https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x231w1w
Hey guys! Remember Home Improvement? 1992! That was a good year! I’m so *nostalgic* for it.
Home Improvement was a popular culture phenomena during its early years. Jonathan Taylor Thomas (or “JTT” as he was called in Tiger Beat) became huge. But then his ego got too big and he quit the show to move on to “better things”. I think racing dirt bikes or something. He must regret that now. How many millions of dollars did he throw away?
Anyway, Home Improvement never really took off in syndication. I think it was on for a little while after the show ended but then it stopped. At least, that’s my experience. Maybe in other syndication markets it was different.
Some shows have a timeless quality and can live on in reruns but not Home Improvement. The show ended in 1999 and it looked old and dated by 2000. Also, the show just wasn’t very good. I’ve probably seen every episode and haven’t laughed a single time. That’s how loads of shows are. They’re just not funny. But there must be somebody out there laughing at this shit.
This is one of the few episodes that I remember. It’s from season 1.
Wow. I don’t remember this intro at all. The kids look so young. I guess that the syndication episodes just all just used like season 3’s intro or something.
4:00 – After some boyish mischief with the patriarch of the Taylor clan, the mother comes in and says, “Okay, it’s family night. What do you want to do?” to which Randy says, “We want to play video games!”
Do they even have a system? I’ve never seen them play video games on the show.
Anyway, the mother suggests charades, which wasn’t popular with the kids. So Tim suggests bowling, which was also unpopular but then he says that there’s a “video arcade” which brings the kids around.
By the way, the mother was fucking dreadful. I don’t know what it is exactly. The actress is really snooty and it comes across in her performance.
8:00 – Randy and Brad are in the “video arcade”. They’re just made up games. One of them is called Alien Attack. And I think that the cabinets themselves are just created from scratch. They seem to be weird shapes. One of them is really elongated, for example. There’s a weird cocktail as well.
The only real game is Zaxxon. Is that how it really looked? Oh, it is. The side art and everything is right. So maybe these aren’t fake. I mean, the names are but maybe the cabinets are from real games and they just changed the marquees.
Anyway, the focus of this episode will be Zaxxon. And I remember watching this episode, probably in 1992, and thinking, “Zaxxon? What? Why would they care about this old game?” It completely took me out of the show.
Zaxxon was ten years old by the time this episode aired. I had the Atari 2600 port and I even had the board game. But in 1992, I wasn’t playing this stuff. I had a TurboGrafx 16 by then.
And in the arcades, you had Street Fighter 2 and WrestleFest and X-Men and shit like this. Why would Randy and Brad eschew these titles in favour of some primitive isometric game which wasn’t even any good? Has there ever been a good isometric game?
I think that the writers just chose a game that they enjoyed in their youth. And it was undoubtedly cheaper to license Zaxxon instead of Street Fighter 2 or something.
So Randy is apparently some kind of Zaxxon pro and his mission is to have his name on the high score list. He claims that his high score is 1.5 million. Let me look up the world record.
http://highscore.com/scores/Arcade/Zaxxon/13077
That guy got 140,900.
https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/179300-Arcade-Zaxxon-Points-127-500-John-McAllister
That guy got 127,500.
So Randy must be really awesome to be ten times better than the world leaders.
Or he’s full of shit. The game doesn’t even support that many numbers. The high score list is like:
045600
000890
007400
There’s no room for a seventh digit. It would presumably roll over or just stick at 999999. So fuck Randy and his girly 1990s haircut. Lying bitch.
But immediately upon starting his world record attempt, a bully comes over and declares, “That’s my machine”. Words are exchanged, and this bully takes over the game. The Taylor lads run away.
13:00 – After some bowling hijinks, we’re back to Zaxxon. They show actual footage of the game so I assume that they got permission for this. It just seems odd to me.
Randy is back on the machine and Brad says, “You’re going to beat the record”.
The bully, who was playing this weird cocktail machine, overhears this. It seems that this bully has the high score and doesn’t want Randy beating it. So the bully gets up and unplugs the machine.
Wouldn’t that reset the scores? Something to do with RAM or ROM or something. The old machines couldn’t hold high scores once the power was shut off.
13:30 – We get a picture of Lady Bug. That’s a real game, isn’t it? Yeah. 1981. But I think the marquee is fake. I’m not finding a picture like that on Google.
There’s also Gorf.(1981) and Arkanoid (1986). Those appear to have the genuine marquees on them. Why would only Lady Bug be fake? Maybe it’s just a variant that I’m not seeing. But it looks fake.
Anyway, Brad tackles the bully and we cut to commercials.
When we return, the bully has Brad in a choke hold and demands that Randy declares him “the king of Zaxxon”.
Randy complies but then the bully wants Randy to declare him “the best looking guy in the bowling alley”. This just took a weird turn. Next he’s going to make Randy kiss him.
14:45 – The bully lets him go and then Brad says, “How could you say that he’s the king of Zaxxon? You’re ten times better than him.”
This is mathematically accurate, assuming that the bully is at a world record level and Randy genuinely can score 1.5 million points.
18:45 – The boys hatch a plan and handcuff the bully to the Zaxxon machine. Then they spray him with Silly String.
Then a lesson is learned and the credits roll.
That Zaxxon just never sat right with me, though. The general population didn’t care much about video games in 1992. You figure the writers were probably in their mid to late 20s. So they were born in about 1965, on average. When the Atari 2600 came out, they were 12 years old. And of course not everybody got one, especially not the first year it was released. In a couple of years, they’d be 14 and maybe interested in sports or girls or whatever. And video games were for nerdy kids. So it’s quite possible that these writers never played a video game in their lives.