strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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May 5 03: kaiju
I mentioned it briefly, but let me reiterate: the Kaiju Big Battel show was some seriously weird stuff. And I’m not just saying that because I went there on the same day we came home from England and thus was seriously jet-lagged.
It delivered exactly what it promised: a bizarre amalgamation of the WWE and Ultraman. People in big rubber suits duked it out in a steel cage filled with little cardboard skyscrapers. The bad guys cheated outrageously and always got away with it: this was a night where evil ended up triumphant. (Poor Silver Potato! He got the snot kicked out of him by, like, seven different monsters at once in the final belt match.) The announcer screamed himself hoarse over the course of the evening—he had to provide a complete running commentary by himself, because none of the combatants could talk from inside their rubber heads. The cage had been constructed in the middle of Roseland’s dance floor: the combatants entered via the stage and walked down a gangplank to take their turns. Video monitors provided periodic interludes of “news,” generally pertaining to a sudden and mysterious crime spree by the beloved freedom-fighting duo Los Plantanos. (Yes, they were bananas. It turned out that the Plantanoses had been captured and replaced by their evil twins. There was a gigantic tag-team grudge match when the plot was revealed. The evil twins, for reasons unclear, had ‘CIA’ stencilled across their yellow skins.) The violence was simulated in the time-honored pro-wrestling tradition: lots of foot-stomping and judo throws. A couple of dive-from-the-top-of-the-cage moments, though, which are always impressive.
The Trachtenbergs were, um, fascinating. Dad Trachtenberg seemed pretty manic, but I guess that’s the way it has to be if you’re being upstaged by your nine-year-old daughter. Sadly, they were crammed off into one corner of the stage for their set, and their slideshow was not duplicated on the big video monitors. So most people kind of missed out on the totality of the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players experience.