Nerding Day: Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad (Patreon)

Everyone wanted in on that sweet Power Rangers heat in the ’90s. And  while Saban Entertainment cranked out their share of shows based on  Japanese tokusatsu to capitalize on the craze for spandex-clad warriors  battling bug-eyed monsters like VR Troopers, Masked Rider, and the horrifying Big Bad Beetleborgs, they weren’t the only ones with their eyes on the prize.

In 1994, DIC Productions, who put out at least half of the American  cartoons produced in the ’80s and ’90s, partnered with Tsuburaya  Productions to create Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad. If you’re  unfamiliar, I bet you’re picturing a Power Rangers-like team of  samurai-themed guys. If so, you are wrong. This is a show about four  kids in a band called Team Samurai who occasionally go inside their  Compaq brand computers to kill monsters devised by a socially awkward  outcast classmate and brought to life by Tim Curry.

Sam(urai) Collins and his bandmates Tanker, Syd, and Amp are drawn  into battle against the evil Kilokahn, a military AI gone rogue, when a  power surge turns Sam into a video game character of his own creation.  Sam is played by Matthew Lawrence, who was also Shawn’s brother on Boy Meets World and one of the kids in Mrs. Doubtfire (the one who sees his dad pissing in drag).

Sam’s friends Tanker and Syd were portrayed by Kevin Castro and Robin Mary Florence, respectively, who are best known for… Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad. Amp was played by Troy Slaten, who was in Parker Lewis Can’t Lose and is now a lawyer interested in “ending the scourge of mass  incarceration, ending the jail turnstile and ending the school-to-prison  pipeline.” Hey, that’s actually pretty cool! Chalk one up for child  actors.

But, of course, the real draw of the cast is Tim “Hexxus in  FernGully” Curry as Kilokahn. He looks like a cyber-Shredder, he calls  human beings “meat-things,” and he craaaaaves power. (Hi daddy.)

Kilokahn makes a deal with Malcolm Frink: Malcolm designs  “mega-viruses,” and Kilokahn brings them to life to mess up Sam’s  chances with their shared love interest, Jennifer. Of course, Kilokahn  also wants to subjugate all of humanity, so Malcolm maybe isn’t thinking  this all through, but who can judge what the young do for love? I once  allowed a girl I had a crush on to pierce my ears with a sewing needle,  and at least Malcolm isn’t getting staph from teaming up with a  genocidal computer program.

How does Malcolm fuck with Sam? In the first episode, he creates a  virus to stop Sam from calling Jennifer and asking her out. But uh oh!  Kilokhan shuts down the entire world’s telephone lines. Sam is sucked  into his computer after a power surge and becomes Servo, an  Ultraman-looking hero who kicks the virus’s ass, and telephonic  communication is saved.

Sam decides to keep all this a secret from everyone except his  bandmates — not because he’s worried about the potential dangers or the  government tracking him down to weaponize his ability to physically  enter computers and do karate stunts, but because he’s embarrassed about  it and doesn’t want people to think he’s a computer geek.

Sam sucks. He is, by his own admission, only interested in playing  rock music to attract women. He tricks Jennifer into giving him her  phone number. And he’s completely uninteresting, a vacant-eyed  indictment of the emptiness of American youth culture in the ’90s.

Contrast him with Malcolm — a creative, driven young man who is  computer-savvy, a talented artist, and has a cool put-on British accent.  Malcolm is the kind of kid who probably got the shit kicked out of him  throughout high school for being overly theatrical and wearing black all  the time, then landed a great job working for a game developer and  realized that he was never all that into Jennifer anyway.

Maybe his rivalry with Sam and his willingness to partner with the  computer devil stemmed from his sublimated desires for his all-American  classmate whose easy charm and circle of friends represented everything  that Malcolm wanted but felt was denied to him because of how different  he felt from his peers.

And maybe one day he’d meet someone, a programmer with a shy smile  named Jake who could give him what neither Jennifer, nor Sam, nor even  Kilokahn could — love and understanding. They would be happy, Malcolm  and his husband. There would always be nights when he would wake up in a  sweat, feeling sick to his stomach at the horrors he had wrought in his  youth: the time he set up an impenetrable wall around half the world to  stop Sam from getting to a gig; the time he forced Syd to go on a crime  spree by putting a virus in her wristwatch; the time he tried to roast  everyone in the school alive by raising the thermostat and locking the  doors; the time he nearly made Sam go insane from isolation by trapping  him in his video camera; the time he turned the city’s entire water  supply into hydrochloric acid. That’s not who you are anymore, Jake  would remind him. You’re the man I fell in love with.

