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Robot Boogie

The folks over at Robot Japan just held the 1st Robot Japan Dance Competition on Sunday, January 9, 2011 in Tokyo. This video has some clips from that contest, with several different entrants, and it is worth watching just for the silliness factor. There are a few worth noting for the skill and ingenuity that went into their construction and programing, mostly towards the end of the video.

And one of them, the Kabuki bot, is very reminiscent of the wonderful days when Steampunk Japan was created. From 1600 to 1900, from the Edo to the Meiji periods, Karakuri or Clockwork Dolls were designed and built, mechanical robots who’s movement and logic tree choices were based on mechanical programming rather than electronic. At the beginning it was imported technology, based on Swiss gearboxes (mostly watches and clocks with the occasional Mecha built into a cuckoo clock) brought over by Portuguese sailors. It didn’t take long for some truly smart artisans to grasp the basic principles and start designing their own, starting with a tea serving robot who would bring you your cup, wait while you drank, and take the empty back. To the best of my knowledge this was the very first practical implementation of household robotics in any form, and at the core of Japan’s current supremacy in the field; they have now been building them for 400 years, after all.

Thanks to Singularity Hub for the heads up on this one.

Something to Watch: DVD’s

There are a few movies being released on DVD this week, but only one of any real importance. The first is Sci-Fi High: The Movie Musical, which supposedly was in theaters last April, but none anywhere near me. Even IMDB doesn’t seem to know anything about this one, so it will be a pass for me. As will be Wolvesbayne, another redundant 1800s vampire versus werewolf film. The movie worth adding to the collection this time around is Howl, the beat generation anthem and poem and the story of Alan Ginsberg’s obscenity trial in the 1950s because of it. This legal battle had fear and repression driving the prosecution and freedom of speech upholding the defense, in what would be a verdict that would help change the direction of what was permissible in America closer to true freedom for all. This one isn’t sci-fi, but it is an important milepost on the path of literature and the development of a culture.

The TV fictional pick of the week is the Sarah Jane Adventures: The Complete Third Season. They have just finished up season 4 in the UK, and the first season was aired in the US on the Sci-Fi Channel, but not seasons 2 or 3. Nor do they appear to have been picked up by BBC America, at least not so far. So the DVD’s may be the only way we get to see them for a while; at least the UK has acknowledged and signed off on season 5 for 2011.

Into the Universe with Steven Hawking is another Science of Science Fiction type educational program which covers such topics as alien intelligences, wormhole transportation systems, time travel requirements, and the evolution of life in radically different physical environments than ours. Obviously, the narrator’s voice is not that of professor Hawking, but the program is quite entertaining as well as providing scientifically rigorous and accurate speculation about many aspects of the currently unknown. Particularly useful if you were considering writing any science fiction books or screenplays of your own. You can watch segments of the program online at that link.

There are three restored superhero movie serials being released this week, all from 1940. Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe was the third Flash Gordon serial to be made; The Green Hornet Strikes Again! preceded the 1960s TV show by two and a half decades but Keye Luke was no Bruce Lee, and The Green Archer bears a striking resemblance to The Green Arrow. For those too young to remember, a movie serial was a series of 12 or so episodes, 15 to 25 minutes long, which would play before the feature presentation in a movie theater in the 1930s and 40s. Many of them were science fiction of one flavor or another, and they translated directly to television in the 1950’s, creating the template for the episodic TV series still used to this day. Their most famous feature was the cliffhanger ending, intended to draw audiences back the following week to find out how the hero escaped near-certain death this time, again utilized in TV.

In Anime, Koihime Muso – Complete Collection is a kind of Hidden Dragon versus bandits story line, not quite genre but not quite not, with combat grade heavily armed women protecting the innocent from outlaws and violence. The Tsubasa OVAs collection also becomes available this week, bringing us several more stories involving the protagonists crossing from world to world through the multiverse seeking to solve the mysteries affecting them.

Dirty Pair – Collection 2 completes the original Dirty Pair series with the final 12 episodes, but depending on which site you go to it might be coming out this Tuesday, February 1st, or February 8th. In any event, the original Girls with Guns destroying everything in sight series will be completed soon.

Early Gaming

On the first day of the new year I tend to think of the first days of other things. Remember back in 1982, when state of the art gaming brought you that marvel of the modern world, Pong? That was actually a crude digital descendant of the more elegant Brookhaven Lab’s Tennis for Two, built all the way back in 1958 by nuclear physicist William Higinbotham. It used a Donner Analog computer to drive the game, which was basically a series of potentiometers married to a patch panel; the potentiometers were assembled in sets as electronic slide rules, the patch panels allowed you to physically configure each electronic slide rule for specific types of calculations and then assemble sequences of the configured assemblies to simulate various real world processes or respond to real time input. The game controllers were two boxes with a button and a potentiometer on each, the potentiometer controlling the angle of the virtual tennis racket, and the button indicating the swing moment.

When Brookhaven National Laboratory was celebrating their 50th anniversary in 1997, they had the good sense to want to make this piece of gaming history part of the party, but the original device had only existed for a year. So another engineer who had joined Brookhaven a few decades later had to resurrect the game based on old film footage and a series of notebooks. He could not get a Donner analog computer at first, so parts of his reconstruction were digital circuits imitating the actions of the original.

