Product Placement

Product placement, the effort by advertisers to get their products included in a movie or TV show as a sort of embedded commercial, has been going on for decades. Sometimes it's subtle, as when James Bond just happened to drive an Aston Martin in "Goldfinger." Other times, it's blatant, as in the first season of Heroes when Claire threw a screaming fit of joy over getting to drive a Nissan Rogue, while Hiro insisted that the clerk at the car rental place give him a Nissan Versa and only a Nissan Versa.

The world of animation has been generally different. Sometimes the shows themselves are nothing more than 30-minute commercials for a given toy line, but you generally don't see American-style product placement in animated shows. But while waiting for the fall season to start, I've been watching more anime lately on Hulu (Baccano! is a sweet little show, BTW, although skipping around between three separate timelines can make it seriously hard to follow at times), but while watching a show titled Darker Than Black, I was struck by this.

You see the Pizza Hut box between them? I know that the logo is illegible in this shot--which is what movie and TV productions often do to give the flavor of a real-world product while not using the actual label--but it struck me that in an earlier shot on a train, the logo had been perfectly legible. And that wouldn't have been a big deal, except that in the next episode, it happened again.

And again, this time with an added "Look!".

And so on for several episodes in a row.

It's pretty obvious that the makers of the series made a deal with Pizza Hut for some product placement, which I just don't remember ever happening in an anime series before. Is this a first or can someone help me out?

Corinne Bohrer wants to know.

Movie Monday - The Original Animated Superman, 1941-1943

So it may be incredibly ambitious, but I couldn't resist any longer. Movie Monday is back, and in a big way, starting a mammoth series covering the Superman theatrical films.

To start, I'm going to break my former rule and cover an animated series first (which still sort of counts, because though these were not live-action features, they were theatrical releases and not television cartoons). Superman first appeared on screen in a series of 17 animated shorts produced by Paramount from 1941 to 1943. The first of the Superman cartoons appeared the same year as the Republic serial Adventures of Captain Marvel, a one-two punch that marks the first screen appearances of comic-book superheroes anywhere.

The cartoons are often referred to as the "Fleischer Superman cartoons," because the series was launched by the Fleischer studios with Max Fleischer credited as the producer (see above) and Dave Fleischer credited as director (as he was on every Fleischer cartoon). However, about halfway through the series, it stopped being produced by Fleischer Studios and became a Famous Studios production. Which is to say that in 1942, the Fleischers were ousted by Paramount, who kept the same animation staff on under the leadership of former animator Seymour Kneitel and story man Izzy Sparber.

I have mentioned before, in discussing the Adventures of Superman radio series, just how much the later comic-book portrayal of Superman owed to the radio series, from the way it developed stories, to the supporting cast of Perry White and Jimmy Olson (and even Batman), to specific plot elements like Kryptonite. It should come as no surprise, then, that the screen portrayals of Superman also owe a great deal to the radio series.

The cartoons open with essentially the radio show opening-- "Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!", followed by a few variations on the "Faster than a speeding bullet" theme. They also use the same voices for the leads--Bud Collyer as Superman/Clark Kent and Joan Alexander as Lois Lane. However, Jimmy Olson never appears, and Perry White is never referred to by name until the next to last episode. And it should be noted the influence went both ways. The rousing orchestral theme that opens the cartoons was later used as the theme song for the radio show as well, although it was played by a simple organ then.

The thing that really stands out about the Paramount Superman cartoons is their quality. Paramount gave the Fleischers a huge budget for each episode and it shows. And though the stories are simplistic by necessity (since each episode ran from 7 to 10 minutes in length), several used innovative layouts and dramatic effects to create an experience unlike any other animated film to that point. Disney's animators were better artists, but neither Disney nor any other animation studio in America undertook a straightforward adventure like the Superman cartoons until the 60's. And even then, they were cheaply animated children's shows like Space Ghost, with nothing approaching the lush, sophisticated visuals of the best Superman episodes.

The series began in 1941 with "The Mad Scientist," which opens with a brief origin story for Superman. One of the biggest differences between the Batman films and the Superman films is that each new iteration of Superman had to begin with an origin story to explain Superman's great powers, while the Batman films rarely did. The murder of Batman's parents was never shown until Tim Burton's Batman in 1988, and Bruce Wayne was never depicted donning the cowl for the first time until Batman Begins. Batman's origin has always been taken for granted, while Superman's never was.


