During the Cold War, children were taught to fear the Red Menace, not knowing when the time would come that the Russians would hit an over-sized red button and launch their nukes at us. Yet, kids back in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s didn’t let the fear of atomization stop them from enjoying Mr. Sun’s rays while playing on lead jungle gyms. Yet, during the early 2000’s this enjoyment of the outdoors was not as widespread as it had been in decades past. The vast majority of my afternoons during seventh grade were spent on the computer, more specifically on AOL Instant Messenger. Many an adventure were created between myself, and my then pals whom I shall refer to as Berry and Shake.
Each of us had our main character, mine was a young fellow by the name of Alx Topi (who apparently either Albanian, or an antelope) with spiky black hair, and a green kung-fu outfit. Shake’s character was an android named Zerbo who I like to picture wearing kaki slacks, and had a white helmet with a black visor covering his face. Berry’s character was the least describable, I don’t think he had any fantastical powers, or even a garish costume, but his name was Hank T.C. which was simply stolen from the anagram for the Hank the Cow-Dog books. So, there we were; a generic Anime character, a moldy robot, and a dog traveling from dimension to dimension, much like the show Sliders, only it didn’t feature John Rhys-Davies.
I don’t remember many of the adventures we suffered through, but I do recall the basics of it all. A lot of the stories Shake, Berry, and myself came up with were simply ripped off from TV shows, and Video games we enjoyed, so not much creativity was shared between us. The times that Berry and I would steal copyrighted characters and locations, we would change it up a bit, or make a new story which featured both our characters and those from the original show. I also thought that Shake was doing this from the get go, but for some reason he rebuffed any of Berry’s or I’s attempts of taking the story in a different direction. I later learned that Shake was merely reciting to us the opening movie of a game he played at some point in time, and as exciting as that may be, it was about as creative as Meet The Spartans.
Though we did it every day, there were times when we would have to remind one of the others that it was our daily ritual. So, we would go about gabbing on the phone like cartoon chickens, telling the other to go online so they could talk. A bit silly really (rhyme), but what can you expect from three socially awkward boys who didn’t go outside? The few times we would play with only two participants, and the fun would run away like a squirrel into heavy traffic. Our adventures would consist of characters sharing conversations consisting of one or two word answers and very little action (much like my modern phone calls.)
So, it’s fairly obvious why the television version of our exploits wasn’t picked up for a premiere season. The logistics in securing the rights to copyrighted characters alone would cost the yearly gross revenue of both Belgium and Luxembourg.
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