Even more Giant Robots...

It might as well have been giant robot theme week, but once you get into it... Grendizer is perhaps better know as Goldorak by French audiences, these two lovely videos pay testimony to it's enduring popularity:



If my spotty French is anything to go by: "Goldorak is dead, and my dad killed him."



Noted French Goldorak fans Metallica there, weighing in. Aside from these little gems, Grendizer was also the premier anime in the Arabic world, and Italian fans are now making the feature length remake themselves:

More Giant Robots!

After that giant Gundam Statue, another beloved Japanese giant Robot franchise gets it's life-size recreation. Considering japan's existing lead in Creepy robot technology, the hour draws nearer when they'll just attack China, and their crippling national debt be damned. If fake giant robots become ubiquitous, as they are now poised to, how long before real giant robots do? Sure, there's no point, but when has that ever been a problem?

Giant Robots Go!

In a typical 20 minute interval from work I looked up a cartoon I watched as a kid, because that's what you do with those intervals. I remembered this because of it's annoying/awesome theme song and bizarre Japanese dream logic storytelling, barely compensated by an English Dub.



It just looks a little weird, especially compared to the show, which just wasn't as filled with cool for 1985 flip-wipes, and seizure inducing colour effects. This is of course, because the Japanese opening is different and much weirder. Observe:



People who watched this show in America apparently had footage of this show, interspersed with footage of another Japanese giant Robot show, and some unconvincing 'alternate universe' explanation for these two different shows pasted together. Japanese stuff is difficult to make palatable to Western audiences, but there's no doubt in my mind which of these intros I would have preferred as a kid.

British politics more or less resolved for indeterminate period

Well, there we are. Conservatives get to fix the economy in the most cynical way they can come up with, but the Liberal Democrats get their reforms. The only question now is how bad they'll allow it to get before bailing. Lack of experience with coalitions, the general malaise and the little or no hope of ideological change in the government mean this might not last until the end of the year, if it wasn't for the horrible state of the Labour party. There won't be a competent opposition, maybe not for years. But there is some hope that the old Labour will come back, the social democratic party so thoroughly destroyed by Tony Blair. That would make a difference, and if this coalition holds, it may mean a brighter future where one of the richest countries in Europe isn't also the most in Debt, or has the highest teen pregnancy rate, etc.

The future of fashion is the past.

This is way less ridiculous than you might think. Just look at the guy's outfit at the end and realise that every webmaster you know looks like this, except all the gadgets are smaller. That's how the thirties envisioned the neckbeard they knew was coming, instinctively. Women in shiny, metalic dresses? The same outfit throughout the day? These guys knew exactly what was up. There's way to much pointing out of the obvious failures. We forget that the reason we don't have rocket cars isn't because we don't want them, it's because they're too expensive, ridiculous and unsafe. So many of these things are more cyclical than we'd like to admit. Imagine sitting in the sixties movie version of H.G. Wells' time machine and looking only at beard fashions from circa 1880-2010: Seeing unkempt muttonchops degrade to pencil thin mustaches, to clean shaven, to hippie hair, degrading into sideburns, back to mullets and 'taches, on to gelled tops and goatees, to resurgent neckbeards and permastubble.