Gladiators

Before X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, before even Stephen Mulhern’s Animals Do The Funniest Things, Saturday nights on ITV were ruled by one show – Gladiators.

Every Saturday evening, families across the nation would sit down with a plate of oven chips and watch the lycra-clad likes of Hunter, Falcon, Jet and Panther slug it out with members of the public at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham.

The show comprised of a series of challenges, undertaken by fitness fanatics from around the UK. So you’d have Greg, an IT consultant from Milton Keynes battling Rhino – a man actually wider than he was tall – by bouncing around on giant elastic bungee ropes, smashing each other offer pedestals with massive foam sticks or racing up climbing walls.

The best Gladiator was Wolf. Wolf was in fact a 57 year old homeless man pulled off the streets at the last minute by London Weekend Television producers, desperate for someone to play the bad guy. Wolf was a pantomime villain, all straggly hair and crazy eyes.

Supposed to be terrifying, he was by far the least frightening Gladiator, and you could see the contestants visibly draw a sigh of relief if he was their chosen opponent. Only Shadow actually looked like he might actually be taking the whole thing completely seriously and could possibly kill a contestant

The whole thing was hosted perkily by Ulrika Johnson and John ‘Fash’ Fashanu, but referee John Anderson had the catchphrase– shouting ‘Contestant, Ready! Gladiator, Ready!’ in his broad Scottish accent before blowing his whistle loudly.

The big finale was a race between the two contestants through the ominously named The Eliminator– basically a big assault course over various crash mats and monkey bars. The Eliminator ended with possibly the most tortuous device ever created – The Travelator. Essentially one of those moving walkways you get at the airport, only risen by 45 degrees and going backwards, it had the power to sap any remaining ounce of remaining energy from an already exhausted contestant. Every week, you could guarantee at least three minutes of joy, laughing as a contestant tried in vain to jog up it, their legs going nine to the dozen, but getting nowhere. If someone did manage to run up the Travelator, their reward was getting to jump spectacularly through a piece of paper and have a sweaty chat with Ulrika. There must have been some sort of prize, but I can’t remember what it was. Perhaps a sweaty chat with Ulrika was enough.

The show was incredibly popular, turning the phrase ‘pugel sticks’ a household phrase and catapulting the muscle-bound Gladiators into superstars. Kids would watch for the sub-WWF style pantomime, while the Dads could enjoy the glamorous delights of female Gladiators like Jet and Lightning. Sky1 re-made Gladiators a couple of years ago, but it’s time had passed. It’s real successor is the BBC’s Total Wipeout – essentially Gladiators without the Gladiators – and that, my friends, is what is called missing the point.

Transformers

Picture the scene. A school assembly circa 1986. One sentence is whispered across the hall.

“Megatron is dead.”

No.

You are joking.

But how? He’s too powerful! It CAN’T be true.

But it was true. Megatron, evil leader of the Decepticons, had finally been defeated by his nemesis Optimus Prime.*

In the world of Transformers, this was like JR getting shot, Dirty Den divorcing Angie or Simon Groom leaving Blue Peter. In other words, it was MASSIVE.

Remember the boardroom scene in Big when Tom Hanks comes up with the idea of a robot that turns into a giant bug? Somewhere, sometime in the Eighties, in some Hasbro office in California, that happened for real. Some genius came up with an idea so devastatingly simple, it changed toys forever:

Kids like robots. Kids like cars. SO WHAT ABOUT A ROBOT THAT IS ALSO A CAR?

It’s probably the best idea of all time. Better than the egg cup, better than chocolate covered pretzels and much better than boring rubbish like Action Man (not a robot, couldn’t change into a car) and Star Wars figures. (Some robots, no cars).

And so in 1984 Transformers were born. Plastic cars that with a flick of the thumb would become robotic warriors from the planet Cybertron. What kid wouldn’t want to play with that? Okay, so while the vehicles looked alright, you’d usually end up with a slightly dodgy looking robot with a tyre for a head and a hubcab for an arm. That didn’t matter though. The sheer concept of a robot that was also a car was so brilliant that it was hard to believe such a thing could really exist.

But now they did exist and you could buy them for less than a tenner.

