Sadly not with a robot backup band, and I am sorry to report there are no North American dates as yet, but Babymetal is setting up its first World Tour. The announced stops include Paris, Cologne, London, and Chiba City, and they are currently negotiating more concerts, so we could still get to see them here. Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on this one, who got the word from J-Pop Idols, who heard about it from Natalie.
Here is an interesting Battle of the Robot Bands video put together by the Cyborg News Channel on You Tube. The bands they chose for the report were Germany’s Compressorhead, mentioned earlier on this blog, and Japan’s Z Machine, a University of Tokyo project sponsored by Zima.
KMel Robotics has an airborne video recording service as one of the uses for its quadrotor drones, and apparently to showcase that function they programed some of their drones to play the music being recorded. They also had to create some special instruments the drones could play, mostly by modifying existing devices. In this video they play three tunes, Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001 theme), Carroll of the Bells, and the national anthem. They have to have recorded the sound the drone motors and fans make and be electronically subtracting it from the audio track in order to make the music clear, which makes me wonder if they chose the instruments because they were not on the same frequencies as those noises. Thanks to I Programmer for the heads up on this one.
Robots haven’t been the stuff of science fiction as much as part of everyday life for years now, although Almost Human is a favorite show of mine, and still enough in the future to be sci-fi. How mainstream are robots getting? Recently President Obama exchanged bows with a Japanese Robot named ASIMO (just one letter short of Asimov, the sci-fi writer who invented the 3 Laws of Robotics), I think being acknowledged by a head of state counts as mainstream. Pretty much in that same number of days ago, sci-fi author John Scalzi tweeted about how he would like to see Babymetal, a three girl Idol group who sing sweet harmonies with a heavy metal band, tour with Compressorhead as their band. And yes, surprise, Compressorhead is a bunch of robots! I admit, I would pay money to see that show. Who is your favorite robot band?
This week sees the animated Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return on the big screen, with quite an impressive collection of actors doing the voice work. The book it is based on was not written by L. Frank Baum, but rather his great-grandson, Roger S. Baum, who also writes books about Oz. Roger’s grandfather, Frank Joslyn Baum, didn’t write any books, but he did broker the deal with Samuel Goldwyn in 1934 that gave MGM the film rights to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Frank J. had the contacts to make that deal because he was in the business, having adopted two other Oz books into screenplays that became an animation in 1933 and a live action feature film in 1925.
There is not much in Movies this week, other than another slew of re-released Godzilla films packaged up two movies to a box to take advantage of the forthcoming new movie version. There is also the western animated Son of Batman, an adaptation of the 2006 Batman and Son storyline which looks pretty good. Western TV series seem to be notable for their absence this time around.
In Anime, Persona 4: Complete Collection is a surreal tale of murder, mystery, odd weather patterns, a self-willed TV show, and clues from an alternate reality. Fusé: Memoirs of a Huntress is a historical fantasy about the shogun’s vendetta against a group of human/dog hybrids known as the Fuse. The huntress who joins in the search ends up befriending one of them, and begins to question everything about the persecution of the group. Finally, Aria the Origination also includes an OVA, continuing the stories of gondoliers on Mars.