Watching Swat Kats on my hard drive isn’t nearly as much fun as it was back when it came on Cartoon Network regularly. Power Zone was that two-hour slot you just couldn’t miss, with the coolest shows: Swat Kats, Centurions, G.I.Joe and a few others had all had to be seen in a two-hour package for maximum effect.
And the odd thing about Power Zone back then, and almost all the shows they had, was that they were all cyberpunk. It’s a genre which talks about a decaying Earth, usually ruled by multinational corporations that are brought down by this hard-boiled hero who, after rising from obscurity, goes on to save the world.
Both Swat Kats and, for example, Deus Ex (the three-game series by Ion Storm and Eidos) are in the same place: Earth (but radically twisted versions of our planet) and both shows have this feeling around it: noir, dark fiction, always this dangerous hero who has it in him to take on hundreds of evil robots at once. The same goes for Dragonball Z as much as The Matrix.
They’re cyberpunk too. This sort of stuff goes back to the early ’80s, and it’s not changed that much. The story is always about a loner in society, who struggles to get to the bottom of things; a detective whodunnit. Samurai Jack is the best example because it’s one man’s quest against Aku. Even in Dragonball Z, there’s tons of villains to get past.
The Terminator? Of course. “I’ll be back.” And Schwarzenegger goes on to plough through three films’ worth of robots. Then, while we’re talking Terminator; why not Robocop, obeying the ‘Prime Directive’? And we can’t forget Sylvester Stallone in Judge Dredd, with that blood-red uniform and one of the most stylish bikes in film history.
Then there’s another part of cyberpunk that sees hackers as the heroes — like in Disney’s Tron series, where both father and son take turns in their virtual world. The second film starts off with the son, Sam Flynn, hacking into his father’s corporation, and then being transported right into ‘the Game’, his father’s virtual world. Like Johnny Quest jumping into ‘Questworld’ every other episode and messing around with amazingly futuristic bikes, cars, guns, you name it.
There’s Johnny Mnemonic, with Keanu Reeves in the protagonist’s role, a hard-boiled courier with too much in his head and too little time. Speaking of couriers, the visually stunning game Mirror’s Edge (2009) is just as cyberpunk, with its heroine Faith, and all her impossible acrobatics.
Apart from having these die-hard heroes, there’s another aspect of cyberpunk that comes into play: all these worlds have gone horribly wrong. Something has happened – or is happening, with the Earth, like in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033. Both of these games deal with a world affected by nuclear disaster; this is the dystopian theme that’s seen so much in cyberpunk, the opposite of a utopia. The good thing about this is that there’s always a reason behind the madness; there’s good and there’s bad in this theme. The problem with this theme, though, is that the basic situation is the same. It’s like Swat Kats all over again; badass heroes, take-over-the-world villains, and a world that’s gone so badly to waste you wonder why the villain wants it in the first place. It seemed natural that when so much goes wrong on the Earth mankind moves upward into space. That’s why the earlier versions of cyberpunk led to the first ‘space operas”’ which people like Arthur C Clarke and Asimov brought up.
In many ways the cyberpunk genre is pretty evident; today’s novels, games and movies take advantage of that easy-to-build plotline. It still allows for a lot of variations — Real Steel (2011), about robots being boxers, is as cyberpunk as Equilibrium (2002) and the animated A Scanner Darkly (2006).
Still, of late the genre’s been stagnant since there’s actually nothing new. Almost every version of the Earth in trouble has been used, and it’ll take something to rebuild it. A Judge Dredd reboot, perhaps? Might work.