Power On!

"The world is in transition! When I am finished, it will be a model of mechanical perfection!"

—Lord Dread

Note: The fanfic is strong with this one.

Sometimes you unearth a gem from childhood that shines every bit as brightly as an evergreen tree plugged into a smoking wall socket around Christmas time, promising that, soon—maybe in the middle of the night—fire will engulf your domicile, consume your sleeping form, and render you a blackened, truncated corpse lying on a mortuary slab in Muncie, Indiana. With a stupid grin on your extra-crispy kisser.

Okay, maybe that isn't where I was going, or intending to go, but we got there. But let's backtrack. I got just two words for you, Bubba-Lou, and them words are: POWER ON!

Oh gawd, Power ahhhhn! I think I'm gonna... ah, ah, ah! Gimme power, baby!

I'm talking Captain Power, baby. And them "Soldiers of the Future." Major Hawk, Lieutenant Tank, Sgt. Scout, and the hotsy-totsy sexpot of the bunch: Cpl. Jennifer "Pilot" Chase. (I'd like to do some chasin'...)

Oh, never mind.

I like how her name is a sort of play on pilots chasing each other.

They were the lifesized action-figure ensemble who battled the Bio-Mechs of Lord Dread (real name: Lyman Taggart, portrayed by the late David Hemblen), who emerged from his Harkonnenesque secret fortress of Volcania in the war-ravaged world of 2122, or thereabouts, when "machine fought man—and machine won!" The Soldiers of the Future were a comic-book cadre cum toy commercial who starred in a show universally panned as a hyper-violent... toy commercial. The show used some pretty cool television-box-variety 1987 special effects and weird blinking light toy-interactive images to create a very primitive play experience, wherein young kids with the battery-operated spaceship toy could shoot at the f-cking screen like lone nuts and—blammo!—hit the bad guys. And they would hear some beeps and shit from the toy spaceship/gun/active first-person shooter training device.

But the catch was that the guys on the screen could shoot back. I think. Or maybe it was that if they missed, the toy racked it up and eventually the Soldier of the Future Captain Power action man would be ejected and die on mom's carpet. (Bad, because you know, Buddy-Roe, she just got that sucker steam-cleaned.)

Lord Dread was a sort of proto-Borg (the show's chief writer was J. Michael Straczynski, who helmed him some "Babylon 5," eventually), and the sci-fi tropes list is rather long: post-apocalypse, renegade AI, heroic superheroes and villainous robot baddies, a flying CGI pterodactyl-man named "Soaron" who is a little like Starscream with less charm, and so on. The Captain Power show, besides having a very, very jank title (someone once said it was the all-time worst for this sort of thing), also raised red flags with concerned moms groups due to the fact that (and I quote someone from somewhere): "The point of that show is violence." I would argue that, no, lady, the point of this show is to SELL TOYS. We call it capitalism, dig? But I doubt my counter-argument would have carried much weight.

But in all of its 22 episodes, Captain Power (played by the incredibly tall, gangling former "A-Team" member Tim Dunigan) unspooled an epic of simple-minded sci-fi comic-book action so infectiously and incredibly entertaining it makes me want to be twice as much the fat and pathetic comic-book and horror-movie geek I already am. It pioneered CGI in the form of Soaron, and the sets and combat and all of it—while claustrophobically fake, insofar as we never get the impression we are far outside the confines of a studio set—are still great, with a classic look and feel to them.

And the stories, sandwiched as they were between an obligatory five-minute "interactive" sequence and the requisite violent action-figure-fighting-man exposition combat sequences (against masked metaloid Bio-Mechs, and everyone wielding the de rigueur laser blasters), were pretty tough. In episode one, "Shattered," Captain Jonathan receives a message from an old flame in the ruins of San-Fran (they visit a post-apocalyptic City Lights Bookstore), and something or other has to be stopped by the Power Team (who hole up in Power Base, which I think is in the Rocky Mountains) so she won't be digitized and end up in Lord Dread's demonic AI "Overmind." In between, dudes like Major Matthew "Hawk" Masterson (Peter MacNeill) and Lieutenant Michael "Tank" Ellis (Sven-Ole Thorsen, Danish actor and strongman competition winner) fly around against a phony bluescreened sky, while Sgt. Robert "Scout" Baker (Maurice Dean Wint, who does kind of a holographic chameleon thing with his power suit) and Cpl. Jennifer "Pilot" Chase (Jessica Steen) run around in the "Jump Ship" and fly around on Judge Dredd hover bikes, and Captain Power (whose superpower I'm a little vague on) begins each show in profile before turning to the camera and going "Power on!"

His father Dr. Stuart Gordon Power (actor Bruce Gray, preserved as the Power Team's AI construct "Mentor") created the power suits, and his mommy was revealed to be having an affair with Lyman Taggart, who became Lord Dread when the AI robots won the "Apocalypse War and Mega City was bombed to the floor!" (Little Anthrax reference.)

At any rate, there was a sci-fi story arc there created by Straczynski and the writers who genuinely thought they had been hired to write an actual television series. This created a rift with Mattel apparently, whose main purpose was to promote and sell their toyline in the most vulgar, exploitative way possible. And on the other side of that, morality watchdog hysterics panicked over the very violent nature of the shows which, at any rate, never could find an adequate market or time slot in syndication. The toy sales were underwhelming, and Mattel decided to scrap the whole project, leaving El Capitan and his troops of tomorrow with their heavy-metal death rays a-danglin'.

And Straczynski had a whole season 2 already planned out! With an apocalyptic Lord Dread plotting the extermination, digitizing, and reconstruction of the human race via "Project New Order" (the phases of which all had names like "Prometheus," "Charon," etc.). Captain Power was one of the most groundbreaking excuses for violence and destruction (which, on the whole, is what audiences want) in the children's entertainment market… like, well, like ever, dude!

I remember it vaguely, walking around the pea-soup-and-puke-green trailer I lived in with my mom in 1987. It aired a few times, and I didn't pay a lot of attention to it because my Captain Power jet always malfunctioned, and never did I really seem to get a "hit" on the little glowing squares on the Bio-Mech armored suits. A few rounds of this, an eleven-year-old moves on to something else.

But 38 years later, I'm hooked, like only a fat, bespectacled comic-book and horror-movie sci-fi nerd can be on his tearful trip down the nostalgic hell that leads from wonderland dreams of tabletop fantasy and adventure to a ho-hum existence remembering the days when he could still imagine visiting a strange futuristic world, and killing anything that moved.

Of such innocence is wonderment born.

Power off.

Trivia: The short-lived Captain Power comic book series, which I would kill a Bio-Mech to get my hands on, was written by none other than Neal Adams. Yeah.

Captain Power HD

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1

Ebook

Print

My book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels.

Ebook (Itch.io)

Print