#[the music for the original dub of his movie was foreshadowing this]

[cxldtyrant]

I am one step closer to having Cooler get into Earth's hard rock/heavy metal genre...

[chalkrevelations]

Word of Honor Ep 6, and let’s talk a little about what’s canon, and what’s not, and about the particular slip-slidiness of the line between them on this show.

But first, due diligence: If you are NEW or JUST VISITING, this is a re-watch, so you’re going to find SPOILERS not just for this ep, but for the entire show. Scroll away and come back later if you haven’t seen all 36.5 eps and want to watch unspoiled. Also, heads-up, this got super long, because I had to talk about that stuff up there and then still talk about the ep. Hashtag long post (remorseful).

So, “canon,” as applied to fannish source material (in Western fandom, at least) traditionally has been considered the official stuff – the episode, the book, the comic, the movie – based on the religious definition of  “canon,” the collection of texts accepted as genuine and official within a religion. The word “fanon” – widely accepted fannish ideas – plays on this, as does the fandom concept of “word of God,” or things the Creators have said about the text but outside of it. Is it in the show as it aired or the book as it was printed? Canon. Is it not in the show as it aired or the book as it was printed? Not canon. (Apocrypha? Maybe. Anyway.) Generally, I think we’d say that things like material in the first draft of a script that doesn’t make it through revisions and onto the screen isn’t canon, even if you can get your hands on a copy of the first draft. The final product that airs is what’s canon. BUT this gets super slippery in something like WoH, in a way that’s exemplified in this episode. This ep is one of the places where people who can lip-read Chinese have spotted some significant dialogue changes between what the actors say on-screen and what lines have been dubbed in. (Everybody’s dubbed in cdramas, it’s just the thing that happens. You have your on-screen actors, and you have your voice actors. The ONLY person in The Untamed who did his own voice dubbing, for instance, was Ji Li, who played Nie Huaisang. All the other characters had voice actors dubbed in. In fact, the voice actor for Jiang Cheng in The Untamed is the voice actor for Wen Kexing in WoH.) One of the descriptions of WoH that I’ve heard is that this show was filmed as a bl and dubbed as a bromance. The thing is, nobody tried very hard to hide the shift. There are plenty of places that you can clearly see the actor’s mouths don’t match the dubbing, and they’re not artfully shot or edited to hide this. They’re fully on-screen, mouthing words that don’t match, right out in the open, almost like they want to you to pick up on it. Almost like it’s canon, because it’s right there on-screen, aired in the episode. In my first-watch reactions to Eps 36 and 37, I talked a lot about how the dubbing puts a layer of de-queered no-homo over what the on-screen actors are saying in these places, but if you can see what they’re actually saying and understand it, does that make it canon? What does it mean, both textually and meta-textually, if you can’t believe what you’re hearing – what you’re being told – because it contradicts what you’re seeing? How does that affect what we’re told about Our Protagonists and its “truth,” particularly in the final scenes? How much is the show deliberately working against censorship in this way? How much is it teaching us to look deeper than what we’re hearing on the surface?

Several people have talked about what’s actually being said by the on-screen actors in places where this happens, and I’m going to direct you to AvenueX on Youtube if you want a complete overview, because she’s reliable and has a good compilation that’s easy to find. She has a couple of videos called “Lip Reading for Sugar,” and the March 9, 2021, installment includes the Ep 6 incidences, the most significant of which are: At 3:05 in the ep, when WKX throws himself on Zhou Zishu’s back during the zombie Drug Men attack, calls him “mom,” asks ZZS to carry him, and tells “mom” that “your shoulder blades are the most beautiful.” Only no, Gong Jun didn’t say this, if you watch his mouth compared to the sound of the words. Instead of “niang” (mom), he says “Zhou Zishu.” Twice. “Zhou Zishu, carry me.” “Zhou Zishu, your shoulder blades are the most beautiful.” This is not only important because it emphasizes he’s gay for Zhou Zishu’s shoulder blades, but also because he’s fucking baked on Drunk Like A Dream incense when it happens, and later, ZZS will reveal that Drunk Like a Dream makes you see what you most desire, and he’ll confront WKX about how he “kept calling” someone’s name while he was under the influence of it. This makes no sense with the dubbing we get, because with “mom” dubbed over ZZS’s name here, WKX only calls Zhou Zishu’s real name once while he’s under the influence, at the end of ep 5. That is not kept calling. ANYWAY, once WKX clears his head and flies them away from the Drug Men, back to the a lakeside, there’s another disjunct at 5:05, when the dubbing has WKX tell ZZS not to play hero, that he doesn’t lose face if WKX helps him, and ZZS responds with something about your grandmother’s bear, which AvenueX tells me is a real Chinese idiom, although not for what. What Gong Jun and Zhang Zhehan appear to actually have said, though, is that WKX tells ZZS that this was just like a hero saving a beauty, with the implication that ZZS is the beauty, the damsel in distress, and ZZS respons that no, it’s like the beauty saving the hero, without a lick of concern that he’s the beauty, the damsel, in this scenario, just that he did all the work killing Drug Men and now this asshole is going to act like he’s the one who did the saving. At 31:24, dubbing has WKX telling ZZS that he’ll give ZZS whatever he wants if ZZS can get him some of the Drunk Like a Dream, but AvenueX tells me that he actually offers his body in exchange, in a way that implies marriage. And at 32:22, when ZZS asks WKX what he saw under the influence of the Drunk Like a Dream, the dubbing gives us some random story about baby WKX throwing a rat on his mother’s bed, while Gong Jun’s mouth seems to be saying something something about being in the bridal chamber with his beloved … so circling back to our first instance at 3:05, WKX using Zhou ZIshu’s name is now super-interesting, eh?

Another slip-slidey point of canon here is that there are two versions of this episode. The original version didn’t have the rabbit-washing scene. That was an extra that was inserted later into a Special Version ep when Youku reached 2 million subscribers. But the Special Version is now available on Youku’s channel (it’s the one I watched for this re-watch), AND it’s the regular version that’s on Netflix. So at 25:28, we now get this adorable little scene where ZZS and WKX are cleaning two rabbits in the lake before cooking them, and WKX splashes ZZS who pretends to be irritated before splashing WKX back and running away up the riverbank, chased by WKX. It’s flirty and playful and ALSO a foreshadowing of the flashback we’re going to see in a later ep, when they play together for an afternoon as children. Wasn’t canon before. Now it is.

Anyway, even with the (bad) dubbing that we get, this is a fantastic WenZhou ep. We open with them still being menaced by the zombies Drug Men, with a lot of swordwork by ZZS before he starts flagging because of his Nails Issue, whereupon WKX instantly sobers up, goes Evil Ghost Valley Master on Imposter Hanged Ghost who’s controlling the Drug Men, kills him with his Fan of Death, then scoops up ZZS and flies him off to a lake, where he attempts to tenderly check ZZS’s pulse and take care of his wounds before ZZS slaps away his hand like an offended maiden. WKX has to give him the qi smackdown in order to hold him still to :coff: pull down his robes and suck out the poison from the Drug Men scratches on the back of his shoulder. :hands: I remember the first time around, watching this with my mouth hanging open, demanding to know the heterosexual explanation for this. (Also, if you’re rummaging on Youtube, the Five Straight Guys Watching Word of Honor for this ep is not to be missed. They’re a little questionable in their reaction to the poison sucking, but before that, they’re a bunch of squeamish babies over using the dagger to further slice open the wounds to get to the poison, and it’s HILARIOUS. They can’t even look at the screen once the dagger comes out, hiding behind their hands. I love them, more and more as the eps go on, but they are WEAK compared to even the newbiest hurt/comfort fangirl.) There’s some more back and forth between WKX and ZZS about revealing their true selves to each other, no you, no YOU. WKX makes it clear that he knows there’s something really wrong with ZZS, and then they fight, set to romantic music, and ZZS ends up falling in the lake. I do the victory arms (  \o/  ) to myself where I’m sitting on the couch and startle one of the cats, because FINALLY we’re going to get rid of that execrable fake facial hair. ZZS fucks with WKX by staying underwater long enough that WKX panics and also dives in, we get some really cheap and awful underwater effects, and ZZS reveals his face! They end up back on the edge of the lake, drying their perfectly dry outer robes, while they sit around the fire together in their perfectly dry inner robes, but I am not going to complain because y’all. I CANNOT with how smug and pleased ZZS is for just a moment about WKX mooning over how pretty he is. Then he remembers to be an ill-tempered gremlin and pokes at WKX with a flaming stick, but I had to rewind four times just to catch that little moment of satisfaction about being admired again – it’s subtle and gorgeous and Zhang Zhehan is going to kill me with his face one of these days. ZZS demands dinner on this date, and fake-coughs pitifully to get WKX to go hunt something down, while he stays and does his delightful little thinky face as he pokes at the Soul Winding Box they got from Imposter Hanged Ghost. Then we get a shot of WKX looking at ZZS before he heads off to catch some rabbits that confirms he now knows he’s really Zhou Zishu, rather than Zhou Xu.

So, we’ll get back to the Ghost and the Box in a minute, but I do want to mention that this whole ep is layered through with mini-references and thematic stuff. Imposter Hanged Ghost rings his little bell to control his Drug Men, and remember that, we’ll see that again. WKX asks if ZZS came from the Healer’s Valley when ZZS offers him an antidote to the Drug Man poison; we learn later that WKX, himself, is the one who came from the Healer’s Valley. When ZZS gets the Soul Winding Box open and finds a piece of the Glazed Armor inside (Danyang’s, taken off of Ao Laizi by Ghost Valley before he was hung at the gate of Sanbai Manor), he gives it to WKX, tells him to throw it away if he doesn’t want it. WKX says he couldn’t possibly, and that he’ll wear it because it’s his first gift from A-Xu. Compare this to the way Xie’er will wear Awful Yifu’s Glazed Armor around his neck. We also see some of the thematic and referential stuff come up in conversations that form a repeated pattern in this ep of ZZS stressing what a bad and dangerous person he is: He scoffs at the idea he’s from Healer’s Valley, and asks if he looks like someone who practices medicine; WKX responds that he looked like a professional killer (true) who was cruel in the abandoned temple (presumably while escaping Mirror Lake) and frightening to a kind-hearted man like WKX who can’t even kill a chicken (particularly amusing given the prep for New Year’s dinner in a later ep, when WKX is the only one who CAN). At the lakeside and again after ZZS hightails it away from Sanbai Manor when they spot Han Ying there (HAN YING, my beloved), WKX asks if ZZS is a fugitive, what he’s hiding from, and says that he’ll protect him – by reason, because would he kill anyone unreasonably (omg, where to even begin? How many guys have you choked out at this point)? When they’re arguing about ZZS revealing his “true” face, ZZS warns that most people who’ve seen his real appearance are dead (probably true). WKX says he’s not afraid of death (not his own, at least, we’ll see that the thing he’s afraid of is ZZS’s death). ZZS warns WKX that he’s not only sharp-tongued, he’s ruthless (true). He tells WKX that he’s murdered many people (true) and set them on fire (not unlikely, frankly) and committed many crimes (true, in a way, although they were state-sanctioned, making them legal, if morally reprehensible). This is the ZZS who put the Nails in himself, who talks to himself about what a truly awful shixiong he is, who tells Prince Jin that he’s only good as a weapon. I like how we see this at the same time that we’re starting to see the side of him that’ll preen when someone thinks he’s pretty - this is a process, and it’s subtle, not as high-drama as WKX’s, but it’s there, nonetheless.

We also formally meet Xie Wang in this ep, artfully posed and playing his pipa among the bodies – old and new – of Zhao Coffin Home. He and Changing Ghost have a bit of a slapfight over whose fault it is that Imposter Hanged Ghost, who was actually Long-Tongued Ghost, got killed and got his (Danyang’s) Glazed Armor took by WKX, when Changing Ghost stole it from Ao Laizi, put it in the Soul Winding Box and gave it to Long-Tongued Ghost specifically to deliver it to Xie Wang. Xie Wang is super cool through all of this, and I think we get a sense of how deadly he is by the way Changing Ghost backs down. So, here’s what’s falling together: Some iteration of Ghost Valley is working with Xie Wang and the Scorpion Sect, giving the Scorpions access to the Soul Winding Threads, which we saw used at the Mirror Lake massacre and in the woods outside of Sanbai Manor to kill Yu Tianjie in the last ep. Via Xie Wang, Ghost Vally has access to use of the Drug Men, which we’ve seen at the Zhao Coffin Home (so far), although we haven’t yet been told (I think) how Xie Wang got access to the potions to create Drug Men (we also know ZZS read about Drug Men in a book somewhere, and got enough info to engineer an antidote to them). Xie Wang and the Scorpions have access to Drunk Like a Dream incense, which had to come from Prince Jin’s court, having been engineered by ZZS based on a much stronger formulation. Han Ying, from Tian Chuang in Prince Jin’s court, has been seen at Sanbai Manor, Zhao Jing’s place.

Meanwhile Chengling is doing poorly, with no appetite and getting bellowed at some more by Shen Shen, who would be the worst if only I didn’t know everything I know, which makes me cringe when Zhao Jing refers to Chengling as “my son, now.” NO. RUN, Goldbean. For some more thematic and referential stuff in this ep, WKX calls Chengling a “lonely chick with no one to rely on” and tsks over the fact that he’s “surrounded by hounds smarter than foxes” now that he’s under the care of the Five Lakes Alliance. This is clearly to manipulate ZZS into thinking Chengling is better off with ZZS, but it also sounds like an awfully apt description of Zhen Yan in Ghost Valley. I’m just sayin’.

[kaiowut99]

5D’s Episode 29… With an “Uncut” Dub?! (Re-Edited 4Kids Dub/Japanese OST)

“A Looming Threat! The Dark Signer Ushio?!”/”Good Cop, Bad Cop”

Everybody listen!

Well, after over 2.5 years now (...welp), this little mini-project is finally wrapped up! (Well, not totally, as I realized I have to go back and fix a few things for consistency, but y’know) It’s been neat editing these to throw the Japanese OST back in, and while I might do a few clips here/there now for fun, unless 4K/Konami Cross Media decide to flub up more episode uploads without their dub OST, I probably won’t be doing more full episodes. (Need to work on finalizing my GX subs finally, haha.)

But in case this is still the first you’re hearing about my mini-project here, let’s get you up to speed:

So, the official Spanish YGO channel on YouTube flubbed a few uploads of the 5D’s dub such that they ended up uploading a few episodes of the English dub instead of the Latin American dub (21-29)–but with none of 4Kids’s background music! Which meant that I could swoop in and re-insert the original Japanese soundtrack (which I did by matching each track to how it was looped in the episode), but I wanted to do more by also tweaking the dub itself so that not only was it matching the original footage, but the dialogue was more in line with the original dialogue timing-wise (since I couldn’t salvage much of what they changed).  Hence, the “dubbed uncut” gimmick here.  To this end, I’ve also used dialogue from Duel Links where applicable, or even borrowed audio from other episodes with the vocals isolated to lend to that effect.

Check out the masterpost of episodes here!

