Beware The Spaceman

Author: Analyst

  • Hooked on the Brothers: Mario Advance

    Retro Reaction in ZX Spectrum colours

    It’s the early 00s and the world is now obsessed with 3D gaming. The Sega Saturn had been built more around 2D, and it had at least commercially been seen as a failure. Sony’s PlayStation had won out in the console wars. Microsoft were about to enter the console market with their Xbox. The first one. Not to be confused with Xbox One (never got why they did that). This was the original Xbox. Never owned one, but the ones I saw? Those things were big.

    The big games were Metal Gear Solid 2 and Grand Theft Auto III. Games had made the jump to 3D. The gaming landscape was settling into a status quo still recognised today.

    The era of the mascot platformer had passed, mostly. The pixel art of 2D gaming was seen as old now. Everyone wanted 3D and arcade-perfect graphics.

    That’s what was going on with the home consoles. The handhelds, however, were another story. The Game Boy Advance was Nintendo’s next version of the Game Boy, and an upgrade to something approaching Super Nintendo quality. A 16-bit system existed with a user base estimated at around 81 million.

    But rather than make 2D platform games for their handheld, Nintendo looked to their past. Remember how the SNES had Mario All-Stars and Super Mario World? Both had already been remade for 16-bit hardware. Nintendo decided to re-release these games as the Super Mario Advance series.

    I remember having some relations over from the USA, and they were glued to their portable Nintendos. I assume they had made quite a lot of progress on the plane. When I glanced over their shoulder, I was delighted to see they were playing a Mario game. Throwing turnips at bad guys in a game I called Super Mario Bros. 2, but they called Super Mario Advance.

    Nintendo had got another generation into Super Mario games by re-releasing what they already had.

    It worked. Outside of the Pokémon series, which became massive, the Super Mario Advance series was among the most successful on the GBA. With the Game Boy Color receiving a port of the original Super Mario Bros. (which included The Lost Levels as a bonus), the entire Super Mario Bros. back catalogue never really went away.

    While the massive 3D games of the time were hitting larger TVs, Super Mario remained big on the little screen.

    The Mario Advance series saw to it that another generation grew up with Mario.

    The re-releases worked, and it was great to see another generation “Hooked on the Brothers”. But there were no new adventures.

    Mario, though, has a frenemy. Evil Mario, known to gamers as Wario. After being defeated by Mario in Super Mario Land 2, he took that series for himself as Wario Land. Wario seems to be Nintendo’s go-to character for testing the waters. (I’m looking at you, WarioWare.)

    To tell the story of how we get to New Super Mario Bros., we need to go back to Wario Land.

  • It’s real to her, that’s all that matters

    a spaceship above the world with title

    This one feels like an Off World post because it’s an interpretation, and my interpretations can be wrong. Off a Halloween retro reaction, I rewatched A Nightmare on Elm Street.

    The film is layered. I always knew that. But watching it on my tenner Blu-ray player, a film I must have seen countless times, one of the scenes changed the context of the whole film for me.

    It’s the scene before that last confrontation. Nancy calls her Dad Donald over to the house. Freddy melts into the bed and Nancy begs her police chief dad to get him.

    I always thought that this scene confirmed Freddy’s existence. We see a close-up of Donald’s face. But what my brain never registered before is that he never confirms seeing the boogeyman.

    His only reaction is to hug his daughter.

    Chronologically, the sequels confirm he did indeed see Freddy. But take those out of the equation for a moment. What he sees is a house fire and his troubled daughter.

    The hug, in my estimation, confirms that his character accepts that the situation is real to his daughter, and that actually is all that matters.

    It reframes the whole film.

    I have seen the calls to cancel films like Nightmare, and I get it. They’re not the nicest of films. They’re not designed to be for everyone.

    But I think there’s another reading worth considering.

    We all face our Elm Street at some point or another and when we do that situation can be very urgent and very real. Sometimes our house fire is invisible to others.

    “Daddy” couldn’t fix this. It took the character’s inner strength to do that.

    I think the overall message there is actually very relevant and very positive in today’s world.

  • The Story of the Mario Bros 2006 Requel

    Retro Reaction in ZX Spectrum colours

    It has been almost 20 years since Nintendo rebooted the 2D Super Mario Bros. franchise.

