A Steady Diet of the Weird

Born in the mid 1980s, by the time I was able to sit up without rolling over because of my enormous cranium and pay attention to the talking plastic box in our suburban living room, the world of entertainment had decided that it'd forgo trying to be anything even resembling normal. I think this was mostly brought about because of one man, Tim Burton. From the start with films like Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, he was a new voice that not only brought a dark whimsy to the mainstream, but also gently indoctrinated a new generation into what I lovingly call the Weird. Others would take over and tweak the Weird, adding in splashes of sci-fi, satire, or horror but overall the Weird was a very big presence in the 90s. For me especially.

Note: I have that exact shirt. And hair.

I couldn't get enough Tim Burton growing up. I drew Edward Scissorhands just as often as Sonic the Hedgehog. So much of stuff geared toward my age group in the early 1990s could get away with quite a lot because this was a time before we were all so worried about how this or that would "warp our children's precious little minds." We had reptiles that were given anthropomorphic qualities because of a mysterious green sludge who were adept at martial arts. We had motorcycle enthusiast rodents from the red planet. A Chihuahua and a dim-witted feline who lived together and often got into some really odd adventures. Some of the stuff, I think, went well and beyond what was suitable for kids. Namely Ren & Stimpy.

Not because of the content exactly. But because of the brain twist it provided.

"Brain twist? What do you mean?" you may be asking yourself.

Okay. You ever get that feeling after watching some really out-there animated show? Kind of like when the thing's over and you're plopped back into reality everything feels . . . off? I don't know what the hell that sensation is, or why it happens, and for the longest time I thought I was the only one who experienced it until my wife confessed that, yes, she too had that happen before, namely after watching some unsettling cartoons. It lasts a few hours, and more often than not it comes with a feeling of being preoccupied. People may ask you if something is wrong or inquire as to why you keep staring at the floor. Maybe it's just your mind trying to parse out what it was you just saw and make sense of it. Ren & Stimpy did seem to have a lot of things happen that came out of left field. But I think it went well beyond that. I think it was because the Weird had paid you a visit.

Just another Tuesday.

For a while, I became addicted to that feeling. I guess I was curious as to why it'd happen. But I'd get it not only in weird cartoons likely written and animated by people that had chemical imbalances (not judging, all creative types I think should probably be on some form of medication, myself included). But I don't think I was doing it voluntarily, really, seeking out my next shot in the arm of the Weird, voluntarily hopping directly into the path of a brain twist like a death-wish stormchaser.
I guess I just thought, "This is just what I like."

And the 90s was more than happy to accommodate.

Almost anyone who is a writer or an artist of any kind can retrace the things that influenced them and made them become the person they are. And just as many people like to kick dirt over that particular assortment of stuff and pretend they are true originals who had no actual influences. Others like to draw direct lines to their inspirations and heroes. I like to travel back and think about what inspired me, what contributed to making my muse the wide eyed, twitch-prone freak-thing she is. With ease, I can draw you a dotted line going back through everything I enjoyed growing up that influenced me, like when Billy terrorizes the neighborhood in Family Circus.

"Then, if I bury the body in Mr. Kline's back yard, everyone will think it was him who did it! Mischief: managed!"

While I can credit Tim Burton for a whole lot of inspiration, namely that of A Nightmare Before Christmas (Yes, I saw it in the theater when it was originally released unlike all of you Hot Topic shoppers that were born in 1997), I also have to pay my respects to the likes of Bruce Coville who wrote My Teacher is an Alien and its sequels. I think it was the first time that I was actually reading stuff of the Weird, and it was also my introduction to science fiction. After that, since my dad is a big sci-fi buff as well, I started in on Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein. The cover art, which is wicked awesome, also gives a blurb about the book's premise: A Colonial Boy on Mars. How could you not want to read that?


There came a point in the mid-90s when the Weird, which was already being largely commercialized, became even more so.

The culprit, patient zero of this movement: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. What started out as something rather tongue-in-cheek and wholly dark got bought up, made into a cartoon, and it sold a lot of toys. This wasn't exactly a new idea since Transformers was a toy line that they made up a TV show to operate as a giant half-hour commercial for action figures. Same as He-Man. With the major success of Turtles, something that came if nowhere else but from within the squishy green ventricles of the Weird, other properties got bought up and made into colorful cartoons that bore little resemblance to their source material. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Or the Troma figurehead character, The Toxic Avenger. Yes, even he got a cartoon. Enter: The Toxic Crusaders.

So how many appearances of Ron Jeremy can we expect in this cartoon?

Did anyone in that board meeting ever actually see the original Toxic Avenger? I mean, the name Troma pretty much says it all. Don't get me wrong, I love Toxic Avenger, but I still don't think that was a well thought out. But, then again, if it was of the Weird, it got made. Hell, they even were considering doing a cartoon of Aliens. (Thus why the action figures looked so different from their movie counterparts--they were redesigns for an aborted cartoon.)

