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Childhood Heroine #14: The Lady from Poltergeist

When I was a kid, there was a period when my mother and I lived with my aunt Karen, uncle Don, and cousin Kim, who was about my age.  My parents weren’t separated or going through a rocky patch, or at least a rockier patch than usual; they just lived in separate states for a while.  Kim and I shared a bedroom and we put my baby brother in a closet.  Only much later did it occur to me that this was in any way odd.

As far as I can recall, Kim and I spent roughly 75% of that time watching Poltergeist on HBO and freaking ourselves out.  Many of the effects–the levitating toys, the cups and saucers scooting around the kitchen, the evil tree–registered as more funny than scary to me, which is probably a sign that I was not a well child.  But that just meant that it came as an extra shock when something really scary happened, mostly the guy going into the bathroom and peeling his face off for no reason, which invariably drove us out of the rec room screaming.

The best character was, of course, Tangina, the medium hired by the movie’s whitebread family to rid their shoddily-constructed suburban home of its 999 unhappy haunts.  Between forcing Mom and Dad to yell at their daughter trapped between dimensions (a scene that now shocks me more than the face-peeling guy) and trying to make the girl go into the light–i.e., DEATH–when she thinks rescue is impossible, Tangina is a hardass.  She’s so tough that it’s easy to forget how completely she fails at getting rid of the damn ghosts.  Still, actress Zelda Rubinstein was tough enough to survive the urban-legendary Poltergeist Curse, which is pretty impressive.

Last month, for my mother’s 60th birthday, the extended family gathered at Key West for a week-long, booze-soaked celebration that was immediately drowned in a freak rainstorm that lasted the exact length of our visit.  One morning my cousin Kim and I were stuck indoors, rain drumming steadily outside, and there, on basic cable, it was: Poltergeist.  We huddled close to the TV and let it suck us in, falling back to that time when the whims of adults made us sisters, trusting Tangina to guide us home.

Childhood Heroine #13: Murphy Brown

When I was a kid, my aunt Kerry worked as a news producer in Pittsburgh.   During this time, members of my family were often recruited for bit parts in local-interest stories and PSAs.  I myself was interviewed about my new Cabbage Patch Kid for a 1983 piece on the Cabbage Patch craze and starred in a holiday bumper about not leaving booze out where kids could get it.  And of course I was in the cast of the epic “Vacation Stress,” a segment featuring my mother as Mom, my uncle Harold as Dad, my cousin Tony as Junior, and myself in the scene-stealing role of Little Girl Who Is Upset To Have Forgotten Her Teddy Bear.

In Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon writes, “I like a good sitcom as much as anybody, but did any kid ever try to get up a game of Murphy Brown?”  I can’t say I did, but Candice Bergen’s prickly newswoman loomed fairly large in my developing imagination.  In addition to watching Murphy Brown religiously with the rest of my family, I read Linda Ellerbee’s memoir And So It Goes over and over, and I was very fond of all incarnations of Lois Lane.

Despite visiting the WTAE News studios, where I got to work the cameras and sit behind the big desk, I had only a vague and confused idea of what reporters actually did, but it seemed like a good gig.  Some days you ducked bombs in Beirut; other days you spent an entire afternoon at home trying to get footage of your dog eating out of her Snoopy bowl for a five-second clip.  Either way, it made up for having to wear pearl earrings all the time.

I love Kate Beaton’s 1980′s Businesswoman Comics, to the point that 1980′s Businesswoman is tied with Tiny Hermione for favorite character.  Like Beaton, I lived through the era when, at some point, “power-suited professional” became a thing a little girl could grow up to be.  I’m writing this in ratty jeans and a sweater I stole from my dad, but Murphy Brown is clicking around in heels somewhere in my psyche, barking out orders and pissing off Republicans.  And the clip of her singing “Natural Woman” to her baby still chokes me up.  And so it goes.

Childhood Heroine #12: Batgirl

I didn’t get hardcore into comic books until high school, so my childhood concept of Batgirl came from reruns of the final season of the Adam West Batman show.  From these I learned that Batgirl spent a lot of time climbing around on window ledges, was such a master of disguise that not even Batman knew her true identity, and was also totally boss.  Batgirl is so great that she continued to be awesome in the comic books even after getting paralyzed by the Joker in a total bullshit plot twist, but my primal image of her will always be Yvonne Craig running up and down unconvincing rooftops.

As an adult who is dangerously obsessed with comic books, I often give talks about comics at libraries, and mentioning Batgirl and her alter ego, classic hot librarian Barbara Gordon, is always a good way to get cheap pops from the librarians.

Batgirl was one of my husband Andrew’s first crushes, along with Jerrica Benton and Penny from Inspector Gadget. I try to live up to these models of womanhood, but really, who can match Batgirl?

