Many years ago, back in the mid-1980s, I used to watch a late-night programming block called “Night Flight.” Most of what I loved was trippy cartoons and messed-up short features, including ‘Fantastic Planet,’ which still wigs me out decades later. But, interestingly, another of the recurring features was ‘Dynaman,’ a gag dub of what I know now to be an early season of the Japanese Super Sentai series that eventually came to our shores as Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. I clearly recall the Dynaman series, and even stole one of my most beloved jokes from it, but I often wonder what might have happened had I tried to find out about Super Sentai earlier in my life. (Short answer: Without Google, nothing. Nothing would have happened.) And what if my drunken viewing of ‘Robot Carnival’ at a party in college had led me down the path of anime and manga?
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) ponders the road not taken, asking:
What do you wish you had become a fan of earlier in your lifetime?
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Magic The Gathering. I remember friends playing it in junior high but I never even watched a game or learned the rules. For years I just heard about it in the background. Two of my co-workers had been talking about it last year and when I saw the demo for Duels of the Planeswalkers on the PS3 I thought I owed it to find out at least the rules.
Now I’m hooked and wish I’d played it when I had all that free time!
There are two big ones that I can think of:
1. Punk Music. I resisted listening to punk because I didn’t want to be grouped with the stupid punk kids in my high school. It wasn’t until years later that I learned how much of the music I liked inherited from punk’s social and political traditions.
2. Game of Thrones. My friends told me that I should read A Game of Thrones when it first published in 1996. I was a little wrapped up in Star Wars, Michael Moorcock and the original Conan stories at the time and completely forgot about it. I finally got into the series 12 years later and it was everything they said it would be.
Comics. I didn’t really get into them until just recently. But more-so, I grabbed the new issue of Swamp Thing and was surprised at how much I liked it. So now I kinda want to go back and find the issues of the past year.
Holy crud, Matthew. Your article brought back so many mid 80’s Night Flight memories (sometimes hosted by L.A. DJ Fraiser Smith) and the brain altering Fantastic Planet. I need to YouTube Dynaman…
Exercising and Vegetables.
Everyone should have been a fan of Firefly earlier. Maybe we would have had more than one season.
D&D Novels outside of Forgotten Realms settings. I’m not even sure why I was so against reading others (like Dragonlance) other than the fact that most of our campaigns were based in or inspired by Forgotten Realms settings.
I remember loving Dynaman as a kid because it reminded me of “those tapes my brother had” (other Super Sentai series), and I later became a fan of MMPR, but I wish I’d paid more attention to Super Sentai back then. I’ve done my best to sort of catch up, but my pre-Jetman viewing is terribly incomplete, and even the series that were translated into Power Rangers have been difficult to find once they were no longer current. I’ve been lucky, though, as I’ve been able to see some stuff I can’t find online (including DVD and VHS specials) as well as get some Super Sentai and Kamen Rider collectibles from friends who live in Japan.
Doctor Who and the Justice Society of America. I started collecting comics on a weekly basis roughly two years ago, about six months prior to DC’s reboot. But I didn’t read the JSA series when it was still around. Now I wish I’d been there to see the old team off.
At least there’ll always be trade paperbacks. And Earth 2.
Exercise and vegetables (as stated above; I’m gettin’ old and hurtin’ in weird places)…
Dr Who: I didn’t realize how much fun it would be but now that I have decided to watch it I’m loving it.
Astro City and Kurt Busiek’s work: I only recently (thanks Major Spoilers) discovered his work; however, I’m not sure I would have picked up on some of the nuances without the “life experiences” to back them up. But I think I would have enjoyed reading Astro City when it first came out, then re-reading them again as an older man and comparing the two.