since this DVD came out in May of 2002 I won't be talking too much about the actual movie, aside to say it's easily one of the best that Universal made in the 50s. the print looks great and the sound is good. buy it here.
mostly I want to talk about the extras, starting with movie historian Tom Weaver's excellent commentary. I rarely listen to commentary tracks, since most of them are not that informative (maybe I've listened to the wrong ones, hello GIANT BEHEMOTH) but Tom does an exemplary job at talking about every part of the movie, from Ray Bradbury's two treatments for the scripts to the actors, directors, effects and locations used for filming. he also had a good sense of humor about some things but never treated any of the subject matter as a joke.
the other great extra is (I believe) a TCM produced documentary called "The Universe According to Universal" and it talks about many of the classic 50s sci-fi movies and aliens. not too long and not too short.
of course, the DVD itself has one glaring problem- that cover! while it's a cool looking alien, nothing like that appears in the movie at all. ever. did the moron who designed THE VALLEY OF GWANGI make this cover as well?
and for the record, I am glad they showed the xenomorphs in all their one eyed glory.
9. Hullabaloo Land- Princess Lollipop escapes from "the happiest place on Earth" and ends up at Astro's place. Baron Hoodwink shows up and takes her back. Astro and Elefun visit Hullabaloo Land and Astro ends up freeing all the robots.
Firesnout the robot dragon was cool. Astro really doesn't do too much, the imp-robot is the real star of this episode. as always, there are some fun sight gags, and lots of references to various folk tales from all over the world (Snow White, Peter Pan, etc).
10. The Spirit Machine: Rudolph Hazard kidnaps Dr. Elefun to help make his "Spirit Machine" which will give him eternal life. naturally Astro flies after him to the rescue. he also topples Hazard's dictatorship while he is at it.
Tom Speed is the driver of the Silver Comet. his sister is Twin Tails (huge pony tails). badguys want to destroy the Comet so he can't win the World Wide Race. they call Dr. Elefun to help out. Astro allows them to put his brain into the Comet.
"Yodelbug" lots of nifty sight gags here, and the English writers came up with some clever names for the cars.
I should just write down the names of the villains, like Tex Tamale. he drives the "Black Vulcan".
of course there's a secret about the car, but if you are paying attention you can figure it out pretty easily. the animation is improving already. these last two episodes have had the most damage that I have seen so far. it's almost like watching it on tv with some splices here and there.
Dr. Isaac Nuttin invents Zero, an invisible robot. Fearless Freddie Fink bankrolled him, and is now using Zero to commit crimes. Zero doesn't know right from wrong, and Astro Boy has to intervene.
Lots of visual gags here, mostly to do with the invisible robot. Freddie is a no good crook, who apparently bought off the judge. I would be surprised if many kids got all that was going on in this episode, including the rather downbeat ending.
no spoilers, but it involves Zero and a time bomb set to go off right at 10 PM.
there are a few name gags, with Dr. Nuttin and Sing Sung Prison as well.
been watching this cool show, am up to episode #15 or so. it's not really a "Kamen Rider" show, it's like they used the name at the last moment for commercial value (imagine that).
it's about a battle of Oni (the good guys) vs the Makamo (the bad guys). both are demons of a kind, but the Makamo tend to make meals out of humans.
the gimmick here is that the Makamo can only be defeated by the use of "pure sound" so our heroes use drums, horns and guitars to defeat both the human sized monsters and the giant ones that show up.
I really enjoy the musical aspect of the show. it's novel and very cool. the human aspect is also interesting, to a degree. it'll be fun seeing how it evolves. there's lots of good action in this show, without relying on effects too much. there's also some controversy about the series, as shown on Wiki here.
