Special Effects Sure Have Come a Long Way

This morning, I was undergoing the painstaking process that is helping Son find coloring pages online when something happened to enliven what is normally simply a chore. It's not that there is a dearth of coloring pages online. It's that there are so very many, and they are all so very cool ("except for the bad guys, I don't like to color bad guys") that it just becomes so very hard to choose which coloring pages are the right coloring pages for this particular morning. I know it doesn't make me Evil, just human, to find this process tiresome, and yet I do feel a little guilt over my impatience.

This morning, though, not quite so much guilt as just thinly-masked impatience because I haven't had my coffee yet. And, more importantly, Daughter is simultaneously downstairs painting. Unsupervised. Which means almost anything could be green by the time I get back from the eons long process that is choosing the exact right Ben 10 alien to color. (Note to self: perhaps throw down a drop cloth and set her up with latex instead of finger paints next time, and let her go to town on the kitchen cupboards.)

Anyway, at some point in the twelve minutes it took us to peruse nearly every possible Ben 10 coloring page online and choose the very best one (who turns out to be a guy who is, Son tells me, "all brown," which means it will take about 37 seconds to color the picture that it took us nearly a quarter of an hour to choose), we came across this guy.

He did not make the cut as color-worthy, in part I suspect because Son didn't know his name and therefore can't be sure whether he's a good guy or a bad guy. My response to him, though, was almost visceral -- a little surge of excitement. "He looks like a Sleestack!" I exclaimed.

"What's a Sleeve-stack?" Son asked.

Instantly, I felt all nostalgic for the alien bad guys of my own youth--reliving my delighted shivers of horror every time the Land of the Lost family encountered these fearsome foes, recollecting one particular episode in which the Sleestacks were sort of like Sleestack-zombies, and came marching out of a cave, bedecked with whispy bits of twine-like spider webs signaling how long they had been asleep and how, therefore, increasingly ominous was their waking.

So I did what any good mother in the digital age would do, and I zipped us over to Google images to find a picture of the terrifying and dangerous villains of my memory.

This is what I found.


Seriously? THESE were the monsters I loved to fear? These are obviously people. Wearing green latex heads apparently molded on old fashioned diving helmets. They look pretty much like a child's drawing of a Martian. Am I wrong, or does the line drawing of the Ben 10 alien above look approximately 100,000 times scarier than these dudes?

Son took one look at them and said, in a voice filled with contempt, "I don't like Sleeve-stacks." He was not rejecting them for being bad guys. He was rejecting them for being bad guys who just look silly.

It makes me realize how high the bar is now. No yo-yo with an old wetsuit, a can of paint, and an 8mm camera can film a pilot for a hit TV show anymore. No sir. It takes Industrial Light and Magic to impress the little ones these days.

In my secret heart of hearts, I kept hoping that Sleestacks really were as scary as I remembered them, and so long after Son had gone off to find his crayons, I perused pictures. But, sadly, no. All the stills look the same. And just like that, a tiny thrill of my youth has been shattered. I don't even have the heart to correct his pronunciation. They might as well be "Sleeve-stacks."

Remind me not to look up stills of Goldar, Silvar, and Gam. I'm sure they were fabulous and powerful robots. And their ability to transform into rockets -- even the kid robot could do it! -- was astonishing.*

Oh, heck, I couldn't resist.


No wonder kids these days are so enamored of Transformers.

(Seriously, watch that video. You will fall over laughing.)

*Actually, even as kids, my sisters and I found the kid robot as annoying as we found his parents amazing. We were fascinated by Space Giants, but we referred to the robots as Goldar, Silvar, and Twerpar because the kid robot was such a whiner.