Fake! Copy! Stupid! (Coda)

27 March 2022 by Rey Armenteros

We had nothing in those days. We just had whatever the TV channels felt it valuable enough to air. And we had the movies. There was no way for us to collect the material on DVD because all everybody had was VHS. We used to have a Beta player, but that format was discontinued. Everything relied on scheduling, and one day, they stopped airing Robotech. It was sad, but then again, we had our memories, and we’d talk about the various exploits from the thirty-something episodes of the first storyline. We had it all memorized. But you could never own Robotech. At least with comics, you owned the story and were able to experience it again whenever you liked. Cartoons were not possible to own.

One day, at the comic book store, I found a book titled Robotech Art 2 and was thrilled that I could own something from my favorite cartoon of all time. For me, however, it was a novelty thing because the art book exhibited was merely interpretations of the show by industry professionals. There was very little art from the video stills of the cartoon itself, and I would have preferred art from the actual animation. I don’t remember if I bought it or if I asked my mom for it as a gift for birthday or Christmas. I must have bought it because in the back of the book, there was an ad for Robotech Art 1, which did appear to have art from the episodes, and I remember getting that one for Christmas. This, for me, was the far better book, because I could reminisce about the cartoon through stills decorating every page. There was some action on display, enough to remind us of the killing involved. In addition, half of the pages were devoted to an episode-by-episode summary of the entire series. They were nothing more than a paragraph each. delineating only the essentials of a particular episode. Yet I could relive the hallmarks of the story and try to dig into my brain for the positions of those details in the main storyline in these short summaries. If my brother and I ever had a question about when something happened, here was the official source of reference. I treasured both of these books and considered them high points in my comic book and book collection.

With time, I would end up reversing my tastes in both books, appreciating the Robotech Art 2 book over the first one because the art actually looked better. Though I originally felt it was inferior because I had little interest in seeing how other artists with all types of styles interpreted the characters, I now found it more creative. Some of the images were silly, and some had very little hint of Robotech in them. I never really showed that second book to my brother because at first, the two of us could only talk about the first book, which had the official art. But when I finally changed my interests to favor the second, I wanted even less to show it to him. I knew he was going to shoot it down with what he thought was fake or just plain stupid.

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Fake! Copy! Stupid! (4)

20 March 2022 by Rey Armenteros

Piecing this together is not easy. It started off easily enough, but now I think about what made me change. What was considered good bits of violence in stories afterward? We liked killing in stories, as long as it was done without the elements of “fake” or “copy.” But at what point did our viewpoints turn around and accept that every heroic piece of fiction that we had seen in our youths was not what we thought they were? They had killing, but to what extent could we say today, “realistic?” And what was responsible for that shift in our perspectives?

I know the exact moment for me. It was the Oliver Stone movie, Platoon. The year after Robotech, we would watch this seminal movie at the movie theater with our cousin. And we would never be the same again.

This anti-war movie was being rereleased in 1987 because of the movie nominations it had garnered. We watched it during the rerelease, already aware of the kind of movie it was, depicting a harrowing subject in the American consciousness of the day. Nobody spoke of the Vietnam War since it ended, when people wanted to move on already, and this movie opened the discussion again.

Platoon succeeded in depicting a brutality that had never been seen in Hollywood. American soldiers were blown to pieces as they committed atrocities that no war could justify. It was a cold, hard look at a dark time.

But we didn’t view it that way. Yes, of course, we were aware of the message of the movie, and we were behind the message about war being bad and devastating to all that it touched and all that. In spite of the message (which went against the grain of our motives to watch movies), it was because it displayed the fighting without holding back that we venerated this movie so much.

Years later, I would watch this movie again with a new set of lenses to my outlook, and I would be shocked at how horrible the violent acts actually were — as if I had never seen the movie before. This was years after I no longer looked at entertainment and devalued it according to how fake or stupid it was. And it was many years after I dropped my penchant for watching violent action scenes. I received a dose of Platoon and almost felt the tears coming because of the misery of it all.

