윤

No wonder I don’t remember this one from Saturday mornings, it’s just a rehash of the epic Executioners from Shaolin (with Lo Lieh quasi-reprising a similar villain he played 3 years prior after amazingly another 73 films), though Kara Hui demonstrates excellent form in her mentor role. She still looks great, while poor Gordon Liu might provide a glimpse of my future beside my own young auntie.

This episode in particular had a profound effect upon me when I was but a small child watching reruns of this syndicated show in the 80’s: I wondered why the villain couldn’t find the micro-library with his initial X-ray scan, and Spidey had it hidden in his webshooter all along (also reused animation). This lack of continuity struck me [even then] as an egregious flaw in presentation, stayed with me throughout the years, and put me on the path towards seeking consistency in all things.

Dreading the prospect of returning to my regularly scheduled programming, I continue exploring later seasons of Mission: Impossible—though I swear, when Willy’s hair gets too long, I’m definitely stopping and digging out my Police Squad! DVD—and watched the episode they liked enough to remake as the opener of the Eighties revival, where the IMF must fool a hitman with the challenging MO of rolling dice to make his decisions “random”. (The latter I would find on YouTube, and yeah, it wasn’t a major studio production like the original, but at least they tried to correct the glaring mistake of faking the hotel address.) So, a cross between Two-Face and the Joker? Robert Conrad aced the role with that same James West confidence, and Lesley Ann Warren was a 70’s hottie.

The retrofest continues. Last night I completed the Gerber Defenders run after what, 30 years, and today a few episodes of the recently-reissued Johnny Sokko compilation. Like Shout’s ウルトラセブン from last year, video quality is positively barbaric (my early Nineties ジャイアントロボ Laserdisc seemed like a remaster), but it’s excusable this time around, as they got the American dubbed version, which I’ve only seen in my youth as the “Voyage into Space” remix. Man, we would go nuts when that showed up Saturday afternoons.

I haven’t seen anything yet like that artsy Ultraseven episode, but the body count is simply staggering for a children’s show. Closing in on half a century of enlightenment later, I can’t imagine a 10-year-old being revealed as a master spy then getting shot dead in the back by his former masters, outside of maybe SVU.

Must be all the comics I’ve been reading lately, or the feeling of empowerment from last night’s speed feat, but this morning I was quite the badass, at first offering to protect a young feline stowaway from behind a long curtain hiding bloody bathtubs. “Not even the Thundercats could stop me,” I assured her. Then I was outside, watching said cartoon, wherein John Travolta led a squad of mafia thugs, the lot of them having been pulled through time & space to do the bidding of their evil master (Mumm-Ra?). In addition to the novel amalgamation, I remarked how surprisingly good the animation was, pointing to the detailed light work on their jackets, but my companion was less impressed, replying that she’d seen this one and the villain was someone not so unfamiliar.

A group of us stormed their headquarters, taking a stairway up from a market on the street. The first room upstairs was for a conference, and I marched through, not taking notice of its participants like a determined 이병헌. (Come to think of it, my stride was more 高倉 健 in The Yakuza, wasn’t it?) I finally met with resistance from an Asian bodyguard who shot me once, and as that had no effect, threw shuriken, which I simply removed from where they had lodged in my arm and returned; unfortunately for him, he didn’t possess my inexplicable regenerative superpowers à la Warren Ellis. The next few along the way I tossed out the windows, describing my technique of immediately surmising the situation, noting all possible tools available to me, then acting faster than apparently they could react. When I felt the realism challenged, I decided that maybe I ought to be breaking the glass with a chair or something before throwing their relatively soft bodies through them. The boss was an invalid old man, helplessly sprawled across a bed, and his young wife pleaded for mercy. Their child was a newborn with an affliction that required it be fully wrapped in bandages. I picked up the bundle and held it to my shoulder as if it were my own, and felt compassion.