Random Sniper Time

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of movies. I still do, if not quite so excitedly. We used to have an old tape of Wind in the Willows that gone played so often it actually wore out. By that point I was grunting along with Badger every time he was on screen. Even then I latched onto characters I identified with wherever I found them. Badger was old, tired and grumpy, and he never really hung around the other characters much, but when something went wrong, when something happened that people couldn’t explain, when people really needed help... enter Badger, stage left.

My mother was the one who sat and watched most of these with my brother and I. Which was fine. I was just happy to be getting lost in another story. It’s not that my father didn’t care; quite the opposite. He was just incredibly busy with work at the time. Selling wine, I think. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the contrast it created. Mum watched a lot with us – a mini tv series about Merlin that she taped one late night that had the scene with a dragon attack missing because she accidentally pushed the wrong button, a dinky BBC version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe with wonky puppets and bad prosthetics, the only two episodes of Tintin that the Blockbuster down the road had on the shelves which we must have rented almost weekly – the list goes on.

There was one thing that wasn’t Mum’s, though. Science Fiction (or SyFy, if you were unfortunately lacking in certain specific mental developments in your early years) was special. That was Dad’s job, and boy did he love it. The big one was Doctor Who. Come Sunday morning, the couch was cleared, the tv was claimed in the name of Boy Time, and for the next few hours it was just us and The Doctor off on another amazing adventure.

Watching some of the old Tom Baker episodes now, seeing him threaten to kill people with a Deadly Jelly Baby, well. It’s somewhat less grandiose than it seemed in my dim memories of aliens made out of green bubble wrap and chicken wire, but if I tilt my head just a little, then it sparks to life again. It’s daggy, don’t get me wrong, but it was never supposed to be cool. It isn’t about making better looking monsters than that other show, or having a really long laser gun battle. It’s about The Doctor going off and getting into trouble, meeting people along the way, and trying to help them however he can. That was the bottom line. Saving the day. Showing up in the tardis at the last second and stopping the bad guys.

There were others aside from The Doctor. Star Trek TNG was an exception to bed time, and I struggled to stay awake every time it was on, especially if it was a Data heavy episode. Then there was Star Wars, of course. Han Solo is still one of Dad’s favourites. I try to watch them every year or two now, and they still make me smile. There’s a little timeless bubble that opens up when those movies start, and even something as tiny as the noise the laser blasters made can open up a thousand memories of the times when sci fi was a lot simpler; all you needed was a hero. Somebody who could fix everything and make it better, no matter how bad it looked, every time, no matter what.

All you needed was a Badger.

Movies about space adventures weren’t the only trick up old dad’s sleeve, though. Back then, spare change had a very different meaning to me than it does now. There was an impossibly big jar that he’d drop his coins into after he got home with a big smile, because we both knew what the change jar meant. That was the savings he’d tuck away each and every year for something that can’t possibly be as great as I remember it. The Royal Melbourne Show.

If you go there now, then it’s pathetic. I can tell you that first hand. The last time I went it was barely shambling along, not even a quarter as lively as it used to be. Frankly, I wouldn’t even bother these days. If you look it up somewhere in a booklet though, it’ll tell you that it’s an agricultural show celebrating livestock or farmyard animals or something equally as underwhelming. Which in’t incorrect, really. Amongst my favourite memories of that place was dragging my brother along to see the turkeys lined up in their enclosures, because they absolutely terrified him, and what self respecting little brother doesn’t get a good laugh out of that?

There were woodchop events, too, where big burly men would pulverise a log of wood in less than a second for anybody who cared to watch. There may have been horse races at some point during the proceedings, but I couldn’t say. I seem to remember us always getting too tired before we got there. In any case, it would indeed be true, in a certain light, to say that all those animal and rural farmish bits were part of the proceedings – there were even a few sciency, educational bits here and there if memory serves – but they damn sure weren’t the main spectacle of the even.

