“Never a Power Ranger around when you really need one.”
The Night Man #11
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (August, 1994)
“Turning On”
WRITER: Steve Englehart
PENCILER: John Dennis
INKER: Thomas Florimonte
COLORING: Mickey Rose & Foodhammer!
LETTERER: Kevin Cunningham
EDITOR: Roland Mann
Catch more from TJOmega on YouTube
I remember seeing the scans when they first came out and that was a horror to see. I don’t think I saw the second set of pages, just to where they combined. Combination is my favorite secondary gimmick in Transformers (blame Voltron and Mighty Orbots) and even I don’t need Dinobots combining. They’re cool the way they are and they stand out as a team. Plus we have more than five now in the toyline and Rescue Bots/Rescue Bots Academy.
Come on, Leon. You know he’s just going to buy more comics.
Speaking of comics, over at The Clutter Reports today events pushed the next stage of the comic digitizing mega-project forward a tad, so I can show off the early scanning process.
I’ve got a disruptive weekend coming, but this week showed I might at least be able to get articles up at a decent time. I shouldn’t miss any, but you know why if I do. That’s the end of the week, though. We still have the Chapter By Chapter review of Star Trek: The IDIC Epidemic coming, that should be bringing us to the Enterprise crew. There’s also the usual comic reviews. It’s Saturday Night Showcase I’m worried about, but we’ll see how that goes.
Have a great week, everyone!
My favorite Saturday morning cartoon wasn’t Superfriends, which will shock more than a few long time readers. It’s still one of my favorites, and what got me into DC Comics, but the true winner was season one of Flash Gordon, a 1979 NBC Saturday morning ender that I was happy to watch on the little black and white TV in my room. Then season two came along, the network decided to kill the serialized format of season one and force a cute sidekick character that offered nothing to the plot and some episodes even took away from the season. I will defend many of the “mascot” characters but not all of them.
Sorry, Gremlin. On another show I might have liked you, but you don’t fit here.
I told you I didn’t forget what you did!
It wasn’t until years later, through the internet, that I learned I missed out on the TV movie that led to the show, often called either The Adventures Of Flash Gordon or The New Adventures Of Flash Gordon despite neither being what Filmation put on the title card, hadn’t aired until NBC saw a way to cash in on the live-action 1980s adaptation of Alex Raymond comic strip that it saw air. That’s because NBC took one look at the movie and said “forget that, go make a series!”, and then screwed it up when it came to the second season. Typical.
Lou Scheimer had learned to draw by copying Flash Gordon comics. They were also inspired by the classic series of serials (more than one serial) starring Buster Crabbe as the man who fell to Mongo and eventually rescued the world from Ming The Merciless…and then the comics didn’t end because Mongo is a very dangerous place. I wonder if it inspired their take on Eternia?
Anyway, back to the movie. Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure Of All was originally created for NBC’s Sunday night family movie. The show, being on Saturday morning, had to remove the Nazi reference and put a few more bits of fabric on Aura’s outfit but it made me come back every week to see the next episode and why I enjoy serials today. Vic Perrin voiced Ming in the movie, but Alan Oppenheimer replaced him in the series, which was a completely new story from the movie.
The movie would get released online as a VCR recording of the one airing…but since it was the early days of the internet tying up phone lines that was only possible in pieces, through torrents and taking a lot of time to get all the parts together, which the downloader would have to assemble themselves. Today we have YouTube and streaming capable bandwidth.
There are two videos below. One is taken from what appears to be a Japanese home video release, or I’m getting my Asian alphabet wrong. It’s the cleanest normal copy I could find. If that bothers you, the cleanest copy overall was an AI upscaled version, but the AI did a few things I found distracting in the scene where Nazi blimps were bombing Warsaw. Scheimer and his family escaped Germany just before the war. In his book on creating Filmation, he told the story about how his dad allegedly knocked Adolf on his keister when he was still a soldier spouting his nonsense at a local gathering spot, and Lou’s dad’s fist let him know what he thought of the man. Yeah, I’d run, too. So choose your most standable version, ask when a proper remaster has never been done, and enjoy!
I wish I caught this for last week’s Saturday Article Link. Digital antennas allow you to watch local channels and their network feeds without cable or satellite. DVR receivers or connecting it to a service like Sling allow you to even record digitally. Even cable and satellite boxes can be hooked up for local OTA (over the antenna) channels, and in the age of digital signals you’re local ABC station might also be bringing you the MeTV line-up of channels or something.
I come from the old days, when pixelization wasn’t an issue but static (we called it “snow”) was. The antenna had to be turned for each station rather than picking the best direction and going with it. We had this little box that would click as the antenna rotated, because you used it to position the antenna without climbing on the roof every time you wanted to switch from the CBS affiliate to the NBC one. Then cable came along. Then the local stations charged cable so much the prices rose until we went back to the digital antenna and free ad-supported streaming for our TV and movies, or paid services, or YouTube and other internet options.
Last week was the anniversary of when the old analog signals were taken by the government, allegedly for rescue radios and such, and Cord Cutters News founder and contributor Luke Bouma decided to look back on those thrilling days of yesteryear. Fellow old fogeys, which bugs you more, static or pixelization?
I can’t believe it took me this long do add this to the list. I even noted in 2020 when I did a Saturday Night Showcase on this show that I should have done this already. Better late than never, I guess.
Cybersix is an American kids show produced by the Japanese and based on a very NOT for kids Argentinian comic. It’s international, but that’s not how “all-ages” works. Specifically, TMS Entertainment produced the show for Fox Kids. It only ran for one season, which is a shame because the show is amazing in animation (of course, it’s TMS), acting, writing, dialog…if you want to see what a superheroine story looks like, you should watch this.
The show follows Cybersix, an escaped experiment by the crazed scientist Doctor Von Richter. She goes underground in the city of Meridiana, but Von Richter’s “son” Julian, a kid with megalomaniacal tendencies, has set up operations to control the city. Disguising herself as the male literature teacher Adrian Seidelman, Cybersix finds love, a pushy teen with a crush, a young street urchin she rescues from a life of thievery, a fellow escapee in the form of a panther named Data-7, and a whole lot of monsters running loose in the city to fight. As for the intro? It knows how to sell the show to an audience.
Taking “smash” a bit too literal, Bozo.
Smash Comics #8
E.M. Arnold (March, 1940)
You know what I just put together? Chic Carter is here AND in Police Comics. I wonder if they’re supposed to be the same character? Both E.M. Arnold and Comic Magazines, Inc will become Quality Comics. Only here (and the dates aren’t far apart), Chic takes on the “Sword” costumed crimefighter identity and there he doesn’t. They’re both crime reporters who get involved in the crimes they’re reporting. I’ll have to look into this, but past me told me to keep reading and I sometimes trust past me’s tastes.
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
BW Media Spotlight 