While Megatron had by far the best name of all the Transformers, he had the worst transformation. He transformed into a gun. Bear in mind that Megatron could fire lasers out of his hands when in robot form, but he still chose to bizarrely transform into a gigantic Walther P38 pistol. (In the cartoon, the gun would magically shrink so one of the other transformers (who could also shoot lasers anyway!!!) could hold it.)

So basically Megatron was completely useless, but that didn’t matter cos as well as cars and robots, kids also liked playing with toy guns.

The Autobots had leader Optimus Prime, a big red truck, and his buddy Bumblebee, a little yellow Beetle. The Decepticons had Megatron of course, and others like StarScream (a jet) and Soundwave (a cassette tape (below). YES YOU READ THAT RIGHT - A CASSETTE TAPE. He wasn’t so fun to play with as the big gun). However, showing the popularity of the show still to this day, a few years ago Hasbro reissued Soundwave in an updated Mp3 player version!

The idea was that they could wage their war in secret by disguising themselves as ‘earth vehicles’. Except they were transforming pretty much all the time into giant massive robots and beating the crap out of each other.

Once the cartoon spin-off started on telly, Transformers was all anyone ever talked about ever. It was the only TV show ever where the opening titles seemed longer than the actual cartoon itself. In it, the robots constantly shot lasers at each other for a good two minutes while a scary robot sings the theme tune. It’s like a horrible Haribo-induced nightmare and must have terrified parents across the country.

Of course now, 25 odd years later, we have the big budget live action films that have already grossed 27 billion dollars, and a new load of Transformer toys.

It just goes to prove that good ideas last.

*Don’t panic robot fans – it turned out Megatron didn’t actually die, he was merely ‘upgraded’ into the equally evil Galvatron by the all-powerful Unicorn. Phew!

Green Lantern

Superhero movies are like sharks – if they stop moving, they die. Ok, maybe not exactly like sharks. But in a movie like Green Lantern, if the audience is given too much time to realise quite how silly what they’re watching is, then they’ll give up.

Despite having fighting purple aliens, making giant fists out of magic rings and a phobia of the colour yellow, everything in Green Lantern feels flat.

An adaptation of the DC comic, Green Lantern is the story of jet fighter pilot Hal Jordan, who reluctantly takes the place of Earth's protector as part of the Green Lantern Corps, a team of intergalactic space cops.

After a good set up, Green Lantern seems like it has all the ingredients, but ultimately spends too much time faffing about with Jordan's dull love life and boring baddies.

Ryan Reynolds is likeable enough as the man in the horrible CGI green tights, but his slacker superhero seems as bored with the whole thing as we are. Basically Top Gun’s Maverick in Space, he’s no different than cinema's countless other lovable rogues who come good in the end.

The one thing that does set Green Lantern apart from say, Superman or Thor, is his power-ring's unique ability to create whatever objects he can imagine - a race car to rescue an out of control helicopter, water to soften the landing of a falling damsel in distress or a brick wall to hide behind. This means Green Lantern has to out think his enemies, rather than just BIFF POW his way out of danger.

But sequences like this, and Hal's Green Lantern training on their home planet, which should have been fun are cut short in favour of lengthy chats between his tough guy boss Sinestro and six funny blue people who sit on massive pillars.

Add to this a very ineffectual villain in Peter Sarsgaard's mutated mad scientist Hector Hammond, and you've got a bona fide snooze-fest.


Green Lantern always never rises above ordinary, and seems satisified with that, almost as if it’s bored with itself. It has the audience in its grasp, but never goes in for the kill.

And that's something you could never say about a shark.

Dungeons and Dragons

The opening titles of Dungeons & Dragons were genuinely terrifying.

As eerie fairground music tinkles in the background, a group of kids take a ride on a ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ rollercoaster. Suddenly, they’re whisked into a nightmarish dimension where they’re immediately charged by a fire breathing five headed dragon.

Luckily, they’re quickly assisted by the Dungeon Master – imagine a sort of squashed Ross Kemp with Jimmy Saville’s hair – who gives each of them a magical weapon and a new job title.

There’s Hank, the Ranger and the gang’s leader, Shelia, who had a cloak that made her invisible, and a massive crush on Hank, and her kid brother, Bobby, the Barbarian. Then there was Presto, the rubbish Magician and Diana, the Acrobat, whose magically super weapon was basically, a stick. And not forgetting the best character, Eric, the Cavalier – a total sh*t, but also the only one who echoed what we were all thinking watching at home, that the whole thing was completely unfair.