    Let that sink in for a moment. In around three months from now, New Super Mario Bros. will be as old as Super Mario Bros. was when it first came out.

    Over at Never-ending 80s, we looked at defending the legacy sequel. Here, Nintendo, the most recognised brand in all of gaming, did its own legacy sequel to the Super Mario Bros. franchise.

    You see, the name was New Super Mario Bros., not Super Mario Bros. 5 (with Super Mario World technically being the fourth main entry on the SNES). It was not a continuation as such. So, legacy sequel?

    Sort of.

    It’s important to point out that Mario had never gone away. The “mainline” Mario games had switched to 3D with the well-received Super Mario 64 for the N64 back in 1997 (for us in the UK).

    These 3D games had been massively successful overall, and Super Mario Galaxy is a darn good reason to find and power on a Nintendo Wii today. Retro Reaction will get to those in time, too.

    This was designed to satisfy those older fans. A throwback to when Mario was a simple case of getting Jumpman to the far right of the screen. A world of flagpoles, fireballs and, erm, dancing Goombas.

    Over the next few blogs, we’re going to be looking at Nintendo’s rebooted New Super Mario Bros. series, at a time when Nintendo wasn’t really focusing on 2D games.

    We will see how they tested the waters with 2D gaming through a lesser-known character from the Mario universe, and how the 2D games would eventually come full circle, feeding ideas back into the 3D ones.

    New Super Mario Bros. arrived in a wave of nostalgic glory. But by 2012, Nintendo was being accused of replaying the same notes one too many times.

    It’s requel month at Retro Reaction. As Mario himself would say, “Let’s-a go!”

  • Ranking Elm Street: Nightmare on Elm Street

    After that viewing of Part 3 and needing to be walked home despite being at secondary school, those words from my friends rang true:

    “If you thought that was scary, you should see Freddy 1.”

    We did indeed watch “Freddy 1”, more well known of course as A Nightmare on Elm Street.

    This film hits different. It opens with a horror segment — a teen running through a nightmare landscape. You automatically settle in, assuming we’re following our protagonist Tina… only for her to be killed in the first few minutes.

    The message is clear: no one is safe.

    What the film does next is build tension absolutely perfectly. We meet Nancy and her friends. The adults — always a step behind in horror — have Tina’s boyfriend down as her killer. As the characters talk about their nightmares featuring the same “creep”, we know that night has to come. It’s this cycle that ramps up the tension massively. You know, because it’s universal, that they will have to fall asleep.

    Unlike the other films, Freddy is on screen here for a grand total of seven minutes. This monster makes the version in the sequels look like a parody. His story is told through the other characters, and that is so much scarier. Proof, I think, that what you don’t see can be scarier than what you do.

    But those story beats we do get… wow. One line on first watch from Nancy’s drunk mother: “He’s dead, Nan. He can’t get you. Mommy killed him.”

    In this ghost story, the spectre, demon, or whatever Freddy is has the children paying for their parents’ sins. This is why none of the adults on Elm Street believe the kids.

    Then there’s the ending. Bob Shaye, the producer, wanted to keep Freddy “alive”, seeing the potential in Elm Street as a franchise (he was right). Wes described a different ending — one that is actually a much better fit for the film (he was also right).

    After pulling Freddy’s hat from her dream, Nancy realises she can bring Freddy back into the real world where he can be hurt. Today we’re used to seeing characters like Nancy in horror — but back in ’84, girls in these films usually did a lot of running and screaming. This was wonderfully against the norm.

    Towards the end she faces Freddy and tells him: “I want my mother and friends again. I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing. You’re sh*t.”

    With that, Freddy is gone.

    In Wes’s proposed ending, this wasn’t undone. Nancy goes to school the next day, her friends still alive.

    The ending we got… well, you’ve likely seen it. The car has Freddy colours, and he drags Nancy’s mum through the door. The seeds of MTV Freddy are planted right there.

    But imagine for a moment that Nancy’s powerful victory was left to stand. That Wes Craven’s ending was the one we got. A Nightmare on Elm Street would be a one‑and‑done masterpiece.