Check out this episode’s WIP videos! WIP #1     WIP #2     WIP #3

This was an interesting one to work with, and I was looking forward to it because of the Jack/Carly scene at the end over Jack Battle; it was also neat working in OSTs like Ceremony off Sound Duel 2 and mesh it with the dub, while recreating some of the OST tweaks they did (like speeding up Carly’s theme or sputtering Rua/Ruka Battle 2 as Jack calls Carly out lol).  Dialogue-editing-wise, this wasn’t as bad as 28, thankfully, as most of the dialogue was more or less adapted well, though I still did need to grab dialogue from other sources to cover for some dub fails, and I did grab audio from episode 30′s dub for the preview.  I also translated the “Road of the King” poster shown in four scenes (two outside the gala that happens and two inside as Godwin talks), using the dub’s “Atlas Rising - The Rise of Jack Atlas” name.  And since this is the last episode I’m working on, I thought it’d be cool to make use of Mark de Groot’s awesome Last Train - A New Morning English cover to really channel more of that “what if uncut” energy (just a shame no solid English CROSS GAME cover exists, but hopefully my eventual full translation when I post it will help that along). Full breakdown below, if you’re curious.

So, yeah... Enjoy, folks! Now that these are all done, I’ll be focusing more on my finalizing my GX subs and looking into finally reuploading my 5D’s sub/dub comparisons onto a new site, though this has made me want to revisit my 5D’s!DBZ Kai project occasionally, lol (I do want to see about using TheMilkman’s reduced-filler cut of Kai, though, as I thought it was a much more streamlined way to watch the show, but we’ll see).  I do have ideas for clips to create later on, but for now, enjoy these and think of what could have been (and could still be if we ever miraculously get a redub...)~

*cracks knuckles*

So, in the Noteworthy Cards section, the twins’ dialogue is still all from Duel Links, as I stitched together a “What will this Monster be?” line for Luna to match Ruka’s line, and recycled the “You get to see!” edit I used in 27 for Leo.

For the cold open, I tweaked Trudge’s dialogue to remove more of the “working together” fluff from the subplot they added (I removed the more overt mentions in 28 since I couldn’t edit around it).

*cue Last Train*

In Carly’s scene with the officer, I recreated the Carly Nagisa theme as used here, which was pitched and sped up by nine seconds, and replaced the one officer’s line about her needing to go outside with Carly gasping (since the officer was originally silent).  Once outside, I used a mix of lines from 27 and Duel Links to stitch together a better line about her fortune matching the original more, then did so again over the transition shots to the Road of the King/Atlas Rising red-carpet event (where the dub inserted a commercial break).

At said red-carpet event, I used a Duel Links line to make Carly’s “Angela! Didn’t see you!” line after bumping into Angela “No way! Angela!” to match the original.

Once the ROTK/Atlas Rising gala starts, I used the Japanese audio from the transition to it to after Godwin steps down the stairs to remove dub!MC’s added lines, then shortened Goodwin’s lines hyping up the movie so it all finished while he was onscreen, using the Japanese audio as the audience clapped.  When Yusei and Jack start hearing the movie on their TV screens, I used Duel Links lines to make Jack’s movie dialogue match what was said in those scenes originally (and the dub was inconsistent), and after Angela calls bull on the movie’s “Jack was born in the Tops” narrative, I kept the reporters prodding Godwin in Japanese with a subbed line because of how 4Kids edited them such that they kept speaking in turns within a shorter scene.  As Carly looks up at the movie before running off, I used a Duel Links line for Jack in the movie, and as she talks with Misty, I shortened Misty’s (fluffed in the dub) foreshadowing line to Carly to match the flaps.

I didn’t edit the scene with Yusei and Trudge much, and then as Carly bumps into a reporter outside Jack’s hospital, I wanted to remove the cameraman’s “We’re still live!” (since he was originally quiet, and you wouldn’t talk over a live shot like that lol) but the reporter’s “I’ll show you sorry” line overlapped with it, making a clean cut hard.  When Carly makes it inside, I shortened her (fluffed in the dub) line about her costume working, then as Trudge walks in, I switched to the Japanese audio to remove his “only doing this to get close to Goodwin” dub-only line, and kept the dub’s Dark Signer birthmark SFX as it appears on Trudge (since the JP version seems to just use the regular Signer one for it).

After the eyecatch, I used the Japanese audio as Mikage peels the apple (since Mina was humming), then switched to it again after Jack says he wants to be alone to deal with the dub cutting Mikage’s bow and removing Mina’s “call me if you need... anything” line).  Once Jack’s outside with Carly and possessed!Trudge walks up to them, I redid the Dark Signer birthmark SFX and the glowing right after to remove the dub’s added zoom-in SFX, then after Jack gasps, I switched to the Japanese audio to remove the dub’s added flashback-transition SFX.  As Carly flashes back to possessed!Dick’s dueling in 28, I added in the “whooshing” SFX and recycled some SFX from 28 to remove “Wipe his mark clean!” from possessed!Dick’s dialogue and adding "Blizzard Strike!!” from my edit in 28 to it, also recycling Yusei’s yelling/groaning to keep Carly quiet--her on-screen “A glowing mark like Yusei” line right after is recycled from 28 (Carly’s original line was “That glowing on his arm...”).  Used Japanese audio as Ushio activates his Disk, then stitched together a “You’re a Dark Signer?!” line for Jack to replace his “I seriously doubt [I’ll be the first to fall]” line to Trudge.  I vocal-isolated Carly’s “Yusei won” line after Jack asks when Yusei’s happened and put it just before he does, replacing Carly introducing herself (which doesn’t happen originally until just before the last turn), and using the Japanese audio for the SFX as Jack looks determined.  I used a Duel Links line to cover Jack using Carly’s name just before he has her use his Duel Disk, and then the duel starts.

I recycled a Trudge “It’s my move” line from later to remove his “Let’s cut the conversation” line (I did what I could to remove how conversational they made possessed!Trudge) over the 4000 LP shots, and then I vocal-isolated parts of Carly’s excited lines about dueling with Jack to remove the dub’s flashback-transition SFX (which they used over a vision...), recreating the Rua/Ruka Battle 2 theme playing here and the sputtering that happens when she declares her turn only for Jack to correct her and say it’s his, lol.  I vocal-isolated Jack dialogue from later in the series to use a proper Vice Dragon effect explanation over Jack’s trash-talk line to Trudge, then did the same for a Carly line in 37 to fix an error where she mentions Vice Dragon having 2400 ATK (as I thought it’d sound better than “twenty-hundred” lol).  I shortened Carly’s and Jack’s (fluffed-up in the dub) lines about his being a “once-great duelist,” then recycled some Trudge laughter to cover for his “Hey, has-been!” line; as Carly sends cards to the Graveyard for Warm Worm’s effect, I redid the Graveyard-sending SFX to remove her “That’s how this works” line and the dub’s add-on to that SFX, adding on a Jack “What’s going on?” thought per the JP script.  As Carly reacts to having to send more cards per Shield Worm’s effect, I switched to the JP audio as the split-screens happen and the cards are sent to use those SFX.

As Carly declares another turn but catches herself, I used an “It’s my turn!” line from Jack to remove his “Let me see my cards” line, then tweaked Carly’s line to fix an error where she has Strong Wind Dragon take out Shield Worm in a “direct attack” so it’s “take out Shield Worm and attack!”; I vocal-isolated the resulting “Dimwit!” and “Did I mess up?” lines from Jack and Carly to remove the dub’s split-screen SFX.  As Trudge brings back Shield Worm with Regretful Rebirthborn, I moved his line about its effect so it started while he was onscreen per the JP script, also removing his “you and your little assistant” fluff, and I vocal-isolated Jack’s “Not as sorry as Trudge is going to be” thought to remove the dub’s added zoom-in SFX, using part of the JP audio to use that SFX, and then using the JP SFX as Carly sends the cards to their Graveyard.  Having removed Jack’s fluff here as there was a dub commercial break inserted, I tweaked a Duel Links “From my hand” line to use before he declares his Twin-Shield Defender summon, using the JP audio for the summon itself.

I moved Trudge’s “It’s my turn then” a second or two earlier, then used the JP audio after he summoned his Worm Tokens as the split-screens and counter fly-ins happen, then vocal-isolated part of Trudge’s line after to remove the dub’s split-screen SFX, and I used the “chaos” part of one of Trudge’s Duel Links lines to try and fix the dumb “Dark Tuner Chaos-Rogue Catastrogue” error (which I do 2-3 more times), using the JP audio as Chaos-Rogue’s summoned.  I moved Jack’s “What’s this Dark Tuning business all about?” line a second or two later to remove his use of Carly’s name, then used the JP audio from where Chaos-Rogue starts tuning to the Worm Token glowing to remove Carly’s added line about Dick Dark Tuning, and used the JP audio as Dark Diviner/Pitch-Dark Zumwalt’s summoned.  I redid the SFX as Carly sends cards to the Graveyard per Chaos-Rogue’s effect to move part of Trudge’s line attacking with Dark Diviner earlier (since 4Kids cut a second or two from this shot), and then vocal-isolated part of Trudge’s line about Dark Diviner’s effect to remove the dub’s split-screen SFX.  I switched to the JP audio as Carly sends cards to the Graveyard after as I moved Trudge’s line a bit to shorten it, then after Carly shields Jack from the attack, I vocal-isolated part of his line to Trudge to remove the dub’s split-screen SFX and used a Duel Links line to extend his dialogue (which 4Kids shortened); I also vocal-isolated Trudge’s line after to remove the dub’s split-screen SFX.

As Carly apologizes to Jack, I used a “Well?” from Duel Links for him to remove his guessing Carly’s name now that she properly introduces herself, and then vocal-isolated their lines as they start their turn to remove the dub’s split-screen SFX.  I used the JP audio after they draw, then again when they activate Mind Trust, vocal-isolating part of Jack’s line to remove the dub’s split-screen SFX and stitching together various lines to extend Jack’s explanation of its effect by adding a mention that it’s a Tuner with half the Level of the Monster he releases that he’s adding to his hand (4Kids cut this short and he just says “to pull a weaker Monster”).  I added a whoosh as the screen goes up Strong Wing Dragon to match the original audio, then as Dark Resonator’s summoned, I used the JP audio as the ATK counter flies in (but at a lower volume, since 4Kids moved Jack’s dialogue about the summon to during the summon itself, since Jack’s lips weren’t moving when he originally said them while onscreen), and stitched together a “Dark Resonator tunes with Twin-Shield Defender” line to remove the “tune-up” line, using Duel Links lines for Jack’s Exploder Dragonwing chant.  I vocal-isolated part of his explanation of its effect to remove the dub’s split-screen SFX, and then his line having Exploder Dragonwing attack to remove his “Of course [I still have it], I only lost yesterday” line to Carly, using his Duel Links “King Storm!!” shout for its attack, and switching to the JP audio as the attack hits and causes the explosion.  

As Trudge comes to, I added a Duel Links grunt over a second of lip-flaps that the dub cut, then no real dialogue edits to Carly’s and the reporter’s lines as she runs out with Jack.  Then, as Goodwin meets up with Yusei, I edited his “It’s time I told you the whole truth” line to match the flaps, adding a vocal-isolated “You see” from 26 just before “It’s time I told you the truth,” and used the JP audio after Yusei gasps looking to where he points to end the episode.

In the Preview, as mentioned, I used dialogue vocal-isolated from episode 30 to recreate the JP dialogue, though I did want to use Crow’s “Ready! Set! Duel!” from Duel Links but it wasn’t working too well, so I stuck with his “Time to ride!” from 30 that hopefully still sounds good.

*phew*

[justforbooks]

The greatest year for books ever?

Several years including 1862, 1899 and 1950 could be considered literature’s very best. But one year towers above these, writes Jane Ciabattari.

The year 1925 was a golden moment in literary history. Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were all published that year. As were Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, among others. In fact, 1925 may well be literature’s greatest year.

But how could one even go about determining the finest 12 months in publishing history? Well, first, by searching for a cluster of landmark books:  debut books or major masterpieces published that year. Next, by evaluating their lasting impact: do these books continue to enthrall readers and explore our human dilemmas and joys in memorable ways? And then by asking: did the books published in this year alter the course of literature? Did they influence literary form or content, or introduce key stylistic innovations?

Books that came out in 1862, for instance, included Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But Gustave Flaubert’s novel of that year, Sallambo, set in Carthage during the 3rd Century BC, was no match for Madame Bovary. George Eliot’s historical novel Romola and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm were also disappointments.

The year 1899 is another contender for literature’s best. Kate Chopin’s seminal work The Awakening was published then, as was Frank Norris’s McTeague and two Joseph Conrad classics – Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim (serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine). But Tolstoy’s last novel Resurrection, published also in 1899, was more shaped by his religious and political ideals than a powerful sense of character; and Henry James’ The Awkward Age was a failed experiment – a novel written almost entirely in dialogue.

And in 1950 there were published books from Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), Doris Lessing (The Grass Is Singing) and CS Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). But other great fiction writers produced lesser works that year – Ernest Hemingway’s minor Across the River and into the Trees; Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City, written under the influence of Thomas Wolfe; John Steinbeck’s poorly received play-in-novel-format Burning Bright and Evelyn Waugh’s only historical novel, the Empress Helena (Roman emperor Constantine’s Christian mother goes in search of relics of the Cross).

But 1925 brought something unique – a vibrant cultural outpouring, multiple landmark books and a paradigm shift in prose style. Literary work that year reflected a world in the aftermath of tremendous upheaval. The brutality of World War One, with some 16 million dead and 70 million mobilised to fight, had left its mark on the Lost Generation. In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf created the indelible shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, “with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?”

Looking inward

The solid external world of the realists and naturalists was giving way to the shifting perceptions of the modernist ‘I’. Mrs Dalloway, which covers one day as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party – and Septimus Smith for his demise – is a landmark modernist novel. Its narrative is rooted in the flow of consciousness, with dreams, fantasies and vague perceptions gaining unprecedented expression. Woolf’s stylistic breakthrough reflected a changing perception of reality. Proust was also all the rage at this moment, as Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Remembrance of Things Past’s third volume was just out. Woolf admired Proust’s “astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification”.

The year 1925 also contributed to the culmination of Gertrude Stein’s career. She had moved to Paris in 1903 and established a Saturday evening salon that eventually included Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound and Sherwood Anderson, as well as artists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Stein responded to her immersion in the Parisian avant-garde by writing The Making of Americans, which was published in 1925, more than a decade after its completion. In over 900 pages of stream-of-consciousness, Stein tells of “the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old,” and describes an American “space of time that is filled always filled with moving”. Early critics like Edmund Wilson couldn’t finish Stein’s complex web of repetition, but she has been credited with foreshadowing postmodernism and making key stylistic breakthroughs, including using the continuous present and a nearly musical word choice. As Anderson put it: “For me, the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entirely new recasting of life, in the city of words.”

Stein’s experiments with language influenced Hemingway’s signature sparseness. Beginning with the autobiographical Nick Adams stories in his first book, 1925’s In Our Time, his fiction is characterised by pared-down prose, with symbolic meaning lying beneath the surface. Nick witnesses birth and suicide as a young boy accompanying his father, a doctor, to deliver a baby in the Michigan woods. He is exposed to urban crime when two Chicago hitmen come to his small town. And as a war veteran trying to keep his memories at bay, he gravitates toward the familiar pleasures of camping and fishing: "He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him."

