March 29, 2025

Saturday Night Showcase> Starship Troopers: The Anime

My experience with the Starship Troopers franchise is seeing part of the CG animated series (a previous Saturday Night Showcase) and the Rifftrax Live in theaters for the first movie (here’s a link to the studio version for purchase, but you’ll need a copy of the movie due to rights issues). It just wasn’t a franchise I got into, but I do want to finish watching the TV series I mentioned. There have been a bunch of movies and I think series set in the universe as put together by the first movie, but I guess it isn’t a proper representation of the original 1959 Robert Heinlein novel. Dave Huber, contributing to Bleeding Fool, recently posted an article about wanting a proper adaptation with the reports of a potential reboot movie by Neil Blomkamp. I’m not really familiar with his works, or the novel, so I can’t tell you if this is a good idea or not, but Huber didn’t seem happy about it.

This made me think of a version I was told at the time, via the anime fan magazine Protoculture Addicts, that was closer to the books according to the article. A six part anime produced by Sunrise, the anime studio known for the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise and thus used to doing anti-war series with robots, was produced as an “original video animation (OVA)”, Japan’s version of a direct-to-video animated production. Never really saw it before but since Huber’s article made me think of it I went to check it out. I just couldn’t get into it for the same reason I didn’t get into the movie. Oddly enjoyed the series more, but the terrible air schedule in syndication meant I missed when they finally aired new episodes. It’s available online and I own one of the DVD sets, so someday I should finish it.

I bring you the fan translated anime because there has never been an official release of the 1988 OVA, even when the 1990s movies came out. You’d think someone would have run for the rights immediately before the movie hit the theaters. This is a playlist (unless I’m forced to relink the video) so you can see all six episodes right through. Enjoy.

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Posted by on March 29, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Book Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged , , , .

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March 29, 2025

BW’s Saturday Article Link> 5 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Batman

I do love showcasing videos and articles that clear up misconceptions about characters that are so prominent that even the writers seem to think they’re true. Bam! Smack! Pow! contributor Mark Lynch lists five such misconceptions about the Dark Knight, including a few I’ve been pushing back against for years.

 

Posted by on March 29, 2025 in DC Spotlight and tagged , , .

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March 28, 2025

Smash Bros Vs Tekken: Two Developers, Two Approaches

This is not some versus article, or two creators yelling at each other. It’s just two articles that came out recently that happen to come together. I only bring up the Super Smash Brothers and Tekken franchises for an attractive title. I don’t know if these guys even talk to each other, so this is just a curiosity.

Both fighting games are beloved by fans. The Smash Bros franchise is Nintendo’s fighting game, pitting various characters they have the license for together in a series of battles. It inspired stuff like Warner Brothers’ Multiverses and other developers pitting their characters against each other in a large brawl competition. The Tekken series, on the other hand, is a more typical fighter. One on one, it features serious martial artists, a girl riding a giant panda, and everything in between. Both are different takes on the fighter genre and both are fan favorites.

Bounding Into Comics posted two articles the past two weeks by the same author who didn’t appear to make the same connection I did. However, I’m going with Google Translate translations (Firefox’s translation is still in Beta and missed a few words) of the articles Spencer Baculi was summarizing and using my own summarization because what I’m seeing are two different creators with two different approaches to how they make decisions for games, and the advice they gave on purpose or by accident to prospective game developers in how they should approach a game. I just found it interesting because they almost seem to be the opposite advice.

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Posted by on March 28, 2025 in Video Game Spotlight and tagged , , , , , , , , .

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March 28, 2025

“Yesterday’s” Comic> Amazing Mystery Funnies #16

“I’ll teach you not to run at the molten metal!”

Amazing Mystery Funnies #16 (v2 #12)

Centaur Publications, Inc (December, 1939)

More trouble at the fair, more adventures with the crimefighting centaur, a few serials, but not a lot of laughs, seeing as the comedy comics are never funny in these and the action stories aren’t supposed to be fun. This is 1939, not 2025.

[Read along with me here]

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

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March 28, 2025

BW’s Daily Video> Pacific Rim’s UN Is Too Stupid To Exist

WARNING: Some swearing and robot on kaiju action

Catch more from Media Zealot on YouTube

Posted by on March 28, 2025 in Book Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged , , .

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March 27, 2025

Marvel Studios’ Most Lazy Promo Ever

You wouldn’t think there would even be an article in this. It’s just a line of movie set chairs with all the actors set to appear in Avengers: Doomsday, the post-Kang pivot of Marvel Studio’s latest phase after Jonathan Majors got in trouble so serious even they couldn’t ignore it. It’s lame, we can see that, move on, right?

This is the short version. When Marvel Studios dropped a livestream version of this, it looked more like this:

You can’t tell until you click on the video when embedded on a site like this, but that’s a nearly five and a half hour video. What’s different? Paul Rudd gets a smaller chair as a joke to his role as Ant-Man, and Robert Downey, Jr redid his bit at the end, though there isn’t a major change. Otherwise it’s the same chairs, the same pan, just a longer waste of time.

Five and half hours. Every ten or so minutes a new chair was revealed. Every ten minutes or so the fans in the chat complaining this was taking too long got something resembling relief from the stupidity, and that’s if they didn’t move on by then. So what did I think of the actual cast list?

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Posted by on March 27, 2025 in Marvel Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged , , , , , .

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March 27, 2025

“Yesterday’s” Comic> Atom Jacket #1

How can the heed the call? None of them are carrying cellphones. Or have pockets.

Atom Jacket #1

James Alexander (July, 2018)

Anthologies today are a good way for creators to get discovered by audiences. Atom Jacket contains seven stories by indie creators. I’ll be curious to see what the shared theme is and what the name means. Let’s get started.

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Posted by on March 27, 2025 in Yesterday's Comics and tagged , , , .

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