As you know, this has been a year of me getting caught up on going to the dentist after several decades out of the game. With each visit I made, I was impressed by the advances in technology that had been made since my childhood, but all the while I felt like something was missing.

Where were the Gleam Team?

I strongly remembered a team of anthropomorphic dental superheroes that existed on stickers and posters and stuff, but searching the Internet I could find nothing about them. Not even people thinking back about them and asking whatever happened to them.

Well, they existed, and today I did a deep dive into the files (aka pile of papers and binders) that I have kept since my childhood and I found the proof!

A sticker showing the team charging out of… a pocket I guess? Like, is it a dental hygienist’s pocket? I guess so. If you’d asked me to describe the team, they would have basically been thus, though in my mind I think they had donned capes, making them more like traditional superheroes. We’ve got a big molar guy, a floss guy, a toothbrush girl, and a toothpaste guy. Probably they had names, though I don’t remember them. Let’s ignore how most of them are tools and one is an actual tooth and just respect them for trying.

Maybe this will end up like my post on Strand-Man, where my site is seemingly the only information on the topic and it gets more hits than anything else on here. Or maybe nobody but me ever had any memory of these guys to begin with. Either way, I’m doing my part. Certainly the fact they were apparently produced by the Nova Scotia Department of Health and Fitness suggests a more limited reach than a product that was probably sold across the country and maybe beyond.

If one were to find a copy of Marvel’s comic Blaze volume one, number five, with the cover date of December, 1994 they could turn to the letters page and find a trace of PDR.

This was a reply to the first issue of the book. I would’ve been possibly twelve but more likely thirteen when I read that first issue (it was released in June, but what are the odds I got to it before July 18th, which is my birthday?) and for a reason I will bring up later, I was moved to write in.

It’s weird that I decided to address the letter to Icebox Bob, the villain of that first issue. I also claimed this villain was the greatest thing ever, and maybe there was some honesty in the my enthusiasm for the character. I like horror villains and did back then too. But if it is true enthusiasm, it certainly isn’t enthusiasm that carried me into continuing the book. I did not read another issue of the book until I found issue five in a back issue bin around the year 2000 and discovered that my letter had been printed. As far as I can remember Icebox Bob was a pretty generic horror villain, some kind of ghost serial killer or something, probably one who laughed and made quips like the Joker. That was the style at the time. I have no idea what ever happened to the character, but I remain somewhat fond of him just because of this letter.

I also feel the need to question my claim here that I had “always been a fan of Johnny Blaze.” I didn’t get into superhero comics until I was ten. While I fully admit that three years at that age mean a helluva lot more than they do at my current age, those three years were certainly not filled with me being a huge fan of Johnny Blaze. I’d probably read a few of his appearances in the then-current Ghost Rider book, and I could believe I’d seen some old guest appearances in Marvel Team-Up or something, but I’d expect most of what I knew about Johnny Blaze I got from trading cards and reading the Marvel Handbook. I probably liked Blaze fine, but he wasn’t my second favourite character (I have no memory of who the first would have been at that time. Darkhawk maybe if the timeline works out?).

But why was I overselling my enthusiasm for the book and characters? Because of what is not included in the letter as printed. In the first issue of Blaze, the only one I bothered to read, they mentioned that they wanted suggestions for the title of the letters page. I wanted to get that, to make a suggestion that would be emblazoned on the book that, I assumed, would go on forever. The fact that they didn’t even include my suggestion shows how good it was. If I remember correctly, which I admit isn’t necessarily the case, my suggestion was “Blazing Pens”. The winning suggestion that got to be the name of the letters page was “Writing Shotgun”. I admitted when I was twenty and I admit now, that is much better than my idea.

I’m gonna do it again! I’m gonna watch a science fiction show I dimly remember from my youth again! Only actually, this time it isn’t as dimly remembered and I was slightly less of a youth.

