Category Archives: thought exercise

Shine on, Geocities. Shine on… Forever

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Yesterday, October 26, 2009, was the day Geocities died.

Now some might call the Geocities we saw hobbling about with an IV attached to its arm not the “true” Geocities. It had, after all, been acquired by Yahoo back around 2000, and gradually lost a lot of what made Geocities so appealing in the mid to late 90s amidst both infrastructure modifications and the evolution of online trends. However, I think that deep within that mass of tubes and cybernetic implants there beat the heart of that noble site which once told anime fans that the best place to put a website was in a Pagoda in Tokyo. And even if that weren’t the case, we still have some evidence (thanks to archive.org) that it existed, and that it gave you 20mb of free space. Do you know big that is? It”s like four to six mp3s!

I’d previously talked about Geocities and how despite never having a Geocities site myself, it was an important part of my youth and my fandom. So many people I met online had Geocities sites, or Fortune City, or Angelfire. Memories of my favorite vido game, NiGHTS into dreams, are tied inexorably to my time on these sites. More broadly though, it represented that era when kids of all ages realized that yes, they could have their own website. On the internet. For free. Gradually, that thrill turned to finding out that yes, even you could implement a scrolling marquee and javascript pop-ups. The most important thing though was that it was yours.

I know some people are ashamed of their old Geocities sites, and I think that’s kind of silly. Sure, the sites might not live up to our current understanding of accessible web design, but they’re so representative of their era that to be relieved that they’re gone is to be relieved that a piece of history has been erased, both greater and personal. After all, that was who you were back in 1997, and you should be proud of that.

Relating to NES Sprites

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Whenever I say there’s something special about video game graphics during the NES/Master System era, some will believe that it’s simply due to nostalgia, while others will agree with me, but won’t be able to explain why. Sometimes those who agree with me will even chalk it up to nostalgia themselves. I however believe that there are concrete reasons as to why the level of graphics that the 8-bit systems achieved for home consoles holds such significance, and I’d like to discuss one of them here. I’m going to be using mainly NES graphics and not Master System ones, because 1) the NES was more popular and 2) the Master System actually had better graphics overall, and we want to look at the less-good.


From left to right: Berzerk, Robot from Berzerk, Circus


From left to right: Mario, Megaman, Karnov

What is the significant feature that the characters below all have in common that the characters above do not, aside from obvious graphical quality improvements?

Answer: They have faces.

This makes it easier to identify with them as characters, and gives them a sense of personality. In the NES era, the graphics were strong enough on the popular consoles to portray characters’ faces and to give them facial expressions, even if it’s the same expression all the time. This is important because we as humans tend to see ourselves in our surroundings. Scott McCloud talks about this a good deal in Understanding Comics, but it really is something fundamental. Two dots and and a line becomes a face. A semi-circle shape can be a smile or a frown depending on which way it’s facing. It allows players to identify with the characters.

While this does not take into account those games which feature primarily vehicles or objects inanimate objects, my focus is not so much on them, as I believe they have a somewhat similar appeal, only focused on their fantastical realism rather than their human quality.

Even those characters who practically had no eyes, noses, or mouths still benefited from the 8-bit graphical quality, as it allowed the games to clearly delineate an area of the body as the head.


From left to right: Simon Belmont, Bill Rizer, Ryu Hayabusa

This was especially useful in portraying characters with more human proportions as opposed to the big-headed cartoonish sprites from before, as it allowed the characters to seem realistic on the NES while again still giving them some sense of personality.

That is not to say that faces on sprites were a wholly unique experience to the 8-bit era. The NES and the Master System were not the first consoles to regularly portray characters with faces, with that honor probably going to the Colecovision in 1982. However, the difference here is a matter of timing, as 1983 was also the year of the North American Video Game Crash, and so in the minds of most people, graphics went from Atari to Nintendo, and if you look at the graphics of that era, they more often than not could barely differentiate a head from a neck, with one notable exception being Pitfall for the Atari 2600. Hey, it’s not all art and discovery.

