But what did the slime do? I am referring here to the Evil Horde’s Slime Pit, one of the Great Toys of my childhood (though I never owned one). It was some sort of torture / interrogation / entrapment rubric, I assume, in that you’d lash a poor sucker (Fisto, perhaps!) into the thing and then dump a vat of electric-green slime all over him, which did something. But aside from the subterranean assumptions of a 9-year-old’s mind (the slime was a paralytic and psychotropic, acting like a combination of the digestive ooze in a pitcher plant and a shot of phenobarbital), I don’t know that we ever learned what the something was.
I stand corrected. In the diagram above, the something is described: the slime turns the entrapped warrior into a slime monster that then does the bidding of Hordak — a pulpy, fulgrant golem, brainwashed and terrorized, doing evil bidding upon the land.
You ever crack open a can of slime that has remained dormant since the 1980s? I did once. A shadow of evil in the form of a puff of spores rose on the wind and scattered away. That was 2016.
Some notes on the fine print:
Re, point 1: yeah, a lot of us learned that one the hard way.
Point 2: yeah, a lot of us learned that one the hard way. Although it didn’t taste bad, as I recall. Just inedible. “You’re definitely not supposed to be doing this and it’s not even the fun kind of wrong,” if that sentence was a flavour.
Point 3: this is almost certainly the reason my parents, generally pretty equanimical folks, refused to have Slime in the house. They had just re-done the entire first floor, transforming it from a ’70s rumpus room with the dingiest orange shag rug in all of creation, into a bright and airy showroom that earned Ferris Bueller’s line re: Cameron’s house: very beautiful, very cold, and you’re not allowed to touch anything.
And finally, point 4: we must acknowledge that, brandingwise, Slime is capitalized.
The terror of Cringer
Y’all know me. You know what I do. Come Saturday morning, I like to throw on some Saturday morning cartoons. For the past five or so years that’s meant He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, because I got the DVD boxed set on Amazon before the pandemic and they made like two hundred episodes of that thing. (We decry the 8-episode season. Remember the 78-episode season?!)
Look He-Man is actually real good, by which I mean it takes place in a colourful animated universe that is fun to look at and, more than occasionally, the story ideas are pretty clever for the era. I can see why kids liked it. It holds up better than its toy-to-TV contemporaries from the Nelvana/Filmation days, e.g. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero or Transformers or Jem and the Holograms.
He-Man‘s sister series, She-Ra: The Princess of Power (another boxed set I have), is maybe even better than He-Man, at least storywise, in that it takes place in an equally colourful world but more directly seems to want to teach young children about the importance of rebellion and resistance (!), the dangers of fascism and empire (!!), and it also features the creepy demisexual childgoblin, Lookee, hiding in every show.
But here’s a He-Man thing that’s been living rent-free in my brain since I started this Saturday morning rewatch: Cringer is afraid of being Battle Cat. And that’s nuts.
To expand: secret identities were pretty common for heroic storytelling in the post-Silver Age world. He-Man, for example, has a secret identity: he’s Prince Adam, a milquetoast layabout who everyone at Castle Greyskull thinks is effectively useless, so they leave him out of stuff, leaving him plenty of time to sneak away, raise his mighty sword aloft, and shout “BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL!!” turning himself into He-Man.
Like Superman ducking into a phone booth, of course, Adam wants to do this. He knows he is He-Man and he knows his He-Man form is supremely powerful and capable; and since so many things go wrong on Eternia all the time, he’s pretty happy to spring into action in his loincloth whenever the others have their backs turned.
On the other hand, there’s Cringer.
Cringer is Prince Adam’s pet green tiger (?!) and as the name suggests, he’s a bit of a fraidycat. Much like Adam’s (false??) prince persona, Cringer doesn’t like doing much other than hanging around the castle, napping and looking for food. So basically: a cat.
When Adam hoists his sword / I have the power! / blah blah blah, he can shoot a beam of lightning at Cringer, which turns Cringer into Battle Cat, He-Man’s steed. Battle Cat is an armoured, courageous, supremely powerful green tiger. (How no one puts the green tiger connection together, re: these “secret” identities, given the presumed paucity of green tigers in this or any other world, is perhaps more galling than Clark Kent’s reading glasses conveying disguise to Superman.)
Here’s what’s nuts: Cringer remembers being Battle Cat, but hates being Battle Cat. Whereas Adam/He-Man are presented as one mind with a particular magic trick that greatly buffs their physical strength, Battle Cat is presented as a separate mind who overrides Cringer’s, makes Cringer do things he finds dangerous, unwise, and terrifying, which he later remembers doing, and fears doing again.
So when trouble turns up in Eternia, Adam’s all ready to He-Man himself, but Cringer is generally of the opinion “fuck no I don’t wanna be that roided-up psycho again” because he hates it. And Adam, usually with a condescending joke, shoots lightning at him anyway. Again and again and again.
It’s awful being Cringer.
This all washed over me as a kid but it sure sticks with me now. Especially as I get deeper and deeper into the run, and the differentiation between Cringer and Battle Cat is played for more and more “jokes,” and it becomes more and more explicitly clear that these two separate personas are aware of one another and, by remove, are actually duelling one another for supremacy. And Cringer always loses. Battle Cat is the bully who overthrows Cringer’s free will and puts him in mortal danger (to quote Bruce Banner re: another green guy, “he had the keys and I was locked in the trunk”); Cringer is the useless wimp who Battle Cat would get rid of altogether if he could, except he needs the secret identity.
Like most cartoons of its ilk, He-Man is generally pretty moral — mostly because of legislation, requiring these half-hour toy commercials to have some educational value, a now-laughable value proposition from an era where governments actually thought “earn as much money as possible” wasn’t necessarily the sole lever of power. But right in the middle of it is a story of consent so warped it’s frightening on its own terms, and which curdles further given the relentless unwillingness of the adults around Cringer to take his concerns seriously: he’ll tell any ally who will listen (Orco, Man-At-Arms, He-Man) that he doesn’t want to be doing this, and they all just laugh and do it to him anyway. Very 1980s.
Growing things
Spring, she sprung. The shoots are up. I’m growing okra this year, and eggplants; and two kinds of peppers and tomatoes as usual. Arugula and basil and snapdragons (not for eating) (except… maybe?). As has become an annual tradition I shall live off the fat of the land, buying no groceries till September.
After an epic pause in my YouTubery owing to the catastrophic lack of new toy stuff, I did two in pretty rapid succession. The first was unboxing Vi from Arcane (League of Legends), my first Hot Toys purchase in… two years? Three?:
Then Baze Malbus showed up and I did a good old-fashioned Star Wars video:
Otherwise, here are the link recs:
- The interracial cuck porn theory of everything certainly won’t steer you wrong (Liberal Currents)
- Marcia Lucas died this week. I just read Howard Kazanjian’s memoir in which she’s a major character (and a bit of an asshole), but if you haven’t watched the video of how she restructured the space battle in Star Wars, well, shame on you. (YouTube)