ALF
A review of Alf's debut episode, plus some info on his fuzzy dolls. Some of these fuzzy dolls talked!
Sea Monkeys
This one was supposed to be a two-parter, but you know me. Read and watch as I bring brine shrimp to life with the official Sea Monkeys kit.
An Ewok Sequel
Believe it or not, there were TWO movies based on Star Wars teddy bears. Read my review of the second, 'Ewoks: The Battle For Endor.'
Garfield Smokes Crack
Animated stars unite against pot in the infamous Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue!
Want more Photon?
Click the above link to visit Minimum Rage, home of the Internet's best Photon tribute page, and maybe the Internet's only Photon tribute page. Great site, with loads of information and media about the show.
Believe it or not, Photon had a television show. I know. It's not that hard to believe. But if you've actually seen it, you know it's a reason to celebrate. For you see, Photon wasn't any kind of normal show. One could only classify it as the best or worst thing they've ever seen, tastes depending, but all would agree that it's always surprising. By surprising, of course, I'm referring to the fact that the show has characters including a giant lizard with a 3' tongue, some orange freak that looks like cake, and a robot with hip hop dreds. Plus lots and lots of drug references! That's a pretty creative path to take when forging a TV show about a simple lazer light toy gun.
I caught an episode for the first time recently, and could only describe the experience as 'surreal.' If you begged and pleaded with me to make my jaw hit the floor right now, for any amount of money, I couldn't make it happen. But while watching Photon, the jaw stayed there the entire time, shocked into a frozen position, collecting June Bugs. Listen, I have no regrets. What's done is done, and I can't change the fact that I've seen Photon. Was I ready -- no wait, did I want to have my life forever changed just by watching some silly old TV show on a grainy video? Of course not, but it happened, and I've decided to embrace Photon. I now realize that nobody, nobody can consider themselves 'schooled' or 'cultured' until they've seen a four-armed red demon try to steal Cosmic Juice from a mega huge, land-dwelling purple space clam.
Your life isn't really being lived until you've experienced Photon.
The episode I saw was on a compilation tape a reader sent in, smack in the middle of The Wuzzles and an episode of Alf Tales. I should've realized that something sinister would lay in the middle of that sandwich, but it was pretty dark in the room and the icicle broke my glasses. What I can tell you about the show is limited. There aren't many tribute sites, and any kind of official info is pretty rare to come by.
From what I've been able to gather, Photon was originally shown in Japan. Don't pat me on the back or anything for that clever deduction - the English dub job employed here is obvious and terrible to the point where I could've sworn one of the potted plants on the set was having a conversation about virus-inflicted mainframes with another character's helmet. On the rare occasions when the voice matches up to the person's lip movements, they rewrite the lines in a way that nobody in the universe would ever possibly speak like, even if they were trying to sound crazy because Maxim said it was chic. Fortunately, many of the characters don't actually have mouths, so it's not terribly hard to follow the action.
Well, except for one little thing.
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It's absolutely insane. It's Godzilla meets Power Rangers meets Culture Club meets Family Ties meets that old little dwarfish principal lady from Kindergarden Cop, who if painted green, would look so much like that scary movie Leprechaun guy that we'd be forever safe if Warwick Davis dies first and the director needs a replacement. You see? You see what watching Photon does to you? I can't control the words that come out of my mouth, and evidently, even the ones that I type. In the end, it's all worth it. I honestly can't believe this show hasn't garnered some serious cult status for itself - this is weirder than any weird movie I've ever seen, and it's not even trying. I italicize because, well, that's my thing, but the emphasis is indeed warranted. Fans of the Odd would do well to track down as many episodes of Photon as possible, and you'll see why in just a minute.
I don't know for sure, but the impression I got was that a normal high-school kid, Bhodi Li, was called upon by a talking spaceship to fight crime with a bunch of sideshow freaks with lazer guns on their continuing mission to collect what I believe what were referred to as 'Photon crystals.' The lead bad guy is some weird black creature who may or may not be made out of construction paper. The villains you see more regularly are 'Mandarr,' the face-painted rock pirate, and 'Warriar,' the multi-armed monster from Hell. The heroes went on various wild adventures for the series' 26-episode run, meeting lots of new friends and enemies, and even a flying cactus with a talking unicorn spike growing out of it's midsection.
Bhodi alternates back and forth between Earth and outer space, and usually chooses to transport himself within the halls of one of our planet's many Photon arenas. For those who don't know, yes, there were really Photon arenas all over the world back then. We've still had a few here-and-there in more recent years, but back then, they seemed almost as numerous as movie theaters. Everyone was playing Photon, but very few were watching it. In America at least, anyway. I remember it being on during the Sunday afternoon lineup on what's now the UPN Network, but I never got too into it because there's some girl who kept taking her face veil on and off and the shit used to really freak me out. My fear was my folly - I would've loved this show.