Aborted cartoon. Man. Remind me never to pair those two words ever again.

This was around the time that there was an enormous push for kids to do two things. Two things their shows and video games were constantly telling them to. One was to D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs and/or violence and/or gangs and/or violent gang drugs and two was to just please give a little bit of a shit about the environment. While Toxic Crusaders didn't really have much room to talk about staying off drugs (it came from Troma!), the show could reinforce a message per ep about the environment, the ozone layer, the streams and lakes and oceans, all in a roundabout way akin to a Captain Planet episode. Come to think of it, really, if it weren't for a sizeable chunk of my generation being brought up on Captain Planet, I don't think I'd get a dirty look--from total strangers--every time I tossed a soda can in the (gasp) trash.

Thanks, asshole.

My beloved Beetlejuice got a similar treatment, but that was one of those rare times that they actually got it right. Instead of being about Alec Baldwin and Gina Davis coming to terms with being recently deceased, it was about BJ himself and Lydia and their adventures in the Neitherworld. It was a cartoon that brilliantly coupled two things that couldn't be more different: German expressionism and bathroom humor. Pure. Genius.

Even something like The Simpsons could be considered part of the Weird. Look at those early episodes. So much of it revolves around Springfield being this urban sprawl of toxic waste polluted land, kids being mesmerized by violent videogames, the convenience stores pushing sugar water and so damn many of the characters smoked. It was a pre-apocalypse world. Not all that different from Tromaville, really, if you think about it. Later, that side of things got smoothed out in Springfield and the town didn't seem so much like a reflecting pool of our world--or a reflecting cesspool. But for a while there, and I remember it clearly, Springfield had grit.

Think about how many movies and TV shows had plots that revolved around trash, trash removal, and toxic waste dumps and/or superheroes borne of radioactivity. Think about Grunge. Even the name speaks directly of this. But, the toxic waste side of things I think came from when Chernobyl happened, just like how paranoia and us-versus-them mentality of now was sparked from 9/11. Except here it was a worry that soon the planet would be soggy from end to end with nuclear crap and we'd all be walkin' around in cleansuits.

It did little to soothe all the other stuff going on at the time. The 90s and its collective unhealthy lifestyle (sodas ads pushed the fact that they were "loaded with carbs"), and a new social unrest equaling that of the 1970s, and a confusing and unpopular war, AIDS, homelessness skyrocketing, and pretty much nobody giving half a crap about any of it because if the cable was still on, we were happy. I'm not judging. I was right there in it too. But when I think about the times then, I see a crap-ton of trash and ominously glowing yellow barrels forming a moat around a graffitied-up castle with a shit-ton of skater punks inside, all being chased around by suits wagging their fingers at them. Because that "Parental Advisory" sticker did so much to improve things.

Okay. Bellyaching complete. Sorry.

The garbage theme continued into video games, another major thing pushing its way into our world of entertainment. Game systems had been present in most homes for this time, but now they were taking off in a big way and considered not just a fun little activity but a genuine source of interest to a great deal of people. Of course, this being years, nay decades, before every video game title released had to sell billions of copies before being considered profitable. This was long before the FPS genre was the (really) huge deal is now, and before games got pumped out on a yearly basis with little to no changes to them at all installment to installment. Yes, EA, I'm looking at you.

This was when games were often made by twenty (or less) individuals, often taking upwards of two to three years to go from inception to finished product, often a cartridge or floppy disk. (Yeah. Remember those?) This was also a time during which the Weird was still fully embraced and if your story involved, you guessed it, toxic waste, neon (lots of neon), strange worlds of dead people or strange creatures or strange, dead creature-people, you were probably going to have some sort of hit on your hands. You could easily look at what's really popular now--vampires, werewolves, teenage deathmatches--and spin the clock back and see that, back then, it was the Weird.

Shiny Entertainment was a huge part, for me personally, that installed a heavy dose of the Weird in me like batteries getting clicked in place; it's charge I still feel today in my own creative endeavors. With games like Cool Spot (yes, a game designed completely around the marketing mascot of 7-Up), Earthworm Jim, Earthworm Jim 2, and MDK. Especially Earthworm Jim. Yet another example of a rather unassuming member of the animal kingdom suddenly granted super powers and a big, quirky personality.

Brass tacks here for a moment. Let's just say if Earthworm Jim didn't exist, my novel Fabrick wouldn't either.