Each episode would see the gang try to locate a portal that would take them back to the real world. Invariably, they’d battle their arch foe, the demon-like Venger, before getting within inches of a portal that offered a tantalising but unreachable glimpse of the theme park, filled with sunshine and happy children eating candyfloss.
Of course, they never made it through.

Usually this was thanks to Uni, Bobby’s squeaking pet unicorn and probably the single most annoying cute sidekick in a cartoon series ever. Almost every episode the gang’s attempt to get back home was ruined by Uni getting her horn stuck in a bush or something.

Most episodes found the group trying their best to put on a brave face as they climbed some impossibly harsh rock face or trekking across a never-ending ice-field before Dungeon Master popped up to set them their task.

You could almost hear a nation of kids screaming as he delivered his infuriatingly ambiguous riddle that was supposed to lead the gang home. In fact, this feeling was, once again, regularly voiced by super-cynical Eric, who was the only character who seemed to recognise how ridiculous the situation was.

Most of us were just praying for the episode where Eric finally lost it and spent the remaining 15 minutes of the show repeatedly punching Dungeon Master in the face while shouting ‘JUST TELL US WHERE THE *$%^$% PORTAL IS YOU BALD HEADED LITTLE S@*T’ and then drop-kicking Uni off a cliff.


The sense of hopelessness I felt as a child watching Dungeons & Dragons has never left me. There weren’t many cartoons where the lead characters were almost exclusively miserable – hounded around an inhospitable landscape by a one-horned bastard and continually ridiculed by a wizened old man with a potato face.
So genuinely did I want those poor kids to get home to their parents, I would have gladly accepted that it meant the end of the show. The saddest thing of all though, is that they never did get back home. The show was cancelled in the middle of its third series, leaving the kids stranded forever. (If they ever did get back though, they could’ve sued that theme park for millions…)

KNIGHT RIDER

Imagine this day at the office – you’re an undercover cop, just going about your business when you’re shot in the face by a ne’er-do-well. When you wake up, some bastard has reconstructed your face so you look like David Hasselhoff. Then, while you’ll still reeling from that horrible news, they give you a talking car.

So, you’ve got a super intelligent car that can drive itself, but you also have David Hasselhoff’s face. Swings and Roundabouts.

Anyway, that’s the set-up for Knight Rider (1982-1986). The aforementioned bastard was Wilton Knight, founded of FLAG (Foundation for Law and Government) and after he pops his clogs in the pilot episode, it’s up to Irish smoothie Devon Miles to send Michael (Hasselhoff) and KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) on crime-busting missions.

In the days before SatNav, a talking car was something of a novelty, and someone thought it might be a good idea to base a whole TV show on one. But KITT (effeminately voiced by William Daniels, later to become Mr Feany from Boy Meets World) did more than direct you the wrong way off the A11 – he was a crime fighting car! A jet-black Pontiac Trans Am with a red pulsating scanner at the front, KITT was every man’s dream car.

Meanwhile, Michael Knight was every woman’s dream man. Leather jacket, perm, a way with the ladies. That’s why FLAG had to give him a gay car, just to temper his extreme manliness a bit. (KITT and Michael always had some affectionate banter going on in-between missions – they were definitely flirting.)

Wow. So many questions. How does the car drive himself? Could anyone just put the handbrake on and render him useless? What sort of a name is Wilton?
Don’t worry, everything was explained in the opening narration. It went like this:

A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in the world of criminals who operate above the law…Michael Knight. A lone crusader in a dangerous world. The world… of the Knight Rider.



Sounds exciting doesn’t it? It was a pity then, that every episode pretty much followed the same basic formula of similar 80s shows like Street Hawk, Airwolf and the A-Team.



In Knight Rider, Devon would send Michael to help out a poor community that was being bothered by hoodlums/mobsters/evil business men. A car chase would be shoe-horned in, and Michael would have a fist fight with somebody. (The community would also include at least one attractive twenty something woman for Michael to snog/save from certain death.)

There were some exceptions to the formula though, like when Michael’s evil twin Gareth turned up in a big truck. (Also played by Hasselhoff, he looked exactly the same as Michael but with a moustache – all evil people have moustaches.) And sometimes, if you were lucky, the episode would feature a bit where Michael put KITT into TURBO BOOST mode. This basically meant KITT went a bit faster, but it was very exciting.

