Contemplations on Boomerangs

"Don't knock boomerangs man: they're coming back!"
-Mike Forest

It's probably common knowledge that boomerangs of popular lore and boomerangs in real life do not operate by the same laws of physical mechanics. This, however, became plain to me today as I was playing The Legend of Zelda (in its purest, 1984 incarnation, on the NES). For those who have never had the privilege of playing it, you spend most of your time traversing a vast, pixelated map screen from overhead as you swing swords (or, if you have full life, throw them) at strange creatures including large spiders and weird furry things with the kind of exaggerated DSL that would make Chasey Lain blush.

Anyway, one of the items in your initially limited repertoire is the "wooden boomerang," which eschews standard real-life boomerangs in mind-bending ways, such as having the capacity to actually stun enemies and retrieve far-away items in otherwise unreachable places. Also, the homely looking wooden boomerang also comes back to you no matter where you go: in other words, you can literally walk away from it, toward it, even bee-line diagonally across the screen to escape it; but, like a loyal domesticated pet or that psychotic ex that always manages to get your new phone number, it will always come back to you.

All of this, of course, would not be noteworthy on its own. In order to enjoy a game like The Legend of Zelda (or pretty much any video game, ever), you obviously need to go in with a healthy level of disbelief. No, that's not what strikes me as absurd about Zelda's "wooden" boomerang. What truly insults the bystander's intelligence is the later acquisition of the "magical boomerang."

The magical boomerang is a little bit anti-climactic in that there really isn't anything--other than the aforementioned disregard for physical restrictions--magical about it. The magical boomerang gets down with all the homing-missile, item retrieving, enemy-stunning antics of the wooden boomerang. The only difference between the two is that the magical boomerang flies a full screen length as opposed to the wooden boomerang's half screen. That's it. It still inflicts no damage on enemies. It isn't even any faster.

So, what the creators of Zelda are trying to tell us is that it is perfectly reasonable to believe that an ordinary, everyday boomerang carved from ordinary wood is capable of astonishing feats; the only reason it would ever be necessary to even bring magic into the equation is to explain the cosmic impossibility that a boomerang could ever fly for an entire screen length.

Because I blindly trust in the scientific conclusions of Nintendo developers, I have instructed Mike Forest to fashion me a wooden boomerang. Though we do not have access to magic at our apartment, I am perfectly happy settling for one with mildly limited range, as that will be the only drawback. Once this is done, I am going to quit my shitty job and move to a small town in the quaint suburbs, where I will find gainful employment as the on-call "cat-in-tree" guy at the local fire department. It will be a lucrative endeavor for sure.