The 8-Bit NES era was when graphics were good enough so that almost anyone who made a game for the console could give a sprite a face (and in essence, a personality), and thanks to good timing also was when video games were again popular enough to be a common feature in households. Graphics were certainly not the only factor in endearing the NES (and to a lesser extent the Master System) to young gamers, but as humans are visual creatures, graphics played a significant role in implanting the memories of these games into their minds.

Celebrating the C-Class of the C-Class: Black Dynamite and Animexploitation

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Last night, I had the fortune of seeing the Blaxploitation Homage/Parody Black Dynamite, and it was fantastic. Despite not being familiar with blaxploitation films. The closest I’ve ever gotten to watching anything like that was The Last Dragon, which I’m kind of sure doesn’t even count. Anyway, fun was had by all, and for a good review you should read the one over at Subatomic Brainfreeze. And if you have the opportunity to go see it, go see it. Because you have the opportunity.

When I got home, Sub linked me to an interview with Scott Sanders and Michael Jai White, co-creators of Black Dynamite (with White playing the movie’s titular character), and something there caught my interest. In it, they said that their goal was not to make Black Dynamite representative of the apogee of blaxploitation cinema, but the films that were made when studios realized they had a successful formula on their hands, and sought to milk that cash cow for all it was worth. They wanted to celebrate the films which went through a checklist of items,  from the rich white guy by the pool side, to the hot bitches, to the liberal application of kung fu, all wrapped in a packaging of shoddy cinematography and excessively expository dialogue. They wanted to celebrate the successful, yet mediocre blaxploitation films in all their film school-reject glory.

It’s an unusual idea I think, in any sort of media, to look fondly upon those works which were just kind of okay at best and weren’t terribly deep, but which sold and made names for themselves. Even in anime discussion, we usually celebrate the so-bad-it’s-good works while shunning the mediocre. And with anime the way it is now, people accuse it of running through checklists, utilizing excessively expository dialogue, and exploiting anime fans to make ultra-formulaic shows. Which they might be, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with it.

From the bit of reading on blaxploitation I’ve done since yesterday (which obviously makes me an expert, right?), the genre came about when US movie studios, suffering the lowest revenues in about 20-30 years, realized that the African Americans were spending a large amount of money in the theaters and so decided to specifically target them by making movies for black people about black people. Much like Super Hero Comics fans and figure-buying moe fans, they became the target audience for relevant genres of entertainment media, for better or worse, because they had the money. Creativity aside, companies would like nothing more than for your dollars to go into their pockets so that they can keep making new works and continue to profit.

That’s the way things go, and much like how Black Dynamite really celebrates the genre of film it’s parodying, warts and all, I have to wonder how fans and creators in the future will regard the anime that comes out now. Maybe in ten to twenty years, we’ll be seeing throwbacks to those old shows of 2009. Not remakes, and not references to the ones that made you think, but the ones that told you, John Animefan, that there’s some kung fu and titties and nekomimi nurse maids in this show so why shouldn’t you watch it?

Stupid Emperor Baseball Girls

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I’ve been reading up a little about Japanese history as of late, and one interesting bit is that the Taisho Emperor was reported as something of a numb-skull. Described as “aloof” and “feeble-minded,” the most famous story is the time he rolled up a document in order to peer through it like a telescope in front of his ministers and officials. He was never allowed in public again. In light of the recent display of 1920s Japanese girls engaging in America’s Favorite Pastime in the form of Taisho Yakyuu Musume, my first reaction was wondering how the existence of a less-than-good Emperor might cast a dubious shadow on the show and its setting.

My second reaction however, was the realization that no moment in history is truly idyllic, even if it might be a lot harder to write about the happy times fighting in the trenches of World War I than it is to portray 1950s America as an A-OK happy fun time (as TV shows from that era often did). If I started looking at TYM from that perspective, I’d probably have to do with every period piece of fiction ever, and that’s not a road I’m willing to travel down.

