Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Best Thing Made by the 80's

In just a few short years, those of us born in the 1980's will be officially uncool. That doesn't bother me so much, as I was never particularly cool to begin with. What does bother me is that all those millennial kids currently enjoying the pop culture spotlight don't really appreciate the difference between the 80's as a span of time and the 80's as a concept. What has basically been reduced to a series of musical compilations, cheekily reductive movies and more bad hair styles than Lionel Richie can remember wearing was actually a very important period in global history. International superpowers fell, free speech in America achieved great victories and the foreboding groundwork for worldwide economic disasters was laid. So, when I say that Cadillacs and Dinosaurs was the best thing made by the 80's, I'm not talking about the time period. Rather, I'm referring to that nebulous collection of alluring pop culture absurdities all those millennial kids will one day know as "The 80's".

For starters, Capcom didn't adapt Mark Schultz's wantonly bizarre alternative comic Xenozoic Tales into an arcade game until 1993. The original comic came out in 1987, with publisher Kitchen Sink Press putting out a few editions every so often for the next decade. CBS turned Cadillacs and Dinosaurs into a Saturday morning cartoon in late 1993, though it was predictably stripped of the pulp violence and sexuality that made the comic popular in the first place. Capcom's arcade game really captures the spirit of Xenozoic Tales, indulging in ridiculous set pieces and gloriously over-the-top touches that set it apart from the plentiful beat-em-up genre that dominated arcades in the early 90's.

The format of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is simple. Players choose one of four characters, each with unique attributes, then set about punching, kicking and suplexing everything that moves until the quarters run out or the game ends. It has a look and feel similar to the classic Final Fight, only it makes no pretenses toward seriousness. C&D is basically a 14-year-old boy's idea for the perfect video game. In addition to being able to beat the hell out of hundreds of bad guys, levels are strewn with barrels and destructible scenery containing everything from machine guns to hand grenades. When an enemy gets hit with one of several kinds of explosives, he doesn't just die, he gets rendered into a scattering collection of bloody meat and eyeballs. And when the guns run out of bullets, the player can use them as clubs. It's gratuitous and hilarious.

The action movie excess of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is really what sets it apart from other games in the genre. It's like playing a silly Flash cartoon about Chuck Norris. You don't just fight 10-foot tall punks with spiked maces, you also have the opportunity to dropkick a raging tyrannosaurus in the face and live to tell the tale. When the player characters lose a life, they don't just come back out of nowhere, they drop out of the sky following a barrage of artillery with a loaded bazooka in their hands.

The game's giddy centerpiece is a wild bonus round in which the player drives a giant Cadillac through a desert wasteland running over as many helpless enemies, barrels and monsters as possible. The whole thing is punctuated with a climactic showdown with a crazed mutant on a motorcycle who lobs grenades and is finally dispatched by a blast from a discarded shotgun. Truly, of all of Capcom's insane experiments in arcade gaming, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is the magnum opus.