Pilot's Log

The Revoltech Evangelion EVA Unit action figures are 1/570 scale, the same as some of Revell/Revell-Germany's ship models, including:

* Bismark/Tirpitz
* Queen Mary
* Titanic
* USS Saratoga (postwar, pre-nuclear power, aircraft carrier)
* King George V
* Prince of Wales...

For the last few days, my Windows 7 Pro has lost its East Asian Language Support. Which means, among a few things, I can't translate the titles of dozens of anime soundtrack songs I have loaded onto WinAmp. The foreign characters display fine on Internet Explorer and other programs, but not on internal Win7 functions like directories and filenames. They don't display in Notepad either.

Windows Update isn't as functional in Win7 as it was in previous versions of Windows. I don't know what I should do about this. I'm not sure I still have the master disks for the OS--Computer King has the nasty habit of just installing the OS and keeping the disks.

Today, I came to the end of a very long and drawn out process in an attempt to acquire something that had some otaku significance but still hadn't made it to America.

Space Gundam V, the South Korean knockoff anime based around the Valkyrie fighter from Macross. Somebody made a torrent available a few months ago, and I got to download it in pieces over the course of the past month or so, and took final delivery overnight.

This program is worse than I imagined it could be. It's even worse than the Digiview content, which I would have found hard to believe if somebody told me so. The visual narrative is a mess, which probably means whoever made this was likely under pressure to get it done quickly and just threw it together. There is far too much cliché physical comedy, the kind you see more often in American and Western cartoons. (If the Filmation people who worked on the Archie cartoons of the Sixties and Seventies did a giant robot show, it would probably be a lot like this--but maybe better!)

The story is pretty much like Fight! Iczer-1 in that an evil alien being is terrorizing Earth with awful monsters, and a good alien being from the same race is a mission to stop him. When a young man heroically fights a great white shark to save his kid sister and friends and gets badly hurt doing so, the good alien does the Ultraman Bargain with him, "synchronizing" and possessing his body so the alien can live among Earthlings and do his work.

He/they go to the shore and retrieve the Valkyrie fighter there just in time to intercept a raid by...an enormous rat. There is a scene in which the good being tries to talk the bad being into giving up his stupid--I mean, nefarious enterprises, but of course, it fails.

And then a giant spider and a Breetai-sized demon show up, and the Valkyrie (and the silly mecha of the silly sidekick character who makes Hayao Kakizaki/Ben Dixon look like Isaac Newton) fight them. The Earthlings trick the demon into killing the spider, and then, after an embarrassing scene of Head Lasers to demonic groin, it is revealed that the demon is actually a bio-mech piloted by the villain, who, through the use of a droid, has kidnapped the kid sister of the possessed hero. It eventually takes an over-the-top Lucasesque Jedi Force fight showdown to resolve the issue, which makes you wonder "if the aliens had these powers to begin with, why did they need giant robots?"

I've probably made it sound more interesting than it is. When I first learned about this program, I'd thought about redubbing it into English as a Robotech tribute/parody, but I'd have to edit it a lot to do that.

FP

( This MAY Look More Familiar )

Taiheiyo No Arashi ("Storm Over The Pacific"), known to American audiences of the era as I Bombed Pearl Harbor. (In fact, when that big-budget stinker Pearl Harbor came along some years ago, I'd have bet some enterprising individual would have taken this movie and redubbed it to DVD. Guess they didn't think of it!) Parts of it were incorporated in Tora! Tora! Tora! and Midway and other American productions.

Why I care: in some ways the American war movies of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies are a part of my own experience growing up. And how could any kid avoid them back then? Many of the kids of my generation were children of military veterans--if not from the War itself, from their younger siblings, nephews and nieces. The echoes of WW2 lingered through the American culture for a very long time. It involved a far greater portion of the nation than any event since in our history. After a period of silent healing in the Forties, the culture here had to tell the stories from that time, and it kept Hollywood busy all the way through the next two decades.

Now, Japan of course had it even worse than America. Leaving aside the physical effects, and the political ones, WW2 meant a different cultural effect on a different culture. If the American soldiers who fought WW2 were our Greatest Generation, the Japanese soldiers of the same War were their nation's Lost Generation. They were defeated and killed in huge numbers; they fought ambitious battles they knew they couldn't win; everything they had was taken from them. It was through their examination of their experiences through film that eventually led to the anime that attracted me in the Seventies and Eighties.

Of course, it helped that the profits from all those successful Kurosawa dramas and Godzilla stompfests could be rolled back into producing these epics. Yes, I know the planes are almost all models and mockups. The ships are either sets on dry land or models in a studio water tank. Doesn't detract from the level of artistry or technique or effectiveness. I can't help but admire it.

It's a shame that none of these are available on DVD in the West. Some of these are available streaming or as torrents over the web, but I want to see these on my big flatscreen and I don't have bandwidth for this kind of thing yet. More to come.

FP

Weird Japan Is Super-Weird--(with apologies to the theme song of Urusei Yatsura) but we love it anyway. Thanks to robotech_master, who posted this on his Facebook.

DISK 1
1) Opening Theme: Sea of the Stars
2) Modest Mussorgsky's Night On Bald Mountain, 1st Movement
3) Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition, 9th Movement
4) Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition, 1st Movement
5) Anton Bruckner's 1st Symphony, 1st Movement
6) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 41st Symphony Jupiter, 2nd Movement
7) Ludwig Van Beethoven's 5th Symphony, 4th Movement
8) Beethoven's 4th Symphony, 2nd Movement

DISK 2
1) Franz Schubert's 4th Symphony Tragic, 1st Movement
2) Piotr Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony Pathetique, 1st Movement
3) Dmitry Shostakovich's 8th Symphony, 3rd Movement
4) Shostakovich's 5th Symphony, 4th Movement
5) Mozart's 19th Symphony, 2nd Movement

DISK 3
1) Shostakovich's 8th Symphony, 3rd Movement
2) Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, 2nd Movement
3) Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, 4th Movement
4) Antonin Dvorak's 5th Symphony, 2nd Movement
5) Johannes Brahms' 3rd Symphony, 4th Movement
6) Brahms' 3rd Symphony, 3rd Movement
7) Closing Theme: Song of Well Wishes (歓送の歌)

The liner notes specify which music was in which episode (scene-by-scene!), but I suppose that some of the content was collected in the other sets. Other composers mentioned in the selections for this series include Bach, Mahler, Handel, Grieg, Chopin, Haydn, Wagner, Rachmaninoff, Mendelsohn, Berlioz, Stravinsky, and Schumann.

Foreign competition, outsourcing, low morale...is this the end of an era?

THIS POST from more than a year ago spawned an additional thought this weekend: because "grown" is no longer a necessarily desirable state to be in if you're younger than a Baby Boomer, then not only is "half-baked" free from its previous stigma, it's a state approaching norm-hood.

I'm not sure I know ANYBODY my own age who's "together". Or maybe they're "stealth together", showing a few "half-baked" traits to keep up the image but unwilling to own up to being "adult".

As for me, the haircut and the "real job" will still have to wait a while.

FP