Battle of the Ambiguously Sexual Signifiers, Anime-Style

Honestly, I don’t know enough about anime to proclaim any given scene the most homoerotic-ever.  However, I know an opportunity for over-reading when I see one, and the 80s action series Saint Seiya is fruitful, so to speak.

In the universe of Saint Seiya (or Knights of the Zodiac, depending on what translation you’re watching), saints are armor-clad superheroes who derive their powers from constellations, because no one on the Japanese side of this project knew a Catholic person.

This scene, which comes from the series’ sixth episode, the pits the Andromeda saint — pink armor with an especially busomy-looking breastplate, and don’t forget that the constellation is named for Greek mythology’s No. 1 damsel in distress — against the purple-clad Unicorn saint. The more passive of the two, Andromeda resists fighting, but he’s goaded by Unicorn, whose most outstanding wardrobe feature, it should be noted, is a single protruding horn. “It sounds like the ladies really love you, don’t they, pretty boy?” Unicorn taunts. Andromeda is unflustered. “I’m sad, and filled with emptiness,” he says, which is clunky entendre but which still gets the point across. The two engage. We get a pink-hued freeze frame of the two intertwined — Unicorn looking focused and aggressive, Andromeda looking serene, even pleased.

Andromeda, however, flips the script when he proves more powerful by virtue of his telekinetic control of a chain — a long, snaking instrument that acts like an extension of his body and which has a pointed tip at the end. (“That chain! It’s like a living thing!”) The scene inexplicably shifts to a celestial backdrop, where he’s superimposed on an image of the Andromeda constellation. It’s a mix of signifiers — phallic weapon combined with maiden imagery. Time literally stands still. Unicorn persists in attacking, and Andromeda calmly sends the chains after him, penetrating him repeatedly. (“Of all the parts of the Nebula Chain, the top is the strongest!” Really.) Based on the noises you hear from the crowd (and the reaction shot you see of the Lady Purple Hair), it’s all being done for the delight of female spectators. You don’t hear a single male voice cheering.

The lesson? Appearances are deceiving, and the dude with flowing ladyhair may be the strongest one in the room.

That’s pretty loaded, just from the standpoints of gender and sexuality. I realize there are always problems in a person from one culture using his terms to analyze something produced by a second culture. But no matter how a Japanese audience would have read the scene back in 1986, this guy over in America in 2014 has a hard time not seeing a whole lot of sexual cues.

Why am I watching Saint Seiya in 2014? I don’t really know. I was trying to look up one minor trivia point and ended up finding a cache of the episodes available online. It turns out I like the look of Japanese animation from back when I was a kid even if I wasn’t watching it at the time. I don’t know why. Regardless, the combo of awkward translations plus bizarre line-readings makes for a more entertaining experience than you might think. Case in point: “My cosmos is about to explode,” which is either bad grammar or bad innuendo or both.

The less said about Death Queen Island, the better.

EDIT: I have encountered another.

A More Detailed Analysis of the Step by Step Opening Than You Ever Wanted

From the Wikipedia page, of course:

The amusement park seen in the opening credits is depicted as being located along the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. (No amusement park exists that is located on the shores of this lake in Wisconsin.) The amusement park used is actually Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California, located many miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. The body of water depicted in the opening and closing credit sequences — located next to the roller coaster at the park, which is digitally inserted into that particular excerpt — is placed over what in actuality is the parking lot at Six Flags Magic Mountain. The body of water is seen to have large waves on a seemingly calm day, which are much too large for Lake Michigan in the absence of a storm.

And yep, here is that mysteriously stormy body of water in the Magic Mountain parking lot. Would it not be incredibly unsafe to build a roller coaster directly on the sand, just yards from the crashing waves? Those Lambert-Fosters are lucky to be alive.

It’s almost as mysterious as the way the show blinked Patrika Darbo and Peggy Rea into the cornfield after the first season.

A Little Bit o’ Bamford

I got to sit down with Maria Bamford, one of my favorite comedians, for no other reason than to talk food. Really, I just got to give her jumping-off points and let her do her thing. You can read the piece here.

photo by robyn von swank

As with most interviews, the final product left a bit out. For example, I omitted the part where she asked me about my hometown, mostly because I knew that the majority of humans who would read this piece would not want to know about the reporter’s hometown. (It was nice that she asked, however. Most moderately famous interview subjects wouldn’t bother.) Still, if you ever wanted to know how Maria Bamford would react to a description of Hollister, California, here you go.

Maria: When I was a baby, I went to the old KCET studios, my mom told me, because they’d pledged, and so they got a free bean bag chair with a kangaroo print on it — 1970.

Drew: Wait, you were a baby in Southern California?

Maria: I was a baby in Southern California. My dad was in the navy, so they drove down from Ventura, down from Port Hueneme. It’s not that interesting of a story, now that I’ve started it.