Childhood Heroine #11: Velma

I have a vivid memory of sitting on the floor of my room at age six, looking at the characters on my Scooby-Doo playing cards, and knowing with absolute certainty that I was going to grow up to look like Velma rather than Daphne.  It wasn’t a strongly negative or positive feeling; it was just there, like the weather.  Shortly after that, I got my first pair of glasses, pink plastic with Woodstock from “Peanuts” stamped on the hinges, and my fate was sealed.  An essential Velmosity has clung to me ever since.  Just last month, for instance, my mother informed me that she is a Ginger and I am a Mary Ann.  (She was wrong.  I am in fact the Professor.)

Ever since that formative moment of truth, I’ve felt protective of Velma and have always deeply disliked “Velma is a lesbian and Shaggy is a stoner” jokes.  I gave up on Kevin Smith forever when he did that in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, a movie that was my Waterloo on many levels, from the opening credits to the realization that I’d lost my dead grandfather’s Irish tweep cap at the theater.  Which is exactly the kind of thing Daphne would never do.  Daphne wouldn’t be wearing a dead man’s tweed cap in the first place.  Or if she did she’d look totally hot in it, and when she lost it some kind man would offer to find it for her.  Or she’d get kidnapped by a man in a gorilla suit and everyone would forget about the hat issue.

Meanwhile, someone needs to solve the mysteries, and that’s where Velma comes in.

On the other hand, I deeply admire “Venture Brothers” for doing a Scooby-Doo parody casting Velma as Valerie Solanas.  Who also wore some pretty good caps.

As an addendum, Velma’s character design in the 1990s cartoon A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was adorable.  She was like half the size of the other characters and had tiny fast-moving legs that made that tinka-tinka-tinka cartoon sound.  I hesitated to bring this up lest it seem sacrilegious to mention a cynical ’90s spinoff in the same breath as the original (although, watching clips on YouTube, the running joke of Fred blaming every crime on his neighbor Red Herring was pretty good), but, frankly, the original Scooby-Doo wasn’t very good either.  It’s not like I’m discussing Popeye and Son here.  Anyway, Velma in that cartoon looked more or less exactly like me at age six, sans glasses, reading my future in the cards.

Childhood Heroine #10: Maleficent

Disney’s Sleeping Beauty gets some feminist flank for having a heroine whose major achievement is sleeping, but it’s a pretty good girl-power fantasy if you assume it’s about the battle for supremacy between the three good fairies and the evil Maleficent.  Which, as a kid, I did.  The good fairies–Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, natch–have some pretty boss powers for women shaped like levitating teapots, but even they’re overshadowed by Maleficent, Mistress of All Evil, with her raven, her weird henchmen, her awesome hat (referred to as the “horns of the devil” by the Disney animators), and her turning into a goddamn dragon.

Put it simply, Maleficent is a class act.  And she was animated by Marc Davis based on concept art by Eyvind Earle, which is a team you can’t beat without bringing in Mary Blair.

Childhood Heroine #9: Princess Leia

In geekdom, the generational divide comes down to one thing: are you old enough to have seen the original Star Wars trilogy in theaters?  I wasn’t around for the first two movies, but Return of the Jedi was one of the first movies I saw; the only earlier moviegoing experiences I remember are E.T. and the 1982 re-release of Bambi.  I remember my first viewing of Jedi as a spectacle of light, sound, and laser battles from which my five-year-old mind retained exactly two things: Speeder Bike Leia and the Ewoks.

Older fans tend to hate the Ewoks because they provide an uncomfortable reminder that Star Wars is basically aimed at children, but as an actual child I adored all action on the forest moon of Endor.  And frankly, as far as merchandisable sellout characters go, you can do a lot worse than robot-worshipping teddy bears that want to eat people.  I was Wicket for Halloween that year, and my baby brother was a baby Ewok in a stroller.

Later, Princess Leia got confused in my mind with the Princess Leia parody character in Spaceballs, and to this day, when I watch the Star Wars movies, I expect Leia to bust out with a machine gun and mow down a bunch of Stormtroopers.  Speaking of which, if you enjoyed Spaceballs as a child in the ’80s, do not watch it as an adult.  It has inexplicably been replaced by a bad movie.

The other good thing about Princess Leia was the hints that she had Force powers like Luke.  I waited twenty years for the next set of Star Wars movies so I could see that foreshadowing pay off with Leia becoming an awesome Jedi knight.  Instead I got her mom dying in childbirth like a character in a Victorian novel.  The hell, George Lucas.  But, um, thanks for the Ewoks and stuff.

Childhood Heroine #8: April O’Neil

When aliens intercept our TV signals from the 1980s, we’d better hope that they don’t pick up Saturday morning cartoons.  Otherwise they’ll get the impression that the gender ratio on Earth is roughly four males to every female, and since such a skewed population is impossible through normal genetic selection (see The Selfish Gene), they’ll naturally conclude that our species engages in widespread female infanticide.  Then they’ll blow up Earth for the good of the Galactic Confederation.  In such a scenario, we have only two hopes: that the aliens will assume that gender in our species is determined by temperature or something, like with snakes, or that they happen to see something like Jem, where the gender ratio is reversed.  But nobody watched the girl cartoons except my husband Andrew, who had a crush on Jem’s alter ego, Jerrica Benton.