But not when I watched it at the movie theater that fateful night, when the sacrificing of our heroic soldiers came to life in a brutality we couldn’t see coming. It was almost religious. We were walking back to our house, talking about how Elias, the good sergeant, had been abandoned by his fellow troopers and then gunned down by the Viet Cong — how it was the best piece of acting Willem Dafoe had ever done. Though there were heroes, there was nothing about soldiers running across a field to capture a bunker, shooting their weapons like they did in old movie posters and inevitably in the old movies themselves.

We took this as a lesson learned. From now on, my brother and I were going to measure every piece of realistic story against the sounding board of Platoon. When watching Star Wars again a few years later and finding that the stormtroopers were killed by a little magic red line that put a small hole in them, it was good, clean fun. It was not as messy as things actually get when real guns are going off.

Though other Vietnam movies came on the coattails of Platoon (as copies, as we would immediately acknowledge), they tried to top this one, and many in fact did find grislier content with which to fill their stories, but the sheer honesty in Platoon still beats them all out.

It was an honesty that was deeper than the mere attention to detail for its realistic mixture of story and violent conflict. It was the honesty that comes from introducing a subject no one else would talk about at the time, and it was delivered by a rookie director who had still not formed a style he would rely on for everything. It just came together perfectly. And it would take me a long time to understand that level of reality.

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Fake! Copy! Stupid! (3)

13 March 2022 by Rey Armenteros

When we got to Robotech, a few years later, we had given up on the whole TV cartoon thing. Of course, there were the cinematic cartoons, but they were different. Even if they were aimed at kids, they were of a much higher quality.

It was hopeless. There was nothing out there that was interesting anymore. Our world was limited. Part of it might have been that we were just growing up. But I will lay the blame on the material that was coming out of the “idiot box” itself. The producers of these shows simply didn’t care. We still went to the movies, but the whole fantasy and science fiction world was changing. Movies were now straight up action stories with no monsters or technological gadgetry. Even the field of comic books was producing fewer and fewer things that were grabbing me. 

In came Robotech, in the wake of a long line of horrible American cartoons. Like some of the best cartoons from our childhood, Robotech was originally a Japanese cartoon. It was a direct descendent of Star Blazers, in some ways.  It was a space saga that involved battles with enemy hordes. People actually died in this cartoon, including main characters. We were so impressed with how this cartoon not only chose to show a more realistic take on future warfare, but it carried a storyline that never went back to square one at the end of every episode. American cartoons were all about maintaining the status quo so that they could easily go into the next episode without any changes. Maybe they were concerned that the next writer wouldn’t get the memo about the changes from the last story. It was as if the team of writers were not expected to communicate with each other in order to be on the same page with changes in an advancing storyline. Robotech went forward, and there was no going back. Besides the killing, the fact the story evolved was the other feature that made the Japanese cartoons so much more sophisticated than anything that we were used to.

Robotech was the one breath of fresh air, the thing we could look forward to on a weekday morning. It was the summer before I started college, and my brother and I had time to kill. We’d talk about Robotech after every episode. He’d mention the things that he thought were fake. Almost nothing was perfect for him, but I could live with whatever he was mentioning because I was already in love with this show, and when you are in love, the flaws are no longer visible.

The show went through three different storylines. Each period was divided by about fifty years. The first was Macross, and it was the best one. It had to do with the defense of Earth by one ship against hordes of alien invaders. There was the love triangle, that would take over the storyline toward the end when the direction of the story changed dramatically after an all-out battle that destroyed just about everything, shifting the conflict into an unexpected area. After the desolation of Earth, the survivors that now held on in pocket communities around the world were trying to live with the repercussions of that old war. The military was a central element of the setting, policing these communities of humans and alien survivors instead of making war. Instead of large-scale battles, we now had small skirmishes between the defense force and alien bandits. One major bad guy had survived, and he was there to put together a sizable enough force to finally destroy the puny humans.

