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Post by Snake on Feb 25, 2019 12:31:10 GMT -5
Those cross over posters look freakin' amazing! I just saw Mazinger Infinity the other day. I was really, really impressed with it. It's a gorgeous movie, with just enough fan service. And I don't mean sexual fan service either, but cameos and robots. Side note, the second poster? It was apparently drawn by Go Nagai himself, which is why it seems to have an art style a bit more similar to older manga, which means he has ended up drawing Transformers in his life! As for the movie, it's...okay? Honestly, the story wasn't that good and it feels like it had a bit too much fan service, i mean, the movie genuinely expects you to already be familiar with Mazinger, in particular the 70's animes to better understand everything, not only that, but it felt like the Mazinger Z VS Mazinger Infinity fight was done when they ran out of budget and it's pratically just Mazinger powering up to deliver a SUPER ULTRA HYPER ROCKET PUNCH! Also, Go Nagai has revealed that Grendizer is canon to Infinity, but he didn't want Kouji or anyone to mention Duke Fleed and Grendizer so that people wouldn't wonder why he doesn't appear to save the day, meaning that Infinity could get a sequel where we get Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and Grendizer coming together to fight aliens or some other threat which...i would really damn love to see that! Wow, I thought that poster was a pretty good "replication" of Nagai's style. Hahahaha~ Now I know why. True, the plot wasn't "amazing." But for me, I didn't particularly have any high expectations for the story. The actual plot of Infinity, itself, felt like it borrowed some ideas from Evangelion (a robot with the ability to create a new future as so-desired by the pilot?) It was enough as eye-candy, for me, to see hoards upon hoards of enemy robots get wrecked in HD with modern camera angles and transitions, with even Boss Robot back in action. Don't underestimate the might of the rocket-o punch-ii!!!! =) Pity about Grendizer. I would definitely look forward to an update. It would've been worth adding another 20 minutes to the film to work in Fleed. |
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Post by silentstorm on Feb 25, 2019 16:23:43 GMT -5
Yeah, but i think Infinity was meant to celebrate Mazinger Z's 45th anniversary so it focused on Kouji and Mazinger Z, which is part of the reason why Tetsuya doesn't appear that much and they didn't want Grendizer stealing the spotlight, to a point where they didn't mention anything about Grendizer just so that viewers wouldn't wonder why Duke isn't helping.
That being said, it does mean that if they ever make a sequel, Go Nagai has already stated that Grendizer is still canon so they could make a story about Fleed returning to Earth and the three Mazingers fighting aliens as little Lisa and Tetsuya's kid see their fathers fight in badass robots.
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Mar 1, 2019 0:50:41 GMT -5
Bro, the venn diagram of people who care about social justice issues and people who can't bear to see a middle finger in a cartoon has practically zero overlap.
Let's not invent bogeymen.
If that is pandering to anybody, it's the Christian Right. |
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Post by JoeQ on Mar 1, 2019 12:01:09 GMT -5
I'm even more confused by the relationship between SJWs and DNR.
