Childhood kinks: Conveyor belts and mechanical hands
So I have this "mechanical/technological" square on my Kink Bingo card, and it's actually kind of exciting because it means I can talk to you about one of the first kinks I ever knew I had, way back when I was about four years old, before I even knew what to do with the idea of a kink-before I even fully understood sexual arousal.
I can trace the genesis, or the epiphany-because I'm not sure you can say whether the media created a taste in me or awakened a nascent preference; I suspect the latter-to three cartoon scenes: two from the Care Bears and one from My Little Pony. Googling revealed that they all aired in 1986. I would have been three to four years old, then, or maybe five if I saw them in reruns. A fourth scene that I remembered once I started thinking about this post, from Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, aired in 1989.
What the scenes have in common are conveyor belts and mechanical hands. Various of them also include bondage, washing/cleaning, sort-of-ageplay, medical play and noncon. For the sake of this square, we will focus on the conveyor belts and the hands. (I definitely did when I was a kid.) Warnings for anything listed above that might be triggery.
Care Bears Movie II
The standout example for me is a scene from early in the Care Bears Movie II (IMDB) when two young human campers babysit the Care Bear Cubs. They don't know what to do when some of the cubs start crying, but it turns out there's an automated system to get them ready for bed: mechanical hands pick up the cubs from their cribs, put them on a table and change their diapers; the hands move them over to a conveyor belt, where it rains bathwater on them; the campers powder them; the cubs ride a slide into their cribs; and the hands come back to give them their bottles.
Password: belts
Clip from "Care Bears Movie II" from bironic on Vimeo.
I... am a little ashamed to admit that re-watching the scene for this post after many years still gave (gives) me a thrill. Especially the part in the middle where you see all the steps on screen at the same time.
I don't know what I understood about this scene and exactly how I felt about it as a child, but I do know it excited me. I know I thought about it a lot, imagining being one of those cubs being handled, lifted, conveyed, rained on, air-dried, cared for. If there is such a thing as proto-arousal, I had it for this scenario.
Another thing I now have for this scene is… an earworm. Sigh.
My Little Pony, "The Glass Princess"
A lady pig villain ties the ponies to a conveyor belt, first with ineffective glass cuffs and then with rope and shackles. As if that weren't exciting enough, the ponies are swept through a car wash sort of thing where they're buffed, washed and dried. I remembered the reappearance of mechanical hands to towel-dry them, but on re-watch, I found there are also gears and whistles and an array of moving parts. The ponies come out looking damp and well used weary. They're then inspected and prettied up by some, like, bird henchmen (henchbirds?), while still tied down.
Password: belts
Clip from My Little Pony "The Glass Princess" from bironic on Vimeo.
Oh, man, I had such a thing for this scene. Such a thing. Again with the steadily moving belt and the being handled by uncaring implements. Also again with the being washed/bathed. This time with the added taboo edge of being made to do it against their will. Come to think of it, this is probably also where my erotica conception of being prepped for forced prostitution comes from.
Care Bears TV show: "Grams Bear's Thanksgiving Surprise"
Another formative scene for me is one from a Care Bears TV episode where-I confess I'm blushing a little to say this "out loud"-Grams Bear is put in a pie plate, trapped there by a crust topping, and sent on a conveyor belt toward an oven by the episode's Crabby Apple Pie-baking villain. It's a variant of the classic "tied-up hero moves inexorably on a conveyance toward a sticky end," but it made an impression on me like none of the others have, either because it was my first or because it contained elements that particularly appealed to me. (Is strudel bondage a thing?)
Password: belts
Clip from Care Bears "Grams Bear's Thanksgiving's Surprise" from bironic on Vimeo.
Before I re-watched the episode last night for the first time since the '80s, I wrote: "I wanted to be Grams Bear struggling to get free. The unforgiving hardness of the plate, the squishy topping holding me fast, the belt moving beneath me, the villain cackling in the background!" Well, it turns out she doesn't struggle so much as call out to the other bears for help, which is interesting, because I "remembered" that part fondly. I guess my brain liked infusing the memory with even more of my own kinks. (My kid brain also must not have processed that she should have gone into the oven about three times while the others worked to shut off the machine.)
