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October 25, 2025

Saturday Night Showcase> The War Of The Gargantuas

With Halloween surrounded by Saturdays I thought it would be fun to do a Halloween kaiju post with sequels. The first and second appearance of Ghidorah or Mechagodzilla or something. All I found were second appearances in various timelines, so there went that plan. Even tonight’s movie is technically a sequel, but so far removed from the first movie that I don’t care. I could have tried Internet Archive, which is great for audio but terrible to post as videos on this host, or DailyMotion, which hasn’t been even a tolerable player in years and currently autoplays an embed even when you tell it not to, so forget it. I can’t even get the Japanese sub anywhere, so the second dub (somewhere Harvey Dent is having a good laugh) of War Of The Gargantuas is what you get. Sorry.

Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira is supposedly a sequel to Frankenstein Vs Baragon, known in the US as Frankenstein Conquers The World. It’s a monster that resembles Frankenstein/Frankenstein’s monster I don’t care the debate is stupid and pedantic and not my genre. Supposedly it was made from the monster’s heart or something. I never cared when I watched it. It’s one of Toho’s rare bad designs. Well, because scientists love to prove that no level of smart is safe from being stupid, they used those cells to create another monster, which gets an evil twin brother through even more dodgy science. Nobody cares about a good origin here. They just want to see monsters fight.

When the good twin is “framed” by the evil twin who just wants to eat people and destroy the world or something evil like that, the scientist must find out who’s who before the government gets their frustration over their Godzilla-killing failures out on the wrong monster. Will they succeed? Find out and enjoy!

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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on October 25, 2025 in Uncategorized and tagged Gaira, Sanda, Saturday Night Showcase, Showa era kaiju, Toho, War Of The Gargantuans.

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October 25, 2025

BW’s Saturday Article Link> Have We Hit Peak Culture?

Something Batman’s wanted to do for a long time. By the way: kids comic to promote a crossover video game. Stop telling me kids stories don’t have to be good, or that promo comics can’t have good stories.

I don’t know if it fits. I just didn’t have a image to go with this one. In a recent social media post, media commentator Matt Walsh declared that 2007-2008 was “peak culture” and every year since hasn’t lived up. This let to discussion on X-Twitter about what qualifies as “peak culture”. Check out this article from Geeks & Gamers contributor Jessika Lindstrom and draw your own conclusion.

Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on October 25, 2025 in Uncategorized and tagged commentary.

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October 24, 2025

CBS Transformers> The First Draft part 5: The Formatting

So word came out this week that Skybound’s “Energon Universe” is getting an animated series, and will be adult like their other big hit, Invincible. So like their Transformers comics it won’t be for me. I don’t need to see an animated version of Bumblebee being destroyed just to prove they aren’t the kids stories–you know, the age group the franchise was made for. I also don’t need the human body count to feel “mature”. If you enjoy it, go right ahead. I’m not stopping you, I’m just not joining you. I’ve said my peace on that. I’m just letting interested parties know it’s coming and segueing into…would a Saturday morning version of Transformers have been too far the other way? They did seriously dumb down Super Dinosaur, another Skybound comic made into a cartoon, and that one WAS for kids, comic AND show.

The problem, and I’ll go more into it in the transition between pitch drafts, is that Saturday morning cartoons in the 1980s had to deal with parent groups and psychologists who think they understand kids but don’t, and consultant firm with their heads in the clouds. Look up what happened at ABC and The Real Ghostbusters. CBS already forced Marvel Productions to add two females, one Autobot and one Decepticon, which they did by gender swapping Sideswipe and Starscream (like Starscream didn’t get enough gay jokes…though now we know Slipstream’s deal in Transformers Animated). Then again, we also know that the Decepticons would be wiped out by the Autobots, come to Earth to possess machines to create their new robot bodies, and the Autobots would have to follow suit, but we still don’t know if they’re dead as well. The Autobots would also be forcing humans to join their cause while the Decepticons followed Cy-Kill’s plan and just recruited one. Like I said many years ago, Cy-Kill is better at his job than G1 Megatron.

