It’s 1987. A Saturday morning. A kid sitting on the sofa in an Ecto-Cooler-stained T-shirt is about to take advantage of this commercial break to grab a third bowl of cereal when the cake commercial on TV goes fuzzy. A voice: “Do we have the power on? What year?” demands the unseen speaker, clearly someone who’s accustomed to the rigors of command. “1987, I think. Try it.”
The screen stabilizes, and the cake commercial is supplanted by a guy from some distant future. “Hello, is anybody watching? This is Captain Power. Jonathan Power. Do you read? We have a situation here. The year is 2147. Human life is threatened by Bio-Dreads. They follow Lord Dread. I need your help. I have instructions.”
That’s a weighty burden to lay on the attention span of a 7-year-old. “If you have the power jet XT-7—the XT-7—you can fire invisible beams at enemy targets on these transmissions.” The screen shows a kid shooting laser beams at his TV set from what appears to be a spaceship-gun hybrid. But wait, there’s a warning: “The TV show will fire back. It will fire back. Score, or be hit. Do you understand?” Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future had arrived.
A year later, after only one season of all-out war against Lord Dread’s mechanical empire, the Captain was no more. But this wasn’t the typical Saturday-morning flameout. Captain Power had a talented staff of writers, including story editor J. Michael Straczynski—who would go on to pen 92 episodes of Babylon 5 and, more recently, both the comic and big-screen versions of Thor—and Larry DiTillio, another future Babylon 5 scribe. Then there was the gaming aspect: Thanks to an electronic toy tie-in, Captain Power had an unprecedented level of interactivity for a broadcast TV show. Despite all this and a small but devoted fan base, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future was a Hindenburg moment for both TV and games, and thus after 22 episodes, it was powered down.
At the heart of the train wreck was an irreconcilable identity crisis. The money for the show came from Mattel, but the atmosphere of Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future is grim, more like something that could have come from the marketing wing of Heckler & Koch. The scripts had totalitarian themes and mild sexual innuendo, and even the occasional jarring death: The lone female team member, Pilot, sacrifices herself in the first season’s final episode, which must have been tough to take for a generation of kids still reeling from the demise of Optimus Prime.
Adults who enjoyed the show’s surprising sophistication would have been put off by its clumsy commercial overtones, and some parents found the show too violent for their kids. In what was surely a productive use of his time, Santa Monica resident Jerry Rubin even went so far as to start (and apparently see through) a 43-day fast in 1987 to protest Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future and its perceived celebration of violence. By aiming at the coveted 4-to-70 demographic, the makers of the show attempted to please everyone, and seemed to end up pleasing none.
The writers, too, reportedly chafed against the oppositional creative and profit-driven mandates. While Mattel likely had something like Voltron: Defender Of The Universe in mind, Straczynski and Co. had other ideas, creating a dark world where humans live on the burnt fringes, hiding from a tireless robotic enemy.
The premise: Lord Dread, once a human named Dr. Lyman Taggart, has through his merging with the Overmind supercomputer become a cyborg megalomaniac intent on “digitizing” the Earth. He’s essentially a worst-case hybrid of Mark Zuckerberg and Darth Vader, with a little Jackie Gleason thrown in for good measure. At times, you can almost see him muttering “One of these days, Overmind. One of these days!” At Dread’s command are legions of mechanized monsters called Bio-Dreads, a sadistic talking Predator Drone named Soaron, a tank-treaded behemoth called Blastarr, and bands of fanatically devoted “Bio-Dread Youth.”
Standing in Dread’s way is Captain Jonathan Power, who leads a small, highly trained band of freedom fighters. Power is an incomparable battlefield commander and a master tactician. To prevent confusion among the ranks, Power refers to each of his subordinates by a helpful job-related call sign, like “Tank” or “Scout.” It’s this kind of human creativity and visionary leadership that the robots can’t match.