The origin story in the first cartoon is only the barest gloss, however. Krypton is shown exploding, with the rocket containing the infant Superman launching from it, but Jor-El and Lara are never shown. John and Martha Kent also never appear. Instead, Clark Kent is said to have grown up in an orphanage before moving to Metropolis to work for the Daily Planet.

As the story proper opens, the editor (who is only referred to as "Chief" until the 16th episode) shows Lois and Clark a note from a mad scientist claiming he will destroy the city with his "Electrothanasia Ray" to take revenge on all those who laughed at him. But seriously, if somebody told you he was inventing an "Electrothanasia Ray," wouldn't you laugh too? It's a funny name.

Lois says she's going to follow up a lead and takes off in a plane to land outside a sinister-looking building on a hill overlooking the city. Which just happens to be the villain's headquarters. He ties Lois up and forces her to watch as he turns his ray on Metropolis.

Bud Collyer gets to utter his famous "This looks like a job for Superman" line, and then Superman appears.


Since this was still early in the Man of Steel's career, the costume is an early variation on Joe Shuster's design at the time. Note the red S on a field of black. The other character designs evoked Shuster's style as well, although with the lush background paintings and the shadows modeled onto many of the characters, the cartoons were better drawn than Shuster's comic ever was.



Superman intervenes by punching the ray back to its source...


then tying the barrel of the ray cannon in a knot, causing the pressure to back up and explode. It's an odd sequence of events, and you can say that it simply shows how unsophisticated audiences were in the early 40's. The funny thing is, the big computer-animated finale in the never-released Fantastic Four movie made by Roger Corman's studio in the 90's is clearly influenced by this sequence, only the Superman version is more exciting (jump ahead to about 5:10 in the clip and compare it to around 8:15 in Superman cartoon linked above to see what I'm talking about).

Subsequent episodes featured Superman fighting giant robots ("The Mechanical Monsters," which inspired Hayao Miyazaki's flying robots in Castle in the Sky and Kerry Conran's giant mechanical monsters in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) and gangsters in armored vehicles ("The Bulleteers" and "Billion Dollar Limited"). He battled a natural disaster in "Volcano" and man-made disasters in "The Electronic Earthquake" (a virtual remake of "The Mad Scientist," only featuring an American Indian in the villain role, trying to reclaim the island of Manhattan for his people) and "The Magnetic Telescope," which features some amazing images of falling meteors devastating the city...


which Superman can only repel by allowing electricity to run through his body to power a giant electromagnet. This episode may have been the most visually impressive of the entire series.


In the fourth film in the series, he fought a cartoony Godzilla-sized Tyrannosaur, illustrating the series' difficulty reconciling the adventurous nature of the episodes with the conventional idea of animation as a kids' medium.


But by the ninth film, "Terror on the Midway," featuring Superman battling a giant circus gorilla run amok, there was no attempt to play the monster for laughs.


In mid-1942, the series changed direction. For one thing, the films were now credited to Famous Studios, with different directors receiving credit for different episodes. And for another, Superman began taking part in the war. In "Japoteurs," he battled a caricatured buck-toothed Japanese villain trying to steal a giant bomber.


In "Destruction Inc." he battled German saboteurs plotting to destroy a munitions factory. In "Eleventh Hour," he took the war to Japan to perform some sabotage of his own, destroying weapons factories and ships being built in drydock. This episode features very dramatic lighting effects and layouts, and Superman attacks through stealth, often seen only in silhouette.


This episode was obviously one of the big influences on Frank Miller's depiction of Superman in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, as well as Bruce Timm's original dark take on Gotham City in his first Batman animated series.

In "Jungle Drums," Superman battled a Nazi posing as a deity to some caricatured African natives. The episode is notable because it is actually Lois who comes through at the climactic moment, sending a radio message to American military commanders to alert them of the location of a Nazi submarine fleet. American bombers destroy the fleet, leading to a very sad Hitler listening to the radio play "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition."


