Maglev to Shambala

Back around 1998 or so, the Adelphia Cable Corporation accidentally wired our house for roughly triple the amount of channels we were actually paying for. In addition to being the catalyst for today’s subject, this also serves as a microcosmic example of why internal error beats external effort every time. Anybody can steal cable. Not every cable company can claim that it gave the Paquet family forty free channels for half a decade without noticing. R.I.P., Adelphia.

Television is often credited as one of the more influential aspects of youth, and this is understandable. When you’re a kid, your world is limited to whatever you can get to within half an hour’s walk from your house. Television takes you to magical, wondrous places, like the Nickelodeon sound stage where they taped “Legends of the Hidden Temple.” Words cannot do justice to the premise of a kids’ game show hosted by a random guy and a talking rubber monolith. Perhaps the scariest part of all is that the kids who couldn’t put the three-piece Silver Monkey statue together are now old enough to vote.

The videoscape of television in the late Nineties and early Aughts was a heady blend of insanity and action. “Legends of the Hidden Temple” notwithstanding, the show most totally unaware of its own shortcomings was “Dragon Ball Z.”

The Cartoon Network had a programming block called Toonami, which is the sort of sophisticated pun you want to wrap around content that consisted largely of burly men hitting each other. Virtually all of the shows I remember seeing under the Toonami banner were action/adventure, consisting of American also-rans (like the “Johnny Quest” series remake and “ReBoot”), and anime. Of all the shows, “Dragon Ball Z” had the longest lifespan in rotation, which makes sense, because it was the ultimate brainless action show, with about a 1:1 ratio of words spoken to punches thrown. I’m surprised anybody bothered to dub it. There are people out there who paid mortgages by going to work five days a week and recording different kinds of grunts.

The hero of the show is a man named Goku. Goku is (as best I can remember) a member of a race of super-strong supermen, and he used his powers to fight the bad guys. These powers included the ability to beat the stuffing out of the bad guys, to have the stuffing beat out of him by the bad guys, to summon a ball of pure energy and the concomitant abilities that allowed him to do so without burning his hands or passing out from ozone fumes.

The show moved forward in what was basically real time, meaning a single fight could take several weeks. In order to convey the significance of these fights, each one was more dramatic than the last. Over time, the writers slowly painted themselves into a corner: the first major arc ended with a fight where the planet the fighters are on gets destroyed in the process. The fight is that awesome.

(Collage by Kevin Paquet)

And so there they would be, Goku and the bad guy, and the planet would be shaking and they would both be grunting menacingly and – this is my favorite part – Goku would be standing there in a ragged pair of pants.

He started out fully clothed, of course, but after being hit so many times by an enemy who just dealt a killer blow to a planet, he’s now down to pants. (His enemy in this particular fight arc, by the way, was apparently some sort of asexual lizard man who didn’t wear clothes.) So the logical question is, what in hell are those pants made out of?

Of course, this is hardly the only example of impossible clothing. I’ve singled out “Dragon Ball Z,” but it was in good company. “ReBoot” featured characters who (under certain conditions) could simply double-click the badge that all of them wore to change clothes. “Sailor Moon” – which was targeted at girls about the same age as the boys who watched “DBZ” – featured stock action sequences in which the heroines would twirl around very fast in a shower of sparkly lights in order to change clothing. In its own way, this is even more hilarious than the indestructible pants phenomenon.

First, the girls – who were all in either high or middle school, I forget – looked almost exactly the same before and after their transformations. They wore matching blouses and skirts. And possibly gloves, I think. That was it. They didn’t even have masks. Second, I challenge any one of you to find anybody, male or female, who can perform any kind of noticeable wardrobe change – even putting on a sock – in ten seconds while twirling around very fast.

Of course, the list is endless. When you’ve got a superhero, you don’t leave him standing there in slacks and a polo shirt – you give him clothes that are as awesome as he is. Or you do the best you can, anyway. Television and movies cost a lot of money to make, which is why Mr. Incredible, who was dreamed up by Pixar, had his own personal seamstress and why Captain Video, who was dreamed up by defunct DuMont in 1949, wore an army surplus uniform (or so I’ve heard).

There is no real-world cloth with these properties. Not that I mind losing the “appear/disappear” bit – which would be inconvenient if it happened spontaneously while in public – but I think that, deep down, we would all sleep a little better at night wearing pajamas that could shield us from molten metal. The ultimate badass fiber has yet to be manufactured by scientists, but I say that we give a Nobel Prize to them when they make it. Or when they put the Silver Monkey statue together correctly, whichever comes first.