The Soldiers of the Future are few, but they have help from an unlikely source. The show, among the first to mix live action and CGI, allowed kids at home to strafe Dread’s goons in a supporting role. The Powerjet XT-7, available for $32.99 from your local Kay-Bee Toys—was outfitted with “the latest in proton and ion beam systems” (read: flashing lights) and was purportedly able to maintain speeds of Mach 20 (read: however fast you could run around the house making jet noises). It was in many ways the world’s first cinematic shooter. This hand-held jet blaster light gun could be aimed at the screen during battle scenes on the show to score hits. The toys could also be used with any of the three available VHS “training” tapes.
Like cold fusion, the hoverboard, and a low-calorie Baconator, it was a great idea that didn’t work. The commercial for the show had clearly shown kids stone-cold blasting the TV with unerring pixel beams. The reality was somewhat less rad. The Bio-Dread enemies on screen displayed flashing squares, providing a handy target for your light-gun salvos. It was a glaring tactical deficiency that Lord Dread may have wanted to address in later seasons. (Like the more successful NES Zapper of Duck Hunt fame, the toy actually “worked” by detecting whether the light sensor in the barrel of the gun was pointed at those bright flashes on the screen.)
But the seeming impracticality of Lord Dread’s design didn’t much matter, because the toy was a piece of crap, a waste of $33 that could’ve been better spent going toward a G.I. Joe aircraft carrier. In theory, if you didn’t return fire accurately, your action figure would be jettisoned from the gun-craft through its auto-eject mechanism. Besides being counterintuitive, this format was deeply unsatisfying. Winning was impossible; players could only hope to not lose. No matter how many shots were fired, it would never result in more metal Bio-Dread entrails littering the battlefield, and inevitably your action figure would hit the silk. Far from promoting violence, the impossibility of real victory in these battle scenes inadvertently taught kids the true futility of war, à la WarGames.
The main reason the toy didn’t function properly was the cut-rate “battle sensors” on the toys. These things were unlikely to pick up solar flares, let alone low-level flashes from the TV. One fix, akin to blowing into NES cartridges, was to lower the brightness and crank the contrast on the TV set—anything to make the receptors less ineffective. But even with the adjusted settings, it was tough for players to shake the feeling that they had no real bearing on the outcome of the fight. Because they didn’t. The broadcast marched on whether kids’ Captain Power action figures hit the rug or not.

While the merchandising wing of the project floundered, the narrative aspects were gaining momentum by the end of the first season. In an interview with Starlog published soon after the show’s cancellation, Larry DiTillio, who was to become head writer after the departure of Straczinski, talked about second-season story arcs that were in the works. The noble Captain was to go rogue, nearly losing his mind and moral compass in the wake of Pilot’s death. He was prepared to wage a hopeless one-man vendetta against Dread while the rest of the team soldiered on without him. Under the progressive leadership of Major Matthew “Hawk” Masterson, the remaining Soldiers of the Future might finally get some flashy new nicknames and emerge from the Captain’s well-coiffed shadow.
That’s all speculation, because Dread had won. Mattel pulled the plug after just one season. The show, with its headstrong writers and flawed toys, was finished, and the second-season scripts were mothballed. The Captain Power experiment, a bald scheme to peddle the world’s least fun toys by roping kids into a show meant for adults, was immolated by its own hubris. All that remains are bootleg DVDs and a semi-active Facebook group whose members amuse themselves by speculating on the manner of Power’s eventual resurrection. Most seem to think it will be suitably Christlike, washing away the sins of the show’s past.
But not all prophesies of the show’s return are the idle musings of Internet sci-fi cultists, and there are some faint life signs coming from Captain Power’s putrified corpse. Lead actor Tim Dunigan has long since quit acting to become a mortgage broker, but others could take up the Powersuit. At captainpowerreturns.net, there is a five-minute video featuring brief interviews with some of the show’s creators, in which writer Marc Scott Zicree suggests that the show has the same kind of potential for a successful reboot as Battlestar Galactica before it.