There might have been some riots during the time Koume and Akiko were learning how to throw a ball, but forcibly attaching the politics of the era to what is supposed to be a harmless show about girls learning about self-improvement (with some yuri humor on the side) would be a definite problem that likely would be purely for my own smug satisfaction, which is the last thing I’d want.

Pronouncin’ Them Anime Words

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For a long time, I was bothered by really inaccurate pronunciations of anime words. I can tell you of the time I was in the comic store and heard a guy remarking that there was a ton of “magna.” I’m sure you’ve seen the people talking about how Sa-soo-ke is their favorite Naruto character. Then something changed.

I’m not sure if it was the realization that as much as I’ve studied Japanese, my own language skills aren’t perfect, but at some point I realized that there’s a good deal of futility in trying to change the way people pronounce Japanese words, particularly anime ones. Even the word “anime” itself falls under this scrutiny. Some people say “annimay” because it’s closer to the word animation, others try to go full on with the Japanese pronunciation with “ah-nee-meh,” and you’ll hear variations every which way. Who’s right? Is there any need to have a right or a wrong pronunciation, as long as we understand one another? Should we be criticizing people who pronounce “karaoke” the non-Japanese way? What if you say it the Japanese way and people have no idea what you’re saying? Should we be criticizing people who pronounce any foreign word outside of the pronunciation in its original language?

English has tons of variations even within the United States, let alone the rest of the world, and while those variations aren’t as drastic as, say, the dialects in China, the result is that you get a whole slew of differing pronunciations for the same word. And then you want to throw Japanese words on top of that?

It’s crazy I tell you.

THAT FAT GUY IS AMURO RAY

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When I first went to see Paprika in theaters, one thing that caught my attention was the voices. At first, I could not pinpoint them. Who is the main character? I know I’ve heard her voice before… And then it hit me: Hayashibara Megumi, that most prolific of 90s voice actors (who’s still doing work today and has recently written her own book), was the voice behind Paprika. Then another voice struck me. THAT FAT GUY IS AMURO RAY! I felt the desire to jump out of my seat and shout, “AHA!” but decided against it. Unfortunately for me though, I was not accompanied to the theater by any friends who were particularly into anime, so I could not share my discoveries at the time.

There are anime fans who have watched just as much if not more than I have, who are unable to pick up on a character being voiced by an actor from their favorite series, but there are also anime fans who have watched far less than me who are able to pick up on the subtle nuances of a voice and determine, despite any sort of wild differences in the voices used for the two characters, that the same actor plays these roles. And they’re not even always seiyuu otaku!

What is it that makes some people more able to recognize voice actors than others? I’m not applying this solely to Japanese seiyuu, but rather voice actors in general from Frank Welker to Kamiya Akira. I don’t consider myself to have a keen sense of hearing, so I can’t say I’m particularly tuned to any difficult-to-perceive aspects of voices, but when I do notice a recognizable voice, it generally has to do with something that one role has in common with another, even if those roles vary wildly. Of course, I don’t always get it right, and there are times when a voice hits me but I just cannot pinpoint it. I don’t know, I unfortunately do not have the proper vocabulary to explain it.

Perhaps someone with greater knowledge of voices and audio could explain better.

Non-Psychic Psychic Sword vs Hindu Magic Lasers

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A few months back I was fortunate enough, blessed, I might say, to have the opportunity watch two incredible animated classics: Psychic Wars and Crystal Triangle.

Seeing those two OVAs on the same day made me aware of just how similar these two fine works are. Both concern heroes in noble professions who must confront an ancient inhuman race of evil beings who wish to once again replace humans as the dominant species of the planet using the most nonsense logic and power set possible. I know that describes a lot of bad 80s OVAs but these two in particular are so alike that if the world were a little different, I think that we’d be seeing not a crossover between all of the Pretty Cure girls or Naruto, Luffy, and Goku, but one between Psychic War’s Retsu Ukyou and Crystal Triangle’s Kamishiro Kouichirou. Or at the very least arguing about who would win in a fight.

