“Gandahar” // Sammy Terry:
A Pleasant Nightmare »
Animated movies I should have regretted seeing Part 2:
“Heavy Metal”
I remember noisy schoolbus rides on old “No. 15”. I was jammed into the seat with my books, folders, and a saxophone case all bouncing over potholes on the narrow country roads. It was a feast of sensation from the butt-pounding of the rickety suspension to the smell wafting out of a dozen lunch boxes as the younger kids traded Little Debbie cakes.
Living out in the sticks, we were isolated from the brighter world of video arcades, cable television, MTV. We were aware of these things, but rather than bathe in them, we only got to dip a toe in from time to time. But we were basically happy. Still, every now and then a trickle of new information came to remind us of our isolation.
One such bringer-of-things-from-the-outside-world appeared on our bus one morning. I don’t remember his name, but he had long black hair, tinted glasses, and wore a camouflage jacket. He looked like the kind of guy who drank coffee and had a stash of Playboys that his parents didn’t care about.
He had moved to Paoli from Indianapolis, as street smart and hard as they come. You never saw him at school. When he stepped off the bus he disappeared until the afternoon when it was time for the trip home. He usually carried some unusual book or some arcane artifact that he would show off to a few of us, careful not to let anyone outside our little circle see. And he always had in his posession a blue spiral notebook with the letters “REO” erased onto the front. One day he showed me what was hidden there and it was the coolest thing this 8th grader had ever seen – a copy of “Heavy Metal” magazine.
I was struck first by the boobs. (Heh) This was my first taste of comic book cleavage with full-on, heavily undershadowed, twin-dotted chesty goodness. There were also dragons and space ships and monsters and stories about zombies and World War II bomber pilots, and it was glossy and thick and absolutely superb.
Memories of moments like that sometimes grow larger than they might have actually been, so it was inevitable that, many years later, my expectations for the animated Heavy Metal movie were set way too high. Still, it was interesting enough that some bits stick with me even today. Like this one, easily my favorite short of the entire movie.
“B-17” is dark, violent, and very scary. Brr….zombies on a plane.
“Heavy Metal”