Children of the 90s TV Superheroes

Every generation of children has their own group of superheroes to admire and adore. Admittedly, ours was somewhat of an eclectic bunch. If our 90s TV superheroes were forced to square off against, say, some 1970s TV superheroes, we'd probably be pretty screwed.

It's not so much that they were unskilled heroes or their powers were not useful. Okay, that may have been true in some cases (Ghostwriter, anyone?), but certainly not all across the board. Generally, though, 90s TV superheroes seemed a bit more down to earth than the heroes of days of yore. Many past superheroes had been virtually untouchable, so on top of their game that we could do no more than stand by in awe, mouths agape in bewonderment. As time went on, however, there developed a prototype for superheroes to whom we could more readily relate. By the time our superheroes were debuting on the airwaves, many of them had been reduced to mere gung-ho environmentalists and literacy-minded street youth.

Like us, many of these heroes were children or adolescents, most made foolish mistakes, and generally were highly fallible characters. Again, maybe not the type of dream team we'd put up against the classic comic book types, but certainly more endearing to the average child. These were a kinder, gentler bunch, and though many could still command some pretty impressive powers, they were certainly not without fault.

Behold, a brief assortment* of some of Children of 90s unique television superheroes:



Darkwing Duck




Darkwing Duck is a spinoff of Disney's Saturday morning DuckTales cartoon featuring an undercover superhero who goes by the alias Drake Mallard. Darkwing Duck is fairly adept at undercover crime-fighting, but he does manage to have the inflated ego and fumbling befuddledness lacking in many of our shinier superheroes. Darkwing is most directly a parody on the earlier Batman comics and show, with many of his attributes and behaviors echoing the Batman character. He doesn't seem to have any real superpower other than being a general protector of good and defender against evil. I know I say that like it's no big thing, but I mean that he never mutated and developed any sort of totally awesome superhuman powers. He's more of a super Samaritan.

In poking around into Darkwing Duck's background, I did come across a rather humorous bit of information. His trademark catchphrase, "Let's get dangerous!" got a bit lost in translation during international syndication. To Indonesian viewers, he declared "Let's charge the danger!" To the Russians, "Well, clear prop!" The Dutch heard, "Let's get nice and risky!" The clear winners, however, were our French viewers, to whom Darkwing Duck declared "This song is creepy!" I don't get it either.


Quailman (Doug)



I know, I know, a middle schooler's daydream fantasy sequences don't necessarily constitute an actual superhero, but for a sideline story Quailman's premise was pretty well-developed. He was, though, an apt superhero role model for children as most of his imaginary dilemmas were based on the actual middle school struggles of the Doug Funnie character. Quailman's main powers were those of patience, intelligence, and speed, leading us to believe we could pretty much do what he did with enough virtuosity. Well, until he broke out the Quail Eye and stupefied his adversaries. Either way, the alter ego was essentially Doug wearing a cape, underwear over his shorts, and a belt on his head. If anyone's still looking for a Halloween costume, I'd say call the search off right now, strap on a belt headdress and over-underwear and you've got yourself a look.



Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles


Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Intro

S.O.B.|MySpace Videos

You've got to hand it to the original masterminds behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, these things were specific. I'd love to have sat in on a brainstorming session about these guys. Certainly the premise is creative, but it's also insanely intricate. We all just accept is a sensible fact because we grew up with it, but any outsiders would tell you in an instant that the notion of a group of sewer-dwelling, pizza-chomping, rat-led giant turtles named for Renaissance artists is completely absurd. They would, of course, be right.



Captain Planet and the Planeteers



Ooh, environmentalism. Now that's a badass power. I imagine Al Gore had a hand in this somewhere. This show is education-disguised-as-entertainment (edutainment to those crafty insiders) at its finest. The Planeteers are not only environmental protectors but as a group are also incredibly multi-cultural. Furthermore, our heroes even travel by solar power to cut down on pollution. How much more pious of superheroes could you get? Captain Planet laid it on pretty thick though when he told us "The power is yours!" Nothing like a combination Saturday morning cartoon/public service announcement to get me going.


Ghostwriter



Speaking of impressive powers, I have to say I'm shocked to see literacy didn't make the cut on any of these other shows. What, you don't think reading and writing skills are superpowerful? Think again. Our again incredibly culturally and racially diverse group of preteens went about their lives solving mysteries through the use of (gasp!) their reading and writing skills. I can not tell a lie, I played along at home with my Ghostwriter pen, too. My solutions, unfortunately, were rarely accurate. I blame the fact that I never actually communicated with Ghostwriter himself.


Alex Mack



Alex Mack was just an average teenager when a freak encounter with some suspicious spilled chemicals renders her superpowerful. She's a classic example of a "they're just like us!" emerging class of superheroes. Sure, she could melt into some amorphous metallic liquid, exercise telekinesis, and issue bursts of electricity with a wave of her finger, but otherwise she was just your average junior high student struggling to find her place. Okay, well I guess the mysteriously evil chemical plant wants to kidnap her and turn her into a human guinea pig, which might not fit into the daily lives of most middle school kids, but you get the point. She wore overalls and backwards baseball hats and had crushes and public embarrassments just like the rest of us.


Mighty Morphin Power Rangers


Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Intro

S.O.B.|MySpace Videos


The MMPRs were a legitimate pop culture phenomenon in the 90s, with kids everywhere clamoring to get their hands on their share of merchandise and memorabilia. Essentially, a group of five sassy teenagers are charged with protecting the Earth. I'm almost positive that's who we'd entrust it to if it really came down to it. Teenagers can have some serious attitude. Their wise leader gives them the power to change into Power Rangers, meaning they get some kickass weapons, cool costumes, and access to Zord hangouts. All in all, not a bad deal. Plus, they came with corresponding colors! What more could you ask for? I personally always thought of myself as the Pink Ranger type. This association quickly became an indicator of personality types amongst the under-12 set.


The Tick



Like Darkwing Duck, The Tick had a largely satirical premise. The Tick is the ultimate parody, featuring a strong-jawed, muscularly defined superhero who is incredibly enthusiastic, a bit dim-witted, and prone to giving long, droning motivational talks full of inane points and comparisons. His trademark cry, "Spooooon!" is also a nonsequitor, originating from a flash of inspiration one morning while eating his cereal. He has a variety of superpowers, such as the inability to be physically hurt in painful situations, but my favorite was always his "drama power". This basically boiled down to the Tick becoming a better superhero as his surrounding situation became increasingly dramatic. Brilliant. I think many teenage girls possess this power, as well.


Sabrina the Teenage Witch



Following the cancellation of Clarissa Explains It All, Melissa Joan Hart stumbled into another successful television franchise in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Par for the 90s superhero course, Sabrina thinks she's just an ordinary teenager until she learns on her sixteenth birthday that she's actually a witch. You'd have thought the talking cat may have tipped her off, but it might have been a bit too subtle**. Every plot seems to revolve around a balance between being a teenager and restraining the abuse of power, but it's cute enough to let the repetitiveness go a bit. And when she poses in the mirror during the intro? Teen sitcom gold.


We may not have had the most enviable superheroes, but they were certainly a fun and eclectic bunch. Perhaps they weren't the best and the brightest or the most talented, but they were...wait, where was I going with this? They're starting to sound pretty lame. Oh, right, the gap between ourselves and our TV superheroes narrowed, making them into characters that we could both relate to, idolize, and find humor in. And really, if you can't laugh at your superheroes, who can you laugh at?



*A Children of the 90s Sampler Pack if you will, I've even removed all the gross coconut-filled ones for your convenience.
**I know, I know, that part came later. It's a joke.

2ge+her

I'm all for satire and parody. There's nothing quite like issuing well-placed subtle jabs and barbs at a mockable target. While at times parody can be forced and rigid, in other cases it's almost impossible to not make fun of a phenomenon. Such was the case with boy bands, giving MTV the perfect satirical opening with which to unleash their made-for-TV movie, 2ge+her.

You really have to give MTV credit where due. As a major source of the hype and hysteria surrounding the boy bands of the late-90s, MTV was not above poking fun at their own bread and butter. Who better than the people constructing the boy band craze to parody their own product? With their insider expertise, they were that much more qualified to offer us a frighteningly accurate tongue-in-cheek portrayal of their bestselling output.

Boy Bands such as *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys were serious moneymaking enterprise in the late 90s, and their penchant for taking themselves incredibly seriously just begged to be parodied. They were far more of a heavily manufactured and well-orchestrated product than a musical act. Sure, they released songs and put on concerts, but you'd be hard pressed to find any respectable musician claiming boy bands as peers. Their squeaky-clean image, pretty boy looks, and high-pitched vocals weren't doing them any favors on street credibility either.



2ge+her was the first MTV made-for-TV movie, a fledgling attempt to capitalize on the cliches and tragically comedic industry standards that put money in their executives' wallets. Though the details were exaggerated, many of the plot points hit remarkably close to home with actual boy band behavior and management. If badly executed or poorly received by fans, MTV could have easily shot themselves in the proverbial foot. After all, they were essentially telling tweens and teens--their target market--that the albums and video their network was peddling were indeed little more than well-polished tripe.

It was a risky business, with MTV teetering on the fine line between satire and flat-out mockery. Luckily, the satirical elements were funny enough to lighten up the darker themes, allowing even the most rabid fans of boy bands an opportunity to step back and laugh a bit at the inane world of prefab music acts. We watched as our tragically humorous heroes were assembled, branded, and marketed by industry managers. While the band was a blatant farce, it was an interesting theme-within-a-theme situation that put 2ge+her dangerously close to their real-life counterparts in their road to success. After all, so-called "real" boy bands were similarly cast, molded, and marketed, leading us to wonder which scenario was indeed more grounded in reality.

MTV utilized much of their own clout as the experts in pop music to offer credibility to the film. The movie opens with a mock MTV news segment that looks and sounds exactly like the ones featured daily by the network. Well, save for the fact that it features the fictional news of music sensation boy band "Whoa" whose hit single "Rub One Out" is ruling the airwaves. That part seems a bit off, right? Maybe it's just me. Other than that, it's spot on.



The movie recognized the usual lineup of cliches favored by boy band managers, with each member appropriately pigeonholed into a character mold and marketed as a two-dimensional musical personality. 2ge+her did not disappoint on this front, featuring some of our standard boy band fare in a new, more comical light. Behold, our heroes:


Mickey Parke: The Bad Boy




You can tell he's bad because he speaks pseudo-ebonics and pretends to rap. Wait, is that the passive near-racism of the milky white boy band world rearing its ugly head? Hmm. Might be.



Jason "QT" McNight: The Cute One



In a dark incident of art imitating life (the term art is used loosely here), part of the QT character's shtick was that he was beloved for being not only adorable but also terminally ill. Tragically, the actor who played QT was actually battling cancer and passed away a couple of years later.



Chad Linus: The Shy One


"Shy" is apparently in this case synonymous with IQ-deficient and a little bit sensitive. In an endearing sort of way.



Jerry O'Keefe: The Hearthrob

The Hearthrob represents the requisite eye candy, but also usually the strongest member vocally. The character truly aspires to be a singer and is relatively dreamy, so it's safe to say he's been appropriately typecast.



Doug Linus: The Older Brother


Poking fun at the fact that most boy bands had one member in their mid-20s, Chad's balding brother Doug is tottering somewhere in the realm of his mid-thirties (though he does hope his braces make him a tad more relatable with the young folk). Oh, and did I mention in he's played by Kevin Farley, Chris Farley's younger brother? That in itself deems him worthy of comedic excellence.

Funnily enough, unlike many artists of today, the ensemble actors actually sang their own songs:


Calculus (U +Me=Us)


A breakout hit in both the movie and real life, the single went on to enjoy a good bit of radio play. It's hilariously on point with actual boy band standards, which is unsurprising as many of the group's songs were penned by songwriters with a track record working with boy bands and pop music acts. This song is fun pure and simple, a no-frills approach to parody that so closely imitates its real-life muse it's nearly impossible to distinguish from the real thing. Well, except that the lyrics are pretty ridiculous. It did come with a fun little dance to the part that goes, "You! Plus sign! Me! Equal sign! Us!" That pretty much makes up for any shortcomings.


Say It (Don't Spray It)



This song is completely ridiculous, but their earnestness in presenting it to us makes it all the funnier.


The Hardest Part of Breaking Up (Is Getting Back Your Stuff)


From their second album, "2ge+her Again", this song was off the wall absurd but still managed to reside in plausible boy band territory as they crooned, "You had my heart, my soul, my attention/but you walked out my life/with my CD collection". It also included some great spoken lines like, Man you ever break up with a girl And she keeps your stuff? Man, What's up with dat?! I dunno man, something wrong! Ya know what I'm sayin'? Something wrong with dat...." Unfortunately, these lines were frighteningly plausible as real boy band song chatter.

The movie was such a hit and the songs such a runaway success that MTV adapted the premise into a weekly series. The band appeared in character on TRL, starred in their own episode of MTV's Making the Video, and even opened for Britney Spears in concert, further blurring the lines between real life and the eerily similar echo of satirical fiction. From the group's formation and initial hype in late 1999 to the show's end in 2001, the band enjoyed relatively realistic music-world success. Pretty impressive for a group of vocally capable comedic actors.

The death of 2ge+her member Michael Cuccione (QT) marked the end of the series run, further blurring the line between Cuccione's reality and his terminally ill character. Despite the tragic circumstances surrounding the act's cancellation, the show proved that MTV not only had a sense of humor but was also surprisingly adept at relentlessly mocking themselves. If only we could get them to do the same these days with those Hills girls, maybe MTV could redeem itself. I wouldn't bet on it, though.

The Mighty Ducks

I suppose I should come right out and admit that I'm more than a little biased in my treatment of certain nostalgic material. Objectivity is a nice idea, but let's be real here: anyone growing up in Minnesota in the 1990s who even knew a person who played hockey was predisposed to fall in love with The Mighty Ducks. As a proud ex-Minneapolitan, I not only loved the movie for its hometown roots but also because my family drove daily past the arenas where the movie was filmed and if I squinted hard enough I can even see some former Pee Wee Hockey League-affiliated friends as cheering crowd extras. It wasn't exactly a tough sell for me.

Regardless of my personal inclination to adore this movie unapologetically, I still assumed that loving this movie was nothing short of a universal kid phenomenon. It had heart, stellar sports movie cliches, quacking, and even a scrappy female player who later went to star in one of my favorite movies*. Maybe I just love hockey enough to be blinded by the subject matter, but I was reasonably certain that this film was beloved by all. Call me naive, but I was shocked to learn that the film hold an 8% positive rating on aggregate movie review site Rotten Tomatoes. I know kids movies can be a little cheesy, but eight percent? Has my entire movie-loving life been a lie? I don't know what to believe anymore.

Maybe the real issue is that these adults just are so darn critical. Yes, as a currently critical adult I realize this likely veers me into hypocritical territory, but as a child I pretty much took everything released on TV or VHS as media gospel until I caught a few episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and realized these things were mockable. The Mighty Ducks, though, lived in a time before over-analyzing and before my friends and I held discerning opinions on quality of entertainment sources. We loved hockey, we loved a young Joshua Jackson, and dammit we loved ourselves some Mighty Ducks and that was that.

The original did seem to have a bit of that magic dust glow haloing its premise, at least to children. Yes, it's a hackneyed and oft repeated tale of a group of ragtag kids who just can't catch a break who finally find the inspiring hope they so desperately crave in the hands of a rough-round-the-edges coach. That description could fit a hundred kids sports movies, but it doesn't detract all that much from their heartwarmingness and general adorability. We may see now that these themes were perhaps not the most original, but they did continually reaffirm our beliefs that even if we were completely terrible at something, some kindly adult might come along and change our lives into those of winners.

On the other side of the fence, I imagine all of my sport coaches throughout the year rewound these inspirational locker room moments again and again, seeking cheesy motivational fodder. Who can argue with that level of cinematic results? If only we could have mustered up the corresponding heartening theme music. Then it would have been in the bag.



The familiar rehashed story focuses on Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez), the most bad-assed named attorney in the Minneapolis area facing drunk driving charges. See, we even start with a message. Don't drink and drive, kids, or you'll have to live out your unfulfilled dreams of leading a group of peewee hockey misfits to a much-deserved victory. Bombay is predictably sentenced to community service coaching a kid's hockey league, forcing him to revisit his own traumatic childhood hockey memories in which he blew the big game for his team. Scarring stuff.

Of course, Bombay is further dismayed to find himself saddled with an untalented motley crew of hockey misfits. There's not a shred of mutual respect between the players and their new coach, with the two sides getting off to an abysmal start. There's a clear hatred brewing between coach and team, and it doesn't look particularly pretty.



Many of Bombay's early coaching efforts are at best misguided, leading both the team and their parents to berate his coaching style and personal character alike. As is apt to happen in these types of Disney films, Bombay coincidentally is reunited with an old mentor, Hans, who seems to be in the right place at the right time at every turn to encourage the budding coach's past passion for the sport.

In typical lawyerly fashion, Bombay solicits funding from his boss, Mr. Ducksworth. Get it? Ducksworth, Ducks? I hope a screenwriter's guild award went to that guy. With financial backing, the team is able to acquire a lot of the equipment and practice space they so sorely needed, and it looks like we're heading in the right direction.




There are the requisite misunderstandings in which the team gets pretty angry over something they misoverheard Bombay say and most players choose to boycott a game, forcing a forfeit. To make things worse, Bombay is coming to the end of serving out his community service sentence only to find that Ducksworth and Co. all seem hell bent on manipulating the peewee hockey system in some sort of corrupt ploy that would never matter in real life. Ducksworth goes so far as to fire Bombay, which is of course the only logical next step in this ever-growing distance between the world of peewee hockey and reality.

Our kids are still scuffling over their mixed loyalties to each other versus the coach, ending in a quacking incident that lands them all in detention. Bombay comes to visit their detention classroom, offers some much-needed pep and encouragement, giving them a major boost of team pride.



The semi-corrupt league disputes over star player Adam (who should be zoned as a Ducks player but played for the anonymously evil rivals the Hawks) are resolved as Adam finally joins the Ducks, adding to their burgeoning confidence. The Ducks make the playoffs, win a couple more games, and all seems to be falling into place as expected in a rah-rah sports movie.

As expected, the Ducks face off against the Hawks in their championship game, setting the stage for a last minute not-so-surprising victory. Instead of chastising and berating the boys like his coach had, Bombay encourages them and they take the game per expected. It's still sweet though. All the while the romantic storyline between Bombay and a player's parent seems to be flourishing. On top of all this feel-goodness, the kids offer their encouragement for Bombay's own fledgling minor league hockey career, and while a tad over the top it still manages to warm your heart at least as much as a shot of good whiskey.

Just ignore that half of this clip is the closing credits. You're granted full permission to skip that part.

It may not be the perfect movie, but there's a reason some movie tropes are replayed time and time again. It isn't a new tale to adult moviegoers, but through the fresh virgin eyes of children it manages to renew itself as affective for a new generation. When we later saw the baseball, football, and basketball versions of this movie we were well prepared for the requisite shots of inspiration. Not to mention the two sequels, the animated series, and an actual NHL team under the Ducks namesake. Learning about sportsmanship and franchise milking management in one fell swoop. Not bad.


*Wet Hot American Summer, in case you were wondering, starring our pal Marguerite Moreau. If any of you caught the Wet Hot references in this post, congratulations. You're awesome.