If you fly into Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, pretty soon you will be greeted by a life size Gundam as you land; the footage here is from the Odaiba Gundam, also life size, which has been up and running all summer. The amazing videos are put together by DarwinFish, who has some great gear and a wonderful grasp of time lapse photography techniques. To see more of his work be sure to hit his You Tube portal, and thanks for the heads up on this one go to Crunchyroll.
Epic is a fun animated adventure from the team that does the Ice Ages franchise. I missed it in the theaters and am looking forward to finally seeing it. Scary Movie 5 is the latest from that series. By now you must know if you like those or not; I always consider them silly fun.
I didn’t find anything that caught my attention in TV this week, but there are a goodly collection of Anime coming out. Being a long time cyberpunk fan, I am excited that Ghost in the Shell: Arise will be out, but not on the shelves. It is only available as a Limited Edition Import from Japan, rather than licensing it to an American distributor to manufacture and release. Add to that the fact that this Blue-Ray is limited to only 2,400 copies in the US plus is the Japanese Collectors Edition, and you wind up with a very expensive 58 minute program. It is still tempting, but I am going to have to wait for a more cost effective release, probably in 6 months to a year.
Also out this week High School DxD doesn’t have anything to do with Dungeons and Dragons, but rather Demons and Devils, one of which is apparently fallen angels while the other is not. It is also from the studio that made Ikki Tousen, so expect some sex and violence. As an example, it starts with our male protagonist going on his first date, only to have said date turn into a monster and kill him. Mobile Suit Gundam UC comes in Part 1 and Part 2, each running about 2 hours, and I am having a hard time when I try to visualize the Unicorn Gundam. For me the words Unicorn and Gundam do not have a lot to do with each other. I am sure I will understand when I get to watch the video.
Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan continues that epic spiritual battle, now against the 88 Demons of Shikoku. In The Legend of the Legendary Heroes, available as a single boxed set for the first time, Ferris and Ryner face an entire countryside filled with their enemies, all armed with mystical weapons. Finally, in Tsuritama, the new kid in school is an alien. Who would have suspected that in an Anime?
And remember: When tanks are outlawed, only outlaws will have tanks! Yes, they are re-releasing Masamune Shirow’s New Dominion Tank Police, an absolute classic in the collateral damage mayhem category.
The vampires in Kiss of the Damned don’t sparkle, but one of them does have a very dramatic love story which may effect their entire community. It is actually an interesting and intelligent tale that is a bit of a homage to the 60s and 70s vampire films. Starbuck is not being promoted as science fiction or fantasy, but I am pretty sure any movie about a man who has 533 children fits that bill. This comedy also appears to have a lot of heart, and when they do the English remake it looks like they got Vince Vaughn for the part. The English version will be out in the fall, but you can watch the original this week.
This weeks TV option is just silly: Duck Dodgers: Deep Space Duck Season 2. Any show that includes Marvin the Martian as a regular character is all right in my book.
In Anime we have Phi-Brain: Season 2 Collection 1, AKA Puzzle of God: The Orpheus Order. Yes, our protagonist defeated the Puzzle Of God by the end of the first season, but now a new crew has shown up with a grudge to work out, and a whole new series of deadly puzzles faces Kaito and his friends. Fairy Tail: Collection Two continues the story of the 4 person wizard guild that tends to do more damage to innocent bystanders and the surrounding area than they do to their opponents, so running away very, very fast is your best option when they show up to save you.
One Piece is rolling out the first half of season 5 this week, bringing the series up to episodes 264 through 275. That might sound impressive, but that season is from 1999, and Japan is up to episode 604 as of last week.
There are two releases in a Mecha franchise this week, 2005’s OVA Super Robot Wars Original Generation, and 2006’s DVD TV series Super Robot Wars OG: Divine Wars. They were loose sequels of the 1999 anime MasÅ Kishin Cybuster, which was itself a loose interpretation of a huge series of games that can trace its lineage all the way back to 1991’s Super Robot Wars for the Nintendo Gameboy. They very rapidly expanded the game to run on pretty much every current platform available, and then kept releasing updates and new versions across an ever expanding set of platforms incorporating more and newer Mechas, battlegrounds, and scenarios. One of the really smart twists to the game was the fact that they had a huge range of character Mechas because they weren’t too fussy about where a bot came from and signed licensing agreements with a bunch of different franchises. This crossover universe arraignment meant that you could fight a battle with a Mazinger Z, a Getter Robo and a Mobile Suit Gundam on one side, and a Evangelion or Rah Xephon Mecha on the other, pretty exciting stuff. It also meant that the legal agreements ran into so many issues once you tried to cross national borders and keep them in compliance with all of a given companies other licensing agreements that only 3 of the games were ever released outside of Japan, and then only on a limited number of platforms. So this anime series is a rare glimpse into that whole shared universe of battling Giant Robots that those of us here in the west never really got to experience.
On a related note, the Robotech: 2-Movie Collection includes the titles The Shadow Chronicles and Love Live Alive, one of which they claim has never been released. I have also seen reviews saying they took some footage out of an exiting Robotech property and added 15 minutes of new footage to it; since I have not seen it yet, I have no clue which claim is real and so can’t speak to whether this one is worth adding. Finally, I should mention that the first 5 seasons of Case Closed are being released as [S.A.V.E], or Super Amazing Value Editions, which allow you to pick up entire seasons for around $20. In fact you should just check out the whole list, there are a bunch of series you can pick up that way.
Your picture will be taken tomorrow, so be sure to look up and smile and wave for the camera. The camera is on the Cassini Spacecraft, and it will be taking a picture of the Earth from the shadow of Saturn (because taking a picture of the Sun does bad things to unprotected cameras). This is a recreation of the original Pale Blue Dot event, when Voyager took a picture of Earth from beyond the orbit of Neptune. Take a peek at the last time Cassini took our picture in 2006 to get an idea of just how amazing an image this could be. The woman who headed the Voyager imaging team in 1990 and is on board the Cassini imaging team taking these photos, Carolyn Porco, wrote a great article about the event you should check out. About the only part of the project I am not in favor of is their Message to the Milky Way transmission on the anniversary of the event, using Earth’s strongest Radio Telescope as the transmitter. Why let the Berserker’s know we are here before we have to? Thanks to Richard Branson for the heads up on this one; while I got Carolyn’s tweet about it, Richards blog entry had lots of juicy details.
I am more than ready for Pacific Rim to hit the theaters! Finally the US gets its own Giant Mecha vs. Monsters kind of movie!
I have been waiting for Pacific Rim for quite a while, and finally It Is Gojira Season! We get to don our Giant Mecha suits and battle the monsters head on, at least in the virtual universe of the big screen. I fully expect to be completely entertained by this one, and will probably come home only to spend the rest of the day being fully immersed in more Giant Mecha excitement.