    As it is, though, it’s still a masterclass in tension and a perfect Halloween watch.

    Had Wes got his way, would I have watched Part 3 at my friend’s house? Would my friends even know who Freddy Krueger was? Would I be writing this blog to you all on Hallows’ Eve?

  • Scream (1984): Not for the Nervous, or the Publisher

    Comic panel with title

    Earlier this month we took a look at classic horror comic Misty. Tonight we look at another British horror anthology comic, Scream. Its original run was only 15 issues in 1984 — a weekly title, the first of which even came with those plastic vampire teeth.

    I can imagine that being a selling point back then. Because in the eighties, fake teeth and a bin liner would make a decent enough Halloween costume. I digress.

    At the time of writing I’m five issues in. Unlike the Misty collection, these issues are in their original form, not collected. Each issue offers a new chapter continuing from the one before.

    Much like any anthology, there’s a lot to like and a lot that wasn’t for me. The strongest story so far is The Thirteenth Floor. It plays on those superstitions around the number 13 (as the recent American Horror Story series has). Maxwell is the computer in charge of Maxwell Towers. The AI goes rogue (well, didn’t that age well?) and Max will protect his — I guess — residents at any cost. The stories so far (a thief in one, a school bully in another) end with the culprit trapped on the building’s thirteenth floor, where Max has various horrors waiting for them.

    Elsewhere, The Dracula File (those teeth had to be relevant somehow) sees Dracula return to England. Rushed to a military hospital from behind the Iron Curtain, a patient riddled with bullet holes is somehow still alive. Dracula escapes the hospital and goes on a spree of terror. This one has a very “Hammer Horror” feeling about it.

    Other stories range from one where a boy’s uncle is a monster living in the basement, to one where all the cats have turned into killers.

    They’re interesting takes on monsters, and here’s where I think it differs from Misty. The fears in that comic were about being the outsider and not fitting in — school bullies, pressure, social anxiety. Scream is more about the monsters. It doesn’t shy away from that. Much like Misty, most of the stories here aren’t colourised.

    By today’s standards the stories are tame. But in 1984 IPC already had already had Mary Whitehouse on their back about their action titles in the mid 70s. Horror comics in the era of the video nasty didn’t last long. Scream’s tagline “not for the nervous” seemed to apply more to its publisher than its audience.

    What we’re left with is an interesting time capsule — a kind of “Twilight Zone” for kids. Perhaps even a predecessor to things like Are You Afraid of the Dark? or Goosebumps.

  • They’re Not Your Toys Anymore

    Cassette tape with title

    Remember I3T? Well, he’s a busy man these days. I would like to tell you all why, but that’s not my tale to tell. Those Spacecasts, well, they sometimes still happen in telephone conversations. (His new job involves a lot of walking!) One night, we were discussing the return of Beetlejuice, the latest in a long line of older films getting a sequel long after the original.

    The gist of the conversation was that I had enjoyed the movie. I3T had seen it and not so much. He felt it didn’t need a sequel.

    Then it hit me. He didn’t like the film because it was an unwelcome reminder. This was because the film was not “our” Beetlejuice. The cast we watched in 1988 don’t look like it’s 1988 anymore, no matter the image you have in your head. A reminder that we don’t look like we did in 1988 anymore either.

    My exact words were: “I think you don’t like it because it’s a greatest hits movie, a goodbye.”

    There was a silence, then an admission.

    “You’re right. On some level, that is exactly what it is. A farewell tour.”

    I have heard all the arguments against legacy sequels, from “Can’t they make anything new?” to “They’re just not as good.” I’ve even subscribed to some of these views myself. But just as I wrote when I took the nephews to watch the latest Ghostbusters, part of getting to grips with this is understanding that they’re not “our” toys anymore.

    Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be looking at how some of our favourites are back again.

    How we are seeing, through the legacy sequel dust, the toys we once loved being brushed off and handed down to the next generation.

    You know what?

    I’m fine with that.

  • Elm Street Ranked:Dream Warriors

    Retro Reaction in ZX Spectrum colours

    Number2:Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors

    I’m going to go back to that night — the one I mentioned in the introduction. Because the first Elm Street I ever saw, taped off Sky onto a VHS, was Part 3: The Dream Warriors. It’s remained a favourite, and it came close — really close — to being as good as the original.