Sure, just cast Nathan Fillion as Captain Power, Dwayne Johnson as his wise-cracking enforcer Tank (originally played by Schwarzenegger film staple Sven-Ole Thorsen), and Edward James Olmos as Lord Dread. The rest will take care of itself.
Salvaging the wreckage of the XT-7 is another matter. The question of whether or not the light gun worked is moot. Even if it functioned as designed, the game would be about as much fun as the 1918 influenza pandemic. It isn’t a stretch to say that Captain Power belongs in the conversation for worst game of all time. Mattel’s best and brightest must’ve been busy tweaking the musculature of He-Man’s pecs, because the dimmest were clearly on the job here.
Words by Drew Toal. Illustrations by Keith Vincent.
I definitely remember asking my mom for one of those jets. What kid could possibly resist having a toy and a video game in one handy, battery-powered device?
Looking at it now, and I definitely did not realize how wise my mom was to not get me one of these things.
I know. It seemed to awesome at the time – I was 10 – and clearly was the opposite of awesome. I’m glad that my folks just ignored this junk and bought me an NES.
I did like the article though.
Your parents are smart. Thanks.
Yeah, this was one of those toy franchises I wanted very much to get, but never had a single action figure. They were so chrome and shiny! But I did have a few Visionaries figures, and they were pretty damn cool. Holograms and mustaches and all that.
I had Supernaturals figures around the same time. Like visionaries, but their heads and torsos were holograms that would change into monsters.
Visionaries were pretty sweet because they were big. The best thing about the Capt Power action figure was that it was built to fit into a “Power Up” playset, basically a chair with a light that made his chest glow. As a result, there was a hole in his back that was precisely the size and shape of a christmas light bulb, meaning that you could use him as an ornament.
Fascinating. I was 9 years old in 1987 and I never heard of this show. I would’ve loved it.
I was born in 1987, so I don’t even remember the first Bush administration. It definitely seems like the sort of thing I’d be all about when I was nine, though.
From what I can tell from the clips here, it seems like it never really had a chance in hell to take off. It’s all well and good to name your show something like “Captain Power” or “He-Man” and expect little boys to gobble it all up, but when you have pretensions of being consumed directly by adults alongside children, it doesn’t work anymore. The adults will be immediately turned off by the ridiculous name and the fact that they have to buy a ridiculously shitty toy to get the “full experience.”
Still, bravo to the writing staff for at least trying to work with what they had and make a show that wasn’t as flawed as its concept. Anything’s worth doing well, if nothing else than for someone else to call your work unappreciated.
Hmm, I wonder if that same idea would still hold up today. I mean, I could see a show like this maybe getting a little traction with college-aged/twentysomething year old people. Certainly there are cults formed around more outwardly immature TV shows (Adventure Time and MLP:FiM, to name two of the more popular ones). The toy component might be a dealbreaker though.
I had vague flashbacks to the toys, but I don’t think I ever knew it was a show– hey, some of us had papers to deliver on saturday mornings!
That was a really neat writeup! Somedays I wish I had been around in the 80s during the whole gimmicky video game boom, not necessarily because I think they are better than anything going around today, but its just fascinating to see what companies were trying to do in order to get a cut of this new “video-game” fad, and to them that always seemed to mean horrible plastic monstrosities. Great read!
I think I was just too young to encounter this on TV, but my next door neighbor had one of the VHSes, and we thought it was so awesome. The tape (naturally) included commercials for the toys, which sounded cool in theory, but even as a 7-year-old they set my bullshit detectors ablaze – how could you “shoot” ships in an unchanging VHS movie?
Still, while I don’t recall the details, I remember liking the story and action. I even picked up a Captain Power computer game on 5.25″ disk for our ancient Epson IBM-Compatible in the dollar basket at Kaybee Toys. It was an unsurprisingly lackluster 3-color CGA affair.
