The '80s, The South, and Jack Chick's Paranoia

How Doktor Rotwang Dodged the Bullet in the Satanic Panic...

For the record, I was born in Fordyce, Arkansas in 1968 and raised in the nearby town/village/wide spot known as New Edinburg.

If you can’t immediately recall off the top of your head where that is, don’t feel bad about it.

(The late, great Ace Frehley once asked me where I was from. I told him Little Rock because I was 99.999% sure Ace Frehley didn’t have a fucking clue where New Edinburg was.)

That’s the most rural Southern of rural Southern towns, and I grew up attending the most rural of Baptist churches which was even further out in the sticks than the town itself.

If this town had a soundtrack, it would be made by Dead Can Dance.

Now that you can admire the picture I’ve painted, let me tell you why I’m painting it.

I was one of the few there who had even heard of Dungeons & Dragons. Me and another guy. He tried to recruit a couple of others, but it didn’t stick.

At first, you could get Moldvay/Cook sets in the nearby Wal-Mart (that’s Fordyce on the above map), but the “harder stuff” could only be found in the larger cities. For us that was a 45 minute trip to nearby Pine Bluff and a Mom-n-Pop bookstore on the edge of the city limits named Pickwick’s Books.

Pickwick’s is long gone now and if you spend more than 30 minutes in Pine Bluff these days you can totally understand why.

Thank God for Little Rock.

But very soon, the church psychos bullied Wal-Mart, along with Sears and JC Penney, into removing all D&D products from their game sections, and therein lies the story for this post.

(Jack Chick at his most ludicrous. Anyone remember anything like this bullshit happening at your table? I certainly don’t.)

Being a teenager in the early 1980s, arguably the Golden Age for AD&D, I never really saw the Satanic Panic.

I’ve heard stories, horrible stories of mother hen bullying of bookstores, groups like BADD being formed and funded (note the last word) and weird episodes of 60 Minutes. There was that sad and atrocious novel Mazes & Monsters which got made into a TV movie with Tom Hanks.

(Tom Hanks peering into the entrance tunnel of a long and brilliant acting career, but checking for traps first. Image copyright to someone somewhere who isn’t me.)

But anyone in Dirty Burg breathing down my neck telling me I’m going to Hell for playing AD&D?

Didn’t happen. Not once. My own Mom was fundamentalist as hell and a devotee of Jerry Falwell, and she liked me playing D&D. She thought it was great. My Mom also loved vampire movies too, so there’s that...

Two chicks in my high school class (who, in retrospect, were way over-rated) were curious about me reading the Player’s Handbook in study hall. They totally... got the wrong impression about the title... and I had to set them straight. That was probably the first time they had heard of D&D.

Over time, I’ve concluded the “D&D is Satanic” was more of an urban phenomenon.

How urban? A few years later I attended college at nearby UA-Monticello. Quaint town that’s now overrun with burger joints. In about three years, I fell in with the campus Methodist Student Center… mainly because a guy there had a running D&D (2E) game going along with a Star Frontiers game which was rampant with hilarious stories. He and I formed a fourteen year friendship that ended because I became a serious liability to him (as many, many others did). Whole other story...

There was a rumor floating around that there was a coven of witches on campus, and he speculated it was because he was running a D&D game. In fact, he was sure of it. I never really saw anything to make the connection, but the rumor did ebb and flow over the years depending on how involved he was with the place. I suspect it’s still going on there.

I wasn’t there for this one, but I was told that one night a couple of the players were sitting there inside rolling up some new PCs… when in walked two very strange cats who were apparently unknown to anyone.

One was a chick with spiked blue hair and a ton of metal in her face framing her Manson lamps… accompanied by a Sting lookalike in a trench coat repeatedly flicking and closing a Zippo.

“We hear there’s gaming here,” they intoned. “Is it true? We want to get in on the gaming.”

The two players replied “Uh, no… nope. No gaming here. No idea what you’re talking about” while quickly shoving their books into a book bag.

I suspect that’s as weird as it got.

Make no mistake, I’m not belittling the experiences of others. I’ve heard stories over the years of family fights, book burning, bookstores being constantly harassed and so forth by busy bodies across the nation. Some geek asses getting kicked on the school bus. You name it.

The D&D subset of the Satanic Panic, which was definitely a thing, was definitely there and definitely caused problems for too many people.

I often think the tragic and highly inflated story of James Egbert Dallas III (Google it) did for AD&D sales what the “Paul is dead” rumor did for Beatles record sales. I’m pretty sure I’m right.

So much in fact that the 1989 sugar-free version of AD&D known as 2^nd edition removed almost all controversial elements of the game in order to give TSR a better public image… to include, but not limited to: demons, devils, half-orcs (and the implication of interracial SA), assassins, whores, and drug use. The giant Molech idol on the cover of the PHB. Satan walking off with Miss America on the cover of the DMG. And so on.

Yeah, good bye to the ‘70s, huh? Meddling old bitties…