These episodes were alternated with Superman battling more conventional menaces like a jewel thief masquerading as Superman himself ("Showdown"), giant sword-wielding mummies ("The Mummy Strikes") and a tribe of bird-people living in a secret subterranean cavern ("The Underground World"). These episodes were okay, with some dramatic moments--many times in the series, the filmmakers would play things almost like a live-action film, with no music on the soundtrack and more intricate editing to build tension--but they weren't as visually lush as the earlier episodes from the Fleischer days. Also, the soundtracks begin to show signs of the later Famous touch: canned music cues and lackluster voices that sound as though they were recorded in a closet.

The final episode of the series, "Secret Agent," came out in 1943, and though it ultimately doesn't reach the heights of the earlier series, it has an amazing opening sequence--a tense car chase in which Clark Kent takes his own action hero turn, riding on the back bumper of his own (stolen) car, while struggling with a pistol-wielding Nazi spy.


So on the one hand, it's good that Superman ended where it did, because Famous Studios quickly degenerated into mediocre and repetitious product (see Friendly Ghost, Casper the). But on the other hand, sequences like the car chase in "Secret Agent" showed that animation had lots of avenues left to explore, and it's sad that American audiences had to wait for the wave of anime from Japan before they could really experience the fuller range of stories animation could tell.

For Superman's fans, they had to make do with the comics and the radio series for five years, until Superman returned, this time in a live-action serial from the same people who made the 1949 serial, "Batman and Robin."

Next week...

Oh, and as a final side note, I also have to give props to whoever designed the logo for the Daily Planet. I realy like the way the final stylized loop from the 'y' gives the impression of a globe, while the 'P' in Planet breaks up the outline in just the right way. The logo would stay fairly consistent for most of the series, although sometimes the 'P' would be entirely within the loop, which didn't look as good.

Movie Monday - Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, 1993

Yeah, I know. More Batman.

Actually, while I was in the thick of the Batman series a few weeks ago, Sargon the Terrible mentioned this one other Batman theatrical feature I had skipped. I blew it off at the time because number one, I only had this movie on VHS, and number two, it's part of the vast DC/Warner animated universe that I couldn't do any justice to in a single post, and number three, well, I was already up to my neck in Batman and didn't want to get any deeper in the weeds.

But Sargon had the DVD, and I've had a few weeks away from Batman movies (though not from Batman, if you've been reading Out of the Vault on Saturdays) , so here goes--"Batman:Mask of the Phantasm."

The movie was an outgrowth of the Batman animated series produced by Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski. The series was immediately embraced by fans because of its darker, more mature feel, truer to the character than either the sunny Hanna-Barbera Super Friends-style Batman cartoons of earlier generations or Burton's dramatic, but odd interpretations. The animated Batman had all of moodiness of Burton's films without the weirdness. Timm and Radomski's Batman was a modern-day noir hero, Sam Spade with a cape.

The movie opens with a typical shot of Gotham City. One of the innovations used to enhance the moody feel of the series was to airbrush the backgrounds on black paper, giving everything a dark, gritty feel.

Some crooks are meeting to discuss the distribution of counterfeit bills, when Batman swoops in to break up the meeting.

You can see that though the animated series took a lot of inspiration from Burton's Batman, they still stuck with the classic comic book version of the tights, rather than the movie's body armor approach to the costume. There's a fight and gangster Chuckie Sol flees. But in the parking garage, Sol runs into this mysterious apparition.

And here you see the real secret to the success of Timm and Radomski. They were thieves. They stole shamelessly, from everywhere. For instance, compare the Phantasm above with the Reaper, from the comic book storyline Batman: Year Two, below.

Okay, you say, so they took inspiration for this storyline from the comic of the main character. That's not exactly stealing. Dude, we haven't even gotten started yet.

So the Phantasm kills Chuckie Sol (though in true kid-movie style, the "murder" of Sol turns out to be more like "avoids being killed by Sol, whose murder attempt backfires and kills himself instead"), and witnesses think Batman did it.

But before Batman can track down the mysterious phantom killer, old flame Andrea Beaumont shows up in town.

Andrea was a girl that Bruce fell for back in his pre-Batman days, leading to a sequence that helped answer a question that's been nagging at me for a while. When I was writing up Batman: Year One, I mentioned how the scene in "Batman Begins," where Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne wears a ski mask in his first outing, was inspired by the comic. But the pictures didn't really back up my assertion, and I couldn't figure out what had brought me to make that linkage.

