X-Men: Volume 1

There’s no real way to say this other than to just say it: Fox Kids completely and utterly ruled. At any one time, Fox Kids was broadcasting Animaniacs, Batman: The Animated Series, The Tick, Spider-Man, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, Taz-Mania and X-Men. And that was just in 1994. I watched Fox Kids for at least the last half of the 90s. You were getting two hours an afternoon and four hours on Saturday mornings before the grown-ups wanted to come along and watch Ricki Lake or whatever. It was the best.

While I’m unfortunately no longer a child living in 1994, DVD box sets help me to prolong having to grow up and be more interested in Jersey Shore than Big Bad Beetleborgs. In 2009, Buena Vista started releasing the full X-Men series under the Marvel Comic Book Collection line. Within ten months, Buena Vista had put out five volumes of the two-disc sets. There were five seasons of X-Men, but instead of releasing the show in a season format (as most television shows are), Buena Vista opted to divvy up the show’s 76 episodes in roughly equal chunks for each volume.

I can kind of see the point in this, as even with season three’s 25 (!) episodes, no one is going to pay more than $30 for X-Men DVDs, and the final season only has 10 episodes. At the same time, some of the episodes are aired out of continuity order, and releasing by volume pretty much forces you to buy all five. For example, the first season is contained in its entirety on X-Men: Volume 1, but after the very satisfying season finale, there’s three extra episodes that starts off the next season. It prevents each set from standing on its own.

The main X-Men team here is made up of Professor X, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Storm, Wolverine, Rogue, Gambit and Jubilee. The characterizations are a little mixed. Professor X seems to show up only when the rest of the team is at an impasse and the plot needs to continue. Cyclops is constantly yelling at everyone, especially Wolverine and Gambit. Beast is removed from the team in the first two episodes to serve a prison sentence (he gets out by the end of disc two), though he’s portrayed as very noble throughout. Morph is another character who starts with the X-Men, but he gets killed in the second episode before any real conclusions about him can be made.

Jubilee acts as the audience surrogate, a young teenager who is new to this whole superhero thing and the world the X-Men live in. Despite having the most useless superpower of the team, she’s surprisingly effective in the role. Jean is absolutely useless, basically serving to illustrate how high the stakes are for our heroes. She’s constantly shown as still learning about her powers, which puts her far behind the curve of everyone save Jubilee. Jean is frequently shown trying to use her telepathy to help the team, only to collapse in screaming pain.

Surprisingly, Wolverine is almost as big a whiner as Jean. Even though he gets an entire episode to himself (“Cold Vengeance”) and even though he’s everyone’s default favourite, he doesn’t actually do anything especially interesting throughout the set. In fact, it isn’t until the opening episodes of the second season (and the final episodes of X-Men: Volume 1), after Morph is brought back, that storylines with Wolverine finally start to heat up. Plus, by then, the writers had long given up on a failed attempt to get over “I go… where I WANNA go” as a catchphrase for him.

Storm and Rogue compete for the most character development. Storm gets an episode dedicated to overcoming her claustrophobia (“Captive Hearts,” though her claustrophobia comes back up in “Slave Island”) and another episode dealing with her past and the best villain on the set, Shadow King (“Whatever It Takes,” the last episode on the set). Rogue gets two episodes dealing with giving up her powers to be normal, only to change her mind when she realizes how much good she can do with them (“The Cure” and “Come The Apocalypse”). Rogue emerges from X-Men: Volume 1 as the best character, the one X-Man with both the best and most tragic mutant powers. She’s also aided by a teased relationship with Gambit, who oozes charisma and is by far the coolest character.

Magneto, the X-Men’s default archrival, isn’t utilized too much. He shows up in three episodes and we get both his backstory and mission statement, but in the finale of season one (“The Final Decision,” which is an interesting title for an episode where the Sentinels try to wipe out all of humanity…) he’s shoved aside fairly quickly so we can get to Master Mold, the “final boss” of the season. Apocalypse shows up for the two Rogue-centric episodes and is sufficiently evil. The viewer is left wanting more from both Magneto and Apocalypse in season two. Mr. Sinister shows up at the end of the set as well and Cyclops actually gets to yell at him instead of his teammates. Sinister seems like evil incarnate until Shadow King’s appearance in the very next episode. Sabretooth is definitely the most disappointing villain of the X-Men: Volume 1, but part of that is probably related to his being tied to Wolverine.

Part of me wishes this two-disc set wrapped up with “The Final Decision,” which really is a satisfying finale. But the other side of including three episodes of season two to make the viewer want to watch the next volume is, well, I really want to watch the next volume now. And you know what? I think the 1994 version of me would be quite pleased with that.

Talent shows.

