Flannel over henley, jeans, hair perfectly parted down the middle. Alan Abernathy is an X-Files sort of guy, marginally cool with just enough quirky oddball energy to be relatable. He’s the late 90s everykid who still carried the Gen X ethos, the kind of jaded teenager who felt like the caretaker of his own parents… whenever they bothered to be around.
He’s a typical 90s kid caught in an 80s adventure.
Small Soldiers is the 90s reckoning with the toy industry of the 80s, and the dark undertones baked into the mythologies they sold to children. The Commando Elite are the logical endpoint of a decade’s worth of action figure plot lines, and like Transformers, GI Joe, Sectaurs or Robotix, the stakes are nothing short of geno… let’s just call it annihilation for the kids.
That original 80s Sunbow-styled toy-cartoon-comic trifecta was a marketing juggernaut aimed at latchkey kids with nothing to do but come home to an empty house and watch cartoons about their toys beating the snot out of each other.
And like these old toy narratives, the titular diminutive commandos take their programming very seriously, they’re not stopping until every Gorgonite is obliterated. By the late 90s, these high concept original toy lines had mostly fallen out of fashion, they were replaced by movie tie-ins, imported Pokemon clones, and revamped legacy brands. Oh and video games and home computers, let’s not forget the world wide web was rearing its ugly head.
Denis Leary plays GloboTech CEO Gil Mars, and the role is pure 90s cynicism. Where the 80s gave us aspirational corporate figures, the kind who built empires and inspired loyalty, the 90s knew better. Mars is a guy who doesn’t care what he sells as long as it ships on time. Enter Dick Miller for his obligatory Joe Dante cameo and exposition, muttering about how one day it’ll all be one giant corporation.
Reading the entertainment news these days, he was definitely onto something.
Spielberg co-founded DreamWorks in 1994, and Small Soldiers feels like an attempt to recapture some of that old 80s Amblin magic. Dante had delivered for him before with Gremlins and Innerspace, and bringing back one of his hit-makers made sense. But by 1998, family adventure films had moved toward darker and more self-aware fare like The Addams Family, while the rest was being hoarded by the Disney Renaissance.
Small Soldiers was a welcome throwback to the Amblin style.
Dante made Gremlins fourteen years earlier, and Small Soldiers covers a similar suburban upheaval – not to mention a few story beats. But where Gremlins was about consumerism run amok, Small Soldiers takes aim at the military ideologies we packaged as kidstuff. And Dante knows when to let things get genuinely unsettling, he masterfully blends cartoon logic with scares… while occasionally touching on body horror. The Gwendy dolls would feel right at home in a Brothers Quay animation.
The film is dedicated to Phil Hartman, who plays the ultimate suburban consumer next door, complete with satellite dish obsession and HOA vibe. It was his last on-screen role before his death two months prior to release. I originally saw this in theatres and watching him here did get to me. I was a huge fan.
Dante was told to make something edgy for teenagers, then told to soften it for the Burger King tie-in crowd, and yet the finished film balances both impulses perfectly.
Small Soldiers didn’t dominate the summer, but for Gen Xers and millennials who grew up under the mushroom cloud of that 80s toy boom, it was a kind of goodbye. One last look at the plastic armies we’d outgrown, and the wars they’d been training us to fight.
But deep down we knew what they were selling. And knowing was half the battle.
-Pop