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Post by silentstorm on Mar 1, 2019 14:18:55 GMT -5
God damn it, i want to stop getting hyped for Transformers VS Mazinger, but another image came up and it has Boss Borot riding Grimlock, something i never even knew i wanted until now:  And now i am even more hyped, if the actual story does not have Boss Borot riding Grimlock i will be pissed, you can't just show something like that and do nothing with it! |
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Post by edmonddantes on Mar 4, 2019 8:05:58 GMT -5
Yeah, I'm known to dislike SocJus but even I'm confused by this claim that the DBZ Blus are somehow pandering to it. .... Getting back on subject, got an anime to review. So lately I'm back into Chinese lit. In a recent vlog I mentioned I was actually thinking of reading Three Kingdoms for a series of Youtube videos (because there are vids for reading creepypastas, and I imagine its a place where the copyright bots would be kinda weak...) So I watched an anime to get a handle on how to pronounce the names. However it turns out you shouldn't go to a Japanese source to learn to pronounce Chinese names. But I had a bigger problem... Okay, the anime in question is this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPuJlah6PhM&list=PL21105BB85E41D2B6The theme song is quite good, kinda reminding me of something by REM. The actual first episode tho, was pure cringe. I brought up one of my reasons on my Wordpress blog... this anime's first episode takes a unique and complicated story and turns it into "here are some faceless goons for our badass heroes to beat." And when I say that, I mean literally, Liu Bei is now one of those kung fu masters who is awesomely skilled but also hates violence and doesn't want to fight despite being urged to, and only gives in when they threaten the local cute little kid... yes there's a cute little kid now. To be fair, years ago I had watched five episodes and I recall the series getting a lot better after the first ep, but watching it now I'm surprised I was able to stand more than one episode. Three Kingdoms, in my experience, doesn't tend to work in anime. I saw another--more recent--one, called something like Soten Kuoro or something like that, which had Cao Cao as the protagonist... that one sucked too, and I remembered hating its second episode which had this drawn-out thing about Cao falling in love with an italian girl and they kept screaming "Amore!" at each other. In fact this anime kinda inspired my bummed-out vlogs on the lack of mature storytelling in most media. Just now found out there's a Three Kingdoms cartoon made in China though, and that one I need to check out... maybe the story's home country will handle it better. |
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Post by GamerL on Mar 5, 2019 0:35:52 GMT -5
I'm even more confused by the relationship between SJWs and DNR. |
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Post by JoeQ on Mar 5, 2019 5:09:30 GMT -5
I'm even more confused by the relationship between SJWs and DNR.
Hahaha, I've seen that movie! It was amazing!
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Post by edmonddantes on Mar 7, 2019 11:24:56 GMT -5
Can we PLEASE get off the SJW/Middle-Finger thing and talk about anime? So continuing on the thread from my last post, I found this on Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR7bKw9DUeQ&list=PLGwpBD8stjqqQYb6QIOnqTvETHngSnu_v... Does Chinese animation count as anime? Actually, I'm kinda intrigued by the art style. Being an ignorant westerner I thought Chinese animation would look anime, but the above kinda looks... well, almost but-not-quite anime. Then there's this Journey to the West cartoon that doesn't look anime at all. It's weird but this kinda makes me more interested--after awhile you get tired of the anime look. It seems Chinese animation is an untapped realm though. That Journey to the West thing has fansubs, but the Three Kingdoms one does not (that I've been able to discover, anyway). I wish it did, because it starts in an atypical way... focusing on some girl who is escaping from a Yellow Scarves attack. I'm expecting that to be Diaochan, because otherwise I can't imagine any woman in the Three Kingdoms story who would get an elevated role (introduced before the Sworn Brothers!) like this. I kinda wanna know what's going on here. So far it doesn't seem cringe like the 1980s anime version. |
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Mar 8, 2019 0:50:43 GMT -5
COW-COW is the strongest warrior in China!
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Post by edmonddantes on Mar 8, 2019 20:55:09 GMT -5
But what about LOO BOO?
Actually, the name that always makes me laugh... there's literally a chapter in the novel where a character (not seen before this point) announces "I am He Man! The Devil of the East! Who will challenge me?"
It's actually pronounced "Huh Mahn" or something like that, but no American from the 1980s can see that name and not think of a certain musclebound hero. If I ever stop being lazy and actually read the book on Youtube (seriously thinking of doing that) its gonna be really hard not to screw up at that point.
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Mar 9, 2019 6:22:54 GMT -5
I don't know much about Chinese literature but there was a lot of interesting shit going on during that period.
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Post by edmonddantes on Mar 10, 2019 9:44:05 GMT -5
I'm finding that Chinese lit is full of interesting stuff. Even Dream of the Red Chamber (which is one of the Four Classics which is little-known in the west, particularly since its basically never adapted into video games) has caught my interest and its the kind of story I normally don't like at all.
