Nerding Day: Cybersix: The Live-Action Series (Patreon)

Everybody loves Batman, the latex-wearing crimefighter who leaps off of buildings and only comes out at night. But you know what would make Batman better? If he was a crossdressing genetically-engineered babe created by Nazi scientists for the purpose of world domination and wore a big floppy hat. Right? I think we can all agree that's an improvement on the original formula.

Created by Argentine perverts Carlos Trillo and Meglia in 1991, Cybersix is a comic series detailing the exploits of its titular character, an artificial human on the run from the mad doctor who created her. Possibly they were trying to clone Hitler? It's like The Boys from Brazil, except with a leggy brunette instead of Gregory Peck. Wait, sorry, same thing. Dude had some serious gams.

Look, I get it. Mission drift happens. Fledgling Manor was supposed to be a cozy game about a witch trying to find her lost cat in the alps, and it ended up as a title we couldn't publish on the Switch because the quantity of gay vampire dry humping it contains greatly exceeds Nintendo's actually pretty generous limits. So yeah, sometimes you set out to create a genetic copy of the leader of the Third Reich and you end up with a sexy lady who has to drink the glowing green blood of Frankensteins to stay alive. Live and learn.

Cybersix is known outside of South America mainly because of the animated series that ran in the late '90s. I've mentioned this before, but it has an insanely hard theme song. It also bravely carried forward the Batman torch of giving children strange and confusing feelings. The series loosely adapted the comic, adding new characters and changing elements like Cybersix being a Frankenstein vampire, instead having her drink the vials of Ecto-Cooler her enemies drop like video game power-ups upon their destruction.

Cybersix was animated by a Japanese studio that worked on classics like Detective Conan and Lupin the 3rd, so the quality is actually really good. And while they toned down the Nazi stuff, they kept the spirit of horny from the original series intact. Thankfully, all of our parents were too divorced to give a shit what we were watching in 1999. Just me? Oops!

They did tone down Cybersix's boobs a little in the cartoon. In the comic, they're not only gigantic, they're also out a lot of the time. Even on the covers! Especially on the covers.

When she's not nude (tastefully or otherwise), Cybersix fights Nazi gargoyles and fuckable werewolves. But during the day, she needs to conceal her identity from Von Reichter and his minions. And so, she assumes the identity of mild-mannered teacher Adrian Seidelman. Donning a pair of glasses and clothes several sizes too big for her, she successfully passes as a man in a pre-transvestigation world, resulting in some weird boners for her fellow teacher Lucas and a likely future realization of queer identity for Lori, whose lust for Adrian is a recurring plot point.

You couldn't make Cybersix today. Not because of woke, but because, like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, the central conceit simply wouldn't play. The median American voter today is too aware of carrying angles and gungular ratios to buy Patrick Swayze as a woman. Maybe Cybersix has magic hypno-glasses like Clark Kent that make people perceive her as a total Chad.

The combination of great animation, out-there subject matter, and a short run made Cybersix into a cult classic. But it wasn't the first adaptation of the original comic. Four years before the cartoon, a live-action Cybersix series aired on Argentine television. It only got eight episodes before it was cancelled, and it is a glorious disaster.

Let's start with the lead. They cast actor and model Carolina Peleritti, who, yeah, is a mega babe.

Moreover, she is a beaked-up queen.

I know rhinoplasties weren't as common in the '90s as they are now, but I still consider this critical media representation.

Peleritti seems like a decent actress, though the whole disguise thing doesn't really work as well in live action. She looks like a beautiful woman cosplaying as the lead from an anime titled something like Being a Nerd Got Me an Elf Harem in Another World??

Another problem: Cybersix is an action series about a superhero fighting monsters. To do that in live action would mean needing stunt people and an effects budget, which Argentina's most ambitious television producers of the 1990s did not have. Occasionally we'll get Cybersix throwing a single kick at someone and missing, but fights seldom go much further than that.

Instead, the series fills much of its air time with slow-motion shots of Cybersix sitting around her apartment in her underwear, pacing her apartment in her underwear, cleaning her apartment in her underwear.

And look: I'm not complaining, really. But who was this show for, exactly? I get the sense that South American audiences are less scandalized by sexuality than their northern counterparts, but is this a sexy drama for adults or a goofy action-comedy for kids? The answer, as best I can tell, is "yes."

Take the first episode. It follows a similar plot as the first episode of the cartoon, in which Adrian's student Lori tries to force herself on him.

When Adrian rejects her advances, Lori has her gang attack him, which he escapes thanks to the intervention of fellow teacher Lucas. I had a little trouble following the next part since I don't speak Spanish and there were no subtitles, but Lori appears to arrive in class the next day dressed as Cybersix, gets kicked out, then makes another attempt to sexually assault her teacher after school.

