To grasp the concept of ToeJam and Earl you must first look at what it is trying to be. ToeJam and Earl is a video game from the 1990's that introduced these funky alien characters, obviously based on popular hip hop culture at this time, and brought them to earth on a wrecked Spaceship that they must rebuild so they can go back to their home planet.
ToeJam and Earl are alien rappers who are foreign creatures on earth, and they battle several different type of villains on their adventure. Interestingly enough, the developers have ToeJam and Earl fighting an all white evil group who don't understand the aliens hip music, slang, clothes, and obvious alien features. The soundtrack for the game is a mix of African funk and hip-hop and the character designs are obviously critiques of urban culture at that time. After the games release, several publications noted the satire the game designers had for urban culture at the time and several designers for ToeJam and Earl have states their vision was to skew the perception of urban culture by making it alien - making it foreign.
The Wikipedia page for ToeJam and Earl states, "ToeJam & Earl has been called a surreal, comic satire,[1] and a "daringly misanthropic commentary on Earthly life".[2] The game's protagonists, ToeJam and Earl, have been described as a "three-legged red alien" and "fat orange alien", respectively.[3] ToeJam wears a large gold medallion and a backwards baseball cap, while Earl is marked by high-tops and oversized sunglasses; both outfits are "over-the-top appropriations" of 1990s urban culture.[1] Their speech features California slang.[4]"
ToeJam and Earl is interesting because it has only recently been recognized as a work of Afrofuturism. It took looking back at the direction of the game to realize what they had subconsciously created in a video game. ToeJam and Earl is the story of alien rappers who can't fit into Earth culture and must build a starship to head back to their funky roots, a seemingly simple story that we see in many pieces of Afrofuturism.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteI am glad you have brought this to our attention because I remember playing the game on Sega, but I did not realize the Afrofuturist content.
I just watched a video of the intro sequence on youtube:
http://youtu.be/x1lrUFXjFhU
As the Wikipedia article states: "Sega wanted innovative games and new mascots to compete with Nintendo."
Nintendo has a lot of white mascots that appeal to the mainstream consumers. But the mascots in the Sega game are absolutely alien transformations of stereotypical urban African Americans. ToeJam wears a gold chain and a backwards hat, while Earl sports black shades like the ones that were popular in rap videos from the 90s era (NWA's Ice Cube and Eazy-E always have black shades on). The duo likes funk music, and the composer of the game's soundtrack was supposedly inspired by Herbie Hancock.
Anyway, to link this example of Afrofuturism to Octavia Butler, just look at her novel Clay's Ark in which the Clay Arks are half human/half alien ethnic minorities whose alienness causes them to gather together in isolated communities in opposition the mainstream dominant culture. The Clay Arks are like ToeJam and Earl from the game.
They crash land on planet Earth only to find out that they need to get back to their home on planet Funkotron because Earth lacks funk. In this Afrofuturist piece, the protagonists can escape Earth when they have had enough. For the Clay Arks in Butler's Afrofuturist work, however, there is no escape from their situation on Earth. Instead, Butler paints a dismal picture in which their plight ends in a vision of their lives which ends in apocalypse on Earth. Video games only have such endings when the player looses and it's "Game Over". In this respect, Butler gives humanity a big game over in the treatment of otherness or alienness in her novel.
As an aside, Sega is a cool game system, and the games are typically more racy and cutting-edge than Nintendo's, so go check out ToeJam & Earl!
This is pretty awesome, Matt, thanks! As crazy as it might sound, there is actually a subfield in Cultural Studies that analyzes games (including video games) and the "gamer" subculture. Your and Nick's ability to write intelligently on this cultural artifact -- straight from the realm of pop culture -- speaks to this new academic interest. Great!
ReplyDelete