Dictionary.com defines talent show as “a theatrical show in which a series of usually amateur or aspiring singers, dancers, comedians, instrumentalists, etc., perform in the hope of gaining recognition.” Talent shows are a stable of every small town community fair, every grade school, every local bar scene. The talent show was, in many ways, the precursor to reality television, so it makes sense that so many reality shows in the past few years have been gussied-up talent shows. Somewhat famously, Trivium frontman Matt Heafy was recruited by original vocalist Brad Lewter after Heafy performed The Offspring’s “Self-Esteem” at a high school talent show in 1999. Lewter left the band soon after, leaving Heafy to the dual duties of lead guitar and vocals.

Trivium released Ember to Inferno in 2003; Heafy was barely 17. Ember to Inferno was very rough and unpolished, sounding more like a collection of demos than a real record. Ascendancy came two years later and was a marked improvement. The band had added a second guitar player and changed bass players. The result was a more full, complete sound and one of the best metalcore records of the 2000s. Everything was massively improved over the previous effort, but you could clearly see how one record led to another. 2006’s The Crusade is where things sort of went off the rails for Trivium. Rather than continue to evolve their existing sound, the band morphed into a Metallica clone. The Crusade had several excellent songs, but was plagued by inconsistency and an uneasy feeling of listening to people cosplaying with instruments in their hands. Or, in other words, just about every talent show I’ve ever been to.

Trivium quickly gave up that direction and basically decided to show off how well they could play their instruments. 2008’s Shogun was a super-bland record that had one really good song, “Down From The Sky,” and a whole bunch of the most blatant musical masturbation this side of prog rock. The most remarkable part of Shogun’s boringness was how “epic” Trivium tried to make it. This only served to bloat the experience; of the 11 songs on the record, not a one was contained to less than four minutes, with the title track leading the way at nearly 12 minutes of forgettable riffing.

In Waves, released earlier this month, brings yet another attempted stylistic change. Heafy and fellow guitar player Corey Beaulieu went around telling everyone that would listen: we’re going back to the Ascendancy sound. Things are going to be simpler. We kicked out the founding drummer because of creative issues. This is our best record yet.

And here’s the problem. No, it’s not that In Waves isn’t their best record (which it isn’t). It’s that this is a group of young men who haven’t grown out of the talent show mentality yet. That’s not a condemnation of them as people, it’s a condemnation of them as a band. Heafy’s a very nice, humble guy, but he can come off as especially eager to please. Despite all Trivium’s success and fans, every new record feels like Heafy is still the 13-year-old playing in front of his high school, trying to show off for the cool kids.

In Waves does have some bright moments. The title track is pretty weak, but the album leads off with “Capsizing The Sea,” a really good instrumental that makes “In Waves” work a lot better than it does otherwise. “Caustic Are The Ties That Bind” fits right in with anything off of Ascendancy. “Forsake Not The Dream” possibly sounds the least like a Trivium song of everything on the record. But for all the ballyhoo of cutting back to their roots, In Waves really just sounds like a stripped down Shogun.

(And it’d be really great if Trivium could start coming up with better song titles. They’re not like Fall Out Boy, whose dumb song names stemmed from Pete Wentz’s overly self-aware cleverness. But shit like “Caustic Are The Ties That Bind” are just awful titles, and they only get worse when you realize these are actual lyrics from the songs.)

In Waves isn’t really a bad record, and Trivium certainly isn’t a bad band. But you get the feeling they’re never going to write another great record until they move on from the talent show.

Jani.

I started listening to hair metal and mid-90s dance pop in grade 11. It was a weird year. I’d just moved from the only city I’d ever lived in and I was in the middle of a two-year span of hair growth. Maybe something in me wanted to listen to other people with big hair. I’m not sure. I just know that I was 16 years old when I discovered Warrant.

Warrant was a band that came along at the end of the hair metal phase, which is too bad because it deprived them from a lot of recognition they should have had. They were very much in the Poison mold – pretty blonde lead singer, stupidly catchy hooks, arena-ready rock anthems. I really like Poison, for the record, but they certainly were never going to be considered in the same light as a band like Motley Crue, who were darker and grittier and preferred their candy to be up their nose or in their arms, not in their choruses.

But Warrant was more than a lame knockoff of a lame knockoff of Motley Crue, and the reason for that pretty much began and ended with Jani Lane. The aforementioned pretty blonde at the front of Warrant, Lane looked very much like a Vince Neil or a Bret Michaels or even a David Lee Roth with more hair. The difference was that Lane singlehandedly drove his band. Whether that’s a good thing or not probably depends on your perspective. I wonder what Jani’s perspective was.

