When Paul proposed writing a group of theme blogs about famous comic book guns I knew right away I wanted to write about the Buck Rogers XZ-38 Disintegrator Pistol. Buck Roger’s iconic ray gun was one of the first toys ever to be manufactured from a licensed character. Released in 1935, the XZ-38 toy was the follow up to the popular Buck Roger’s XZ-31 Rocket Pistol from the previous year. However, the more outlandish, art deco design of the XZ-38 Disintegrator, lifting straight from the popular newspaper strip, was the gun that would become synonymous with Buck Roger’s space adventures.

Interestingly, I discovered the distinctive ray gun an entirely different way, from the cover of the first self-titled Foo Fighters album.

Back in 1995, the Foo Fighters debut was the first CD I ever bought. I also had a t-shirt of the album cover (My second band shirt behind a Dookie-era Green Day shirt) which I wore to my first concert: The Foo Fighters and That Dog at the American Theatre in March of 1996. There I bought a second bootleg shirt with the Buck Rogers ray gun on the front and the tour dates on the back from what looked to be a homeless woman on the streets outside of the venue. Unbeknownst to me, or any of my peers who sported the same shirt through the halls of middle school, we were advertising a toy from our grandparent’s generation.

When I discovered the XZ-38 was from the Buck Roger’s legacy of toys a few later, I gained a new found appreciate for the disintegrator. After reading the introduction in the book “Ray Gun” by Eugene Metclaf, it really put the toy gun’s cultural importance in perspective. The XZ-38 and other 30s ray guns were really the first of their kind, setting up a template for the stylized interpretation of all the subsequent science fiction guns we’ll be discussing over the week.

To zap you back to the past, here is footage of the Foo Fighters tour I saw in my teens, complete with Dave Grohl head-banging with his Black Gibson Explorer and Pat Smear!

-Jon

---

Both comments and pings are currently closed.