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Manimal vs Automan

Saturday, July 28th, 2018

Back in the early 1980s there seemed no end of genre shows on TV and I watched them all avidly. I didn’t realize it then, but many were created and produced by the same man: Glenn Larson, and he was particularly talented at creating shows that appealed to preteen boys.

In 1983 two of his shows started almost simultaneously: Manimal and Automan. I loved both at the time and remembered them fondly for decades. After being unavailable for many years, both recently received DVD collections and last week we binged them both.

Since they were produced by the same man at the same time, and shared writers and themes and screened more or less simultaneously, it seems appropriate to compare them. So which is better? Let’s see…

Minimal tells the story of Dr Jonathan Chase, wealthy English guy who can shape shift into any (?) animal. Naturally he uses his powers to solve crimes, and in the 8 episodes of the series thwarts the plans of the usual gangs of mobsters, industrialists, Kung fu bad guys and even nazis.

Chase is basically James Bond with the gadgets replaced with animal transformations. As the central gimmick of the show it is used frequently, only it is rarely necessary to the story and never pivotal. He could just as easily – and effectively – been an undercover MI5 agent (for instance).

After an overlong and weak pilot the show is quite charming and we enjoyed every episode. While it’s never explained where his powers come from – and in fact they’re rarely discussed at all – we do see Chase change into a large variety of beasts from cats to snakes to sharks to an elephant! The special effects were good in the day, and while poor are not distractingly so. The acting is very ’80s genre drama’ but still enjoyable.

Manimal was canceled due to poor ratings but as I said is a fun show. I think this one failed mostly because of its time slot and not due to inherent weakness in the production. I know as a kid I loved it and now I remember why!

Automan tells the story of programmer/policeman Walter Nebicher who creates a ‘holographic’ man named Automan (since he’s an ‘automatic man’). Automan has frankly ludicrous powers to essentially alter reality and is in essence a superhero. Naturally he uses his powers to assist Walter in fighting crime!

Automan was basically Tron on TV. The effects – which still impress today – boggled minds back in 1983 and was a factor in the shows huge success. Secondary to this were the fun stories (involving mobsters, industrialists, evil bikers, hackers etc.) and the likable characters. As a kid I loved watching Automan use his insane vehicles and powers to catch the bad guys, and I have to say it holds up well.

Automan only lasted one season (13 episodes). While it was a big success it was canceled apparently due to extremely high for the time production costs. Another blow to my preteen heart!

Both shows are good. Both were fun and I dare say we would have liked more episodes of each. But which is best? Let’s compare the three strengths of each:

Manimal

Better lead character (Chase vs Walter)
Cuter girls (a new one every week!)
Impressive (but disturbing) transformation sequences

Automan

Amazing special effects
Ridiculous superhero powers
Funnier by far (Automan is friends with ‘Zaxxon’)

The winner is… Automan! Of course it always was going to be, because the Tron influence coupled with a relatable superhero is an irresistible combination and one that I’m surprised hasn’t been reprised since.

Watch them both though; they’re great!

Posted in Retro, Time, TV | Comments Closed

Air Port Panic

Sunday, July 8th, 2018

In Inverness, a quick search on the information superhighway led me to a used game shop only a few hops and skips away from where we were staying. Of course we wandered over, and found a most intriguing and messy little shop full of records and games.The walls were decorated with album sleeves, mostly examples of 1970s Top Of The Pops ‘cover girl’ compilations like this:

There were loads of records and singles, and even a few cassettes. Disorder was the name of the game, and actually finding anything specific would have been a matter of luck. And yet I reckoned there were treasures in the boxes, and had I not been overseas I may have dug a bit through the vinyl.

Happily the games were sorted, but unfortunately 99% of them were 16 bit or older. I spied a few old Spectrum and CPC computer games, and may have even purchased them if they hadn’t been lacking their sleeves. There were no signs of actual 8-bit computers, or magazines from the 1980s. It looked like I would depart without making a purchase.

