November 30, 2025

Jake & Leon #664> The Observation part 1

And our holiday arc begins. Not holiday themed, mind you.

I couldn’t think of a good Christmas themed story, but this should be a good arc for the season anyway. Who is watching our Leon, how are they watching him, and why are they watching him? The answers will come but this is also a good way to introduce the cast to newcomers.

Over at The Clutter Reports this week, the Christmas decorating is only partly done because Saturday was terrible and I have a plan that will make future decorating sessions easier on me. As it was I was so tired I forgot to label it as a quick report.

Yes, the Christmas season starts tomorrow, and so do the Christmas postings. I’ll be adding or revisiting songs, skits, specials, and having a few Christmas themed posts scattered during the month of December. Hopefully I can get them in among the Chapter By Chapter review of Doctor Who: The Rescue (novelisation), the continued look into CBS’s almost Saturday morning Transformers show, and the comic reviews and current event stuff. Plus I want to get Captain Yuletide out this year on time and I’m of course behind schedule. How that affects things we’ll have to see.

Have a great week, everyone, and I hope your Thanksgiving was a good one.

Posted by on November 30, 2025 in Jake & Leon and tagged , , , .

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November 29, 2025

Saturday Night Showcase> Transformers: The Movie (In Japanese)

A little post-Thanksgiving bonus before the Christmas specials start.

It’s rare to get a movie based on a TV show. I don’t mean these reimagined garbage movies that bear little to no resemblance to the source material unless it’s outright mocking it. I mean the show itself having a movie. You had the occasional reunion like Star Trek: The Motion Picture or The Return Of Maxwell Smart, but an active movie, especially a kids cartoon, getting a theatrical exclusive? Not likely. Then there was The Transformers: The Movie, a 1986 movie that altered the timeline of the cartoon. The movie was set in the far off year of 2005, with season three taking place in 2006. It introduced a new cast while killing off a huge amount of the old one to do so, as Hasbro wanted to push the new toys and didn’t realize the kids had connected so strongly to the old characters.

In Japan, kids are used to watching their heroes die to be replaced with new characters whether there were toys involved or not. Instead of the final three episode miniseries “The Rebirth”, they got The Headmasters, which killed off Optimus Prime (known in Japan as “Convoy”) a second time, after having to explain his death in Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers 2010, since they opted to go five years beyond the American timeline. It wouldn’t be until after The Headmasters, Masterforce, and even Victory that select events got to see a Japanese subbed version of the English movie, and even longer before a Japanese dub of the movie would be made. Tonight I bring you that dub with English subtitles, bring things a bit full circle. You can learn more about the history at the TF Wiki.

You may be wondering why you should even bother watching that version when you already have the English version available to you, or at least you’ve seen it. That’s where the first of our extras comes in, also a way to make this post viable if the feature presentation is every taken down. TJ Omega is how I learned of this version of the movie showing up on YouTube, and he explains why it’s worth watching. Of course, you might want to wait until after you see the movie, to see if you can spot the differences first and then wait for TJ to list them all. That’s one of two extra bonuses before we get to the movie itself. Enjoy.

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Posted by on November 29, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Saturday Night Showcase, Television Spotlight and tagged , , , .

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November 29, 2025

BW’s Saturday Article Link> The Real Culture/Politics Power Dynamic

What does this have to do with the topic? Admittedly little. I just needed an image and it’s Aquaman riding dolphins to chase the Penguin. I need no other reason.

We’ve heard that “politics is downstream from culture”, the idea that affecting the culture may in turn affect how people act politically. Making a case against that expression is  author and commentator Brian Newmeyer, who makes the case that politics has more control over culture than you might realize. I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong, but it may actually be more cylindrical, an oryborous of political culture. Culture can affect people when it sneaks past politics while the current climate will affect what draws people in culturally. So everybody’s right…except the people who are wrong.

Posted by on November 29, 2025 in Uncategorized and tagged , , .

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November 28, 2025

CBS Transformers> The Production Notes part 3

I don’t think I’m going to go through all of the production notes. You can get it from the Sunbow Marvel Archive, unlike the Doctor Who notes we have documents that will be going over everything in there anyway. I do want to focus on a few things of interest. For example we’ll be checking out the Autobots and their human allies in this section. I think we’re still on the first draft’s notes going in. Whomever put this file together opted to put them all in one big file rather than separate between drafts.

We already know some to most of what’s in this because we have the “final” results, but I’m still hoping for some interesting curiosities going in, and we have official Hasbro and CBS notes in this at some point. Sadly, we won’t be going over those today, but these are the notes going into the first draft, and hopefully we’ll learn something interesting.

That’s all the padding I can come up with for an intro. Unless this is your first installment, and I do recommend to at least read the article series intro to get caught up, you already know everything going into this. Let’s just roll out already.

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Posted by on November 28, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, CBS Transformers and tagged , , , , , , , , , .

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November 28, 2025

“Yesterday’s” Comic> Fight Comics #2

You’re welcome, ladies.

Fight Comics #2

Fight Stories, Inc (February, 1940)

I wasn’t exactly impressed with the first issue. Picking this up is more of a curiosity. So many of the stories in the first issue ended so definitely I wasn’t sure how to make a series out of them. So I want to see how many stories fro mthere have a continuation here. I also want to see if I’m going to continue past this issue. Most of the previous issue was about one time of fighting, and I’m not into boxing. Only one way to find out.

[Read along with me here]

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Posted by on November 28, 2025 in Yesterday's Comics and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , .

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November 28, 2025

BW’s Daily Video> The Basics On Transformers Victory

Catch more Transformers: The Basics from Chris McFeely on YouTube

I have a fan translation of two pages of the manga, where we meet the first female Decepticons. I did the lettering based on Doug Dlin’s translation. You can see it in a really old article, but the piece was originally for my old Transformers fansite based on a posting at the alt.toys.transformers newsgroup.

 

Posted by on November 28, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , , .

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November 27, 2025

The History Of Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit

I usually do something for Thanksgiving, but honestly, after 16 years I’m not sure what to add. There’s always new Christmas music and specials, but Thanksgiving specials now tend to lean towards the food and not the origins. It’s not hard to do a search for Thanksgiving posts I’ve done in the past, including specials. Some of those videos might actually still work! Maybe. This year I decided to do something different, which may be a relief to my non-American readers. Plus I was never heavy into Thanksgiving, important as it is to US history.

So…YouTube recommends the above video, or rather a recent repost by The Line, a YouTube animation channel without the closing credits. Well forget that. Give me more of that rockin’ intro, and I’ve made clear that I love my suit-up transformations. So I was going to make it a Daily Video and call it a day, but then I watched the documentary by the animation group for the short. Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit wasn’t just showing off. It was a passion project based on the creator’s history watching the same cartoons growing up that I did. It’s probably why I gravitated to it so much, as apparently have many others.

This sent me down a…pun totally intended…rabbit hole into the short. Not only was work put into the intro, but they made a whole experience for it. Like, there’s a lot of effort in this, and me being me, I just have to show this stuff off. Note that there is occasional cursing in the documentary.

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Posted by on November 27, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Internet Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , , , .

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