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March 19, 2024, 04:34:48 AM

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Mar 10 2024 11:04pm
Tuxedo Mark: My review of "Catnapped!" from Betty and Veronica: Friends Forever: Sleepover: https://riverdalereviewed.wordpress.com/2024/03/10/comics-catnapped/

Mar 03 2024 2:17pm
Tuxedo Mark: My review of "Winners and Losers" from Betty and Veronica #103: https://riverdalereviewed.wordpress.com/2024/03/03/comics-winners-losers/

Mar 03 2024 2:17pm
Tuxedo Mark: My review of "Winners

Feb 25 2024 6:02pm
Tuxedo Mark: My review of "Girl of His Dreams" from Betty and Veronica #101: https://riverdalereviewed.wordpress.com/2024/02/25/comics-girl-of-his-dreams/

Feb 22 2024 5:46pm
Tuxedo Mark: Huh, and apparently World of Betty and Veronica Digest isn't canceled; it just went on a long hiatus: https://archiecomics.com/new-archie-comics-coming-in-may-2024/

Feb 22 2024 5:35pm
Tuxedo Mark: Archie Comics is starting to do $4.99 floppies: https://archiecomics.com/archie-horror-unleashes-apocalyptic-thrills-in-judgment-day/

Feb 17 2024 3:19pm
Tuxedo Mark: My review of "The Big Victory" from Betty and Veronica #99: https://riverdalereviewed.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/comics-the-big-victory/

Feb 04 2024 4:25pm
Tuxedo Mark: My review of "Makeover for a Moose" from Betty and Veronica Jumbo Comics Digest #321: https://riverdalereviewed.wordpress.com/2024/02/04/comics-makeover-for-a-moose/

Jan 27 2024 5:44pm
Tuxedo Mark: My review of "Love is a Football Field!" from Archie Jumbo Comics Digest #347: https://riverdalereviewed.wordpress.com/2024/01/27/comics-love-is-a-football-field/

Jan 25 2024 4:30pm
Tuxedo Mark: My review of "One Shot Worth a Million" from World of Archie Jumbo Comics Digest #136: https://riverdalereviewed.wordpress.com/2024/01/25/comics-one-shot-worth-a-million/

What are you currently watching?

Started by Archiecomicxfan215, March 30, 2016, 10:11:44 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Archiecomicxfan215


BettyReggie

I was watching Seinfeld this morning.

Vegan Jughead

Just finished watching season 1 of Big Little Lies with Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman among others.  GREAT show!

BettyReggie

Sadly no more Roseanne which would have been on tonight.

BettyReggie

I'm watching Seinfeld Season #8 Disc #1

DeCarlo Rules

GALAXY EXPRESS 999 (1979)
ADIEU, GALAXY EXPRESS 999 (1981)
GALAXY EXPRESS: ETERNAL FANTASY (1996)
MAETEL LEGEND (2001)
QUEEN EMERALDAS (1988)
VENGEANCE OF THE SPACE PIRATE (a 1985 English-dubbed edit of the 1982 original anime film Arcadia of My Youth)
CAPTAIN HARLOCK and Friends (1985 English-dubbed version of selected episodes from the 1978 anime TV series Space Pirate Captain Harlock)
STARZINGER: The Movie Collection (selected episodes of the 1978-79 anime TV series, dubbed and edited in 2009 into three 1 hour & 50 minute feature films)