The producers obviously had fun trying to get the word ‘Knight’ into as many episode titles as possible. Over four seasons, they included: Knight Moves, Knightmares, Knight in Shining Armour, A Good Knight’s Work, Halloween Knight, Knight of the and Chameleon, Knight of the Rising Sun, Fright Knight and my favourite, Deadly Knightshade (which has nothing whatsoever to do with nightshade, it was just another chance to shoe-horn their favourite pun into a meaningless phrase)

There were some rubbish Nineties versions of Knight Rider – something called Knight Rider 2000 and Team Knight Rider, but they were even more boring that the original and no one liked them. Hasselhoff went on to be a pervy lifeguard before becoming the second worst judge on Britain’s Got Talent. KITT ended up dispensing wise advice to Cory and Tapanga.

But Knight Rider remains fondly remembered by all who saw it. And be honest, who hasn’t shouted ‘Let’s go KITT!’ to their dashboard, pressed the air con button and pretended it’s a TURBO BOOST while no one’s looking?

X MEN: FIRST CLASS

Ever wondered what Professor X and Magento were like when they were young? No me neither.

Well they've made X-Men: First Class anyway - it's a prequel to the X-Men movies of the 2000s, set in the 1960s during the Cuban missile crisis.

Young Charles (Professor X) is a little toff who goes off to Oxford, while young Erik (Magneto) is really angry about an evil Nazi (Kevin Bacon) who killed his mum. At one point he's so angry he throws a coin at a terrible pencil drawing of Kevin Bacon's face. I don't know where he got the drawing from, but it looks like he paid one of those rubbish caricaturists in Leicester Square 10 euros for it

(Charles can read minds - BUT only when he puts two fingers on his left temple.
In one part of the film he had to read someone's mind secretly so has to pretend to be putting his head in hands - that fools them! However, this means you could easily defeat Prof X - the world's most powerful psychic remember - by just tying his hands behind his back.)

They're brought together by the C.I.A. who co-opt the gang to help round up some more mutants and then go after Kevin Bacon.

Somehow Kevin had become young and American and changed his name to Sebastian Shaw. He's got nice hair and is the leader of the Hellfire Club - a bunch of bad mutants who want to trick the US and Russia into starting a nuclear war and wiping out human life. Then Kevin can rule over the world! Sadly the world will then be a pile of radioactive rubbish and not really worth ruling. BUT DON'T WORRY ABOUT THAT.

Luckily Kevin has got a special metal hat that stops anyone reading his brain, so again Charles' power is rendered completely useless.

There are two excellent montage sequences in X-Men: First Class. One where Charles and Erik ponce around the world rounding up mutants for their team to the sound of some Sixties jazz-funk. They are:

Darwin - his body will adapt to any envirnoment. He uses it to stick his head in a fish tank and to turn into rock when someone hits him with a stick. THEN HE DIES.

Angel - she's got a magic tatoo that turns into butterfly wings so she can fly(And she can also spit balls of fire from her mouth)

Havoc - fires boring energy from his chest. Mostly useless. When will they learn that energy based mutant powers ARE BORING.

Mystique - can change her appearance to look like anything. She uses this power ONCE in the film against the bad guys. The rest of the time she just turns blue, then fleshy, then blue again.

Banshee - he can scream loudly - and fly too but only when wearing his flappy costume. If it gets ripped, then he just goes back to screaming loudly again. LIKE A BIG BABY.

Beast - got big feet. At one point Beast actually says the immortal line: 'But will the world ever be able to accept my big feet?'. Listen, his big feet are pretty big and not very attractive, but I reckon the world probably would accept his big feet. One of his mates can turn into a fish, but he's more worried about having big feet.

In the second montage, Charles trains all the X-Men to use their powers. Beast runs round the block, Havoc sets fire to a mannequin, Mystique just turns blue again and Magneto makes a satalitte dish turn round. Great for getting a better reception for Sky Sports but quite useless for preventing WWIII.

In the end all the good mutants and the evil mutants and the US/Russian armies have a big stand-off. Erik nicks Kevin Bacon's special hat, ditches Charles and buggers off with all the best mutants. THE END. (Or is it?)

