Disclaimer: this is not going to be analytical like my previous posts about published stories. I mainly just like this goofy old show that was objectively bad much of the time.
Mighty Max is an early 90s fantasy horror sci-fi action/adventure spanning 40 episodes about a white boy who lives with his single archeologist mom in the suburbs and sleeps next to a bust of Socrates (and like TMNT, Transformers, and so on, was based on a toy line). He’s destined to save the world from certain doom once a week using a magic hat that opens portals that warp him around the globe (and later they decide it can do time travel and send you to a mind-bendy astral plane). He’s kind of an idiot and a coward, though, so the immortals Norman and Virgil (pictured here) are his brawn and brains, respectively. Norman’s full of sick one-liners and Virgil says the word “destiny” too much. The big bad’s name is Skullmaster and he’s a 20-foot purplish bald guy in a loin cloth and a cape voiced by Tim Curry, naturally.
It’s not necessarily a good show. In retrospect, what’s striking about it is how it recklessly slams all of those genres together, how surprisingly violent it is for a kid’s show, and how socially progressive it was for the time. In episode two you see Norman throw a guy in to an iron maiden, hoist the iron maiden, and drop it in to a pit of even bigger spikes. Somehow that guy doesn’t die, so at the end of the episode Norman hurls him in to a pit of fire instead. Sure, there’s no blood or gore, but that is what it is.
And it’s not sensitive in any way to pretty much anybody, and loves to do the culturally insensitive depiction of aboriginal folks, but these are some satisfying moments from the first few episodes:
Max’s friend from school Bea is a girl. By the time you see her get sucked in to one of these zany adventures, she’s presumably heard about how the hat works and that there are monsters out there, but that’s all she needs to just roll with it. Maybe lazy writing, but there’s a scene where they’re in this dark temple and Bea shines the flashlight on a rat and screams, announces the rat, and instead of making fun of her or acting tough Max panics and grabs the light, desperately trying to find the rat for a moment before deciding she made it up so that he didn’t have to think about rats. Then he shines the light on a human skeleton, screams, and Bea doesn’t get because, “It’s just a skeleton.” Not impressed? Well, later in the temple Bea opens a fifty foot tall stone door with only a moment of strain, putting her strength on par with Norman the Guardian just because, and when the giant snake monsters attack the neighborhood Max’s plan to take a group of them down fails so Bea steps up to run a bunch of them over with her bicycle (somehow) and finally ghostrides the bike in to a group of them, taking them out. Then Max starts swinging at one, but as soon as the thing’s hood comes down (giant snakes in cloaks, I don’t get it either) he gets scared off, so Bea again steps in and brains the thing with a potted plant. So by the time you hear a “You hit like a girl!” taunt from Max in this show, you’re like, “Okay but girls around here hit pretty hard, so is that a compliment?” But that’s just making girls do tough guy shit and doesn’t count? So somehow the thing driving the plot is Max trying to get with this other girl from school who’s presented as the ditsy cheerleader type but the whole time all she cares about is getting a head-start on her future, and when Max agrees to come over to study, thinking that was code for making out, she gets pissed at him like, “The fuck is wrong with you? I’m trying to get an education over here!” And we’re led to believe that Bea is jealous of this kid but later it’s revealed she’s just embarrassed at how clueless Max is about dating.
And then there’s the mom, who dresses like a dude and sports a mullet. It’s never mentioned where the father is, and there’s even a gag about how she doesn’t think about dating. She’s just educated, successful, curious, and cares about her kid. She’s also thrown in to an adventure after presumably only hearing stories (when she first meets the giant viking and the bird person she’s just like, ‘Sup, guys! Nice to finally meet ya.’), and when the magic cap gets stolen and they find a kid biking down the street with it, she without hesitation steals a horse by leaping in to the saddle from the rear, gallops after the kid, hanging over the side to snatch up Virgil along the way, and when the hat triggers a portal just maintains full speed ahead to keep on the cap. Never been through a portal before, just flies on through off of a horse ’cause it’s the right thing to do.
So no, it doesn’t have anything deep to say socially or politically, but that’s the gender vibe I grew up with, from shows like this and from certain JRPGs (Final Fantasy 7 and Lufia 2 come to mind specifically), and I think it’s at least partially why, when gender profiling really started to kick up in middle school, I was so confused. Being an AMAB person whose first two friends were girls probably also contributed to that, but those folks were more or less forgotten by then. And the genre stuff–it didn’t occur to me until Stephen King wrote in his gripe about genres with distinct, marketable boundaries to the Dark Tower that it wasn’t normal to push boundaries and experiment with tones like that. Making my own art, it’d just felt like that’s all I knew.
Also, the theme song was totally rad:
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