Category: Live Action

Pacific Rim: Sie Sind Das Essen Und Wir Sind Die Jäger!

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When Guillermo del Toro does an American super robot movie where huge mecha battle equally huge monsters, a single website cannot cover it effectively. Therefore it takes the combined might of The Cockpit, Ogiue Maniax, and us at the Reverse Thieves to handle the Category 5 Kaiju that is Pacific Rim. While the movie was hardly perfect we generally gush about it while taking apart some of its weaker aspects. The greatest regret is we did not bring up Godannar more in the podcast.

If anyone was curious this Wiki has a fairly good trivia section for each Kaiju in the movie and what classic monster inspired them. If you want to see the inspiration for the Jaeger names, I have to assume it was this.

If nothing else, this is the only Pacific Rim podcast you will listen to with a Natalie Merchant joke in it. So come drift with us.

The Cockpit – Episode 4 – Pacific Rim

Ongoing Investigations: Case #218

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narutaki Thanks to Netflix I had a chance to sit down and watch Adventure Time S1. It is not as if I haven’t watched the show, I’ve just seen random episodes here and there, but I wanted to watch it in order from the beginning. Really there is no need to do this if the first season is any indication, but hey I like to do things in order when I can!

Things I took away from this season: LSP is the best princess with the best voice, George Tekai is always down for a laugh, the most over the kids’ heads joke was when they sack the nut castle, and Whywolves are creatures possessed by the spirit of inquiry . . . and bloodlust.

I really wish Netflix would add more seasons but it sounds like that won’t be happening for a long time. I will have to supplement myself with comics.

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After a long break we get the return of The Venture Bros. in season five. I enjoyed season four but it just felt like it was one step below everything that came before it. Season four was good. I usually got several laughs every episode. Some of the stuff around the Revenge Society and S.P.H.I.N.X. was amazing. I did a whole post on Everybody Comes to Hank’s. It just was never as good as it was in the original three seasons. Something about the plots just felt like they were spinning their wheels despite a lot of things going on in each episode. It was fun but lacking that spark that made the earlier episodes more than just quotable pop culture romps.

Other than the recent Halloween special (which was more of a hype man for the new season than anything else) there has not been a regular episode since November 21, 2010. I did hear quite a bit of rumbling on the day that the new episode came out that people were not than enthusiastic about the return and perhaps they should have let the 4th season be the finale. And the last one hour episode would not have been the worst place to end things all things considered. But the Internet loves to be a group of snarky bastards who claim that everything is over or sycophantic fanboys who can’t see anything in front of them so it’s hard to it as any gauge of quality.

Maybe it is merely a case of absence making the heart grow fonder but I have been majorly grooving the first three episodes of the new season. In retrospect the Halloween special seemed like a strong return to form. But it is much harder to make a solid season than lead with a strong beginning and then never live up to that start. So far I don’t see that happening. I mean I might get a flood of comments about how the is the WORST … SEASON … EVER but that would require us to get comments. But so far I have not really heard hide nor hare about opinions of the new season. But I have been on Twitter much less lately so that might have a lot to do with that.

But I think the key to the new season is it feels fresh. As much as I said this season is a return to form in many ways by changing things up a little while still keeping things authentic it feels like some real progress. The main problem with season four is it felt that no matter what happened or what changed the whole things was just movement in place. A mile run in a circle still bring you back to the same place you started. The new season just has a different feeling of momentum. And it feels great.

Oh but really I want to see Dr. Orpheus this season. I love that guy. Something about his Doctor Strange melodrama turned up to c (because sometimes even 11 is just too small a number) just tickles my fancy.

The Ongoing Investigations are little peeks into what we are watching and reading outside of our main posts on the blog. We each pick three things that we were interested in a week and talk a bit about them. There is often not much rhyme or reason to what we pick. They are just the most interesting things we saw since the last Ongoing Investigation.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #217

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Just when I thought I would have no new Type-Moon manga to talk about I found the first 2 chapters of Tsuki no Sango. Tsuki no Sango is an interesting little project that had Saizensen pair together Kinoko Nasu and Maaya Sakamoto for a short story. It started as Sakamoto reading the story while animation was played in the background. It was popular enough that it has been spun off into several different mediums.

But as a Type-Moon fan I enjoy getting all the Nasu I can. Therefore it is a real boon when a story like this is converted into manga form as that is far easier to see translated than something that usually gets overlooked like drama CDs. (It is not like I’m tripping over Starlit Marmalade translations.) This was drawn by Sasaki Shonen who also did the Shingetsutan Tsukihime manga.

Kinoko Nasu is clearly no stranger to using The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter as in inspiration for stories. Tsukihime means Moon Princess although Arcueid is a much looser adaptation of Kaguya-hime. And in that vein Tsuki no Sango in set in the year 3000 where a princess descended from lunar inhabitants lives on an island on the now stagnating Earth. The Prince of Arishima wishes to make this Storyteller Girl his bride but so far she has asked impossible dowries for her hand in marriage from all her suitors. What is the tale of the Storyteller Girl that made her how she is today?

So far the Storyteller Girl is the biggest hook to the story. She seem to be a proper princess on the outside but overall she seems a spunky Arcueid complete with short blonde haircut and energetic bursts of activity mixed with contemplative melancholy. She also has twin maids that remind me of another similar pair.

This is a far more subdued story that we are used to seeing from Nasu. So far at least. There are no magical orders steeped in blood soaked conspiracies. It seems more a mixture of character study and love story like Notes rather than something like Fate/Stay Night. And I am perfectly fine with that. Can’t wait to read more of it.

Also have to find out what the deal with Small Person is. 

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 The Wake is a new mini-series from the Vertigo line. I was originally curious because Scott Snyder was writing, but I remained unsure. Then I saw the art by Sean Murphy and Matt Hollingsworth and it totally blew me away. The first issue came out this week.

The story centers around Dr. Archer, a cetologist, who is approached by a government organization looking into some strange phenomenon in the ocean around Alaska. She meets a team already selected who were told various other stories about what they are investigating. The mystery setup is classic. We also get glimpses into the distant future and the ancient past implying this manifestation is long reaching.

The art takes the story to another level. The heavy black lines and stark shadows create the perfect atmosphere for this tense, evil in the deep, mystery. The color choices give it a pulpy feel that I just love.

One thing I’m not crazy about is the cover, it really doesn’t do justice to the interior art and doesn’t pull you in.

The Ongoing Investigations are little peeks into what we are watching and reading outside of our main posts on the blog. We each pick three things that we were interested in a week and talk a bit about them. There is often not much rhyme or reason to what we pick. They are just the most interesting things we saw since the last Ongoing Investigation.

Continue reading →