윤

Even more outrageous is that Miller not only probably relished being under that mask, but he’s still on their payroll. Though no way for these lines.

“We’ll escape, we’ll escape into the future—into that dimension we’ve never seen… all of you join me, in escape!”Kid’s interest in Godzilla piqued by the latest CG fests afforded me the opportunity to revisit and share my 昭和-era favorites, including the psychedelic Smog Monster with that startling sight of the big guy from a roller coaster and this denouement of the would-be conqueror from Planet X. I’d later learn many of the stark final moments of characters in Japanese film and television (see Star Blazers for more egregious examples) were edited out of our impressionable young minds, but listening to the original audio at last, that doesn’t seem to have been the case, and the meta-dread following me all these years seems justified.

It’s good enough to stand on its own, even for viewers like me who aren’t necessarily subject to the period nostalgia (I did wear the fuck out of those pants in high school), but I can imagine the frustration if I were by these licensing blackouts imposed on Netflix. The measures are more reminiscent of “White Christmas”, aren’t they, but my mind went first, as it is prone more so than ever nowadays, to my favorite Black Mirror, which does take me back—and forward—how fulfilling would the soundtrack at San Junipero be without Amazon’s reach, or if the arcade required subscription to multiple gaming services?

Without the luxury of cable service during college and the collapse of MTV afterward, music of that era was almost exclusively an aural experience, so those streamers I mentioned the other day led me down a rabbit hole with many period treasures like this Anton Corbijn-directed classic (other versions turn off the video for twenty seconds about halfway in), though his promo for the equally memorable B-side is nowhere to be found. Interesting that the genre’s referred to as electronic body music (“commonly abbreviated as EBM”, which is worse), which must also betray the blindness of its participants to historical perspective.

Twitch’s algorithm recommended a streamer who plays mostly 80’s videos from the UK, and enough of them were right up my alley (well, that particular alley) I tuned in to see some that I must have missed on MTV or have only the faintest memory of, including the catchy Propaganda hit above and this Secession single. Why does it seem acts named themselves back then by taking whatever words happen to be available? I’m unsure how he skirts the obvious copyright violations, other than not having the audience to draw attention to them, but I wonder if, technology willing, the videos were actually being mixed could these broadcasts be justified as DJ-like performances, where instead of just transitioning into one another, clips or images from the next in queue are spliced in towards the end?

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.

Seems it’s been five years since I last revisited this staple of my youth (and I find myself more curious about my circumstances when I did than what I left of them; hence the new tag); maybe by measuring the intervals I can determine the rate of my regression, though in this case the catalyst was the Shout! Factory channel on Twitch, which airs two episodes of the program weekday afternoons to all of a dozen viewers. It’s hard to stay focused on a traditional broadcast, complete with commercial breaks for their catalogue, when the Animal Farm that’s America is being addressed by other streamers, and there’s not even anyone in the chat. Wanting to see Sarah Douglas naked again, I opened Season 2 and found a story I couldn’t remember but seemed pieced together from various Star Treks. Title coincides with the final season of the satisfying Dark series on Netflix, who’s sure to remake it themselves. Small talk from Maya while resisting the urge to mate with Koenig on her study of “Comparative Universal Theology” is reminiscent of Serling or Seuss: “An interesting thing, we [Psychons] managed to find our God, creator of this universe, to find that He had a God, who created a bigger one.”

Sure, True Detective’s second season sucked, but Fargo’s more than made up for it, and with Game of Thrones arguably reaching its zenith, Mr. Robot thankfully returning in a month and the implausible takeover of a network by comical DC characters, it begs the question, why return to a relic that was itself put to pasture by the very Law and Order franchise which has been a season from retirement for the better part of a decade? Syndication, of course, and though there’s a lot less of it, my stubborn refusal to (re)join the Netflix generation but forgo further investment in hard copies has created an interesting delivery model that’s representative of most my preoccupations as of late.