Childhood Hero: 'Baja Hitam'

When it is raining during weekend, the only place I could go is stay inside my hotel room; browsing all TV Channels. Channels with interesting English Movies or Dramas are usually shown in Tamil; others are really old and boring. So, I usually ended up watching cartoons or kids channel.

The most watched kid channel for me is Jetix, a channel that shows Power Rangers! It is usually about 5 kids transform into superheroes with helmets and suits, running around trying to save the world, destroying some monsters or creatures that tried to take over or destroy the world.

I guess there is a kid inside everyone of us or else movies like Spiderman, Ironman or Incredible Hulk would not hit Top Box Office chart.

I remembered my childhood hero, a Japanese but Malay dubbed series called ‘Baja Hitam’. Like other kid show, a guy transformed into a grasshopper kind of robot (that might scare the hell out of some girls if appear in the middle of the night) to save the world. One thing that don’t make sense was that the transformation sequence really takes very long …very very long…. Take a look..

About 25 seconds! I don’t know how the bad guys could stand there watching him transforming. It seems like they went to make a coffee or go for a toilet break while waiting for him to transform.

It created craze among my friends. Some wore helmet for no reason; some be-friended with grasshopper hoping the grasshopper could give them ‘power’; and some were reaching the transform sequence hoping they could unlock the transformation secret one day .

Anyway, I got out of the hype quite fast after learning how to read a Malay dictionary. It seems that ‘Baja’ also means fertilizer. So, Baja Hitam is….

Hmm, talking about ‘Baja Hitam’, I think I am half infected already.