Colonel Bleep and Friends Volume Two

Growing up has never been easy, but in the 60s, it carried some extra emotional burdens, what with persistent political turmoil, looming global annihilation in the blink of an eye, or unexplainable outbursts of extremely bad folk music. It seemed like everyone had an axe to grind, and everyone had somebody else to blame for the world's ills. So it's not surprising that, just as Orwell had given us Oceania and Eurasia, Quaker Oats unveiled "Quisp" and "Quake," then immediately fabricated their bitter rivalry as a ploy to market the two cereals. The absurdity of manufacturing your own competition was compounded by the fact that both were essentially the same recipe of baked corn, sugar and preservatives, differentiated only by their shapes and their eponymous spokesentities. In fact, they both had a flavor strinkingly similar to Captain Crunch, but a slightly softer texture, which took away the added thrill of shredded skin in the roof of your mouth.

Like any malleable American, I knew that I must choose sides. So without hesitation, I aligned with Quake. Admittedly this decision had more to do with Quisp, a bug-eyed alien with a propellor on his head who flitted about like an asshole, pestering the shit out of Quake, and yammering endlessly about the supposed superiority of his brand of extruded slop, with the piercing voice of a Jerry Lewis impersonator at an Elk's lodge. Quake, in contrast, had a booming yet reassuring presence, representing manliness, hard work, integrity, and the concerns and interests of the working man. After witnessing the frequent spectacle of Quake suffering the barbs and insults of his lesser adversary, the choice was clear. "Fuck Quisp," I said.

But just like the Vietnam War, this situation dragged on for years, and eventually Quaker Oats must have tired of having to mold corn paste into two different shapes. So they hit on the idea of a "contest" to decide which cereal would survive and which would join the DeSoto in the dust bin of consumer history. The promotional commercials made it clear that one of them would die, and that the decision laid partially in my hands. Dutifully, I whined at my mother to purchase boxes of Quake so that I could fill out an official ballot and mail it in, along with a proof of purchase seal for authentification, thereby doing my part to keep Quake on the shelves and send that smarmy little prick Quisp backpacking to hell.

Weeks later, on a trip to the store with my mother, I strolled over to the cereal aisle for my box of Quake. I think you can guess where this is headed. Multiple rows of Quisp lined the shelves, but Quake was nowhere to be seen. Quisp had won. It had never occurred to me that other kids could possibly choose Quisp over Quake, but the Piggly Wiggly cereal shelves were giving me a cold, hard slap of reality. I kneeled down and sobbed on the checkered linoleum floor, raised my tiny clenched fist, and resentfully vowed never to let a spoonful of Quisp touch my lips. I became cynical, and my life took a dark turn, during which I began to experiment with other breakfast foods such as plain yogurt and grape nuts. I began questioning whether one brand of laundry detergent was really better than another, or even if, when it did say "Libby's" on the label, I would truly like it on my table.

Now looking back with another forty three years of accrued wisdom, I realize that I was being played for a grade school chump all along. Quisp's eventual "victory" was pre-ordained, just as "Coke Classic" was planned long before President Eisenhower lied to us about the U2 incident. Lest you dismiss my rantings as paranoia, consider the early commercial in which Quake and Quisp compete for market share with bonus premiums. Quake is offering some crappy glow in the dark stickers, but Quisp trumps that measly hand with a working spacecraft equipped with a parachute. Sure, it requires 50 cents and two box tops, but this disparity only underscores the deficiency of Quake's offering, which was no doubt forced upon him by corporate fat cats at Quaker Oats. Yet even with the game so obviously rigged a priori, my faith in the clear moral superiority of Quake had not been shaken until it was too late. When that dark moment of Piggly Wiggly despair finally arrived, my childhood idealism, that inner spring of conviction that people are basically moral and empathetic, was doused in kerosene and set aflame with a single lit match, tossed by a jovial, rosy cheeked man in a blue Quaker hat.

But time heals, as they say, or more to the point, fresher wounds help us to forget the old scars. Aside from occasionally starting awake from deep slumber and bursting into tears, I've rarely given much thought to Quisp, until a recent visit to the Yankee Dollar Store in Plattsburgh, New York. Near the main entrance of Plattsburgh's best dollar store is a kiosk chockablock with dollar DVDs. And buried within this haystack of kung fu movies, Felix the Cat cartoons repackaged for the eight millionth time, and made-for-TV movies with Ed Asner, I found a copy of Colonel Bleep and Friends Volume Two.

The resemblance with Quisp was undeniable. The propeller. The oblong head. I couldn't try to gloss over my discomfort that I might be staring into the abyss of Quisp's origins. But still, this was different. Colonel Bleep lacks the clueless crossed eyes and wrecklessly idiotic arced brows of Quisp. Instead, he had piercing, thoughtful black ovals, placed at perfect thirty degree offsets from the earth's gravitational pull, and eyebrows that betrayed a profound wisdom beyond his years. And his mouth, while not menacing, lacked the mindless, grinning stupidity of Quisp, whose gullet suggests that he'd blow stray animals for spare change. No, Colonel Bleep was cut from another cloth. He hails from an era in which alien cartoon characters carried themselves with dignity, and would have never been caught flitting gaily around a breakfast table in Quisp's geekishly tasteless chartreuse turtleneck sweater.

I nervously handed the clerk a dollar plus the eight cents tax New York requires for funding gubernatorial whore house visits, then scurried eagerly back to the Québec border, where Canadian customs sized up my purchase and extracted another thirteen cents to subsidize seal beatings. The DVD was in the player before I had removed my coat, and after the first few minutes of Colonel Bleep's Arrival on Earth, I knew I had invested wisely. Colonel Bleep was darting around in front of backdrops that looked like Jim Flora album art. In The Killer Whale, a clan of happy, smiling frogs in the "Lillyfied Kingdom of Aqualand" are chased away from their pile of ocean pearls by Colosso the whale. Firebomb involves Bleep's arch nemesis Dr. Destructo threatening Bleep's Futurion robots by having his pet gorilla blow up their supply of Robolube. Bleep responds by having his caveman assistant Scratch don a flameproof suit and fly into the burning pipe with a can of Frigid Futonium 505. In Pirate Plot, spherical "Moon Mites" cultivate "tasty, tender moon mushrooms," until the Americans decide to test a nuclear missile on their planet. Colonel Bleep intervenes just in time by launching the Moon Mites, each straddling a mushroom, off into space by having Scratch whack them on the ass with a baseball bat. This is some seriously damaged shit. A hyperventilating narrator squeals anxiously with overstated gloom during each adventure, and never demurs from pronouncing "Uranus" as "your anus," thereby earning my respect.

My opinion of oval headed space aliens has bumped up a few notches, to say the least. I'd still like to see Quake disembowel Quisp with a rusty fence pole digger, but I no longer speak of his ilk with sweeping generalizations. Reportedly, over half of the Bleep oeuvre has been lost through neglect, which saddens me. Perhaps the missing treasures include the story of Bleep dislodging Scratch from an eighty kilometer wide pile of cow shit in the cross hairs of a Soviet warhead, using only a spray can of Futuro Ozone Foam and a soldering iron. Perhaps not. But for now, I'm pleased with what a dollar and twenty-one cents can still buy.