Thursday, December 18, 2008

Air Man: The History of A Villain

I have a confession. Earlier today, I stumbled upon this story from Yahoo!'s Odd News department:

"TOKYO (Reuters) - A 60-year-old man who was thrown into the air in celebration at his retirement party died after his colleagues failed to catch him and he fell to the floor, a Japanese newspaper reported on Tuesday."

While gearing up for a blog about the story itself, I searched Google images for "Man In Air" or "Jump In Air" or just "In Air" to at least get a picture to post with the quote from this article. Seconds before I started to type a sentence or two in poor taste about this event (I know you think it's somewhat funny too, asshole), I was side-tracked by the results of my search with the image of a villain known as Air Man.

Oh, Air Man. Your name etched into the bright blue screen of Mega Man 2 on NES. Your dangerous world filled with disappearing and then reappearing giant pig heads with George Washington wigs spouting smaller versions of such from your ears as we all carefully tried to avoid those upside-down iced-cream cone horns. Those blue girating pieces of macarroni zipping out of red bowls on the floor were sure to stop our hero:



Powered by his will to destroy anything slightly above room temperature, Air Man was on a mission: stop Mega Man from ever assembling that camping tent on a brisk winter's day. Built from the spare parts of Dr. Wily's defective Honeywell oscillating fan, Air Man's chest tornadoes would send any man, mega or other, into a cooled, soothing coma.

Of course, you never saw Air Woman. It's rumored that all the other evil Robots could never hang out any more because Air Man kept making that "she sure can blow" joke while bumping his elbows on their metallic chests. Get over it, guys. Air Man is legend.

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