No, back then, if there was one thing I lived for, it was showbags. All year every year, I was looking forward ot the showbags. That was were the spare change tin came into the equation. My brother and I were both allowed to pick a couple. I can’t remember if it was that we could only pick X dollars worth, or Y bags in total, but rarely did my eyes go as wide as they did when we hit the showbag pavillion.

Those bags were filled with anything your boyhood wonder could imagine. Giant inflatable hammers, horribly sticky fluro bars of what may as well have been molten sugar, whoopie cushions, sheets and sheets of stickers, expired bubble gum, kazoos, bags of rainbow popcorn, water pistols; the things dreams used to be made of.

Of course, under all that, there were comic books. Not good ones. Not by a long shot. You’d be hard pressed to find anything even resembling Batman or Wolverine there, good god no. The best you could ever get your hands on was something like The Phantom, and when the coolest guy in question is a man in purple spandex with no super powers who dies maybe twelve times throughout the series, what do you suppose the rest of the lineup looks like?

You know what bad comic books were like back then. Presumably still today. Some of them weren’t even in English, some were missing pages, most of them you’d never heard about before and would never see again, and not a single one of them made any sense at all.

Even so, I couldn’t have cared less about any of that at the time. In one of the showbags somewhere along the line, I’d gotten my grubby little hands on some trashy sci fi comic. For the first time ever, I’d found something science fiction on my own, and I was blurting out a million words a second when I was telling Dad about those exciting adventures. Suddenly the situation was reversed, and instead of him showing me all these shows and movies about space heroes, it was me doing that to him.

After that, every year I looked for the showbag with that comic in it so I could try to start collecting them, but, well, it’s hardly a structured sort of deal. Some years I found some, and some years I didn’t, but I was still amassing quite a pile. Of course they were all out of order and almost none of them were sequentially connected, but what mattered was that a fire awoke in me that’s still burning to this day.

Alas, I’m sure you know what happens to old comics, especially when you’re a kid. They get rammed in your school bag under your lunchbox until they’re nice and scrunched up, or dropped in a puddle, or lost somewhere in your room underneath something else. They just sort of faded over the ineffable edge of memory somewhere along the years, until I’d entirely dropped them out of my mind somehow.

I still had a love for science fiction, and I was working my way through whatever I could find, but, then other things got in the way. High school was harder than it should have been, then there was work, then university, then more work, and all the other little problems that life has close at hand.

Unfortunately for me, science fiction was changing from what I’d grown to love as a kid. Now there were movies like Battlefield Earth, Cypher, Aeon Flux, and the abysmal Star Wars prequels. The few times where I did go out on a limb and try to get back into some of them all they did was disappoint me.

Until one day when I walked out of another movie feeling dejected and downtrodden when something in my head lit up. “Lascott Baines wouldn’t have done that,” spoke the ghostly voice of that kid with a redskin perpetually in his mouth. “Lascott Baines wasn’t about who looked the coolest when they were shooting space guns. Lascott Baines was about saving the day when nobody else could.”

My mind was racing. Suddenly all the pages of those old comics I’d loved came blazing back in triumph. I was seeing it all again for the first time, and remembering why I’d become so smitten with this genre in the first place.

As soon as I was in control of my senses again, I phoned up Dad straight away and said I was coming over. I hopped on the next train, and in an instant there I was rummaging through an old shoe box in my room, filled with hidden relics of times long gone by.

I was missing most of the comics, and the ones I did have were not only out of order, but some of the pages were ruined entirely, with a giant sticky lolly wedged between the pages here, a corner torn off there, or even just text that faded away many years ago, just as my memories had.

Right then, sitting on the floor in a puddle of nostalgia, I knew what I had to do. I don’t know if this is what actually happened to Lascott Baines. I don’t even know if anybody else ever read the damn things except for me. All I know is this is how it went in my head when I was a kid, and I hope it’s even half as amazing to you as it was to me back then. The world needs more heroes, more characters who save the day.

We need more Badgers, and Baines is always going to be one of the best.