And then I saw this:

Its an LCD handheld from 1982! The last game in Bandai’s LCD Solarpower series to be precise, and one of the very few released outside of Japan. I’d never heard of this series of games before, and was intrigued to find that they rely completely on solar power to run.

The Japanese box (mine didn’t come with the box) also shows how it has two layered screens for a very subtle 3D effect. This works well and makes the screens look busier than in the Game & Watch units from Nintendo.Unfortunately the technology requires actual solar power, and doesn’t function at all under artificial lighting!

Furthermore, it’s incredibly difficult to get good photos due to how reflective the screen is, but here’s my best attempts:

Air Port Panic is ridiculously difficult to the point where I suspect it’s slightly buggy. The action seems to lag the processor slightly and you seem to die moments before being hit by a projectile. But this can be accounted for somewhat, and success – reaching the hijacked plane in screen one and reaching the terrorists in screen two can be achieved with practice.

Sadky it’s not much fun, and not just because of the stupid difficulty. You also need to be standing in direct sunlight to play, and even then can hardly see the screen. I can see – impressive tech aside – why Bandai didn’t beat Nintendo in the early 80s handheld wars 🙂

I paid a mere £15 for this gem, which is considerably less than I see then for on eBay. As a game I’ll rarely return to it, but as another for the collection it was a happy find!

Posted in Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Music, Otaku, Retro, Tech | Comments Closed

In The Cards

Sunday, May 6th, 2018

I found this at Walmart last week:

‘New low price!’ meant $10, and of course I bought it. Twenty packs for that price was a steal, or seemed that way before I knew what it contained…

Here’s the contents:

Interesting mix. 11 different sets, including 4 packs of collectible card game cards. Nothing newer than 10 years, one of set (Anastasia) 24 years old! I’m guessing these have been in a warehouse a long time…

So let’s examine these in detail:

The Power Rangers cards are based on the film and are pretty boring. The plus is that each pack has a foil card, but the minus is that those foils are awful. Each card also has a strange Amerocentric trivia question on the back like this:

Can you get it without decoding the answer?

The X-Men cards have awful art, from the early days of computer-aided colouring. The less said about these the better. But what’s this on the wrapper…?

Each pack has an entry form for a contest to win a baseball card (then) worth $451k! Wikipedia informs me this card was indeed won, sold shortly afterwards for $641k and is now valued at $2.8 million!

The Anastasia cards are pretty normal for an animated film. I got one chase card (cut into an unusual shape as you can see). I’m pretty sure I’ve got packs of these in other boxes like these in the past so I’m guessing they were overprinted and undersold!

The Panda cards are unremarkable, but I got this flashy monkey card that will make a great Xmas gift for Bernard. And I also got this badass tattoo:

Fear the Fur indeed!!

The game cards are mostly garbage – useless cards from unwanted expansions for forgotten games no one played. But I got a rare token (?) from The Simpsons and some crazy gold Power Rangers card so that was good?

I’ve not seen Igor or Despereaux and judging by the cards I don’t want to! They’re uniformly brown for starters, and both seem to have uninteresting and somewhat ugly design. At least I got another chase in my Igor pack – and a Despereaux sticker that will no doubt end up on a postcard 🙂

Which brings me finally to the Space Jam cards. Again I’ve never seen the film, and frankly have always thought it’s probably awful, but take a close look at that card, specifically the bottom right corner…

Yes that’s a scratch-off panel!

My card may be a Grand Prize winner! I may have won a trip to Hollywood! It’s a shame it expired 21.5 years ago… but I’m still interested if I won? Should I scratch it off?

So that’s that! Worth $10 do you think? Or were these better left in the warehouse?

