Even when you've learned a lot about a subject, there's always something new to find out, especially with something as marginal in one's own country as tokusatsu is in the US. (There was an American quasi-tokusatsu show called Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills? And it's had a DVD release? ...There's a thing I kind of need now.)
Like, I already knew that Toho had taken a shot at making a character in imitation of Ultraman, Zone Fighter, who is notable for 1) being much more brutal than most of the Ultras (I have an old blog post where I comment on this, but the embedded video is long gone and a bit critical to my commentary-but most of it had to do with decapitations, dismemberment, and/or extended application of rapid-fire projectile weaponry, so you can sort of guess at it), and 2) having Godzilla and King Ghidorah guest star here and there.
These shows are even more obscure than Zone Fighter, and, for that matter, much more obscure than Zone Fighter, because while I've known at least a little about Zone Fighter for a decade or so, I first heard of these three while wikiwalking last week, and I'd rather thought I'd heard of most of the "kyodai (giant) heroes."
There's not much to be found on YouTube for the obligatory embed; two of the series have exactly nothing. Go! Greenman does have an intro sequence available, at least, so there's that.
And while I can sort of see why the Godzilla wiki presented the statement that Godman resembles Ultraman more (presumably because of his color scheme), I look at Greenman and see Ultraman wearing a costume to avoid a lawsuit.
From what I've read, it's also amusing to note that Go! Greenman was a show featuring an Ultra-like warrior fighting super sentai/Power Rangers-style villains, with mooks and growing monsters of the week. Japan doesn't mix and match its different henshin hero subgenres enough.
*Assault! Human had the interesting quirk of its Ultra-like protagonists being called "humans" in English. Who knows what's up with that.
I can't really say I'm a Doctor Who fan, but I'm definitely a Dalek fan.
The best part of this clip is that, while the Daleks technically did bring in reinforcements later, it wasn't because they needed them against the Cybermen, it was just part of some sort of other master plan they had; they easily could have killed five million Cybermen with four Daleks, and possibly just with one (as the boasting Dalek leader suggests).
And, of course, there's the fact that Daleks are the same goofy salt-and-pepper shakers as they've always been in appearance, while the Cybermen felt the need to update their looks over and over and over again. (Though I can't say I care for older Cybermen designs; the new "Iron Man-esque" designs are probably my favorite.)
The character Zone Fighter was created by Toho (the company that makes Godzilla films) to compete with Tsubaraya Productions' Ultraman in a similar niche, presumably with the reasoning that if a former Toho employee could make a successful kaiju vs. hero action series, so could Toho.
The result is arguably inferior, as it didn't really go anywhere (although I suspect Toho didn't invest as much energy into it as they could have-if you look at the monster costumes, they look downright stupid next to the contemporary Ultraman series and Godzilla film costumes, with the obvious exception of Godzilla film guest stars, who were all over the darned place-and Zone Fighter was a little too obvious as a direct imitation of Ultraman) and not very memorable other than Godzilla movie kaiju guest starring.
Well, the Godzilla cameos... and the fact that Zone Fighter liked to solve his problems by shooting things repeatedly with rockets and dismembering them with energy crescents until they died.
Of special note: 0:50 (point-blank shot through the gut and out the back), 1:49 (head falls off after a delayed reaction to being shot repeatedly and black blood explosively sprays out), 4:30 (chops off arms), and 4:52 (delayed reaction head falling off).
The decapitations particularly are both gruesome and funny (my sister nearly died after 1:49).
Sure, Ultraman kills his enemies very dead most of the time, but he wears them down with hand to hand combat first, and then usually kills them in a single stroke. Much more humane. (And no, I'm not actually being sarcastic.)
Admittedly, Zone Fighter's way is a bit more batman.
(Oy. If you're wondering about the inconsistent content the last few days, I spent the last two finally reading Gunnerkrigg Court. Like, I finished it maybe ten minutes ago.
It's kinda good.)
I don't know that much about Batman '66, but this? This is kinda brilliant.
Although it admittedly kind of dates it, doesn't it?
If you're wondering: I have very circular thought processes. It's probably a function of all the mowing I've done over the years-going in all those goshdarned circles. Going over the same thoughts repeatedly, sometimes something gets trapped in the circuit and won't leave. I randomly thought of the Hercules clip after seeing the Planet of the Apes cartoon intro, which was followed by the other ones through memetic connections. ("Disappointed!-NO(OOOOOO)!-It's a trap!-Yes! Yes!" seems like a logical flow to me, but maybe I'm alone in that.)
And that's the best explanation I can come up with.
Y'know, if you're going to make a clip about something obscure like this, you could at least explain that the special effects giant robot dragon thing is a real thing that appears at monster truck rallies and whatnot.
It sounds like it would have been a pretty dumb series, but I don't know that that's a bad thing.
Why? I can't really afford it, and it's pretty much devoured the content of broadcast television that interested me.
You know what I really hate? Digital TV.
Why? Suddenly, the diversity of programs available was cut in half. I do not exaggerate.
How was something that was supposed to improve television delivery so bad for it? Well, the effective range for a digital television signal is maybe half what it was for the old analog broadcasts. Guess how far away some of the stations I used to watch (when I watched more TV) were?
I mean, sure, there have been some minor additions of good content. If you want weather coverage at any time, most news stations will now deliver it; if you want to put a show on for a little kid, PBS now airs children's programming nearly 24/7; and one relatively nearby station has a retro channel that airs stuff from several decades ago. (Even the commercials are more old-fashioned [though they still mention the websites]-let me tell you, that's a breath of fresh air. The main problem is that the content seems to be rather unpredictable. Of course, our local TV schedules don't cover it...)
What makes it worse is that digital fidelity and reliability is, while quite good most of the time, much more likely to suffer flagrant failure. Sure, analog signals would sometimes be a bit fuzzy, but if there were signal problems, usually it was just a flash or so of static and then it was done. If DTV goes out, it goes down.
It sure doesn't help that most network television is trying to copy most other network television. Bland/grim shows are on every channel, and what's worse, they compete at being bland/grim.
No thanks. No wonder cable/satellite is so popular.
...they don't seem to be doing this anymore on CSI: Miami.
Instead, apparently searching for a more serious tone, they set people on fire at the beginning of the episode.
I'm serious. My sister mentioned that they'd started an episode by burning down a building with somebody in it, and then they cut to YEEEAAAAAAAHHH! without giving a one-liner. Then, in the most recent episode, they pulled somebody (who turned out to be a dead body) out of a burning house, and one of the main characters suffered from smoke inhalation.
Actually, it's a little disappointing; now, we'll never hear Caine say "I guess that guy... was on fire." Yeeeaaaahhh!
Someone once said that tragedy makes for a more memorable and moving story than a happy ending.
Well, once again, Criminal Minds went too far. But this time, just about every show in that category had a horribly depressing finale which implied an additional character death in the last ten seconds. (CSI: Miami fell short of this, but only because it's still too goofy and confusing to make sense.)
So it's goodbye, evening television. I'll find my escapism somewhere else, thank you. (Eleventh Hour, if it has another season, is something I might consider watching again willingly, because its season finale, while ominous, was ultimately upbeat and feel good.
Speaking of which, I'll talk about such again tomorrow, but I've got too little energy again tonight.
Daitetsujin 17 (pronounced "one seven," or perhaps more properly, "one sevuuuuun," in case you've never been told how the Japanese pronounce Arabic numerals) is something I've rarely discussed-a live-action super robot.
Not related in any way to Tetsujin 28. Really. All they have in common is blueness and super-robotness.
Anyway, Daitetsujin 17 was dubbed as "Brain 17." How you translate "giant iron being" into "brain," I don't know, but somehow they did it.
I suppose they might have done it because the robot is occasionally controlled through the helmet the kid wears, but whatever.
The reason I like what little I've seen of Daitetsujin 17 is because it has such a distinct visual style from other tokusatsu (live action with special effects from Japan-i.e. like Godzilla movies with a bit lower budget) programs I've seen. (There used to be a music video with a nice remix of its theme and the coolest footage from the series, but it apparently doesn't exist anymore. Ah, well.) It's also kind of scary to watch DTJ 17 take out that steamroller robot-I have no idea what he was doing to him, but it looked like it hurt.
(If you can't read that [I can, but my eyesight is notoriously superior], follow that first link to the deviantArt page.)
I do and have frequently watched the huge flood of crime dramas that currently dominate the post-8:00 PM time slots on broadcast television, but I'm at my limit. (My breaking point was an episode of Criminal Minds where it turned out that the rather insane guy of the week who had been shooting other motorists had killed his entire family about the same time he snapped, and most of his family's appearances had been hallucinations. Way to be a downer, man.) While many of the Bruckheimer plague shows have been reasonably smart and clever (as adult television goes), there's a black sheep in every family. The black sheep in this family is CSI: Miami.
This show is stupid. And when I say that, I don't mean garden variety stupid, I mean borderline brain-damaged.
Aside from the gratuitous gore (part and parcel of all CSI shows) and the gratuitous and exploitative shots of women (both of these are alluded to by the little comic above), the show has Horatio Caine, the weirdest and most out of place of all of the CSI series team leads. In addition to his spectacle crunching, Caine is very creepy, and actively looks like he doesn't belong in the lab coat that he only occasionally dons. His creepiest moment comes when he tells a "pedophile" that the guy is "resisting arrest." When the guy says "No, I'm not," Caine says "Let's see how long that lasts," moves towards the guy, and the episode ends. So apparently, it's cool to beat the crud out of pedophiles? (The reason I put quote marks around pedophile earlier is because the girl he was after [this was a clear case of entrapment, by the way] was fourteen. While it's still illegal, there was no sign the guy was going to get violent as the other pedophiles involved in the episode had [the show's weird logic seems to indicate pedophiles are incapable of having sex with children without also killing them], and while it's still a problem, it's not like he was going to rape a five year old, which is the domain of the real creeps. My sister compares the "pedophiles" who go after fourteen-to-seventeen-year olds to losers who can't pick up a smarter, more mature woman. No offense if this describes you.)
Then there's the fact that every single episode, regardless of how appropriate it is, seems to work in a reference to extramarital affairs. In an episode that aired last night, the case involved an amnesiac who had apparently stabbed a man to death. It turned out, upon pulling records, that the guy's father had died from a stab wound inflicted by an angry ex-wife. How did the ex-wife get angry? They don't say, but you can bet it involved some nookie.
The "eyecandy" part of the series extends beyond merely distracting us with in-the-face shots of various pleasantly formed body parts, by the way. In one episode, a character is crouching over, getting into the nitty-gritty of the crime scene... and her hair suddenly goes WAFT WAFT WAFT all pretty-like. The fact that the big sweeping shots that all CSI shows do fly around over the bays and seem to take twice as long as other shows also adds to this feeling.
Then there was the episode where a "private investigator" orchestrated a murder and turned out to be involved in this horribly convoluted and silly plot involving a businessman named (IIRC) Peter Cullen (not that Peter Cullen) and his murdered partner and secretary and an affair (see?) and a SWAT team and... Okay, that's enough. Anyway, this "PI" did all sorts of really illegal things to discredit the CSI team, "effectively" foiling their efforts, until finally the CSIs sent the guy who had been having the affair with the wife of the dead partner who was killed by the SWAT team (and the PI had also been hired by the murdered partner to find out information on the affair, by the way) and who had been the PI's tool in orchestrating the SWAT murder with a wire in order to trick the PI into a confession so that the tool guy could get a plea bargain (this would also let them convict Peter Cullen, who had shot his murdered secretary personally [what happened to all the complicated plotting?]). The PI wasn't fooled, and yanked the wire off and wrecked it before he started saying all the incriminating stuff, which of course was stupid because he had forgotten that there was a thermos on the table that had a bug in it (because tool guy had brought it). And then, for no apparent reason, with no apparent explanation, Horatio freaking Caine was right there and he apparently had ninja skills, because they didn't see or hear him coming in the super-bright Miami sun.
If you look at that last paragraph and go, "WHAT THE HECK?!" well, I can't say I blame you.
If you don't, I'm wondering about you.
Oyah, they solve all their crimes within a single day. Explicitly. Apparently, they need to hurry because they're worried about the statute of limitations running out? Ha ha ha.
(Okay, if you didn't get that: Most crimes have limited durations where they can be punished. Murder is not one of these crimes. Just to be clear.)
So after Sunday's Survivor finale, my sister and I speculated on just what the series would do if they ever run out of new exotic tropical locales in which to film seasons of the show.
Here's some of our ideas.
Survivor: Skyscraper.
Pitch: The Survivor contestants are locked in a twenty story office building with no outside contact except for janitors, caterers, and that annoying host guy. Instead of Exile Island, the person who gets "exiled" would be sent to the Exile Basement, a.k.a. the Dungeon.
Pros: It'd be easier to rush them to the hospital in case of emergency.
Cons: They would probably be able to stand sticking to their regular clothes, and they would also not get all skinny because of the air conditioning.
Survivor: Mars.
Pitch: The Survivor contestants are blasted to Mars.
Pros: A very exotic locale.
Cons: It'll be a long time before this locale is available.
Survivor: Disney World.
Pitch: Does it need explanation? Okay, very brief skit:
A little kid is holding hands with his/her parent, holding an ice cream cone, cotton candy, or some other treat.
The bushes rustle.
A grizzled, sweaty, lightly clothed individual peeks out from the bushes, and gazes hungrily at the child's treat.
Pros: Funnest Survivor ever. Also, there'd be no licensing issues.
