The Lost Godzilla/GIJoe Crossover (Sorta)

Then there was the time that the old Godzilla Power Hour cartoon featured a cameo from the G.I. Joe villain organization Cobra before Cobra existed.

I'd call time travel shenanigans, but it's probably a coincidence, even with the fact that there's some surprising costume design similarities going on here.

-Signing off.

Still The Best Version of That Dragon

Y'know, I'm mostly neutral on the old Hobbit cartoon, but one thing I did rather love in it was the depiction of Smaug.



In fact, in terms of presence and personality, I can't think of more than, oh, one other dragon with the same degree of presence as Smaug has here*, with the strobing spotlight eyes and the booming voice. Having watched a random clip of the Hobbit trilogy Smaug, I had to respond "what's up with this weird flat little hissy guy?"

(Also still holding out for David Kaye doing a dragon character voice, seeing as how his BW Megatron voice was basically an ideal dragon voice already.)

*Draco from Dragonheart; much as I love Granamyr from the He-Man series, he's got the presence of a huge old man, not a furious dragon. Which kinda fits; he's a lot more scholarly than the average dragon, and his main claim to extreme dragonlike power comes from the fact that he's the most powerful wizard on a planet crammed with extremely powerful wizards**.

On the subject of voices of dragons, on the extremely unlikely off-chance that I was ever casting current voices for a He-Man cartoon, Hector Elizondo, who voiced Wan Shi Tong in The Last Airbender and Viragor in the Thundercats remake would be my ideal Granamyr voice.

**A relatively mid-range pair of Eternian magic users combined their magic to create a spell that knocked one of Eternia's moons from its orbit. Granamyr was unambiguously much stronger than another individual who was ambiguously stronger than an individual who was stronger than either of them. Which is to say Granamyr's a really powerful wizard.

-Signing off.

I'm the (Sexy) Bad Guy

I know very little about this show*, so I'm not entirely sure how to approach talking about this clip.



Beyond something like "dang she's cute."

*The title is Wander over Yonder, and if the video is removed at some point, the song is titled "I'm the Bad Guy." Mainly what I do know is that many people were shipping two dudes in this show, and that this character showed up and turned into something of a slap to the face to that idea**, almost as if the show's producers were saying NO NO NO, NO GAY SHIPS. ...Awkward.

**Knowing nothing about the show beyond what I've seen other people say, this is where I heard about this specific thing. That blog is also where I first saw a slightly shorter version of the clip, so...

-Signing off.

In This Cartoon, A Character Gets Trapped In His Own Thought Bubble

You know what has a certain strange charm?

Those weird old cartoons where one person provided all the voices and wasn't trying very hard to sound different. (In this case, as in many similar cases, a character is narrating and providing the other voices.)



Although this cartoon is pretty amusingly weird, the weirdest thing about it for me was something that had nothing to do with the cartoon itself, but a copyright notice at the end:

I mean, I know that corporate characters are a thing, but it's still... really odd to me. Maybe it's just a more old-fashioned sort of copyright notice than I'm used to; these days, a cartoon like this probably wouldn't have a notification like that because it'd almost certainly entirely belong to the corporation that funded it, whereas back then (and maybe to some degree still in the UK, I know copyright laws are different there) the cartoon and the character might belong to different groups.

-Signing off.

One of the Weirder Tie-Ins

(Another birthday come and gone. Eh, whatever*.)

Sergeant Slaughter's old toy commercial sure plays him up, like a lot of individualized toy commercials play up the characters they're representing.



Funny as that is, I think my favorite part of it is that his cartoon appearance was more over the top.



Like, the BATs (Cobra robot soldiers) there are being presented as pretty much impervious to serious machinegun fire. That gun Roadblock's got would knock most people trying to use it down, and the BATs are just shrugging it off.

And Sergeant Slaughter is wrecking them dozens at a time with his bare hands.

*I don't recall if I've mentioned that I don't particularly care for birthdays, but I'm pretty sure I've mentioned I really don't care for holidays. My birthday is like a holiday dedicated to me, but everybody else is in charge of how it gets celebrated. (Though Mom's been good enough to ask me what I want on the menu, even if it's pizza and my favorite kind of cake nearly every year.)

One of these years, I'm gonna manage to convince everybody to stop frickin' singing so we can skip to the darned cake.

-Signing off.

Back When the Truck Guy Died

One of my earliest Transformers memories is of the death of Optimus Prime from the original silly cartoon movie. (That recollection fuzzes things quite a bit; I had a vague sense that the Matrix was passed among half the Autobot ranks before Ultra Magnus actually got the thing, which from one of the clips I've embedded you can see is not the case even if you know nothing about Transformers. Momentary aside: That probably would have kept people from believing the bit of fanon that the Matrix works for Hot Rod and not for Ultra Magnus because it "imprinted" on Hot Rod. What a silly idea... and yet I've seen it from at least two people who probably had nothing to do with each other. One of them was my older brother, incidentally.)

The memory didn't have a lot of weight for me because it was so fuzzy; in fact, my first big Transformers "thing" was "The Return of Optimus Prime," which is of course sort of the happy fixfic epilogue to the movie's story.

But the scenes between Optimus and Megatron in the movie...



(Bonus screenshot: The most awesome frame of animation from the above sequence!

Bask in it.)

...and his subsequent death scene traumatized the hell out of a generation of kids, and probably cemented Transformers as a major franchise in the minds of a lot of people.



(Bonus screenshot: Dead Optimus Prime!

Stupid anecdote time: I once watched a stupid YouTube video where Optimus Prime sings a lengthy piece of opera before suddenly dying; the "turns his head as he dies" bit appeared in the sequence with a screeching clank sound. I think of that video every time I watch this scene.)

The brutality of the death scene in what had previously been a relatively light-hearted franchise (which was apparently inspired by Hasbro realizing "hey, our products are characters! We could kill them to explain why we're not selling them anymore!" in response to a GIJoe writer wanting to kill off Duke in the GIJoe movie-funny story, the death of Optimus Prime saved Duke's life because Hasbro got scared that killing Duke would trigger another outcry) was unintentional, but one could certainly imagine that they were trying to traumatize children without that context.

That's the only actual explanation I can come up with for the Death of Convoy advertisement.



(Bonus screenshot: Other dead Optimus Prime!

While the advertisement was made for the Japanese market, where brutal character death was much more common in animation, even animation ostensibly aimed at children, this scene is amazingly harsh. Seeing the mangled remains of a beloved character carted off by helicopters like so much meat wreckage, while a crowd chants his name in a way that's meant to sound positive but really comes off as creepy as hell, with a narrator grimly saying "Convoy is dead" [a loose translation of something the commercial's narrator does say; I can follow just enough Japanese to know he said "Convoy" and a word that has to do with death], and having this be the closest thing to an explanation that the audience gets for three or four years** all add up to make this way more horrifying than the movie.)

*The child actor who screams "Convoy!" during that commercial apparently showed up in the YouTube comments for the video, commenting that the ad's director "had me say 'Comvoy' instead. Never knew why." He also was enough of a fan of Transformers that he couldn't sit on his nondisclosure agreement and told a friend about Prime's death way too soon. His friend didn't believe him.

**Japan didn't get the movie until at least 1989, several years after Optimus dropped from Transformers fiction with only this*** as an explanation. (He did kind of show up again, but Japan casually killed him back off when the next season started.) They just kind of dove into the third season of the cartoon with no explanation at all. You think "Five Faces of Darkness" was confusing for the American audience...

***This and a momentary scene from the Headmasters cartoon, which wasn't a good explanation either. Shoulda doublechecked on the wiki sooner...

-Signing off.

Blah Blah Ninja Turtles

Not ashamed to say that I've seen episodes of every Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, including the weird live-action one that crossed over with Power Rangers.



(If you go into it with an open mind and keep in mind it had a really low budget and cornball writing, which is fine because Ninja Turtles has always been silly and will always be silly, it's better than people give it credit for. Not great, mind you, but it is what it is and it's not terrible. Bad yes, awful no.)

I mention this because last night my sister and I finally watched the most recent movie, and actually watched some episodes of said live-action series to palate-cleanse afterwards (we'd had one we hadn't watched sitting around because of reasons). It was... less necessary than we'd worried, probably, anyway, although it definitely was the worst Ninja Turtles movie, and that includes the time-travel one where they wore samurai armor for about a third of their screentime.

(The best Ninja Turtles movie is either the original one or Turtles Forever, depending on whether you're asking me for an objective or subjective opinion.* Because the first Ninja Turtles movie is a surprisingly good movie for something that essentially was just helping boost what started as a quirky indie franchise, and Turtles Forever is for nerdy people who are already into the franchise, and handles cross-dimensional antics, metafictionality, and multiversal crises in a way that's more fun than any other such thing I've ever seen.)

I'll admit to being entertained and annoyed by turns; typifying the movie was the fact that Shredder's cutlery was a big silly exosuit that shot blades and retrieved them with magnets, which is both wonderful and incredibly stupid. Also, boy they made the turtles ridiculously durable. (My sister and I joked about one shot and its remarkable similarity to a scene from One Piece where the character Luffy screams "Bullets can't hurt me!")

Surprisingly enough, for a blatantly dumb action flick, my favorite moment was actually an emotional moment during the climax, where everyone thinks they're going to die and Raphael confesses that the reason he was always so hard on them was because he loved them. My sister and I agreed that this was something that is or should be true of more or less every version of Raphael, even if there's never a chance to visit the story beat.

Also, the changes they made to the origin story? What, man, what. My sister actually compared the changes to an origin story for Spider-Man where Uncle Ben is still alive at the end of it.

*My sister would always say the best one is the first one, I think, but she loves the first three movies unabashedly and unequivocally. She also decided to go ahead and take the plunge to buy DVDs of the newest cartoon, which I'd not have seen otherwise (I was a bit more hesitant, and we don't really have any TV, cable or otherwise, by choice).

-Signing off.

What the Heck, '80s?

These cartoons were made in the same decade, technically by the same industry, ostensibly for the same purpose (advertising products). (I'm well aware that this isn't a remotely fair comparison. Like it matters.)



The above show is apparently about an alien who... either appears when you solve a Rubik's Cube, or simply is a Rubik's cube that sprouts a face and legs when solved.

Contrast it with the following show.



Spiral Zone* is about a futuristic military commando team that goes on expeditions into an artificially induced atmosphere that causes people to become mind-controlled zombies under the villains' control. (I've only seen a few episodes and it was a long darned time ago, but my memories of it suggest it was comparable or superior in quality to the '80s GIJoe cartoon.)

The '80s was kind of a weird time for cartoons, yo.

*It's interesting to note that Spiral Zone was a derivation of a toyline from Japan that amazingly had the same name.

However, I've never seen any indication that there was a Spiral Zone anime, and I know that the cartoon wasn't a dub, because I've looked into Japanese Spiral Zone just enough to know that the toyline had its own distinct storyline over there: Instead of the artificial zombie-creating field of the cartoon, the titular Spiral Zone was an alien ecosystem or something that had invaded Earth (probably heavily inspired by Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind's toxic jungle/sea of decay, though without the twist at the end), at least as far as I can tell from the few available snippets.

-Signing off.

I Do Not Celebrate Black Friday

In honor of Blatantly Trying To Get You To Spend Money Day, here's a commercial sort-of-featuring Skeletor (as an action figure) advertising a much more expensive toy.



That's not the worst Skeletor voice I've ever heard, although it doesn't really compare to Oppenheimer's flawless vocals.



"'Cuz you were a wimp scientist and you could be a wimp villain!"

-Signing off.

Five Things To Love About Filmation He-Man

I've mentioned a few times that I'm a genuine fan of the original Filmation He-Man cartoon (and its literal sister series She-Ra, for that matter).

Having just started a semi-regular rewatch that my sister and I do periodically with our complete collection of the series, I decided I'd catalog some of my favorite things in the series.

5. Our car is a badass.

So He-Man is technically a toy commercial, right? And the toyline is a typical boy's toyline, with figures with silly gimmicks and dopey little vehicles that are often even more ridiculous.

Hypothetically, Attack Trak is an advertisement for a similarly named toy, which was a typical weird little one-man vehicle. The series writers developed the concept-a tracked vehicle that "only He-Man can drive" because it perceives who's trying to operate it-into something completely different, that being the amazing character Attack Trak. (I add the "c" primarily for purposes of distinguishing the two.)

This is Attack Trak, casually ascending a cliff face.



And he doesn't have a driver, because Trak doesn't need a driver.

Imagine if KITT from Knight Rider was a tank that could climb anything and armed with lasers, and was kind of a jerk to boot. Some episodes didn't give him any dialogue or autonomy, but there was also an episode which displayed an entire fleet of Attack Traks; I'm pretty sure, from his ability to handle most of Skeletor's minions by himself, that if they'd just had a fleet of him that Skeletor wouldn't pose any threat at all, so presumably the production version lacked the sapience and for some reason they just didn't use Trak himself sometimes.

One of the last episodes of the series even expanded on the idea of the sentient/sapient vehicle, portraying Skeletor's Land Shark as Trak's bestial rival that he really didn't care for at all; sadly, the Land Shark's only other appearance in the series was as a generic bad guy car.

There are a lot of characters from this cartoon that I really like, but Attack Trak is probably my personal favorite case of a character arising from Filmation deciding to go their own way with the concept.

My biggest regret about Lou Scheimer's He-Ro, Son of He-Man pitch being a thing that never happened was that apparently all the vehicles were going to be large sapient mechanical creatures, a bit more in the vein of the Land Shark, but still enough like Trak that I have to think he was an influence on the idea.

4. How weird can this show get?

There's an episode of He-Man where Castle Greyskull gets pulled into another dimension, and they follow it...



...into a Steve Ditko-drawn issue of Doctor Strange.

There's another episode where He-Man gets thrown into another dimension, and things get even weirder.

Like, he fights what's basically a Captain Planet villain, Plundor, but Plundor is a pink bunny man and the cuddly animals he's threatening are called Schminavits (or something like that) and look like cutesy video game critters.



And the rescue party sent to find him just kind of floats through space on their way there.



They pass through more Ditko space on the way, incidentally. Filmation kind of liked Ditko space.

And Plundor's pollution machines looked like Dr. Seuss drew them.



That's not even getting into episodes featuring other characters from Orko's homeworld of Trolla (or Trolla itself) or Orko's Missing Magic, which involves traveling to another weirdo dimension with weirdo inhabitants who happily flout normal laws of anatomy/physics. Like, do you think a guy built like this...



...should really be able to do this?



I don't know that this show was the first to essentially go with the idea that other dimensions with weird physics can just use cartoon physics, but it is the earliest one I know of that does it.

(It's also interesting to note that the inhabitants of that world, Omiros, actually have distinctly different magic visually from all the other magic-users in the series. A little touch, but a nice one.)

3. Yog.



That is all.



(More generally, Filmation had a lot of great creature designs.)

2. Mom is also a badass.

Okay, so here's a little secret about Filmation's He-Man: Its version of Queen Marlena (Prince Adam's/He-Man's mother) was amazing.

Granted, a lot of writers kind of ignored her, to the point where a lot of people don't even seem to be aware that Marlena's full name is Marlena Glenn and that she was a spacecraft test pilot/explorer from a slightly nebulous future version of Earth. (Probably an explorer in the Star Trek sense; her spaceship had missiles.)

She spends most of her time hanging around being a queen and a mom, but then there's The Rainbow Warrior... where she demonstrates that she's actually still the best combat pilot on Eternia and personally shoots down about half of Skeletor's air fleet.



...Calling her the best pilot on Eternia isn't saying that much, because Eternians seem to be crap at three-dimensional thinking, but still.

1. The Dragon Invasion.

When I was a kid, The Dragon Invasion was one of two episodes of the show that my family owned on VHS since almost before I could remember. (I actually do remember it being purchased at the Wal-Mart that had just moved into town a little while before. It was a strange release for various reasons, but then, a lot of late '80s/early '90s VHS releases were pretty odd.) That means that it's one of two episodes I've watched more than any other.

It's still one of my favorite episodes and is probably among the reasons I get nostalgic about the series. And there's a good reason for that:

Skeletor is awesome in this episode.

Even when he's being written poorly, Skeletor is very entertaining, because he's a bright blue guy with a yellow skull for a face who's in it for the cartoonish Evulz, and his voice actor, Alan Oppenheimer, is a real treasure. (In all seriousness, I rate Oppenheimer higher than Frank Welker and Peter Cullen, probably the most famous voice actors of the era, for the specific purpose of villain voices-in fact, in that specific category he's probably tied with the amazing David Kaye, whose Beast Wars Megatron is probably my favorite cartoon villain of all time. All his villain voices and a goodly number of his not-villain voices are fricking amazing.) But this episode was written by Michael Reaves, who would later write for Batman: TAS and Gargoyles, which I will point out are generally very well-written series.

Skeletor is on his A-game here.

First off, I should establish something about Eternian dragons. Aside from Granamyr (who qualifies for everything I'm about to describe but is also the most powerful wizard on Eternia, and yes, he's much more powerful than Skeletor or the Sorceress-there's an episode where He-Man's solution to a problem, that problem being an evil wizard dragon, is "get Granamyr to notice the problem"*) and his fellow sapient dragons, there's a pretty fair population of unintelligent animal dragons. Among other things, they're capable of flying at speeds comparable to Eternian aircraft, breathe fire of destructive power comparable to Eternian vehicle-mounted weaponry, withstand Eternian artillery fire without apparent injury, demolish buildings with their tails, and have a limited degree of resistance to being controlled by the telepathic powers of Skeletor's minion Beast Man.

Specifically, a mother dragon protecting her eggs can't be controlled by Beast Man, and the episode opens with Skeletor and Beast Man raiding a dragon nest for eggs.



When Beast Man freaks out because he can't stop the mother dragon, Skeletor basically calls him a wimp and sends her plummeting into a nearby abyss. (Presumably, she didn't fly because she was surprised; she also wasn't seriously injured by the fall, because she showed up later.) Then he has the eggs dropped all over Eternia, uses magic to make the dragons grow instantly to adults and has Beast Man force them to rampage, and does all this just to distract He-Man from his real plan, which is using a magic artifact called the Dragon Pearl (he must have been feeling thematic that day) to capture the Sorceress and Castle Greyskull, puts up an impenetrable forcefield around Greyskull, and when the heroes break down the forcefield anyway (ironically with help from the no-longer-manipulated-by-Beast-Man dragons), uses the Dragon Pearl to tap into the captured Sorceress's powers and turn himself into a giant version of himself that's actually strong enough to bring He-Man to his knees.

He still loses, of course; this is He-Man we're talking about.

But The Dragon Invasion is the quintessential He-Man action episode, and probably the purest example of such.

...I'm probably going to talk about She-Ra before too much longer, because this was going to be a bit more general of a post and instead it ended up being just about Filmation's version of He-Man specifically.

*He-Man does this by being a bit of a jerk, by the way: He deliberately crashes his flying car into Granamyr's house.

-Signing off.

This Show Exists (And It's Kinda Awesome)

Reminder if you knew it already, informational if you didn't: There was a show in the mid-'90s or so about a kid who was a reincarnated pharaoh and his four mummy bodyguards who were basically a team of Power Rangers.



It's kind of funny that the only previous time I brought up mummies (other than a linkback and one time I mentioned a mummy offhandedly in a Nagraj-related article) was in Spider Plus Mummy, which is on a technical level about the relatively short-lived The Mummy tie-in cartoon but is really more about a silly (and awesome) commercial for a single episode of said cartoon.

It's funny because it's another cartoon about Ancient Egyptian-related things that my sister and I used to joke about writing crossover fanfic with Yu-Gi-Oh! for. (Actually, I seem to recall it would have been crossover fanfic for all three series, because they all have varying degrees of themeparkified Egyptian mythology and that's enough for a high concept fanfic if you think about it. Mummies Alive! definitely took this themeparkification process the furthest, as it not only had henshin hero-style transforming warriors, but a magical "horseless chariot" that was actually a laser-shooting hot rod done up like an Egyptian sarcophagus and ostensibly an actual Ancient Egyptian vehicle, although probably not really. ...Yes, the show really was that awesome, why do you ask?)

-Signing off.

"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.

'80s Krang and Shredder: Basically an Old Married Couple

Got distracted by way too many things (rereading Adventurers! again, for instance, plus an awkward weird situation with my internet connection), so here's a random YouTube video.



I did say random.

-Signing off.

The Ten Best Kaiju From Godzilla: The Series

In honor of the great cartoon tie-in to that Godzilla movie that everybody hates finally having a good DVD release (which I found well after it was originally released, because the local Wal-Mart is awful), here's a list talking about some personal favorite monsters.

(Honestly, it's not really a list of the very best or even my very favorite, but a list of ones I consider more notable and worth paying attention to. I left out a few I really like, honestly, like the so-called Thorny Devil, Norzzug the living statue, the Fire Monster, the giant frog/plant hybrid thing that thought it was Swamp Thing, and the giant scorpions.)

Each is listed with its debut episode's title here for your convenience. (Unfortunately, the Godzilla wiki isn't very good about this series, and all the episodes are currently redlinks there.)

10. The Crackler, What Dreams May Come. Okay, honestly this is a little bit of a concession to personal taste.

See, the Crackler barely qualifies as an actual monster, because it's actually a manifestation of the amplified brain waves of an insomnia patient. Calling this thing a monster is like calling a bolt of lightning an animal. And it's made of electricity, somehow, so it's a surprisingly apt comparison. And even by the admittedly often tenuous science of the series, this doesn't really make any sense.

But it has a wonderfully alien design, and I adore it.

9. Crustaceous Rex, New Family: Part 2. Crustaceous Rex kind of had to make this list, being the first proper enemy kaiju to be introduced in the series, and a bit of an icon for it as well, appearing in a number of episodes other than his debut (despite being fairly unambiguously killed by Godzilla).

Unlike a lot of the monsters from the series, there was no real explanation of just what the flip it's supposed to be, because it's definitely in no way a crustacean or anything like one. Instead, it's some vaguely unidentifiable Barlownian beasty that pretty much is entirely alien (a lot like the Crackler, really).

It also eats tar that somehow magically parasitizes other animals and at one point pukes some in Godzilla's face.

C-Rex isn't a particularly formidable monster, honestly, but it's a charming one.

8. Ice borers, Freeze. Okay, these guys weren't originally going to be anywhere near this list, because they're honestly kind of silly little things and not that impressive design-wise. But then I read that they're probably based on an April Fool's gag about naked mole rats burrowing through ice with their super-hot foreheads, and I figured they deserve a spot for that.

Otherwise, they're just big moles living in the Arctic.

7. Sub-Zero Manta, Wedding Bells Blew. Something that's actually a teense lacking in Godzilla: The Series is kaiju with iconic profiles. A lot of them are just huge animals or incredibly weird things, and don't quite have the same punch.

And then there's this thing, a completely inexplicable thing that resembles a giant manta ray that flies, only breathes air, has an icy breath weapon, and repeatedly attacks buildings with good air conditioning because it's trying to find a place to hibernate.

Easily my favorite part of this particular monster was that when it got into an inevitable breath weapon war with Godzilla, it was as if the two monsters were clashing weather fronts and started causing severe storm weather to manifest.

6. The Shrewster, The Twister. And then there's the gigantic rodent created by nuclear power/wind power experiments (seriously) that merged with and controlled a tornado.

I love the Shrewster for no reason beyond the fact that it's a giant animal that's merged with a weather pattern. That is golden.

(There's also the fact that its incredibly high metabolism is a loosely implied explanation for how a tornado can be sustained for weeks, which actually makes a minute amount of sense.)

5. Bacillus, What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been. It's kind of funny that there's a monster that's supposed to be just a big old bacterium.

It doesn't make any sense, and it's honestly part of one of the sillier episodes (one of those "journey through a living body" plots that honestly aren't very good), but I really like its design.

4. Quetzalcoatl, Bird of Paradise. Sometimes your giant monster cartoon just needs a giant ugly firebreathing birdosaur.

While it looks surprisingly like a hoatzin, which is a neat bit of trivia (hoatzins are South American birds and the only living member of a big family of birds, and the only birds alive today which at any point in their life cycles have true claws on their wings), it's vaguely implied that "Q" may simply be a big, weird holdover from prehistoric times rather than a mutant like most of the other monsters of the series.

3. El Gusano Gigante ("the giant worm"), D.O.A.. El Gusano, as he's often known for short, is one of the more massive monsters from Godzilla: The Series, at least by bulk, and that gives him a lot of presence; he's one of the more iconic monsters from the series, and like C-Rex appears in several episodes.

While he has some superficial resemblance to both whales and armored dinosaurs, looking at his anatomy he's almost certainly some kind of weird Onychophoran, that is, an offshoot of velvet worm.

Also like C-Rex, his primary role in the series is getting stomped on by other kaiju, because despite his size he's a pushover, though he definitely lived through his run-in with Godzilla. (The only reason he was a serious threat to Godzilla is because he was immune to the toxin that the local government tried to kill both monsters with, and even got a little more impressive because it was a concentrated form of stuff he ate.)

2. The Techno-Sentient, Juggernaut. The Techno-Sentient is both one of the most inexplicable* and one of the most terrifying monsters to appear in the series.

First off, it was able to absorb technology into its body almost completely at will, to the point where missiles that hit it didn't detonate because it had already subverted them; this made it only a little shy of indestructible.

Second, while it was pretty alien, it was very intelligent, and figured out from data it had downloaded from the internet how to start a nuclear war, and promptly tried to do so by invading a missile base and launching a missile at Baghdad. (Fortunately, its own plot was its undoing, because it got stuck to the missile and the missile detonated in orbit instead of when it hit its target; that was probably the only way to stop the darned thing.)

It was easily the most threatening and dangerous monster to appear in the series, and there was no explanation of its origins beyond "it fell from space" and no explanation of its motivations beyond "it wants to kill all organic life on Earth."

*Someone on the wiki suggested, and not without reason, that the Techno-Sentient was a creation of the series' aliens, the Tachyons**. While it makes some sense, I have to admit I don't really like the idea, because the Techno-Sentient was much more effective story-wise as something thoroughly inexplicable.

Also, 1) I think they'd have noticed similarities between it and the technology they'd already observed and worked with if it was made by the Tachyons, and 2) it would have spent less time screwing around than it did if it was on a mission it had been sent on; it would have had better intelligence if it had been sent by somebody who'd been to Earth before it.

**I don't really like that name as the name of an alien race, but ah well.

1. Skeetera, S.C.A.L.E.. Skeetera is the sort-of star kaiju of what is easily the best episode of the series. S.C.A.L.E. used an experimental storytelling style by framing the episode as a documentary composed from camera footage, something like what Cloverfield was trying to do but more successful (well, I suppose not that much like Cloverfield, but the point stands), and was a much more interesting narrative to boot. In fact, I'd say it was better than just about every "artsy" movie I've ever seen.

But enough about that; Skeetera is the hands-down best kaiju from Godzilla: The Series because she's perfect.

First, she's the only monster whose name would fit in in the wider Toho canon, even if it's a name that Toho probably would never quite have generated themselves. Compare it to "Mothra," for instance.

Second, she's probably the most iconic monster in the series (GIANT KILLER MOSQUITO), and iconic in a way more akin to the recurring Toho monsters. (I hate to harp on comparing her to Mothra, but she's really got a lot in common with the other female insect kaiju, except she's rather more evil, or at least amoral.) But she still fits in with the series' own feel.

Third, she has a neat power that's derived from her animal inspiration (sucks blood of other kaiju -> gets bigger and gains new powers derived from victims) in an intuitive/magical thinking sort of way. (Which, with Mothra's "poison dust" attacks being derived from the same sort of thinking, is yet another thing she has in common with her.)

Skeetera only showed up in this one episode, but she's so iconic that I was a bit mystified when Matt Frank left her out of his excellent art-based fan series, Godzilla Neo. Out of the things in this series that need more love, Skeetera is definitely the most deserving.

-Signing off.

Godzilla Makes A Comeback

I'd almost given up on the Godzilla vs. Gamera running tally I've been talking about for a while.

Then, without warning:



I finally found Godzilla: The Series. (Actually, my sister spotted it first, if I'm remembering.)

It was the only one on its rack, which begs some questions, but regardless, I'm pretty sure that's an even score on the ol' scoreboard.

This DVD release is wonderful to have, because besides being one of the best pieces of kaiju fiction ever made (it really is), this DVD release includes two episodes that didn't air on television.*

I'm a happy daikaiju fan.

*Network wars of the late '90s/early '00s, you have much to answer for.

-Signing off.

Genre Shift: Garfield Edition

And then there was that time that Garfield and Friends turned into a fairly well-animated '80s action cartoon that was under attack by an army* of '70s super robots for about six minutes.



Seriously.

Amazingly enough, the episode actually opened with Garfield complaining about having a dream about three hundred cheeseburgers and no ketchup.

You know how when certain cartoons are in long-term syndication reruns, there'll be that one episode you see eight million times and grow to hate, even if it's good?

I seem to remember seeing this episode about that many times, but I don't remember ever being annoyed.

*I've stated in the past that any non-binary number of giant robots generally qualifies as an army. In effect, two or more.

-Signing off.

I AM INVINCIBLE AND ALSO I CANNOT BE STOPPED OR DESTROYED

I don't think I've ever posted this.



My favorite thing about this random baddie of the week from Megas XLR is that he's apparently completely indestructible and close to unstoppable but he's also a near-mindless idiot who prattles to himself.

-Signing off.

At Least His Name Hasn't Ruined His Self Esteem*

My sister declared this the weirdest thing she's seen "in a while." Take that how you will.



I love how apparently Coach Crime knows when crooks are near random phones. (I wasn't watching quite closely enough to know if there's an actual explanation, but it seems dubious.)

Fun facts:

The main characters are voiced by Peter Cullen (many versions of Optimus Prime) and Frank Welker (has voiced characters in almost every cartoon ever, but in context the most relevant are the Megatron voices he did). (Additional fun fact: The spellcheck knows "Cullen" but not "Welker.")

This originally aired as part of a block called The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show.

The dog's name is Yukk!, in the words of Wikipedia's article "formally stylized with an exclamation point."

I stumbled across this, by the way, because I was looking at an entry on the Ben 10 wiki about an alien with a loosely similar gag to Yukk!'s.

*I mention this because he compares himself to Robert Redford. Dude's pretty comfortable with himself.

-Signing off.

...Meh

I don't have much to say about this, because it's emergency blog filler.



Well, beyond the fact that Donald Duck is pretty awesome.

-Signing off.

Stronger Than Superman

Have a Popeye cartoon, because the thing I would probably have posted otherwise got vaporized off YouTube. (What's funny is that my sister instantly knew what was playing from the other room from the music. We've watched quite a few Popeye cartoons over the years.)



The way Popeye warps the laws of physics always makes me smile. (Also, his laugh is generally funnier than what he's laughing at.)

Also, he's a bigger industrial power than the country he lives in.

-Signing off.