Endnotes and digressions from
the latest show:
* We opened the show this week talking about the trailer for Atomic Blonde.
It’s here. You should watch it. This is a red-band trailer, but honestly, I think it’s almost entirely safe for work.
* Vic and I spent some time being nostalgic for the Japanese TV imports of our childhood. It turns out that YouTube is a tremendous repository for these tiny bits of awesomeness. For instance:
Here’s the intro for Space Giants, featuring Goldar. And here’s a commercial for the amazing
Shogun Warriors toys. (Which Vic had and I did not.) (I did have the
comic books, though.)
But the greatest Japanimation of the age was, obviously, Star Blazers. For an entire generation of boys, Star Blazers was their introduction to the space opera. And you can find
both
seasons in toto.
A lot of times when you look back at a cultural artifact from your youth you’re mystified as to how you could ever have been taken with something so embarrassing. That’s not the case with Star Blazers. Everything about the show is perfectly engineered for boys, from the shifting alliance with Desslok to the designs of the spaceships. (The Argo remains the
sexiest spaceship ever conceived.) By the by, a few years back a Japanese studio made a live-action Star Blazers. I still haven’t seen it, but this clip of the live-action
firing of the wave-motion gun is everything I ever dreamed it could be.
* Moving along to King Kong and my obsession with his shifting scale in Kong: Skull Island, it turns out that Kong isn’t the only kaiju who’s grown over the years. Originally he was supposed to be 150 feet tall, because this height was just big enough to allow him to peer over the tops of most buildings in Tokyo in the mid-1950s. But as of the 2014 Godzilla, he’d grown to 350 feet. Check out how
Godzilla has super-sized since his screen debut.
* Also, back when Kong was just 25 feet tall (in the 2005 Peter Jackson version, which has been rightly memory-holed) Forbes did a nifty little piece on
the biology of King Kong. Their basic take-away: A gorilla that big is an impossibility because his bones would snap under the muscle-mass.
Killjoys. Next they’ll tell us that a giant lizard wouldn’t be able to store enough heat to survive even a day.
* I mentioned the movie-monster size charts. This one goes
from Chucky to Clovie. But my favorite is
this one, which has simply everything. From the T-Rex to the monster from The Mist to Jaws to King Gidorah. It’s an amazing piece of nerd art.
And it’s downloadable! Surely you need one for your office.
* One final note about Kong: Skull Island, which I didn’t have a chance to mention during the show. There’s a bit of fan service in the first act where Sam Jackson’s character tells his troops to “Hold on to your butts.” I understand what the writers were trying to do here. It’s a love note. But all it really serves to do it remind the audience how inferior Kong is to Jurassic Park. You should never call back to movies that are much better than your own.
* And last but not least, in our definitive ranking of movie monsters I can’t believe we forgot to mention the tyrannosaurus rex from Tammy and the T-Rex.
What’s Tammy and the T-Rex, you ask?
Well hold on to your butts. It’s a 1994 movie starring Denise Richards and Paul Walker in which the premise is that a high school kid gets killed and a mad-scientist keeps his spirit alive by grafting his brain onto a robot dinosaur and the dino and Tammy fall in love and OH MY GOD. I’m not even kidding. However insane you think this sounds, the actual execution is even crazier.
Get some popcorn and absinthe and wrap a bandage around your head because this movie will blow your mind. (Thanks to Jim Swift for bringing Tammy into my life.)
* As always, you can download the episode here and subscribe to the Substandard on iTunes or on Google Play.
And while you’re at it, go give us a five-star rating. We earned it this week.
