9. Magic America

Back in the mid ‘80s, my only connections to the US were the indie record shop that fed my imported Electro habit, and some guy called William F. Sessions who persistently reminded me that WINNERS DON’T DO DRUGS, whenever – er – Spliff-Smoker Me put up silly scores on certain coin-ops.

Marvel Comics had already given me a sense of the place. Through Spider-Man’s eyes, I saw America as one big looming metropolis, decorated with cherry-flavoured Hostess Twinkie and X-Ray Specs ads. I learned about summer camps and cheerleaders and prom night and “getting laid” from Screwballs, Porky’s, The Last American Virgin, Carrie, and – Christ, no – King Frat.

The non-taste of the US of A. Ooh, how I wanted it.

My mate’s dad’s copy of Easy Rider hinted at a more complex side: wide open spaces with scary people who hurt you if you didn’t have short hair like theirs. Every day, on the way to school, I passed a spiteful splat of graffitti that announced: “STOKE SKINS”, so I could kind of relate to that bit. Apart from the wide open spaces.

But Tron was the clincher. I remember the camera sweeping into Flynn’s plush, two-tier, blinking, chinking arcade with its happy-smiley clean and friendly people and thinking: “Where the hell IS this place? There must be one in England, somewhere…”.

In the UK, coin-ops spluttered away in the toxic fugs of greasy-spoons, chippies, mini-cab offices, tacky-carpeted side-street arcades… They were sleazy, curious things to be wedged into awkward corners – hoovering up spare change, alleviating fish-frying boredom.

Flynn’s. Clean, vibrant… And look – old ladies enjoy videogames, too.

News-wise, they occasionally cropped up as grudging filler on earnest things like Nationwide. But we seemed intimidated. We just didn’t know what to make of them. The Americans, however, were happy to embrace arcade gaming as a big, exciting, yoof-culture thing, and the coin-ops were on proud display in bright, parent-friendly malls.

Until recently, I’d convinced myself that our poky, dirty-little-secret approach was all part of the appeal and ah, I just wouldn’t have enjoyed the cosy, modulated American way.

And then I saw Starcade.

Starcade was a Saturday morning/early afternoon TV show that aired across the US from 1982 to… er, I don’t know. I haven’t done the research. I know there were 133 episodes in total, though, if that helps. I think.

”Step One. Admit that you are powerless against us”.

Basically, it featured kids playing videogames competitively – for prizes and everything. The only real, long-running equivalent in the UK was the score challenge aspect of Channel Four’s GamesMaster – a show which perfectly captured the games biz in one of its heydays (the Mega Drive/SNES/Amiga era) but where all genuine joy for the games was suffocated by the knowingness, the archness, the ever-so-slightly removedness of it all.

The cliché about Americans not ‘doing’ irony can easily be turned around. You can be *so* ironic, that you end up mocking the thing you’re supposed to love.

And that’s why Starcade is a thing of great, great beauty. There isn’t a single, solitary, microscopic droplet of irony anywhere to be seen.

It manages to evoke how I really *felt* about videogames and arcade machines in my early teens: the unique characters of the cabs, the breathless sense of technical revolution, the cheerful oddness of being in control of a laser-spewing spaceship, a jittery chef, a sentient paintbrush…

Starcade isn’t afraid to admit how in awe it is of the games. I love the way the star prize coin-op is introduced early on in each episode, and sits, overseeing everything, on a raised podium – to be worshipped, fetishised. The focus is most definitely on the games, not the show.

”Look at that hunk of glass and metal and plastic… Oh, I could just screw the shit out of that
damned thing until it begged for mercy – how’bout you, kids?”

One of the reasons us Brits find it tough to come up with a good videogame TV format is that we really do struggle with the unqualified enthusiasm thing. Starcade is great because it screams enthusiasm from start to finish.

There’s a lot of running, for a start. None of your orderly shuffling from place fo place, here. Where GamesMaster was always obsessed with maintaining a visual theme with tight shots of gameplay, each episode of Starcade begins with the presenter and two contestants bashing away at a few coin-ops in some kind of illustrious training basement, before leaping up and down and barrelling out of the place like their crystal meth is kicking in.

”Ready, guys?”… “WOOH! YEEEAH!”… “LET’S HAVE IT, YOU SLAG!”