Also: What IS it with this site and cake?! Eating cake in all the videos, opening the story with an anecdotal “cake commercial.” I know Teti’s old bio on Eurogramer listed “cake” right alongside “TV” and “Video Games” as primary interests…Is this part his bold, singular, too-big-for-the-AV-Club editorial vision?
Ha, just a coincidence. I DO like cake, though!
We all do.
I actually don’t like cake very much. At birthday parties I’d always double-up on the ice cream.
I will allow for certain exceptional cakes.
@bakana42:disqus Ice cream cake?
I had the best ice cream of my life last week. Steve’s. Has anyone had this? http://stevesicecream.com/
All my birthday cakes as a kid were ice cream cakes from Dairy Queen, because convention required a cake, and those were the only ones I’d eat. Also: they were awesome.
At some point I learned I love German chocolate cake, which is fantastic and has insane gross-looking frosting. This came in handy as my adult vegan self can’t really do ice cream cakes (and an entire cake made out of vegan ice cream would be crazy expensive), but I can totally bake a vegan German chocolate cake, no prob.
Why relegate this pertinent talk to the comments? I think Gameological Society should do a recurring feature where they choose a commenter (or game luminary) and interview them about their cake history.
To make it vaguely game-related, but also hackneyed, you could involve lying somewhere in there. “2 cake truths and a cake lie.”
They all want cake.
Ugh. CGA was the WORST. And they always picked the worst pallet available, too! I didn’t know this until recently (I found a CGA card and started flashing back to the horrors of cyan, magenta, white, and black. Anyway, there was another option with real red, green, brown, and black, I think.
Anyway, I had CGA megaman game that I should have taken better care of.
I think CGA had two 4-color options: pink, cyan, white, and black, or yellow, green, red, and black. Both were kind of eye-melting.
My computer had VGA graphics, so while I had the same MegaMan game as you, I was able to enjoy it in 256 beautiful colors. Those dimestore games (Captain Power, I had an Alf one, and some others, all kind of shitty) were all cheap-ass CGA-only games.
Edit: AND HERE IT IS:
http://www.captainpower.com/powergame.html
Our first family computer was a used IBM XT with an eye-searing amber monochrome monitor plugged into one of those crappy Hercules graphics cards. It couldn’t even handle grayscale; it ’emulated’ CGA by drawing a different pattern on the screen for each of the 4 colors. The end result was an unintelligible mess of blocky orange pixels on the screen.
@Mr_Glitch:disqus That sounds kind of horribly awesome.
Apparently DOSBox can emulate those graphics if you have a nostalgic, anti-aesthetic itch:
http://members.quicknet.nl/blankendaalr/dbgl/img/tdh_003.png
Yep, that’s about what it looked like. Well, minus the WordPerfect status bar burned into the bottom of the screen and the smell of old cigarettes that wafted out once it got hot.
I never had an actual CGA system– I’m pretty sure I played it on my super powerful 386 with vga and never saw the VGA option. I might have had some bargain version of it. Maybe it was Magaman or something.
And awesome link. God, who ever thought those were good colors to have!? Even if you were using it for business purposes and just wanted to have color for negatives on your spreadsheet, it’s still terrible.
The same crappy company (“Box Office Software”) apparently made an abysmal video game based on the movie Psycho, too:
http://homeoftheunderdogs.net/game.php?id=1443
Great article. I was only 3 at the time, so I have never heard of this show or its disappointing toy tie-in.
They should remake it, using the cutting edge technology of 2003. Have people text their “shots” at the Bio-Dreads, and have the total number of texts (costing $.99 each, standard rates apply) affect the outcome of the show’s narrative week to week. This way you still make your money, and you don’t have to peddle all that crappy plastic.
That’s what I thought when I saw that clip, too: “Holy crap, it’s Locutus!” The similarites are uncanny.
Great writeup of a strangely fascinating story.
