Pretty Sure There Was A Lot More Than That, Too

So how can you overwhelm my capacity for listing off nerdy things?

Well, you could be the predecessor to Studio Gainax and make an animation like this one, which followed an animation I've previously mentioned.



While I was able to follow just about everything in the previous video and name it off without looking stuff up, this one is just too much. Xenomorphs? Chibi-esque anime Yoda? Doctor Nazo? One of the mutants from Metaluna?



(Yes, it's in there somewhere, in one of the massive character crowds. You have to be sharp-eyed.)

I'd meant to talk about this before now, but I don't really have much to say except 1) "Holy Pop Culture References, Batman!" and 2) I love the quality of animation. It's got little to do with how the gal in the bunny suit looks, no matter how distracting she's trying to be-those buildings blowing up? The explosive verdant growth? The big energy blasts? Yeah, I enjoy watching that kind of stuff, especially when it's just so darned sharp.

-Signing off.

YOU DEAD

(I spent some time putting together a post over at that Yu-Gi-Oh! blog where I post stuff, if you're interested.)

This is kind of an interesting little vignette that apparently was part of the Macross 7 series (which is sort of related to Robotech). It tells you a fair bit about someone without actually saying very much (in fact, the character himself just has a few nonverbal vocalizations).



Despite the artful and poetic nature of the piece, though, my favorite part is the simulator game over screen, which simply proclaims "YOU DEAD."

-Signing off.

China Loves Giant Robots, Too

In Japan, one of the most well-known anime featuring robots of all time is Macross, which featured jets that transformed into robots and a huge alien invasion. (I talked about it somewhere...)



It was dubbed (by the infamous Carl Macek) and merged with several other series into a series called Robotech, which Americans may be more familiar with.



Entertainment in China is heavily modelled after that of Japan; Japan is something of an entertainment juggernaut, and its works are imitated to some degree in pretty much every country in the world. China's proximity means it imitates Japan pretty heavily.

Thus, "Astro Plan," which is frequently known as "Chinese Macross."



I showed this to my sister a few days ago, and she remarked casually "So the main difference (between this and Macross) is that these have magical girl attacks?"

I sat there for a second, thinking about it, and because I'm used to her off-the-wall comments, I shrugged and said "Well, you certainly could put it that way."

The other significant difference is that Macross never featured lightsabers/beam sabers... (Close-quarters combat was relatively minimal in Macross. The only incident that occurs to me was an image of a Zentradi being slapped by a police mech in an animated GIF on the Robotech home page somewhere...)

-Signing off.

Random Commercial Action!

No offense to the kid actor here...



...but didn't Hasbro have the creepiest kids in its commercials?



And again. Yeesh.

On a different note, this commercial makes very blatant the copyright infringement behind the confusing case of Autobot Jetfire (AKA Skyfire). (On a side note, I remember that toy. My brother gave it to me, and then took it back because it was one of his favorites [it really was one of the best-engineered toys of the era]. Then his dog ate the gun. Darnit.)

By contrast, Japan's commercials were pretty awesome.



That's right, these commercials are so nifty they're illegal here in the US. (It was apparently determined at some point that using stop motion in advertising for toys was implying that the toys were capable of things they couldn't actually do, and thus it is banned here. Darnit, regulatory agencies!)

-Signing off.

Super Robot Profiles: Macross

Macross is an anime from 1982-83 which was adapted into the first part of Robotech for North American distribution. (This is a simplification-the first Macross was followed by at least two "non-sequel sequels" [basically new series set in the same or a similar universe] and about a bazillion retellings of the same stuff, the latest one of which is slated for this summer.)



Created by Tatsunoko, this series follows what I think of as "the Tatsunoko Rule." The Tatsunoko Rule is as follows: The robots from a given Tatsunoko Productions series must fight enemies at least twice their own size, preferably at least five times their own size, and if possible a few thousand times their own size. This, despite the series ostensibly being one of the earliest "real robot" series, which changes the focus from a single, essentially magical robot to a large number of mass-produced robots that are fairly clearly technological.

The Tatsunoko Rule extends even to the enemy warfleet that attacks Earth in the series.

(Image yanked from Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions, specifically the -10X page. The SDF-1 Macross, the ship used by the protagonists, is on the bottom.)

That big ship on top? It's one of the Zentradi's medium-sized ships. And to be fair, while the Executor dwarfs even the massive flagships used by the Zentradi, the Zentradi "home base" is literally four to ten times the size of the Death Star. (You can use this page for a visual comparison of the two structures' official sizes.)

The really interesting part, though, is that that, as a species, the Zentradi themselves follow the Tatsunoko Rule. The Zentradi, while more or less the same species (in some insane Japanese way) as humans, are approximately the same size as the mecha piloted by the humans. This obviously helps account for some of the usage of the Tatsunoko Rule here, which really is more than can be said for any other Tatsunoko series. (Part of the irony here, of course, is the fact that the big ugly mecha used by the Zentradi [ugly in the best possible sense-they're charming designs] are, while faster and more agile than their opposite numbers, pretty much a cinch for their tiny and less technologically advanced enemies to destroy.)

Other than that, blah blah love triangle blah blah fishcakes.

Also, one of the later Macross series featured the protagonists controlling and powering their fighter mecha by playing guitars.

I'm sorry, but that's a little too silly even for me.

-Signing off.