study in scarlet

Happy birthday, Mr. Sims! I tried to get the Baroness, but she was already booked to appear at a John McCain fundraiser.

808 State - In Yer Face (from Ex:El, 1991) - Techno grooves that hit like unto a thing of iron...or a thrown car battery.

Lalo Schifrin - Main Titles (from the Enter the Dragon OST, 1973) - Facekicking it up old school.

Vacation 2008: Day 3 - Give me fyah

Look what I got in the mail last Saturday!

The 25th anniversary edition of Barbecue, the G.I. Joe team's resident firefighter! Or more accurately, the G.I. Joe team's rezahdint fy-ah-fy-tah and token Bostonian.

Lady Jaye's file card states she was born in the Vineyard, but it's safe to assume that she was a high holiday baby with a permanent address in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Gabriel "Bahbahcue" Kelly, on the other hand, was the real fictional deal, a seventh generation Beantown jake presumably well versed in the local culture of fradulent disability reports and lack of independent oversight.

"I'd love tah help ya fight Cobra Cammandah, Duke, but my back's been actin' up. Union rules. Maybe when I get back from rock climbin' I can do somethin'."

While the general wisdom regarding special forces operatives stresses cross-training (so that the units can function effectively despite loss of individual members), the Joes were hyper-specialized to a fault, with full-time team members dedicated solely to covering even the most narrow of disciplines. In practice, this meant that many of the less well-rounded members of the team either spent most of their time warming the benches back at the Joes' HQ or got dragged along on missions outside their areas of expertise, leading to absurd scenarios like Snow Job, an arctic warfare expert, fighting in full cold weather gear in the tropics. Call it the "licensed merchandise theory of warfare."

For poor Barbecue -- armed with a hi-tech supersoaker and a fire axe -- the time not spent inspecting the base's smoke detectors and spinkler systems went something like this...


An important function, to be sure, but it doesn't dull the gnawing feelings of inadequacy when the other guys and gals on the team are doing some post-op boasting about how many Rattlers they shot down or how they kicked Destro in the 'nads while leaping from an exploding A.W.E. Striker.

In the overfondly remembered G.I. Joe cartoon series, Barbecue's great shining moment came in "The Viper Is Coming," a episode revolving around the title's ominous warning and culminating, as these things usually do, with an Eastern European gentleman arriving to "vipe the vindows."

Yes, for real. So fuck your rose-tinted childhood nostalgia, fanboys. All the perfumes in Araby can't mask the pungent stink of 80's toy cartoons.

The episode did treat the public, however, to another interesting popcult attempt to duplicate the Bay State's distinctive regional accent. It goes about as well as you'd expect, as demonstrated by this fan-edited trip into the poorly-synched mouth of madness...

Now while there are certain Snagglepussean overtones in the Charlestown variant of the Boston accent (which I suspect is the real reason behind the Townies' famous "Code of Silence"), I can state with a reasonable degree of authority that we do not speak like the "confirmed bachelor" character actor lovechild of Phil Silvers and Jack Haley. (Haley, along with Ray Bolger, did happen to hail from Beantown, but even so...)

(Also, I don't want to read too much into things, but the personality profile on Barbecue's file card states, and I quote, "He can...wrap his lips completely around the bottom of a quart Coke bottle." Fancy that.)

Dude, I know you're tired of "pahk the cah" jokes, but the white boy ebonics thing is not the answer.
For the musical portion of today's post, I decided to keep things nice and local...

The Cars - It's All I Can Do (from Candy-O, 1979) - As long as it's done well, I won't complain.

The Pixies - Dig for Fire (from Bossanova, 1990) - This is Boston, not Centralia. I still haven't warmed up to The Pixies, as the psychic scars inflicted by the various fans of the band are still tender after almost twenty years, though I can appreciate the music...in small doses...in the rare proper context.

and off they go

I was born in 1972, and my formative years were split between the self-asorbed malaise of the Me Decade and the superficial glitter of the Greed Decade. It was fun time to be a kid, as long as you discount the nuclear war anxiety, plaid chinos, Foreigner songs....

...and toy cartoons. Those fruits of the FCC's (at Reagan's behest) removal of restrictions on maximum advertising time allowed toy manufacturers to target their sales pitch to the tykes though program-length commercials posing as poorly-animated syndicated cartoon shows. Even as a kid, I thought they were pretty stupid and far tamer than what happened in actual backyard play sessions, though I did collect and play with some of the featured plastic gee-gaws.

G.I. Joe was a special favorite. Its superheroic presentation (with code names and colorful costumes) of ostensibly "real" military professions and hardware was an easy sell to a kid who was obsessed with comic books and dreamed of following in the footsteps of his war hero father. My brother and I didn't follow the script as laid out in the cartoon and licensed Marvel comic book series, but instead crafted our own (very derivative) characterizations and scenarios, which prefigured the role playing games that would supplant action figures as our hobby of choice.

All of my old figures, along with a lot of other popcult artifacts I'd sacrifice an eye to regain, were lost in the crazy period after my mother's death. My brother did hang on to, or rediscover, a handful of mostly-broken figures which rest in the hulk of a Cobra Terrordrome we pulled out of a neighbor's trash and which is now collecting dust in a corner of my grandma's attic.

I've purchased the occasional vintage or reissued figure or vehicle for reasons of nostalgia or lingering sentimental value, though I've generally avoided the totemic fetishization of childhood diversions that affects too many of my peers. I understand the allure of employing the disposable income of one's adult self to try to recapture (or to hold on to) the stuff of one's youth, but it's a path fraught with the risk of crossing over into dogma and obsession, long nights spent scanning eBay listings and arguing over minutae in discussion section of Optimus Prime's Wikpedia page.

Or worse, using facile references to Thundercats or The Inhumanoids as shorthand for real humor.

There is a certain sense of victory in scoring a coveted prize toy twenty-five years after the fact, but it's a hollow victory....unless you're talking about a set of these beauties.

Sick Of It All - G.I. Joe Headstomp (from Blood, Sweat, and No Tears, 1989) - "Headstomp?" Wasn't he the Joes' civil affairs and community relations specialist?

The Clash - Ivan Meets G.I. Joe (from Sandinista! 1980) - Revisionist rock historians be damned, there is only one word that effectively describes Sandinista!

That word is hubris.

Finally, no musical tribute to G.I. Joe would be complete without some Cold Slither...

I heard that Buzzer tried to get the original lineup together to play at this year's Crüe Fest. Zartan held out for too much money, however, so they decided to replace him with Ronnie James Dio for the tour.

Zartan & The Dreadnoks - Cold Slither - Obtained from here, which also has an alternate version and lyrics for the karaoke-minded.