Nerding Day: 1993's Street Fighter 2 Toyline

There was only one way to sell plastic crap to children in the 1990s: Live action commercial. That was it! There was no second way, there wasn’t even any variation in the first way. I could spend a few thousand words trying to prove it to you, or I could just show you, so I’m going to do both. I’m going to use 1993’s Street Fighter II toyline to dissect the entire 1990s toy commercial formula:

We must start with something ripping, exploding, or jumpkicking through the logo.

We need lots of lightning-quick cuts to nurse what we didn’t know was generational ADHD yet. We also need a brick-faced white guy with a lot of facial range but zero charisma. Like the kind of dude who thinks he’s king of a local improv troupe, but really he’s just the loudest.

At some point he should shout “NO WAY!” and somebody else must reply “WAY!!”

We’re gonna want at least one terrible pun.

Oh, a fat joke is mandatory. Up to three are tolerated, six is too many, but 10+ comes back around to genius again.

Let’s get all those out of the way at once with Chip Hayface here shouting “NO WAY” only to be answered (fatly) by E. Honda, who crushes him from above and then beefs out “WEIGH.”

Fuck, FUCK we forgot to dismiss a minority.

Man, we really could have slipped that in the last scene. Like maybe E. Honda could’ve said “WEIGH, CHIP-SAN” and Chip’s coin-flattened corpse could’ve eked out “Dad?”

No, that would extend the scene to 2.5 seconds and we would’ve lost the children. This was the right call.

We’ll have to tick the Dismissed Minorities checkbox with a different scene:

Chip: “What’s a Dhalsim?”

Chip’s Face: (A Jim Carrey third take)

Chip: “Oh!”

There were only a few transitions approved by the ‘90s Toy Commercial Board of Visual Standards. You could Skateboard Wipe, you could zoom in through an explosion, you could chase a lightning bolt up an electric guitar into the next scene, or you could BASH something and cut out on the screen shake.

Side note: Those same transitions were also mandated in advertisements for snacks, shoes, new styles of Trapper Keeper, some but not all juices, Double Ticket Night at the arcade next to the Target, and only that one time for a funeral home.

We need to have a “NOT!” joke in here somewhere. Grammar Check insists the last sentence is incorrect, and the only way to fix it is to delete the word “joke.” Well played, Grammar Check. Let’s have Chip survey his enemies and say “these guys look unbeatable…” his pregnant pause demanding a-

You can tell this is a director at the top of his game, by which I mean sleeping in the backseat of his Ford Taurus in between gigs, because he seamlessly combines a NOT! with a GROUP FIST PUMP. A tricky shot, truly this is the Kubrick of Somebody’s Cousin Who Almost Went to Film School.

It’s tough to exit a ‘90s toy commercial. You want to leave an impression, but you also know you’ve bombarded your audience with sirens and flashing slaps from a hundred directions so they can’t remember what happened twenty seconds ago. The best you can usually manage is a screamed order by an aggressive narrator as something hits the camera. “GET GAKKED” a commercial might shriek, while sliming the screen. “IT’S THE EM-BOMB!” another might yell, as a 3D corpse is fired out of a cannon into our living room.

Street Fighter here? Model of restraint: They just end on a lil’ thumbjerk like “get a load of these guys.”

The Street Fighter 2 live-action commercials are the second most ‘90s thing I’ve ever seen. In the next Neil Gaiman book, where the living personification of various decades sadly discuss humanity in a void full of weird stairways, I nominate Chip Hayface to play the 1990s and maybe his turmoil is that behind all that bravado he’s really fucked up by the lingering AIDS crisis. I don’t know, that’s a Gaiman call.

I say the Street Fighter toy commercials were the second most ‘90s thing only because we haven’t talked about the actual toys yet. The first-run action figures were just reskinned GI Joes, a move which makes sense when first pitched to a sleepy Hasbro board by a magically bigged child. But it falls apart when you realize the appeal of the Street Fighter IP is that they fight with fists and magical powers, and your company has 8 tons of plastic accessories from Taiwan to offload.

That meant every Street Fighter came with weapons, no matter how preposterous it was. Like Balrog, who devoted himself to the punch so hard he unsubscribed from legs entirely – he came with two rifles, a knife, a missile launcher, two missiles, and a fucking grappling hook.

Balrog is nothing but punch. He only does punch, he only thinks punch, he only speaks Punchese. He doesn’t comprehend human English – the only thing he understands is sign language, and even then just the signs for “five men going up” and “STRONG no.” There’s no way he knows he has individual fingers, much less that you could work them to fire missiles.

Look at that packaging again. Notice two things: That I didn’t bother removing the watermark from YO JOE! the world’s most adorable repository for obscure GI Joe weirdos, and that Balrog’s “knockout launcher really shoots!” Motherfuckers gave Four Punch Man a bazooka and he put a boxing glove on the end of the rocket. It’s actually perfect character work, and I take back this entire section.

