4th of July

Oh, hey! Uh… so, you may be wondering what happened to this week’s column. Well, it’s a little thing I like to call freedom. That’s right, for those of you who live in the shitty countries, this Sunday was the 4th of July, and I’ve only just now recovered from the festivities. Also the reason I didn’t just finish my article earlier in the week is because I had to spend that much time preparing for said festivities. The fourth means a lot of things to a lot of people, but to me it will always mean two things: barbecues with friends and family, and MOTHER-FUCKING EXPLOSIONS!!

These days I content myself with just watching the explosions in the sky, but in my youth I preferred to be right there, lighting the goddamn fuse! This is the only time of the year where, not only are children allowed to purchase incendiary devices from guys in rickety sheds on the side of the highway, but they’re actually considered weird if they don’t. God Bless America. I have a lot of fond memories of putting myself and those I care about in mortal danger by setting off miniature, sparkly bombs near them, but invariably the specifics that I always find myself focusing on are the various toys that I’ve destroyed.

An average Independence Day in the Woodis household

So now, for your amusement, I’m going to recall these various toys as best I can, along with the method by which I destroyed them, and the reasoning by which I justified it to myself.

Alien Vs. Predator Two-Pack

Damn, that was a rad toy. You got yourself an Alien and a Predator, and also a buttload of weapons for said Predator. These two were tricky bastards to destroy, I’ll tell you that much. I was quite pleased to find that the Predator could hold a Black Cat perfectly in his grip hand, but once it went off it didn’t really do anything. If you look at them you can see that these characters are actually pretty dense: explosions just roll around them and they keep coming for you in the night to eat your skin and place your skull on their mantle… and no, that wasn’t my justification for destroying them. Actually, the reason they had to die was simply because I already had both of these toys. It’s not like the two-pack was this all-new thing: these are actually two toys that they had been selling separately for years, and now they just put them together. Ultimately the pair survived the fourth with naught but a few badass burn marks, though I eventually melted them over an actual oil drum fire I had somehow become involved in.

Pizza Skimmin' Jetboat

Generally, TMNT toys were sacred objects, even around the wanton destruction that is the 4th. Yet this thing… I mean, just look at the fucking thing. What the fuck? Did I ask my parents for this fucking thing? I really hope for my sake that I didn’t. Why the fuck does everything have a turtle face? How fucked up would it be if you saw a guy going down the lake with a boat shaped like his own fucking head? Even worse, what would you think of some kind of crime fighting unit that not only had missiles on their jetboat, but missiles shaped like their goddamned faces?? To make matters worse, the damn thing didn’t even float (even though the front of the box clearly said it did)! The “Pizza skimmin’ Pizza Ski” down there at the front (which, in case you can’t tell, is a jet ski shaped like a goddamn pizza) could slide down to turn it into an even less functional and stupider looking hydrofoil. However, in order to do that there had to be a hole right there which, y’know, kinda made floating a very temporary prospect. It also didn’t help that the teeth and the interior of the boat were just stickers that peeled off after getting them wet. We tortured this thing for a while, mostly loading actual explosives into the flick-missile ports, but finally we put it out of our misery by sticking a disco flash in the cockpit.

For those who don’t know, Disco Flashes (or whatever your local variant on the concept was) were little reese’s cup looking capsules that, when ignited, flashed like a strobelight in various colors. These things burned ridiculously hot, and were often the final resort for annihilating a toy. If your retarded pizza-boat is shrugging off M-80’s, nothing takes that fucker down faster than a white-hot Reese’s Cup jammed down its cockpit.

G.I. Joe Style Guile

I’ve never really liked Guile, and to this day I don’t really know why. I guess I just never quite got his gameplay style down. I always preferred the quarter-circle style attacks versus charge moves. But whatever, this is Guile. After a couple of black cats we had successfully removed his left hand, but the classic “cherry bomb in the crotch” method saw little success. Eventually we started taking pot shots at him with an air soft gun, and low and behold, a solid hit in the center of the chest cause the fucker to explode! It took me a while to figure that one out, until I realized that these G.I. Joes were all held together by a rubber band in the center of their body to increase their flexibility, and snapping that basically sent all the pieces flying.

