Acapella Science has put together a great little song giving you the history of Exoplanets, from its beginnings back in 1990 to the present, culminating with the TRAPPIST-1 discovery. You have to appreciate him when he says I’m a harmony addict working on a master’s in theoretical physics; what ELSE was I going to make a YouTube channel about? This is his latest, but far from his only such production; he tries to crank one of these out each week. So I thought I would include a few more, with Entropic Time for the second tune, and the final one is CRISPR-Cas9 (Bring Me A Gene). I don’t usually include videos with a stinger at the end hyping the person’s channel, but this isn’t just music, it is science at the same time, and that is a combination worth supporting. The man creating these is Tim Blais, and I hope he keeps making these for a long time to come.
This time around we get Moana, a quality animation telling one of the stories of the transpacific culture that spans a range of islands from Tahiti to Hawaii. They have been some of the most successful explorers the world has ever known, and have an artistic and musical tradition unique on the planet. As near as I can remember, this film is the first sympathetic treatment of that culture to receive world wide distribution and major box office success. Also out, Bad Kids of Crestview Academy, what you wold get if they filmed The Breakfast Club in the Nightmare on Elm Street neighborhood, a comedy/horror. About the only thing we get in Anime is the S.A.V.E. edition of Wanna Be the Strongest in the World!, which has both the complete series plus the OVAs. I am not certain that that one is even genre, but being a series about an Idol who becomes a Pro Wrestling Diva I am going to call it Fantasy, if only so I don’t have to skip the Anime entry altogether.
There are some new songs from Fukuoka prefecture art-rock band PolkadotStingray (yes, it really is one word run together), the first one here is ELECTRIC PUBLIC posted last Sunday and rapidly approaching half a million view in just 6 days. That is the opening song of their 1st Mini Album Great Justice, which will be released on April 26th. The next track is the mermaid from their first E.P. release last year, Boneless E. P., and I almost put a pretty interesting Google Android commercial they did for an app that would let you search for photos of yourself. The song on that one is great, but I can’t see posting a commercial.
In western releases, Arrival looks like the most interesting genre offering, with Alien spaceships touching down around the globe. It has been nominated in at least a couple of categories for every major film award going, with a total of 8 Academy Awards nominations alone. As near as I can tell The Crash is genre only by virtue of the line “set in the near future” in its advertising because its hackers are not nerds, but I suppose I should mention it comes out this week as well. The non-genre film worth mentioning is London Town, about growing up in the 1970’s London Punk scene. Check that that is the topic when you see it on the shelves, or you might end up watching another movie with the same name about a washed up comic trying to make a comeback in Vaudeville.
Anime brings us Busou Shinki: Armored War Goddess, A story about a gamer and his four 6-inch-tall combat androids, and yes, it is a comedy. Comet Lucifer is also a comedy of surreal proportions with the fate of the world ultimately at stake. Persona 5 the Animation -The Day Breakers- is a single 24 minute episode running just under $40, so I will not be recommending it. Particularly because I don’t know what it is about, and haven’t found it streaming on any of the North American services, nor on Daisuki, a Japanese anime consortium who stream directly to the US. We do get One Piece: Collection 18 this time around, though.
I want to make special mention of The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, where real works of literature combine with a supernatural world to create the backdrop for a series of interesting mysteries, whodunit style. The series came out in 2011, but first streamed to North America last year, and it looks like this will be its first disc release for the US and Canada. Finally, in Nobunagun our protagonist’s school trip is interrupted by a monster attack! A clandestine government agency arrives to battles the army of monsters, using possessed weapons. The spirits possessing those weapons belong to famous historical military figures, mostly generals, warlords, and shoguns. This one is coming out now in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you should be able to pick it up for under $20 if you shop around.
Marvel’s Runaways is being made for TV, specifically Hulu, and will probably be ready to watch at the end of this year or the beginning of next. The story is simple (at least for a Marvel comic series); a group of teenagers who get together once a year at their parent’s annual party discover one year their parents are actually running a massive criminal organization. They all run away together, vowing to bring that organization down. I love that James Marsters gets to play Victor Stein, the mad scientist (or a scientist who gets really mad sometimes, at least). So they have now announced the cast members playing the Runnaways: Rhenzy Feliz, Lyrica Okano, Virginia Gardner, Ariela Barer, Gregg Sulkin and Allegra Acosta. And the latest announcement (at the initial link) gives us The Pride, the parental bad guys of the series: Brigid Brannagh, Ever Carradine, Brittany Ishibashi, James Marsters, Angel Parker, Kip Pardue, Ryan Sands, Annie Wersching, Kevin Weisman, and James Yaegashi. I can’t wait to see this one come to the small screen!
The wonderful voice of Yūko Suzuhana has been driving the Wagakki Band for years, a band blending traditional Japanese musical instruments and Western rock in ways never heard before. This past November, she finally got her first solo mini-album, Cradle Of Eternity, with a different musical sensibility but that same powerful voice. Here is a taste of each, first the song Cradle Of Eternity from the album of the same name, then the track Strong Fate from the Wagakki Band, and finally the more mellow Wagakki Band track Okinota yu, just posted Tuesday. Enjoy!