    The opening scene sees Kristen falling asleep while making the matchstick house she keeps seeing in her dreams. Freddy’s house. I remember an eerie guitar riff here, but I’m glad to see my Blu‑ray restores the true “Into the Fire” track by Dokken — the rock music she uses to stay awake.

    Her falling asleep leads to a very frightening (to my thirteen‑year‑old brain) run through Freddy’s house of horrors. It’s easy to see now that the little girl she tries to save is a puppet, but back then it was terrifying. When Kristen wakes, everything seems fine. She heads to the bathroom — and jump scare. He’s in the mirror. Never trust a mirror in a horror movie. The taps morph into razors and slash Kristen’s wrists just as her mother walks in to ask what she’s doing.

    At the time, I hadn’t seen anything like it. I didn’t have the words. Freddy is staging these murders to look like suicides. The adults can’t see the threat. They see cries for attention, and later tragedies of the teens’ own making. It’s clear Freddy is a metaphor for depressive mental illness.

    Luckily for the teens, someone does know what they’re going through, as we’re reintroduced to Nancy from the first film.

    This is the first Elm Street to use the psychiatric ward setting. And despite what might sound doom‑and‑gloom so far, the film pivots from horror to dark fantasy. To defeat Freddy, our Dream Warriors use a psychiatric drug and have to find their inner powers (the depression metaphor really keeps coming, doesn’t it). The X‑Men film New Mutants would later credit this movie as a heavy influence.

    I actually loved this change. It’s perhaps the last Nightmare film where you’re rooting for the teens, not the killer. There are a couple of very memorable kills — one where he takes out a Harry Potter lookalike years before that was a thing, using a wheelchair (it’s bizarre). And of course, the iconic moment where he pops out of a TV and, after slamming his victim’s face into it, quips: “Welcome to prime time, b%tch.”

    It’s with this line that you can trace the steady decline. Once the monster starts taunting his prey with one‑liners, a layer of mystique is lost. But in my opinion, this film is darn near perfect anyway.

    We do lose some key characters. Nancy is killed in the story — though, as you already know, this isn’t her last appearance. But overall, the film is surprisingly hopeful.

    If you wanted to see the best this franchise has to offer, you can make an unofficial trilogy of Wes Craven’s films: the first, the third, and New Nightmare. Everything from the soundtrack, those really dark subtexts, and the practical visuals make this a classic.

    But that just leaves one. The one that started it all. Meet me on Elm Street. This Halloween.

  • Why Shouldn’t I Watch with Subtitles?

    a spaceship above the world with title

    My attempt to be less reliant on those streaming services led to that meltdown last week. Well, here came the good part. I was on the lookout for some bargains.

    My first ports of call were eBay and MusicMagpie.

    All 8 Potter films. I have seen most of these, but in the wrong order. I was lucky enough to visit the studio on one of my nephews’ birthdays. It was enough to pique my interest and, at £7 for all 8 films on Blu-ray, it seemed a steal.

    Then on eBay, I found the whole Lord of the Rings set. £4 for the trilogy. I have seen these before, but not for years.

    £11, which was about £3 over the cost of one month of Netflix, with some films I was excited to watch.

    So, on the first night, I tried The Philosopher’s Stone. This analyst is getting to that middle-age category (did the Atari reviews give that away?), so I was surprised there was no subtitle option on the menu.

    A quick Google search told me that old Blu-rays expect you to press the subtitle button on your remote. But of course, I’m using one of those universal remotes. So it turns out people at Hogwarts either shout at each other or whisper. Given my next option was to turn the sound up, yeah, I don’t think my neighbour would appreciate that.

    The next night, it was time to follow Frodo. The film starts with a menu. The menu offers subtitles. The picture looks great.

    I lay there with the electric blanket on, thinking I had cracked it. I was watching a film I actually owned. One where I had read the back of the box. All was great.

    Then the picture got stuck.

    Now, I do want to point out that a quick stop-start fixed it. I absolutely don’t regret getting back into physical media. But when you spend a while with real discs and real cables, the result can be real headaches.

