Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season this year, and gearing up for another exciting round for next year. I thought I would share one of my favorite Elfbot images a good friend made of me. And before you laugh, trust me when I say this is no where near as silly as the one she made of me for Easter.
Well, no actually; nothing genre comes out at all this week. So this could be an excellent time to catch up on anything still in theaters that you haven’t seen yet. Or maybe like me you might decide to see The Hobbit one more time. Whatever you decide, have a safe and sane holiday week.
Frankly, I am surprised anything new is being released on Christmas day, and not surprised there are only a couple of titles, all some form of animation. Mass Effect: Paragon Lost is a Machinima coming out on the 28th, but it has been out for viewing in Video On Demand for several weeks already. I suspect some regular Anime fans will enjoy this, but it is targeting the Gamers first. Hakuoki: Record Of The Jade Blood is coming out with season two of this story of the ninja/samurai wars of the Edo period. IDOLM@STER: Xenoglossia brings collection 2 with more Mecha action as the war heats up, as well as developing relationships between the giant robots and their pilots.
Or at least new to me; they have been running The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Glittering Storm over on BBC4 Extra this week, with Liz Sladen doing the reading. I am hoping they have a bunch more from her, so there are still more new adventures even though she is gone. If you missed any of the episodes you can still catch them on their Listen Again service each day, or you can hear the whole thing in one go tomorrow at the first link I gave. Or you could even listen to it live as it aired in London tomorrow. Now if only they offered that service with their TV programming. They have been promising it for years, but there is still no subscription package available for watching the full BBC TV programming outside of the UK in real time that I am aware of. If anyone knows if they now have that service in place, I will be delighted to be wrong about that.
Sure, and this week we have some fun Mystery J-Rock. I am completely clueless on who does the first track or what it is called, since I only saw squiggles on the page, but I like it a lot. The second one is by Plenty, kind of a J-Grunge band with some interesting music. The third is the Genki Rockets song Touch Me from their second album.
Pacific Rim is definitely Guillermo del Toro’s homage to both flavors of the Japanese fascination with the gods; expressed as giant monsters or giant piloted robots as they have been in film and anime for decades. He didn’t choose, he went for both, and I think this movie is going to be a lot of fun. At least, the first time I saw this trailer, I shouted It’s Gojira Season right out loud and jumped up and down, wishing that I could be riding the god-robots with them to save the Earth. We have to wait until July of 2013 to see this one, but otaku that I am I am looking forward to it.