Modern times

The midpoint of the Roaring ‘20s was a time of rare prosperity and upward mobility in the United States. The stock market seemed destined to climb forever, and the American Dream seemed within the grasp of the masses. 1925 was special, though. In New York, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance were given a definitive showcase that year in the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke. At the same time Harold Ross launched a revolutionary and risky weekly magazine called The New Yorker, which featured portraits of Manhattan socialites and their adventures and offered what would be a treasured showcase for short stories ever since.

F Scott Fitzgerald dubbed this flamboyant postwar American era “the Jazz Age”. Alcohol flowed freely despite Prohibition; flappers followed the sober suffragettes into a time of sexual freedom. New wealth was spreading the riches and opening doors to players like Fitzgerald’s immortal character Jay Gatsby, whose fortune was rumoured to be based on bootlegging. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, gives a portrait both tawdry and touching, as Gatsby remakes himself in a doomed attempt to win the love of the wealthy Daisy Buchanan. The tarnished American Dream also was central that year to Theodore Dreiser’s naturalist masterpiece, An American Tragedy. Dreiser based the novel on a real criminal case, in which a young man murders his pregnant mistress in an attempt to marry into an upper class family, and is executed by electric chair. Also ripped from the headlines, Sinclair Lewis’s realistic 1925 novel Arrowsmith was a first in exploring the influence of science on American culture. Lewis wrote of the medical training, practice and ethical dilemmas facing a physician involved in high-level scientific research.

These books weren’t just original, even revolutionary, creations – they were helping to establish the very idea of modernity, to make sense of the times. Perhaps 1925 is literature’s most important year simply because no other 12-month span features such a dialogue between literature and real life. Certainly that’s the case in terms of how new technologies – the automobile, the cinema – shook up literary form in 1925. John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer introduced the cinematic narrative form to the novel. New York, presented in fragments as if it were a movie montage on the page, is the novel’s collective protagonist, the inhuman industrialised city presented as a flow of images and characters passing at high speed. "Declaration of war… rumble of drums... Commencement of hostilities in a long parade through the empty rain lashed streets,” Dos Passos writes. “Extra, extra, extra. Santa Claus shoots daughter he has tried to attack. Slays Self With Shotgun." Sinclair Lewis called Manhattan Transfer "the vast and blazing dawn we have awaited. It may be the foundation of a whole new school of fiction."

Was 1925 the greatest year in literature? The ultimate proof, 90 years later, is the shape-shifting the novel has undergone, still based on these early inspirations – and the continuing resonance of Nick Adams, Jay Gatsby and Clarissa Dalloway. These characters from a transformative time are still enthralling generations of new readers.

Copyright © 2020 BBC

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

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The horrific Resident Evil playthrough, interlude three

I just finished watching all of the Resident Evil movies I could get my hands on. When I told people I was doing this as the last part of my great year-long playthrough, they all let out groans and said something along the lines of, “Ugh, don’t you wanna end on a good note?” Undaunted by these words and fueled by my ability to tolerate crappy cinema, I moved forward, courageously making it through nine of these suckers...which, to be fair, ranged from surprisingly enjoyable to just as terrible as everyone warned me about. 

Before I begin, it’s important to note that we’re dealing with two separate film series here. There’s director Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil Hollywood films, which are the ones that most people know about. Then there are three Japanese-made CG movies that are canon and co-exist alongside the stories of the games. The Anderson movies are...mostly ass. The Japanese ones are okay. 

Let us start with the ass first. 

Resident Evil - The first RE film came out in 2002, which means that what little CG it has is laughably dated and it’s refreshingly small-scale when compared to its sequels. The movie’s a fan fiction remix of some themes from Resident Evil 1, except with none of the characters from the games present. Instead, we have Paul W.S. Anderson’s wife Milla Jovovich taking center stage as Alice, the former head of Umbrella security in a secret base called the Hive that goes to hell when some dude tries to steal viruses. The entirety of the action takes place in the Hive, and we get a surprisingly tiny number of monsters, with just your garden variety zombies, a few Cerberus and a single Licker showing up. Even though she does run up a wall and kick a Cerberus in the face, Alice is at her most realistic here (she turns into a dual wielding mutant with the ability to make the camera go into slow-motion whenever she wants in all the other films), there’s a nifty laser grid scene that all the sequels keep referencing when they want you to feel nostalgic, and the Hive’s sentient AI, the Red Queen, is compelling enough that Capcom eventually stuck her in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. Aside from this movie being full of British actors who do REALLY awful American accents, sounding like they all have mouths full of sausages, Paul W.S. Anderson’s first take on Resident Evil is probably the most watchable one he made. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse - Okay, this one is watchable too, but in more of a popcorn-munching “lol, this shit is dumb” way. It steals the general plot of Resident Evils 2 and 3, with Raccoon City getting infected, but ups the cheese by a hundred. Alice is now a thirteen-year-old boy’s version of a BADAZZ woman, with lots of guns and a bare midriff, and she teams up with Jill Valentine, who resembles her game self in looks but not exactly in personality. Together, they’ve gotta escape Raccoon City along with Carlos Oliveira, who is possibly the only character from the games who is done a great service in these Anderson movies, which make him much more likable even if they couldn’t find an actual Hispanic actor to portray him and had to settle for an Israeli instead. Oh, and Nemesis shows up, because one of the dudes from the first movie who accompanied Alice into the Hive gets experimented on and turned into what honestly looks like someone’s Halloween costume. The writers commit a cardinal sin at the end of the flick by humanizing him, having him suddenly remember his TRUE SELF and help the good guys, but aside from that screw-up I admit that I had a goofy grin on my face throughout several parts of this movie. After Nemesis blows up the Raccoon City station and murmurs his one line of dialogue- “STARRRRRSSSS” - I even kinda felt like clapping. So yeah, Apocalpyse is idiotic fun.

Resident Evil: Extinction - Here’s where the movies stop being mildly entertaining and become varying degrees of either “meh” or just plain bad. Extinction’s biggest problem is that it makes the weird decision of having the entire PLANET be wiped nearly completely clean by Umbrella’s virus, giving the franchise the most generic setting imaginable for a zombie flick - a post-apocalyptic world. And even though this film features Claire Redfield and actually has Alice fight a Tyrant that looks the part, I feel that by turning the environment into Mad Max the filmmakers missed the entire point of the franchise. Resident Evil isn’t really about a “what if” scenario with mankind dying and zombies taking over the world. Instead, it’s about how humanity manages to cope in a time where zombies are used by corporations for terrorism purposes - hence the franchise’s “bio-organic weapon” catch-phrase for its creatures. It’s about how brave people live on in an era that just happens to feature biopunk monsters as a deadly fact of life. It’s about the evil that resides within a world that is pretty shitty, but hasn’t completely gone to shit. By turning the whole planet into the same ol’ zombie playground that we see in most popular fiction starring these workman-like horror tropes, Extinction - which probably thought it was upping the stakes - instead just feels sorta dull, and anyone who views the film today is probably going to see it as a weaker version of The Walking Dead. Oh, and it ends with Alice discovering clones of herself, which will only serve to screw with the loose continuity of these movies as they go on. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife - This one starts with Alice’s clones raiding the Umbrella facility in Tokyo, and the whole sequence - which feels like it should be the finale - is reduced to a few minutes of special effects in the beginning. (This is foreshadowing for the next two films, which both end with hints of giant, climatic battles that mostly happen off-screen, if at all.) The first thing that I noticed when watching this was how slow-mo kicked in every five minutes and how the camera seemed to linger on bullets, and I eventually remembered that this film was released during Hollywood’s obsession with 3D during the early 2010s. This explains Afterlife’s IN-YOUR-FACE-IN-THREE-DIMENSIONS action scenes, which are initially pretty in a music video sort of way but become overdone and tiresome as the movie goes on, kinda like a Zack Snyder film. (I place Paul W.S. Anderson in the same “style over substance” category of director as both Zack Snyder and Michael Bay, by the way.) Anyway, Afterlife deals with Alice teaming up with more survivors to try to find a secret ship haven free of zombies. Along the way she runs into Chris Redfield, who looks more like a janitor than the jacked BSAA agent that he is in the games, and Chris and Claire Redfield have a quick sibling reunion and fight Wesker in a scene with choreography shamelessly stolen from Resident Evil 5. It’s pandering fan service and sort of diverting, but ultimately none of it matters. Chris disappears after this movie and is never seen again, and Afterlife is more interesting as a specimen of 2010 3D excess than it is as an actual narrative.

Resident Evil: Retribution - Retribution amps the pandering fan service that Afterlife dabbled in to new levels. Ada Wong is here, played by Li Bingbing but dubbed by her original voice actress, Sally Cahill, probably because Li’s English isn’t that great. Leon Kennedy and Barry frickin’ Burton show up, both looking pretty much like their in-game counterparts. Even Michelle Rodriguez and a few other faces from Paul W.S. Anderson’s first Resident Evil flick make an appearance, thanks to the fact that this movie has clones up the wazoo and uses them to handwave away any series inconsistencies you could think of. So you’re got fan service for the people who like the games and fan service for the folks who liked the first movie, and on top of it all the film has the extreme 3D that its predecessor possessed and a buttload of battles because it all takes place in a giant Umbrella simulation facility full of stuff that can easily be wrecked. By now the plot to these things has gotten more scrambled than my eggs in the morning, but I will say that thanks to its inclusion of classic characters, Retribution is more or less tolerable. There’s even a bit of characterization this time around, thanks to a little hearing-impaired clone girl who Alice takes under her wing and begins to care for, and the movie ends on an okay cliffhanger in a Washington DC under siege, promising epic things to come in the next movie. Unfortunately... Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - I really did not enjoy The Final Chapter for a myriad of reasons. First of all, the Washington battle promised at the end of Retribution never happens. Instead, we fast forward to several months later, when Alice is (big surprise) the only survivor, and EVERYONE she was with in the last flick - Ada, Leon, the little deaf girl - is gone and never mentioned ever again. Wesker, who Alice was working with in Retribution, is back to being a bad guy for poorly explained reasons. Another bad scientist dude that Alice killed in Extinction also returns for even worse reasons, because supposedly Alice only offed his clone three movies ago. But wait, this “real” bad scientist dude is also revealed to be a clone as the TRUE bad scientist dude shows up in the movie’s last act! AND THE ULTIMATE TWIST (look away now if you actually care about spoilers) is that Alice is HERSELF a clone of the original daughter of the Umbrella corporation’s founder who died of a degenerative disease and served as the basis for the Red Queen AI. The idiotic thing is that this daughter was said to be the progeny of Dr. Charles Ashford in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but this movie retcons her to be the spawn of Dr. James Marcus. The Final Chapter, in fact, screws with continuity to a degree I have rarely seen before in a long-running film franchise. Yeah, the framework tying this series together got weird as soon as clones were introduced, but previously it seemed that Paul W.S. Anderson at least cared about his own messy fan fiction. Here? It’s like he forgot what he’d spent the last 15 years building up to and ended on one sloppy fart. If this weren’t bad enough, The Final Chapter is edited in that god awful “shaky cam, lots of fast cuts” way that I hate. In fact, I counted something like twenty cuts in a scene of a few seconds when Alice is attacked by a creature, which means that this film won’t just baffle you with its disregard for continuity - it’ll give you a headache too. 

Resident Evil: Degeneration - After watching an array of live-action flicks that took random Resident Evil threads and mashed them together with the elegance of a splattered turd, it did feel good to switch things up and move to the CG movies that were actually put out by Capcom. This 2008 offering takes place in between Resident Evils 4 and 5, stars Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy, and deals with a virus breakout in an airport and some of the pharmaceutical company backstabbing that occurred in the aftermath of Umbrella’s destruction. It’s all stuff that feels like it could have come from a lesser gaiden game - perhaps in the same vein as the first Revelations title - and it kinda gives off that “so-so anime movie” vibe, especially because the dubbing always sounds a tad off. Nevertheless, Degeneration’s still a breath of fresh air compared to the Anderson series, and there’s a nice gag where Claire’s searching for a weapon in the airport, someone hands her a physical umbrella, and she looks at it and is like, “Hm, didn’t see this coming.” (Lollerskates.) The main issue I have with Degeneration is how “plasticky” everyone looks - it’s hard to realize how far computer animation has advanced in the last decade until you look at Degeneration’s stiff visuals and compare them to the other CG films. Also, Leon’s characterization is terrible. He’s meant to be a super serious badass, I guess, but he mostly just looks like someone rammed a Samurai Edge up his sphincter. I prefer my Leon Kennedy to be the “Don’t worry Ashley, I’m comin’ for ya!” version from Resident Evil 4, or at least a dude with a little sass to him. The guy in Degeneration is about as interesting as a board.  Resident Evil: Damnation - Damnation is a noticeable step above Degeneration, both in computer animation, which really got better from 2008 to 2012, and in all-around presentation. The dubbing’s still somewhat wonky with that same anime movie vibe, but the characterization is on point, and Leon, who’s taking center stage once more, is just like his RE6 self. Speaking of RE6, this movie channels that game’s themes of international terrorism with a plot that involves rebels in a made-up Eastern European country using Lickers and Las Plagas in an effort to fight for their freedom, only to learn that lo and behold, the nefarious female president who’s seized control of their nation has her own B.O.W.s - in the form of Tyrants - at her disposal. Leon’s caught in the middle of this mess and ends up befriending some of the rebels, and Ada Wong’s also infiltrated the country to manipulate the president. Ada and Leon’s interactions are as insubstantial as they’ve been in pretty much every game that isn’t the recent RE2make, but we do get a cool fight between Ada and the president, who for some reason knows substantial knife fu. There’s an even better battle between Tyrants and Lickers in a city hall square, and Leon gets throw against pillars, regularly takes hits that would kill a normal person and pilots a tank alongside one of the rebels who looks a lot like Chris Redfield but isn’t Chris Redfield. This dude serves as the film’s sympathetic character - a guy torn from his peaceful existence thanks to political wrangling and is tricked into using B.O.W.s to try to achieve a brighter future. It ends with the fella severely injured but learning how to live and move forward in a world infected with nefarious bioweapons, which is the very theme that the Anderson flicks ditched around movie number three. So good work for side-stepping previous failures and recognizing what Resident Evil is all about, Damnation. 

Resident Evil: Vendetta - If Degeneration’s a so-so anime movie, and Damnation a good anime movie, then Vendetta is just a good movie in general, with no “anime” distinction needed. The dubbing’s finally pretty decent, for one, and the story takes place in between RE6 and RE7, teaming Leon and Chris Redfield up with - HOLY CRAP - Rebecca Chambers, who’s been AWOL since Resident Evil Zero. They’ve gotta stop an arms dealer from bio-nuking New York and doing nasty things to Rebecca, who resembles his dead wife, and along the way Leon pilots a motorcycle on the freeway with his feet while shooting at Cerebrus with his hands. Nearly all of the movie’s considerable action segments are punctuated with rapid fire John Wick-style gunplay, and it works. It’s like the folks who made this film realized that the coolest part of Resident Evil 6 was the point where Leon and Chris point their guns at each other for a few seconds before deciding that they need to put their differences aside and cooperate, and even though you could conceivably fault Vendetta for leaning heavily towards the “action” side of Resident Evil rather than the “horror” side, it’s a well-paced film that finally gives us a substantial interaction between two series mainstays beyond the one minute they shared with each other in RE6. Also, people are still posting GIFs from Vendetta’s action sequences all across Tumblr and forums whenever arguments break out over whether Chris or Leon is TEH COoLER Resident Evil protagonist, so Capcom obviously did something right. If we get another computer animated film, I imagine it’ll lean more heavily towards horror since that’s where the series has gone recently...but hopefully the path of improvement that we’ve seen from Degeneration to Damnation to Vendetta won’t be broken. 

And with that, whew, I’m done with RE movies, at least until the rumored Hollywood reboot that’s supposedly drawing inspiration from Resident Evil 7 comes out. (It can’t be worse than The Final Chapter, I suppose.) I can’t say that my friends were wrong when they warned me that half of these would be shite, but I also can’t say that I ended on a bad note, because Vendetta was pretty good.

After all this, my grand playthrough and consumption of all Resident Evil media is about to finish Next post I make will be a last look at the franchise as a whole...and what a year’s worth of zombie headshots taught me.  All screencaps taken by me. 

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Okay I know that kingdom hearts has a bad reputation for sticking crucial plot information on obscure spinoff games but HOLY SHIT I just finally watched a lets play of the fuckin digimon tcg game and found out it ACTUALLY HAS A GODDAMN CONCLUSION TO ANALOGMAN FROM DIGIMON WORLD 1

like 90% of the damn game has no plot whatsoever let alone indicating its a digimon world sequel! and then suddenly in the last battle without being foreshadowed whatsoever analogman returns and gets possibly the best boss battle ever IN A GODDAMN TCG GAME

holy shit his whole fight is framed as ‘this is literally the same guy from digimon world 1, hacking another game’, the interface wigs out and a bunch of fake command windows pop up with rapidly scrolling code of the game supposedly falling apart. And then his boss battle flips the entire gameplay system on its head by giving him fourth wall breaking special moves that pull overpowered effects by “hacking the engine”, with cool animations to fit. Fuckin badasssss!!

and it also fuckin FINALLY EXPLAINS THE DAMN PLOT LIKE GEEZ

digimon world’s conclusion was so rushed, you never even meet the villain until the final battle and it ends all weird with just “something” going wrong that causes him to get sucked into a portal or something while screaming dramatically in weirdly high resolution terror faces??? the tcg game confirms that this was him attempting to flee back to the human world after you defeated him, but one of the stray attacks from the battle damaged his machine and it caused him to essentially commit accidental suicide when he turned it on.

and HOLY SHIT MY FUCKIN OBSCURE HEADCANON IS TRUE????

the game had some sequel bait hints that maybe analogman is somehow still around and that the portal explosion just turned him into “corrupted data” so he can never return to the human world. and i always thought it would be super ironic if he actually got turned into a digimon aka the thing he hates more than anything

WELL OKAY I GUESS CRITICAL LORE IN A TCG GAME IS OKAY WHEN ITS A BIG YES BUNNI U THEORY BE CORRECT

he appears in this game as a malomyotismon who does a damn good vexen face during the fight, lol. And he’s all “gahh that stupid kid ruined my plans but this accursed body at least improved my hacking abilities!” Tho its implied that his corrupted state is more like a bodyless cloud of data that can possess/copy different digimon, which would be REALLY FUCKIN CRITICAL to explaining the goddamn plot of Digimon World Next Order!

Seriously wtf is up with this series? Digimon World 2 is not the sequel to Digimon World 1, all the numbered games are entirely separate individual stories with wildly different genres from pet sim to roguelike strategy. The real sequel is fucking DIGIMON THE CARD GAME THE GAME and then Digimon World Next Order a bazillion years later for the ps4. In which i am STILL REALLY SALTY that they have a FUCKIN RAD remix of analogman’s boss theme yet he doesn’t appear in the game. The added context of this damn tcg game confirms once and for all that the Ambiguous As Fuck Ending actually WAS him appearing in the game, this unexplained “oh wait the villain was good all along and he was just possessed by an evil virus” was supposed to be corrupted-digi-analogman and seriously WHY DONT THEY JUST FUCKIN EXPLAIN IT!!! this tcg game wasnt even released in europe!! and even american fans probably had no clue it was linked to this entirely separate subseries! You have to friggin piece it together with context clues like the battle music and the fact analogman’s signature mon was machinedramon. I mean vjesus christ Next Order is a litera; sequel with the grown up version of Digimon World’s protagonist as a badass home ec teacher who still defends the digital world in his free time yet you couldnt spare ONE LINE OF DIALOGUE mentioning the name of the villain?? and summarizing the fuckin tcg game everyone missed??? AND CONFIRMING THAT THE VILLAIN IS INDEED MAKING A REAPPEARANCE POSSESSING THIS GUY??? oh god everything makes SENSE, thank you terrible card game adaptation. ehh but i do still love Next Order for making Hiro/Mameo’s canon partner Mamemon, he’s even more badass as this big tough bishie version of himself with a tiny adorable pal that can shoot rocket fists through space and time. (its funny tho cos the DW1 intro movie showed metalmamemon and metalgreymon and the american boxart flipped a coin and decided metalgreymon must have been the one the protagonist was using in that scene. Whoops!)

anyway even with the added context that IT WAS INDEED GODDAMN ANALOGMAN, the final boss fight in Next Order was as terrible as the rest of the plot. So I’m glad trash gramps got a suitably badass boss fight after all, even if it was a CARD GAME VERSION! lets all celebrate the awesomeness of this obscure fuckin spinoff game’s obscure fuckin intercontinuity cameo with the boss fight music that other game wasted

seriously fuckin hell the biggest challenge in that final boss was that i was so distracted by SHEER OFFENDEDNESS at the cool music not matching it that it was hard to keep focused

its not just a great boss theme for a terrible boss, its a really fuckin EMOTIONAL song for anyone whose childhood was fuckin defined by the first game!!!

and look you had a PERFECT FUCKIN EXCUSE for a REALLY GOOD boss battle against MY MAN GRUMPY GRANDPA OF THE COOL DAMN NAME. Seriously guys analogman was THE FIRST digimon villain! digimon world came out before the anime, digimon world was the BETA FOR THE ANIME! this was the first place they had the ideas for file island, so much of the areas in the game are awkwardly mistranslated versions of stuff that would later appear in the anime in a different form. before this digimon had never been anything more than a fuckin 2-bit graphics tamagotchi and this was (after the manga) only the second goddamn time these monsters had an actual full colour character design! all of those charmingly janky 90s gross out show styled tcg illustrations? that was concept art that this game was working from! fuckin hell this game thought up the idea for metalgreymon’s changed design that ended up becoming the iconic partner of tai in the anime. (you can also see beta tai in the manga with a beta veemon as a partner instead! o_O)

SO LIKE...

JUST....

I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT ANALOGMAN OKAY!!! he’s a badly written guy with only like five sentences across all the videogames but fuckin hell he was such an Iconique part of the development of this series that they named him fucking ANALOGMAN

like dude you could have SO EASILY made me scream at my tv in a more positive way by bringing him out as the surprise villain and showing us wtf his deisgn is even supposed to look like cos god all we have is a blurry faceless early ps1 model buried under the glow filters of Mt Infinity’s funky background effects.

AND FUCKING

IF IT IS CANON

THAT MY FUCKIN

STUPID THEORY

IS CANON

slap a fuckin O on this man and LITERALLY LET ME BEAT HIM UP

like dont even give him a team or anything, just let me fight THE MAN HIMSELF

you canonically fuckin said he’s a digital ghost now and basically the same as a digimon

let me beat the shit out of a regular businessman in a suit and tie while he pulls his badass ‘i’m hacking the game i’m in’ bullshit from the GODDAMN TCG GAME THAT WAS MORE CLIMACTIC THAN YOUR SHITTY CASH GRAB FAKE SEQUEL

man god i didnt expect a fuckin TCG GAME to revive my righteous fury from back when i first played that piece of shit. i hate it cos Next order is so pretty and its gameplay is so good and i really loved my twin digis but there were SO MANY bugs and cut corners and missing content and really bad writing and GOD it made me so sad that the dub team really really tried, they tried so hard that they got fuckin renamon’s original voice actress back even though the renamon in this game has nothing to do with the anime one. THE DUB WAS REALLY GOOD BUT IT COULDNT SALVAGE THAT SCRIPT!! THE MUSIC WAS REALLY GOOD AND THE ART WAS REALLY GOOD AND THE DIGIMON THEMSELVES WERE MY BEST DAMN FRIENDS FOR THAT MONTH OF MY LIFE BUT THE GODDAMN FUCKIN SCRIPT!!! the postgame was MORE FUN because FINALLY everything opened up like the sandbox of the first game and you could just fuckin hug u digis without being distracted by constant cutscenes butchering your childhood nostalgia

man i wanted to write a fic/draw a comic about my headcanons on how to fix it but i never managed to do it cos holy shit it was basically “throw everything out and make a different game geez” I COULD RAMBLE FOR HOURS ABOUT THE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SEQUEL THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN!! and a fuckin!! tcg game!! was closer to that sequel!!!

and fuckin MY THEORY WAS RIGHT AND MY BETTER GAME IDEA ACTUALLY WOULD WORK IN CANON

fuck it im gonna do draw myself decking business gramps in the face

oh! and the female protagonist design! thats another rare good part of that thing! i loved the pixellization effect on her ponytal, way better than the male equivelant having a very ordinary costume design just with a pixel corner taken out of his jacket. also why did the plot never actually make a thing out of that? like you’d think that ‘unlike every other digimon tamer i’ve got this scar of my digitization’ would be a plot point. like they didnt give everyone else a cool pixel squares mark! they could have at least used it as an excuse why the protagonist is the Only Chosen One who can do all this plot shit. or if it was me i would have made it early foreshadowing for the Return Of Business Gramps, like you were partially infected by the Oooo Mysterious Unexplained Digi Virus (seriously why did they not just have ONE SENTENCE explaining its the fuckin original villain returning????) during the prologue and i dunno somehow that gives you powers to break analogman’s control on the digimon he possesses. or maybe the pixel thing is like a tracking device he put on you? or just give that cool design trait to the protagonist of digimon cyber sleuth instead, whose entire plot is that theyre a digimon human hybrid with literaly the power to pixellize themself into computers.

ALSO!!! actually do something!!! with mameo!!!

they really fuckin hyped up in all the prelease materials that the digimon world 1 protagonist was gonna be in this game and he’s all grown up now. and then he does NOTHING in the plot except babble exposition and stand around your home base. and has one line about how he’s a badass teacher now and his partner is mamemon but hey we made a bullshit excuse for why his digimon is sealed away and he never gets to fight :<

give me an actual cool teamup of new protag girl and her cool teacher dude beating the shit out of business trash with their bare fists and also their digimon’s bare fists while THE BEST DAMN MUSIC GOES UNWASTED

...fuck i sure do Feel Intensely about nostalgic games lol. i wonder if i’ll be so rambley when i play kh3? maybe itd be a really shitty lp, aaagh...

[its-whitetomorrow]

Movie 20: THE TRUE STORY

First of all, this is definitely an alternate universe on the other side of Ultra Hole. So many rainbows and rainbow colors in this movie, folks. Rainbow because don’t forget rainbows are ultra holes and they lead to other dimensions and also Rainbow. Like Rainbow Rocket and that’s the newest, coolest rainbow addition from beyond the rainbow.

But let’s just think about something from original Kanto episodes... because I don’t think it was THAT intense...

I think they’re having a romance here! Oh, wow. So sweet.

Also, watching with dub music gives us *serious* hints about what’s going on here...

Remeber this guy?

You may think he “died” in the blast but seeing how both Lysandre and the megalith simply vanished, it’s possible they were physically disintegrated - but released power caused Lysandre to jump between dimensions as pure energy. Like, seriously, these things are pretty canon in poke-series now!

AND HERE IT IS, JUST LISTEN TO THE MUSIC AND WHAT OMINOUS LYSANDRISH THINGS DOES IT TELL YOU

OH THAT FLARE IN THE EYE!

Lysandre is clearly possessing Entei to further his plans in this new dimension... only his past has come to hunt him...

Made him pretty pissed!

BUUURN THEM!!!

Or whatever....

This is not even the same Ash, right? Not suitable for his revenge. Let the minions handle them.

Meanwhile, in the poke-world poke-news spread fast...

Onix, a Poke Flare admin, wants to satisfy the boss.

ASH YOU WILL PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID TO THE HUMAN FORM OF THE BOSS!!!

Onix can come up with some pretty evil smiles...

“OKAY THAT WATER IS NOT NICE BUT LET US MEET AGAIN FOOLS”

If that’s not enough, young version of Lysandre is also in this movie (only pretty violent, early teenage rage of some sort). Nice red trousers man!

LYSANDRE VANNILA STYLE

“Hi, I’m Lysandre and I am mature enough to hate all the fools with my very soul. Also misanthropy all day long”

LYSANDRE TEEN-CROSS STYLE

“Hi, I’m not really mature and I hate all the weaklings but at least I don’t care too much... so I don’t really need to kill everybody”

But look who is back, with their unsettling music...

You stupid chosen one amateur, that’s my HQ!

Come come pokemon children of the Flare, sleep well!

One day our beautiful world will be realized...

But here is when things really start to go off rails... SHADOW SHADOWWW

When you’re not sure what even happened to your pal Entei...

When you’re Cynthia but you smile like Lusamine

When not-really-boss Lysandre wants to battle!

When something bad is foreshadowed, possibly Ultimate Weapon and the destruction of the Universe

When the romance blossoms

When you have frozen pokemon in recent games and it’s really hardcore, so why not in the movie!

CONGRATS: YOU WERE CHOSEN

When you’re angry something is wrong with your pal Entei 

LET’S OPEN AN ULTRA...

... Rainbow

YES YES YES, RAINBOWS> Rainbows pretty great, Rainbows lolz

even Giovanni loves Rainbows these days

“I’m obviously Ash travelling through Ultra Wormholes but don’t tell anybody. I came to have fun and do research, who cares about being a pokemon master anymore. ULTRAAAA HOOOOLESS!”

*YOUNG LYSANDRE RUINS EVERYTHING*

He is just being a jerk and wants to prove he is strong...

but the rainbow feather aligns with his real self, hence the disaster...

Marshadow is now being consumed by many Lysandres of all Dimensions and wants to kill EVERYBODY.

Even stands on Megalith!

When you were KILLED but somehow you ended up between dimensions...

Luckily, an ultra hole remains open, there is still time...

GO GO, YOU CAN MAKE IT THROUGH THE RAINBOW...

Oh, Rainbow!

Young Lysandre in awe - oh how beautiful the world is...

HAPPY ENDING!

He is finally on the right path to become a decent guy who cares... only to end up with a decent genocide idea

Little he knows...

his future version that ended up in Entei is going to anihilate him anyway because he sure was a trash

Movie 20 teaches you that anything is possible and facial expressions don’t lie...

[mst3kproject]

Venus meets the Son of Hercules

The Hercules movies were always among my favourite episodes of MST3K, so I'm definitely gonna review more of them as Episodes that Never Were.  This one features Massimo Serato from The Loves of Hercules and a lot of people who spent the entire sixties being in one sword-and-sandal movie after another.  The music is by Gino Marinuzzi Jr, who also did the score for Hercules and the Captive Women.  And the title is almost a complete lie – there's no son of Hercules in this movie, or even Hercules himself.  I bet that would have confused the hell out of Joel and the bots.

Some vaguely Minoan city is being attacked by a hybrid of racist stereotypes and losing badly, when suddenly a mysterious warrior in an extremely impractical helmet descends from the heavens to save the day!  He single-handedly turns the tide of battle, and then stops to save the life of a pretty girl named Daphne before vanishing into the sunset.  This warrior, however, is none other than Mars, the God of War, who returns to the city as a mortal man because he has fallen in love with Daphne.  He arrives to learn that she has been sent to be a sacred virgin in the temple of Venus, as thanks to the gods for his help – whoops!

Mars never was a very reasonable guy, so he decides he's just gonna have to storm the temple and get her back.  This ought to be easy for somebody whose powers include invisibility and godlike strength, but Venus is a little pissed about the theft of one of her virgins, and wants Mars for herself.  Meanwhile, there's a palace conspiracy going on back in the city, too.  Remember Licos from The Loves of Hercules?  I guess after faking his own death in Ecalia he changed his name to Antarus and went to find some other royal family to marry into.  He wants to have his cake and eat it too, marrying Princess Hecuba but also banging Daphne on the side.  Hecuba wants to be rid of Daphne forever so she'll have no competition for Antarus' affections.  The whole thing's a poorly-researched ancient soap opera!

The movie is full of riff opportunities.  The high priest's costume looks like he's wearing droopy bunny ears.  I bet Joel and the Bots would have loved that.  I hereby dub him Father Harvey. There's a pyre scene that would no doubt have prompted jokes about marshmallows and hot dogs.  Hecuba looks like Minoan Angelica Houston.  A bit where the priestesses perform a weird dance with big pieces of coloured fabric would have been fodder for comments about skittles and possibly Disney's Fantasia.  The women wear spirals on their boobs.  The monster they sacrifice young virgins to looks like a cross between a sundew and a sarlaac.  The Brains would have had a ball with this one, and I hope they still might.

As a movie, though, it's one of those films in which we really have no reason to root for the love story between Mars and Daphne, because they literally do not know each other.  They said a couple of sentences each when he rescued her from the barbarians, and then he had to go back to Olympus – the next time they meet he's trying to kidnap her from the temple, and they're making declarations of love.  Hercules knew Deianira better than that!  The film seems to know this is dumb, too, because it tries to get us to ship Marphne by presenting all alternative relationships as dysfunctional.

Venus is manipulative and uses trickery to get Mars into bed with her.  Antarus is not only engaged to somebody else, but he's old enough to be Daphne's father (come to think of it, Mars, as a god, is probably hundreds or thousands of years old, but let's not go there.  The Greek myths give the gods an average mental age of about fifteen anyway).  Antarus and Hecuba are much more interested in using each other than kissing each other.  The only healthy relationship Daphne is seen to have with a man is with Frixos the Armorer, who serves as her Sassy Gay Friend so the movie won't have to risk passing the Bechdel test.  At the end he's paired up with a girl to reassure the audience that despite being respectful and supportive of his female best friend, a coward in battle, and interested in what people are wearing, he's totally heterosexual.

Except for pure and virginal Daphne, the women with speaking roles in this movie are jealous and scheming.  Hecuba wants Daphne put in a convent or fed to a monster, so that she'll have Antarus all to herself, and she misuses her political authority in order to accomplish this.  Venus tricks Mars out of his first attempt to rescue Daphne, then takes on the girl's face to seduce him – and he demonstrates that he's no smarter than Micky Hargitay's Hercules by going for it!  Even Daphne herself has her jealous moment, when she looks into the Sybil's pool and sees Mars and Venus in bed together (this is the most mythologically-accurate moment in the movie, by the way.  Greek oracles loved to give truthful but misleading answers. Daphne sees the couple in bed, but not that the woman is wearing her face).

The men in the movie, meanwhile, all deserve a couple of good smacks for thinking with their dicks.  Mars gives up his immortality in order to bone a girl he only just met, then sleeps with her doppelgänger.  Antarus finds his pending marriage to Hecuba threatened by his desire to sleep with Daphne, but continues trying to sleep with her anyway, and actually murders his fiancee, ruining his own plans to enter the royal succession, rather than just accept that he can't always have what he wants!  A guard continually catcalls the deaf-mute Maya despite his colleague pointing out, again and again, that she can't hear him.  The only man who comes across as having a brain in his head instead of his penis is Frixos, who suspects a trick and refuses when he thinks Maya is trying to get him in bed.

Later in the movie, Frixos claims to have fallen in love with Maya, and when Mars asks him what makes her different from other women, Frixos explains about her being unable to hear or speak.  Both of them then laugh!  I think this is a joke about women talking too much, but given how Frixos comes across, I found myself theorizing that he hoped to reduce gossip by having a woman living with him – one who can't go around telling people he doesn't sleep with her.

So much for gender and sexuality.  Let's talk about race in this movie.  The most notable actor of colour is John Kitzmiller, playing the barbarian king who attacks the city at the beginning. This character is literally named Afros and is portrayed as having complete contempt for the lives, laws, and sacred spaces of the locals.  This is not explored thoroughly enough to be an intentional reversal, so it stands as a snortworthy nugget of irony. Then there's Maya, who is vaguely non-white as well as being a disabled female slave.  She makes friends with Daphne and while she turns out to be quite intelligent and competent, her role in the story is limited to doing a service for her white friend at considerable risk to herself.  For the most part she is a helpless victim, blamed for a crime she did not commit and tortured into admitting to it.

Finally there's the movie's entirely unexplained ending.  Now, I made fun of the monster earlier, but I have to give them full points for originality.  Throughout the movie they talk about this beast, but never describe it.  I was expecting some sort of traditional reptilian creature, so the maiden-devouring plant was actually a nice surprise.  It's not a bad design, either, although it could have used some colour.  There's something appealingly caterpillar-ish about the way the big, spiky petals unfurl.  A priest refers to the thing as sacred to Proserpine, who was a goddess of plant life married to Pluto, god of death, so it's also thematically appropriate!  The rubber model doesn't look very good in full light, but a-plus concept.

Getting back to the ending, though.  Earlier in the story the Sybil told Daphne that Mars was not destined to live a mortal life, and the only way to resolve the situation was for Daphne to die.  In the final battle, sure enough, she takes the arrow Antarus meant for Mars – Mars pushes Antarus into the sarlaac pit, but Daphne dies in his arms.  Mars then declares that he will commit suicide, since if he and Daphne could not share life he wants them to share death.  This seems like it will be the fulfillment of the Sybil's prophecy.  Then, however, Daphne's body disappears and she materializes, alive, in a chariot drawn by four white horses!  Mars climbs in, and they fly off into the night or something.

Mars calls out a thanks to his father Jupiter for this favour, so I guess he made Daphne immortal or something?  This is not unprecedented in mythology: the same boon was granted to Psyche so she could marry Cupid.  In the tale of Cupid and Psyche, however, the gods are active throughout, and the concept of ambrosia, a potion that confers immortality, is already introduced.  In Venus meets the Son of Hercules this comes out of nowhere, to give a happy ending to a story we've already been told cannot have one!

If I were in charge of remaking this movie, the first thing I would do is have Mars stick around a while, perhaps as the city gives a feast in his honour or something, and actually talk to Daphne before deciding he loves her.  Then I would foreshadow the idea that Daphne can earn immortality through an act of selflessness – the Temple of Venus could be presented as a possible avenue to this, giving an extra reason why Mars should not be allowed to take her away.  It's not like they wouldn't have had time for such things. The movie has a number of over-long sequences, like the opening battle and the dance of the vestals, that could easily have been cut to make room for actual plot and character development.

Venus meets the Son of Hercules is kind of okay as a peplum romance, but it's depressing how easy it would have been to improve on it.

[scifihorroradventure]

FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD (1965)

At the tail end of World War II, the heart of the Frankenstein Monster is smuggled out of Germany by the Nazis. Taken to Japan in order to be studied, its experimentation is cut short by the bombing of Hiroshima. Several years later, scientists Dr. Bowen (Nick Adams), Sueko (Kumi Mizuno), and Kawaji (Tadao Takashima) work night and day in their clinic, tending to patients dying from radiation sickness. Sueko and Bowen encounter a young boy (Kenichiro Kawaji) desperate for food, even killing animals for it, and soon bring him to their clinic for further study. At the same time, a large, ravenous reptile known as Baragon surfaces from deep within the earth, devouring humans every chance it gets. A discussion with a German scientist convinces Kawaji that the boy is in fact the reincarnation of the Frankenstein Monster, only for an episode with some overzealous reporters resulting in the boy - now an immense size - escaping the clinic. Unfortunately, as Baragon eats more and more people, his carnage is blamed on Frankenstein. As Bowen, Sueko, and Kawaji try to convince the military that Frankenstein is innocent, the two monsters unknowingly head for a final showdown.

The second of Toho's collaborations with American producer Henry G. Saperstein, Frankenstein Conquers the World answers the question "What if the Frankenstein Monster got mutated into an even bigger monster?" The film opens with a great sequence set during World War II. This opening bit has some really nice atmosphere that sadly isn't carried over throughout the rest of the film. What's interesting is that this opening and some of the later dialogue ("Frankenstein was actually murdered many times...") suggest that this could loosely (very loosely) follow the Universal films. Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects are top notch, as always, and Akira Ifukube provides yet another memorable score (some of which was later reused for Godzilla vs. Gigan). Of course, one interesting bit of trivia concerning this film is that it was initially planned to be a far different movie. Instead of simply being a Frankenstein film with another monster for him to defeat and save the day from, the movie was originally going to continue the tradition started by King Kong vs. Godzilla and pit the immortal Monster against the King of the Monsters himself! At this point, however, Godzilla had already begun his transition from villain to hero with Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster and Monster Zero, and thus his role as the antagonist that Frankenstein must overcome no longer made any sense, thus necessitating the creation of Baragon. Portrayed by Toho suitmation veteran Haruo Nakajima, Baragon is a fun monster to watch, his large, frill-like ears flopping about as he leaves a trail of carnage in his wake. Unlike Godzilla, Rodan, Varan, and other previous giant monsters, Baragon isn't given a backstory or origin to tell us where he came from, he's just a huge prehistoric reptile that shows up one day, using his fiery heat ray to help blast away rock and earth as he tunnels around Japan. Baragon would prove to be an extremely popular creation of Toho's, returning in Destroy All Monsters and, decades later, Godzilla Mothra King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.

But of course, the star of the show is Frankenstein. Portrayed mainly by Koji Furuhata, this incarnation of the Monster is a different sort of kaiju for Toho, an oversized man rather than a giant reptile or insect. As a portrayal of Mary Shelley's famous creation, Toho's Frankenstein Monster is - while ultimately effective - a mixed bag. While Eiji Tsuburaya faithfully recreates Jack Pierce's iconic raised forehead, Furuhata is a noticeably thin man, resulting in a rather scrawny Frankenstein. Honestly, there are times where one may forget this is intended to be the Frankenstein Monster and not just some giant caveman type being. That being said, Furuhata plays Frankenstein well, eliciting just the right amount of sympathy while still keeping the Monster very much a threat. Unfortunately, Frankenstein turns out to be too much of a threat by the time he fights Baragon. Instead of the heroic Frankenstein struggling to overcome and defeat the vicious, man eating monstrosity, he quickly begins to overpower and out think Baragon from the very beginning until he finally kills him. While yes, Frankenstein has always been known as a very strong character, there's nothing tense or rewarding about watching the hero effortlessly beat the tar out of the villain for fifteen minutes, making for an admittedly entertaining, though not entirely satisfying final battle. Oddly, Frankenstein has a notable lack of an exact origin in this film. While he clearly comes from the heart of the Monster at the start of the movie, it's never really said if the creature we follow throughout the film is an entirely new body generated by the heart, or if he is a starving street urchin having been mutated by eating it, or what. It ultimately doesn't affect the film, but it's strange when the character is usually so specific in its science and origins ("We dug up body parts, then sewed them together, then gave it a brain, then used lightning to bring it to life, then gave it a new brain, etc." vs. "It was the heart somehow maybe").

For the cast, the winning duo of Nick Adams and Kumi Mizuno return as the leads. And while Glenn and Miss Namikawa are clearly the more iconic couple played by the two (and rightfully so), their chemistry really shines here as the two are allowed to play more of a traditional couple as opposed to literally star crossed lovers who don't even share too many scenes together. The two have some really nice moments together, especially the dinners they have in each other's native culture. It's a nice little touch that one might not even notice at first. It's also nice that, unlike most other scientists in Frankenstein movies, Dr. Bowen never goes crazy and tries to use Frankenstein for his own ends. That honor, kind of, goes to Tadao Takashima as Dr. Kawaji. Kawaji is vastly uneven compared to Bowen and Sueko, at first insisting that Frankenstein is just as human as the next person, deserving better than being held in a zoo and being treated like a science experiment. But then, when discussing the Monster's origins with Dr. Liesendorf (a delightfully over the top Peter Mann, whose dub voice sounds like Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein), he quickly decides that the boy should be immediately hacked apart and studied. Kawaji later eases up on this train of thought, only to then decide that he should be the one to kill Frankenstein by throwing bombs into his eyes! Going from one to the other would be one thing, but the continuous back and forth is a little ridiculous. Also odd is the fact that Kawaji survives the film, when any other Frankenstein movie would have killed him off.

The film is also known for its original, unused ending, in which Frankenstein encounters Toho's infamous Giant Octopus after slaying Baragon. The Octopus attacks Frankenstein, who does well at first, only to become ensnared by the animal's tentacles, then dragged into a nearby lake, where he drowns and is presumably eaten. It's a fun enough scene, but comes completely out of left field, as the Octopus had clearly not been foreshadowed in any way prior to it simply popping up in the middle of the mountains.

Frankenstein would be the last American creation to receive his own Toho film, but he nevertheless left a strong mark on Toho's legacy which continues to be felt to this day, even more so than King Kong. As previously mentioned, Baragon would go on to become one of the more popular characters within the Godzilla franchise, while the semi-sequel to this film, War of the Gargantuas, remains one of Toho's most popular kaiju films to date, especially among their non-Godzilla films.

Rating: ★★★ ½

Cast: Nick Adams ... Dr. James Bowen Kumi Mizuno ... Dr. Sueko Togami Tadao Takashima ... Dr. Yuzo Kawaji Yoshio Tsuchiya ... Kawai Peter Mann ... Dr. Liesendorf Jun Tazaki ... Military Advisor Takashi Shimura ... Axis Scientist Koji Furuhata ... Frankenstein Kenichiro Kawaji ... Frankenstein (Juvenile) Haruo Nakajima ... Baragon (uncredited)

A.K.A.: Frankenstein vs. Baragon. Director: Ishiro Honda. Producer: Tomoyuki Tanaka, Reuben Bercovitch (executive producer), Henry G. Saperstein (executive producer), Samuel Arkoff (executive producer), and James H. Nicholson (executive producer). Writer: Takeshi Kimura, Reuben Bercovitch, Jerry Sohl, and Mary Shelley (original "Frankenstein" novel). Music: Akira Ifukube. Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya (director), Teruyoshi Nakano (assistant director), Fumio Nakadai (scene manipulation), Akira Watanabe (art director), Sadamasa Arikawa (director of photography), Sadao Iizuda (optical photography), Kuichiro Kishida (lighting), Yukio Manoda (optical photographer), and Sokei Tomioka (director of photography).

[mrjoelgarcia9]

Let’s Talk #SailorMoon R: The Movie

The first theatrical Sailor Moon film was based on the original show’s second season and titled Sailor Moon R: The Movie. When it was originally brought over to the United States by DiC and Pioneer, it was heavily censored and oddly renamed Sailor Moon R The Movie: The Promise of the Rose.

Viz Media, the current North American distributor of Sailor Moon, has recently produced a new uncensored English dub. After being theatrically screened in theaters around the United States and Canada earlier this year, the film (with its original title) has been released for the first time ever on Blu-ray alongside an obscure short film.

For a review of Sailor Moon R: The Movie (and Make Up! Sailor Guardians), feel free to keep reading. There will be spoilers.

Like with the show’s original English dub, I did not watch any of the three films when they originally aired on Toonami. When the original Japanese version of the show began streaming on Hulu, I assumed the films would either be uploaded onto the service or included alongside the Blu-ray and DVD releases of their respective seasons. This film’s North American re-release comes a little more than a year after Sailor Moon R was fully released on Blu-ray and DVD.

However, it is coming out at the right time, with the franchise currently celebrating its 25th anniversary and the fourth season of Sailor Moon Crystal (presumably) premiering later this year.

Sailor Moon R: The Movie features the team being confronted by an alien named Fiore. He wants to fulfill a promise he made to Mamoru years ago and sees Usagi as a selfish girl preventing him from being with Mamoru. When Luna and Artemis realize he possesses the powerful Xenian Flower, a destroyer of planets, it is up to Sailor Moon and the Guardians to stop Fiore before he destroys Earth.

While the film is set during R, it is strictly non-canon.

While it could take place anytime between episodes 77 (when Usagi and Mamoru got back together) and 82 (when the team went to the future), there is one big problem: The Black Moon Clan’s sudden disappearance. They are neither seen or mentioned in the film, which leaves open a major plot hole of why they did not try to capture Chibiusa when the Guardians and Tuxedo Mask were off Earth. It does not hurt the film but it could have easily been fixed with a throwaway line.

Consequentially, this causes Chibiusa to contribute very little in the film. She mostly serves as Usagi’s motivational speaker, encouraging her to go save Mamoru and telling Luna and Artemis that Sailor Moon is everyone’s mom. Admittedly, the latter line was clever foreshadowing since this film came out nearly two months before it was revealed in the show that she is Usagi and Mamoru’s daughter.

Despite the plot hole, the film is really good.

It had a great story which presented something the show rarely did: focus on Mamoru. While the show had previously revealed his past, the film expands upon it to seamlessly integrate Fiore into the story and the first time he met Usagi in their reincarnated lives.

Fiore is a great villain for the film. It was refreshing to see someone whose priority was neither to conquer or destroy the world, which was instead the flower’s main goal, and quickly recognize the team’s secret identities. His relationship with Mamoru is shown to be aggressively possessive due to the Xenian Flower’s power. While the film never outright states Fiore's true feelings for him, it is implied by how disgusted he looks when Usagi tells him that Mamoru is her boyfriend and Ami says that Mamoru is probably “popular with the guys”.

He also heavily resembles Ail from the Makaiju Tree filler arc. In the original Japanese version, both characters were even played by the same voice actor (Hikaru Midorikawa).

The voice acting is equally great in both its original Japanese and VIz’s new uncensored English dub. The latter is superior to the old DiC/Pioneer dub by faithfully translating the original dialogue, not adding noise to the intentionally silent moments, and avoiding dumb lines such as “Moon Mama”.

“Moon Revenge” is a great song which perfectly fits the climax’s tone in the same way “Moonlight Densetsu” did for the first season finale. “The Power of Love”, the replacement song used in the DiC/Pioneer dub, is better than the music featured in the DiC seasons but still sounds dated and more like something one would hear at a nightclub than a theatrical film.

The film’s only other flaws were the Xenian Flower’s quick death and the CG asteroid sequence that has not aged well and looks extremely blurry in HD.

When the film was originally released in Japan, it was preceded by a short film titled Make Up! Sailor Guardians. It features Usagi and Chibiusa overhearing a conversation about the Guardians, with Usagi getting annoyed by how they recall everyone except Sailor Moon. It mainly serves as a quick introduction to the main characters and is helpful for those who may want to see the film but do not have time to watch the show. The short is also making its North American home media debut after being theatrically screened with the film.

There were a lot of great moments in the film, such as Mamoru telling Usagi he considers her to be his family, Sailor Venus realizing the flowers are the monsters, Tuxedo Mask stabbing Fiore with a rose, and the aforementioned first meeting between Usagi and Mamoru. The short also had a funny moment where Usagi tries to apologize for being a crybaby only to then start crying.

Sailor Moon R: The Movie and Make Up! Sailor Guardians are both Highly Recommended. They are available to own on Blu-ray and DVD from Viz Media. The film is also available on iTunes but only in English and does not include the short.

Until next time, thank you for reading!

[justanothercinemaniac]

Epic Movie (Re)Watch #123 - Back to the Future Part III

Spoilers below.

Have I seen it before: Yes

Did I like it then: Yes!

Do I remember it: Yes.

Did I see it in theaters: Yes.

Was it a movie I saw since August 22nd, 2009: Yes. #385.

Format: Blu-ray

1) I like really enjoy this film and I don’t know why. In some ways it is my favorite of the trilogy (but not really, the first one is my favorite). There are just so many things I love about it. The Western genre, the greater emphasis we get on Doc, Thomas F. Wilson as Mad Dog, there are just a lot of things about this film that really work for me on a base level. Outside of the original, this is the one I watch most of the trilogy.

2) Universal decided to unveil a new logo at the start of this film because 1) it was the studio’s 75th anniversary and 2) this was their most popular series at the time. It is the rare occasion when a logo actually adds to the weight of a film, as it feels more magical and we have a greater sense of time than we did with past logos.

3) Because the last film ended with the climax of the first film, and because this film’s opening scene was the ending of the last film (kudos if any of that made sense to you), this means that the end of the clock tower scene is the only sequence to appear in all three Back to the Future films.

4) The film’s opening theme actually introduces a new love theme from composer Alan Silvestri. A lighter melody which reoccurs throughout the film which I always tied to Doc and Clara’s relationship. But in hindsight it could just as easily be used to relate Doc and Marty’s friendship.

5) I mentioned in my post about Back to the Future Part II that the sequels play with the idea of history repeating itself by recreating scenes from the original in new circumstances. This trend continues in Part III immediately when Doc doesn’t believe that Marty actually came back FROM the future and refers to him as, “future boy,” only for Marty to talk to Doc through a locked door and convince him otherwise.

6) Doc reading the letter his future self wrote to Marty from 1885 is great. We get to see a lot of fun from 1955 Doc in reacting to ideas like the flying Delorean and briefly thinking that, “Einstein,” was someone other than his own future dog. Also it makes both Doc & Marty tear up. I’m all for tearful bromances.

7) As I mentioned before, this film does succeed in some nice emphasis on Doc’s character. Before he was a funny enthusiastic scientist and we didn’t get MUCH of his backstory, but here we get nice little details which flesh out his character more. Notably, his love for Jules Verne inspiring his desires to be a scientist. We also learn that he LOVED the Old West and as a kid he wanted to be a cowboy. That’s such a fun idea!

8)

Marty [after finding a picture of his great-great-grandfather Seamus McFly, also played by Michael J. Fox]: “That’s him. Good looking guy.”

9) So Doc is about to send Marty into the old west dressed as a “cowboy” and Marty points out he never saw Clint Eastwood dress like this.

Doc: “Clint who?”

Marty [looking at the movie posters]: “That’s right. You haven’t heard of him yet.”

The movies featured at the drive-in - Revenge of the Creature and Tarantula -both actually feature a young Clint Eastwood in them!

10) According to IMDb:

The drive-in theater was constructed specifically for this film. It was built in Monument Valley, and demolished immediately after filming. No films were ever screened there.

I would have LOVED to go to that drive in. Like that would be a must see destination for sure.

11) This is a nice callback to the original:

1955 Doc (telling Marty about how he’ll have to drive through the desert): “Remember where you’re going there are no roads!”

12) The gag with the Native Americans is pretty clever. For those of you who haven’t seen the film: Marty is concerned about running into the drive in wall with the Native Americans on it but is concerned he’ll hit them, but Doc points out he’ll travel back in time when there was no wall. Except when he travels back in time, there’s a group of (possibly stereotypical) Native Americans charging right at him (because they’re being chased by the cavalry).

13) Michael J. Fox as William McFly.

Fox continues his excellence of acting out multiple characters from the first film with his performance as Marty’s ancestor Seamus. He plays it totally different than he does Marty. Quieter, kinder, a little less brash, and with a killer Irish accent. Like his acting in the previous film, you never feel like you’re watching Fox play against Fox. They’re two totally different characters and he does well to show that.

14) Not only does this film play well with preexisting gags, but it also adds to them.

Marty: I had this horrible nightmare. Dreamed I w-... dreamed I was in a western. And I was being chased by all these Indians... and a bear.

Maggie McFly: Well... you're safe and sound here, now, at the McFly farm.

Marty: McFly farm? (Marty jolts out of bed to see Maggie) Why, you're my, you're my, my...(realizes he’s never actually met this woman in his whole life, as opposed to all the times he’s done this with his mom.) Who are you?

15) Just as Fox plays Seamus well, Lea Thompson does a great job as Maggie McFly.

Maggie is so different from Lorraine or...huh, I guess she’s only played different versions of Lorraine before. But she’s a little fiercer, being an immigrant at all, is able to hold her own with her husband, and again the Irish accent is great! I very much enjoy Maggie.

16) Robert Zemeckis directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit before the two Back to the Future sequels...

17) Think about this: we have seen seven full generations of Marty’s family.

His great great grandparents, Seamus and Maggie.

His great grandfather, William (as a baby).

His grandparents, Sam and Stella (in the original film)

His parents and his mother’s siblings (in the original film)

His parents.

Him and his siblings.

His children.

That gets to an excellent point about this series: it’s not about random time travel, it’s very much about family and the relationships we form between blood and friends. The fact that we meet seven generations of one kid’s family I think illustrates that perfectly.

18) Marty wandering through town illustrates how he wanders through town in the earlier films, giving us some nice throwbacks/foreshadowing (I don’t know which it is in a time travel movie) when we see A. Jones Manure Company.

19) The three bar patrons:

Dub Taylor, Harrey Carey. Jr., and Pat Buttram made careers out of playing sidekicks, town drunks, and colorful townsfolk in hundreds of westerns and television shows. Buttram in particular provided memorable voice over work in The Fox & The Hound as Chief and Disney’s Robin Hood as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

20) Bufford ‘Mad Dog’ Tannen.

This was Thomas F. Wilson’s favorite film to shoot out of the Back to the Future trilogy because he got to be a cowboy pretty much. Wilson is truly underrated throughout this film. In so many ways Mad Dog is a wildly different character from Biff and Griff. He’s more of a classic thug, he feels like he’s straight out of an old western and Wilson is chameleonic in the part. You don’t see Biff or Griff or any of other Wilson’s work, you just see Mad Dog and I will forever shout to the heavens that Thomas F. Wilson does not get enough credit for his work in this film.

21) These films really lucked out in their pop culture references. From the original we’ve had references to films, TV and music which have stood the test of time. These include Star Wars, “Star Trek”, Jaws, and - in this film - Clint Eastwood and Michael Jackson. Marty’s Michael Jackson dance when Mad Dog asks him to Dance is great!

22) In each film Marty pisses off a Tannen family member in a place to drink and is chased through town by him and his gang. This film is a bit more serious with that idea, as Mad Dog and his crew ride their horses and practically hogtie and lynch Marty. It’s the one time the town chase has not ended with Marty coming up on top, needing Doc’s sharpshooting to save his life. According to IMDb:

Thomas F. Wilson who plays Buford Tannen, performed all his horse riding stunts himself. He also did the trick where he lassoes Marty just before we meet the 1885 Doc.

When "Mad Dog" tried to lynch Marty, Michael J. Fox was accidentally hanged, rendering him unconscious for a short time. He records this in his autobiography "Lucky Man" (2002).

23) I never knew how amazing Doc Brown as a badass gunslinger would be until I saw this film.

24) It’s interesting to note that Doc does not remember helping Marty get to the Old West when he did so thirty years earlier. My working theory is this: we know that Doc hit his head a lot, so I’m guessing at some point he just banged himself up so much he forgot his own future in the Old West.

25) The Mayor in Part III was a part which was offered to Ronald Reagan after his presidency, as he was a fan of the original film. He ended up turning it down.

26) The whole idea of an act committed by Marty and Doc changes the name of Clayton Ravine to Shonash Ravine then to Eastwood Ravine is basically a more obvious version of the Twin Pines/Lone Pine Mall joke in the first film.

27) Clara Clayton.

With the exception of Lorraine, the Back to the Future films don’t exactly excel at representing female characters (they literally left Jennifer on the porch in the middle of the last film and she won’t show up again until the end of this film). Mary Steenburgen as Clara Clayton is a nice change of pace for that. Although largely introduced as a love interest for Doc Brown, she is developed into an interesting character to match Doc’s. She has the same love for Jules Verne and science as he does (a rarity in the Old West), she’s able to fend for herself around Bufford Tannen, but she and Doc also connect on a really fascinating level. Even though they just met, the chemistry between Lloyd and Steenburgen make you really believe that these two love each other (the scene where Doc agrees to fix her telescope is so cute!). I love Mary Steenburgen in this film, and she’s a worthy addition to the trilogy.

28) With the extension of the story to a trilogy, we get to see when the famous Hill Valley clock starts clicking in 1885 (in Part III) and when it stops clicking in 1955 (in the original film). Thinking it through, you can figure out exactly how long the clock ran. The clock in the clock tower started running at 8:00 p.m. on September 5, 1885 (the date is provided by the caption on the photograph Doc gives Marty at the end of the movie). The lightning strikes the clock tower at 10:04 p.m. on November 12, 1955. This means that the clock tower operated for exactly 70 years, 2 months, 7 days, 2 hours, and 4 minutes.

29) Much like how Huey Lewis made a cameo in the original film, ZZ Top (who sings the song “Doubleback” which plays during the credits) cameos as the 1885 town bad during the dance.

According to IMDb:

According to the book "Billy Gibbons: Rock & Roll Gearhead", ZZ Top was hanging around the set and was asked to be the town band. During one take, the camera broke. While waiting for the camera to be repaired, Michael J. Fox asked if they would play "Hey Good Lookin'" which they did. Afterwards, more requests were played. Two hours later, someone inquired if the camera had been repaired. Robert Zemeckis replied that it had been fixed for quite a while, he just didn't want to stop the party that had evolved.

Also the song they’re playing is an acoustic version of “Doubleback” from the film.

30) I’m sharing this largely for the first 22 seconds.

After watching the modern “Doctor Who” series I immediately think of this:

You Whovians get me.

31) I’ve seen this film probably around ten times (maybe eleven now) but this was the first time that the actor playing the Colt salesman looked familiar to me.

Well that’s because the last time I watched this film and my most recent viewing I’d see Blazing Saddles twice and, well...

32) And of course this has to continue because it wasn’t resolved in Part II:

Mad Dog [to Marty]: “You yella?”

Again, I don’t have an issue with this as much as other people do, but it’s hardly my favorite aspect of the trilogy.

33) This part makes me laugh every time:

Mad Dog: Then let's finish it, right now!

Gang Member #1: Uh, not now, Buford. Uh, Marshal's got our guns.

Mad Dog: Like I said, we'll finish this tomorrow.

Gang Member #2: Tomorrow, we're robbin' the Pine City Stage.

Mad Dog: What about Monday? Are we doin' anything Monday?

Gang Member #1: Uh, no, Monday'd be fine. You can kill him on Monday.

Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen: I'll be back this way on Monday!

34) Doc and Clara stargazing melts my cynical heart.

(GIF sources unknown [if these are your GIFs please let me know].)

35) The only time in the entire trilogy when the catchphrases are flipped!

(GIF source unknown [if this is your GIF please let me know].)

And I laugh every time.

36) It is a truly fascinating scene to watch when Doc tells Marty he wants to stay in 1885, but Marty knows Doc so well he is able to pretty easily convince him otherwise (mainly by appealing to the scientist in him). It shows just how great a friendship these two have.

37) You know what I never got: why does Doc not want to take Clara with them to 1985?

SHE’S SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD ANYWAY!!!!

38) My heart breaks every time Doc tries to tell Clara the truth about himself, and each time I watch this film there’s a part of me that thinks it won’t happen this time. I’m always wrong.

(GIF originally posted by @whatshouldwecallme)

39) This fucking scene:

Doc [after a traveling salesman tells him you never know what the future holds]: “Oh...the future. I can tell you about the future.”

(Feel free to stop watching after 1:44)

40) I’m starting to realize this film has some of my favorite gags in the whole trilogy.

Marty [after Doc faints after taking a shot]: “How many did he have?”

Bartender: “Just one.”

Marty: “‘Just one’?”

Bartender: “Now there’s a man who can’t hold his liquor.”

41) Marty realizing what we all should when dealing with someone like Tannen:

(GIF source unknown [if this is your GIF please let me know].)

42) If I didn’t ship these two enough, just listen to how Clara describes Doc:

Clara [asking about Doc]: “Was this man tall, with great big brown puppy dog eyes and long silvery flowing hair?”

I love it!

43) Originally Mad Dog Tannen (after falling in manure) was arrested for killing Marshal Strickland and this was said by the deputy. However, this scene was deleted as the filmmaker decided it was too dark. They pointed out the fact that no one dies and stays dead in the Back to the Future films. Hence the re-dub.

44) When Doc blows the train whistle he gleefully exclaims, “I’ve wanted to do that all my life!” This sentiment would be repeated by the main character in 2004′s The Polar Express, also directed by Robert Zemeckis.

45) The entire climax with the train - while no Clock Tower scene from the original - is a great ride! It keeps the film’s standard for exciting and well done action in check while also feeding in incredibly into the western genre. It’s just a lot of fun!

46) This moment:

(GIFs originally posted by @gif-weenus)

HIS FACE! HE’S JUST SO HAPPY AND I LOVE IT! YES!!!!

47) It’s so sad when we think that Marty will never see Doc again because the Delorean is destroyed. Thank god for time travel.

48) Needles looks like a moron. Did people really dress this way in 1985?

49) In the last film it was established that Marty got into a car accident with a Rolls Royce after being called chicken, a decision which sent his life spinning down the toilet. This time we see the scene itself and while Marty decides not to race Needles (and in doing so he avoids the accident), because of time travel something is different this time:

JENNIFER IS IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF THE CAR! JENNIFER WOULD’VE FREAKING DIED!

That could’ve been very bad for Marty.

50) I have a lot of fan theories in my head that fill up a lot of plot holes, but one thing I can’t figure out is how did Doc get the barriers to the railroad to drop before he traveled back in the time train to meet Marty & Jennifer?

51) Jules & Verne.

If you watch carefully, you can see the younger of the two - Verne - doing random stuff with his hands during the wide-shot. That’s because a crew member was in charge of doing things with his hands that the child actor would mirror, mainly with petting the dog. But when the crew member started gesturing for someone to come by them Verne continued mirroring him. And it’s in the final film.

52) This is a great closing message for the entire trilogy.

I love Back to the Future Part III. I love all the Back to the Future movies honestly, but something about Part III just really does it for me. I love the Western setting, I love the emphasis on Doc, I think Lloyd and Wilson get to really shine, and Clara is such a wonderful addition to the story. It’s just a really great way to close out one of the best film trilogies in movie history! So go watch it! Not just this film, the whole trilogy. You won’t be sorry.

[newyorktheater]

Though many people may now most associate her with Peter Pan, Mary Martin (1913-1990) originated the roles of Nellie Forbush in “South Pacific” and Maria von Trapp in “The Sound of Music.” Years earlier her performances in musicals by Cole Porter and Kurt Weill made her a star. She had a robust career on Broadway over 40 years that featured both musicals and straight plays.

Mary Martin in “Leave to Me,” the Cole Porter musical that marked her Broadway debut. The photograph is by the famed Alfred Eisenstadt

Mary Martin in One Touch of Venus

Mary Martin with Yul Brynner in Lute Song

Mary Martin with Charles Boyer in “Kind Sir,” one of the three non-musical plays in which she starred on Broadway

Washing the man outta her hair in South Pacific

Mary Martin (Nellie Forbush) and Myron McCormick (Luther Billis) in South Pacific

with Jerome Robbins (!) in Peter Pan

Mary Martin (Maria Rainer) with Evanna Lien (Gretl), Mary Susan Locke (Marta), Marilyn Rogers (Brigitta), Joseph Stewart (Kurt), Mary Martin (Maria Rainer), Kathy Dunn (Louisa), William Snowden (Friedrich) and Lauri Peters (Liesl) in The Sound of Music

Mary Martin in The Sound of Music

Mary Martin in “Jennie,” 1963

with Robert Preston in “I Do! I Do!” 1966

Mary Martin as Lidya Vasilyevna in “Do You Turn Somersaults? ” The 1978 play by Aleksei Arbuzov; translated by Ariadne Nicolaeff, in which she starred opposite Anthony Quayle fan for 16 performances.

Check out the rest of the Broadway Alphabet series

Martin did not get to re-create her signature roles in the movie versions of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. But Martin was one of the first Broadway stars to take advantage of television.

Here is an odd broadcast in 1953 that shows her skills as a performer even when she’s not singing or dancing, or saying a word

While she reportedly turned down the role of Annie Oakley in the original Broadway production of the Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun (the role going to Ethel Merman), she toured with a production, and then performed it on television in 1957. See below for all 105 minutes of it.

Leave It To Me, 1938

Score by Cole Porter. Book by Bella Spewack and Sam Spewack based on their play “Clear All Wires”

The show in which Martin made her Broadway debut included the popular coquettish song “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” That one song made her a star. Here she is singing it some 17 years later

One Touch of Venus, 1943

Music by Kurt Weill; Book by S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash; Lyrics by Ogden Nash

Mary Martin cemented her celebrity on Broadway with her sensual portrayal of Venus. (In a bit of foreshadowing, the movie version of the show starred…Ava Gardner, whose singing was dubbed by Eileen Wilson)

Here’s an audio of the gorgeous song “Speak Low”

Decades later, she sang “That’s Him” at the White House

Lute Song, 1946

Book by Sidney Howard and Will Irwin; Based on the famous Chinese play “Pi-Pa-Ki” by Kao-Tong-Kia and Mao-Tseo; Music by Raymond Scott; Lyrics by Bernard Hanighen;

Martin played a Chinese character named Tchao-Ou-Niang, married to a character portrayed by Yul Brynner. Although it was a typically large cast for the 1940s, she sang seven of the eight songs.

Here’s the audio of her singing the title song

South Pacific, 1949

Music by Richard Rodgers; Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; Book by Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan; Based on “Tales of the South Pacific” by James A. Michener;

Audio of I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair

The tail end of Wash That Man, leading to a duet with Ezio Pinza on “Some Enchanted Evening,” followed by “I’m In Love With a Wonderful Guy”

Her performance in “South Pacific” won the first of her three competitive Tony Awards

Peter Pan, 1954

Based on the play by James M. Barrie; Lyrics by Carolyn Leigh; Music by Mark Charlap; Additional music by Jule Styne; Additional lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; Incidental music by Elmer Bernstein and Trude Rittman;

Mary Martin famously re-created her role in a television special in 1955 and in 1960.

I’m Flying

Distant Melody

The Sound of Music, 1959

Book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse; Music by Richard Rodgers; Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; Based on “The Trapp Family Singers” by Maria Augusta Trapp;

Audio of Mary Martin’s final performance of “The Sound of Music” on Broadway

She sings the song she introduced to the world “My Favorite Things” in a duet with Petula Clark decades later

I Do! I Do!, 1966

Book by Tom Jones; Lyrics by Tom Jones; Music by Harvey Schmidt; Based on “The Fourposter” by Jan De Hartog

Martin sings with Robert Preston at the 1967 Tony Awards

Annie Get Your Gun, 1957 television special

Mary Martin highlights Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly, around 12:40 You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun, around 19:30 There’s No Business Like Show Business (a quartet) 29:30 Moonshine Lullaby 38:17 They Say It’s Wonderful, duet with John Raitt, 45:00 Lost in His Arms, 117:10 Sun in the Morning, 125:30 Anything You Can Do, duet with John Raitt 137:30

Together on Broadway (Mary Martin and Ethel Merman), 1977

The two Broadway divas appeared on Broadway together for one night only. It was the last musical performance on Broadway for both of them. (The one “video” I could find is only an audio and doesn’t do either of them justice. But here there are four years later, performing one after the other, in the farewell gala for Beverly Sills

Lets close with Mary Martin back on TV in the 1950s. First, singing while Richard Rodgers plays the piano on a TV special celebrating his years in show business. Her singing begins at 2:20.

Then in 1955, Mary Martin sings a Cole Porter favorite, “I Get a Kick Out of You” from the 1934 Broadway musical “Anything Goes” — very far from Peter Pan.

M is for Mary Martin. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Muse, Broadway’s First TV Star. Though many people may now most associate her with Peter Pan, Mary Martin (1913-1990) originated the roles of Nellie Forbush in "South Pacific" and Maria von Trapp in "The Sound of Music." Years earlier her performances in musicals by Cole Porter and Kurt Weill made her a star.

[supercultshow]

Hello Supercult West! This is Supercult South Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (BS in “Anime Legwarmers” with a minor in “Have a McNice McDay!”) and I’m reaching out to you from across the country to help hype the Anime OVA Megazone 23, part 1!

In the distant future…and apparently in the 80s…teenager Shogo Yahagi finds himself in possession of an experimental motorcycle, like Akira (1988). It isn’t long before men in dark suits come for Shogo, murder his friend, and force Shogo deeper and deeper into a city-wide conspiracy to keep the entire populace ignorant of the truth, like Dark City (1998). That’s not even mentioning the artificial intelligence being used to control the populace, like the Matrix (1999), or the fact that the bike transforms into a humanoid robot.

“What if the entire world that we live in was being controlled from outside? What if everything was a illusion run by a computer? And what if all the air turned into mayonnaise? What then, huh?

So, it’s somewhere between Gundam Wing and Jem and the Holograms? Gotcha. I’m in.

Want to save the world from G-men trying to enslave the populace in a simulation? All you need is a COKE!

“What? He drop-kicked a cop car?”

For a crazy fast experimental bike, it sure has a lot of curiously foreshadowing dead weight hanging off the sides…

Stick with me and my outrageous anime hair. We’re goin’ places. Not aerodynamically, but definitely goin!

Woah, there buddy, we’re trying to capture you, but I don’t skin your knees.

Oh, no, which one do I choose? Mint legwarmer swirl, or flamin’ hot videography nacho?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJYRv9IOjSk

And that’s just part 1! Megazone 23 is a four-part Japanese Cyberpunk original video animation released on VHS, Betamax, Laserdisk, and VHD formats. Originally meant for as a 26 episode TV series, titled Omega City 23, investment pull outs forced the studio to shift the production to a direct to video release. Nevertheless, it was wildly successful in Japan, grossing over $21 million from video sales. But, the crazy thing is that the concepts introduced in the show, namely simulated reality, cyberpunk dystopias, and artificial intelligence aren’t cliché, they’re sort of groundbreaking. See, this thing was released in 1985, years or even decades prior to the films that popularized these tropes. Of course people like the Wachowskis completely deny ripping off or even being influenced by Megazone 23…but that’s exactly what Disney said about the Lion King and Kimba the White Lion!!

Megazone 23, or Megazone Two Three depending on how much of a weeb you are and whether or not you believe the name is a reference to the 23 districts of Japan, has a respectable 80% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.9 on IMDB putting it on par ratings-wise with other great films like Top Gun, Captain Marvel, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, or Supercult Classic The Last Dragon…uh…hmmm. Maybe I should stop using that as a measure of quality.

Depending on which version of the film you get your hands on here in America you will get an absolute garbage cut released by Harmony Gold USA and the infamous Cannon films group that has about 20% of the film cut out, an entirely rewritten storyline, a new ending, and spliced in footage from the series Space Cavalry Southern Cross as a way of releasing Megazone 23 as part of a completely different series, Robotech: The Movie – The Untold Story. If you’re lucky though, that story is left untold and you find yourself holding the 2004 ADV Films release with a new English dub that has some real treats for Anime lovers. It features the voice talents of Vic Mignogna of Full Metal Alchemist Edward Elric fame, Allison Keith-Shipp who played Misato Kasturagi in Neon Genesis Evangelion, as well as Monica Rial who plays Bulma in the more recent adaptations of the Dragonball franchise. With the closure of ADV in 2008 the series is now out-of-print in the US and is only available as a Japanese import. Regardless of the make and model of Megazone you subject yourself to, you’re in for a wild ride.