It'll be hard to do Photon justice, but I'm gonna give it the ol' college dropout try with this episode review. Today's show was titled 'Mind Zapped,' and featured everything from futuristic drug use to a little kid with a Cleveland Indians hat who predicts the future using a calculator. Keep in mind, it probably would've been a better idea to watch this episode five or six times before reviewing it, as it's a little tough to really soak in on the first try. Still, I accidentally did a lot of drugs when I was a younger, and I'm not so sure my brain could handle a playback so soon without forcing itself to implode and make my face shrink like the cursed spaghetti lover from Thinner. Okay, no more stalling. Here we go...
On his way to the Photon arena, Bhodi Li happens across Chris, the local junkie. Chris (I hope that's his name...) tries to goad Bhodi into doing drugs by saying that pretty girls only like guys who do coke, or something like that. Bhodi, clean as a whistle, responds to the request by staring at the street silently for a few minutes before lifting his head up and confirming the rumor that he owns and wears the world's largest pair of sunglasses. Great shirt, too. How come all the Japanese people here are so much more fashionable than the homeland ones? Is there some magnetic pole over the sea on the plane route to our country that clicks everyone who flies over into a Svengali of Style?
Bhodi and Chris have what I'm guessing was supposed to represent a conversation for the next few minutes, but our hero soon grows tired of Chris' incessant drug pushing. He insists that he must be on his way. To change his mind, Chris contorts his body into a position not unlike that of a flamingo while performing a type of interpretive dance in front of Bhodi's bike. You know, if a duck walked into the middle of my living room and shouted at me before exploding, I still wouldn't have been able to pull my eyes off the screen. If someone ever offers you the choice of watching a Photon episode or actual video footage of the universe being created, don't screw up. You can live without seeing a piece of cosmic dust doubling in size, but you shouldn't continue on without seeing Chris the drug addict imitate a lawn flamingo.
Bhodi escapes the awkward social moment when his gaudy Crackerjack ring starts glowing bright pink, indicating that he's wanted by the Photon 'MOM' ship in outer space. His suit is indeed the official Photon outfit, and you could get a similar helmet and other equipment by buying the light gun set. Somehow, I don't think product placement was on their minds at the time, but it's nice to know that we had the available means to look like Bhodi Li.
When he transports to the shuttle, I was immediately surprised to see that the rest of the Photon gang weren't quite human. Now we're not talking about space aliens in the same way we do when referencing Star Trek. These weren't just a few guys with some extra face putty taped to the bridge of their noses. This show went all out with their creatures, which was both admirable in its initiative and laughable in its execution. Who are some of Bhodi Li's comrades, you ask?
A giant lizard with Yoko Ono's body frame, and a talking muffin wearing construction worker clothes. Or if you prefer, 'Leon' and 'Pike.' They're both attention-grabbers, but in Leon's case, I've seen giant talking lizards in other movies. His novelty wore off pretty quickly. I've never seen a talking muffin in construction worker clothes, though. Pike's my new main man. He seemed to be a fairly major character on the show, and in addition, the only one with an edible head. Fuck, that's not even true. There's a least two other characters with heads that were conceivably edible. God, Photon is the best show ever.
The ship tells our heroes that another Photon Crystal has been found, and orders them to seek out some new character to find it. Again, I'm not sure if they're really called 'Photon Crystals,' but I'm not going back to check. They're looking for some kind of rare, valuable, energizing element, that's for sure. Bhodi and Pike (yeaaahhhh Pike!!) use a dimensional portal to seek out the latest Crystal piece, while the rest of the heroes remain onboard. Photon wouldn't be much without some serious Bad Guy Yang to balance out Bhodi's Yin, so let's meet today's starring villains.
On the left: Lord Beathen. On the right: Mandarr and Warriar. Beathen is the leader of the villains, but he doesn't participate in today's battle. I'm not sure if he participates in the battles on other episodes, but it'd be pretty tough to film since Beathen appears to be just a lunch-bag hand puppet, spray-painted black with wax lips candy tacked on to the front. Mandarr and Warriar are the more active agents of evil. Warriar especially. He has four arms. Like Goro. I don't think you could compare Mandarr to Shang Tsung as easily, though. Unless you're assuming that Shang once morphed into the body of a transvestite death metal pirate band's lead singer to confuse Liu Kang and keep him from transforming into that big dragon and biting Tsung's head off.
Beathen the All-knowing tells his troops to seek out the Photon Crystal and kill those dirty heroes. Though with the dub job, it's tough to tell. He could've been asking them for the answer to 42-Down on a crossword puzzle for all I know. Judging from the amount of snarling involved, I think he was talking about something a little more evil.
So, the heroes meet up with this guy who allegedly owns one of the Photon Crystals, but he doesn't exactly seem like the type who'd have anything that valuable. In fact, after introducing himself to Bhodi, he sits down at a computer screen, lets weird acid trippy light beams hit his face, and caps the whole thing off by commenting on what a 'great high' he's experiencing. Yes, it's the outer dimension's version of drugs. The other heroes warn Bhodi of its ill-effects, citing that doing whatever it is this big goof just did will 'turn your brains to mush.' What in God's name am I watching?