It’s not even a good guess at Balrog’s outfit though, which was just Guy You Don’t Talk To At The Gym. But that’s fine, they’re repurposing molds for these figures. Chun Li got it worse, having her tits bound in shibari rope like she married a mall tattoo artist.

Chun Li came with all the swords she never had in the game, and none of the child labor used to pluck tiny plastic weapons from their molding tree because UNICEF raided the plant that year.

The characters weren’t rebooted for this toyline – each one comes with a card laying out the accurate information from the game. Blanka’s card is very clear that this is a jungle tragedy we’re dealing with here. Some sort of Goblin Tarzan who knows which yips mean danger but will never understand “purple” no matter how the therapists try.

Don’t fall in love with Blanka; you’re going to lose him back to the wild the first time a fire alarm goes off. His biography card understands all of this perfectly. And yet here he is with his grappling hook rocket launcher and assault rifle.

If you asked the canonical Blanka what that fucking orange thing is, it would take Helen Hunt the entire second act of a movie called some shit like Voice of the Jungle to understand he’s trying to say “cold bright food.” Just give him Sparks and Bite, Hasbro! We had the technology back then!

Dhalsim is as close to a pacifist as a game about bare-handed alley maulings can get away with – he only fights to perfect his yoga, which the 1990s heard of one time and figured they got the gist of, but very much did not.

He only fights when he has to, and “will never hurt his opponent more than necessary.” Here are five of his twenty-six knives.

The whole thing is a tax loophole to dispose of a decimal error in a plastic weapon order. But there were other logistical problems facing the Street Fighter toys: Like how do you model a fat character when your every mold is a Roadblock or greater?

Haha shit, poor E. Honda looks like he thought the tapeworm diet meant tapeworms were low in calories. He looks like he did gymnastics after a hoagie-eating contest. He’s posing for a medical textbook above the entry for Human Gastric Torsion. This is present day Steven Seagal.

I’ve never seen such a savage burn on aging punks for their skinny-jean muffintops.

The character art was also perfectly 1993 – in that it was given to somebody’s kid ten years before the brief six-year window when we respected and paid artists.

Art Guile looks like Blanka’s mother in the heartrending Voice of the Jungle finale where she tries to get Blanka back from Helen Hunt. This is an inside joke between me and my doctor, but his face looks like what’s wrong with my knee. You ever squeeze a boiled sausage, like the moment just before the skin bursts? It’s like that, but also a bad Halloween drunk for a balding man in a sarcastic Vanilla Ice costume.

Meanwhile Toy Guile just looks like he can read all of these jokes.

Most of the toys came with REAL STREET ACTION and you can bet it WAS NOT GREAT. Here’s Sagat’s biography card, painting a touching image of the man as a troubled fighter torn between nobility and vanity.

Here’s the front of that card, promising he comes with THAI CHOP.

Zangief competes for the raw love of wrestling. He loves grappling human meat so much he’ll tank 7 dollars in quarters trying to pull off one Spinning Pile Driver. You better believe his toy comes with multiple assault rifles.

It also comes with a weapon the package describes as “PILE DRIVER SHOOTS!” I’m not sure if that means he has a rocket launcher that somehow shoots pile drivers, or if he just named his rocket launcher Pile Driver, but either way I take back everything bad I said about it and apologize without reserve.

This being a ‘90s IP adaptation, you know they had inexplicable vehicles! You fuckin’ know they’re introduced by an inexplicable skit!

This was 1993. This was how it was done. The Batman Returns toys had a day-glo yellow Batman with a pet toucan called Vacation Bat and his Bat-Houseboat was sold separately.

Once again we’ve got Blanka, who in the lore of the game struggles with pooping inside, but here is blasting through the vast deserts(?) of Street Fighter at the wheel of his battle jitney – a tit-bound Chun Li at his side asking if the bounces should be turning her nipples purple like this, but Blanka will never understand.

I know what you’re thinking, kids of 1993. Don’t worry, it comes complete with CELL RECEPTION!

The villains need vehicles, too. Here’s M. Bison, evil dictator and psychic mastermind, at the wheel of his sweet-ass dune buggy. He’s even got his own version of Chun Li: Vega.

Yes, it comes with real STREET SLAMMIN’ MISSILES but I see that look of bewilderment and fear — chillax, ‘90s kids, don’t bust a cow! You know this gnartacular war jalopy has got plenty of CELL RECEPTION!

I don’t recall understanding or giving a shit about cell reception back in ‘93, but if these toys and the twelve minute long satellite-phone sequence of Congo are any indication, the 1990s thought the coolest thing in science fiction was making a phone call from anywhere. As a grown man living in the future, I would like to send this message back in time to my child self: Cell reception sucks, buy the one with the working water gun so you can forget to empty it for two months and give all your friends Legionnaires’ Disease.

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