”Run, you beautiful bastards! RUN LIKE THE FUCKING WIND!!”

A UK version would have been fronted by the hippest, heppest, blabbiest drama-school graduate available. Starcade initially tried out a young guy called Mark Richards who fumbled and stumbled a lot, and was eventually replaced by an old-school pro, Geoff Edwards.

Geoff is excellent, because, although he clearly knows precisely nothing about videogames, he seems to be genuinely having a damned good, irony-free time. Sure, he has the unctuous, condescending manner drawn from a youth watching Ed Sullivan, but he works. He’s just old enough for the contestants to treat him with avuncular respect, but not so old that he seems out of place.

“Hope all your troubles get zapped!” is his sign-off tag, bless his cheery little camera-mugs and Blankety Blank mike and Bobby Robson-style game-name memory troubles (Dragon’s Lair becomes “Devil’s Lair”, Galaga becomes “Guyalla”).

Geoff always loosens up the big-haired, beige-and-pastel, tight-Wranglered contestants with some carefully scripted, zinger-friendly chat about hobbies and stuff.

“Oh, er, I play trumpet”, says one.

“Good for you!”, says Geoff.

“I raise rabbits”, says another – which is Geoff’s cue for a near-the-knuckle, ba-doom-tish comment about breeding or something. Rabbit Boy doesn’t roll his eyes or pretend-groan. He LAUGHS. He SMILES. Because he is AN AMERICAN.

The voice-over guy… He is called Kevin and has the kind of please-kill-me syrupyness now recognised as the standard for all parody voice-overs. His clunky banter with Geoff is joyously reminiscent of Alan Partridge’s ill-suppressed hate-hate relationship with house band leader Glen Ponder. Watch and gape as Kevin’s jocular jibes about Geoff’s character are met with a dutiful guffaw and a look deep behind the eyes which says: “I really do fucking despise you, you smirking, smart-arsed slop of sewage”.

”Ha, ha, ha. ‘SMASH’ TV, huh? That’s funny, Kevin, because I’d so love to ’smash’ you in
the face until you scream for your mommy”.

There’s one wonderful, breath-catching moment where, after Kevin’s explanation of how to play Arabian, wishful-thinking Geoff suggests: “Sounds like you had a little turban stuck in your throat there, Kevin!”.

There’s an even wonderfuller moment where Geoff snidily refers to Kevin as a “snake in the grass” – after a contestant chooses Super Cobra for their challenge game. In his narration, Kevin triumphantly points out that Super Cobra is entirely snake-free, as it happens. AND THEN – on a later episode, when Super Cobra crops up again, Geoff makes a point of introducing Kevin as the “resident snake”. The brief, lost-for-words pause is pure eloquence.

”Doubles, pal? Whaddaya mean: ‘No’? Y’little freak. Outside!”

After some desperately unbalanced thirty-second score challenges, a recognition round (“Is that Star Wars or Gravitar?”) and geekoid gaming questions (“How many home docks are there at the top of the screen in Frogger?”), the overall winner gets a final challenge to overcome before bagging the coin-op.

As ever, the loser’s prizes are much more interesting – metal detectors, programmable robots, a ‘Bionic Chair’ (sort of a pikey Parker-Knoll), ‘Mister Disc’ (a hilariously impractical early Walkman which played vinyl records and was “no bigger than a man’s shoe!”), lots of nasty denim things, nerdy chess computers, dizzyingly exotic wireless phones, and Colecovision – always Colecovision.

Programmable Robot. We waaaaant one.

So, yeah. I love Starcade. It’s a retro-fantasy – a peek into a parallel videogaming past that I sorta kinda wish I’d been a part of. It’s also the kind of weekend TV I still covet today. I loved my Tiswas, but how much better it would have been if Chris Tarrant had suddenly wandered off to the side and revealed a coin-op set up for a gaming challenge. Winner takes it home, loser gets dunked in a vat of filth, naturally.

Keep on zapping them troubles.

The Starcade DVD was released on June 1 st and is available from the website (http://www.starcade.tv/Starcade/starframe.htm).

There are loads of episodes on alt.binaries.multimedia, too. We order you to watch the Track & Field special.

SICKBOY, June 2004

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