Saturday Night Showcase> Ultraman Kids

I know the past few Saturday Night Showcase installments have been on Ultraman, but I still have that annoying YouTube backlog I’m dealing with so I’m going with the easy entries. They’re posting first episodes to the TokuSHOUTsu YouTube channel and they’re short enough to check. I’m still not past the first episode of Ultraman Blazar and I was kind of iffy on the first episode. Still, even with a few more shows to Showcase I want to find a different topic, so let’s end on this one.

Ultraman Kids: 3 Million Light Years In Search Of Mother is the third installment of the Ultraman franchise. The Ultraman fan wiki says the show is non-canon but with the other universes out there I’m not sure they should bother. I still don’t expect to see them in the Ultra Galaxy Fight series, though Boy would have someone to play with. This full series comes after two short films, The Pleasant Friends Of Nebula M7.8 and Proverb Stories, which is not currently available to me. The show follows kid versions of classic Ultras having an adventure to find the parents of Maa, patterned after the classic Ultraman.

Tonight we see how Maa and his friends Piko (the only girl and not directly based on one of the Ultras), Sev (based on Ultraseven, and the one the Ultraman wiki doesn’t seem to know exists), and Taa (based on Ultraman Taro) end up in space after the last day of school, as well as the rest of the cast who will follow them later. Enjoy.

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“Yesterday’s” Comic> The Blue Beetle #24

Tracking the guy at Holyoke trying to push him out of his own comic.

The Blue Beetle #24

Holyoke Publishing (August, 1943)

[Read along here]

Well, two stories in his own comic. Except he’s not the starting story. If you didn’t want to make a Blue Beetle comic, why did you? If they hadn’t, Fox Features might not have been able to continue the character, we wouldn’t have Charlton’s reimagined Dan Garrett (they used the two “T”s), Ted Kord, or Jaime Reyes. I can still question their lack of thought in this manner even if keeping him around was beneficial in the future. It’s just a shame to see a character playing second fiddle in his own book!

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The Many, MANY, Intros Of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles> Nick-ja’s Rise

And so we come to the final entry of this series until the next TV show comes out. I’m not sure we’re ending on a high note. “Better than The Next Mutation” really shouldn’t be the bar to set. I already did my review of the first batch of episodes Nickelodeon dropped when Rise Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles premiered. The first episode aired on TV with more available through their site and on demand. The show wasn’t terrible but I would have enjoyed it more had they just done some show about anthropomorphic animals living alongside humans. I went through five episodes and found a terrible adaptation I might have enjoyed as a different product. I didn’t like Splinter, the new de-aged April was also a black girl with attitude (because aren’t they all in modern media), and they dropped the ball on the mutant flood idea the first episode started with. I did like the magic weapons for the same reason I liked the high-tech ones in Fast Forward because it was an advancement in the weapons but as an adaptation it failed hard no matter how good the animation was while the writing wasn’t to my tastes but not terrible.

There were only two seasons and we don’t get anything resembling a serious intro change until season three with this franchise so this shouldn’t take long. We even have an official source to work with as I write this. Okay, let’s see it.

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“Yesterday’s” Comic> Star Power #5

In this issue: Star Power battles gender-swapped alien Gene Simmons! That could actually be a comic name.

Star Power #5

(May, 2014)

WRITER: Michael Terracino

ARTIST: Garth Graham

[READ ALONG HERE]

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BW’s Daily Video> How To Write A Negative Character Arc

Catch more from Abbie Emmons on YouTube

 

The Part About The “Swapping” Trend That Gets Glossed Over

You can’t deny it’s a new trend in adaptations, one meant to avoid the “hassle” of properly making existing characters that are people of color, women, and whatever as popular as the white ones. Yes, the only reason the white male heroes are in the supposed “lead” is that so many more of them were made but it’s not like there weren’t black women basically running superteams. Filmation not only gave us Space Sentinels but put Isis (since now apparently Egyptians are black because Egypt is a country on the continent of Africa…which I guess means the Inuit are now Native Americans like the Apache or one of the Canadian tribes or something?) in command of the Freedom Force. (Interesting enough, Hercules was somehow on both teams. Guess it’s called the Valley Of Time for a reason.) I’ve listed the heroes I grew up watching and I could (and probably should) easily do another installment. Note how long it took for Black Panther, a hero created by two Jewish men in the 1960s, to become a famous name outside of comics and now a ping pong ball in the culture war.

I was watching a video recently by YouTube commentator Just A Robot I won’t be posting because I’ll be hitting similar points in my article but a bit more toned down. Plus he seems to think Invincible is on Disney+ instead of Netflix. (And apparently I’m as bad, as someone just pointed out in the comments it was on Amazon Prime. Articles are easier to fix than videos thankfully. I don’t have access to any of them, though some older Amazon shows are starting to make their way to Freevee…which I still don’t watch there either because the franchise is a bit too bloody for me.) Of course with the way Disney keeps buying competition and thinking that will solve their financial failures…

I will, however, link to it in case you want to watch it later. Entitled “Is Racebending Making People More Racist“, the host posts the theory that instead of solving racism the replacement of traditionally white characters may make people more resentful, thus making the problem worse. And this may be the goal as the elitists want to divide us to control us.Whatever you may think of his point of view, and it should be noted that even people of those races disagree that the changes are positive since they aren’t what was created (when gay rights activist and former Sulu portrayer George Takei is telling you not to make Sulu gay because that’s the actor’s orientation and not his character’s and you don’t listen, you’re the idiot) in the source material, that’s not really what I want to focus on. The culture war may be ruining modern storytelling, but it’s only one factor. The other is not caring about the source material. The changes made to the Battlestar Galactica reimagine wasn’t because of “wokeness”, it was because they didn’t care about the original show.

No, there’s something that is only part of the discussion that I really want to focus on. Have you ever notice that anytime a male character becomes a woman, a straight character is turned gay, or a white character becomes a person of color that the whole character is different? Not necessarily bad, though most are, but why does changing the race, gender, and/or orientation also mean changing everything else?

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“Yesterday’s” Comic> Street Fighter #0 (Digital Edition)

Nice poster but it doesn’t sell the comic.

Street Fighter #0

Udon Studios (August, 2003–as posted to ComiXology)

WRITER: Ken Siu-Chong

ARTISTS: Arnold Tsang, Avil Lee, Rob Ross, & Andrew Hou

LETTERER: Simon Yeung

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