Posted in Collecting, Retro, Trading Cards | 2 Comments »

Videogaming Illustrated (Issue 4, Feb 1983)

Sunday, April 8th, 2018

At a convention a few weeks ago for the princely sum of $5 I bought this:

It’s one of the very earliest video game magazines, dating to before the ‘crash of 1983’. It’s from the same publisher of the old sci-fi magazine Omni, and the format is very similar (silver pages, yellow pages with fiction, somewhat pretentious tone).

This was very much a magazine without an audience. The inclusion of fiction, the monthly news round up heavy on business content and the (repulsive) interview with Don Imus suggests they were going for the Playboy approach. So much so I’m surprised there’s no cheesecake photos!

That said it’s also an interesting curio from the earliest days of my favourite hobby! For instance I was surprised by the lavish adverts for Atari 2600 games:

(By the way I’m ripping off Ashens here and taking photos of the magazine on a couch rather than scanning it. Hey I’m lazy!)

And the lengthy strategy sections – which take up a decent amount of the magazine and cover arcade and 2600 games – are charmingly low-tech:

The middle one is a four page guide to the arcade game Kangaroo which was probably mostly forgotten even when this issue shipped!

There’s also a guide to third-party 2600 joysticks, a lengthy but superficial article about pinball machines, too much fiction and a lot of uninteresting (even then I suspect) ‘monthly news’.

What isn’t well-represented though are advertisements. I’ve shown some above, but there are very few in total and many of them are clearly there as part of some paid-content promotion:

That’s just one of two ads for Cosmic Creeps, an Atari 2600 game profiled and given a strategy guide in this very issue…

The other element common to today’s magazines that is almost entirely absent are screenshots! In fact, in the entire issue, there is a grand total on one real shot (as opposed to drawings of the screen) and this is it:

Can you name the game? (And yes, I suspect it may also be fake…)

Anyway this mag was sold at the con by a guy who flogs old magazines of many kinds, and at the same time I got some very old Dr Who magazines as well as a bunch of cheesecake horror mags. Why was he selling this one issue of a 35 year old gaming magazine? The cover!! It features a preview of sorts of Revenge Of The Jedi (tied to an article about the 2600 Jedi Arena) which includes this gem:

It was all mostly true, if a bit off with the date estimates!

Anyway a curio from the dawn of gaming time. This magazine would run another year and change names twice before becoming another victim of the crash that almost sunk the US industry, but from what I see here I struggle to wonder who bought it even then?

Posted in Games, Movies, Retro, Tech, Time | 1 Comment »

Buried Treasure

Thursday, March 22nd, 2018

Last year I went on an expedition into a tomb that had been sealed for decades: a crawlspace upstairs in J & J’s house. I found some startling things in there, mostly in great condition, and one of the most remarkable was this:

The Game Of Time And Space eh? This beauty was published way back in 1980, and is a board game made for and by ‘anoraks’. Back then I would have loved it!

Here’s what it says on the back:

Note that the complexity claims to tend low…

The game includes a big board, some boring plastic pieces (instead of cardboard versions of The Doctors?) and loads of cardboard tokens.

Here’s the board:

And a closeup of a very fanciful depiction of Gallifrey:

And here’s a selection of tokens:

Gameplay is a little like Dungeon and consists of the player moving around the board trying to find several treasures which are initially face-down and often protected by monsters. A selection of items can assist with movement, combat etc. and once the player has the pieces he is after he returns to Gallifrey to win.

A read of the rules seems to contradict the summary on the back: this game seems overly complex and tedious to play. I couldn’t convince KLS to have a go, but I imagine the item wrangling and large variety of rules does not a quick-and-easy game make.

Look at this quick reference rulebook for instance, which every player gets a copy of for reference:

As I said, by nerds for nerds 🙂

It’s also got very little to do with Doctor Who, in the sense you could easily change some names and art and the game would be the same. Shouldn’t time travel or regeneration been themes?

One day I’ll play this, and possible I’ll update when I do. But for me it’s an ancient and treasured part ‘of the collection’!

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Time | 1 Comment »

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