Childhood interests

It's interesting to see that two of the biggest movies coming out this summer are both based on 80's toy lines that I actually didn't have a lot of interest in. Transformers 2 and GI Joe. I'm not going to go into how much I can't stand Michael Bay and his take on Transformers, but GI Joe hasn't come out yet and I can already tell that's going to be pretty damn bad. While I didn't follow these two series very closely as a kid, as a geek you just kind of KNOW about these types of things. I did watch the original animated Transformers movie, same with GI Joe, but I never really owned any of the toys. The only GI Joe toys I had were a couple 12 inch "dolls". They were the male equivalent to Barbie I guess one would say because they had different clothing and weapons to change and use. The actual GI Joe toys were always so silly to me. They we're incredibly tiny! I had a friend in my neighborhood who only wanted to play with GI Joe's. He had an amazing set up, I'll give him that, but the fun with those toys was lost on me. I also knew people who had Transformers but I didn't find those all that fun either. I would change one back and forth several times and then get bored with it.

My childhood phases went something like this: He-man was the first, brief obsession. Then came Ghostbusters. Pronton packs were a big craze in my neighborhood and I was one of the first kids to get the "trap" which was pretty sweet. Then probably the biggest of all the crazes was Ninja Turtles. That whole thing took a life of it's own for most boys in the early 90's. Then probably my favorite was the Marvel phase (which sadly hasn't gone away since I was but a young boy). While most of the other kids wanted to play with Autobots and tiny army figurines, I wanted to play with Wolverine and Spider-man. Unfortunately for me not a lot of the other kids would like doing this and would always get excited the day my mom would tell me I was going to spend the weekend at my cousin's house. He had giant plastic containers filled with so many Marvel figures it would make my head spin. So there we would sit, play with these silly toys and read comic books all weekend. It was like heaven for me.

Most of the other kids thought comics were lame. I could have sworn little kids were supposed to like comics! But I guess I was wrong. I guess I kind of had the last laugh though as now some of the biggest movies in the past few years have been movies based on comics. Hells yes! But that's when everyone else starts to jump on the bandwagon. "OH man, I always loved Wolverine!" or "Batman fucking rocks!" It suddenly was actually cool to like these things because the movies were so huge.

Better late then never I guess. Now if I could only get some of these supposed "Batman fans" to actually pick up "The Dark Knight Returns" and read possibly the best Batman story ever told. Or have these "Wolverine fans" read some of Frank Miller's run.

But hey, can't win them all.

But now I have to go to work which I'm really not "feeling" right now since I woke up today and my entire body was sore and I have no idea why.

Later all!