alt title(s): Captain Power
Power On.
In the late 1980s, it became clear that in the next couple of decades, cable television was going to allow the number of stations the average viewer received to increase from, say, four to, say, four
hundred.
As things turned out, this was not a huge deal, but at the time, this was not an easy thing to get your mind around. Network executives scratched their heads in confusion as they tried to work out how in the world they were going to fill that much airtime.
Given how it eventually turned out, it may be hard to believe that pretty much everyone was convinced that it was going to involve "interactive" TV. In the future, we were told, at every commercial break, you, the viewer, would decide how you wanted the story to play out. If the hero got the girl, turn to channel 127; if he gets killed by the villain instead, turn to channel 138. It is probably not coincidental that this was around the same time that "
Choose Your Own Adventure" books were a big thing. Early adopters of DVD may recall that there were early promises that it would also lead to this sort of thing. Of course, as it turned out, branching movies and even multiple camera angles ended up a
feature utilized almost exclusively by pornography.
The thing was, Hollywood had precisely zero experience at this sort of thing, so they figured they'd need practice. There were a number of experiments in this direction in the late 80s, such as a murder mystery where viewers called in between acts to vote on who would turn out to have dunnit. But one of the more radical experiments in interactive television was
Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future.
The story followed the adventures of Captain Johnathan Power and his team of freedom fighters on a post-apocalyptic Earth where most of the population had been converted into robotic warriors by the evil Lord Dredd. Fortunately, Captain Power and his team had the ability to transform into armored super-soldiers by standing in a special booth and saying, "Power on."
The interactive element was this: the show was clearly and heavily
Merchandise Driven. Captain Power action figures interacted with electronic toys based on the show's transformation booth, fighter jets, and other hardware. These could interact with each other: the jets fired a strobe of IR which a receptor on another jet could register as a hit. After six hits, the pilot would be ejected. Though the centerpiece of the merchandise line, the jets themselves only appear in the two-parter "A Summoning of Thunder," in which their appearance is so incidental as to smack of product placement (The bulk of the episode is a flashback, with the jets appearing in a few seconds of framing story).
But the
really cool thing the toys could do was interact with the show itself: various things in the show emitted a strobe effect which would register on the toy: villains and heroes had strobes which the jets would register as targets (Red for villains, blue for heroes), weapons fire emitted a yellow strobe that would register as a hit (and viewers were gently reminded that hiding the jets behind their backs was cheating). The "power on" sequence would both reset the damage count on a jet, and activate the "power on" cycle in the transformation booth toy. At the end of each episode, one of the characters would step through the
Fourth Wall to tell viewers what constituted a good score. Around the same time, three anime videos were released,
Future Force Training,
Bio-Dread Assault, and
Raid On Volcania, which fans could "Train" on between episodes. These featured the viewer as new recruit, designated "Pilot-1", who received training from the captain himself in piloting the XT-7 fighter, and undertook some dangerous missions. These episodes were animated by Artmic, one of the companies responsible for
Bubblegum Crisis and many other anime of the late 80's, and were surprisingly well-animated (they also recycle sound effects from Bubblegum Crisis).
The show was a relatively early TV example of
dystopian Cyber Punk, and, though ostensibly aimed at children, was so dark and violent (
Anyone Can Die, which means people got
Killed Off For Real) that one wonders how many parents were really comfortable letting their children watch it. All the same, it is difficult to believe that
J Michael Straczynski (later of
Babylon 5 fame) was one of the creative minds behind it. (He did leave the show, though, when level of merchandising became
really excessive in his opinion.) Other big Sci-Fi creators involved in the show were Larry
Di Tillo (of
Beast Wars fame) and New
Teen Titans creator Marv Wolfman.
Howard The Duck creator Steve Gerber was also slated to write for the unproduced second season.
Beyond the strobing villains, the special effects in the show made extensive use of CGI, and it was the first TV show to use CGI extensively. Watching it now, one can see why, since the computer-generated characters and sequences are of lower quality than one can achieve on the typical PC of today using only free software such as DAZ|Studio, POV-Ray and Blender. Still, at the time, it was mind-blowing.
The show was clearly inspired by the
Sentai genre of Japanese toku, probably by
Super Sentai specifically (though it had almost as much in common with the related "Metal Heroes" franchise), and as such is something of a spiritual ancestor to
Power Rangers.
(And before anyone points it out, there were indeed earlier experiments in "interactive television", probably starting with
Winky Dink, or even on radio with
Doctor Christian. But the appearance of an interactive aspect in
Captain Power seems to be part of a specific drive that went on at this time.)
This show provides examples of:
- After The End
- AI Is A Crapshoot: Overmind went evil after becoming rampant. Mentor, given the personality and appearance of Stuart Power, is fatherly and benign.
- Airstrike Impossible
- All Your Base Are Belong To Us
- Antagonist In Mourning: Lord Dread visiting Captain Power's father's grave.
- Anyone Can Die
- Apocalypse How: The series starts off at Class 2, with only isolated pockets of civilization still around. Overmind is aiming specifically for a Class 3a; given the scope and methods of Project New Order, it could end up as a Class 4.
