Bebop's Blimp

How's this for a nerd filter? At work today, I was in someone's office,
talking about work stuff. When I turned to walk out, I said as a
conversation closer, "Well, keep on rockin'." She retorted, "Yeah, I'm
rocksteady." And before I even knew what was happening, I said, "Call me
Bebop." As someone who spent a large part of his youth manning the Ninja
Turtle blimp, sometimes my instincts just take over.

I actually did have the TMNT blimp; it was majestic. I got it for Christmas
one year, and right after I laid eyes on it, the purpose of my life became
to ferry around action figures from one end of our house to the other. I
only used it for transport, though, I never staged any battles with it.
There's a good reason for that. If you were to float that thing into
battle, it doesn't seem like it'd take too long before someone on the other
side said, "Hey guys, why don't we try shooting at the blimp?" Even at the
age of 8, I knew that slow, highly flammable vehicles were better suited for
luxurious pizza parites than for for destroying Shredder.

I think the Ninja Turtle blimp was actually the coolest toy I ever had.
That's not to say it was the coolest toy around. For me, that was the GI
Joe Space Shuttle. Man oh man, I lusted for that like Gollum, but I never
got it. In retrospect, that's a good thing; why on earth did the GI Joe
guys need a space shuttle? Were the forces of Cobra storming the Van Allen
radiation belts? Perhaps Destro took over Telemundo's satellites.
Pragmatic or not, I wanted that thing badly. Imagine the sort of flight
service I could've arranged across the living room with a space shuttle plus
a blimp. You can either go very slowly and burst into flames over the
couch, or you can go at warp speed to the garage, where you'll die in the
freezer. Clearly Air Powell wouldn't have made its money on repeat
business.