Stretching the Limits of Nostalgia

Why, Lord? Why must the fucking Baby Boomers always get the end of the stick that hasn’t been used to stir shit?

When we hit the twenty-year anniversary of the Summer Of Love, those fuckers’ childhood nostaligia train rolled in packed to the rails with blotter acid, weed, and Rolling Stones reunion concerts. Tie dye came back, chicks started seeing the merits of free love (Even with a Marching Band / comic book geek with a horrible, horrible 1988 mullet), and they came out with a Batman movie that was so watchable it erased their wretched memories of trying to get laid via mastery of the Batusi.

(Of course to hear the Boomers tell, in 1969 the “Batusi” method was no more or less successful than the “I haven’t showered in a month, and someone appears to have shit in my pants! And yet we’re both bored, and my penis still appears to maintain some form of rudimentary functionality! Wanna?” method. Course, then one of them appears to have tried one of those methods with a champanzee, turning sex for the next generation from “free love” to “love for fifteen clams for a dozen, and I hope you don’t mind the feeling of fucking / being fucked by a Howie Mandel’s rubber glove”… but that’s another article.)

Now, it’s twenty years later – the twentieth anniversary of Generation X’s high water mark – the Summer Of… Summer Of… shit, I don’t know. If you’re Kid Rock, it was the “Summer Of Sweet Home Alabama and Banging A Detroit Hood Rat”. For me, it was the “Summmer Of Whoops! Sorry, This Has Never Happened To Me Before. No, This Has Literally Never Happened To Me Before, So I Don’t Know If It’ll Wash Out Of Your Hair.”

Anyway – twenty years on, and Generation X’s nostalgia train’s rolling in, and what do we get? We get shit. Shit like a Stretch Fucking Armstrong movie.

I’ve got news for the “coolmakers” who ginned up this idea: nobody is nostalgic for Stretch Armstrong. It was a boring toy. Here’s what you did with Stretch Armstrong:

1. Stretch his arms out.
2. Let go and watch them snap back.
3. Repeat until horribly bored.

And step three took most kids about ten minutes to hit… and if you went longer, it doesn’t prove that Stretch Armstrong was a good toy, it only proves that we’re better than we were in the 1970’s at diagnosing autism.

Any movie about Stretch Armstrong would, by nature, appeal to the people who owned the toy back in the 70’s, i.e.: guys in their late thirties or early forties. So why in hell would you cast Taylor Lautner as Stretch? As part of this movie’s target demographic, allow me to assure you that Taylor Lautner irritates us.

He was in the last Twilight movie, which many of us were dragged to by our significant others and forced to watch, all the while sneaking peeks at our girls staring rapturously at that constantly shirtless prick. And we just knew that ten minutes after we got home we were going to be looking up at her from the bed, seeing her closed eyes and knowing that she’d be picturing that child, and that we’d only be able to console ourselves by remembering that while we might not have six-packs anymore, we did have whiskey, which should blot this little ugliness out of our long-term memories… and if it didn’t, hey; at least we were getting laid.

Plus, he ruined Comic-Con. So, you know, fuck that guy.

I can only surmise that casting this empty meatsuit is an effort to attract swooning Twilight estrogen junkies to see the flick, with all of them probably hoping that, by being Stretch Armstrong, maybe his junk will also stretch *giggleswoonpissmeoff*. Those chicks are fools who clearly never played with Stretch Armstrong, because that’s the first thing we all fucking tried. Stretch Armstrong has no penis… which actually makes casting Taylor Lautner seem like a level-headed, reasonable choice.

Even overlooking the casting of Little Prince Hairgel, the people making this movie have a problem that the guys who did the Transformers and G.I. Joe movies didn’t: Stretch Armstrong has no backstory. There was no Stretch Armstrong cartoon, there was never a Stretch Armstrong comic book, there is literally no Stretch Armstrong canon to follow except for the ones the boys who played with it came up with… and I guarantee you that those stories are all exactly the same:

“Stretch Armstrong escapes from his box! Stretch Armstrong stretches to catch Maskatron! Now Stretch Armstrong stretches to catch… I dunno… Bulletman! Um… uh… Oh no! Stretch Armstrong has been captured by the world’s largest boy! ‘I’ve got you now, Stretch! There is no escape! And now, I’m going to open you up and see what gives you your powers!'”

“Robbie! What are you doing with your mother’s nail file!? For Christ’s – I just bought you that Goddamned toy!”

Actually, if that’s the story, I’ve changed my mind: Taylor Lautner is perfect casting, and I need to see this movie.

Not only that, but I’ve come to believe that the coolhunters are whoring my childhood in the perfect way, and that their next step should be to make a Shrinky Dinks movie. Which I will also see, provided they show similar casting sense and hire Robert Pattinson.

[tags]Stretch Armstrong, Taylor Lautner, 70s nostalgia, Twilight, dark humor, satire[/tags]