| First appearance: StarTropics (Nintendo, NES, 1991) M.O.: Kidnapping; Psychic domination Weaknesses: Yo-yos; Bananas |
| Profile by Nich Maragos? | February 2, 2011 |
The history of alien invasions has revealed that these extraterrestrial marauders are vulnerable to a number of things ironically common on Earth: bacteria, or drinking water, or the song stylings of Slim Whitman.
The most embarrassing of all these, however, might be the sad story of the Prime Invader Zoda and his susceptibility to bananas.
He seemed to have everything going for him, at first. At a stroke he destroyed the civilization of the Argonians and their leader, Hirocon, leaving only seven children imprisoned in a set of three magic cubes. His next target, Earth, had its primary threat removed when he kidnapped Dr. Jones, the only Earthling aware of his existence, let alone his malign intent.
It might have worked, if he hadn’t based his whole operation out of a Pacific island chain where Dr. Jones had set up his lab. Everything that seemed to be an advantage in thwarting Jones’ young nephew, from the active volcano to the sunken pirate ship to the haunted graveyard, proved to be little threat for the feckless adventurer.
The last straw came when the Prime Invader found his own ship boarded by the human youth. Drawing on his fearsome mental strength, Zoda unleashed a psychic assault designed to dominate the young man’s mind and enlist his strange “yo-yo”-based martial prowess into his own army.
What he didn’t know was that Jones was versed in defenses against such an attack, discovering to his horror that the bananas Jones stuck in his ears blocked even the Prime Invader’s attempts at control. And once that point of no return had passed, neither his combat shell of a giant face with disembodied claws, nor his true saurian form, had any hope of repelling the boy in a physical confrontation. It would take a miracola to salvage Zoda’s scheme then.
Some say Zoda waged a time-based counterattack, but the trouble with finding good historical records on things like these is that temporally speaking, they never happened before they began. Anyone with hard evidence of a second campaign is invited to submit it to the Journal of Paleomalology for peer review.
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