TV Shows That Fell Through the Cracks: Flint the Time Detective

2009-08-07T16:45:00.015-04:00

Hello. As my first few posts, I've decided to put up the first posts of various post series. Starting out is "TV Shows That Fell Through the Cracks". This is to highlight campy 80's-90's shows that were lost to time, primarily focusing on tween or early teen shows, since I am in that age bracket. Our special for today? Flint the Time Detective!

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Flint the Time Detective was a 38-episode 1998-99 anime that was best described as "so bad it's good". The plot centered on three kids. Two of them are from our future, Sarah and Tony Goodman. The third is a caveboy named Flint. Sarah and Tony are the niece and nephew of a scientist who works with the Bereau of Time & Space to capture time-travelling criminals (Remember, this is the future. A permit is all that's needed to go stepping on prehistoric butterflies).

Flint, being the eponymous hero, is given a backstory involving the villains. Specifically, Petra Fina, servant and fangirl of the Dark Lord, plus two henchmen, Dino and Mite, turned him and his father into a rock to get at a small bird-like creature near them (also turned to stone). Petra then inadvertantly led Sarah and Tony to the rocks in her day job as a history teacher.

Thanks to future technology, Flint and the bird-thing are restored. Flint's dad, however, becomes a talking hammer. It is then revealed that the creature is a Time Shifter, one of several helpers to Father Time, each with an individual power. However, each one was trapped in a different time period. Why they didn't end up in the present through waiting escapes me. Anyhow, this one is Getalong, able to make people love each other and stop fighting.

Petra eventually flies in with a giant cat-transformer called the Catamaran and tries to kidnap Getalong. Needless to say, she's trounced. What follows is a systematic plot. A Time Shifter is found in a time period, possibly helping some historical figure. The heroes come and meet the Shifter. Petra comes in with her magic stamp, stamps the Shifter to control it, and makes it turn into its larger, evil form. The heroes either defeat it themselves or have a previously befriended Shifter come and help. The plot, however, slowly thickens.

As you may have noticed, I mentioned alternate forms for Shifters. As someone who likes complex systems of Mons' transformations, such as in Pokemon and Digimon, this is where the early episodes shine. Each Shifter has four forms. An inanimate egg form, a small, often cute normal form, and two forms for fighting, one for when they're good and one for when they're evil. The evil forms tend to be animalistic whilst the heroic forms look like Super Sentai heroes.

In closing, this is better than it sounds. It starts off being amusingly bizarre, gets weirder and weirder, but eventually puts down roots and becomes interesting. It's one of those shows that's better when you're a toddler, but it shouldn't be overlooked. If you like camp, you can get the first few episodes on DVD off Amazon. If you like it, and want more, I should tell you that the company making the DVDs doesn't plan to make any more. Sorry.

The Dawn of Dave

2009-08-03T17:52:00.004-04:00

Hello. I will bet anything that you have just came here by a link from my genius father's blog, Booksteve's Library. You came expecting something similar to it. Guess what? You've found it.

However, this is the Booksteve's Library of a different topic. Dad deals in the 50's-80's. I, however, am a teen. I deal in the 90's-2000's. This is not for you. However, if you have kids around thier teens and 20's, whom you've passed pop culture onto, this is for them.

As a demonstration of what we'll be talking about here, I will now connect Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Star Wars, going through all sorts of things that will be mentioned on this blog. Ready? Let's go.

One episode of Buffy had a villain who was a shapeshifting assassin whose true form was a hivemind of worms in a human form. The big-bad, or main antagonist, of The Nightmare Before Christmas was kind of like that. He was called Oogie Boogie (alias "The Boogieman") and was a hive of insects, worms, and arachnids inside a burlap sack. The director of TNBC, Henry Selick, also directed Coraline.

The villain of Coraline, The Other Mother, is essentially a fairy-spider that appears "better" than a child's real mother to lure them in and take control of them to keep as her children. The idea of a spider-like shapeshifter gaining your trust to do unspeakable things to you is somewhat similar to the "Spiderwitch" in Ghostbusters: The Video Game. The Ghostbusters game has two different versions sold separately. This is vaguely similar to the setup of the Pokemon games. Some Pokemon characters crossed over with other Nintendo characters in the Super Smash Bros series. Among these characters are Mario and Luigi.

There's a new Super Mario Bros game coming out; Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. I'm really looking forward to it, as it's being exported early in my school year. Another game coming out in the states soon is Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. Fans of Kingdom Hearts have recently found that the weapon the games revolve around, the Keyblade, was originally going to be a chainsaw without blades, essentially a conveyor-belt-on-a-stick. Y'know, with some wheels attached to fixated shapes and rectangles connected with rotating joints, one can make a conveyor belt in the online game Incredibots. One of the most popular games made in Incredibots is a Star Wars simulator.

There. That's what Bookdave's Shelf is.