I’m not a US national, so this show and the gimmicks it was promoted with seem very alien to me. It’s the kind of thing futuristic enough that it could only have happened in the eighties.
wasn’t there another show of this ilk that involved toy robots somehow interacting with the cartoon?
I’m sure people assumed that all this “the tv controlling the toy” business was just one step away from Satan possessing your kids through the television
also THEN PAY WITH YOUR BLOOD!
Hail Satan!
I can’t imagine that you’re talking about ROB, but they could have made a show that controlled rob and made him do things in a special NES game… that would have been smarter and not have relied on getting kids to buy into an entirely new franchise.
So THAT’s how the toys worked with the show. I had a friend who was huge into this show, had all the toys and always talked about it to make me jealous. But my mom wouldn’t pay for the crap (a sincere thank you from the future, 1987 Mom), and I could never make it to my friend’s house when the show was on, so I could only nod along and pretend to already know how YOU COULD ACTUALLY SHOOT AT THE SHOW AND FIGHT ROBOTS!
Now I know why my friend would never let me try out his “training videos” with the toys–he was a fucking liar. The tv show didn’t do shit when you shot at it.
I had a Captain Power comic book. Only had the first issue and I’ve been looking for other ones ever since. It was great.
I had that comic, too. It was published by Neal Adam’s Continuity Comics, which was also quite a mess, but I still have a soft spot for. I’ve never seen the second issue, but apparently it’s the only other one they published.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_Comics
Ugh, these things.
My two step-brothers and I each got one of the jets for Christmas in 1988. We never saw the TV show, it sounds like it was already off the air by this time. The VHS tape fight was CRAP. John got it right when he said it was just about “how long you can go before you lose”. The ships hardly ever detected hits ON your enemies, but any blast that came from the TV pretty much instantly “killed” us. The only way to avoid it was to either move the jet away from the TV or cover the sensor with our hands.
Against each other it was slightly more fun, trying to eject each other first….but Laser Tag and/or Photon was more fun.
I always figured the TJ Lazer show in Robocop was a callback to this.
I’D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR
On the subject of fleetingly functional, VHS-based gaming: Did anyone else out there have a View-Master Interactive Vision?
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/View-Master_Interactive_Vision
Direct a movie starring The Muppets! Provided you synced the system and your VCR properly…
Whoa. I’m a fan of any toy that includes “A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT” on the back of the box. Complete with ultra-serious portrait!
There was also the “Action Max” which (according the summary on Wikipedia) more or less worked like this show: you watched a video and shot at some stuff, earning points. You obviously couldn’t influence the outcome in any way though.
If this show gets a reboot with “interactive” segments, this approach could work though – at the end of a segment, the toy would tell the viewer how many points he reached and how many he could have reached. That way, the “you can only hope to not lose” would at least be avoided.
Awesome article, guys! Just wanted to send you the correct link to Tim Dunigan’s profile, which is pretty great:
http://www.frfgp.com/directory.i?cmd=view&acctnum=2754690739
Thanks, Michael! I’ve corrected the link.
Jessica Sheen went on to play the original Dr Elizabeth Weir in SG1. Pity she didn’t continue the role into Stargate:Atlantis.
Glad she made it out of the Power Base in one piece.
Is that a Borg in the 3rd clip? WTF?
I thought that too! And i think this would predate Borg.
This show can and should come back, but not as a toy commercial. Imagine a weekly, downloadable interactive series with branching paths. The ending of any given episode is dependent on your performance, and from that ending you get one of two (or three) new episodes the following week. Good writing can tighten it down to only a few variations from week to week instead of an endlessly branching series. Oh, and of course this wouldn’t be performed by real actors, given how much is expected of them.
Give it a thought, then think about how well this would work on PS3, 360, or Wii(-U).
In this day and age, though, if you wanted to craft an interactive narrative experience, it seems like it would make more sense just to make a game. I guess what you’re describing already is kind of a game, but its one of those crummy 90s CD-ROM FMV games…
Yes, I am literally describing a game, but not like those old games. There would be a lot more on the back-end.