Actually, we could do that right now. Let’s compare our two heroes.

Retsu Ukyou: Surgeon, visited by ancient spirits who give him “Psychic Powers,” which apparently means being able to summon swords and spears out of thin air. Shirt has a tendency to rip open to reveal his mighty pecs. Travels back in time to fight evil beasts whose goal is to travel into the future so that they can wipe out humanity. Does the nasty with a girl who turns out to be their last surviving member.

Kamishiro Kouichirou: World-famous archaeologist, gained his “Upanishad” powers and his ability to read “Jindai Moji” by studying with monks. Upanishad in this case manifests itself as the ability to shoot lasers out of magical batons. Shirt also has a tendency to burst open to further emphasize masculinity. Fights an evil over ten million years old that consists of alien buddhist monk dinosaurs who have been waiting for an evil star to empower them so that they can take over the world once more. Does not do the nasty with the girl who is the catalyst for the evil monsters’ return, but would have.

You’d think Kamishiro would definitely have the advantage with his Upanishad giving him a range advantage, but I’m pretty sure Retsu would be able to think of a way to get in close, where his superior close combat weapons would give him the edge. Ultimately though, the fight would come down to a matter of wits and cunning, as both men are incredibly resourceful and would be trying out-think the other. Is Retsu standing near any crates of dynamite, for instance? Well maybe he is, but it’s actually a trap to lure Kamishiro to attack, during which Retsu would use his knowledge of human anatomy to deliver a knock-out spear. But of course Kamishiro is too smart for that.

It’s a complex scenario which far transcends any intellectual battles by Lelouch and Schneizel, Kira and L, and Encyclopedia Brown and Wilford Wiggins.

Now, if the two of them could team up to fight the Most Dangerous Soldier known as Geist, then we’d have a real Japanimation on our hands.

The Many Faces of the Bionic Commando

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Bionic Commando, originally an arcade game from 1987, found its way onto the Famicom/NES, where a new plot involving Nazis Badds and an improvement on gameplay features made it a hit, particularly in the United States. Since then, while not a super popular franchise, Bionic Commando has gotten a number of remakes, most notably the HD 3-D retooling of the original game, Bionic Commando: Rearmed and the 2009 Bionic Commando sequel.

In each game, you control a man with a gun and a bionic arm, whose goal it is to climb and swing through levels while eliminating enemy soldiers and reach the end of the level. While the gist of gameplay has remained fairly consistent, the art direction has not, resulting in a very different face for our cyborg hero over the years.

Our hero from left to right: Bionic Commando (Arcade, 1987), Bionic Commando (NES, 1988), Bionic Commando (Game Boy, 1992), Bionic Commando: Elite Forces (Game Boy Color, 1999), Bionic Commando: Rearmed (PS3 and 360, 2008), Bionic Commando (PS3 and 360, 2009)

Here you can see the Bionic Commando go from a simple blue-haired arcade hero to different degrees of fantastic and realistic, producing about as wide a range of portraits as a franchise can get. Note that portraits two, five, and six are all supposed to be the same character, i.e. Radd Spencer, bane of mustached fascists. What is immediately evident is that the NES Bionic Commando was originally made for a Japanese audience with his vaguely manga-style 80’s looks, while the newest Bionic Commandos are both conscious of the fact that the NES version built a sizable American audience, and are attempting to appeal to a childhood image of the NES game being a fairly gritty and serious affair. Square jaws are the name of the game here.

Now, compare the Game Boy version to the Game Boy Color version. Can you guess which was done by a Japanese development team and which was done by an American one? Yeah, pretty hard I know.