Hibiki returned in Kamen Rider Decade, mostly recast, but not bad.
called "The Preying Mantis". There's been tons of talk about this new GH movie (starring *ugh* Seth Rogen, though the pics don't look bad, actually) and it made me want to watch some of the tv series.
this happens to be one of the better known episodes, since GH and Kato take on a tong in a protection racket scheme. so there's a Chinese Connection (sorry, couldn't resist) here as well, which had to be something pretty rare on US tv back in the mid 60s, don'tcha think?
anyway, the new evil leader of the Tong is none other than Mako, who would later become a sidekick for Conan. he actually gets the drop on Kato and dumps our hero into a trashcan. now that's going all out for the story!
his style is the Mantis Fist, which is an actual kung fu style. I wonder if Bruce coached him, as he gets the hand position to looded like it should. there are a few more martial arts battles in this episode, including some with the traditional weapons. which is ironic, since Bruce's style (at the time), wing chun, only has the staff as it's main weapon.
here's almost the end result of the last battle, though you know our hero is the victor. it's a pretty brief skirmish, though I once saw a stripped version of the episode which left out the entire battle leading up to this. sometimes editors baffle me. still, it's a fun episode to watch, as are all of them, since they only had 26 in the series.
here's hoping that what almost promises to be a fiasco of a new movie coming out that someone gets the rights to this cleared up and out on legit DVD.
this is an interesting early 70s Shaw Brothers movie. I had never heard of it until seeing it here. the kung fu used here is actually tai chi, which predates the more traditional kung fu styles.
however, not much of the fighting actually looks like tai chi. Tai chi can be a devastating martial art, but here, without the expert guidance of master choreographer Lau Kar Leung, all of our participants and just throwing punches, blocks and kicks without any regard to the style.
good thing in this movie one really doesn't need much more than that, as it's a story of an evil boss exploiting his workers and then our heroes go out for revenge when they've had all they can take and can't takes no more!
I did not recognize any of the actors, other than the lovely Shih Szu. but they all do a fine enough job here, including the hero Ku Ting, played by Wo-fu Chen. while they may not have had any particular training, they all throw themselves into the fight scenes with gusto, and I am sure more than one of them had injuries. some of the actors did have better style than the others, but at this time it was just not that important to look good, just be tough. for my money, no one looks very good doing the "basher" style of kung fu except Jimmy Wang Yu.
too bad it doesn't have an English dubbed track, but the picture looks great. definitely worth a look to see an internal martial arts style at work. sort of.
finally finished the entire series of Juken Sentai Gekiranger, and it was lots of fun. the villains were defeated, Mele and Rio turned out not so bad after all, which probably annoys the "villains are always cooler than the heroes" fans and there were lots of fights that were not always aided by CGI or flashy effects.
and I know it'll never happen, but I so wish the toys, er, "mecha" didn't have to be so prominent in almost every freakin' episode. and so frickin' many of them, I couldn't keep track of all the thousands of forms and names. one or two giant robots are cool, and if used sparingly would be a special thing instead being turned into the cliche.
this is also the first super sentai I have ever followed start to finish (thank the gods for fansubs) so I am sure there are many similarities between this and in the series from the last 21 years. wouldn't surprise me a bit. now let's have someone fansub GoRanger. JAQK is supposed to be done, but so far it has not gotten past the first episode.
In the middle of 1977 my life was about to change. Surprisingly, I knew it would a bit, but not like it did. I had passed sixth grade (no useless graduations back then!) and was a little apprehensive about entering junior high. There would be new friends met, old friends lost and many other discoveries that I had no idea were going to happen to me. Mostly, junior high seemed very overwhelming and a little scary.
However, that was almost 3 months away, so I wasn’t that worried about it yet. I was going to enjoy my summer, and that meant sleeping in on weekday mornings! That first Monday though, I heard the television on earlier than normal. I knew there wasn’t a monster movie on. I had no idea what my younger brother Eric would have been watching. Turns out it was some morning show, and they were interviewing actors from this hot new film called STAR WARS. Along with the interviews, they were showing clips from the movie (in glorious full screen picture and mono sound, no less).
