majestic

Before I return to hatewatching Sailor Moon Crystal so I can be done with it and focus on more fun things like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Steven Universe I'll take some time to introduce something I mentioned earlier: ReBoot. But! Not the reboot of ReBoot because that was so bad it's good gone so wrong that it's so bad it's good it's horrible. But anyway. I'm sure there are posters here who haven't seen the original ReBoot. I think @Malcador did, at least he expressed some desire to see the terrible reboot at some point. What is ReBoot? ReBoot is a fully CGI TV show from '94 that... whoa whoa whoa you say. TV, '94, CGI? Indeed! So we can get the prime issue out of the way then. The show looks dated. To say it aged poorly is the understatement of the century. The designs are simple, the animation is super stiff and even the highest quality sources you can potentially find look desastrous. For a long time this only existed as poor VHS scans. There's a DVD version now, but it still doesn't look good. With that out of the way, what is it about? Life in a mainframe! The first season is mostly episodic until the second season introduces a story arc. The creators constantly had to deal with cencorship (the show aired on ABC), which sometimes lead to hilarious episodes where they spoofed having to constantly rewrite parts of their scripts so they would pass evaluation. One of the best episodes of the entire run, the first season's "Talent Night" features a censor that is constantly banning acts from appearing. The episode ends with Bob summoning his "BFG"... It also features a YMCA spoof "BSnP" by a group called Small Town Binomes: Instead of monsters of the week most of the time like in other shows at the time (ahem...) in the first season the user simply uploads a game, and Mainframe's guardian Bob (sort of an anti-virus software) has to win against the user. Should the user win the game, any sprites, binomes, numerals or other inhabitants of Mainframe will be reduced to nulls. This is later phased out for a more story driven format. When it's not user interference that troubles Mainframe it is the two computer viruses that are around. Megabyte (voiced by the magnificent Tony Jay) who wants to control all of Mainframe and Hexadecimal, a complete nutjob whose only goal is to cause as much wanton destruction and chaos as possible. The show really kicks off in the second season when a web creature invades Mainframe. At the end of the season, a group of ABCs is seen attacking Mainframe too (ABC and the creators had a ,uhm, falling out over creative differences). It's delightfully full of every possible piece of nerd humor and reference you can dream up. From the command line of Mainframe called Phong, to the Diner owner Dot Matrix, the freelance hacker called Mouse and the fun viruses. It even has an X-Files spoof episode in the second season that features CGI Special Agents Fax Modem and Data Nully (voiced by none other than Gillian Anderson herself). Fax Modem, Data Nully and Bob also have one of the best dialogues ever. Assuming one knows X-Files and liked it. Modem keeps telling Bob his conspiracy theories, like how there is no user and the Guardians perpetrate the User myth to keep control over computer systems or that his friend Mouse is maybe a web creature in disguise. Bob eventually asks Data Nully: "Is your partner completely random?"

