Pilot's Log

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Blue Gender. Too many central characters were killed off or went rogue, and it hit a tipping point to "why should I care what happens from here?"

The other day, I went to Gatlinburg to window shop and to just plain avoid the noise and chaos of the renovation being done to Rather Manor's bathroom. At a sports memorabilia shop, I found some keychains of FOX Sports' robot mascot Cleatus in various team colors. I may buy one eventually, but I feel little urgency.

I'd thought, on the way back to the house, to "stat" him out for wargames, as the keychain figure was of a good size for CAV, Heavy Gear and other games I could play. While looking to get started, I found something that I'd been looking for for weeks but kept missing--a concept for a marketing campaign. (I had NOT misfiled it...just that I had changed my mind about where it belonged, and the other parts of my imagination didn't get the memo!)

Back in the Nineties, I was trying to get hired by a company that imported model kits from around the world. At the time, it was the height of the real robots genre of anime, and this company sold South Korean knockoff/bootleg versions of the popular model kits of the day. My thought, as an alternative of the cliche practice of making mecha into Transformers automatons, was to make a deliberate alternative continuity in which there could be hints of the "real worlds" but not infringe on existing anime properties.

I never came up with a title for this idea. When the CAV game came along, I adapted some of my concepts for my own use, but haven't done much with it. Like many sci-fi wargame continuity creators, I am loathe to make factions "good" or "evil"--although some concepts are easy to make one way or another.

Anyway, I've come back to this because now I have the resources to take the overall concept into new and more interesting directions. Suddenly I have NINE political factions to make livery, insignia and themes for and a galaxy to redraw.

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

( Meet My Good Friends Glomaar And Orguss! )

The opening sequence to the anime series Orguss.

Since I had time to burn on Friday evening before the Hackerspaces meeting, I took a trip to Clinton to the comics shop there (Q.V. White Lightning Trail Stage Ⅱ) and found the Macross Guide Book. The owner-operator of the store didn't know what it was, so I was able to name my price and $10 was totally fair to him, in his opinion.

This doesn't complete my set. Don't you know there is no such thing as a "complete" set? ;)

FP