That's because I had forgotten that "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" filled in the missing links. In the movie, Bruce Wayne's first battle with criminals starts with him in a stocking cap, just like Year One...



But then he pulls it down to form a ski mask as in "Batman Begins."



Though he eventually wins the altercation (after an action sequence that steals from such sources as "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark"), the crooks aren't very impressed. "They weren't afraid of me," Bruce growls later. "I've gotta' strike fear into them from the start."

Which will eventually lead to the creation of the Batman. But first, Bruce falls in love with Andrea, taking her to the Gotham World's Fair (which looks an awful lot like the 1939 World's Fair in New York City) before getting into an altercation with some street thugs on motorcycles, which leads to this stunt...


stolen quite shamelessly from a certain other influential animated film...


In the modern day, the mysterious Phantasm continues to kill off criminals, and we learn through flashbacks that the gangsters were all affiliated with Andrea's father.


Leading the film to take a rather sharp turn halfway through, as we learn that the sharp-nosed young thug in the upper right of the photo above grew up to become this guy...


Possibly the best all-around interpretation of the Joker on screen, ever (not speaking necessarily of this particular film, just the animated series version of the Joker in general). Between the sharp writing and Hamill's voice work, we're given a character who manages to walk the line between loony and genuinely frightening, making for a memorably entertaining murderer. Ledger's Joker was a work of art, but in some ways, you could argue that he was almost a brand new character in a familiar costume, while the cartoon Joker manages to capture the best versions of the comics character and bring them to life.

As the Joker is killing off the last of the gangsters and seeking to lure the Phantasm into a trap, the police continue to hunt down the Batman, in a scene that seems suspiciously reminiscent of a certain other confrontation in a certain Miller comic.



Oh yeah, and you can't have a comic book adaptation nowadays without the obligatory shout-out to the comics creators...

Anyway, it all leads to a final confrontation between Batman, the Phantasm, and the Joker that is downright operatic in its combination of over-the-top emotion and fiery destruction. Oh, and in a lot of ways, it steals shamelessly from "Batman Returns," (released the year before this film came out) what with the exploding park and the woman Bruce loves who seemingly dies while exacting vengeance, leaving Batman broken-hearted while barely escaping with his life.

And yeah, I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek about the thievery bit. All creative people steal, or take inspiration from, the things they like. I haven't even mentioned the scene stolen straight from the Bible. What made the animated Batman so successful was that it wasn't just a regurgitation of stale tropes from here and everywhere. The makers of the series stole a lot, from everywhere, but they gave everything their own spin and made their work into its own coherent whole. It can be argued that "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" was the best big-screen adaptation of the character ever, at least before "Batman Begins" (and some who bear no love for Nolan's film might even end the sentence before the qualifier).

I don't know if I'd go that far. While the film is pretty well-written, with a sophisticated noirish mystery plot that spans years, the animation ranges from passable to crude. The budget was limited (it was originally supposed to be a simple direct-to-video release, actually), with bits of the animation being farmed out to different studios, and the schedule appears to have been pretty tight. The animation is nowhere near as smooth and dynamic as, say, your usual Disney feature or the best Japanese releases. I'd love to see the guys with the dramatic chops of folks like Timm and Dini get hooked up with a really big budget and a studio with Disney's animation expertise.

Then again, I sort of did once. It was called "The Incredibles." But that's a completely different subject.

J-Men Forever

In the mid- to late 80's on Friday and Saturday nights, USA Network used to have a show called Night Flight, a cornucopia of music videos, animated films, stand-up comedy and the occasional feature. It is remembered fondly by the people who used to watch it.

The coolest thing I ever saw on Night Flight was this clip from an old animated film in black-and-white, featuring the Devil conducting a bunch of dancing demons and street garbage that transformed into living creatures. It was amazing, both for its bizarre imagery and for the ambitious effects it attempted, like moving camera and motion blur, decades before ILM made such a big deal out of their Go-Motion process in "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Dragonslayer."