Ah, the S movie. It's a little infamous, because, mild spoiler here: If that does read like it makes no sense, it will once you see it. To be honest I am probably a little too hard on the flaws of Sailor Moon Crystal. I especially like to beat up Rei over her uselessness precisely because Ms. Takeuchi complained about the liberties taken with her character. The actual reason that this is so problematic in Crystal is something else of course, and I guess you know that anyway, but it bears typing out: It's arguably the weakest and least interesting part in the 90ies anime, and it is mostly there because the showrunners had to put in manga story beats and pad the runtime of each episode by having a more or less pointless monster fight, and some neat repetition for the actual target audience. Sailor Moon Crystal on the other hand is purely focused on these elements, and when they aren't good - and let's face it, they're not, and dare I say it, they could not be with such a direct adaptation - then that is much, much more in the foreground. Much more noticable. It becomes something worth complaining about, instead of something you shrug off because when one's lying on the floor laughing about Minako being hilariously goofy, Ami being awkward, or Rei and Usagi fighting, or Makoto thinking that random boy she just met looks like her old senpai, there barely is any time or reason to think about it. Mike and Jay mention this in one of the Half in the Bag episodes that prove that not even their taste in movies is infallible. Yep, talking about the Skyfall Half in the Bag here. I disagree with what they're saying, that movie's ridiculous plot points distract me enough to dislike it. It crosses the point where the plot holes can be ignored and they become glaring and stupid. The entire movie is a crapfest for me, but they liked it well enough and therefore weren't bothered as much by the plot holes and contrivances. I have, however, also hated every single Daniel Craig Bond film. I'd even go so far as to rank Timothy Dalton's films above them. That by the time of Skyfall I had no good will left over didn't help either. That was strained to the breaking point in Casino Royale already and completely evaporated in the mess that Quantum of Solace was. The same happened to JJ's Kelvin Star Dreck. Beyond might be a fun movie, maybe. All I could think of watching it was why, if he has a swarm of nearly invincible mining ships that destroy everything in their wake, would the bad guy bother to go and look for some biological agent? Why? He has an invincible swarm fleet of mining ships which which he can conquer the galaxy. You moron, you don't need anything else. Just go and... dunno, conquer everything. Like Nero in Star Dreck 2009: Hey Nero, you're sitting on a mining vessel that is more powerful than the entire Star Fleet combined in this age. Maybe get your ass over to Romulus and conquer the galaxy? I mean, you can have your revenge later. It's not like it takes a while for Spock to show up, right? RIGHT? I've thought about this a bit because in the funny stuff thread someone posted a picture of the old Star Trek episode where Apollo (or, rather, a powerful alien who fancied himself a Greek god, implied to have actually been to Earth, like... yeah, Ancient Aliens guys believe) grabs the Enterprise in his oversized green hands, with a caption that went like: "To everyone who thought only Star Trek Discovery had dumb ideas." It's true that this was one of the lesser Star Trek episodes of yore, but such things do happen in a series' run. It's no problem insofar because the very next episode, "The Changeling" was a milestone of sci-fi and one of the best episodes in Star Trek history. Plus you can use seemingly stupid ideas to make a decent point, or shine a light on an issue, philosophical, social or otherwise. In Discovery, nothing of that happens. Everything that does happen is merely in service of something either stupid, totally stupid or GOD DAMNED STUPID. Well, and the PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW action scenes. God damned stupid action scenes. I can't believe that I complained about the purple space bazooka in Insurrection 20 years ago. That was harmless. Hey maybe Star Trek Nemesis is a good film by now. I'll go watch that. Plus you're absolutely right about the point you made earlier, when you don't have any decent explanation, just leave it out. The Daimon eggs of Crystal de-evolving creatures and turning them into violent GIANT MONSTERS makes no sense. Sailor Moon S never explained what these things were, or how they could bond with inanimate objects. Why bother? It made for sometimes funny, sometimes weird and sometimes really terrible monster designs. The entire world is magic anyway. Nobody's asking how Gandalf summons light in Moria. He just can. Funny minor Sailor Stars spoiler: Fair point.

SMC, Act 28: Speaking of ReBoot, have you guys seen that show? It was awesome. I'm considering to drop these write-ups. With all the pausing I need to do to write something down, it takes roughly an hour to go through an episode. That triples the torture that this is. So unless you find them fun enough, I'll... stick to small blurbs. Maybe. I admit it is a little therapeutic.

Heh. We've started to use the assignments list of our Teams channel to organize our, well, assignments and tasks. Teams only showed me that three people have access to the list, that was our team and the admin of our channel, so I figured I'd be safe and populated every one of my assignments with meme-style checkbox lists to go through. Like: Fix bug Inform users ??? Profit! Only to see that our, ahem, department head posted in the channel that he thought the list was a good idea. Yeah... uhm, I guess I better go and remove the memes and all the snark.

Just grind some rosehip and rub the fine itchy hairs on your wound. Then it'll itch, and it might even get properly infected too.

That's episode two of SuperS, so you're in luck. It's also the one with the worst dream mirror scene (at least when the show isn't targetting children), maybe outside of those that deal with characters you might acutally like. edit: Speaking of SuperS, did you notice how they were all skinny dipping in the pond before taking off and chasing after the, uhm, new character? The opening sequence, I mean.

No, I'm in the middle of a fight with Dio, Baron Zeppeli, Speedwagon and JoJo in a zombie infested graveyard next to some prison village. Didn't get to watch much recently, and when I did I wasted it on Sailor Moon Crystal. I should probably watch more JoJo and Steven Universe.

He sure has the best monologues, and his voice actor REALLY does a good job of saying Joestar-san. Dshoooooooostaaaah-SN.

I love this Unicorn of War guy, here's a quote from his 90ies Anime review where he states how much Sailor Stars is a "sin" in his eyes. Major Sailor Stars spoiler: Mental note: For the love of god stop reading the crap this guy puts out.