I was over twenty when I watched Firefly, still a child by the standards I hold now, but technically an adult. And by the time I was twenty, I was more discerning about the television I watched, which is why I absolutely never watched Firefly while it was on television. But I heard good things and I got around to it when it was on DVD. I remember liking it! But I also remember thinking it’s one of those things where if it hadn’t been cancelled early, the Internet maybe wouldn’t have been as in love with it as it was. I can’t know if that’s true, but it was the opinion I held. Now, decades later, I don’t even know if the show is held in the esteem it once was. I think people still like it fine, but I’m out of touch, so what do I know? But here’s the thing: I wanted to do another PDR Sci-Fi Watching but also I don’t want to commit to a big project while I’m falling behind on other projects, so a show that got cancelled after a dozen episodes or whatever sounds like it’ll go down smooth.

So what do I remember about the show? Well, unlike Earth-2 or Space: Above and Beyond, which had fled my teenage mind after their cancellations, I can even now remember whole characters, names and all. If I tried, I could probably come up with a general description of five or six episodes even. I even know that the show doesn’t have any aliens for poor little alien-starved me. So this one will not be a font of surprises, but it should be easy, and that’s probably more important.

I first got into Star Trek when I was around ten years old. So this was after I played the Space Quest games and experienced world with truly weird aliens. This was after I watched that Star Wars documentary about how they made all the alien puppets. This was possibly even after I read collections of Marvel’s pre-Fantastic Four sci-fi stories I got from the library with Kirby and Ditko-designed aliens abounding. What I’m saying is that, even though I came to love Star Trek, I was disappointed with the aliens on the show since Day One. That’s why so many of the Trek Thoughts I’ve posted have been about that.

As a child new to Star Trek, I responded the way a PDR responds to everything. I wondered what I could do if I got to make Star Trek. I daydreamed about a type of alien I would make. Well, today, more than three decades later, I finally got around to putting ink to paper:

This is the one. It’s nothing radical by the alien designs I prefer, but by Trek standards, it’s some unknowable beast. I pictured them being about half the size of humans (probably E.T. sized, if I’m looking for more of my likely inspirations), and in closeups I assumed they’d be worked like puppets, or more specifically Muppets given what I watched back then. But the real innovation that little PDR had was how we’d show this alien get around the ship in wide shots. The reason the alien is designed with the big dress is to hide the remote control car that lets it move!

Now, keep in mind that as a ten-year-old I did not assume that they would build some remote-controlled wheel system or whatever, I assumed they would need an entire remote control car under there for it to work.

Remote control cars are peak technology to ten-year-olds.

I accept that would probably not be how they do it now, but I’d still want keep the dress for the design. Just assume there’s some alien business going on under there. Anything that makes them less humanoid.

Now, a full-grown PDR would have named the species and thought up stuff about their homeworld and all kinds stuff. Little PDR didn’t do that. He just thought that this little design deserved to be represented in Starfleet. Well, Old PDR can agree with him on that.

For some reason, one of my earliest experiences in reading superhero comics was the Official Marvel Index to the Fantastic Four, which was actually not comics, it was prose summaries of the Fantastic Four’s comics. I remember many nights laying in bed reading dry descriptions of these high concept character driven adventures. Maybe it wasn’t the ideal way to experience them, but it was how I did, so I cherished it.

Life went on and I grew up, but one thing I remembered was that there was an image in one of those Index issues of Ben Grimm, the ever-loving blue-eyed Thing, relaxing on a beach and his erect penis was visible, but because of his craggy, rocky skin, it was hidden. Eventually I didn’t own those Indexes anymore, so I couldn’t prove it, but I was sure I had seen it.

Much later in my adult life (April 2021, according to when I posted about it on Twitter), I found the answer to my childhood memory:

It was his foot. He was indeed relaxing on a beach, but he had one leg crossed over the other and his toes were positioned such that a child could see them as being a dong. I don’t know what I expected, but I was sure that if an artist (I had actually assumed it might have been done by the inker as a form of rebellion) had snuck Ben’s boner into a comic it would have been noticed long ago and it would be known to the Internet. So why wasn’t it? Maybe I imagined it, or misread some coincidental pattern on his skin? But the memory had been so certain. Anyway, I never entertained the idea that it was just his foot.

Anyway, since that time I’ve definitely read at least one Fantastic Four comic that calls into question whether Ben even has genitalia post-transformation. At least I’m pretty sure I have. I guess I can’t really trust my memory about these things.