(I remember the otherwise terrible cartoon Galaxy High making its lack of female characters into a plot point by explaining that its titular space school had a hard time recruiting girls, and as a result the few girls at the school were very popular.  This information is stored in the part of my brain that’s supposed to contain Spanish.)

Anyway, April O’Neil.  Plucky girl reporter.  Open-minded attitude regarding reptilian sewer mutants. Wears a yellow speedsuit everywhere, a wise choice for someone who spends much of her time in the sewers.  I understand she’s a lab assistant in the newest version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I prefer her with a camera and a mic.

As a kid I was also fond of April’s gawky friend Irma, for absolutely no other reason than that she looked like me.  My favorite turtle was Donatello, who did machines, so the greatest episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the one where Irma has to impersonate Donatello at a science conference because he’s been publishing papers under the name “Donna Tello,” and then they have to defeat the Foot together.  That episode didn’t, admittedly, have a lot of April O’Neil in it, but I felt like drawing April.

Update: In the course of researching this post, I discovered that my parakeet, Grace Hopper, goes completely batshit at the sound of the Jem theme song.

Childhood Heroine #7: Kira

The Dark Crystal scared the crap out of me, so of course I watched it obsessively every time it reran on Showtime in the early 1980s.  (This was when my family lived in eastern Texas, and cable TV was a life necessity because you couldn’t go outside in the summer without bursting into flames.  Or you could go to the mall, but mall socialization in the South led directly to child beauty pageants and the Baby Olympics.)  In a movie filled with moments designed to darken the dreams and steal the innocence of Muppet-loving children everywhere, there was one scene that particularly haunted me, where one of the evil roadkill-crow Muppets dies and at the same moment one of the good but still extremely creepy four-armed monk Muppets  keels over dead, because they’re psychically linked or something.  That freaked the crap out of me.  I watched it over and over.

Once in a while something non-terrifying happened in The Dark Crystal, usually involving hyper-competent hippie elf chick Kira, friend to all Henson-operated woodland creatures.  Like many girls, I was deeply impressed by the scene where HOLY CRUD MUPPET SPOILERS Kira rescues the main elf guy by suddenly sprouting fucking wings and flying, and when he says, “Wings?  I don’t have wings,” she says, “Of course not.  You’re a boy.”

In college, my friend Cory-Ellen confessed that Kira was her first crush.  My first crush was Gonzo on The Muppet Show, and in retrospect I have to admit she made the better choice.

Childhood Heroine #6: Samus Aran

How did kids know stuff before the Internet?  Through some gestalt consciousness, we all knew the Konami Code (the only way to get past the first damn level in Contra), the locations of any and all warp zones (even Fred Savage’s brother in The Wizard used his magic autism powers to find the warp whistles in Super Mario 3), and that your guy in Metroid was actually a girl and if you beat the game you got to see her naked.  Or so the legend went.

There was one friend of my brother’s who had beaten Metroid, an obnoxiously difficult game where just getting space warrior Samus Aran to walk across a room and do the rolling-into-a-ball trick took endless after-school practice, and he used to fire up the last level–that was another exciting thing, that you could save the game–so we could all watch the magic moment.  This turned out to consist of Samus turning into what might, if you squinted hard and used all the power of a child’s imagination, be a stick figure in a bikini.  Add some math, and it could’ve been a page from the Women of xkcd pinup calendar.  But this was what kids did for video-game cheesecake in the 80s.  Again, no Internet.

The strategy of using the promise of digitized female flesh to convince male gamers to spend untold hours learning to operate an annoyingly hard-to-control avatar would later be honed to perfection for Tomb Raider.  But by then I was older and already missing Samus Aran, the James Tiptree of pixels, winning in a boys’ world inside her Christmas-colored masculine armor.

Childhood Heroine #5: Princess Peach

It was an amazing moment when Super Mario 2 came out, and Toad and Princess Peach were suddenly upgraded from vaguely humanoid stacks of immobile pixels to playable characters.  I became a Jedi of the Peach, mastering her signature drifting long jump.  I played Princess Peach on every level except that one where you need Luigi’s powered-up high jump to get to a warp or something, and usually you can warp past that level anyway.

To this day, there are only two video games I’m any good at: Super Mario 2 and Ms. Pac-Man, which taught kids with only mildly indulgent parents how to make a quarter last for twenty minutes.  I’m especially ninja on the Mario 2 whale level in the ice world, still second in awesomeness only to the level of Mario 3 with Kuribo’s Shoe.  Princess Peach riding in Kuribo’s Shoe–now that’d be something to see.  Maybe  I should draw that next.