Wednesday, September 14, 2005
My Childhood Arms Race
by Ilya
I don't mean to be one of those crotchety jerks who keeps talking about how much better everything was when he was a kid, but damn it, everything was much better when I was a kid.
Case in point: my childhood witnessed the renaissance of the Super Soaker: the most incredible children's weapon since the advent of the BB gun, the sling shot, or the bayonette.
The original Super Soaker was a work of industrial-design genius. Its revolutionary air-pressure pump system liberated children the world over from the oppressive shackles of the ancient squirt gun—an antique weapon that had not undergone significant upgrade since its serendipitous invention by Confederate Medic Dr. Thaddeus McSquirt during the Battle of Sharpsburg in 1862.
Furthermore, the Super Soaker added a deadly new element of psychological warfare to Dr. McSquirt's creation. The aggressive, neon-yellow-and-green coloration of the opaque water reservoir created a perpetual dread in the victim's mind: was he about to get squirted by water? Or by potent uric acid?
Granted, the Super Soaker was not flawless. For one thing, you could never get it to shoot quite as far as it did on television. Super Soaker's manufacturer, Laramie, dealt with this by giving kids the same excuse that Reebok did when their "Pump" sneakers failed to turn upper middle-class white boys into baby Jordans: if something's not working right, pump harder.
Despite this shortcoming, the Super Soaker was manna from water gun heaven for a generation of kids who had learned from Desert Storm that combat was fun, easy, and generally resulted in little collateral damage apart from a stray burning oil field here and there.
Kids rushed to incorporate the Super Soaker into their arsenals, but the overwhelming advantage the gun conferred on its wielder was soon eroded by the simple fact that everyone had a Super Soaker of their own. Previously one-sided drenchings began to deteriorate into interminable World War I-style engagements, only minus the tear gas and the depressing Hemingway stories.
Any military historian could see the writing on the wall, and the writing said: "I am a Wall." It also said that there would be a bitter and bloody arms race. Laramie gratefully obliged, and bestowed upon the unwashed masses two devastating new weapons: the Super Soaker 100, with a larger water reservoir and bigger air pressure tank, and the 300, a behemoth water cannon and backpack combo. You didn't fire the Super Soaker 300; you unleashed it.
Recalling those halcyon days of aquatic combat with a smile, I typed "Super Soaker" into Google, eager to catch up on the latest in hydro-munitions. What would today's kids be arming themselves with, I wondered—how far had the technology advanced in the past decade? Would there be water shotguns? Water cruise missiles? Water napalm? Fearsome robot automatons with water turrets bristling from their tempered-steel chestplates?
Alas, I found no such thing. Instead, it seems that Super Soakers have gotten lamer in the ten years since I last used them. My beloved Super Soaker 50, 100, and 300 have been replaced with guns bearing names like Hydroblade, Helix, and Tempest. Am I shooting a water gun or going to a rave in the meatpacking district? Spare me.
What's worse is that the guns even look like they belong at a rave. The neon-bright primary colors and extraneous tubes make the weapons look like they're designed to squirt Red Bull at an undulating skinny white guy with a mesh shirt and a pacifier in his mouth. If I brought something like this onto a playground in my day, I would be ruthlessly mocked and beaten. But mostly just beaten.
My favorite example of this decline of the Super Soaker brand into baroque nonsense is the Arctic Shock, a garish piece of garbage whose much-heralded feature is its ability to chill water before you shoot it, presumably rendering your target hypothermic instead of merely wet. Not only is that a grave violation of the principals of water combat, but I'm pretty sure it's against the Geneva Conventions, too.
Is it too much to ask for to have a reliable and practical means of soaking other people? Apparently so. Thanks for the memories, Super Soaker, but you've lost your way. As my father used to say, I'm not mad at you, I'm just very disappointed to the point of not loving you anymore.