Earthworm Jim's creator, Doug TenNapel, would later go on to create some other incredibly bizarre (and awesome) projects of the Weird, like the claymation video game The Neverhood and the mostly-forgotten cartoon Project G.e.e.K.e.R. The latter of which, if given to your kid in steady doses along with WB's Freakazoid (another personal favorite of mine) will result in them having a severe disorder of deficit of attention and strange. Guaranteed. TenNapel could almost be considered co-King of the Weird right along Kevin Eastman. The man is responsible for many amazing graphic novels (I particularly recommend Iron West), as well as Skullmonkeys for the original PlayStation. If you have a PS1 laying around and you don't mind it not being in HD, I'd highly recommend it. Or The Neverhood for PC as well. If you're looking to get that brain twist feeling, it's a sure place to get it. Nothing twists a brain quite like claymation. Nothing.

Don't believe me?



Another game carrying the theme of toxic waste (yet again), was Vectorman for the Sega Genesis. The Genesis, in my opinion, being the home of some of the very best games of the Weird, and almost a keystone of my early welcoming into said Weirdness. The Genesis, all sixteen bits of it, was a transporter for my spongy, little mind. "Come on," it'd say when I jammed in the cartridge and flipped the switch to turn the thing on (yes, it had a switch), "Let's go see some weird shit, yeah?"


Vectorman was a robot who after the entire population of Earth leaves because the planet's been destroyed due to pollution and oodles of trash everywhere, he's left behind to clean up while they're gone. A fellow 'bot loses his mind and decides that he'd be better suited causing mass destruction instead of sweeping up and Vectorman has to do his darndest to improve the situation of a rather f***ed planet.

Remind you of anyone?

Which brings us to the High Priestess of the Weird. Aeon Flux.


Now, I didn't see Aeon Flux in its original run on MTV's Liquid Television. I got into it much later after discovering it in the "animation for grown-ups" section of my local Suncoast while in high school. I knew about the show, had caught it a few times on MTV when I got brained by the insomnia fairy's magic wand, but I didn't fully grasp how terrifically strange the show really was until watching every episode back to back over the course of an afternoon. It had everything required to be receive the stamp of the Weird, to the point I felt like a few things I once considered Weird to be taken off because Aeon Flux really redrew the definitions, to me. I can say with absolute certainty that nothing else mentioned in this post has inspired me more than Aeon Flux.

Liquid Television, and MTV's animated show lineup, was amazing. It included Beavis & Butt-Head (which would later have a spin-off, Daria, which I cannot tell you how much I love), The Maxx, and a few segments based off of Art Spiegelman's work found in his Raw magazine. Beavis & Butt-Head, I don't need to tell you, took off in a big way and left most of Liquid Television in its heh-heh-hehing dust. But I think the real lost treasure was Aeon Flux.

Now, you can go ahead and tell me that Aeon Flux wasn't lost because it was made into a movie starring Charlize Theron a few years back and to that, I will give you a blank stare, shake my head, turn around, and walk away. No. Absolutely not. I don't draw a lot of lines in the sand like overly passionate fanboys often. But Aeon Flux, the movie, never expletive happened.

There have been attempts to continue with the Weird in the 00s and the 10s. Mostly animation has resorted to a more polished, squeaky-clean image because it's hard to do grit with computer animation I think. There are some exceptions, of course. 9 definitely had it. Dark, weird, scary and funny in equal measure. But it was produced by Tim Burton, so who can really be that surprised?

I still see a few examples of the Weird trickle out now and again. It's less about saving the environment and staying off drugs now. Mostly our big themes come out of that us-versus-them thing which I just find just oh so fun. I mean, what better way to provide escapism for people than making Gotham City the setting for every cartoonish reinterpretation of every bad guy America had to squash? Yeah. I really feel like I'm at the movies with that because it's just so different from our world!

I digress. I make fun of movies and games now because it's easy. I didn't know it then but what I hold close to my heart and warmly consider the Weird were just skewed looks at what was going on then. The AIDS epidemic found its way into so many comic book storylines and even certain sequences of Alien 3 ring of that fear of getting tested when Ripley, shaking and sweating, gives herself the sonogram terrified in confirming the worst is possibly true.

But that's what makes art so great, when you're a specific age. You don't really see the influences or the weld lines where things were surreptitiously borrowed and patched on, both from real life and the creator's own inspirations and muse-whisperings. I'm sure the Weird is still out there being made, but I'm just too old to not look for the puppet strings anymore. I'm watching the magician's other hand while he makes something go flash in the opposite. I'm constantly on the prowl for homages, hints, easter eggs, borrowed lines or allusions to Honey Badger.

I guess that's when you know you're grown up, is when you're trying to figure things out, wanting to look under the hood. It's when you feel the need to start making your own stuff, showing off your influences, paying respect to those mad geniuses that came before you and put a fire under your ass so you'd go out and do something with all of that pent-up creativity.

It's what I'm doing now. Since I can't see any of the Weird for myself with those same eyes I used to have, I have to start creating my own. And each thing I do is another little salute to those that inspired me, dared to create insane things and tell bizarre stories because that's just what they had in them. Me writing a book, something shaken loose of the dirt that they plowed, is just another shovelful contributed to the mountain. Another couple inches added to Mount Weird.