Captain Power: Video is Enjoyable With or Without the Toy

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future: The Intruder

Fond at a local thrift store in April 2012

My girlfriend works at a thrift store, which is great for a junk collector like myself.  She spotted this VHS for me,  and many, many things jumped out at me while holding the cover.  At the top of the cassette it says “POWER ON! To The Interactive Video Revolution!” … wowiw zowie.  Then there is an awesome space-airbrush art illustration that would lead one to believe that this was an animated film, however at the bottom it clearly states “A Live-Action Videocassette” which lit up my eyes like rockets on the back of a super star destroyer.  The back of the cassette had even more in store, with a drawing of someone pointing a space ship firing lasers at a television with a disclaimer reading “Light rays are for illustration only”  it went on to elaborate  “ACCESSORIES INTERACT WITH CAPTAIN POWER ON VIDEO!  Fire at targets – they actually fire back” and more “Video is enjoyable, either with or without the toy”.  Holy crap what had I found!?

       The first thing that I did when I got home was to stick this puppy in my VCR, I wanted  the video revolution to start!  I began to watch it, and immediately knew I had struck gold, and called over my brother.  I was struck by how high the production values where and said to my brother “this must have cost like a million dollars an episode” .  The episode was complete with well done matte paintings for backgrounds, some fairly advanced CGI for 1988, a few b list actors, and very nice model work.  During various parts of the episode the baddies chests flash with seizure inducing brightness, which I found out after some research,  is how the toy/video interaction works.  Also discovered in my research, was that the budget for each episode was roughly 1 million dollars, yipes!  This is on par with the budget of an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation.  Check out this ridiculous TV spot as for more details.

    Allot of the visuals are ripped off shamelessly from Star Wars, even Captain Power’s adversary Lord Dread is a cross between Darth Vader and the Borg (although you could say Star Trek TNG ripped them off).  The closing credit sequence of a trench run is so similar to Star Wars, that I’m surprised George Lucas didn’t sue these guys like he did with Battlestar Gallactica.

Looks like this cassette came from Jay’s Video in Brooklyn, enjoy.  -Wiley

Drop off time and location: April 16 apx. 8Pm Brookline J.P. Licks