Look, I get it. It was the '90s, we thought this kind of thing was hilarious, and the fact that it is obviously two women adds another level of titillation. What I don't get is how this leads to Lori stripping down to her underwear and then trying to fight Cybersix in the streets.

Yeah, that's Lori she's throwing that awkward kick at. You might also notice that Cybersix isn't wearing her trademark hat here, and in fact, she doesn't for most of the show. Maybe Peleritti didn't want it to cover her face. Maybe they couldn't get it to stay on. I don't know. But without the hat or cape, she kind of just looks like a sex worker who did her best to put together a Catwoman outfit on extremely short notice.

The episode ends with Cybersix being trapped in a box by Von Reichter's son Jose. In the cartoon, he was a goosestepping evil child.

In the live-action version, he's a fully-grown man wearing short pants and garters. He looks like the world's most problematic Panic! at the Disco fan.

And how about his dad about Von Reichter, the evil Nazi scientist? In the cartoon, his aesthetic can best be summed up as "extra-racist safari director."

How did they depict him in the live-action series? Well, here's how he appears at the end of the episode as Cybersix passes out in Jose's Cybersix Glass Box Trap.

Is this symbolism? Are we meant to interpret a shot of the villain eating a banana while facing directly into the camera as some kind of castration metaphor, whereby Cybersix's masculine vitality has been sapped by the power of glass box? Are bananas critical to the plot in some way I couldn't discern because I didn't understand any of the dialogue? What the fuck is happening? We need some more context.

Let's try another episode. In "Fratello Pippo," Von Reichter faces the biggest threat to his resurgent Nazi organization yet. It isn't Cybersix, who is still mostly just walking around with no pants on.

No, it's the harsh realities of economics. They're got a lot of overhead, those Nazi scientists, and making flesh monsters doesn't exactly bring in the big bucks. And so, they do what The Aquabats' singer did when he realized he'd spent most of his adult life playing in a comedy rock band whose members all wore matching spandex outfits: they pivot to the lucrative world of children's entertainment by creating a monster to enthrall the hearts and minds of the nation's kids.

Cybersix, meanwhile, yearns for the childhood entertainer of her generation: a sailor named Captain Pituso. She looks upon Fratello Pippo with the geriatric fury of a millennial cursing out Skibidi Toilet. You forgot how stupid and terrible animutations were, man. You forgot about Lobster Magnet!

A person cannot look like Mickey or Pluto! Cartoons these days are infected by the woke mind virus, telling kids they can be a talking mouse or his non-verbal dog pet! But uh, Cybersix?

Your brother is a fucking panther. (Don't worry about it. He just is.) Is he not a person? Woe, for I have discovered an inconsistency in your reasoning and you must therefore now revise all of your beliefs accordingly. Signed, everyone who is still on Twitter because they think they can use logic to reform the jackals baying for the streets to run red with the blood of the innocent.

To be fair, I guess her point is that Fratello Pippo, a real living hell gremlin, should not exist in our reality. The villains could have just pretended that their creation was an advanced robot, work the Mac and Me angle. But no. Instead, Von Reichter comes up with an explanation that only a professional race scientist could devise.

Fratello Pippo looks like this:

Now, I must make it absolutely clear that Fratello Pippo is not some kind of Sailor Moon thing where he's feeding on the kids' love to charge up a moon-exploding hate ray. He was created solely for the purpose of entertaining children. That's his whole deal. But an artist cannot help but infuse their passions into their designs. Just as the creators of Cybersix made a show mainly about a woman walking around her apartment in panties and socks, Von Reichter made a lovable Tibetan skinmuppet that hungers for child flesh. Just in the regular cannibal way, though, as Von Reichter explains. I think.

Fratello Pippo just wants to eat children, not sexually attack them. Maybe. I think something is lost in translation here.

Later, Cybersix has a nightmare about Fratello Pippo chasing her through a sky void.

Again, I don't think this guy has psychic powers. I don't think she even knows he actually eats people yet. She's just having a regular nightmare about a grinning ogre she saw on TV trying to kill her, and this happened to be the one time it wasn't the result of falling asleep on the couch during Mind of Mencia reruns.

Cybersix rescues Captain Pituso and he responds to being carried up onto a roof by an impossibly beautiful woman in a leather catsuit by complaining that nobody likes him anymore.

Get your priorities straight, man! You look like Rob Schneider went to jail for having sex with every topping at a Subway and yet you're somehow sitting next to an Argentine goddess who moments ago rescued you from a Tibetan piranha monster! Seize the moment! You know what you have to do. Ask her to go see RoboCop 4!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: toasty god, who had all of the original comics on display and blew up the covers into full sized posters for lore reasons.

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