Now we’re going to look at further information about the format of the show. This should tell us the tone, style, and goals of the series should Hasbro sign off on the new concept and CBS greenlights a series. Would this get around the stuff they couldn’t get away with? Let’s see.

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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on October 24, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Show Bibles & Pitches, Television Spotlight and tagged 80s cartoon, 80s television, 80s TV, CBS, CBS Saturday Morning, failed pitch, kids TV, Transformers.

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October 24, 2025

“Yesterday’s Comic> Smash Comics #6

As so began the adventures of Black X: Space Ranger.

Smash Comics #6

E.M. Arnold (January, 1940)

One problem, and I may have mentioned it before, with all these anthologies is remembering which ones I actually liked enough to continue. I have to consult the last review to see if I decided to continue or not. A bunch of these come out each month and I’m reading the public domain archives once a week. A few characters are memorable enough, but barely, and I can see why so many failed to pass on to the periods we remember these characters from. The Silver Age has this as an advantage, giving us comics where the title character has more presence and allows us to remember them, if not all of their stories, so far onward. I could rewrite the first Superman story from Action Comics #1 with the same characters (the only ones still around today being Superman/Clark Kent and Lois Lane) it might still feel like a new story to the uninitiated…but you’d still know the characters. Sometimes I only remember characters when I see them again. There’s so many that nobody really stands out, so hopefully there are at least some good stories this issue. According to reviews, I’ve enjoyed it so far.

[Read along with me here]

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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on October 24, 2025 in Yesterday's Comics and tagged Abdul The Arab, Bozo the Iron Man, Captain Cook Of Scotland Yard, Chic Carter, Chip, Clip Chance, E.M. Arnold, Flash Fulton, Golden Age comics, Hugh Hazzard, Invisible Hood, John Law, The Black X, The Invisible Hood, Wings Wendall.

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October 24, 2025

BW’s Daily Video> 50 Facts About G1 Bumblebee

Catch more from CerealgeekTV on YouTube

51: “Plight Of The Bumblebee” is the story that really let a kid with his own self-worth issues see a fellow afflicted go through his own issues, something that continued on as Bumblebee learned as Goldbug that how you saw yourself mattered more, and fostering his character growth. That kid, though not having as strong a growth unfortunately, would later declare Bumblebee his favorite Autobot and have a dedicated Bumblebee shelf of depictions of that character that I…he still maintains.

Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on October 24, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Comic Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged 80s cartoon, 80s television, 80s TV, Bumblebee, kids TV, Transformers.

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October 23, 2025

The Problem With Lola Bunny

Let’s be honest. Lola Bunny was created for the wrong reason. If they wanted to add another girl to the cast, this time one of the mains instead of a supporting character like Granny or an antagonist like Witch Hazel, that would have been fine. I wouldn’t have had a problem with it and probably neither would anyone else. I still treat the Tiny Toons characters as Looney Tunes whether it’s official or not, and I haven’t heard either way. Instead, Warner Brothers wanted to prove Bugs Bunny was straight. As the rise of the current extremist perspectives in culture would try to claim every character and the studios were still staffed by people who believed in tradition and honesty, looking at Bugs putting on a dress to escape “certain” death (despite everyone else getting shot and blown up only to be a minor inconvenience via the comedy “gag reflex”) as anything other than a defense mechanism was not something they were willing to let stand.

And so Space Jam introduced Lola. To be fair she was a good character and addition to the team in their fight to protect their homes and freedom from aliens via a basketball game. The problem is what happened after that. It seems like Warner Brothers never really knew what to do with her, and each incarnation of her seems to be different, some more than others if you watched today’s Daily Video I found doing research for this commentary, that unlike the others she can’t seem to find a distinct identity of her own. Bugs is the snarky problem solver out to to protect, get payback, or occasionally mess with someone out of sheer boredom. Daffy himself acknowledged being a “greedy little coward” out for fame and fortune by entertaining others. Porky…had the stutter. By now you know the personalities of everyone from Yosemite Sam to Silvester, Speedy Gonzales to the Road Runner. What about Lola? Think you know who she is? Because there are versions of her that bear no real resemblance to the previous. Let’s look at her various incarnations.

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