I finally tracked it down a few years ago on the Internet. The clip was from "The Mascot," a 1934 Russian film animated by Ladislaw Starewicz. Here's the bit I saw (though it was edited a bit to be faster-paced, if I remember correctly):



But you see, the point is, I tried to order the DVD of this off of Amazon using a gift card I got for Christmas, but they were out of stock, so I settled for the second best thing I ever saw on Night Flight, but hadn't seen since.

"J-Men Forever."

Basically, a couple of guys from a comedy group called Firesign Theater edited together a bunch of clips from Republic Serials like "King of the Rocketmen" and "Captain Marvel," then dubbed in a bunch of funny dialogue on top of it, with help from DJ Machine Gun Kelly. The basic plot is that the King of the Moon, a mad villain known as Lightning Bug, tries to conquer Earth using sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, and only the heroic yet hapless J-Men can stop him. It's fast-paced and funny, with a pun in virtually every line. Someone's posted it on YouTube, but I can't embed it, so go here and watch a bit.

It hasn't aged tremendously well, just because drug humor isn't the comedy gold it seemed to be in the 70's and 80's. It seemed a lot funnier when I was 23. But I enjoyed seeing it again.

Roughnecks: Starship Troopers

So despite Veoh's best efforts to drive me away from their site, I finally managed to watch all the episodes of Roughnecks: Starship Troopers (except for a couple of clip shows). Actually, although all the materials I can find on the show call it either Roughnecks: Starship Troopers or Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, the title card on the actual show calls it Starship Troopers: The Series.

The series is spun off of the Paul Verhoeven movie. Not an extension of the movie, but instead a reinterpretation, incorporating more elements of the novel than the film did, like powered armor suits and Skinnies. We follow Johnny Rico and Dizzy Flores along with their squad, Razak's Roughnecks, through virtually the entire Bug War (until the show stopped being produced after 36 full episodes and four clip shows, leaving four episodes unfinished), from its origins on Pluto through Tophet, the homeworld of the Skinnies, to Klendathu, the bug homeworld, and finally to the final defense of Earth (with other campaigns in between).

Right up front, I have to say that I liked the book. I was in the Army when I first read it, so I could relate to a lot of what Heinlein was saying about leadership and sacrifice and service. On the other hand, I hated the movie. Verhoeven had no interest in making a film that honored the book or portrayed realistic people; he wanted to make a satire that portrayed soldiers as brutal morons, and succeeded in making them look pretty stupid. For all their advanced technology, the Mobile Infantry of the movie were so tactically inept that they could have been mopped up by an equal sized squad of real-life soldiers from WWII--even the Italians.

And when in the final scene, Doogie Howser of the S.S. shows up to give his monologue about exterminating the entire bug race, I guess we're supposed to realize the fascism within ourselves or something, but all I felt was Verhoeven flipping me off. Because of course, when the bugs invade, what we should have done was sit in the street with our arms linked together while singing "We Shall Overcome"and making sure that someone with a camera was filming everything so we could put it on Youtube and embarrass the bugs to death or something. Fucking moron. Right back at ya, Verhoeven, with both barrels.

Luckily, the producers of the series realized they couldn't sell that concept for a weekly series (and yes, I realize Verhoeven gets an exec producer credit on the show, but like Fran Rubel Kuzui's similar credit on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, I think that's more a contractual requirement than an indication he ever had anything to do with the show's production). So instead, we get something closer to the novel. The humans actually aren't the bad guys. We also get to see more realistic tactics in the series than the movie. The humans wear powersuits (not the supersuits of the novel, but still...). The Roughnecks also employ heavy weapons, demolitions, close air support, tactical maneuver. None of it is textbook, and there's a lot of Hollywood silliness, like characters constantly running across each others' field of fire, but it's way better than the movie in that respect.

The series has to tread an uneasy line, though, between being a kid-friendly show and being a war drama for older fans of the book and movie. So on the one hand, the series employs more sophisticated storytelling techniques than your normal kids' show. Each week's episodes feature a campaign on a different planet, showing the progress of the war in continuity. There is romance. Characters face hard moral choices, losses and betrayals. Bugs get blown to smithereens. Characters get wounded, and even die on occasion.

But on the other hand, casualties are still very light. The language is highly sanitized. The episodes sometimes play out as clunky morality tales where Rico or one of the others learns a Very Important Lesson.

