Thursday Threesome: Three 80s/90s franchises that I horribly misunderstood

The 80s were my pre-school years, and accordingly I was a trusting and gullible little doofus. This was not helped by the fact that my sisters were ready and willing to feed me untruths to amuse themselves, which means nowadays I become immediately defensive if someone gets all incredulous about the gaping black holes in my pop culture knowledge. Screw you guys, I was busy reading Asterix and teaching myself hieroglyphics. Important things.

To add an additional layer of confusion, my older sister was very happy to load her own enthusiasms on me, who dutifully tried to mimic fandom though I was really too young to make any sense of it. 90210 springs to mind. As does East 17 and Snow's Informer. I overshot and tried to understand teen sensations and thus missed out on a big chunk of primary aged stuff that my schoolmates were all over. 

Yet despite all this I managed to develop my own healthy crop of misunderstandings about the franchises that surrounded me as a pre-school and primary aged child, many of which I'm still actively undoing (I only learn recently that a badger is not, in fact, the size of a bear. The animated Redwall series had led me to believe otherwise). 

Join me after the jump for more ridiculousness!

Transformers
I knew next to nothing about this line until Michael Bay took it on, to be honest, and even then the handily nerdy boyfriend had to explain a fair bit. I was familiar with the name Optimus Prime, but my internal juvenile translation pictured him thusly: 

 

And I knew there were robots somewhere about the place, but I didn't entirely understand how. And they were an awkward colorful collection of robots that looked very Duplo-ish and dated even to my 1990/six year old eyes. I believe I had some peripheral knowledge of the franchise through visiting male schoolfriends houses, but even then they looked weird and disproportionate and clunky and I mentally compartmentalized it as something you had to be a boy to understand. I even did a series of MS Paints somewhere about my understanding of Transformers as a youngster - complete with a weird looking Mantis-bot called Insecktor and a spherical Bumblebee on tractor-treads, plus a Megatron who was decidedly Tim Curry-ish. Damn I wish I could find them.

Labyrinth
Everyone has a story to tell about their childhood experiences of Labyrinth – mine kicked in rather late, at age seven. It was playing at a friend’s birthday party and as such my attention was fleeting, but as it reached its climactic Escher-steps sequence it managed to gather back the horde of girls it had steadily been losing since Dance Magic Dance. As such we watched the last chunk of it in bewildered silence, completely unsure as to what was going on. The main piece of confusion being in regard to Bowie himself, who we managed to misconstrue as being a rather strange looking lady.

Obviously I realized later (a good deal later - I didn't see it again for about seven years) that I had been wrong, but considering David Bowie as an entity unto himself, plus the rather dubious Jareth & Sarah sexual tension (still fueling fan fiction, so you know), plus the substantial wardrobe malfunction that Shall Not Be Named  - this misunderstanding is truly epic, not to mention longstanding. My primary-aged self did not have the internet. Nor access to anything remotely popculturey, so my initial impressions of Labyrinth remained crystallised in their purest form until I went through a period of pillaging my local video store and watching various oddities in the back room by myself. In blessed privacy, I finally made sense of the thing, insomuch as you can make sense of Labyrinth. Also it made me feel a bit funny. In a lady way. But I'm not going to admit that to anyone.
Inspector Gadget

This ones something of a curveball. I used to watch it an absolute stack, along with Get Smart, and only made the voice acting connection very late in life, despite enjoying the two and feeling like there was something very similar between them (common thread - slow on the uptake). 

It's a strange one because all the references it makes - Bond movies primarily - were all alien to me when I watched them. Bond came later, which means all the Bond gadgetry makes me resentfully think that a helicopter hat is still a better option. 

But that wasn't the issue at hand. The issue at hand was Penny.

This plucky little Nancy Drew spent each episode unraveling the mystery at hand and solving it, usually in spite of Gadget's inept detective work. The meme of the ultra smart child covering for the useless adult professional appears all the time (the only other example that springs to mind is Captain Pugwash and Tom the Cabin Boy), but what really drew my attention, and that I didn't particularly question until later in life, was the inevitable point in every episode where she was grabbed, gagged, tied up and either stuck in a car boot or put on a factory conveyor belt to be rolled out to a furnace or turned into dog food or whatever. Every single episode had a bound and gagged Penny. I wanted to find an image to emphasize my point but to be honest there aren't enough safety filters in the world to make that image search an easy prospect. I didn't question it at all as a kid, but now, looking back? There was some serious fixations onstaff that might need attention. Granted she always had the smarts to get out of it, but - really? And the fact that the gagging was always being done by some huge sniggering leering henchmen added a whole other level of what-the-christ.

So yes - this is my shame. I'm going to assume not all of these are completely unfounded. Yes? Maybe? I may be called upon to forfeit my nerd accreditation.