I was a sci-fi film buff by then, and pretty much thought I was quite the expert on the subject by age 12. Needless to say, I was not prepared to see space battles like that, or light sabers, or droids or that awesome music. Now, to be honest, I had seen the first issue of Marvel’s Star Wars comic book, since it predated the movie by a few months. But I passed it up, as it didn’t have a superhero in it, so how could that interest me?
So after watching the early morning talk show for 3 more days, Eric and I marched upstairs to ask (in the least demanding way preteen boys can do) our long-suffering mother if we could see this movie. And she said “yes” being the wonderful mother that she was. This was probably early in June. Which, is about two weeks after the movie would have premiered. Back in 1977, not every movie was released in every town. Longmont didn’t get STAR WARS right away. I am not sure if Fox was striking new prints for more theaters (seems likely), but it was after the movie had been out a week or two that the TV show would have been aired.
On what I believe was a Friday evening my mother piled Eric and me into the car and we went down to the Parkway for the 7 PM showing at the Parkway theater, Longmont’s second and “deluxe” theater. There was not a line there, but the place was full up.
We sat in our seats and the lights went down. To this day, the fanfare for 20th Century Fox makes me wait for the opening theme of Star Wars. And then…
Two hours later the entire theater emptied out, and I discovered I had to re-break myself of the habit of chewing my nails, and that being a space opera hero was not a bad thing at all. My mother was also impressed with the movie as well, though she would not see the rest of the films. All we could do was talk about the light sabers and the blasters and the spaceship battles. We were aware that we had nothing to fear from storm troopers, since they only thing they could hit was a Jawa Sandcrawler. They never were able to shoot the heroes! And of course, the speculation of what would be in the sequel, since there had to be one, Darth Vader got away and Luke needed to avenge Obi-Wan and his father’s death. No way would he let that go! I was sure that the second movie would be more of the same, though how Luke would learn to use the force was beyond me.
This movie pushed all other stuff out of my mind for a while. I was not talking about Godzilla, Spider-man or Star Trek. My brother and I had to talk about it incessantly, and then see it several more times that summer, in the company of other friends (Hi Charles!) and even our 8 year old cousin Ron-Bill, who took it far more to heart than either of us did. It was easy to see that summer, since it stayed at the Parkway for something like 8 or 9 months, if not longer. We had many light saber battles, and used our blasters in the name of justice to destroy any forces of the empire we might find.
And then school started, and at age 12 ½ life will start changing, even with laser battles and spaceships running around your brain. You start getting more clothes than toys for Christmas and birthdays, and I never had that many Star Wars toys (I grew up with Mego dolls, and didn’t care for the less than desirable poseability of the SW toys). The opposite sex also starts making life more interesting as well. So eventually, my interest in Star Wars and SW related accessories took a more normal course. But after seeing a young man destroy the mightiest weapon the Empire could build, suddenly junior high didn’t seem so daunting. It never was, either!
I recently got the two TPBs of DC comics' "The New Frontier". I had seen the movie, which is great, and recently watched it again while listening to the commentary (I rarely do that, since it's usually distracting or not very good).
the books are excellent. well written and drawn, with most everything in the "right" order of how things would have gone had the DCU decided to progress in "real" time.
Darwyn Cooke made use of much history from the DCU, including the blacklisting of the JSA by the "commie hunters" and their subsequent disbanding. though how did Jay Garrick get to be known as the original Flash? I loved all the little touches he included and tied together, much the same way Alan Moore has done with other characters in the past. and that's a high compliment as anyone who knows me will realize.
my main gripe with most comics these days is that- aside from them having to be "realistic" and "dark and gritty" the characters never really do mature or age. thus the writers and artists have to use the same plots over and over again.
anyway, the one thing that didn't quite gel with me, in the book or the movie, was the villain, The Centre. it's so just there. the movie helped out making more of a menace, but it seemed almost beside the point. I know they had to get all the heroes together and it works, but it doesn't seem to be exactly what was needed.