What I find so interesting about the GB and GBC incarnations of Bionic Commando relative to each other is that they are both trying to achieve the same aesthetic goal: a far-flung whiz-bang high-tech laser future setting for the game that appeals to the audiences in their native countries. The GB Bionic Commando is a full-on early 90s anime bishounen hero with big eyes, small mouth, and hair reminiscent of Cyborg 009 or Soldier Blue from Towards the Terra. The GBC Bionic Commando meanwhile is a rough and gruff 90s X-Treme superhero akin to Marvel’s Cable or DC’s Lobo. “Yes! This is exactly what kids want!” both development teams must have thought as they approved the designs.

If Bionic Commando gets remade again in a few years, I look forward to how the cultural fashions of the time influence our hero yet again. Who knows? Maybe he’ll be some kind of strange amalgam of realistic muscley dude, superhero, and anime protagonist.

Vocabulary Power Up with Otaku Mind

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If you’ve been paying attention to my Twitter, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been doing some vocabulary study over the past few days, and that I have been distinctly anime and geek-themed in constructing my example sentences. For example, yesterday I wrote that Jagi fomented Shin’s decision to take Yuria from Kenshiro.

Good laughs for all, this anime vocabulary buildup, except I am conscious of the fact that it is actually helping me to study. I think that says more about my mind and my anime obsession than anything else, and I worry a little about my future sanity.

I’ve used a similar method for memorizing other things, including rules of Japanese grammar as well as vocabulary, but when I try to explain these mnemonic devices and such to other people they just look at me blankly. “That doesn’t help!” they might say. In short, I’ve created a study system that works only for me because I’m a huge anime nerd.

You might be asking, “Why are you sending these sentences to Twitter?” And to that I say, I’m not entirely sure. It’s definitely not because I want it to be noticed however. I think I just concentrate and remember better when I feel like my example sentences have some kind of target or purpose, and sending them online into the great Twittering Beyond kind of accomplishes that.

The Different Perceptions of “Realism” in Anime Among Fans

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What does it mean for an anime to be “realistic?”

It’s a question which seems simple, until you realize that different people interpret and prioritize different aspects of an anime as “realism” based on their own personalities and beliefs.

Take the Gundam franchise for instance. Depending on who you ask, you will get different answers for what is the “most realistic” Gundam series. Let’s look at just Universal Century.

Some will say First Gundam, because of the complex morals the characters possess.

Some will say Zeta Gundam, because it shows how easily government corrupts.

Some will say Gundam 0083, because of the grittiness and detail of the technology and battles.

Some will say 0080 War in the Pocket because of its depiction of what impact war has on the innocent.

Some will say 08th MS Team because of the way it follows the down-to-Earth “common soldier.”

And so on.

In every case, the supporters are correct, but only when they define “realism” by their own standards. Just as easily, I can accuse First Gundam of being unrealistic for having characters realize things a little too quickly, or Zeta for its over-the-top characterizations. I can accuse 0083 of being unrealistic for a lack of depth in its characters, and 0080 for being too preachy in its anti-war message. I can even accuse 08th MS Team of not being about the REALLY common soldiers, i.e. the ones NOT riding in Mobile Suits, or simply say that Gundam as a whole is nowhere close to “realistic” because the concept itself is preposterous.

The idea of “realistic romance” also has the same issue. Is a show realistic because the characters talk like real people? Is a show realistic because it conveys emotions in a way that is easily relatable? Is a show realistic because nobody falls in love (provided you believe true love isn’t realistic)?

You can already see some of the different ways to define “realism” in regards to fiction. There’s an external realism, where everything looks and acts as it does in the real world. There’s an emotional realism, where the characters’ feelings appear to be so genuine that they mirror your own. There’s a conceptual realism, where complex ideas and ideologies show a world of shades of gray. But in these cases and beyond, how we define realism is of course based on our experiences in life.

It’s just up to us whether or not we want to understand everyone else’s “reality.”