After the first Star Wars film came out in 1977, myself and every other kid I knew played Star Wars in the school playground. Squabbling over who was Luke or Han, not wanting to be Chewie or Lea. At the time, Star Wars merchandise was thin on the ground. Figures were hard to get your hands on, due to high demand, and we were ravenous for any Star Wars toys. So some bright-spark hit on the idea of bootlegging a lightsaber, marketing it as a "force beam". And as soon as I heard, I had to have one.

Essentially it was a torch with a green filter in it, that was attached to a long plastic tube. It was cheap, it was nasty, but I loved it. Along with the judo suit I convinced my parents to buy me. I told them I want to go to judo classes, which was a total lie. It was just that a judo suit was the nearest thing to Luke's costume I could think of. So on my eighth birthday, that's what I got. A judo suit, and a crappy "force beam".

If like me, one are one of these people who likes to dig around the weirder side of the Weird Wide Web, then you couldn't have failed to some point to have come across pictures of dismembered body parts toys from Japan. Or the bright graphic of the baby bursting out of the microwave, its guts spilling out. You may have just shrugged, laughed and shook your head, mumbling, "Oh, those Japanese!" But have you bothered to find out what they are all about? Anyone who knows about Japanese pop-culture will be aware of their love of extreme violence through manga, anime and J-Horror cinema.

These particular toys are by the ero-guro (エログロ) and manga artist Shintaro Kago. Ero-guro is an artistic movement in Japan that depicts the decadence of society through images of extreme sexual violence, eroticism and sexual corruption. Deviant and grotesque to a ridiculous degree, the movement which has a long history in Japan, has influenced many areas of Japanese pop-culture. 

Shintaro Kago, made his début in 1988, has become a very popular artist. His grotesque works, push many boundaries, both in style and imagery. Taking things to such extremes that they appear comedic, yet unnerving, satirising aspects of Japanese culture. His range of toys, which are available by mail order, and through vending machines in Japan, play with the idea of collectable toys for adults. Mirroring other mass-produced collectables, and are available as key-chains, phone charms and vinyl book shelf display pieces.

In my head 1981 doesn't seem that long ago, but in computing terms it was just the beginning of the modern technological age we all accept as normal today. IBM released their first home computer (PC), with Apple congratulating them in a famously sardonic advert in the August of that year. The Osbourne 1 was released to market, considered the first affordable "laptop". Affordable at $1725, and 24lb behemoth my have been a bit uncomfortable on your lap, but all that same. 

The Osbourne 1 was doomed, and with the introduction of the IBM PC and it's MS-Dos operation system, the Osbourne was obsolete by 1983. That same year saw the introduction of the two home computers, the predecessors of computing giants that would revolutionise home computing only a year later. Commodore introduced the VIC-20, and Sinclair the ZX-81. By 1982, they would bring out the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Also 1981, KRON news did a little report about a small revolution happening in San Francisco, where people with a "modem" could read their daily newspapers via their home computer. "It's not as far fetched as it may seem", says the news anchor. You have to love the bit when the tech-guy from the San Francisco Examiner says they won't make any money from it, and the tag-line to the consumer/reader Richard Halloran, that simply states "Owns Home Computer".

And how Mr. Halloran goes on to say, that you can copy the information off the computer onto "paper" to "save it". Oh how wonderfully naive things were back then. Now we're plugged into that "Internet" 24/7, on multiple devices with more computing power than the massive mainframe in Ohio, that Mr. Halloran was calling-up on his dial-up modem to read the newspaper.

I just came across a documentary about editor of Famous Monsters Of Filmland, Forrest J Ackerman, called The AckerMonster Chronicles (2012). Famous Monsters Of Filmland was the famous horror, fantasy and sci-fi magazine that first came out as a special one-off edition in February 1958. It proved to be so popular however that it carried on being published by Warren Publishing right up until 1983.  Warren also published the sister magazines Creepy, Eerie and comic book heroine Vampirella, that was originally created by Ackerman.


The pair decided to publish the first edition of Famous Monsters Of Filmland, on the back of the success of the Shock Theater package released for TV syndication by Universal Studios. The package of 52 classic horror films, also spawned TV horror hosts across the country. 