The one I've found to be weakest so far is The Water Margin--that's the 108 bandits story (and supposedly the source for Konami's Suikoden series--"Suikoden" is even the novel's Japanese title--but reading the HG101 article, the game sounds more like a vaguely-similar-to-the-novel premise rather than an adaptation). Right now I'm going through Journey to the West (Anthony C. Yu recently did a revised translation--"revised" because he had done one before in the 1980s--which is what I'm reading), and just placed an order for a recent (2016-ish) translation of Three Kingdoms, so I can see how it compares to the Moss Roberts one (which right now I consider the gold standard of Three Kingdoms translations).
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Post by toei on Mar 10, 2019 18:34:45 GMT -5
I read The Three Kingdoms back in the day - I probably still have them somewhere - but I never could finish Journey to the West, on account of how repetitive it gets. The opening, dealing with the Monkey King and how he angered the gods, is interesting, but once they get started on their trip it's a real drag.
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Post by edmonddantes on Mar 12, 2019 10:42:26 GMT -5
Yeah, I've been told about that and I can imagine. That's the reason I don't finish a lot of anime--very often I'm just tired of the adventure-of-the-day (or as anime fans call it, the filler episodes). Sometimes I'm okay with it though, if the individual adventures are what I care about in the first place (example: Ranma 1/2)
So far the only Journey West I've finished is the Arthur Waley translation, and his version basically only translates the beginning, ending, and a few of his favorite episodes, so its basically a "Best Of" (it goes under the name Monkey: Folk Novel of China).
I'm curious about something... the Ox King seems to be in every adaptation, usually advanced to being the master of all the other evil things the travellers have to fight, but Waley's translation barely even mentioned the guy and none of the stories in that version involved a battle with him. I'm guessing Ox King is in a Moriarty-like situation (in the original Sherlock Holmes stories, Moriarty was literally only in one story, and mentioned in another, but he was so popular that basically all Holmes movies and TV shows make him the overarching villain of whatever story they have going on).
... I probably need to give Water Margin a second shot. My main problem was two things, the first being that the book read like a collection of origin stories--like imagine if a book about Robin Hood was literally about how every one of his Merry Men came to be in Robin's band--and while the book started off with a character (Sagacious Lu) who I really liked... the nature of the novel meant that after his bit was over he basically was never seen again (the leader, Song Jiang, actually takes awhile to be introduced). The second problem I had was most of the "heroes" struck me as far more evil than the people they were fighting. Li Kui kills a child to force a man to join the gang, just for example... I can't see this guy being a hero. The excuse I often hear is "well, the govt they were fighting was worse," but the novel doesn't really get that across outside of a few chapters... or really even get across that they WERE fighting the govt. I honestly rather got the idea that they were hanging around Mt. Liang and doing bandit stuff rather than mounting an organized resistance.
But my stomach is a lot stronger now (though I still don't like child-killers) and anyway, it's not good to leave things unfinished.
Three Kingdoms is easily the best of the four classics tho.
.....
And now I need to look into anime and video games. Well, not so much video games as I already have a few for Three Kingdoms. For Journey West, there was a PS1 strategy RPG which I rather like, but it suffers from the same "they go to a new town, a thing happens" structure the novel does (but from what I saw, it's not a 1:1 adaptation. Sanzo in the game is trying to deliver a magical staff to a temple in India, and there's this element where some people can transform into monsters, which plotwise leads to an X-Men element where they tend to get ostracized and thus, they join Sanzo on his journey).
Only Journey West anime I've ever seen (though I liked both of them) were Monkey Magic (which used to air in dubbed form on US TV in the late 90s) and a 1960s movie called Alakazam the Great... which I think is on DVD now. Not sure about Monkey Magic. I haven't seen either in years, so I have no idea how they hold up.
I've read about Konami's Suikoden, which from the sound of it is basically not an adaptation but just a "well here's a similar sort of story" thing. None of the characters are even named Song Jiang.
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