Aliens in the Desert

Do you remember Captain Power? That show that had those jet/space plane toys where you could actually fire at the tv screen and the show would shoot back at you? Man that was awesome! I always wanted one of those toys…I remember watching the commercials and drooling. And yet I never saw the show. I’m not sure if it was just on some strange time slot that I always missed.

But what a great cross-media cross-marketing plan! You actually buy the toys in order to interact with each new episode of the television show. It’s like those secret deocder rings kids once sent away for and then they’d be given a secret code on their favorite radio show. Brilliant!

Why is it that this genius has been discarded? Why aren’t there a million products out there that combine regular television and games in different ways? Sure Captain Power basically worked on a light gun its been almost 20 years since then, why don’t we have new and more sophisticated devices that “talk” to our favorite television shows? And even better, then communicate to our favorite games?

Think of this: You have a plastic pokeball that you sit with in front of your Pokemon cartoon. A special pokemon comes on the screen and you “zap” it with your ball. Now you can take your “captured” pokemon and download the data into your pokemon game and you have a new pokemon to play with.

Genius! Quick, someone give me a grant!

ps: the link up above is a crazy in-depth Captain Power site and even carries a copy of the Captain Power computer game. Which, incidentally sucks. And if you’ve ever wondered how those crazy light guns work anyway, click here.