All of the above anime were based on the work of manga creator Leiji Matsumoto (best known in the US as the creator of Space Battleship Yamato, dubbed and edited and broadcast on US television as Star Blazers in the 1980s). Apart from series he created like Yamato, Starzinger, and Danguard Ace (a popular super-robot anime series of the 1970s), many of the other manga and anime series share a common continuity and characters, coexisting in a "Leijiverse". The primary series involved in this shared continuity are Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, Queen Millennia, and Galaxy Railways. Galaxy Express 999 is a 19th-century styled space locomotive that travels across space, stopping at various planets. It's endpoints are Earth and the planet LaMetal in the Andromeda galaxy, ruled by Queen Andromeda Promethium, otherwise known as Queen Millennia, the "Queen of a Thousand Years". Planet LaMetal is the seat of the Machine Empire, which seeks to dominate the universe, conquering or converting all other sentient races into mechanoids like themselves. Queen Promethium is also the mother of Maetel (one of the main characters of Galaxy Express 999) and Emeraldas (like Captain Harlock, a space pirate, and a primary supporting character in both that series and GE999). How a mechanoid queen like Promethium can be the mother of Maetel and Emeraldas is explained in Maetel Legend. Queen Promethium's backstory was the subject of the TV series Queen Millennia, untranslated into English except as part of the edited-&-dubbed by Carl Macek version Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years, seen ever-so-briefly in the US in 1985-86. Continuity as such is a little loose as such in the Leijiverse, as the original Space Pirate Captain Harlock series (1977-78) was not originally conceived as part of a shared universe, and only later, with the feature films Galaxy Express 999 (1979, a condensed retelling of the major plot arc of an earlier-aired TV series) and My Youth in Arcadia (1982, essentially what amounts to Harlock's origin story) were connections forged. Many of the earlier or later anime contain discrepancies or contradictions of events which can't be accounted for, and some need to be eliminated as existing in the shared universe altogther, like Harlock Saga (1996), an OVA series which recast the main characters of Captain Harlock in the roles of characters from operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. Other series in which Harlock and his best friend Tochiro Oyama appear, take place in other times, like Gun Frontier, a 2002 OVA series (the manga on which it is based actually preceded the Space Pirate Captain Harlock manga) in which Harlock and Tochiro have analogs in their ancestors who are destined to share a common history and genetic memory (this plot point was explained in the film My Youth in Arcadia, which showed that Harlock and Tochiro also had ancestors who shared history during WWII). In fact it appears that in a sense, all of Harlock and Tochiro's descendants are genetically-identical reincarnations of their former ancestors. Yes, it's more than a little confusing, so I've been sifting through the various films, OVAs and TV series related and trying determine if they can be made to fit within the shared continuity, and if so, in what order events take place relative to other stories. There are a number of tangential spinoffs as well, like the OVA series COSMO WARRIOR ZERO.

STARZINGER was fun, but is otherwise unrelated to Leiji Matsumoto's shared universe. The series' title remained unexplained in the English-language dub. In 1980, the series had 26 of its 73 episodes translated into English by Jim Terry's American Way Productions, retitled as Spaceketeers, one of five different anime series broadcast as part of a 5-days-a-week syndicated package under the overall title FORCE FIVE. That series only aired for a few years in 4 or 5 select broadcast markets in the US, and a couple more in Canada. Starzinger's original story is a loosely-based space-opera iteration of the ancient Chinese Buddhist classic, Journey To The West. It's full title in Japan translates roughly as Science-Fiction West STARZINGER. The 1980 version tried to recast the three cyborg heroes of the series as science-fiction analogs of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, since Journey to the West remains a largely unfamiliar story to English-speaking audiences. Spaceketeers was the only one out of FORCE FIVE's English-dubbed anime adaptations not to feature a giant super-robot as the main character. Jim Terry's original plans to obtain rights to Go Nagai's Great Mazinger anime collapsed when negotiations stalled out, and so a dubbed adaptation of Leiji Matsumoto's Starzinger became an eleventh-hour substitute. The initial impetus for the American syndication packaging came from Mattel's then-popular toy line Shogun Warriors, which imported various unrelated Japanese super-robot toys in different scales (the most impressive of which were gigantic 26" plastic versions) with English-language repackaging, this being several years prior to Hasbro's similar imported Japanese robot toys which were dubbed TRANSFORMERS; however, Mattel's Shogun Warriors super-robot toys didn't have the feature which allowed a seemingly-innocuous vehicle like a car or plane to be converted into a giant robot. The initial success of Mattel's Shogun Warriors toy line turned out to be short-lived, as within a couple of years a number of complaints from concerned parents, over the toys' small parts like projectile missiles presenting a choking hazard to small children, eventually put an end to the line.

