When I was high school, the CDTA (Capital District Transportation Authority) of Albany, NY introduced a new bus route: #17, the four mall circuit.   As the name suggests, the bus provides direct transportation between four area shopping malls.  The inception of this route led me to run away with my imagination: I envisioned city-states rising around the malls — complete with built in condominiums.  Subways would connect each city-state with the other and all the old cities and towns would vanish.  "Wow", I thought.  "What a great short story that would make.  I oughta write that someday."
 

    Of course this, like so many other ideas, was passively shelved due to laziness.  It made its print debut almost a decade later in this writing.  I was reminded of it while reading Edge City by Joel Garreau (see review). According to Garreau, what I then perceived as a cute little sci-fi fantasy wasn't far off the mark from the very real future of civilized America. (My friend Andrew once speculated that the enclosed shopping mall represents the highest form of civilization — "How could you get more civilized than this?"). Different, of course, is that the condos aren't built in — they're a mile or two down the interstate.  Also, for the most part no subway systems connect "edge cities" — public mass transit in the wilds of America?  I was so naïve.

     Still, this got me to thinking.  Have you noticed that it has become increasingly difficult to make a joke without it coming true? Have you ever sat around the tube with your friends, making fun of silly stuff like The Psychic Friends Network only to discover a few months later that there is something new on the scene that outdoes your wildest fantasies (e.g. Philip Michael Thomas's Psychic Connection)? [An aside, added August 2005: Curiously, according to NNDB, Thomas was once the boyfriend of singer Dionne Warwick. Warwick, you may remember, hosted The Psychic Friends Network. Hmm...]

    This phenomena has been of concern to me over the last couple of years.  I now honestly fear that parody may one day (if not next week) become an antiquated form.  As the world becomes a place which — by twentieth century standards — can best be described as surreal, will future generations have the tools to recognize the concept of the surreal?

     Back in 1993, Jeff recalled the days of old (which for us, is the 80's). It went something like this:  "I remember when I was growing up, once in awhile there'd be something on television that'd just be so crazy that I'd really make note of it and remember to tell people about it ... and now I see it every day."

    '93 was the year I remember as bringing us The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, a horrific Saturday morning cartoon wherein Pooh was arrested (not once, but twice — in two separate episodes), Tigger was hanged, and the adventures of the whole gang were supposed to be just the dreams they had after falling asleep watching TV(!?) in Christopher Robin's room.  At this time, such media psychosis had started to become the rule, rather than the exception.  It was soon accepted in our circle that one could simply not write fast enough to keep up with the insanity.

    By 1994 however, an even more frightening pattern began to emerge.  In the years prior, it had simply been a question of society's overall acceptance of the ridiculous as standard, of the obscene as healthy.  But now we would bear witness concrete examples of parody becoming reality and, soon after, reality surpassing the absurdities once delineated by parody.

    The best example of the former circles around the child's television show - toy - cereal - icon known as The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  Now, while few of us would consider this to be a "serious" TV show, the kids take it very seriously, and I think we can all agree that its creators by no means intended it to be a comedy. Few of us, however, are aware that the show's roots are in a (late 80's early 90's?) comedy program called Dynaman (see links below).

    I, myself, had never heard of the program, but was told by my friend Jeff that it was  exactly like The Power Rangers, except that it was intended for adults and was supposed to be funny.  It was sort of generic parody of the 60's and 70's Japanese television aesthetic — a loving mixture of references to shows like Battle of the Planets (AKA G-Force, from the same period as SpeedRacer),  Ultraman, Godzilla etc. Though I have never seen an episode of Dynaman, I once caught an excerpt of the same while watching an old rerun of Night Flight and can confirm that Jeff was not exaggerating at all — the only visual difference I could discern between Dynaman and The Power Rangers was the colors of the characters' uniforms.  Somehow the hands of media production and popular demand took a little-known adult comedy and morphed it into the most watched children's television program in the world.

 

the Dyanaman characters

    Now what was that I said about reality surpassing parody?  Well,  during the year I lived in the Midwest I was forced, on many an unfortunate lunch hour,  to delve further into the world of fast food culture than I care to remember.   Hardee's, Wendy's, Burger King, McDonald's, Rally's — all the big boys, as it were — were engaged in what seemed to be a bacon war.