Super HUman Samurai Syber-Squad Figure

You know, I don’t think I’ve seen a single episode of that show, but I owned about a half-dozen of these things. I dunno, isn’t that dude just awesome looking? Plus… look at all the fucking swords he’s got! That was another thing I owned: I had an awesome kid-sized version of that sword, which could transform into a shield, or an axe, or a gun and probably a game controller and toaster oven if you worked at it long enough. As I recall, I had replaced this one because it lost all its accessories and was basically in shitty condition anyway, so I might as well let the dude go out with a bang. I tried wrapping a twenty pack of Black Cats around him, but nothing happened. You know, despite the fact that Black Cats never successfully destroyed anything, for whatever reason they were always my go-to weapon of destruction. We tried attaching him to a rocket, but not surprisingly it didn’t have enough lift to get him off the ground and it just fell over and skidded along the ground, burning a hole in his ass like on The Rocketeer. The hole in his ass turned out to be pretty helpful, since it was a convenient (and hilarious) place to shove a handful of explosives. We started with a smoke bomb just because, well, I was 12, but eventually the disco flash went in, and that was the end of… wait, was his name Servo? Weird…

Ace Duck

Seriously, fuck Ace Duck. He wasn’t even in the show. We threw that filthy duck straight to the Disco Flash and never looked back. Ace Duck was a weird toy… pretty much everyone had him, but nobody knew why. Nobody remembered asking for it, or buying it themselves. They certainly didn’t know where the Hell he came from. Granted there were a lot of TMNT toys based on obscure, one-shot characters, but I’m pretty sure Ace didn’t even get that one shot. He was a no-shot character! I think it was one of those things where all the other toys were sold out at Kay-Bee Toys when your parents went out to get you your birthday present, so they just grabbed the only toy in the Ninja Turtles section. That’s the only reason I can figure for why I (or anyone else) had this toy.

Various Cheap Plush Dolls

These were mostly gathered from the local fair by popping balloons or throwing rings around hoops. There were a few from that claw game that you find everywhere, but I was always terrible at that so there weren’t many. These were actually some of the most satisfying toys to destroy. They were poorly made, when they ruptured stuffing spilled everywhere, and in general they were disconcertingly flammable. I’ve had some start burning just from the fuse. All in all, if you want to destroy something, but you don’t want to deeply regret it later (I’ll miss you, Deluxe Servo, which is apparently your name), I recommend hitting up the fair and shooting water into a clown’s mouth.

Plastic Army Men

Celebrate your countries independence by melting representations of its greatest heroes with a Disco Flash. I don’t even know where to start with these things. In retrospect the craftsmanship on them was amazing. I don’t know how many of you have tried sculpting, but it’s really fucking hard to do with small objects like that. They’ve even got the wrinkles in the clothing and everything! Granted I’m pretty sure they’ve been using the exact same sculpts since the 50’s, but still. I think my favorite was always “dude with his gun lifted over his head ready to stab someone with his bayonet”. That dude was hardcore. Way more hardcore than “metal detector guy” or “radio dude”. These little dudes were actually kind hard to destroy, since they had no moving parts, but it was always fun to see how far you could launch them. I always tried to send a couple of the parachute guys up with a rocket, but I never did figure out a way to deploy the parachute at the end.

Black Power Ranger Toy

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with this particular breed of Power Ranger toy, but suffice to say they were actually pretty shitty. The plastic they were made from was thin and brittle, the joints were loosely attached, and they had a tendency to lose belt buckles and holsters through the slightest misuse. Ours in particular had a tendency for the left arm to just pop off, which sucked a as a toy but was awesome as a way to cram this dude full of M-80’s. This was probably the only interesting toy we owned that was flimsy enough to just annihilate with standard-issue fire crackers. I think at this point we stopped buying Power Ranger figures and just focused on Zords and kid-sized weapon replicas.

I think we’ve learned a few things today. Firstly, I’ve learned that just because someone or something you cared about is gone doesn’t mean it’s forgotten, and secondly I’ve learned that preteen boys are a danger to themselves and society as a whole. And that’s what 4th of July is all about.