Last night, we attempted to offer a pal of ours some reassurance. He’s expecting his first kid this summer, and he naturally has mixed feelings about what the future holds in store—the unabashed joy of ushering new life onto Planet Earth, of course, but also the loss of a whole bunch of personal autonomy for the next 18 years. We did our best to tell him that the pluses vastly outweigh the minuses, but he sort of scoffed at our sweet words. People who wax rhapsodic about the pleasures of parenting, he boldly suggested, reminded him of brainwashed cult members.
At that very moment, our thoughts turned back to one of our formative literary experiences: the serialized comic version of The White Mountains, which appeared in Boy’s Life in the early 1980s. For a magazine frequently lampooned for its wholesomeness, the series represented a terrifying departure from the norm. Forget about the book’s alien invasion theme for the moment; what really freaked us out about The White Mountains was the description of “capping,” by which young teenagers were turned into zombies by sinister cyborg overlords. As noted in the outtake above, the biggest juvenile rebel would become a veritable cog-in-the-machine after being capped—an awful fate that didn’t escape the notice of the book’s young heroes, who choose to rebel against this de facto lobotomization.
That said, the capped were rewarded with bliss. And they in turn became the community leaders who assured future capees that the process was not to be feared. We have to hand it to The Tripods—they took a page out of the human-perpetuation playbook, and ran with it.
(h/t The Haunted Closet)
Joe // Apr 7, 2010 at 12:31 pm
I’d never made that connection–but I also loved those books, and the serialization.
Brendan I. Koerner // Apr 7, 2010 at 12:43 pm
@Joe: If you can set aside five minutes, you should really check out the complete serial. I was surprised by how well it stands up.
Gramsci // Apr 7, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Tell your friend to watch Baby Einstein’s xylophone rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth, keeping his eyes wide open the whole time.
Speaking of which, have you thought about looking into that fraudulent franchise and its cognitive-development quackery?
Jordan // Apr 7, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Wow, that Prince Valient/Ranger Rick/Mary Worth style is so classic.
Brendan I. Koerner // Apr 7, 2010 at 8:20 pm
@Gramsci: I vividly remember when the founder of Baby Einstein got invited to one of GWB’s State of the Union addresses. That was a big mistake on her part–seems like that’s precisely when folks started probing her company’s claims, and they fell apart under scrutiny. The latest:
http://www.nj.com/parenting/eric_ruhalter/index.ssf/2009/10/baby_einstein_recall_-_like_fi.html
@Jordan: Don’t forget Mark Trail.
DM // Apr 7, 2010 at 10:41 pm
I loved those books but, despite my 5 years as a Boy’s Life subscriber, don’t recall the comic. John Christopher was great. He also wrote a great end of days thriller – No Blade of Grass – that is basically about UG99.
Brendan I. Koerner // Apr 8, 2010 at 8:33 am
@DM: Amazingly, the guy’s still alive and writing–last book was published in 2003, under his real name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Youd
Exit the Tripods | Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner // Feb 8, 2012 at 10:44 am
[…] Christopher, creator of one of my formative sci-fi experiences: the harrowing Tripods Trilogy. As I discussed nearly two years ago, Christopher’s tale of alien overlords was far more than crackling […]