But, in short, don’t crush my dreams!
Gospel, it was called Heavy Rain…and if anything will crush your dreams, that was it.
Now that is an interesting bit of gaming/tv history right there. I’m surprised such an idea even made it off the ground.
The cyborg-thing looks just like the one from Red Dwarf
Gazpacho?
Also, I dig the accompanying illustrations. I’ll love you guys forever if you keep incorporating original artwork into stories. I’ll love you and all the exasperated-looking white guys and Asian business women on laptops on iStock will love you.
We definitely plan to make illustrations a part of feature articles like this one. I love seeing what happens when a writer and a visual artist come together, working from the same material.
Keith made my piece roughly 10,000 times better. Thanks, Keith.
Why relegate this pertinent talk to the comments? I think Gameological
Society should do a recurring feature where they choose a commenter (or
game luminary) and interview them about their cake history.
http://goo.gl/G2vxa
I’m Captain Power, and this is my favorite article on the Gameological Society.
I remember playing with the XT-7 at a friend’s house, and even though I never saw it in action, the thing exuded cheapness and an urge to spit out its pilot at the slightest provocation.
I was 11 when it came out and had the Captain Power ship as well as the “Power On” chair. I used to tape the show every week so that I could replay the episodes. I would set everything up, the Captain in his chair and the jet by his side. When he powered on in the show, the chair would activate and then I’d move him to the jet and proceed to shoot at whatever bad guys were on the screen. The “game” parts of the actual show were usually pretty lame and the acting was horrendous. I do remember thinking the story was pretty sweet, but I was a dystopian fan from an early age (like Max Headroom or almost every Doctor Who story.)
The only fun thing to play was the credits which was designed like Luke flying through the trenches in the Death Star, that ended up being pretty cool and had some replay value (meaning that you sometimes you’d get ejected from your seat if you were “hit” and if you made it to the end of it, it sounded a little victory song!)
Overall, the process of playing it was pretty lame, but it was such an awesome idea that it kind of overshadowed it for me. It felt like I was playing a game in the future, it felt cutting edge, and that was part of the fun.
Aww c’mon, the Captain Power toys weren’t that bad. If you got sick of the show, you could also just shoot your buddy, Lazer Tag-style. Those toys were a good way to test for epilepsy, too.
Christ. The concept blew me away as a child. I was peripherally aware of the show’s concept, but it was the toy itself I dreamed about and stared over in those huge JC Penny’s Christmas catalogs in days of yore.
Great write-up, Drew. I think it’s a little fish in a barrel to knock a Saturday show for it’s simplicity, but I’m actually a bit intrigued now.
It actually reminds me of some horror VHS/board game my cousins and I freaked out about in past years. Tombstone was it? Nostalgia is one warm fucking blanket…
Hey thanks. Next I plan on taking down Muppet Babies. I remember Tombstone! Maybe it’s still in my parents’ attic…
Was it Nightmare?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Z1Kfk-2sc
Apparently they released a bunch of sequels/updates to it, too. Weird.
Yeah, the real highlight of this toyline was that A: the jets could shoot at each other, and B: they were the same size as GIJoes, so while my brother had Captain Power and his jet, I had Cobra Commander flying around in Lord Dread’s Doom Chair Thing.
(and you could cheat by putting your hand over the sensor. GODMODE, BITCH.)
I think it was my fourth or fifth birthday when one of my dad’s friends got me the jet, three videos, and some kind of reflective practice target thing (coincidentally, that man is now a US Congressman). I had no idea what to expect, having never heard of the thing before, but my first attempt went rather poorly and that jet was absolutely terrifying when you didn’t shoot well. Somewhere there is a video of the cockpit popping off as the jet made all these awful noises, me crying about it, and my father and the congressman laughing their asses off at me. I wonder if his opponents in the next election could do anything with that?
one of the finest tv shows according tome..srilaxmicargo.in