The scary part is this wasn’t even the first video game; that honor goes to 1947’s Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, which was the original analog computer version of arcade favorite Missile Command. I had thought Asteroids came before Missile Command, but that one didn’t get invented until 1962 at MIT under the name Spacewar, and was first built on a digital computer. I include part one of The History of Gaming from The Irate Gamer. He seems to think his topic begins with 1962’s Spacewar, but from that point forward he does manage to hit a few of the high points.

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Something to Do: Movies

This weekend hasn’t been in doubt since half way through 2009; TRON: The Legacy is the hands-down winner. Many of us have been waiting decades for the continuation of this story, an archetype tale of the computer age that changed movies forever. It wasn’t just the use of computer graphics (real and simulated), although that was a precursor of movie production processes to come. It was also the first time computer processes were personified, with each subprogram taking on the personalty its function set would require; the first time the kind of Artificial Intelligence we had known for years from books was portrayed on any screen.

There had been previous attempts to personify AIs on screen, such as 1967’s Colossus: The Forbin Project, which in my mind was the inspiration for the original Skynet from 1984’s Terminator movie, much as the original 1982 TRON was the inspiration for the animated masterpiece ReBoot in 2001. The most notable AI film after them was 1999’s The Matrix, which again completely changed the rules.

None of them led to War Games in 1983, because that box was a real computer and the logic of the plot line adhered to actual parsing rules any programmer of today understands. There was no touch of AI in that story, just the massive paranoia of the time combined with a lack of understanding on the majority of the audiences part of how computers worked. Just saying…

Interestingly enough, the other movie coming out this weekend is a spiritual descendant of TRON by way of William Gibson’s Neuromancer on several levels; the protagonist in Spark Riders invents a way for people to place their soul on the internet. When her idea is stolen by a power hungry psycho and a greedy spy, people begin to become trapped online. With a total budget much less than TRON spent on catering the location shoots, this film could still potentially be worth checking out; after all, they made Dark Star on 10% of Spark Riders budget, and Hollywood promptly threw a ton of money at Dan Obannon and John Carpenter (who then created the Alien and Halloween franchises respectively) because of it.

And one final note; for all of those who, like me, have been frustrated in their efforts to acquire ReBoot for their personal collections, an agreement was reached a few months age between Rainmaker Entertainment, Inc. (the direct descendant of Mainframe Entertainment) and Shout! Factory to release ReBoot in the US in some format or another, most probably a DVD Box Set version. ReBoot really is a direct descendant of Tron; what a treat if we could finally access the original of the former with the the next volume of the later within a year or less of each other! Here is the latest peek at the cover art for the complete series DVD.

Something to Watch: DVD’s

There are no real genre movies coming out this week, but Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire) brings part two of the trilogy that began with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo home. This Swedish series about an investigative reporter and a girl genius hacker is very much edge of your seat thriller to the core, so much so that even if you have to read subtitles it won’t slow down the movie. The third film, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest, is hitting the theaters on this Friday, October 29th.

For TV, they are finally releasing War of the Worlds: The Final Season, as well as the complete series in one box set, since it only ran two seasons. This was Adrian Paul’s last Sci-Fi TV roll before he became the Highlander. Someone is re-releasing the surviving episodes of Captain Video And His Video Rangers, America’s first Sci-Fi TV show. It ran live on the DuMont Network for half an hour every night from 1949 to 1954. If you don’t remember, Allen B. DuMont invented the cathode ray tube (also called the Picture Tube) in 1932, the Oscillograph (later called the Oscilloscope) in 1933, and Radar in 1934 (the US military asked him not to patent it so they could keep it secret). But he is best known as the inventor of the Television, and his company was selling the TV sets he invented beginning in 1938, with his TV Network going live in 1946.

Bridging the gap between TV and Anime, the American animation series Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Complete Season Two also hits the shelves this week. What I find much more exciting is the fact that Lucasfilm Animation is looking into doing a new animated series with direct creative involvement from Seth Green and Matthew Senreich.

In Anime, Birdy is back with all new adventures in Birdy the Mighty: Decode. Birdy is an interstellar agent with one minor flaw; she is more dangerous to innocent bystanders than the bad guys she pursues, and has been known to take out an entire planet while trying to stop one evildoer. This is part one of the new series, with part two coming out around Thanksgiving. You can watch the first episode online to give you an idea of what the series is like.

In the finest tradition of the Girls with Guns sub-genre, Canaan – Complete Collection takes place after biochemical attacks become common usage, and some assassins have synesthesia, giving them a distinct edge. If you liked Noir, you will love this series. Also in combat mode, Queen’s Blade: The Exiled Virgin – Complete Series takes place in a world where the Queen is chosen by being the last woman standing at the end of a series of battles. All contests are magically transmitted to crystal spheres for the entertainment of the populace. I don’t think either one of these places sounds like somewhere I would want to live, but the shows themselves are fun to watch.

Pandora Hearts part 1 seems to be a twisted variation on Alice in Wonderland meets the Count of Monte Cristo. For his birthday present they put him in a dungeon, with no explanations and no obvious way out. And Fullmetal Alchemist: The Complete Second Season (Viridian Collection) also becomes available, bringing still more world class timeline jumping steampunk into our hands at a more reasonable price.

Also out this week, Naruto Shippuden: Box Set 4 continues the ninja adventure (although there is some evidence it came out last week, since I already saw it on the shelves), while Hetalia: Season Two continues the rather silly story of WWII nations as schoolchildren. This program could actually be used as a teaching tool for that period of history, not because it is particularly accurate, but because it might catch a child’s attention and make them curious. Every teacher I know considers that the most difficult step in the education process, because once they are interested they seek out new knowledge on their own.