James Hynes

Looming out of my childhood comes this monster from my id, circa 1963 (clip courtesy of my brother Mike in Los Angeles). I only dimly remember this commercial—which seems to have been art directed and photographed by the same people who made Star Trek a few years later—but christ almighty, do I remember King Zor. He appeared under our Christmas tree that year, bright green, already loaded up with batteries and armed with ping pong balls. The switch (I dimly recall) was on his underside, and he rolled around on two wheels, with a tinny, recorded roar that was only just barely louder than his junky, grinding little engine. In retrospect, he seems like the kind of toy that you'd play with a lot on Christmas morning, but get bored with by Christmas afternoon, yet I remember playing with him for months afterwards, until his motor burned out. Who knows what this says about me. I usually played with him down in our finished basement, where Zor could wheel and lurch and grumble relatively freely on the tile my dad had laid down—and where I could play with him without bothering my mother, who found him pretty annoying. The point was not just to let him roll around and bump into things, it was to shoot at him with the equally bright green plastic raygun that came with him. The gun fired those darts with little suction cups on them, and the idea was to hit the broad disc at the end of his tail, which would make him wheel around and fire a ping pong ball at you out of the hump on his back. (Just like a real dinosaur, natch.) Come to think of it, the whole exercise was kind of counterintuitive—instead of the dart "killing" King Zor, or incapacitating him, or even just slowing him down, all it did was piss him off and make him more dangerous. Like I say, just like a real dinosaur. Just like a lot of things in life, come to think of it.

It also seems to me that he was a pretty sophisticated toy for a pre-digital age, since he exhibited "behavior" of a sort, and responded to stimuli—or to one stimulus, I should say, and only if you actually hit him at the right spot on the tail. (And never, not once, did I ever make the dart actually stick to his tail, the way that kid did in the commercial.) But soon enough, entropy began to encroach upon the mighty Zor—just as it did on the real dinosaurs—as the ping pong balls went missing or got dinged up so that they wouldn't fire or (in one case) got accidentally crushed underfoot in the heat of battle. And then his roar gave out, and he began to lurch more like a raucous drunk than a murderous carnivore, and finally his motor fried itself, and the light went out of Zor's eyes forever. Well, to be honest, he never had a light in his eyes, but you know what I mean. I kept playing with the gun, though, even after the spring inside broke and it wouldn't fire darts anymore, because it was so cool looking. (Hey, I was eight, alright?) I can still remember the feel of the grip in my hand.

The noble thing to do when he died would have been to bury him in the backyard, so that he could either join with the elements, or fossilize like his brethren and intrigue future paleontologists. I can't actually remember what happened to him, but it's possible he's still in the attic of my parents' house, along with the broken gun and three and a half ping pong balls, still waiting for me, still fighting mad.

Forget Cloverfield—King Zor rules!

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