As super-fan of horror and sci-fi, Ackerman brought his own deep knowledge of cinema and an irreverent humour to the magazine, giving it a unique style no other magazine could compete with. There have been many imitators, but there was only one F.J. Ackerman. Not only was he the editor of the magazine, he was a science fiction writer, a literary agent and the man credited with creating the whole idea of sci-fi fandom. To which we are all grateful. 

As a literary agent Ackerman knew nearly every sci-fi writer of the 20th century, and managed some 200 of them. He is credited with encouraging and nurturing the early careers of such sc-fi luminaries as Ray Bradbury, L. Ron Hubbard, Ray Harryhausen and the literary career of the "worst director of all time" Ed Wood. As a writer he collaborated with some of the greats of sci-fi, and through his promotion sci-fi/horror film-makers' work, he inspired hundreds of people to follow their dreams and become film-makers themselves.

Cybernetic revolt, the technological singularity! Is it just a matter of time now, rather than science fiction? Horror and sci-fi movies, literature and computer games have been warning us for years of the inevitable/possibility of a computer taking over and controlling humanity.

One of the seminal movies that addresses this is the 1970 sci-fi thriller, Colossus: The Forbin Project. Based on a 1966 sci-fi novel Colossus, by D.F. Jones. In the story a massive AI computer, designed to control the United States nuclear defence system, becomes sentient. Colossus becomes aware of the existence of a Soviet supercomputer, like itself. The two computers start to communicate, but their link is cut by their governments. So the two computers launch nuclear attacks on each other's country, until their link is re-established. The two computers become one entity, and proclaims itself "the voice of World Control". Making its mission to end war among humans. The human choice? They have none! They must accept that with peace comes control, its control, and that "freedom is just an illusion".

Below are other links to posts that cover computers/entities that have managed to or tried to take-over humanity. Now... That give me an idea for an article about computers that take over the world!

The Revolution Started Here: Beneath A Steel Sky- The "revolutionary" adventure game from a small software house in Hull, that went up against the big U.S. software houses, and kicked arse!

EarthBound: The Trippiest And Most Fucked-Up Cutesy RPG Ever! - The weird world of the SNES game from 1994. How it mirrored real world events, and created a nightmare.

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream (1967) - Harlan Ellison short-story about a computer that take over the world, that was made into a creepy 1995 point-and-click adventure game.

A single from the stadium prog rock band Styx, from their 1983 rock opera album Kilroy Was Here.The story of the opera is of Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (ROCK), a rock and roll performer who was placed in a futuristic prison for "rock and roll misfits" by the anti-rock-and-roll group the Majority for Musical Morality (MMM). Kilroy, over powers a "Roboto", and hides inside its emptied out shell. The song tells of Kilroy's meeting with another character, as the robot, and his eventual unmasking. (Yeah, it was the early 80s, these guys had probably taken a lot of drugs in the 70s!) When the band performed the rock opera, they had robots designed by special effects genius Stan Winston, which featured on the album cover.

The video for the song, features the band dressed in the robot costumes, long before Daft Punk were ever around. And despite the over-the-top acting and dramatics of the video and the band's performance, the robots do add a creepy dystopian element to what is otherwise a bad 80s music video. Though I'm still confused as to how the prisoners in the video manage to over-power robots by a punch in the guts! Bit a design flaw in poor old Mr. Roboto.

The vocoded chorus is what the song is most well known for, with the repeated Japanese line, "dōmo arigatō misutā Robotto". Making the song popular in Japan. In 2002, the Japanese new wave band Polysics recorded a cover version of the song, which was a hit in Japan and Korea. And was accompanied by a fun video that paid homage to Japanese giant robot sci-fi movies and TV shows of 1960s, like Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot (1967-1968).

Perhaps one of the weirdest "love songs" ever written and recorded. Written by song writing genius Jimmy Webb and bizarrely recorded by his mate, actor and infamous hell-raiser Richard Harris. Who couldn't sing! MacArthur Park, is a 7 minute long psychedelic orchestral trip, involving surreal metaphors about cakes being left out in the rain, and an instrumental middle section that sounds very similar to the cinema advertising music of Paul & Dean. No wonder most people who Jimmy presented it to rejected it. The song is epic, and in a bizarre twist, getting his drinking buddy Richard Harris to sing turned out to be a mad moment of musical wonderment. Thus creating a crazy classic, one hit wonder.