What's also interesting is that even though it's right up my alley and surely contributed to the shaping and/or articulation of my turn-ons, I didn't remember the mechanical arm, shaped like the claw from those grab-a-plushie booths, that snatches Grams from the park and into Sour Sam's truck (:15), then deposits her in his factory and into the pie dish (2:45), nor the barred captivity in between. Ditto for the mechanical spatula that lifts her off in the nick of time. Probably I incorporated that into my fantasies at the time, then forgot it over the years. So it seems the episode stuck with me in both conscious and subconscious ways.
Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers, "Adventures in Squirrel-sitting"
Last but not least, a scene from the Rescue Rangers that I baaaarely recalled: only that Gadget got picked up by something like a mechanical hand and deposited in some villainous contraption that may or may not have been a conveyor belt. Some Googling and some guesswork led me to the right disc-thanks again, Netflix :)-and memories came flooding back as I watched the episode.
Turns out the Fat Cat villain, who sounds like Dom Deluise's cat from An American Tail, has the whole team hoisted up in pairs on metal pincers. With the push of a button, he sends them jerking along a clothesline and dropping down a funnel into his cat food canning machine, where there awaits-you guessed it-a conveyor belt, complete with chopping axes and a giant pounding mallet. They spend time doing your typical dumb running along the conveyor belt in the opposite direction of the threat instead of 90 degrees off the side of the belt, but whatever, the point for me was more about the magical combination of being trapped and held fast while something sweeps you along through or toward something sexy-dangerous. After an almost successful escape attempt, they accidentally tie themselves together and brace for a pounded-flat fate. Happy young bironic.
Password: belts
Clip from Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers "Adventures in Squirrelsitting" from bironic on Vimeo.
In conclusion
So yes, I had a huge thing for conveyor belts and mechanical hands by the time I was school-aged. When I had my first fictional crush, on Dr. McCoy, the coolest thing I could imagine was being put through a Sickbay machine on a conveyor belt. I definitely had at least one conveyor belt-like dream with a series of log flumes, where flowing water replaced the belt itself. Weird? Maybe. But here we are in fandom, during Kink Bingo season, and it's okay to talk about this stuff. <3
I can trace the genesis, or the epiphany-because I'm not sure you can say whether the media created a taste in me or awakened a nascent preference; I suspect the latter-to three cartoon scenes: two from the Care Bears and one from My Little Pony. Googling revealed that they all aired in 1986. I would have been three to four years old, then, or maybe five if I saw them in reruns. A fourth scene that I remembered once I started thinking about this post, from Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, aired in 1989.
What the scenes have in common are conveyor belts and mechanical hands. Various of them also include bondage, washing/cleaning, sort-of-ageplay, medical play and noncon. For the sake of this square, we will focus on the conveyor belts and the hands. (I definitely did when I was a kid.) Warnings for anything listed above that might be triggery.
Care Bears Movie II
The standout example for me is a scene from early in the Care Bears Movie II (IMDB) when two young human campers babysit the Care Bear Cubs. They don't know what to do when some of the cubs start crying, but it turns out there's an automated system to get them ready for bed: mechanical hands pick up the cubs from their cribs, put them on a table and change their diapers; the hands move them over to a conveyor belt, where it rains bathwater on them; the campers powder them; the cubs ride a slide into their cribs; and the hands come back to give them their bottles.
Password: belts
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Clip from "Care Bears Movie II" from bironic on Vimeo.
I... am a little ashamed to admit that re-watching the scene for this post after many years still gave (gives) me a thrill. Especially the part in the middle where you see all the steps on screen at the same time.
I don't know what I understood about this scene and exactly how I felt about it as a child, but I do know it excited me. I know I thought about it a lot, imagining being one of those cubs being handled, lifted, conveyed, rained on, air-dried, cared for. If there is such a thing as proto-arousal, I had it for this scenario.
Another thing I now have for this scene is… an earworm. Sigh.