In the meantime, the main character was slowly falling for his commander, but he still had feelings for the girl that had been avoiding him due to her celebrity status as a singer.

Though I never admitted it to my brother, I was just as enthralled with the romantic dynamics of Robotech as I was with all that killing. And we were still too uninformed in those matters to know if the romance were fake or were some kind of a copy. And to me at least, it never felt stupid.

NEXT: Platoon

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Fake! Copy! Stupid! (2)

06 March 2022 by Rey Armenteros

As kids, we had a simple repertoire of terms used to distinguish quality. We were negative about much that TV and movies had to offer. We had a critical eye towards things that were just plain no good. We were concerned with what seemed to be fake. We used fake for everything that was beyond reality. If the piece of action movie we watched were admirable, then it was “realistic,” and that meant that the events portrayed strove for no fakery in any of the results.

We also looked at the stories that did not include death as pure crap. Since we were only interested in action stories, and that almost always included blasting guns, if the story did not quantify the danger of such scenes by including at least several men being killed by flying bullets and exploding vehicles, we would be convinced that such work was not even worth our time. We would summarize the ending of some TV movie with our hands on our hips, simply stating: “No killing.” In the end, fake and no killing meant the same thing. One was the subset of the other. Fake should have been the broader title that encapsulated the other. But for us, they were almost synonymous, because since what we were looking for was violent solutions in our stories, “no killing” included about 95% of fake.

The other term was “copy.” If something was a copy of something, it meant we had seen that before in another movie or TV show. It was usually so blatant that the production had obviously looked at this other thing and took pointers in order to capitalize on other people’s successes. Just look at Star Wars and see how it influenced ten years of movies and shows about space travel. Everything after Star Wars involved lasers and fighter ships, and so every space saga was a copy of Star Wars. It was the same with those adventure movies where the hero had a five o’clock shadow and he had the same good luck-bad luck dynamics of Indiana Jones. The TV shows of Bring ‘Em Back Alive and Tales of the Gold Monkey were heinous — although we enjoyed them all the same.

It was true that we would resort to watching a copy if we felt it was good, but it was never going to be respected. Even though we were kids, we apparently had some ethical boundaries that could not be crossed. Tales of the Gold Monkey was one of the highest points of our week in those days, but it was never going to get more than a dismissive nod when we were talking about the qualities of the show.

Everything that we deemed bad was either fake or a copy. But there was a third piece of distinction that we used, and I was talking about it to my brother the other day, wondering what it could be. It wasn’t fake and no killing because we had concluded that they were the same thing. I started thinking about it, and then it dawned on me that my brother used to think a lot of things were stupid. I would use the term too, but not as often as he. He would put real stress on this expression. Both syllables of that word were projected with emphasis by him, with real force.

We talked about how we would use this word. “That’s just stupid!” was the regular use of it, but then, there was, “That’s so stupid!” The one word delivered with emphasis was the favored option when “just stupid” was not enough.

We were going over it, and I was telling him that though stupid was a very general term, it meant something specific to us. They were a few different things that meant stupid, but we agreed that the term was specific within these various uses. Stupid could mean that the show or movie was just ridiculous. It could also mean that something about it was not right, like certain scenes that were too weird for words. It was also that the situation was embarrassing even to the viewer. My brother added a couple of other possibilities, but the one that he felt went beyond everything else was,”A cheap solution to a complicated problem.” And that was a fair assessment of most of what we watched in the entire 1980s.

NEXT: Robotech

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Fake! Copy! Stupid! (1)

27 February 2022 by Rey Armenteros

For us, it was about which ones had killing and which ones didn’t. If it didn’t have killing, it was the type of story we were not interested in.

