"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"

When I was a kid, I used to get sick.

A lot.

As in, "holy crap how are you still alive?" a lot.

I don't believe in the "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger" nonsense, because I've lived through a winter that had me catch bronchitis, the flu (twice), strep throat, scarlet fever, and pneumonia. That was just ONE WINTER, that of my First Grade. Eventually, my doctor told my parents that if I caught one more thing it would likely kill me, so they pulled me from school and made an arrangement with my teacher for me to complete my First Grade schoolwork at home.

I, uh, was not a very attentive student at that time, and although I lived in fear of my father, I could get away with goofing off with my mother.*

But for a hyperactive kid, being cooped up is like a death sentence. You can't go outside, you can't run around**, and you can't make any noise. I did love reading, but there's only so much schoolwork type of reading you can do before you start to go crazy.

What kept me sane? My imagination.

There were three shows on television that captivated my attention --two series, one movie-- and I'd spend hours dreaming about them: Batman, Speed Racer, and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

***

The first, the 1960s live action Batman television series, was what I lived for on Saturday nights at 7:30 PM. Even my aunts and uncle were cued to that I loved that show, so when we'd visit my mom's family*** they made sure that the television was tuned to Adam West and Burt Ward. My mom had a pair of button down cardigan sweaters, one blue and one yellow, so my brother and I would wear them as capes, mimicking Batman (me, because I was the oldest dammit) and Robin (my brother). 

Oh, I did. Believe me, I did.

 

In an era before The Dark Knight (the comic book), Adam West's semi-comic version of Batman was what I knew, and I loved his wit and his gadgets and ability to see through the villain of the week's plans. It seems so odd to me now that Batman struck such a chord with me, given that superheroes as a genre today aren't really my bag, given I'm kind of sick and tired of all the superhero movies out these days.

***

The second, Speed Racer, was more of a forbidden fruit for me than anything else. 

Oh, not in the way you'd expect, mind you. My parents were fine with the early anime show. It was that Speed Racer was pulled from the local airwaves because it was "too violent". 

I wish I were making it up, but there it is. 

I mean, I've seen Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, and all of the old Popeye cartoons, and they were all vastly more violent than Speed Racer. But since Speed Racer involved car crashes, it was supposedly far more violent than those others. Parental complaints led to Speed getting pulled off our local independent station, and there was nothing I could do about that. 

And oh yeah, somebody bitched about the word "demon" in the theme song. Yes, my hometown is right on the northern edge of the Bible Belt. Does it show?

But while it was on, I loved that show. I loved the Mach 5 so much that 5 became my favorite number. Add to that Speed's propensity to getting into trouble with the "bad guys" that always led to confrontations on the race track****, yeah I was hooked. I had no idea what anime was --I believe both Speed Racer and the few years later import Star Blazers were lumped into the name "Japanimation" back then-- but in an era before the dominance of NASCAR in the US, motorsports were dominated by the Indy 500 and Le Mans, and Speed tapped into that popularity with a car so far out that it was more James Bond than Mazerati.

***

I saved the best for last, and I referenced it in a comment I made over on Bhagpuss' Inventory Full: The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Since I was sick a lot, some of my earliest memories were of me being propped up on the couch where I could watch television when I was recovering. We only had one television at the time, and it was a black and white one*****, but it was my window into the world. 

In those days, before Rupert Murdoch launched FOX as a fourth network, most localities in the US had at least one independent television station. Those stations were typically filled with old shows in syndication, cartoons in the afternoon that they could put on cheaply, and old movies. Tons and tons of old movies.

Like, oh, the 1938 Errol Flynn classic mentioned above.

Channel 19, before it became one of the first FOX stations back in the mid-80s, would have movies at 1 PM daily (ending at 3 PM in time for cartoons), and would have an average of three movies on during the weekends during the days. And it always seemed that whenever I was sick, The Adventures of Robin Hood was sure to be on in one of those slots. If you want adventure, patriotism, strong female characters (for the era), and more than a bit of swashbuckling adventure, Robin, Lady Marian, Little John, and the Merry Men were hard to beat. And for a kid watching the swordplay and archery in an era before D&D or the SCA exploded onto the scene, it was more than you could ever hope for.

You can't have a good movie without good
villains. Before I knew him as Sherlock
Holmes, Basil Rathbone (center) was
Sir Guy of Gisbourne. (From the DVD.)

It was little surprise, I suppose, that several years later when I was introduced to Lord of the Rings and D&D that I just hopped on board that train and haven't looked back.

***

It's not hyperbole to say that those early influences helped pave the way for my love of gaming. A love of adventure, heroism, and the medieval period are pretty much a straight line from those early influences to RPGs to video game RPGs and finally to MMOs. It probably also provides a background why I play the way I play; I don't explicitly think it, but my deference to letting others have loot first and helping others rather than asking for help could be easily traced from Batman and Robin Hood to today. From my perspective, it's just being a decent player, but for others it could easily be seen as being a 'goody-two-shoes' and 'overly chivalrous'. But you can't please everyone, I suppose.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there are some influences from my later childhood that I need to reconnect with as well....

*How times changed. When the mini-Reds were old enough for school, I was much more easy-going than my wife was. I swore I would not be my father, and I refused to engage in strict discipline. Thankfully, the mini-Reds turned out okay, but I was basically the "Good Cop" to my wife's "Bad Cop".

**We lived in an apartment that Spring while our house was being built, and the family below us had a newborn. So my brother and I weren't allowed to run around the apartment at all. Or bang on the metal container that held our Lincoln Logs like a drum.

***She was the oldest of six, so only she and her closest sibling in age were married. Her second sibling was still 3+ years away from her wedding.

****And that the mysterious Racer X was in fact Speed's older brother, there were definitely overtones that as a kid you never realized weren't in cartoons before.

*****We didn't buy our first color television until 1979. I remember that day well, because we bought the set at Sears, brought it home with the box in the trunk of my parents' 1972 Chevy Nova with the trunk lid tied down with twine, and when my dad turned on the TV for the first time, there was Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk in his full green skinned glory.