The same sort of uneasy balance played out in the visuals of the show. The art design of the show built upon the excellent design work from the movie; the bugs and ship designs echo what was seen in the theater. But the show added to it with mechanized armor suits and support vehicles and space fighters. Some of the planetary environments are breathtaking. And since this was a CGI show, they were able to use the camera with a sophistication that is impossible (or almost) to achieve in a traditional 2-D animated show.

But on the other hand, the demands of a TV schedule meant that quality could be very variable. Four different production houses made episodes of the series. They used the same software rendering the same models, so the look of the show stayed the same. But their animators weren't all on the same level, and the tight schedule meant limited amounts of time to fix mistakes or tweak shots, so you see lots of flubs that drop you out of the moment--characters' hands not locking right on the objects they're supposedly grasping, or Dizzy's lips not meeting Barcalow's right when they kiss. It doesn't help that the almost photo-realistic characters are lurking right in the shadow of the Uncanny Valley.

And though the voice acting is generally pretty good, the opening theme music is oddly muted and the sound of the rifles is downright anemic. So the sound is a mixed bag as well.

But overall, the good points of the show overwhelm the bad points. It was an entertaining series. It's too bad the production of the show was such a cluster that it ended up never having the final climactic episodes produced. The show leads you right up to the big climax and then ends on a note reminiscent of "The Empire Strikes Back." Aaargh.

If you want to see the series for yourself, you can buy the DVDs, or if you're up to the challenge of a little search-fu, you can try to track it down on veoh.com. I was down to the last three episodes when their episode home page suddenly emptied. The episodes are still in their databases and watchable, but you have to do some playing around with different search options to find them. I'm guessing Veoh is going to delete them pretty soon, but for now, here's a link that I hope will work.

But now that I'm done with Starship Troopers, it's back to Hulu for me.

Aquarion

So when I was watching Angel on Hulu, I kept seeing this intriguing title among the A's. Aquarion was some kind of giant robot anime series, and I like watching giant robots blow stuff up, so I figured I'd give it a try once I was done with Angel.

Aquarion is about Apollo, a street kid who gets dragged into a battle between an agency called Deava and the Shadow Angels, a mysterious force which sends giant Harvest Beasts to hoover thousands of people up off the streets for some unknown purpose. Deava battles the Harvest Beasts and their monstrous Cherubim guards with an ancient giant robot known as Aquarion. Apollo is recruited because Deava suspects him to be the reincarnation of Apollonius, Aquarion's first pilot from 12,000 years ago, as recorded in the Book of Holy Genesis.

After the first couple of episodes, it was apparent that this was a rip-off of Neon Genesis Evangelion. A mysterious government agency using giant robots to battle an invasion by grotesque creatures from who-knows-where ("Angels" in NGE, "Cherubim" sent by Shadow Angels in Aquarion). The man in charge seems to have his own designs based on some esoteric knowledge. The main robot pilot is a teenage boy who has a bickering love-hate relationship with a female co-pilot. There's a creepy albino girl whose cryptic statements reveal she knows more than most about what's really going on, and a pretty blonde scientist in charge of technical stuff. Gratuitous biblical references and the Tree of Life from the Kabbalah.

And of course, there's a big-ass control room, where lots of technicians monitor the fights while not contributing in any apparent way.


But unlike NGE, which took pains to subvert as many anime cliches as it could, Aquarion plays everything more conventionally. The hero is your typical brash know-nothing, whose secret past and incredible natural talents cover for his ignorance (see Naruto, DBZ, Bleach, etc.). The antagonist are shown plotting their counter-moves, and the main antagonist has a personal grudge against Apollo (actually his grudge is against Apollo's former life). The team gradually comes together through adversity, culminating in a big battle which the good guys win.

But the thing that's really weird about Aquarion is the kitchen sink nature of the thing; it seems cobbled together out of random elements to try to appeal to every possible audience.

At heart, it seems like a typical robot series designed to sell toys to young boys. For instance, whenever the three fighter jets merge into Aquarion, we get a dramatic toy pose.