Lane wasn’t so much interested in the fame and the fortune that came with the gig as he was in writing songs. There’s so much more emotion in the lyrics of a song like “I Saw Red” than in most of the other power ballads that Warrant’s contemporaries were putting out.

The problem for Warrant, and Lane in particular, was twofold. The first problem was popping up just as a little band called Nirvana was about to change mainstream rock for everyone. Second, they were a hair metal band and the music industry’s powers-that-be expected hair metal songs. Lane wrote “Cherry Pie,” Warrant’s answer to “Pour Some Sugar On Me” by Def Leppard, in roughly 15 minutes. He would regret it forever.

“Cherry Pie” led to millions of dollars for Warrant but it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t an artistic failure. Lane was forever tortured by the way the executives were right, the way the masses ate up a simple, stupid song about sex, the way his joke song overshadowed the rest of the record, such as the wonderfully subtle “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

More, it ensured that no one would ever take Warrant seriously again. They would forever be the “Cherry Pie” band, the group who had a video too sexist to air in Canada. Jani Lane was branded as a joke and he came to hate his success.

All he wanted to do was write songs, and his greatest success became his greatest failure. That’s a sort of torture that only the most cruel of men would wish on even their greatest enemy. Jani lived with that for 22 years.

Jani Lane died last week. I hope he found peace with himself before he passed.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

Lucky.

Sometimes, the best things happen to you when you least expect it.

Last year, a couple of us got together and decided we wanted to go to the Warped Tour. None of us wanted to take a day off of work, so we decided to pile into a car and drive the seven hours to Montreal. One of the people who was going to come with us backed out and our driver filled that seat with some girl he knew. “Metalface”, he called her. Because she had piercings, you see.

I made fun of her the entire way. She laughed and smiled and covered her mouth when she was smiling or laughing too much.

The trip itself, objectively, was something of a disaster. The car was much too small for people of our size. The hotel we booked “forgot” to save a room for us, instead preferring the man who had to keep going back to the ATM for more cash and the woman who escorted him back and forth, making sure he didn’t run with her money.

We left that hotel and scrambled to find another. We did, and it wasn’t as bad as the first hotel, but it was still only marginally bigger than the car, and the driver decided to go for a shirtless run through Montreal at 4 in the morning. The five of us may have gotten eight hours of sleep between us.

We got up and lathered ourselves in sunscreen and navigated a subway system that operated in a language most of us hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. We made it to the Warped Tour. Every Time I Die played yet another set that was better than the previous time I saw them. I felt like the world was about to end every time Whitechapel used a bass drop. Sum 41 was cool to see because they were popular when I was 13.

I made fun of the girl the entire time. She still laughed and smiled and covered her mouth.

Despite our lack of sleep and our exhaustion from standing around in the sun all day, we drove back that same night. The driver cranked the air conditioning so he wouldn’t fall asleep and talked to me about fuel efficiency. I wasn’t really listening. I kissed the girl instead.

We made it “Facebook official” a month later and a few months after that, she dropped her entire life to move away with me while I chased something of a dream. I still think that was an incredible leap of faith, but God am I ever glad she made it. How do you repay someone for that?

But that’s the thing about Erin. She would never expect me to do that. All she wants is for me to be hers. In return, I get to hang out with the coolest girl in the world, someone who loves Mortal Kombat and gets excited for video games, someone who loves Breaking Bad just as much as the X-Men cartoon, someone who’ll hop on a plane with me and go on whatever adventure I talk her into. Today is our anniversary and God help me, I know it’s presumptuous but I can’t fathom not sitting here one year from today, waiting for her to come home so we can read comic books together.

I’m so fucking lucky.

Kirby.

"Don't take anything for granted, because tomorrow is not promised to any of us."

Kirby Puckett was a baseball player. A great baseball player. One of the best ever. He played his entire career with the Minnesota Twins, though it was cut short due to an eye injury that rendered him unable to see our of his right eye. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, the first chance he had to get in.

"I was told I would never make it because I'm too short. Well, I'm still too short, but I've got 10 All-Star games, two World Series championships, and I'm a very happy and contented guy. It doesn't matter what your height is, it's what's in your heart."

He wasn't a model citizen off the field after his retirement, but he will always be remembered for the enthusiasm and joy he brought to playing the game of baseball. He faced long odds to make it, and always tried his hardest.

"Kirby Puckett's going to be all right. Don't worry about me. I'll show up, and I'll have a smile on my face. The only thing I won't have is this uniform on. But you guys can have the memories of what I did when I did have it on."

On March 5, 2006, Kirby Puckett suffered a severe stroke at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona and underwent emergency surgery. He died of complications from the stroke the next day, just 8 days away from his 46th birthday.



Goodbye, Kirby. We'll all miss you.