So basically First Class is a bit like a remake of the first X-Men film, if you subsitute Wolverine (the angry, revenge seeking mutant that's hard to control) for Erik, and Sebastian Shaw (the evil, human-hating mutant with designs on world domination) for Magneto. Add in Mystique as the Rogue analouge, and it's pretty much the same film but this time they only spent 2p on the special effects.

X-Men: First Class is alright - I will award it 4 out of 7.

HE-MAN

He-Man was the perfect man – big muscles, tall and healthy with lovely long blond hair. That’s what every 80s schoolboy looked for in their heroes right? Oh, no sorry, that was Hitler.

(There’s an urban myth that He-Man started life as a toy-range spun off from the then forthcoming Conan the Barbarian film. When Conan turned out to be a violent 18 certificate, Mattel re-jigged the concept into kid friendly He-Man. With the toy moulds already cast, they simply changed the lead figure’s brown hair to blond. This at least goes someway in explaining He-Man’s revolting golden mullet.)

Masters of the Universe was basically a half hour commercial for the Mattel toy-line - rubbish animation and repetitive plots designed to trick kids into buying the plastic dolls like Ram-Man (whose special power was head butting things), MekaNeck (special power – extra long neck) and best of all Buzz-Off (special power – he was a bee).

Every episode began with Prince Adam, (AKA He-Man), explaining the premise of the show: Basically, he had been gifted magical powers by a woman dressed as a bird in order to defend a big castle that looked like a skeleton for his arch-enemy, Skeletor. (Why does He-Man’s house looked exactly like his worst enemy? If I was Skeletor, I’d take one look at Castle Grayskull and think I had a pretty good claim to it.)

He-Man made even less effort to hide his secret identity than Superman. I’m amazed no one on Eternia ever figured it out. Here are three tell-tale signs that He-Man is really cowardly Prince Adam.

1.Prince Adam looks exactly the same as He Man. At least Clark Kent had the decency to take his glasses off, Adam just whips off his shirt. Lazy.

(NOTE THE MOST CUNNING PART OF PRINCE ADAM'S DISGUISE HERE - HIS PENCHANT FOR PASTEL COLOURS - FURRY LILAC PANTS WITH A NATTY PINK WAISTCOAT - NO ONE WOULD SUSPECT HE-MAN OF EVER WEARING THESE CLOTHES)

2.Price Adam has a massive yellow and green striped pet tiger. He-Man has a massive yellow and green striped tiger. Just how many massive green and yellow striped tigers are there on Eternia? I never saw anyone else with one. At least when Cringer changed into Battlecat he bothered to put on a mask.

3.As explained in the intro, Adam has entrusted his true identity to just a few selected people – first, his mystical guide the Sorceress, then his trustworthy best friend Man-At-Arms. But why stop there? Why not let it slip to Orko, a bungling idiot-wizard from the planet Trolla? He sounds like the type to keep a secret. Good thinking He-Man.

Never the less, Skeletor remained clueless as to He-Man’s true identity. Maybe that was because Skeletor DIDN’T HAVE ANY EYES. Or really even a proper face for that matter.

One of the scariest children’s cartoon characters ever created (followed by Mumm-Ra the Ever Living and the gay skeleton out of SuperTed), Skeletor’s hooded skull-face was genuinely terrifying. Like He-Man, he surrounded himself with various hench-men such as the vaguely rude sounding Fisto, Stinkor and Fakor, and his horrifying face didn’t stop him having a girlfriend either – the glamorous Evil-Lyn. (He'd just broken up with Slightly-naughty-Janet).

Almost every single episode of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe featured Skeletor trying to capture Castle Grayskull and/or He-Man’s Power Sword. Then, at the end of every show, He-Man would pop up again to share a moral completely unrelated to the story, such as ‘don’t eat too many sweets’ or ‘be nice to your mum’. This was hard to take from a man in red furry pants who’d just spent the previous 25 minutes beating up a man with a terrible wasting disease.

He-Man was sadly cancelled after two series, and over the years various re-imaginings, including a live-action movie starring Dolph Lundgren in 1987, failed to capture the magic of the original.

But perhaps Masters of the Universe’s greatest legacy was the phenomenal rise of televised wrestling that followed its demise in the late 80s. He Man’s young audience found slightly more realistic successors in the equally muscle bound stars of WWF and Wrestlemania. And after all, if you shaved off a certain 80's wrestler's moustache at his peak, doesn’t he sort of remind you of someone…?