How About That Thing?

A couple weeks ago, I was looking around Netflix for something mindless to watch before bed. Nothing bad, necessarily, but something that didn’t require a whole lot of brain power, you know? Usually, I find something that I’ve watched a hundred times already, or something I can tell is going to be the pure definition of adequate if I were watching it with 100% of my brain. And that’s the story of how I managed to find a cartoon by the name of Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters.

“Stretch Armstrong?” I say to myself. ”There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”

I ended up watching a couple of episodes of the show out of morbid curiosity, and… It’s fine. Nothing all that revolutionary, but I’ve definitely seen Netflix put out worse.

The worst thing I can say out the gate is it reminds me suspiciously of a pilot for a superhero cartoon I was writing a year ago. Except this show came out in 2017, and I was writing that pilot in 2021, so maybe I’m just not as creative as I thought I was. For fuck sakes, I’m operating what has ultimately turned out to be a nostalgia site in 2024: a time and place were even the nostalgic are sick of nostalgia. But I digress.

I’ll admit, it’s definitely not the Stretch Armstrong I’m familiar with. I’m sure it was the kind of reimagining that’d have the Clownfishes of the world absolutely furious, and stoking the flames of YouTube’s perpetual hate algorithm… But not me. And as much as I’d love to brag about how it has everything to do with me being mature, and realizing the absurdity of getting butthurt because toy designers are trying to cater to the next generation of children instead of my forty-year-old loser ass…. Yeah, there’s actually more to unpack there when it comes to Stretch Armstrong.

To put things into perspective, this is the Stretch Armstrong I’m familiar with.

Just look at this dope. Compared to his 2017 counterpart, it’s definitely an interesting choice to dress like this on purpose. A far cry from the generic, Power Rangers esque outfits of The Flex Force… Though the more I look at this picture, I’m beginning to think The Flex Force might have had the right idea.

I used to have a Stretch Armstrong when I was a kid. He was one of the things I put on my Christmas list one year, and to this day, I’m surprised I got him. But I did, and I had fun with him. For about five minutes.

Not going to lie, his weird, putty-like body kind of weirded me out a little. It wasn’t necessarily unpleasant to the touch, but I remembered having this weird feeling like I needed to wash my hands after I played with him. And that was BEFORE I found out he was full of syrup.

I played with him for about a grand total of a day, and then he ended up in the toybox for the rest of his life. Somewhere between his trip to the toybox and his eventual demise, I vaguely remember bringing him to school for show and tell.

They would eventually introduce a dog sidekick by the name of Fetch Armstrong, but by this point, I’d learned my lesson.

And then, this guy showed up.

This abomination is Vac Man: Stretch Armstrong’s newest villain. Stretch and Fetch’s commercials individually were saturated with cheese, but this guy? Holy shit, this guy!

Basically, Vac Man is hanging out in his house, sitting on the couch, watching some TV, when he spotted Stretch Armstrong’s latest daring feat of criminal justice. And it was right about then Vac Man said to himself: “You know what? Fuck this guy!”, and made it his life’s goal to thoroughly kick his ass. And that is literally his origin story. No tragic antivillain undertones, no megalomania gone horribly askew, no poorly disguised allegory for how much the creator(s) hate Donald Trump… That’s it. I got to say, it takes balls to just get up and decide out of the blue that you’re going to kick a random superhero’s ass just cuz.

Upon Vac Man being introduced into the canon, I actually found myself regretting no longer having my Stretch Armstrong as a kid.

Vac Man, to put it bluntly, was sort of the antithesis of Stretch Armstrong. Instead of a solid substance surrounding a liquid core, Vac Man was designed with a solid core surrounded by air. Once you used his trademark vac pump to suck all the air out of him, you could stretch him into even more unholy shapes. Unlike Stretch, though, he’d stay that way until you pressed the button on his head. Once you pressed the button, he’d reinflate, and go back to normal.

I never had a Vac Man, but god damn, that comercial made him look badass. Admittedly, yeah, Stretch Armstrong was kind of a goof, if his comercials were anything to go by, but once Vac Man entered the canon, shit got real.

And then, one fateful day, these guys debuted.

Allow me to introduce you to The Intergalactic Vac Pack, or Vac Pack for short. The yellow one is Humungor, the red one is Grappler, and the green one is Claudius. Realizing that Vac Man was too cool for Stretch Armstrong, Cap Toys decided to go a different direction. And the direction they went is one I actually found kind of baffling.

In the canon of Stretch Armstrong commercials, Vac Man actually beat Stretch Armstrong, and was in the process of turning him and Fetch into pretzels. Then, out of nowhere, The Intergalactic Vac Pack burst onto the scene. The dude narrating the commercial introduces us to the three, and their unique qualities. In typical toy commercial fair, the heroes defeat Vac Man. However…

That’s right, folks. Stretch and Fetch weren’t able to avoid their Pretzelization. So in a way, you could make the argument that, in all technicality, the bad guy won. Sure, The Vac Pack arrived on the scene, kicked Vac man’s ass, and… Well, who can say from that point? Maybe they arrived too late, or maybe Vac Man proved to be such a menace that it took all three of them to even stand a chance, and in the interim, Stretch and Fetch met their gruesome fate. All I know is that for The Vac Pack, this was a very puric victory. Though they stopped Vac Man from reeking havoc on the city, they were the ones who had to deliver the bad news. Vac Man, in turn, successfully defeated one nemesis, only to end up attracting the attention of a whole new one. And thus, the vicious cycle continues to perpetuate.

Or you could go with THEIR story, and assume that Stretch and Fetch recovered, Vac Man got bored and decided fighting three dudes from space with attitude was more fun than fighting some loser who looks like Hulk Hogan and Silly Putty had a baby, and Stretch decided he needed lower stakes gigs and called up his old bud, Wretch Armstrong, to see if he was still available. But I like mine better.

Toy commercials that could easily be cartoons, and vise versa, was a dying art in the 1990s, but Stretch Armstrong toys were among the few who maintained that status quo. And at the end of the day, I got to say, the commercials were more fun than the toys themselves were. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have a Vac Man to go up against my Stretch Armstrong, and I only ended up with one of the three Vac Pack guys long after The Vac Pack themselves ended up as bargain bin material. Maybe it’s because these toys are kind of lame when you get down to it. Whatever it is, I remember seeing it on TV, and wanting it, only to get it, and suddenly not want it anymore.

And that’s probably why I’m not so angry about a cartoon from 2017 taking my nostalgia, and basically turning it into every high school superhero show ever with a dash of Mark Zuckerberg allegory. Yeah, it’s not great, but Stretch Armstrong in general wasn’t that great, really.

I don’t know, maybe I’m the outlier when it comes to Stretch Armstrong. I certainly didn’t hate my time with the toy, but I guess my imagination was only capable of going so far.

I also probably would’ve liked the show if I was a high schooler, and not the thirty-eight-year-old so and so reflecting on old Christmas presents from my childhood out of boredom. Or maybe not. I don’t know.