The version of Starzinger I have here on DVD was newly redubbed in 2009, and tries to condense three of the more important story arcs of related episodes into three movies which each tell somewhat-complete stories, but are still part of an overall trilogy.  The main premise of the series involved the quest of three cyborg guardians to deliver the beautiful telempathic Princess Aurora to the Great Planet at the center of the galaxy. It seems that the Great Planet was formerly the source of all beneficial energy that endowed all the galaxy's living creatures with life and peace, but the former queen of the Great Planet is aging, and the radiations from the Great Planet have been corrupted, resulting in normal alien races becoming delvolved into evil space mutants. Doctor Kitty, a beautiful lady scientist from Earth, discovers that her adopted daughter, the orphaned Princess Aurora, sole survivor of the ruling royal family of the moon, is the pnly person who possesses the proper telempatic gifts to restore the beneficial energy of the Great Planet and is destined to replace the ageing queen and become the new queen of the Great Planet. Dr. Kitty selects the powerful but impulsive and undisciplined cyborg Jan Kudo (based on the Monkey King) to be the Princess' elite warrior, and guide her on her Journey to the West Center of the Galaxy in safety. She informs them that they will also encounter two alien cyborgs as they set out on their mission, who will also swear allegiance to the Princess Aurora, and join Jan Kudo as her protectors. These turn out to be Don Hakka, a short, stout, green-armored cyborg from a muddy planetoid, who is gluttonous and crude-mannered, but nevertheless heroic, and Sir Jogo, a tall, lanky blue-armored cyborg from a watery planetoid with a calm, analytical nature (he often consults a handheld computer to calculate the odds of whether some intended plan of action will lead to success or failure). Together with the red-armored cyborg Jan Kugo who is brash and impulsive and given to acting without thinking, although well-intentioned, their personalities and distinctive weapons and powers make them a well-balanced trio for guarding Aurora, but she often has to caution them that the various foes they encounter were orignally peaceful alien creatures and are not responsible for their actions in their now-mutated state, so they must combat them without using lethal force. The princess' kind and compassionate nature causes all three of her escorts to develop feelings for her, which is sometimes the source of conflict between them. Eventually, the three warriors encounter Bellamiss, a female cyborg warrior whose personality is similar to Jan Kugo's. She's not really evil, but simply a misguided patriot trying to protect her homeworld. She can't see how evil her own Queen Larisse is, because the Queen just happens to closely resemble Bellamiss' poor deceased mother. In a surprising turn for a children's cartoon, Jan Kugo eventually does fall in love with her, even though they've battled each other several times, but Bellamiss sacrifices her own life to avenge the deaths of the last refugees from her destroyed world after they have been killed by a rampaging electromagnetic space creature. Jan Kugo weeps bitter tears over her death. There is a surprising amount of emotional expression and conflicts of personality and internal intrigue among the space mutants for a kids' cartoon. At one point the Princess even threatened to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner by aliens who sought to drain her of her telempathic powers and use them for their own gain.

BettyReggie


rusty

I finished watching The Crown Season 1 and enjoyed it a lot.  Now I'm working on The Colony Season 3.

BettyReggie

I watched That 70's Show this morning.

rusty

I finished The Colony Season 3 and am 70% of the way through Cloak and Dagger.  It has been very good so far, much better than I was expecting.

BettyReggie

#685
Riverdale Season #2 Espoide #3

BettyReggie


BettyReggie

I'm on the 2nd disc of Riverdale Season #2


DeCarlo Rules

Anime. Nothing but anime. I've been watching:
THE BIG O (Seasons 1 & 2; 26 episode TV series)
GIANT ROBO: The Animation (8-episode OAV)
BABEL II: Perfect Collection (4-episode OAV)
BABEL II: BEYOND INFINITY (13-episode TV series)
TIGER & BUNNY The Movie: THE BEGINNING
TIGER & BUNNY The Movie: THE RISING
CYBORG 009: The Cyborg Soldier
(first 8 episodes from 2001-02 TV series)
009 RE:CYBORG (anime movie)
CYBORG 009: CALL OF JUSTICE (found it on YouTube, but NetFlix has it officially)
009-01 (13-episode TV series)
GAIKING: The Movie Collection (3 films edited together from 15 TV episodes)
DANGUARD ACE: The Movie Collection (3 films edited together from 15 TV episodes)

Tuxedo Mark

recently:

Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears (downloads)
Kaleido Star (need to check if I ever actually bought the volume 6 DVD)
Vampire Knight (on the first disc of Guilty)
Sailor Moon S (need to get the second Blu-ray set)
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (saw it through downloads, watching it on DVD now)
BV-kiss-small
Riverdale Reviewed
http://riverdalereviewed.wordpress.com
Every episode of "Riverdale", "The New Archies", and "Archie's Weird Mysteries" reviewed.
My digital wish list
https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/14FS742SI1R5I

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