As expected, the villains show up, and bring with them the awful truth about the Photon show. Whenever there's a battle scene, the background music consists of upbeat 80s pop hits sung by people with 1/1,000th the talent of the song's original artist. When Mandarr and Warriar arrive to wreak havoc, guess what theme song they choose to play in the background? Come on, guess. No? Damn, I feel like the dickhead from Blues Clues whenever I ask you questions like that. Want to help me find blue paw prints on a potato? The song they choose, obviously, is Michael Jackson's Thriller. Remember my jaw? The one that wouldn't get up off the floor? Well, once Thriller hit my television speakers, the damn thing dug all the way through the Earth's core and popped back out somewhere in Chongqing. By the time I almost got it back into place, Pike the Muffin walked back onscreen and the jaw fell off entirely. I really love Pike.
Any chance of taking this battle scene seriously is lost when Mandarr's ring beams seem to shoot in perfect harmony with Michael Jackson's sporadic 'hoo!' sounds. After some intense brawling, the kind that could only be seen elsewhere if you're baby-sitting a four-year-old who really likes to play-wrestle, the villains get the better of the good guys and knock 'em all unconscious. Mandarr drags a groggy Bhodi to the Drug Machine of Doom, zapping him over and over again with that brain-mushing narcotic flashlight. Bhodi responds by jerking his head in the same way guys do when they're trying to show off their ability to cause the bone joints around their neck to make cracking noises. I think my jaw was somewhere around Toledo by this point, and even the television itself started bouncing up and down in protest. Still, Photon's strange and stupid, but it's the kind of 'strange and stupid' you just can't turn away from. It's the most engaging example of 'strange and stupid' ever, or at least until the episode's climax scene.
Despite getting pounded, the heroes manage to transport back to their ship along with that drugged out old guy. They regain their strength before going on a mission to retrieve the Photon Crystal from its hidden location, and this affords us the chance to get a better look at some of the other characters...
On the left, Pike has a conversation with a silver-faced crazy man who has an awful lot of hair considering that he's a robot. Actually, I think he was supposed to be more of a ninja than a robot, but I might just be stereotyping because he's wearing a karate headband. The picture on the right introduces two other characters, but I can't remember either of their names. I mentioned the girl earlier - she wears a veil, and looks mostly human. For added affect, they've adorned her arms with metallic sweatsocks and poofed her hair out to sizes previously thought humanly impossible. I also mentioned the kid with the calculator earlier, but I didn't tell you the best part - Veronica Taylor, who covered his dub job, is the same person who voices Ash, the lead character from Pokemon. It's strange. You'd think that Veronica's work on the Pokemon show, where she typically has to say things like 'Pikachu, use your thunderbolt attack on that big eggplant with the blowjob lips,' would provide the strangest things she's ever had to say aloud. After watching Photon, I'm not so sure that's true.
Anyway, they all go to another planet to find the Crystal, and in a plot development that should surprise no one at this point, the Crystal's hidden away inside a monstrous lavender space clam. After the villains arrive, we get yet another battle sequence set to the score of badly redone 80s pop rock, which ultimately leads to some of the characters getting trapped inside the clam. I kinda liked that part.
In the end, the heroes are victorious. They kill off the villains, who've decided that the best way to illustrate their deaths is by slowly fading in and out of an invisible state while screaming. Apparently, these two die in most of the other episodes, too. I'm sure they'll be back, but today's war is won and the Photon Crystal is safe. Yeah, the big clam eventually gave it up. Big clams are big softies deep down.
After being congratulated on a job well done, Bhodi beams back to Earth, in the middle of his local Photon arena. On the ride home, he runs back into Chris the Junkie, who still hasn't given up on his dreams of turning Bhodi into a smackhead. Since he was just force-fed a laser light drug show out in space, Bhodi's less patient this time around. After calling Chris an idiot, he confesses that he doesn't need drugs because, and this is a direct quote, 'Photon is the way!' If a two-headed alien from Neptune sneaks into my bedroom tonight and starts fondling my balls, I'm still going to tell people that watching Photon was the most interesting experience I've had this week.
Overall: Amazing and unreal, awesome and stupid, muffin and head. I've never been quite as interested in Photon lore as I am now, and I've got this unbelievably loopy show to thank. It's absolutely worth tracking down if you've got the time - I've honestly never seen anything like it, and doubt I ever will. Make no mistake, Photon was a pretty terrible show. But terrible can be really fun, sometimes. 'CVC,' thanks so much for sending in this tape! (I think.) 9 out of 10.
Remember that Nike Transformers contest we were promoting a few weeks ago? Well, several X-E readers took home a prize. See, not all contests are fake and nasty. UGO's running another one, this time giving away a brand new Sony Watchman every day in February. It's free to enter, and you won't get spammed by doing so. Click here to throw your name in the hat!