You're right. In the TV thread I posted that the male gaze issues of the show were down to the animators sneaking them in, and that Naoko Takeuchi wasn't very keen on them either. She did complain about the sexualization of her characters in the original anime after all (and about changing Rei). I also argued that for a 90ies anime they were pretty tame and that the show did more right than wrong when it came to empowering girls. The former is pretty much correct. There was never any need to draw the underwear of the girls (and I think Minako's scene in her backstory episode in season one stands out because it was completely unnecessary, you can't even argue that this happens because of the motion on screen, like with the very early shots of Rei's leotard during her jumps). The latter I now know is ridiculous because Rei has no character in the first place. My mistake was trusting the word of the creator, fanboys and/or drawing the conclusion that these issues weren't present in the source material. There are upskirts in there, Usagi and Ami get one in the third act for instance, and the issue then becomes that any drawing of upskirts is only problematic when men do it, so, not sure if I want to subscribe to that theory. There are also scenes in the manga where the girls are standing in positions that should reveal underwear but don't. Instead there's either nothing at all or simply skin visible. It looks weird at best and like they're wearing very tiny thongs at worst. I also honestly thought that the weird lusting of Chibi-Usa after her father was the showrunners idea. Turns out it wasn't. Between what's actually going on in the manga and what was in the 90ies anime, yes, I really would rather look at Minako's skirt blowing in the wind than being subjected to the implications at the end of the Black Moon arc. So indeed, I changed my mind. Let the showrunners have their 10 seconds of upskirts in the show. It still beats what the manga is capable of subjecting its readers to. By a mile. Oh, I agree. They never attempted to explain where their wealth comes from and left it at that in Sailor Moon S, and it pretty much worked anyway. It's a good indication that something's wrong with your material if viewers suddenly start noticing all the plot holes or the convergence of many contrivances for the story to work. Speaking of the weird shiny spots on the picture. Man, why did you have to mention that? I honestly didn't see this in the animation before. Just now that I HAVE seen it, I cannot UNSEE it.

By the way, this is what I think will happen on screen when I see these weird, broken lipped creature things that replaced the alien giraffe people in Sailor Moon Crystal in the third season:

Oh my, look at how Sailor Moon reinforces harmful stereotypes of women. Tsk, bad Sailor Moon, bad. Should have stuck closer to the feminist masterpiece that the manga is. Actually... it's not that bad showing a quartett of villains being vain, I'd say. It beats their character in the manga (although that's like stealing candy from babies). It's a bad trait, and it makes sense to show the bad guys have it, and them obsessing over superficialities like make up and beauty neatly frames the entire cosmetic industry in a less than ideal light, kind of like the first season attempted to show that having an unhealthy body image is harmful. This is a good way to teach the actual target audience something about not falling prey to consumerist explotation of a lack of self-worth. It might not be overly interesting to us as adults, but the message is there. There's something else I just recently noticed when it comes to Sailor Moon. It's an early to mid 90ies anime and whenever they have a one-off side character that's a woman, or even recurring female side characters that aren't at school any more, they all have a wide variety of jobs. Journalists, photographers, directors, scientists, an astronaut in the Sailor Moon S movie, and it is never framed as something special. Here the women just have the same job opportunities as men and they take it. The feminist masterpiece manga doesn't even have side characters that can have jobs. The characters they have are chronically anemic in terms of characterization. Heh. As for what KP likes to call hatewatching, I'm used to it by now, and I can't help it anyway. It's how I work. It is Sailor Moon and I know about it, therefore I must watch it, much like I need to finish reading the manga in the end. But at least I can make it somewhat fun by complaining about it, like I did with Star Trek Discovery. Maybe, just maybe, I will eventually undergo a psychotic break like when I watched the premiere of Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, where suddenly every problem is stripped away in my mind and I only revelled in the glory of this masterpiece of filmmaking. It was perfect. I even got up and gave the screen standing ovations when Darth Sidious disabled the entire Resistance fleet by shooting lightning at it from the ground. People around me looked at me as if I've lost my mind, but I just saw the light! Praise be to Jar Jar Abrams. *cough* bro they didn't have time for that in the original show, the hell makes you think they're going to in this one lmao; although now that I think about it, an unnecessary detail that will presumably be poorly handled and unreasonably explained is the exact type of thing that this show would dedicate time to, so you know what, it probably will happen at some point To be completely fair here, I did come up with that "how rich are they really?" post in response to rewatching their completely ridiculous display of wealth in Sailor Moon S.

