“First my Striker terminal, then this, this little slap at my industrial complex. You’re a flea, Jonathan Power, and I’m going to swat you!”
I played this in a VCR, and I have no equipment to capture images from it except by photographing the screen, so please excuse the picture quality.
Anyway, I absolutely love Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, an ill-fated children’s television series that ran for one season in 1987. It was the first—and last—attempt at interactive television, something that many at the time mistakenly assumed was the future of TV. Costing a million dollars an episode, sparking controversy for its violent content, and plagued by continuous fights between the writers (led by J. Michael Straczynski) and sponsor Mattel, the show was destined for early cancellation.
For many years, Captain Power was available only on old VHS tapes and on bootlegged DVDs, until it finally saw a remastered release. On my previous, now fossilized blog, I have a review of the DVD release of the television series.
The “interactive” part of Captain Power involved some way-cool but hugely expensive toys that looked like futuristic jet fighters. These could be used with one another to play a type of laser tag, or pointed at the television. The toys would react to certain colors on the screen (eye-straining, flashing red and yellow, which are probably a seizure risk). If you shoot the red with the toy, you gain Power Points. If the light sensor detects yellow, you lose Power Points. When your Power Points drain, the toy freezes up and the cockpit ejects your action figure.
It’s awesome.
The story, from a child’s point of view, is dark and disturbing, having, as most science fiction of the time did, the Cold War as a backdrop. It is something like a pastiche of The Terminator, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Tron: in the twenty-second century, a war between man and machine ended with victory for the machines, and now humanity exists in isolated, wandering pockets of “survivors.” Leading the machines is Lord Dread, a cyborg intent on replacing fallible, fragile humans with new and perfect robots, for the purpose of which he sends his BioDreads, living machines with human DNA, to “digitize” the survivors, transforming them into computer information to await the time when Lord Dread has perfected humanity’s new cybernetic form.
Opposing Dread is the Resistance, a band of rebels led by Captain Jonathan Power. He and his team are armed with Power Suits, strength-enhancing mecha suits loaded with weaponry, and which protect their wearers from digitization.
In addition to the live-action television series, there were three VHS tapes, called Future Force Training Videos, each about fifteen minutes in length, that featured animated fly-throughs designed to be watched with the toys in hand. The result is something like playing a rail shooter. Unfortunately, these three videos were not released with the remastered television series. But I have one of them, as you see here. I put it in a VCR and discovered that it still plays, so I intend to rip it to DVD in the near future.
My brother and I owned two of the toys (he had an XT-7, and I had a BioDread Phantom Striker), and we had just one of the animated videos, the one you see here: “BioDread Strike Mission.” The animation was outsourced to Japan, where it was created by AIC and Anime R, but it looks as if the Japanese studios put their hearts into it, because the animation is quite lovely.
It is hard to explain what Captain Power meant to a boy of seven. Nothing like it had been made before, and nothing quite like it has been made since. When I was a kid, it was mind-blowing. Even today, although it is unquestionably campy, it is still quite entertaining.
Anyway, I popped this VHS tape into a VCR and, lo and behold, it still plays. In fact, the tape appears to be in pretty good shape overall, though as I played it through, I realized something was wrong with the sound: during the flight mission, the voice of Jennifer “Pilot” Chase (Jessica Steen) is barely audible. This is a strangely specific problem in sound quality.
The world of the Future Force videos is somewhat different from that of the television series, probably in large part because the animated videos were less constrained by special effects limitations. Whereas the TV show depicts Dread having only successfully created two BioDreads (Soaron and Blastarr, the first CGI characters to feature regularly in a live-action show), the Future Force videos depict a slew of BioDreads, which attack you relentlessly. Also, although the XT-7 and Phantom Striker make brief appearances in the TV show, Power and his team usually travel together in a shuttle or else use personal anti-grav speeder bikes. By contrast, the Future Force videos are all about piloting an XT-7 and hitting Dread’s installations from the air. The Future Force videos also grant the XT-7 a “hyperdrive,” which apparently allows rapid travel across the continent, whereas in the show, the Captain and company travel by a teleportation device, which plays a big part in the plot.
One line I always remember from this video is the one I’ve captured here, uttered by David Hemblen, who plays Lord Dread:
