Sleepovers & Cartoons

“Have you ever noticed how they can’t make a good video game where you’re flying in it?"

This was what Adam asked his friend Scott, who was sleeping over on a Saturday night. They were in the third grade and it was 2am, technically Sunday morning. The boys had gone to sleep at 11pm, but set an alarm for 1:30am, when they agreed to crawl out of bed and slip into the family room for the TV, which they turned on at a low volume and used to look for cartoons. The kind of animation broadcast on television in the middle of the night strangely fascinated the boys. This was the early 1990s, and there was no Cartoon Network. Cartoons at this hour were bizarre.

I distinctly remember discovering Aeon Flux on MTV, and I recall being profoundly confused. There was a great deal of explicit sex: tongues swirling around inside mouths and breasts and dicks testing the elasticity of leather constraints. There was hifalutin dialog and melodramatic tension. It was not like the stuff on TV at 3:30pm, when I got home from school. I remember a specific scene when Aeon was running up and down flights of stairs, trying frantically to stop some kind of countdown. As she tried to crack a computer code, she would run back to a high vantage point and fire a rifle at a large plug on the end of a crane, in order to keep it from being inserted into an open pipe. I don’t remember understanding how the plug worked, but it was clear that -- should the bad guys succeed in delivering it (or maybe they were trying to remove it?) -- something terrible would happen. I remember Aeon, this slender, quick woman, trying desperately to prevent the world’s doom on two fronts. The scene probably lasted just three minutes (they were only shorts, after all), but I watched her panic and it felt like hours.

She died in the end, of course. She dies at the end of every clip. That was the design of the show. It was hard to take in, as a third grader. But, damn, it was a thrill.

“And I’d really like to play a decent flyer game, you know?” Adam added to his question. Scott nodded thoughtfully and ruminated on the few ‘flyer games’ with which he was familiar. The one that stood out best was an adaptation of Superman. Once you were airborne, the game was pretty boring. But, he had to admit (though not to Adam, who was something of an ideologue on this subject) that the game did a great job with Superman’s takeoff. He would sort of hunch down the split second before he took off. Scott enjoyed the sensation that small touch gave him. (It’s things like that, incidentally, that separate good games from great games.)

Scott only smiled, though, and told his friend that he was right. "I don’t know what they’re waiting for. Flying is, like, the most desired skill, for everybody, I think," he finally answered.

The boys both nodded, happy and united by a false consensus. The search for unusual cartoons was under way.