- Ave Machina: At least one sequence shows Lord Dread dictating what seems to be a Bible for the machine empire; and his speeches to the
Hitler Bio-Dread Youth seem near-evangelistic. One evil spy actually near-religiously praises "the Machine" and practically describes the team's heroic heel-face-turncoat as a heretic.
- Battleship Raid: The climactic battle of the second Future Force Training video.
- Brain Uploading: Warlord-class BioDreads are equipped with Digitizers that can reduce an entire human being to data, which is then stored in Overmind. Although the process can be reversed, victims tend to be irrevocably changed by the experience.
- By The Power Of Greyskull
- Christmas Episode: The worst possible kind.
- Cool Ship: The Jumpship, the XT-7 fighter (attached to the top of the Jumpship,) and the enemy Phantom Stryker.
- Cut Short
- Cyber Punk
- Darkest Hour: ...at which point, the series ends.
- The Dragon: The pterodactyl-like Soaron to Lord Dread.
- Dressing As The Enemy: Scout's primary method of infiltration.
- Executive Meddling: In an article from Starlog magazine, the writers and producers talked about how the series was going to become Darker And Edgier and break away from the half-hour commercial format that Mattel wanted. Amongst the highlights that were mentioned included Overmind and Dread simply forgetting the whole idea of digitizing humanity in favor of simply exterminating them wholesale, La Resistance picking up a Dark Action Girl (callsign Ranger) to replace Pilot's loss, Power slowly eroding towards a Heroic BSOD while Hawk ended up becoming the de facto group leader, and eventually Soaron doing a Heel Face Turn when it becomes clear he's been replaced by Blastarr as The Dragon. Needless to say, the head honchos at Mattel were pissed at the season finale- which would have signalled the beginning of the shift- and pulled the plug on the show before we could see the transition.
- Five Man Band
- Gameplay And Story Segregation: In the Future Force Training animation videos, there are hundreds of BioDreads in Soaron and Blastarr's units... only not quite as durable as the real thing. In the actual series, only one of each class exists, but they're much, much more fearsome.
- Going Down With The Ship
- Healing Factor: The warlord-class BioDreads can regenerate from any damage, even being blown to smithereens.
- The Juggernaut: Blastarr.
- Killed Off For Real
Straczynski: "I've never talked about this before — said I was in a thoughtful mood — but I've known several people, friends, who've taken their own lives. In one case, I spoke to her just beforehand. Tried, through the phone lines, to reach her one more time, pull her back from the edge. I couldn't. Years pass. Time comes for me to write the last filmed episode of Power. Jennifer Chase is going to die, partly of her injuries, partly of her own volition. Part of my life went into that scene, in the way it was constructed, and what was said. And what was not said, what never had the chance to be said, and thus still burns. I knew that, at the crucial moment of that scene, he couldn't be near her, as I wasn't near my friend...it had to be long-distance, hearing but not seeing her, and the terrible pain of arriving too late. I cannot watch that episode without crying. Ever."
- La Resistance
- Master Computer: The Overmind intelligence, originally designed to stop wars between countries, initiated the Metal Wars against mankind itself.
- Mecha Mooks
- Merchandise Driven
- Nintendo Hard: The Battleship Raid and Storming The Castle sequences in the second and third Future Force Training videos toss the player into the yellow-strobe equivalent of Bullet Hell.
- No Fourth Wall
- Omnicidal Maniac: Overmind.
- Opening Narration
- Powered Armor
- Robot War
- Serkis Folk
- Shout Out: To Star Wars's Trench Run during the assault on Vulcania. The ending credits recycle this scene, presumably to allow kids to interact with it with the toys.
- Storming The Castle: The Soldiers of the Future must storm Vulcania to stop Project New Order.
- Taking You With Me: Part of a Heroic Sacrifice.
Blastarr: Surrender, by order of Lord Dread.
Pilot: Go to hell. (pushes self-destruct button of the Power Base reactor)
- Teleporters And Transporters: The Jump Gates, which the Soldiers of the Future use to get around the country. Ultimately became their own undoing when Lord Dread acquired their access frequency.
- The Mole: Laccki is this for Overmind, working in Lord Dread's service.
- Laccki, it should be noted, is a terrible mole: he lacks anything even vaguely resembling stealth or subtlty, and Dread is suspicious of him from the very moment of his creation.
- Transformation Sequence
- Well Intentioned Extremist: Lyman Taggart sincerely thought that humanity would be improved by becoming a cybernetic organism. After becoming Lord Dread, though...
- The whole idea behind Overmind in the first place was as a computer with which Taggart and Power could take control of all the world's military robots, in order to end the years of stalemated warfare that had followed from the invention of robot soldiers.
- What Now Ending: The fate of the Soldiers of the Future after the series finale.
- Where Did They Get Lasers
- Whole Episode Flashback: "The Summoning Of Thunder," a Death By Origin Story for Stuart Power, and Start Of Darkness for
Lyman Taggart Lord Dread.
