Fake! Copy! Stupid! (1)
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