Sights not seen

Around the time HEAVY METAL (1981) was released, an older cousin of mine had a poster of this scene on his bedroom wall. I would be eleven, maybe twelve, he was already sixteen. After much cajoling, and begging, and trading, I finally persuaded him to let me have it, unbeknownst to my parents. He always had wonderful posters on his walls. I remember another one, with a psychedelic Bob Marley painting that made his rasta hair seem alive like that many colorful serpents, and another one of Björn Borg, and an unstapled double spread from a music magazine featuring Agnetha and Frida from ABBA, singing in very short skirts and fishnets. Later on, this last one would also be mine. But right then no other image set my mind on fire like this one did. For in it, there was an unexpected revelation: animated cartoons could also be sexy.

As every preteen, I watched lots of cartoons on TV, and just like any preteen, I felt that quite indescribable pre-sexual tingle of arousal when a sexy cartoon girl – say, Sheila on the Dungeons & Dragons TV series, for example – was in dangerous situations; or – supreme pleasure – was captured by the bad guys and tied to a post in some damp and dark cavern. In that image, however, in its printed immobility and glorious color, was suddenly depicted everything my young mind struggled to imagine could happen to my bound heroines. Or, more precisely, what was hidden beneath their cartoon clothes. (Of course, I knew some of it; at age seven I’d seen SUPERMAN (1978), and Valerie Perrine’s stunning cleavage would haunt many a sleepless summer night thereafter; as would Jessica Lange, bound and frightened as offering to savage Kong, clad in ragged furs, in Dino de Laurenti’s  KING KONG (1976); moreover, Tarzan’s mate, Jane, didn’t have much in the way of clothes, and Tarzan movies were my favorites when I was a kid).

But I don’t recall having seen a naked cartoon girl before I saw this poster. And the scenarios this image of Taarna (I didn’t knew her name then), naked and bound, with proud breasts exposed, and that defiant look in her eyes, would fire my fantasies for years. What had happened to her? What would be done to her? At the time, I hadn’t no way of seeing the movie. It didn’t play on my hometown cinema, never ran on national TV, and when I got my first VCR I was already eighteen and, by then, there was no way in hell that the real movie would ever reach the peaks of depravity my mind had accrued around that scene and what was done to Taarna. And so, although I have the film in DVD (I bought it as soon as it came out), I never got to see it. And I guess I’ll never will. So Taarna will be forever tied in that spread-eagled pose, looking defiantly at me, with gorgeous naked breasts, trying to figure out what’s going on in my mind.