We were boys, and we were aware of the growing movement against violence on television. It started with the cartoons. Adults were saying how violent kid’s cartoons were. We would laugh, because they were not violent enough. You could have heroes and villains beating up on each other, but there was to be no blood or actual wounding, and absolutely no killing. In cartoons like G.I.Joe, soldiers were firing at each other with all forms of ordinance, never hitting a single person, as if bullets and rockets were only made for vehicles and structures. The word we used for this sort of unrealistic treatment of action stories was “fake.”

If the movie in question were not fake, it was “realistic.”

The A-Team was another fake program we watched. A helicopter was hit with a rocket launcher, and after it slammed down a cliffside in a cascade of fire, the two villains were seen stumbling out, asking, “You okay, Bob?” As if the bad guys mattered anyway! And the funny thing was that no matter how much we hated that program, we were there to watch it every week.

There was nothing else! Our world was limited by the occasional good movie and whatever we could get on regular TV. And we were only interested in things that had killing. This didn’t include slasher movies or things with genocide or any real kind of killing. We just liked action movies of all varieties, and if action included weapons, they had to show some kind of repercussion. It was basic mathematics. If bullets were flying through the air, some people would be there to stop them.

If you asked us back then, killing started with Star Wars, but that was not true. On television a couple years before Star Wars, we had reruns of old TV shows and movies, like the original Star Trek. When Captain Kirk killed a monster, we were happy in knowing that monster would never get up again. If we watched a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, the shooting of gunslingers on the other side of the fence of right and wrong was appropriate and to be expected.

The first movie I recalled watching in the theater was one of the old Sinbad movies. In time, we would have watched three such Sinbad movies. The formula was similar throughout. At some point in the adventure, after the quest was established, Sinbad’s voyage replete with sea dangers and some form of deceit would take them to a land where they needed to disembark. He usually left most of the crew on the ship, but he would take four of his heroic seamen to accompany him and the interested party that had hired them. They would lose one guy to some colossal monster, and then another guy to something else. Sinbad and the last two would encounter the main monster in the end of the movie, and a third guy would die. His closest friend usually survived alongside Sinbad and the people who had hired him.

The play-by-play results was important because it dictated the same tune in most other stories of the same type. The good guy never died in these things, and he usually had a friend that almost always made it out alive. But the other guys were fodder. To the writers of such stories, the systematic deaths of good guy underlings was certainly to show the danger involved in their endeavors. That is how writers were thinking back then; you have to show that there is an actual stake in the story, or the audience was not going to get emotionally involved. That is not at all how kids look at it. To us, it meant that if there were monsters, you had to have deaths. It almost sounds like these two things mean the same thing, but they don’t. For the storytellers, they need to quantify the deadliness of such adventures by including a scene to show just how dangerous the bad guys were; for boys hungry for logical consequences, such adventures exacted a price, and the underlings were there to complete the sacrifice.

It created a pattern that was hard to shy away from.

We eventually started noticing that Hollywood movies were starting to kill the best friend of the hero more and more often. Again, this was a consideration for script writers to really raise the stakes and have the hero get back at the bastards that had done that to his chum. For us, we would just roll our eyes to another predictable consequence of tumbling with the bad guys. We knew it was coming as soon as the story started to give you more scenes with the best friend, who you were finding out was a really good guy. Naturally!

I realize that I’m speaking for my brother, and if I were to ask him today what thoughts he might have had back then, it would likely be different. But in our conversations, this is what I gleaned from our concerns, and what was uncanny, when I think back on it was that our critical criteria paralleled each other. We were always on the same page, although I would say that at some point, he became more critical about lapses in “reality” than I was. There were times I would let things go because everything else seemed to come together so well, and he would be crucially dismissive of anything that had even an inkling of “fake.”

As far-fetched as the adventure of Star Wars was, it was still possible to have done all those things, or so we reasoned as boys. Star Wars never seemed to delve into the superheroic. The numbers of stormtroopers were manageable. And we loved that movie so much that at that early point as amateur critics, we allowed for any small errors of judgment.

NEXT: Defining the Terms

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