But at the same time, there are lots of philosophical discussions and angst, seemingly designed to attract older audiences who made shows like NGE a hit. Then again, it plays in many parts like a shojo series for girls. Lots of emphasis on romance, and as many variations on romantic coupling as they can come up with. There's Apollo and Silvia (the reincarnation of Apollonius's first love Celiane):


But Silvia actually spends most of the series denying her attraction to Apollo and involved in a rivalry with fellow female pilot Reika for the affections of Silvia's brother Sirius, on whom she has a major crush (that's right, Silvia spends most of the series in love with her brother). Reika, meanwhile, is pining for Glenn, another pilot who has been left comatose as a result of a battle in the pilot episode, and is also being pursued by Tsugumi, a nerdy female pilot. There are other relationships, too. Nobody ever hooks up, but out of 14 major characters, there are at least 8 romantic pairings floated out there, hetero, homo and incestuo. Oh yeah, and there's a vampire.

Which is not to mention this guy, big bad Shadow Angel Toma, who is still pining for his ancient lost love (I don't want to spoil it by revealing who). The series has not one, but two tall, thin, androgynous main characters designed to appeal to teenage girls.


As the series progresses, it continues to steal, I mean, homage elements of NGE. The government, not wanting to put all of their eggs in the Deava basket, use captured Shadow Angel technology to build an assembly line version of Aquarion (to be fair, NGE took the idea from Gundam, but still...). A young humanoid Angel confronts the pilots and is killed late in the series, setting up the final confrontation. The head of Deava is deposed by the government, but rebels. In one late episode, dead bodies sprout flowers that contain their prana energy (a device stolen from Betterman, itself a bad NGE imitator).

The most interesting/oddball element of the show is the overtly sexual references to "merging," the process in which the pilots of the three fighter jets join spiritually as their vehicles are joining physically to form Aquarion. In NGE, the EVA pilots were literally babies in the womb. In Aquarion, the pilots are all cumming their brains out. Money quote from Silvia's first merge:: "Oh, it feels so good!"


And it's not limited to just throwaway shots during each merge sequence. In the first episode, Silvia is jealous that Sirius's first time is with Reika, not her. In the episode, "The First Merge," we see female teenagers in the shower asking one of the girls about merging ("I've heard everyone's nervous the first time"), leading to a scene between Tsugumi and Reika where Tsugumi eagerly asks, "What was it like the first time you merged? Were you nervous? Did it feel good?...Silvia said it feels great no matter who you're with."

The sexual metaphor manages to get even more explicit in the episode "Mischief Without Malice" (which seems to have been entirely animated by a different studio--the bulk of the episode is a dream/illusion using different character models influenced by shows like FLCL, but even in the "normal" scenes, everybody's off-model), where Silvia can't help but slip a finger down there during her merge (hope she cleaned up the cockpit after--other pilots have to use those controls, you know).


And need I mention that this means that every episode features a threesome (since it takes three pilots to merge into Aquarion)?

So anyway, bottom line: opening episodes are intriguing but flawed, middle episodes (especially 14-18) absolutely awful, final arc disappointing.

I started to watch something called Glass Fleet after this, but it was pretty bad, too. Political drama approximating the French Revolution in Space or something, with a female main character that everybody keeps referring to as a man. Then I tried something called xXxHolic, which is sadly not about porn addiction; it was a goofy "comedy" about a guy who sees spirits or something. First ep didn't grab me at all.

Bolt and a New Die Hard

Saw "Bolt" yesterday. It's good. It's got your standard "you're special just because you're you" moral, but the gags are funny and the opening, which depicts Bolt's fictional TV show, is pretty damn awesome. I'd watch that show.

However, this is a pet peeve of mine. The central premise of the story is that Bolt doesn't know he's on a TV show, because they act out all the scenes and special effects in real time around him while keeping the cameras hidden. Which, as anyone who has actually worked on any type of film or TV show knows, is exactly not how you make any type of film except maybe Punk'd, but even then, they can't keep a straight face for more than a few minutes.

It doesn't bother me so much when movies get other things wrong. I don't expect civilians to get every aspect of military operations right, for instance. But making movies is their job, damn it. They should know better.