And on occasion he might think of Sam, wonder where he was since  they’d last seen each other at graduation, made eye contact across the  stage and silently nodded, the last gesture of recognition on the part  of two worthy rivals parting ways.

Meanwhile, Sam is still living in his mother’s basement and swearing  that he’s going to “make it” any day now. Jennifer is a dream from long  ago, and when Tanker and Syd come back to town to see their families,  they smile weakly when he talks about the open mics he’s playing and how  close he thinks he is to getting a record deal. Nobody has the heart to  tell him to give up, that it’s not going to happen.

Sorry, I think I just started writing the world’s only Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad fanfiction. But I digress. Aside from the humans, the monsters, and  Kilokahn, there’s another character in SSSS: Compaq Computers.

Whenever a character is shown looking at something on a computer  screen — which happens a lot — the Compaq logo is prominently visible on  the monitor. This seems like a really odd choice for product placement  in a show aimed at kids. Was the idea that children would think that  Compaq computers had the capabilities to transform them into digital  superheroes so they’d beg their parents to buy one rather than a Dell or  Gateway?

Or was the idea just to establish brand recognition so that when the  target audience was grown up and shopping for a home computer, they’d  have some flash of recognition, some positive association with Compaq  machines they couldn’t explain? Am I overthinking this and the Compaq  executives just went to the same strip clubs as the DIC guys and they  made a seemingly senseless, coke-addled deal one night? Yes.

Unlike a lot of similar shows, SSSS is actually pretty close to the Japanese series it draws its action footage from. Gridman the Hyper Agent is also about a bunch of teens who fight virtual monsters with the help  of a cyber superhero. In that show, the viruses are also created by a  misfit fellow student and brought to life by evil program Khan Digifer.  Of course, in the original version Khan Digifer wasn’t played by Tim  Curry. Can you imagine? What do the Japanese think of Tim Curry, anyway?  Do they think of him as the Copy Machine Wizard because of that time he  was in a Xerox commercial?

Unfortunately, Gridman ended with the protagonist dying in its 39th and final episode. That meant that SSSS had to get creative with their material around the same episode mark.  After a dramatic finale in which Malcolm turns face and helps save  Christmas from Kilokahn (real, that really happened), we got a number of  episodes featuring all of the hits of the desperate screenwriter trying  to make things work. There’s a mirror universe episode where Malcolm is  nice and Jennifer is a nerd! There’s an amnesia episode where everyone  forgets who they are! There’s a clip show where it’s revealed that one  of the core cast members is an alien who has returned to his home  planet!

And of course, there were toys. I only ever remember seeing them at  the hardware store and they were marketed with the phrase “SAMURIZED FOR  YOUR PROTECTION.”

What the fuck does that mean? I would have asked my dad when he was  done shopping for screws or whatever, but one time my family went to  stay in this cabin out in Atlantic Canada and my sister and I found a  wrapper over the toilet that said “sanitized for your protection” and we  thought it was the funniest thing in the world, like the toilet had  been sealed off to protect us from the horrors within. Anyway he got  pretty annoyed at how hyper we got about it and snapped at us, so I  wasn’t going to risk bringing up that memory again.

What was I talking about? Oh, right. A show where the kid from Mrs.  Doubtfire (not Mara Wilson or the other girl) fights the digital mind  creations of a friendless and possibly closeted goth brought to life by  Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

I watched a number of episodes of the show to jog my memory for this  piece, but I also referred to the Wikipedia article, which is…  extensive. Once again, I’ve stumbled onto a subject obsessively  remembered by like six people and forgotten entirely by the rest of the  planet. To put things in perspective, the Wikipedia article for beloved  and accomplished actor and musician Tim Curry is about 4,600 words. The  article on legendary German character Faust, which is linked in the plot  section of the SSSS article to describe Malcolm Frink’s deal with Kilokahn, is 5,200 words. The article on SSSS is larger than both of those put together, clocking in at over 12,000 words long.

It’s a trite observation at this point that Wikipedia articles on  subjects of relative inconsequence — such as ’90s television shows about  teenage cyberwarriors fighting mutant diamond dinosaurs inside Compaq  computers for the fate of the earth — receive far more attention than  those which most people would agree are more critical to the collective  store of human knowledge. I don’t care, I’m going to say it anyway.  Hideo Kojima was right in Metal Gear Solid 2. The internet was a mistake.

Ironically, that seems to also be the prophetic message of Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, a message we failed to heed. And that might be the most interesting thing about Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad — it accurately predicted how fucking terrible the internet and a world  of connected technology would be. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some  fanfiction to post to Archive of Our Own.

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