The musical collage of strange imagery, was written by Jimmy in 1967, after he broke-up with his girlfriend. Harris had asked Webb for a song to record, and after listening to a number of possible choices, he went for the last song Webb played him, MacArthur Park. Harris recorded the song in late 1967, backed by the infamous LA based session musicians, the Wrecking Crew. Despite making onto lists of the worst songs ever recorded, it was a hit. Peaking at No.4 in the UK charts and No.2 on the Billboard charts in the US. 

In the summer of 1978, disco diva Donna Summer, recorded a version of the song. The song reached No.1 on the Billboard charts, giving Jimmy Webb his only No.1 hit in the United States. In addition, Summer recorded an 18 minute long 12" version, called the MacArthur Park Suite, which stayed at No.1 in the charts for 5 weeks.

The all-time classic game, that every boy had on their Christmas list during the 60s and 70s. (Or at least I did!) Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots was first manufactured by the Marx toy company in 1964. Players take charge of the two robots, "Red Rocker" and "Blue Bomber". Pressing the buttons like crazy, throwing punches left and right, until one of you catches the other robot of the chin, and his head pops up! Slap that head back down and repeat. That's it, but it's just so addictive. A number of licensed versions of the game have been produced over the years, we covered the Street Fighter II, Guile & Ryu version of the game from 1993 in a Captain's Blog post in December last year.

I finally got a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots from eBay. I and the rocketship co-pilot have spent many happy hours, knocking each other's blocks off.

Those Toys You Wanted, And The Ones You Got!!! - Childhood dreams shattered by poor parental purchases.

Sci-fi b-movie from producer William Alland, who brought us such classics as, It Came From Outer Space (1953), The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), and This Island Earth (1955). Directed by Eugène Lourié, it's the story of a scientist's son, who following an accident has brain transplanted into the body of "the colossus". A 7 foot cyborg, that has more than a passing resemblance to Frankenstein. Except for the laser beams for eyes, and the on/off switch under his arm-pit. His father believes that by saving his son's brain, he can continue to serve mankind. Obviously, in true b-movie style, things don't go to plan. And soon the robot monster is on the rampage in New York, or as the promotional tag-line puts it, an "orgy of destruction".

The colossus was played by 7' 4" tall actor and stuntman Ed Wolff, famed for his movie monster roles. Wolff also starred in The Phantom Creeps (1939) and Invaders From Mars (1953). Before becoming an actor, he was a circus giant. He had his first film role in The Phantom Of The Opera (1925), at the age of 18.

The film's trailer begs the question: "Can a man's mind function in the body of a monster?" According to the film's "terrifying" philosophy, the divorced human brain - from its own body, heart and soul - would become monstrous, cold, and inhuman. "Fantastic are the implications of this story today, as men delve very closer to the secrets of eternity!" ... It's "Fantastic science fiction. That may soon become science fact!"

Metal Mickey was a robot who featured in his own Saturday afternoon (5.15 pm) TV show in the UK. Humphrey Barclay, Head of Light Entertainment suggested that using his name to banner the show was "money in the bank". So the TV show Metal Mickey took its place in the annals of TV history. He thought the show had "the appeal of Star Wars, the Daleks and Mork and Mindy", after seeing the robot on the Jim'll Fix It TV show on the BBC. Former drummer and singer with The Monkees, Mickey Dolenz was invited by Humphrey to produce and direct the show for ITV.

Metal Mickey was created and voiced by Johnny Edward, musician, song-writer and ex pirate radio DJ for Radio City and latterly Radio London in the mid-1960s. 
Metal Mickey first appeared on TV in 1978 with 21 episodes of a Saturday morning kids TV show, The Saturday Banana. 

Metal Mickey is still waiting in the wings for Lady Luck to knock on his door once more. A team of professionals led by Hollyoaks producer Emma Smethwick has a team including director, script writer and a star in mind to co-star with Mickey in a new TV series.