My Little Pony, "The Glass Princess"
A lady pig villain ties the ponies to a conveyor belt, first with ineffective glass cuffs and then with rope and shackles. As if that weren't exciting enough, the ponies are swept through a car wash sort of thing where they're buffed, washed and dried. I remembered the reappearance of mechanical hands to towel-dry them, but on re-watch, I found there are also gears and whistles and an array of moving parts. The ponies come out looking damp and well used weary. They're then inspected and prettied up by some, like, bird henchmen (henchbirds?), while still tied down.
Password: belts
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Clip from My Little Pony "The Glass Princess" from bironic on Vimeo.
Oh, man, I had such a thing for this scene. Such a thing. Again with the steadily moving belt and the being handled by uncaring implements. Also again with the being washed/bathed. This time with the added taboo edge of being made to do it against their will. Come to think of it, this is probably also where my erotica conception of being prepped for forced prostitution comes from.
Care Bears TV show: "Grams Bear's Thanksgiving Surprise"
Another formative scene for me is one from a Care Bears TV episode where-I confess I'm blushing a little to say this "out loud"-Grams Bear is put in a pie plate, trapped there by a crust topping, and sent on a conveyor belt toward an oven by the episode's Crabby Apple Pie-baking villain. It's a variant of the classic "tied-up hero moves inexorably on a conveyance toward a sticky end," but it made an impression on me like none of the others have, either because it was my first or because it contained elements that particularly appealed to me. (Is strudel bondage a thing?)
Password: belts
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Clip from Care Bears "Grams Bear's Thanksgiving's Surprise" from bironic on Vimeo.
Before I re-watched the episode last night for the first time since the '80s, I wrote: "I wanted to be Grams Bear struggling to get free. The unforgiving hardness of the plate, the squishy topping holding me fast, the belt moving beneath me, the villain cackling in the background!" Well, it turns out she doesn't struggle so much as call out to the other bears for help, which is interesting, because I "remembered" that part fondly. I guess my brain liked infusing the memory with even more of my own kinks. (My kid brain also must not have processed that she should have gone into the oven about three times while the others worked to shut off the machine.)
What's also interesting is that even though it's right up my alley and surely contributed to the shaping and/or articulation of my turn-ons, I didn't remember the mechanical arm, shaped like the claw from those grab-a-plushie booths, that snatches Grams from the park and into Sour Sam's truck (:15), then deposits her in his factory and into the pie dish (2:45), nor the barred captivity in between. Ditto for the mechanical spatula that lifts her off in the nick of time. Probably I incorporated that into my fantasies at the time, then forgot it over the years. So it seems the episode stuck with me in both conscious and subconscious ways.
Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers, "Adventures in Squirrel-sitting"
Last but not least, a scene from the Rescue Rangers that I baaaarely recalled: only that Gadget got picked up by something like a mechanical hand and deposited in some villainous contraption that may or may not have been a conveyor belt. Some Googling and some guesswork led me to the right disc-thanks again, Netflix :)-and memories came flooding back as I watched the episode.
Turns out the Fat Cat villain, who sounds like Dom Deluise's cat from An American Tail, has the whole team hoisted up in pairs on metal pincers. With the push of a button, he sends them jerking along a clothesline and dropping down a funnel into his cat food canning machine, where there awaits-you guessed it-a conveyor belt, complete with chopping axes and a giant pounding mallet. They spend time doing your typical dumb running along the conveyor belt in the opposite direction of the threat instead of 90 degrees off the side of the belt, but whatever, the point for me was more about the magical combination of being trapped and held fast while something sweeps you along through or toward something sexy-dangerous. After an almost successful escape attempt, they accidentally tie themselves together and brace for a pounded-flat fate. Happy young bironic.
Password: belts
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Clip from Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers "Adventures in Squirrelsitting" from bironic on Vimeo.
In conclusion
So yes, I had a huge thing for conveyor belts and mechanical hands by the time I was school-aged. When I had my first fictional crush, on Dr. McCoy, the coolest thing I could imagine was being put through a Sickbay machine on a conveyor belt. I definitely had at least one conveyor belt-like dream with a series of log flumes, where flowing water replaced the belt itself. Weird? Maybe. But here we are in fandom, during Kink Bingo season, and it's okay to talk about this stuff. <3