Wednesday, August 22, 2007
About 30 years late to the party.
There are certain bands that will never by "mine." I will always think of them as the bands my older sister and her friends listened to: Kansas, AC/DC, Pat Benatar, Styx, Foreigner... and Kiss.
As I kid, I just found Kiss freaking bizarre. I was too young to get that they just a rock band (I would never call them "heavy metal," because they're not). You see interviews with them from back then, and it was all in good fun, tongue in cheek. But they just seemed dark and evil to me, with their platform boots, black outfits, makeup, spitting blood and fire. Just look:
Gene Simmons is apparently one of the friendliest guys on the planet (He has a reality show on A&E, for pete's sake. ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL!), but when I was five or six, he scared me. One friend's older brother had a poster of Gene on stage, with blood running down his face. Nightmare material to an innocent kid such as me.
Kiss went into super marketing mode in the late 1970s, and you could see Kiss dolls, lunchboxes, bedsheets... if you named a product, you could probably buy an officially licensed version of it with the band's faces on it.
I didn't want anything to do with that stuff, obviously. He scared me, yet I could buy a toy of him? How bizarre was that? (I know now you can buy toys of most horror movie characters, but back then it was a new concept).
Where am I going with all this? I'm not unloading childhood emotional baggage. I'm bring all this up to mention that I watched Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park the other night. On the box, Gene says they were pitched the idea as A Hard Day's Night (the Beatles movie) meets Star Wars. The final results were not quite like that. The band has powers. Gene can spit fire, Ace can teleport, Paul can shoot rays from his eyes, and Chris... well, he doesn't actually demonstrate any power. I guess they ran out of ideas or money by the time they got to the drummer. The movie is hilarious though. The band fights robotic cat men. I'll say that again: The band fights robotic cat men. Awesome. You can find the movie on YouTube, but it's worth renting on DVD to get the full experience. It's in amazing condition for a made-for-TV movie from so long ago.
As I kid, I just found Kiss freaking bizarre. I was too young to get that they just a rock band (I would never call them "heavy metal," because they're not). You see interviews with them from back then, and it was all in good fun, tongue in cheek. But they just seemed dark and evil to me, with their platform boots, black outfits, makeup, spitting blood and fire. Just look:
Gene Simmons is apparently one of the friendliest guys on the planet (He has a reality show on A&E, for pete's sake. ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL!), but when I was five or six, he scared me. One friend's older brother had a poster of Gene on stage, with blood running down his face. Nightmare material to an innocent kid such as me.Kiss went into super marketing mode in the late 1970s, and you could see Kiss dolls, lunchboxes, bedsheets... if you named a product, you could probably buy an officially licensed version of it with the band's faces on it.
I didn't want anything to do with that stuff, obviously. He scared me, yet I could buy a toy of him? How bizarre was that? (I know now you can buy toys of most horror movie characters, but back then it was a new concept).
Where am I going with all this? I'm not unloading childhood emotional baggage. I'm bring all this up to mention that I watched Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park the other night. On the box, Gene says they were pitched the idea as A Hard Day's Night (the Beatles movie) meets Star Wars. The final results were not quite like that. The band has powers. Gene can spit fire, Ace can teleport, Paul can shoot rays from his eyes, and Chris... well, he doesn't actually demonstrate any power. I guess they ran out of ideas or money by the time they got to the drummer. The movie is hilarious though. The band fights robotic cat men. I'll say that again: The band fights robotic cat men. Awesome. You can find the movie on YouTube, but it's worth renting on DVD to get the full experience. It's in amazing condition for a made-for-TV movie from so long ago.
# posted by smacky @ 8:23 AM 