Sailor Moon Crystal Season III, Act 27.

Eh, HIM is dark/gothic rock and Moonspell is an actual gothic/black metal band with a vocalist that doesn't try to drown out their band mates incessant ineptitude. Although going purely from the posted video, you're not wrong (for the record, I like HIM ). Moonspell does have a lot of more experimental stuff too. They probably have an album for everyone. edit: Well look at Moonspell releasing new stuff that basically proves me wrong. Haha. Yeah, this is HIM 2.0 all right.

Heh. Yeah. Watching these clips, uhm. Can it be that Mamoru is a much more condescending prick in the DiC dub than he really is and that is the reason why people in reviews think that Usagi's relationship with him is bad? Weird breakup storyline nonwithstanding (which beats Usagi verbally abusing an otherwise sympathetic Chibi-Usa for no reason). Because I do know that our dubbed Rei comes across as a lot meaner than her original character is, e.g. the original dialogue would be something like "Oh come on Usagi, don't be silly!" and in the German dub she'd go like "My god Usagi you're such a moron!" Oh part of it is good fun, but the frustration and the feeling of having to yell at the screen/pages because everyone's a moron kind of outweighs that for Order of the Phoenix.

Heh, that third clip is from SuperS. One of the better episodes. Heh, when it comes to HP I went the other way around. I ignored the hype on purpose until I was subjected to watching the first three movies and realized that they weren't so bad. When I was done watching them all I started reading the books because I figured that everything I thought was weird or a plot hole or not explained enough in the movies would become clear upon reading the novels. Boy was I wrong. It's worse in the source material. Well, in my opinion. Your milage may vary as you've read the novels first. It might just have been my general disappointment with The Order of the Phoenix. I didn't like the film, but I hated reading the book. It was overly long, a complete drag and Mr. Potter was even wangstier than he was in the movie, and everyone was out of character. Good grief. Could say that it was the SuperS of HP. Liked the others though, mostly.

Huh, not sure, maybe he meant the episode where Mimetto-kun breaks reality by baking way too many items in the Daimon oven. Even spelling that out is funny.

It's been too long since I've posted some Moonspell: I probably linked that song three times already, and got no reactions. Guess this one won't be any different.

No, it did not. It took almost 25 years for me to work up the "courage" to rewatch the original 90ies anime. There are a few movies that I've rewatched that kind of... killed my nostalgic enjoyment of them. I like to call that The Black Hole effect, named so after, you probably guessed it, Disney's The Black Hole, which I loved as a kid and has two actors that rank very highly on my list of actors I enjoy watching - Ernest Borgnine and Maximilan Schell. Rewatching that was an unmitigated disaster in spite of the cast. It took someone who has never seen the show before liking it for me to even consider going back, and what a wonderful ride that was. It took a dip for some 20 episodes with SuperS, but hey, in 200 episodes, that's... still a pretty goood run. If anything, watching Sailor Moon Crystal and partially reading the manga made me appreciate the 90ies anime even more. Yes, even SuperS. I keep mentioning Harry Potter in comparison to Sailor Moon. Uhm. It does bear the queston, did you read the novels or see the films?

That sounds like Dragonforce, just with more girls. Which means I approve.

SMC, Act 26: Final episode for Black Moon, and the final one before the animation overhaul. Phew.

I also want to point out that Ms. Takeuchi felt the need to create side stories for Sailor Moon somewhen around the Infinity or Dreams arc where she expands on everyone's backstory. The fact that these separate character development stories even exists validates my impression that there is barely - and none in most cases - character development for them in the actual Sailor Moon manga. Miko Stoklasa would say "don't give me that crap about books or comics, if it's not in the movie then it's bad writing" as he usually does when fanboys try to explain something in Star Wars to him when referencing separate background material. It's also possible that there's better characterization later in the series, in Infinity, Dreams and Starsm and that reading the entire manga at once lets you fill the gaps for the first two arcs. It's not like they're long. Some of chapters are immensely drawn out just to fill pages. Doesn't change the fact that aside from Usagi, Mamoru and Chibi-Usa barely anyone even had a character in the Sailor Moon manga for the first - at least - 26 months of it being released. @KaineParker

By the way, who says she doesn't. It's her second attack in Sailor Moon Crystal. Collecting and then emitting moonlight from her tiara. I haven't really mentioned it because even the manga drops that crap after a couple of pages or a chapter or so. Probably Viz blocked YT video: