So I was looking up super robot music, as one does, and found a lyrics video for the first opening of Akuu Daisakusen Srungle, a series with a pretty rad intro song that I know very little else about*.
There was a word repeatedly used in the intro that I never quite understood; if the captions given by this video's poster are anything to go by, the word in question was... well, see for yourself.
"Gorilla" was perhaps not the dead last thing I'd have expected the enthusiastic cries of "greelya" to be, but it was pretty far back there.
Then there's the intro to Sengoku Majin GoShogun**, which is one of my all-time favorite super robot openings of its era across the board (music, visuals, whatever):
And the vocals of this song starts with a meaningful question:
"Do you know the red button?" (Followed up by asking if you know about the blue button. Yes, really.)
That... actually makes it even better.
*The main thing I know about Srungle is that it was given a Robotech-style merged dub treatment where its cast and Goshogun's cast were supposedly both members of a cross-dimensional organization working to overthrow some multidimensional tyrant or something; the new show was called Macron One, which actually had its own pretty neat intro song. Also, its cast had the most ridiculous names, listed here for your education: Captain Chance (okay, not THAT weird, but wait for it), Babyface, Sexy, Magician, Superstar, and Jet. Amazing that they manage to make "Jet" sound remarkably ordinary.
I also learned today that the intro song cataloged here was replaced partway through the series' run. WHY?!
**There's slightly different ways to translate it, but the title's meaning can be roughly translated as "Warring States Demon-God GoShogun." GoShogun the series is rather more light-hearted than the title would indicate, at least from what I've read; supposedly it's among the first super robot series to qualify as parodic.
One of the villains, a "synthetic human" named Kernagul, wanted to open some restaurant chains as his major motivation: Kernagul's Fried Chicken and KerDonald's.
So I was looking at something involving cockroaches and robots intended to mimic their social behavior... (The relevant bits are about forty minutes in.)
...And I was rather startled to realize that the video involved a bunch of dead roaches at one point.
It probably caused that reaction because a lot of arthropods have the ability to provoke empathy in me.
In fact, I generally feel much worse about having to squash spiders than I do about accidentally running over squirrels and such. (Admittedly, my lack of reaction to running over furry animals probably has to do with the fact that I worked at a factory for a few summers running the mowing tractor, and I ran over a number of animals without seeing them, especially rabbits, and couldn't really afford to get too upset over it*. The only animal I ever really got upset over hitting was a turtle I hit one year. ...How that turtle managed to get so big when it was living so close to those train tracks, I'll never know.)
*As much as I hated that job, I got to see a lot of nature in less harmful ways, too. Like the local bird of prey that knew that following the tractor would bring it food (and the huge horde of little birds that were after the bugs the tractor kicked up). And then there was the day I must have seen half a dozen praying mantids in one stretch of five hundred feet or so, which was nearly as many as I'd seen in the wild in my entire life to that point.
And then there was the time I was mowing a particularly wet place, and I met two or three entire species of mosquito** that I'd never met before. Ah well, you take the good and the bad together, I guess.
**My general insect empathy doesn't extend to little jerks that want to bite me or people (or animals) I like. I.e. mosquitoes, fleas, those big biting flies, etc. But spiders, roaches, beetles, etc. are generally pretty harmless. Also, I like ants, but honestly anytime they're in one's house, one must be on a war footing with them, and empathy is something you can't afford in that situation.
Couldn't decide which panel in the current Atomic Robo story (which I'm bringing up because Atomic Robo is now officially a proper webcomic, rather than uploading more than twenty pages every three days-which is kind of like reading a controlled archive binge, really) was my favorite; fortunately, they were right next to each other on the same page, so I decided to screenshot them both.
One of the most amazing things about Atomic Robo is that he has two long-running arch-nemeses.
One of them is an incredibly old racist German with lots of super-science that predated Hitler by decades and has been plotting to conquer the world since the late 1800s.
The other one is a talking dinosaur who may not be a real dinosaur but don't tell him that who has roughly the mannerisms of an anthropomorphized turkey or a chicken.
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...
Y'know, I know it's probably for the best not to ask questions about this sort of thing, but...
Why would there be power cells to power a personal shield generator that basically only one person in the galaxy uses sitting around in a base full of people hostile to him? (Also, it's pretty great that the page quote for "personal energy shield" is actually attributed to this game's character.)
For that matter, I'll admit they're actually pretty cool, but why are the elevators in Dark Forces so... so... non-OSHA compliant? Because those things would take off a lot of fingers and probably cause quite a few falls to one's death. (Not to mention the "elevator" that's a giant drill bit that's somehow being spun by invisible forces and raised and lowered via the same invisible forces, which hurts you if you so much as brush against the wrong part of it and requires you to be good at jumping.)
Recently picked up the original Dark Forces for three bucks at GOG.com (it's still on sale at that price as of this writing; if you miss the sale, you'd have to pay another whole three bucks) and noticed something: Kyle Katarn walks like any normal human being would run, and runs like some kind of mutant turbocamel*.
The above is a speedrun that makes me feel a bit pathetic; it took me months to beat the game the first time, and even this time I'm progressing pretty slowly.
Though I'll grant you part of the problem is that I keep getting distracted whenever I see a probe droid, because I really enjoy punching them. (I'd take screenshots, because probe droid punching** is a truly fine pastime, but apparently DosBox keeps me from using the screenshot button properly.)
The other part of the problem is mazey areas that require jumping.
*On average, from what I've read, camels are as fast or faster than horses. Like, some very fast horses are faster than camels, but a camel at a sustained pace is as fast as the average galloping horse and can sprint a fair bit faster.
**A revision of my estimate of how far probe droids fly when you punch them: They don't go any further than, say, stormtroopers do when you punch them, if you're punching them sideways. You have to get underneath them and punch upwards for the best absurd results, which can send them flying over a hundred in-game feet straight up***.
***Make sure to do it outside. Ceilings are such spoilsports.
So I was randomly playing the free RTS Warzone 2100 today, and noticed something that amused me.
I screenshotted it...
...then remembered that the screenshot was too big to fit well on my blog, so here's a cropped version:
In the game, you need to do research to have a lot of technology be available. Also, when you have allies, you share research.
And the hearts in the above screenshot tell you what research your allies are doing at the same time as you.
I'm not sure how beneficial this is for research in general-it looks rather like it doesn't speed things up, and if it could, you'd probably be allowed to put multiple of one's own research stations to work researching the same project-but I have noticed that if you click to research a thing that an ally wants to research but doesn't have the resources for at the moment, your resources will start up the research. Sort of an angel investor thing, I guess.
Too bad you can't rescue them from their own stupidity in other ways...*
*One of the things that I find rather useful in an RTS where one may have computer allies is the ability to use friendly fire to manage the AI's basebuilding. For whatever reason, numerous RTS AIs are notorious for their bizarre, extreme basebuilding habits, which often result in hideous, unnavigable sprawls. And sometimes they just snipe the resource spot you want, which is nearly as bad.
At any rate, being able to hurt allied units is useful, especially when your ally doesn't complain.** But a lot of RTS games, this one included, make it incredibly difficult to do even the slightest harm to an ally. (Or in this game's case, to one's own units.)
To be fair, the only game I've played that actually makes it easy is Total Annihilation-a force-fire option plus massive artillery, nukes, powerful self-destruct explosions, and the Commander's disintegrator gun-with TA:Kingdoms being a distant second (only artillery and area-of-effect spells there, which are nowhere near as flexible and effective as the TA options).
The closest I got to that in Warzone 2100 was using a laser satellite on a neutral building while friendlies were nearby, and for obvious reasons that only works on my own guys. But then, the only other way to harm one's own units in Warzone 2100 is to send them into hostile fire, so there are times when that's useful.
**I can't imagine, if you've ever played an RTS, that you've never screwed with an AI, whether friendly or enemy. They don't have feelings, but they can still be aggravating, and being able to mess with them has always been an important part of why Total Annihilation is good catharsis for me. And most RTS players are probably bigger control freaks than I am.
