DIGITAL HOVERBOY FRIDAY

Here we go again, fellow Float Fans!  It’s that day of the week, and time for the greatest bucket wearing hero of the twentieth century (and 2nd greatest bucket wearing hero of all time!) HOVERBOY!   This week:  Hoverboy goes DIGITAL!

We start with the Hoverboy: FLOATING FIGHTER video game of 1982, manufactured in the EXCITE-O-VISION format from Softie Games.  This unique format promised to be the first home-system 3-d graphics on the market, with an effect that was described by the designers as “graphics floating in front of your very eyes”.  Naturally with a slogan like that, they set their sites on the leading floating character in the super-hero market to launch their fledgling game company.

When Superman turned down Softie Games, they tried to get the license for Captain Marvel, and then Hawkman, followed by Dr. Fate, Ghost Woman, Sky-Man: The Helium Filled Detective, Thor, Casper the Friendly Ghost, The Blimp (from the Inferior Five), The Specter, Dr. Strange, Dr. Druid, Flight Boy, and a character I’ve never heard of elsewhere called “FLOATY: Clown Chimp of the Stratosphere”.

Eventually Softie settled on Hoverboy, and the rest is long forgotten history.

The first impediment to success was the design of the basic game.  Though the three-dimensional graphics of the EXCITE-O-VISION format were quite spectacular, the simple geometric figures and low-pixel backgrounds made the game seem dreadfully old fashioned for the sophisticated gamers of the eighties.   To top it all off, HOVERBOY: FLOATING FIGHTER was originally test marketed only in  the poorer counties of Louisiana and Georgia, a population made up mostly of low income African-American families, who had little or no awareness of Hoverboy, or indeed computer games for the home at that time.

The test-market scores for the game were exceedingly low, and the two phrases most often spontaneously given in written reviews were “Can I get my money now?” and “What the hell?  Who would do this for FUN?”

HOVERBOY: FLOATING FIGHTER was never released, and the money spent in developing it was lost.  Softie Games president, Lionel Jackson, was devastated by the adventure and swore off the game industry forever to his family and friends, mere moments before he was hit by a bus.

Another tragic loss, blamed on the HOVERBOY curse, by those too uneducated to know better.  Blamed on a drunken bus driver named Clement McManus, by the coroner for the city of San Fransisco, where the accident happened.

Next up:

Above is one of the more public tributes given to Hoverboy in recent years.  For fans of the movie “THE INCREDIBLES” there’s a moment near the beginning of the film, when Mr. Incredible heads up to his attic retreat, to wax nostalgic for his heroic past.   Eagle eyed Hoverboy fans like myself instantly noticed the clear nod to the Battlin’ Bucket on the top shelf to the right of the door.  Is that a HOVERBOY helmet up there?  It looks like the late sixties version, though it’s hard to say, considering how often the design changed from show to show, or even comic to comic.  At any rate, Incredibles Director, Brad Bird, is a well known Hoverboy fan, and has mentioned him in many interviews, so the familiar helmet isn’t all that unexpected.  Hoverboy references abound in Bird’s work, including The Simpsons, Iron Giant and Ratatouille (look for ‘em yourself, once you know they’re there, they’re easy to spot!)

As always, head on over to the nearly abandoned HOVERBOY MUSEUM for more about the history and future of this amazing and popular character from the world of Superheroes.

Coming up:  More Marvel March Madness as soon as I scan the Spidey Stuff.

Ty the Guy

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Hoverboy-Friday on SUNDAY! CURSES!!

Once more, knee-deep into the land of Hoverboy we go, fellow inter-tube travelers, and this time, we’re exploring the wonderful world of the infamous “HOVERBOY CURSE”.

Most fans of The Battling Bucket know that co-creator Bob Stark ran down both his dog and his gardener the day after he created Hoverboy, in an accident the police dismissed as “hi-jinx” in their official report.  But the death of his beloved dog Skippy, and his casual acquaintance, Carlos the groundskeeper, would haunt Stark for the rest of his life.   Often, Stark would wander to the end of his driveway on Stonebrook Terrace and stare intently at the trees found there, where he would then start to whistle violently, calling for either the dog to come “do his business” or the gardener to “Trim these damn shrubs!”.   These episodes increased as the creator got older.

Some consider this tragic car accident the official start of the curse.  Others cite the meteor strike that killed Stark’s parents the week later.  Certainly the meteor strike was more memorable, singling Stark’s family out so specifically from the  crowd like that at the baseball game.  Either way, from that month  forward, and until his death at the hands of overzealous mall security officers in 1982,  Bob Stark’s life and the life of his creation, Hoverboy, were surrounded by mysterious and bizarre tragedies with a frightening regularity.

As this is the fiftieth anniversary of “The Day the India Ink Died”, when most of the staff of Vigilance Comics was killed by a dose of weapons grade botulism toxin that was accidentally spilled into the machine that wrote out the company cheques, I thought I’d focus on the curse and the cartoonists.   (Steve Ditko, the only survivor of the famous Vigilance disaster, had refused to cash his cheque for Hoverboy #37 that month, as he claimed later it was “against the higher laws” to do touch money throughout all of February.  Famously, when Ditko co-created Spider-Man with Stan Lee two years later, he would insist on being paid entirely in trousers and butter.)

The twenty eight cartoonists who died on February 13th, 1960 were not the only Vigilance artists to die mysteriously.  In fact, the regularity with which these poor ink stained souls would pass away was so frequent, that amongst working illustrators, a Hoverboy job was known as “taking the last gig”.   So great was the fear of the curse, that creators such as Kirby, Adams, Steranko and Toth stayed away from Hoverboy throughout their lives.  Lucky for us they did avoid the curse, and got to spend long years working at their craft.  Well, except for Steranko, the lazy bum.

At any rate, let us now pay tribute to some of the other unlucky craftsmen who “took the last gig”.  This is but a partial sampling of the many Hoverboy artists and writers who died of suspicious circumstances.  The loss to the golden and silver age of comics cannot be calculated, but some experts estimate it at around eight thousand dollars in unpublished art.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolled for these guys…but good.

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Ty the Guy