"Somebody Needed To Shut That Guy Up!"

I'll get back to my big Star Wars posts eventually, my schedule just had some hiccups (and is likely to have a few more in the next couple of weeks because of reasons).

In the meantime: A poorly audio-synced YouTube video featuring everyone's oldest least favorite X-Men villain, Apocalypse!



Most people really just kind of hate Apocalypse. I, for one, don't really hate him... because I find him an extremely stupid kind of funny.

Q: What is the ultimate ancient evil in X-Men stories?
A: Some big doofus with blue clown makeup.

-Signing off.

Wolverine Can Sing

What makes me laugh about the (...creatively pronounced) "Adamantium" segment is that I just heard some other parody of the same song while my sister was going through things.



...I don't like musicals either, Hulk. I actually watched this because it's Wolverine as a muppet.

-Signing off.

You'd Think He'd Test His Powers On Some Other Object Before Leaping To Such A Conclusion

So...



Did they run out of villains who actually were Fantastic Four characters, and that's why they turned to (a hilarious rendition of) Magneto?

I mean, there's nothing wrong with using Magneto in a non-X-Men show, it's just... silly. (Not that this wasn't silly already.)

-Signing off.

Gladiator Does Not Care That You Are The Juggernaut

If you've ever watched a certain memetic video, you know how this ends.



Even outside of the memetic part, it's still funny.

-Signing off.

Lamest Giant Robots

The funny thing about the Sentinels that appeared in the old X-Men cartoon is that they're often a much more realistic depiction of durability than most giant robots you'll see in fiction...



...to the point where one wonders why anybody bothered.

Because in all seriousness, most robots that size would probably come apart pretty easily.

Of course, it doesn't keep watching them from being entertaining...

-Signing off.

Wolverine in the Wild

It's rather obvious, but it's still funny.



"Sometimes he obtains too much nourishment" (or whatever it is he says) kills me every time.

-Signing off.

Go Go Speed Metal Video

So Chris Sims referred his readers to this music video of the Danny Elfman Batman theme cover by the band Powerglove.



It's a pretty good performance, and I like it quite a bit, but... I couldn't help being more excited by the song I spotted in the "Related Videos" list.

It wasn't their '90s X-Men cover...



...or their MMPR cover...



...it was their Inspector Gadget cover.



THAT is awesome.

(I don't know why I love the Inspector Gadget song so darned much, but I do. Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that Inspector Gadget was the show I used to watch on weekdays before I went to school as a grade schooler. It was my favorite thing ever way back then.

Did you know Inspector Gadget used to have a mustache?)

-Signing off.

Sniktbub

Had a bit of an off-day again. There's a pretty fair chance you'll have seen this video, but if not, enjoy.



If you enjoy that kind of silliness, anyway.

-Signing off.

Adaptations and Longevity

My titles for the posts where I link my other blog are probably just going to get weirder and weirder.

This week, my random video fun choices are some things I've featured here before. The first two are anime-style introductions for the '90s era X-Men cartoon.



Having reasonably fond memories of that show, I can safely state that these intros have nothing to do with it whatsoever.

Those have nothing, though, on the other video: Japanese Spider-Man.



True fact: In Japan, Spider-Man codified many features of Super Sentai, which means that Power Rangers could be seen as a Spider-Man spinoff.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: The Science of The X-Men

When my mother showed me this book after coming back from the library, I thought to myself, "Hark! A book, which I might review!"

That was the most positive part of the reading experience.

The Science of The X-Men (The Official Guide to The Scientific Reality of The Mutant World!) is a terrible, terrible book.

It starts out promisingly enough, with claims by the authors of connections with people with huge comic collections, Dark Horse, and Robert Silverberg, but it goes downhill at a steady, easily measurable pace. As far as I know and am concerned, this is all true enough... but quality doesn't show.

For starters, there are audacious and bizarre claims. The book talks about the events of the comic books as though they are real. This is a workable way to write it, but they didn't do it well enough.

The "science" of the book is frequently absurd. They fall back on the ancient notion common among "science fiction writers" of the old days, that things from places we haven't been are necessarily incomprehensible. While in old quasi-SF, this tended to be bull along the lines of "different elements from different planets/galaxies/parts of the universe," modern writers don't fall back on this in serious science fiction. Yet this book claims that any mysterious energies that don't obey the laws of physics as we know them must in fact simply come from another, "non-Einsteinian" dimension. If you don't know why this is absurd, I'm afraid that your science education is beyond my meager abilities to repair.

Even worse, while some principles discussed (especially with relation to biology and evolution) have some degree of insight, the understanding that the writers seem to actually possess of some of these subjects seems laughable at best and fatally flawed at worst. While the discussion of Nightcrawler's momentum is an interesting tackling of the subject of teleporting around on the surface of a planet, other parts make me shake my head in ridicule or seethe with anger. Also, while they discuss Occam's razor, they tend to come up with radically complex explanations for relatively simple phenomena.

These might be somewhat acceptable, were it not for the fact that the editors clearly cared less and less as the book progressed, gradually allowing an ever increasing number of typos and incomprehensible non sequiturs. Let's see if I can dig a few up:

"Storm makes every effort to keep here motions under control, but she's not always successful." ("Her emotions.")

"Wind can also move soil and shaping sand dunes, which, at its most extreme, can turn farmland into a dessert in a few years." (Yum.)

"Like radar and sonar, the ultrasound bounces back off objects and a sensing device then translates that information into detailed images." (I'll just point out that "the ultrasound" is an odd way to phrase it, and also that sonar generally is ultrasonic.)

"He could survive a head-on collision with a bus traveling at a hundred miles an hour. Such a meteorite would weigh more than half a million tons and would be super-heated from its atmospheric descent." (I totally did not mess with this passage at all; this is exactly how it appears in the book.)

"Beast exhibits characteristics that are considered 'neotonous.' Neotony is an evolutionary phenomenon that explains why Beast has a big modern head and a muscular hairy body." (Technically, "neotonous" is apparently an acceptable spelling of neotenous, but it drives me bonkers every time I read it. Also, yeah, sure, all babies I've ever seen have muscular, hairy bodies. Okay, maybe I'm taking the statement out of context, but it drives me nuts.)

"Like the electric eel, he might have a biological mechanism that generates and manipulates energy, in his case producing cold." (Cold is not a form of energy. It is a lack of energy.)

"The way things stand now; particle beams don't seem particularly useful as weapons." (Learn how to use semicolons before you write a book. Also, it's ironic that the authors are critical of particle beam realism when they're trying to justify the workings of mutant powers.)

I'm sure there were more than that, but I can't recall them at the moment.

Anyway, I actually make it sound worse than it is (there are some interesting and insightful bits here and there), but it's got problems. If you read it, be careful-there's a lot of junky stuff in it. It's works like these that make me prefer to read unofficial materials.

-Signing off.

Character Distillation: Wolverine

Been a while since I've done one of these, and I might as well throw this one out, though it's incredibly obvious.

1. Wolverine has "animal-like" powers and temperament, and metal claws and bones.
2. Wolverine has a long, dirty history because he's old, and his memory is terrible (though terrible memory is an animal characteristic, so whatever).
   
3. Wolverine is the bestest ever. Or so Marvel's marketing department has been led to believe, and so the writers like to present him as a result.

Yes, that's the core of the character. I'm sure plenty of people would disagree with this assessment, but the first two are deeper and more central to him than any other characteristics, and the last is the most important in terms of how he gets treated.

Of course, the last part is what drives a lot of comic book fans (and Wolverine fans) nuts these days. Wolverine has to do all these really insane things and kick everyone's butts all the time, and if he ever gets his butt kicked it's not good. And thus he gets to do things that totally ruin logic as a result.

Although there was that one time when Magneto ripped the adamantium out of him, which amusingly arose (according to Peter David) from a random comment Peter David made that he didn't think it made much sense to have a big fight between the two characters, because Magneto could just pull his skeleton out. (He didn't think they should do it because Wolverine would die after that, but obviously they disagreed. And Wolverine disagreed with the dying part, of course. Because he's frikkin' Wolverine and can ignore death.)

As for the animal powers, metal bones/claws, and old man thing? I think one of my favorite things about Wolverine actually is that for all intents and purposes, he's a grouchy old man.

-Signing off.

X-Men Cartoon

They say it's out on DVD now. (shrug)

I was going through the rounds, and found some very critical commentary on it.

Well, I never said the old X-Men cartoon was as good as Batman: TAS. And if I ever implied it, it was unintentional.

The old X-Men cartoon was enjoyable for what it was-a rather cheap cartoon about the X-Men. Any affection I have for the X-Men pretty much comes from there, as I've read like three X-Men comics (and one of those was based on an episode of the cartoon).

The reason I've indicated I enjoy the series is because I did. Even the worst cartoons often have something very enjoyable about them, and many such series are better than their critics give them credit for.

What I liked about the X-Men cartoon and its contemporaries, good or not, was that they tended to be reasonably long-running series with reasonably strong internal continuity and some degree of focus on action. That era made such series in pretty large numbers, and all of them are at least a little watchable. (Many of them, while hopelessly stupid, were still pretty enough to enjoy them. There were plenty of good series, like Exo-Squad, Reboot, and Beast Wars, though.) What further distinguished them was that their internal quality was consistent-it wasn't like watching the He-Man cartoon (or any '80s series), where one episode would be awesome and the one right next to it would be absolutely awful.

There are still series like that, but most of them live on cable now, and I don't get to watch many of them. (Any other series like that tends to have been imported, which is why I like anime. Nothing to do with the genre itself.)

Sigh. Stupid cable networks.

-Signing off.

Professor X: Master of Psychoanalysis

I was looking at the Professor X page on Wikipedia as I prepared to write this, and noticed the information on his "dark side." Let me tell you what, his "nice side" isn't always so pleasant either. (The clip I want you to look at is from about 1:11 to 2:22.)



So what we have here is the good Professor probing someone's mind without consent. Never mind that it's the royally screwed up Sabretooth whose mind he's probing. Never mind that he intends to help.
This is distinctly unethical. Against Sabretooth's will, he is entering his mind and trying to find things that Sabretooth has sealed away. (Also, never mind that it turned out Sabretooth was actually working for Magneto and was intended to take the place over.) The ethics of characters with telepathy in fiction have nearly always been kinda... unpleasant, and this was in a kid's cartoon.

And then, later in the same episode, he chases away Magneto, formerly his friend, by making him think of bad, painful thoughts. Freezing a bunch of people in their tracks is one thing. Making them relive their nightmares is another. (Of course, it was self defense-Magneto was intending to crush him to death. But that's not the point-this kind of act is often called mindrape or worse for good reason.)

And then there was the time in Secret Wars where he wiped Spider-Man's mind to keep him from relating that the X-Men were about to betray the Avengers faction and join Magneto. He commented later that "I may have overstepped my boundaries." Gee, really?

-Signing off.

East Vs. West: Ideon and Jean Grey

When comparing manga/anime with Western comics/cartoons, there's a lot of information to be found on stylistic differences, reinterpretations, and so on. Sometime soon, I'll do a similar article comparing Superman to Son Goku.

So what do Jean Grey and the Ideon have in common?

Themes and Powers:
Jean Grey is powered by the Phoenix Force, a power source of death and rebirth, which is an embodiment of the unborn and the collected life force of the entire universe.
The Ideon is powered by the Ide, a power source of death and rebirth, and pretty similar in terms of scope.

Power Level:
With the Phoenix Force, Jean Grey can potentially destroy worlds or devour suns.
The Ideon blew up the universe.

Appearance:
Jean Grey is a 5'6", 115 lb. redhead.
The Ideon is a giant red robot that stands over three hundred feet tall and weighs over five thousand tons.
(Hm. At least they're both red.)

Other Features:
Jean Grey was cloned or duplicated at least twice, and at one point was merged with the clones and duplicates. Also, she brought herself back to life at least once aside from the duplications and false deaths.
The Ideon was made up of three unique vehicles that combined. When piloted by younger people, the Ideon was more powerful-it was once piloted by a baby.

I think that this can be viewed as one of the relatively few instances where the Japanese series doesn't make an otherwise similar character into a cute girl instead of something perhaps more logical; of course, they go with the other Japanese path.

Speaking of the '90s...

If you watched cartoons in the '90s, you probably saw the incredibly long-running X-Men cartoon at least once.

I was just going through someone else's blog archives, where he talked about this series and its awesome intro. (When I say "awesome," off the top of my head the only series I can think of with better intros were Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series. The '90s had the best intros ever. [Goodbye, objectivity. I won't miss you.]) He linked a no longer available YouTube video there.

That video turned out to be one of two intros created for the '90s X-Men's Japanese dub (each of those, obviously, linked in the links), and thus is something very fun if nothing else: The cast of the X-Men cartoon (which I am senselessly nostalgic for, I'll admit) animated in a classic late-'80s-early-'90s "serious" anime style. I am and have always been a sucker for late '80s/early '90s anime's visuals, and these intros were no exception.

Perhaps even better, these intros are almost completely nonsensical compared to the actual plot and whatnot of the '90s series.

Let's go over some of what happens in this intro.

1. A fleet of blimps (or something-maybe they're Proshes, as their profile seems more similar) making a guest appearance from Batman: TAS are over a city.
2. Magneto shows up and summons the Brood. Yes, Magneto summons the Brood. Magneto summons the Brood.
3. Jubilee fights with the Brood. They aren't amused.
4. Wolverine falls from the sky, lands behind Jubilee, and slices up those Brood like so many ugly chickens.
5. Jean Grey uses telekinesis to pick up some Brood. We don't know if she does anything else with them; the visuals cut to Cyclops.
6. Cyclops cuts off a bunch of Brood heads with an optic blast. If you've ever seen the '90s X-Men, you know that Cyclops' optic blasts never cut or tore anything, even paper.
7. An insane Japanese rocker (not shown in the visuals, sadly) screams SHOCK! a whole bunch of times. Brilliant.
8. Cable shoots some kind of robot that looks very anime and nothing like anything from this series. Like, five million times. With guns that look ridiculously oversized even by anime standards. (Cable with normal arms; in the earliest part of this series Cable had no origin explaining he was from the future and no seemingly cybernetic parts.)
9. Gambit charges a card and throws it at something that may be a robot. I can't tell.
10. Some dark figure that I can't make out cracks the ground. Maybe it's supposed to be Beast.
11. Professor X is clearly a pimp, as he has Rogue and Storm on each arm. I'm stone cold serious.
12. More Brood and weird robot things.
13. Wolverine and Omega Red have a hilarious midair battle in looped footage.
14. Shots of the characters paired off and looking really funky realistic anime. (The pairs are Cyclops and Jean Grey, Gambit and Beast, Storm and Rogue, and Wolverine and Jubilee.
15. Babe shot(TM), of Storm, Jean Grey, and Rogue in that order. Rogue looks fetching in this style, and does an anime babe wink(TM), which is totally in character for her. (Of course, I'm a huge sucker for Rogue, but whatever.)
16. Totally inexplicable shot of this hallway where the X-Men come flying from random angles to showcase... something. (Cable is once again inexplicably among them.) Wolverine wraps it up with the classic "claw-based wipe" scene change.
17. To that Japanese rocker screaming again, we get a still team portrait. It "slides out" dramatically to a couple of guitar riffs.

The other one has only a couple of great moments, such as the X-Men leaping off of a suddenly erupting volcano, leaping out of the Blackbird at approximately ten thousand feet in order to engage in hand to hand combat with about a thousand cyborg robot things unrelated to the series, and Professor X locked in telepathic battle with Magneto's magnetism. Part of the reason it is less awesome is because the animators showed signs of actually having some idea of what a heck actually went on in the series (things like Apocalypse, Mojo [through Spiral], the Sentinels, the Cyclops/Jean Grey/Wolverine triangle, and Wolverine cutting random props in half). Also, for no apparent reason, Iceman, who if I remember was in maybe one episode, appears. (Maybe they thought it would be cool if he was in the introduction. Ha ha ha ow.)

The series also received some anime break cuts, where some of the characters would fly around anime style and a voice would say "X-Men" in a Japanese accent. I'm not bothering to link those, though.

I usually try not to let nostalgia get to me too badly, but man I miss '90s cartoons. That seems to be the one thing I get really irrational about.

Character Distillation: Juggernaut

Juggernaut, like Meggan, is pretty simple to distill into his most basic and fundamental characteristics. In fact, he's really somewhat easier:

1. Juggernaut does not yield on any physical field.
2. Cain Marko has never had a functional relationship in his life.

It can be speculated that the two factors are related.

In terms of physical power, Juggernaut has few equals, and only one enemy he's ever fought has anything like a greater level of power-the Hulk, who is generally depicted as perhaps the physically strongest character in Marvel Comics. But even the Hulk isn't able to defeat Juggernaut outright-it usually takes a cosmic force of some kind to do that. (Okay, probably that last one only applied in the X-Men cartoon. I don't know.) Juggernaut's unyielding nature manifests itself in two different ways: enormous momentum and inertia, and total unbreakability. When the Juggernaut starts running, it's really hard to stop him. And pretty much nothing, from the hammer of Thor to being buried alive in solid concrete or under thousands of tons of rubble, can hurt him. On those very rare occasions when he has actually been physically hurt while at full power (note that for a while he had lost most of these powers, simply retaining some lesser degree of superhuman durability and strength), he regenerates instantly (even from total vaporization), and he does not need food, water, or air. The only ways to stop him are to reason with him, yank off his helmet and fry his mind, or send him to another dimension. (Or be a cosmic force. That works too.)

The dysfunctional relationships that Juggernaut has suffered through are numerous:

• His father beat him, and liked his stepbrother better.
• His stepbrother upstaged him (by using telepathy to cheat at schoolwork, no less), and as Onslaught punched him into another state, then punched a hole into his chest to reach the internalized crystal that gives Juggernaut his powers to banish him into it (being banished into his own power source is a frequent mishap for Juggernaut).
• He was banished to a dimension called Oblivion so often that this dimension, tired of him, actually banished him back. No, not the inhabitants-the dimension itself.
• His best friend, Black Tom, killed another of the Juggernaut's few friends. He also didn't appreciate Juggernaut's birthday presents.
• That friend that Black Tom killed declared that he hated Juggernaut with his last breath. OUCH.
• Some lady was only after his body-in this case, his life force.
• Cyttorak, the godlike being who granted Juggernaut his powers, would rather have had his stepbrother as Juggernaut. Later, he took Juggernaut's powers away from him, and later still, told him he had to ditch his friends and be an evil loner again if he wanted them back.
• When he found himself trapped in the Ultraverse after Marvel acquired the property, he made some friends-but one of them, also from the MarvelU, banished them back to the limbo he'd previously been banished to because he wanted to stay in the Ultraverse instead. (It's a somewhat long story.)
• A demoness named Spite used the heck out of him. (I don't have any other information on Spite, sadly.)
• He was captured and put on trial for not following the rules of a contest he didn't even know he was part of. (Really, this is another sign of his stinky relationship with Cyttorak, but whatever.)
• He was captured by Prosh (the Ship mentioned in an earlier link) to "battle a threat to humanity" which turned out to be Prosh itself. This event forced him to confront just how stupid his life had been, as Prosh showed him just how much of his time had been spent buried under stuff. (No kidding.)

And now I feel sorry for Cain Marko and think Professor X is a total jerk.

Is it any wonder this guy is so nuts?

Character Distillation: Meggan (Excalibur)

Eventually, I am going to post something that has nothing to do with comic books, I swear. In the meantime, these posts are coming most easily.

I often randomly browse through websites like Wikipedia, the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and various others. Sure, there are probably better ways to spend my time, but this generally gives me lots of ideas and occasional genuine insights.

Case in point: I was reading this, and once I read through it, within a short time I realized that the subject, Meggan of the Captain Britain, Excalibur, and X-Men comics, could easily have her character boiled down into three main components.

1. She is defined by her relationships, especially those she has with men.
2. She is by nature innocent and at least a little simple.
3. She is insanely powerful, and the only reason she doesn't trample everyone is because she's not very assertive.

When I finished these thoughts, the first thought that came into my head was, "Man, Meggan's depiction must drive feminists nuts."

The first sentence can be explicated by the vast majority of her interactions with other characters. Meggan's very appearance is dictated entirely by the fancies of the men she loves most, and before she gained conscious control of her powers, it was also dictated by the loathing that others bore for her in her monstrous form. Thus, Meggan can often be summed up in the phrase "wish fulfillment" simply for her appearance. (I'm probably going to dig a hole for myself with feminist types when I say that if Meggan is drawn in a way that isn't especially attractive or fetching, the artist has done a bad job.) Even in Meggan's relatively recent death/disappearance during the House of M, she was sacrificing herself for her friends and husband.

The second sentence can be summed up in various ways. Meggan was illiterate for most of her life, and only recently learned to read. She was cut off from other people because of her appearance, and sheltered for her entire life. These are not in and of themselves bad things; it makes one vulnerable in ways, but it gives the character some distinctive features (such as her perpetual shoelessness), and it also gave her a really nice line at one point: "You think me stupid because I cannot read or understand clever words. But life is bigger than words. Words are just small noises that hide the truth. I see more than you could know."

And that line segways nicely into the third sentence. The only reason Meggan doesn't trash everything in her path is because it isn't in her nature. She has pretty much any superhuman powers she could ever need whenever she wants them: She can change her shape, has some degree of telepathy, can draw energy into herself to increase her strength, resilience, and the like, and she has the ability to disrupt or control any kind of force or energy imaginable. The previous quote attributed to Meggan was one that she made in response to Jamie Braddock, an insane reality-warping mutant (and her boyfriend's brother). (Note: If you are a sensitive soul, don't click the above link, for you may be scarred for life. Jamie Braddock always runs around in his teeny tiny underwear.) The act that brought on the quote itself was her total defiance of his ability to warp reality around himself, to which almost no one else was resistant. And in the aforementioned incident where she sacrificed herself, she used her powers to stop what the others could not-and one of the others was Rachel Summers, sometimes host of the Phoenix Force. (Okay, so the others helped a little.) And according to Wikipedia, she has successfully replicated the powers and abilities of Godzilla, Dazzler, Rogue, Colossus, Longshot, Storm, Wolverine, Havok, and has imitated the powers of a werewolf, Sandman, Hydro-man and confronted Galactus.

I can't even make this stuff up.

So, in closing, Meggan may look cute and innocent, but she can kick your rear end seven ways to Sunday on her worst day.