- In the 1980s, Bigfoot was big news. This was especially true if you were a fan of Ford trucks, as Bob Chandler's monster machine was perhaps the highest profile pickup in the world for that long stretch of years when Bigfoot dominated the show-n-crush circuit of a sport that the two of them helped foist into the global spotlight.
No. Trucks and off-roading was pretty much at a nadir in '87. On the one hand, Tread Lightly! was a year old, having been introduced because of asshole trucks in the woods. On the other hand, Bigfoot 5, the self-parody, was in arenas reminding the whole goddamn world how fucking stupid off-roaders were. But holy shit a few redneck males under 12 fucking loved it. In 1986, Ford Corporate introduced the Taurus, arguably the first American car to recognize the inevitable rise of Communist design ideas like "Aerodynamics" and "composite body panels" and "non-shitty fuel injection" (look at this miserable chunk of shit - LOOK AT IT). Meanwhile in the greater world we were dealing with the Challenger explosion and Iran Contra. People were beginning to aver that, maybe, in fact, real men DID eat quiche from time to time. And into this, Ford launched a special edition marketed to nine year old boys. And not just any 9-year-old boys, either. GI Joe had been on the air for 3 years, Transformers for two. He-man had just left the air but Robotech was in full swing and there was even M.A.S.K. if you were truly deviant. 3-wheelers were murdering people and 2 years from being banned but if you were that one kid drawing monster trucks in your trapper keeper (in my school, his name was Tony Boggs)... ...Ford wanted you to convince your dad to buy a pickup truck. The reputational damage they suffered lasted years. Fords were for clowns. Full stop. DODGE had a better reputation. You could drive a Bronco? but not if it was newer than '83, and certainly not if it was a Bronco II. Subaru had grudging respect for the simple fact that Subaru station wagons were radically faster on logging roads due to independent suspension. Toyota? infinitely less ridiculous than Ford, and not the subject of a goddamn Saturday morning cartoon show. That ridiculous "bigfoot edition" pickup was in the back of Petersen's 4-wheel & Off Road, 4-Wheeler, Hot Rod, you name it. And the end result was that nobody - NOBODY - built dirt Fords for ten years. (I didn't even know about the recalls, that's hilarious)
illusion is the ultimate weapon... just sayin'. . . . . joking aside, M.A.S.K. hit right when I was on the cusp of being "too old" to play with toys. I remember buying a couple with my own money, and taking them to my friends house and feeling distinctly like... oh... no one else is bringing toys anymore...
So, I couldn't believe that you'd add a M.A.S.K. video that wasn't the theme song, so of course I had to go listen to the theme song, which of course auto-played into a cover where the original singer drops in to comment. Anyway, I don't want to be cool enough for GoBots at this point in life. Like, did they even have Orson Welles playing Unicron, the Lord of Chaos, the Chaos Bringer, the Planet Eater? Maybe, maybe not. From the Transformers Wiki: George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985), actor and director, was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin and lived a fairly eventful life, in case you hadn't heard. For starters, in 1938 he convinced a bunch of rubes that Martians were invading the Earth with his The War of the Worlds radio show. On screen, Welles had a highly memorable role in The Muppet Movie, where he gave Kermit the Frog his big break in Hollywood. Oh yeah, he also made some movie about some guy who wants a sled (spoiler alert). It wasn't until 1985 that Mr. Welles finally fulfilled his true destiny by playing the planet-gobbling world Unicron, although, sadly, Mr. Welles died before the movie was released in 1986. "You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen." —Orson Welles, on his final film performance. "The irony of [Welles] playing a planet-sized eating machine wasn't lost on anyone." —Michael McConnohie
Oh so you're going there, are you? I mean yeah, Orson Welles was in the Transformers Movie, which nobody realized until IMDb existed, because nobody actually saw the Transformers Movie. I think Takara figured what their sales really needed was an OVA and Hasbro went "psshhh it's your money fam" without convincing them that things didn't work that way in the US. Still kind of baffling that even after the legendarily lackluster performance of the Transformers movie and the Care Bears movie, they still put together and released a Masters of the Universe movie, despite the fact that Masters of the Universe only existed because Conan the Barbarian was too violent for a toy series. Here's the thing, though. It was all bullshit. Not as bullshit as it is now (the new She-Ra kicks the ever-loving crap out of the old one, don't get me wrong) But the bullshit was new. And it was REALLY OBVIOUS. The switchover was astounding. We went from Marshall Will and Holly facing alien conspiracies to SOCOM using less-lethal, all because nobody wanted to jeopardize the toy sales that are only there because of FCC changes. And I mean, look. While Snake Eyes is busy telling you to look both ways before crossing the street and Megatron is somehow menacing the world while also being a Walther P-38 whose second-in-command is a boom box, Scott Bernard lost his fiancee attempting to retake Earth from an alien invasion and failing. In the first episode. The entertainment was there? We were just denied it. We knew Macross was out there. We knew Spaceship Yamato was out there. And we knew the rich kids were only slapping construction equipment together to form a robot that falls apart because some craven fucktard somewhere decided that Voltron needed some more John Deere. There's a Masters of the Universe Christmas movie. It's worse than you imagine. Anyone under 40 watches this shit from time to time ironically and waxes nostalgic, but it's like me having a fondness for Cheburashka - I never had to live in the USSR. I don't know what my point is, other than to point out that this has devolved into a discussion as to whether MASK was/was not cool (it wasn't) when my grand point is that Ford went from the Shelby GT350 to "let's sell pickups to emotionally arrested eight year olds" and pop culture has come around to "whoa why didn't anybody buy this really cool Ford."