  • Ranking Elm Street: New Nightmare

    Retro Reaction in ZX Spectrum colours

    Number 3: Wes Cravens New Nightmare

    It’s 1995. I’m over at my friend’s before school. He has horror movies on, which isn’t unusual. The trailer (yes, VHS tapes did this before the main feature — it wasn’t just a cinema thing) was for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. My friend smiles and says, “Freddy’s back.”

    But “Freddy’s back” was no longer a surprise. This was the VHS release, but looking at the cinema dates, Freddy had been declared dead in 1992 only for a new film to be advertised in 1994. “Freddy’s back” was becoming as predictable as EastEnders being on tonight.

    There had been six films, and when we last saw Krueger, his daughter had banished him to hell for what was promised to be the final time.

    What came out in 1994 was, in this Analyst’s opinion, an absolute stroke of genius. The film didn’t undo Freddy’s death. It brought back Nancy from the first film despite her being “dead” by Part 3. Except it didn’t. Nancy remained dead. Heather Langenkamp returned — and there lies the film’s difference.

    One of my favourite scenes in the entire franchise follows Heather on a talk show. The host brings out Robert Englund in full MTV Freddy mode. He gets a standing ovation from the studio audience as he teases, “You’re all my children now!” It’s a famous quote from Nightmare 2. But wow, what a creative way to make a point.

    This boogeyman — whose picture on a VHS box once sent me home with nightmares — had become something else. An icon still, yes always. But somewhere between saying “Welcome to prime time!” in Dream Warriors and rapping with the Fat Boys in 1988, the curtain had been pulled too far open. The mystique of the dream stalker had long gone with every lore dump in every sequel. In this one scene, Wes told his audience he knew that.

    Wes writes a film here that puts his Dream Demon — the thing we call Krueger — back to his darkest. He stalks Heather, her son, and other Elm Street cast members. The way to defeat him is to play Nancy one last time. She faces off with him in the boiler room. After Freddy’s defeat, we learn this was all a screenplay, and that Freddy is once again trapped inside the story. Leaving us all safe until next time.

    Among our group at the time, I don’t think this one got the love it deserved. Partly because it came towards the end of the Elm Street run — we’d seen a lot of the scares done before. But also because it was, whisper it, a bit creative and arty. When you’re that age, you don’t usually go for that kind of thing.

    This concept though — where the characters know they’re in a horror film and know the rules — well, that could be expanded upon by Wes a couple of years later in a film called Scream. It became quite big. A story for another time, I think.

  • Ranking Elm Street: The Dream Child

    Retro Reaction in ZX Spectrum colours

    Number 4: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child

    We’ve reached one of the more difficult parts of the countdown. There’s a strong argument that Part 4 could sit in this spot. The Dream Child is often seen toward the back end of the Nightmare series, and there are downsides to it — plenty of them.

    Here’s my reasoning. Of the two movies where our Dream Master Alice defeats Freddy, this is the one that doesn’t dismantle the previous film in the first twenty minutes. Much like The Dream Master, it’s unmistakably 80s in tone and effects. But more importantly, it tries something different with the franchise this far in. Probably just a personal opinion, but I found the question of whether unborn babies dream interesting enough to carry the story.

    We also build on some of the lore introduced in The Dream Warriors: Krueger being the son of a nun who was abused in an asylum. The doors were locked, the guards left for a few days — unlikely, yes, but it’s a ghost story. Amanda Krueger first appeared under the alias Sister Mary in Dream Warriors, and in The Dream Child she has powers to haunt and stop Freddy… at least until Part 6.

    We get another round of very 80s deaths. A character is killed inside a comic book. But Freddy retains a darker edge not seen for a few films at this point. The Amanda Krueger ghost story and some more unsettling kills alongside it give the film a tone shift away from the “MTV Freddy,” though not completely.

    It’s mixed. The latter half of Part 4 is probably stronger. But for me, the different premise and the change in tone just edge it over Part 5.

    And now we’re heading into the top three — the films with the most involvement from series creator Wes Craven. The three that most people think of when they look back on A Nightmare on Elm Street.

    Next time, we look at the film that took the whole saga and turned it on its head. An influential entry with DNA that runs through so much of modern horror. I’ll see you in the next one.