    Each was determined to  have  (in  the words of   Hardee's)  "The ULTIMATE Bacon Cheeseburger".  The commercials to this end amazed the viewer with that relatively new breed of food photography known in the advertising industry as "beautiful food."  Borrowed mainly from the "plumbing shots" of the porn world, beautiful food is those shiny, hypercolored photos of hamburgers, pies, frozen dinners, etc that make their way onto food packages and magazines.  Also prevalent in the prolific, Midwest fast food ads were were shots of people shoving, shoving cheeseburgers and other fast food sandwiches down their throats.  The most memorable visual was that of a Hardee's ad for an elongated cheeseburger (just imagine two burgers side by side and fused to one another) wherein a man shoved the thing into his mouth while standing in the middle of a football stadium.

    Foolishly, I tried to get in on the act.  I wrote a fake commercial for the "Megalopolis Burger ... dripping with HOT bacon" thinking that the idea of a cheeseburger with "... ten strips of pure bacon" would beat them all.    My roommate Ryan and I built and polyurethaned the Megalopolis Burger,  took photos, storyboarded the ad, and prayed for the magic TV people to make come make my dream come true.  A month or so later (when it was clear that the magic traveling television crew had stayed home), I lay in a depressed heap in front of the TV when it happened:

    "Oh, my God! They out-Megalopolised me!", I exclaimed in a mix of excitement, horror, panic, and jealousy.  An ad for one of the burger chains was introducing a burger that featured a bacon disc with a diameter equal to its beef counterpart.  If that wasn't enough, 18 months later Taco Bell was selling a bacon-cheeseburger-burrito. (Read a related Bloomberg News article about this spike in bacon consumption affecting pork belly futures).

     These examples, of course, are merely the flagships of an assault that could possibly destroy the very essence of such things as ... oh ... irony.  Every day we wade through herds of seemingly humorless dolts.  But that's okay — it's been that way since humans could grunt.  Luckily I have always been fortunate to meet those souls that possess a set of perceptive tools and shared a common language.  We speak in codes to one another, often at the expense of the said humorless dolts.

    But, though the tools will most likely remain, it seems possible that the language itself may soon fail us.  Speaking on the (exponentially increasing) number of surreal, Huxleyan badges which currently tag almost every aspect of life, my friend Matt once noted that "it comes to a point where it's just not funny anymore."  He's absolutely right. It does cease to be funny.  It almost even fails to be depressing after a certain point. Instead it becomes mundane.

     In Culture Freak # 2 I wrote a little blurb about the then recent demise of Jerry Garcia.  Conceived and written almost in passing, fantasy images came to mind: of deadheads continuing the tours in memory of Jerry (without the band); of the band finding a look-and/or-sound-alike, or animatronic Jerry; of the band simply trying to go on without him.

    Less than two weeks after The Grateful Dead announced their 'break up' what did we see but television commercials for "Tour of the Living Dead"  (the tour, the album, most likely the movie or at least the video, and perhaps even the breakfast cereal).  While, in the back of my mind, I really I was expecting something nutty like this to happen,  I also rather hoped that I'd be way off base; that beyond the quintessential release of posthumous recordings (intended for the not so Deadicated, newer fans) and a movie on Jerry's life, they'd let a sleeping dog lie.  But instead:

Mike: "Man, they're doing a reunion tour. They can already play the retro card."

Matt: "Yeah, they should call it 'A Retrospective; Last Year — Looking back."

    I don't know, maybe I'm just a little paranoid.  As Matt once suggested hopefully,  "maybe one day we'll look back on the 90s the way we now look at the 50s — as some caricature of the past: like 'Wow, remember back when everything had a ^TM next to it?"  Maybe.  But, in all seriousness, I have a lot at stake with this stuff.  My very being seems centered around the production (in one form or another) of satire from materials ranging from the ironic, to the studied, to the psychotic, and everywhere in between.  But our increasingly insane world may out do me yet.

Dynaman Links:

Fortune City