  Get ready for all the 80s fashion and music smashed together with all the classic 80s anime tropes smashed together with a plot ripped straight out of an edgy 90s blockbuster along with healthy doses of gore, violence, and nudity encouraged by the studio after time and budget forced the project out of the mainstream and into the more risqué direct to video market. Some would say we don’t watch enough animated stuff here at Supercult. Eve would just smile, wink and say, “If you’ve got the scoop give us the poop!”…which I think is some sort of 80s future slang for “Submit more wacky anime, Supercultists!”

Supercult West is proud to present, Megazone 23!

Megazone 23 Hello Supercult West! This is Supercult South Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (BS in “Anime Legwarmers” with a minor in “Have a McNice McDay!”) and I’m reaching out to you from across the country to help hype the Anime OVA Megazone 23, part 1!

[thisisheavynews]

Why Black Sabbath Are Heavy Metal’s Greatest Band – Rolling Stone

When Black Sabbath first attempted to tour America in 1970, they had a Hell of a time. “We had to face the mayor of [every] town,” drummer Bill Ward once recalled. “We were banned all the time. They were afraid of us. They thought we were going to put a spell on you.”

Although Mick Jagger and Sammy Davis, Jr. had already publicly flirted with satanism, Black Sabbath — whose members all wore crosses to ward off evil — were much too scary for the United States. Their self-titled debut album sported a witchy woman on its cover, their eponymous song detailed an ill-fated dalliance with a demon (“Please God help me!”), and, in the U.K., their label took things one hooved step further by printing an inverted cross on the inside sleeve with a passage about a dead, black swan floating upside down in a lake as a preamble for what was inside. The group had nicked its name from a 1963 Boris Karloff horror movie, and both its name and fright-flick lyrics sparked confusion and new mythologies nearly everywhere they went.

Over the years, rumors have abounded that Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey hosted a parade in their honor in San Francisco that year (not true, the Church’s High Priest, Magus Peter H. Gilmore tells Rolling Stone — though there was a Sabbath float in a gay pride parade in the Golden Gate City that year), and then there were whisperings that the Manson Family were fans of the band, which makes no sense since the Tate-LaBianca murders were a year earlier. And then there were the misunderstandings that had nothing to do with black magic: Ozzy Osbourne recalled in his autobiography how when the band played Philadelphia, a group of African American concertgoers were disappointed the band didn’t live up to their expectations. “You guys ain’t black,” one of them told Osbourne. Black Sabbath were a mystery, and it was the mythology of Black Sabbath that built heavy metal.

Many bands can claim responsibility for the genre’s bludgeoning guitar lines and intensely intense vocals (Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin are obvious go-to’s, and critic Lester Bangs once curiously cited the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat as a starting point), but the group most responsible for metal as the world knows it today is Black Sabbath. The song “Black Sabbath,” the first track on their first album, begins with eerie sound effects of rain and church bells (a brilliantly gothic detail that foreshadowed the darkness to come) before exploding with guitarist Tony Iommi’s lumbering, Godzilla stomp of a riff and Osbourne pleading to heaven to deliver him from Satan — lyrics he based on a nightmare bassist Geezer Butler had had. They wanted to feel scared and they wanted you to feel scared. Over the next eight years, they used that song as a prototype for new sounds — speeding it up, funking it up, stretching it out, wringing the blues out of it, inverting it into lucious folk music — essentially creating the Rosetta Stone for metal with their early discography.

The band’s first eight albums, the ones made by Osbourne, Iommi, Butler, and Ward, are still vital, enigmatic, and inspiring. On an album like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the band transitions from the blunt-force riff pugilism of the frightening title cut (dig that almost Black Flaggy breakdown, “Nowhere to run to … “) to the intricate, contemplative “Sabbra Cadabra” within a few minutes — and it makes perfect sense.

Those albums, compiled into Rhino’s new limited-edition LP box set, The Vinyl Collection: 1970 – 1978, represent the multifaceted essence of not just Black Sabbath but metal and hard rock as a whole, proving why they weren’t just the first but also the greatest metal band. And vinyl is the best way to experience the music since you can ponder the quixotic artwork (who is the witch on the cover of Black Sabbath? why are there airmen on Never Say Die? what was Bill Ward smoking when he wore see-through red tights for the cover of Sabotage?) and feel the pacing and admire the grooves of the music as the LP spins on the turntable. (And to sweeten people’s appreciation, the box set also includes replica tour programs from the Seventies, which oddly include Osbourne and Iommi sniping at each other in the interviews within — it shows how the prickly pair made the band’s chemistry work.)

But it’s the music that remains most powerful. You can hear the breakneck thrashing of Metallica and Slayer in “Children of the Grave” and “Symptom of the Universe,” the manic riffs of the Sex Pistols and Ramones are steeped in “Paranoid,” and the downer-rock groundwork of grunge reverberates through songs like “War Pigs” and “Into the Void.” Although Black Sabbath went on to record brilliant albums with Ronnie James Dio and Ian Gillan in the Eighties, the group’s original lineup sowed the seeds for a whole musical culture in the previous decade on their first eight LPs.

The reason the music was so game-changing — and so excellent — was because it was a reflection of who these four men were offstage. The band members have each made much of their working-class backgrounds, growing up in post-War Birmingham, England. Iommi accidentally lopped off the fingertips of his fretting hand, forcing him to relearn the guitar and draw inspiration from Gypsy-jazz virtuoso Django Reinhardt. Osbourne came from a big family and worked as a car-horn tuner and in a slaughterhouse before spending time in jail for burglary; eventually his dad bought him a PA, setting him on the road to music making. Butler grew up in an Irish-Catholic household but suffered from undiagnosed depression causing him to feel like an outcast. And Ward had a humble upbringing where his parents encouraged his drumming. When they formed Black Sabbath (né Earth, smartly né the Polka Tulk Blues Band) in 1968, they all were avowed fans of the blues and heavy rock like Jimi Hendrix and Cream but as Butler once said, “We just took it one step heavier.”

The secret to Black Sabbath’s sound in the beginning was that they wanted to be big. The first original song they they remember writing was “Wicked World,” a skittery blues number about what an abomination the planet was in 1969 with poor people dying in the gutter. But it’s on the second song they wrote, “Black Sabbath,” where they consecrated their approach. Iommi and Butler (formerly a guitar player) colluded to make the riff sound massive, like more than the two of them playing at once, and Ward approached his instrument not so much like Ginger Baker but like an expressionist painter, adding drama to each of Osbourne’s pleas for salvation. The first single they put out, included in the box set as a bonus cut on its mono-only Monomania compilation, was a cover of American hard rockers Crow’s “Evil Woman,” a chunky blues number advising cruel-hearted ladies to steer clear of the band members. It was two years after Fleetwood Mac’s “Black Magic Woman” (and the same year as Santana’s) and two years before Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” — and none of this means anything since Black Sabbath courted every kind of women throughout the Seventies, regardless of their evil affiliations.

But beyond the cover versions, each band member found his groove. Iommi was the riffmaster general, capable of whipping out a song like “Paranoid” in an afternoon; to this day, Osbourne says that while he and Iommi have had their personal differences, nobody writes riffs like Iommi. The guitarists once said that he would sometimes put himself in a grim mood on purpose in order to write riffs, but his impish personality and love of pranks suggests they just come naturally to him. Osbourne was the king of melodies, sometimes copying the riff, sometimes going way out. Butler was the wordsmith, the “Irish poet” as Ward has dubbed him (even though Butler unapologetically rhymed “masses” with “masses” in “War Pigs”), writing about his general malaise with the world. He and Ward together were the band’s glue, creating a heavy groove that no other band has matched. Together, they concocted a curious mix of footslogging blues and ornately gothic melodies that paradoxically both paid tribute to and showed a great fear of death and the underworld.

And then there was their look. If the peace and love generation dressed themselves like an acid trip, Black Sabbath were like a PCP nightmare with their garish clothes, Osbourne’s fringe jacket, and their mid-Seventies wizard garb. They looked as scary as they sounded. You knew that their racket was unwittingly born of a beautiful dysfunction, a natural urge that came out of the four of them together.

Music critic Lester Bangs infamously closed his Rolling Stone review of the album Black Sabbath (which was incidentally released in the U.K. on a Friday the 13th) with the punchline that Sabbath were “just like Cream! But worse.” He eventually became a fan as the group became more nuanced, but he missed out on the directness that separated them from Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. Where Cream had a song like “Sunshine of Your Love,” Sabbath used a similar riff for Black Sabbath’s “N.I.B.” and infused it with dark psychedelia and a thicker wallop. Their music was much more barebones and much more like a slap in the face; Cream were genteel London noblemen by comparison.

Butler wrote lyrics about H.P. Lovecraft–inspired trippiness (“Behind the Wall of Sleep”), astral projection and love (“Planet Caravan”), war (“War Pigs,” “Hand of Doom,” “Children of the Grave”), and feeling like an outcast (“Paranoid”). He avowed the band’s love of Jesus Christ in the wake of a British sorcerer allegedly hexing them (“After Forever”) and his love of drugs (“Sweet Leaf”). “Into the Void,” one of the band’s heaviest early songs, was an elegy for a dying planet: “Back on earth the flame of life burns low/Everywhere is misery and woe/Pollution kills the air, the land, the sea/Man prepares to meet his destiny.” It was the opposite of megahits in 1971 like Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” and the Bee Gees’ “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”

“Sabbath was everything the Sixties weren’t,” Metallica frontman James Hetfield once beamed. “Their music was so cool because it was completely anti-hippie.”

In their defiance, Sabbath embraced nuance. Just look at the grooves of 1970’s Paranoid or 1971’s Master of Reality, and the folky ballads are immediately noticeable next to ragers like “Lord of This World,” as are effects like the gurgly voiced “I am Iron Man” that opens one of their most famous songs or the choking weed cough of “Sweet Leaf.” It’s a paradox of detail and dudeliness. A mono version of the Master track “Into the Void” on Monomania is even thicker and heavier than the one on the record, and you can feel the power they were starting to tap into with their music on the way the verse riff on “After Forever” returns with an extra dimension of bass-guitar smackdown. They were masters of their own reality.

On 1972’s unimaginatively titled Vol. 4, the group broke new ground and recorded some of their most creative sounds. It was the band’s proud cocaine moment (“We wish to thank the great COKE-Cola Company of Los Angeles,” read the liner notes) and they paid tribute to their powdery muse on “Snowblind.” But there was a new depth of sound on the weighty “Wheels of Confusion” and thumping “Supernaut.” The ballad “Changes” featured a piano and a mellotron with an orchestral string sound, and it was disarmingly fragile. The record closes with “Under the Sun,” a tune that grinds slower and slower and slower as it ends until you’re looking up from the dirt. “Life is one long overdose,” Osbourne sings.

The group had leveled up, and its music would grow more and more complex on 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and their last masterpiece, 1975’s Sabotage (which sports a deceptively corny album cover despite the impossibly hard-hitting riff on “The Thrill of It All”). Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself to Live” is like a Black Sabbath glossary that finds Osbourne screeching, “I’m telling you, believe in me” — and you want to with all the blues riffs, Sgt. Pepper psychedelia and surprising a breakdown. In the middle of it he whispers “smoke it” in one speaker, and “get high” in the other, and you don’t know if it’s peer pressure or an admonition. That album’s “Who Are You?” is a buoyant synth track Osbourne dreamt up, complete with a proto-industrial rattle, and the record as a whole variously features Iommi playing synth, flute, organ, bagpipes, and piano, while Ward expanded his repertoire to bongos and timpani.

And on Sabotage, they invert the folky, Latin jazz jam at the end of “Symptom of the Universe” by pairing one of their heaviest-ever songs, “Hole in the Sky,” with a quirky acoustic jam called “Don’t Start Too Late.” And once again, you can see in the grooves how complicated a song like the gloomy “Megalomania” on Sabotage is by the way the rungs contort. “Symptom,” too, contains some of Butler’s trippiest lyrics, in which he asks you to “take [him] through the centuries to supersonic years” and “swim the magic ocean I’ve been crying all these years,” making it one of the band’s biggest headfucks. The megagothic “Supertzar” is an instrumental piece Iommi dreamt up, complete with a 55-voice choir, and it was majestic enough for the band to use it to open their shows on the tours that followed.

Drink, drugs, and too many years on the road got the better of them on their two final releases of their initial run, 1976’s Technical Ecstasy, and 1978’s ironically titled swan song for Osbourne, Never Say Die!, and the music is noticeably less inspired but still rocks as hard (if not a little harder) than Led Zeppelin’s two final albums. Oddly, the Never Say Die! single “A Hard Road,” with its slick swagger got them back on Top of the Pops, eight years after they played “Paranoid” on the U.K. music show, making them pop stars. But the intra-band bacchanalia proved too much for the group and they oustered Osbourne for his herculean drug use (even though they were all using), ultimately giving him the opportunity to defy all odds and become a bigger solo star than the band in the Eighties all while they started over with Ronnie James Dio and inspired a new wave of heavy metal fans with their Heaven and Hell album.

At their peak — whether that’s their first trilogy of heavy-hitting albums or the technical ecstasy of their work in the mid-Seventies — Black Sabbath were the touchstone for everything that followed. Although the band members have each scoffed at the metal tag over the years, they’ve never denied their influence on the genre and the bands whom they have inspired.

In the five decades since they formed, Black Sabbath’s music has been interpreted in many different ways. Metallica reveled in the complexity of their mid-Seventies recordings. Megadeth zeroed in on the hits (“Paranoid” and “Never Say Die”) and thrashed them up. Pantera surprisingly tackled the ballad “Planet Caravan.” Van Halen, who went out on their first big tour supporting Sabbath, once flirted with calling themselves Rat Salad after an instrumental on Paranoid. Cypress Hill, Ice-T and Busta Rhymes all sampled Sabbath. And the band Sleep is basically a Sabbath tribute band, formed at a time when the band was less fashionable. Moreover, Weezer, Green Day, Charles Bradley, Blondie, Foo Fighters, Replacements, the Roots, Beastie Boys and Courtney Love, among dozens of others, have covered their songs. Without these eight records, music would sound drastically different.

Weirdly, some of the band members don’t fully appreciate the work they put into their records. “I was always disappointed with our albums because of the fact that we were a fucking great live band,” drummer Bill Ward said in the liner notes to the 1998 live album Reunion. “I felt we always lost something by trying to record what we did.” But long after the original lineup fell apart, it’s what they put on their LPs that cemented their legend.

Since 1979, the original members of Black Sabbath have reunited and broken up and carried on with solo records. Everything finally came full circle in 2013, when they released 13 (sadly without Ward and not included in the box set) showing they still had it in them to conjure their dark spirits for tracks like “Damaged Soul” and “God Is Dead?” that could have come out anytime in the Seventies. The album was a worldwide smash, notching the Number One positions in the U.S. and U.K. The determination, and the willingness to work through their differences, harks back to a lyric on Vol. 4’s “Under the Sun,” and one that captures the spirit of the band:

“Just believe in yourself you know you really shouldn’t have to pretend/ “Don’t let those empty people try to interfere with your mind/ Just live your life and leave them all behind”

Long may this message echo through centuries into supersonic years. Hail Black Sabbath, Lords of This World!

from Heavy News https://thisisheavynews.com/why-black-sabbath-are-heavy-metals-greatest-band-rolling-stone/