Oh well. There was also an awesome trailer that's got me really excited. It was "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," starring that guy from King of Queens. And it's basically "Die Hard" in a mall. Crooks take over a mall and hold the shoppers hostage, and it's up to mall cop Paul Blart to save the day. And yeah, it's not exactly cutting-edge to be making a parody of movie that's 20 years old, but it's one of my favorite movies, and the parody looks to be really funny.

The Brave and The Bold

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was a DC reader growing up. One of the books I enjoyed was The Brave and the Bold, a Batman team-up book. Both Marvel and DC had these, books that featured their most popular characters teamed up with a different guest star every issue. So besides the continuing adventures of the Fantastic Four, the Thing was constantly going off on adventures with other heroes in Marvel Two-In-One, while Marvel Team-Up featured mostly Spider-Man running into virtually every other character in the Marvel Universe. On the DC side, World's Finest teamed Batman and Superman in every issue with frequent guest-stars.

A team-up book like this demands a versatile artist and The Brave and the Bold had one of DC's best at the height of his talent: Jim Aparo. The book ended its run in 1983 with Batman forming a superhero team called The Outsiders, whose adventures began in their own book, appropriately titled Batman and the Outsiders.

Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up now is that this Friday, Cartoon Network will debut a new Batman series titled, guess what? The Brave and the Bold. The first episode features a team-up with the Blue Beetle (if you haven't listened to the Blue Beetle radio show I posted a few days ago, listen to it here--it's a different Blue Beetle, but entertainingly wacky). Subsequent episodes are due to feature characters like Plastic Man, Aquaman, Adam Strange, Guy Gardner, Booster Gold and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. If you haven't figured it out from the guest stars, the show will not be entirely serious in tone.

I'm looking forward to it.

Fantastic Planet

I don't remember what got me all nostalgic about this movie, but I found out the entire thing is on YouTube, in pieces. So I watched it again. It's the French version, without subtitles--maybe that's how they get around copyright laws--but the story is simple enough that I was still able to follow it pretty well, especially since I read a couple of on-line synopses first.

Anyway, "Fantastic Planet" was a French/Czech coproduction originally titled "La Planete Sauvage," directed by Rene Laloux. It had its first release in America in December 1973, so I would have been 11 when I first saw it. What an eye-opener this was for an eleven-year-old!

Based on a French sci-fi novel titled "Oms En Serie," it tells the story of Terr, a young human (or "Om") who grows up as the plaything of Tiva on the planet Ygam. The humans' planet has been taken over by these giant blue humanoid aliens called Draags, and what few humans survive have been brought back to their home planet as pets and playthings. However, just like tribbles, Oms reproduce at a rate that alarms the Draags and many have escaped into the wild, so the Draags are constantly trying to cull the human population. The giant blue Tiva takes Terr as a pet after his mother is killed by a group of Draag kids.

Years later, Terr escapes from Tiva's house with a Draag teaching machine and joins a group of wild Oms in a park. They use the machine to learn Draag language and science. Armed with that knowledge, they begin a rebellion against their alien masters.

This sounds larger in scope than it really is. There's very little plot on display here, very little in the way of cause and effect. So much of the film consists of action in the background, depicting Terr and fellow Oms walking past landscapes of incredible strangeness, like a landscape of twisting orgainc pipes that look like intestines, which kink and curl and spasm when it rains. The characters are dull and undistinguished; the planet is the star.

Watching it now, it is obviously a product of its times. It has that early 70's psychedelia to it, a proto-synthesizer soundtrack, a ponderous and self-important obscurity in the storytelling. And it's full of sex, or at least it looked that way to an eleven-year-old kids who was just beginning to notice that girls were different in good ways. All of the female Draags have prominent bare breasts, although the Draags are distinctly non-sexual. The savage Oms also run around in clothes that leave at least one breast bared. There is a scene in which Terr watches the Oms conduct a mating ritual, which echoes a later scene in which the humans witness a Draag mating ritual (the climax of the film). The film begins with Terr's bare-breasted mother and ends with the Oms disrupting a Draag orgy, and everything in between is filled with the soft moans of a woman's voice on the soundtrack.

"Fantastic Planet" opened my eyes to the fact that animation was not just about funny animals and superheroes. It showed me a world of new possibilities, and though "Fantastic Planet" doesn't realize those possibilities terribly well, it is memorably weird and sometimes disturbing.