KABLAAM! AND THE BUG INSIDE: A RETROSPECTIVE IN ACTION FIGURE DUST AND CHANNEL 99 STATIC" by a boy who never stopped rewinding Action League Now!/“From Synclavier to Cybersoul: Frank Zappa, the Machine, and the Future We’re Still Catching Up To” by Laurence Luther Adams, with signal-flow annotations by Buzz Drainpipe

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I remember where I was. Meridian Street, East Boston. Somewhere between the corner store that sold penny candies in plastic tubs and the cracked steps that led to an apartment full of bootleg VHS and the scent of Sunday sauce. That’s where KABLAM! hit me like a rogue asteroid of orange splatter and claymation chaos.

From the first episode, something inside me clicked—or maybe glitched. A bug, you could say. The kind that burrows deep, rewiring your receptors so that no amount of “normal” media would ever feel quite right again. I didn’t want shows with morals. I wanted melting plastic superheroes yelling about underpants. I wanted Henry and June breaking the fourth wall like it owed them money. I wanted Stinky Diver riding toilet water like it was a tidal wave of destiny.

That bug—it never left. It grew limbs. It learned to draw. It learned to cut video and write stories and tape cardboard signs on the wall that said “DO NOT ENTER – SHOW IN PROGRESS.”

KABLAM! taught me that art could be weird. That being a freak was a career path. That animation didn’t have to be clean or cute—it could be violent, surreal, absurd, and glorious. It showed me that discarded toys had souls, and maybe, so did I.

There’s this Spiderman newspaper panel I used to stare at. He’s mid-swing, shouting some moral quip, and the headline just says something wild like “SPIDEY STOPS CLOCKWORK ROBBERY.” That’s what KABLAM! felt like: a superheroic page of nonsense that somehow meant everything.

So now it’s on Paramount Plus. You can stream the whole thing. Every wiggly, scribbled, plastic-burnt episode. And it’s not nostalgia. It’s a summoning. Because that bug in me? It’s still squirming, still kicking, still trying to build something out of felt and madness.

Watch it again. Let it bite you.

Let us not begin with GarageBand. Or AI. Or even MIDI. Let us begin with a machine that cost more than your house and sounded like the dreams of a Martian librarian: the Synclavier.

The Synclavier was born in the late ’70s out of New England Digital—a name that sounds like a tech support hotline but, in reality, built a spaceship for sound. One part synthesizer, one part digital sampler, one part philosopher’s stone for freaks with a PhD in signal flow, it was the kind of device that didn’t just play music. It rewired it.

Enter Frank Zappa. The man who could write 12-tone fugues in the time it took most rock stars to find their sunglasses. For Zappa, the Synclavier wasn’t just a tool—it was the answer to every logistical nightmare he'd ever suffered dealing with orchestras that couldn’t sight-read 13/16 time while gargling. It was precise. It was obedient. It could play anything he imagined, no matter how impossible.

He loaded it with orchestral samples, gnarly synth tones, and sounds that seemed to come from the future’s own garage. “G-Spot Tornado,” “Jazz from Hell”—these weren’t tracks. They were proofs-of-concept for a new kind of music: fully composed, totally synthetic, and executed with atomic accuracy. Zappa once said the Synclavier was “the only way to get the notes right.” And if anyone knew how wrong humans could be, it was him.

Zappa didn’t use the Synclavier to imitate human players. He used it to exceed them. In doing so, he laid down the blueprint for what would later become the DAW-based world: GarageBand, FL Studio, Ableton Live. He was dragging and dropping before there were mice to drag or screens to drop into.

And now? Now we have AI music models that ingest decades of sonic data and spit out symphonies in the style of Satie meets Skrillex. But this isn’t a new revolution. It’s the second act of the one Zappa started. The Synclavier was the first time a composer could literally program emotion, chaos, and comedy into a machine—and have it talk back.

In a very real sense, Zappa cracked open the question: what is a composer when the instrument can think? What is performance when the performer is made of code?

He made the machine dream.

So yes—GarageBand is Synclavier’s accessible grandchild. MIDI is its grammar. AI is its neural reawakening. But Zappa was the first to throw the match into the dry brush of sonic modernity and say, “Let’s burn the score.”

He didn’t just compose on the Synclavier. He collaborated with it. And the future still hasn’t caught up.