience. What they actually delivered wasn't a game that helped to create awareness of the divide between blacks and whites, but inadvertently between the haves and have nots, irrespective of race. As blacks are portrayed as stereotypically poor and whites as wealthy, with stock dividends and wads of cash.

Even for the 70s, this game was woefully naive.

The game essentially blamed racial inequality on housing issues and made it impossible to win the game if you chose to play as a black player. Needless to say, it turned out to be one of the most controversial board games of all time and even merited an article in Time magazine: "The game, produced by Psychology Today Games (an off shoot of the magazine) now on sale ($5.95) at major department stores, was developed at the University of California at Davis by Psychology Department Chairman Robert Sommer. It was conceived as a painless way for middle-class whites to experience — and understand — the frustrations of blacks. In Sommer’s version, however, the black player could not win; as a simulation of frustration, the game was too successful. Then David Popoff, a Psychology Today editor, redesigned the game, taking suggestions from militant black members of 'US' in San Diego. The new rules give black players an opportunity to use — and even to beat — the System."