Snake America Fifty Six
Snake America is a bi-weekly email newspaper covering salable items. This week: Fur Alien Stompers and a USS Ocean Ranger, the video game, hat. Reading online? Subscribe.
eBay: Reebok Alien Stompers, in fur, only pair, $429: Reebok Alien Stompers are the shoes Sigourney Weaver wore in Aliens (USA 1986), and they had a hard sole for stomping aliens, with no shoelaces so aliens couldn't get at them. Like skinheads having short hair. In 2012 Sneakernews.com, describing a collaborative Alien Stomper between Reebok and Chapter, a Japanese retailer of sneakers, said, "the Alien Stomper is one of those sneakers that’s been out for longer than some sneakerheads have been alive, yet still manages a futuristic vibe even to this day," which is as empty a declaration as anyone in civilization has put to paper. Some sneakerheads are indeed younger than 25. The collaboration described in their post was that the Japanese sneaker store set the Alien Stompers to all white, and all black. That had never been done before. The shoe's original color-motif is grey, with some red and white, like the Japanese superhero Ultraman. One of Ultraman's enemies is a monster named Gyango:
The grey Alien Stompers are the shoes Ripley wears in her movie. She wears a onesie in the first movie (USA 1979), which is as good a film as anyone has made. She is one of the greatest space heroes of all time. The Reeboks fit very big and have been retroed in many different colors, including all black and white, but none as good as the originals. One exception is the above-mentioned(1). They are fur on the outside and the seller says theirs is the only pair. If that's the case--who knows!--the seller is not asking for enough money. If I owned these shoes and was trying for fair value I would only consider trading them for either a piece of the true cross, an unsupervised day tour of Fort Knox or the complete master recordings, A through H, in the Library of Congress. That said, the market for Alien Stompers is slow. It's only a slight exaggeration to say no one buys, wears or talks about them. Another great movie shoe is the Nike Terminator Vandal, which were the Nike Vandals that John Connor's dad, the guy who went back in time to make love to his messianic general's mother, wore in Terminator (USA 1984). Their outsides are made from rip-stop vinyl and they have a strap. Complicating matters are Nike's Terminators, which Patrick Ewing wore in college. Searching for Nike Terminator Vandals is, online, a fruitless pursuit. My friend A.J. had a rotation of two pairs of Alien Stompers in 2004, which qualifies him as a devotee. He asks the following questions:
Are these better for dudes or for girls?
Can I wear these to Prom?
Are these better Prom shoes than Concord Jordan XIs?
Can I wear these with a panda bear backpack? Or is that overkill?
If I wear these to an interview and its not for CEO will I be told I am overqualified?
Should I avoid sticker bushes while wearing these?
Is it true that global warming is only indirectly caused by man, because these joints are wholly responsible?
Is that felt?
The answers to his questions are as follows: It's a push; yes, you can; yes, they are, without a doubt; yes, you can, though I am not sure what situation calls for a panda backpack; yes, you will be told that in so many words; you should be avoiding those to begin with; that is true but unconfirmed; and, yes.(2)
USS Ocean Ranger, the video game, mesh hat: Nice what-has-to-be promotional hat for the 1988 Commodore 64 and PC title of the same name. In the game, the player is assigned, at top secret clearance, by his employer the United States Navy, "to command a naval task force in the Bering Sea on board the USS Ocean Ranger" with the primary and secondary objectives to seek and destroy Soviet-made MIGs. MiGs, in this case and elsewhere, refers to planes created by MiG, a Russian aircraft corporation, formerly the Mikoyan-and-Gurevich Design bureau, run out of Moscow. MiG (Российская самолетостроительная корпорация) mostly designed fighter aircrafts, and theirs had stubby noses until the 1950s and sharper beaks after that. If you bought those model styrofoam planes in the 1980s from bodegas, many were MiGs. During gameplay, the USS Ocean Ranger's bow breaks through electric-blue water and the sound the video game makes is identical to a hand-held radiation detector. How far video games have come. The MiGs don't show to the screen right away, but then they do and you must shoot them down. Reviews for the game are hard to come by. I'm sure it's pretty good. A google search reveals Ocean Ranger available and listed as a recreation software title in a ComputAbility full-page ad in a June 27, 1989 issue of PC World (cover story: Mass Storage by Mail, by Henry Fersko-Weiss), for $25.95, between Uninvited and Visions of the Aftermath, two other PC games.
ComputAbility didn't sell any console games. I was looking for Stadium Events and didn't see it. But, operating out of Milwaukee, they sold computer items--educational tools, mice, etc.--mostly by mail. PC Mail, Inc. bought the company in 1997 for $5.5 million in cash and stock. The bought party was supposed to help PC Mail get out of the Apple market, which they entered in 1994, and into the "dominant PC sector." PCM, which is still around, has seven subsidiaries, a 2014 sales number of around $1.4 billion and a stock ticker that used to be MALL, but isn't any more.
Thanks for reading. And thanks to everyone who may have subscribed after receiving a Nuclear War Now flyer. The Order From Chaos box-set is one of those things that makes me proud to live in America.
Snake
(1) There are Hender Scheme Alien Stompers, which, if I were to meet and interview Mr. Hender, would be the first question I'd ask. "Hey, Mr. Hender, why did you make Alien Stompers?" Hender Scheme's sneakers are natural leather and take the silhouettes from well-considered and well-distributed sneakers, like Nike's Air Force 1 High, or the Vans Authentic, or the fourth Air Jordan, outright. Mr. Scheme then cobbles the shoe off a replicated last and the result is the same shoe, more or less, in leather. They're doing other stuff now, too.
(2) All-purpose second-order thoughts clearinghouse for the above-mentioned topic: Acupuncture shoes were big in the early 2000s and a source says that the guys from Jade Tree Records bought them and wore them when they started making money. Here's a photo of an Acupuncture shoe. Also, the appropriate Bible verse for those Alien Stompers is: "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!," which is Psalm 133, verse 1.