Drew: No, it is interesting. I think most of your fans know you as being from Minnesota.

Maria: Yeah, I did. Where did you grow up?

Drew: Hollister — inland from Monterey, basically.

Maria: Oh, what was that like?

Drew: Agricultural.

Maria: Was it blissful? Could you feel the sea air?

Drew: No, it gets really hot.

Maria: Okay, I can see that. I’m picturing it now. It sounds wonderful, but it was hot. Was it, like, Grapes of Wrath territory?

Drew: It was very John Steinbecky. He actually lived in that area and wrote about it a lot, so we got to read stories about awful things happening in places we knew.

For the sake of brevity, I also had to leave out Maria’s description of her dogs, even though the act of omitting information about dogs runs against everything that I have come to hold dear. Here is that:

Drew: But you do go to the Wizard of Art in Los Feliz, right? How is that?

Maria: It’s great! The wizard, whose name is Paul, is on Hillhurst in Los Feliz. The wizard and his wife, Donna, they’re so enthusiastic. And you just feel so proud. There is theory taught. You learn to see shapes and colors and tones and tints, but you’re also allowed to draw whatever the hell you want. Like, I always draw my dog over and over again. “Do you want to draw a landscape?” “No, I do not.” “Do you want to draw a live nude?” “No, I do not. Is it my dog live and nude? YES.”

Drew: You have two dogs?

Maria: I do. I have a Pug-huahua. I named her Blueberry because she’s sweet and quiet just like blueberries are! Do you know how quiet they are?! And then Burt, who’s a blind pug, is twelve. Now he just gets in the wagon. Me and boyfriend just wheel him around in the wagon. My neighbors were like “We saw this couple, and we thought someone had moved in who had a kid and then we were like ‘Oh, it’s Bert.” Bert’s initial name was like… Chandler, or something. It was like “What? Do you live in Valencia or something?” Bert used to be a cop. He’s a retired cop. And Blueberry was a nurse, and that’s what she’s so codependent. She’s always cleaning things.

So that’s my gift to you — a little cutting room floor something. I’ll point you again to the full article, but I’ll also draw your attention to a tidbit toward the end that you’ll probably enjoy if you read my blog: Maria Bamford based the voice of the Adventure Time character Hot Dog Princess (and also that of her stand-up character, “Did you steal my key lime pie Yoplait?”) on a girl she went to high school with. And I thought that was kind of awesome. Hear her explain it and even do the Hot Dog Princess voice:

This pleases me. Hot Dog Princess in general pleases me.

Revisiting The Visitor: A Cliffs Notes of Suck

Back in November, I watched the 1979 movie The Vistor, which is a work of science fiction that is maybe also horror and it has birds in it and Shelley Winters plays a character who may or may not be intoxicated the whole time. That’s maybe the most accurate thing I can say about The Visitor. It’s a tough movie that goes from “Oh, wow, this is so bad!” to “Oh, wow, this is so bad,” and the scattered moments of what-the-fuckness don’t quite make up for a plot that so vehemently resists sensible direction. That said, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time, because those what-the-fuck moments really linger with you.

Thus, following the success of my Cliffs Notes version of the also terrible Invitation to Hell (a.k.a. “the worst line readings, the shittiest special effects and all of Susan Lucci’s outfits”), I decided to condense The Visitor down to the best-worst parts, so you can see them, appreciate them and then move on with your life. I’m happy to report that I cut down the original film’s running time of 101 minutes down to just 7:37.

Enjoy!

And no, you’re honestly not missing out of that much. Any of the seemingly unexplained plot points go more or less equally unexplained in the real version. Only now you didn’t have to sit through a stuffy Cinefamily screening to see Lance Henriksen get murdered by a bird.

You may rightly be wondering how a film like this ever gets made. Per the Cinefamily screening (and per my original post), the director was fired and then threatened the producer at gunpoint not only to hire him back but allow him to continue seeing through this collection of weirdness and baffling line readings. And that, my friends, is how a movie like this gets made.

For those who dare, you can rent the full film on iTunes.

The Winter That Wasn't

I've given up on winter, our single rainstorm notwithstanding. I spent the better part of Sunday afternoon in a tank top, and even then that was just to endure the heat indoors. But if I can't experience winter in a meteorological sense, then I'll take in a symphonic sense. Please, take three minutes to listen to Georgy Sviridov's 1975 composition "Snowstorm." This is the final part, "Winter Road."

Granted, you're reading words written by a guy who lives in L.A. and rolled up his sleeves for the walk to lunch today and hasn't seen actual snow falling in maybe a decade, but ol' Sviridov has actually captured something here that gives the feeling of a snowstorm — starting light, building to fierce and then fading away. It's beautiful.

And yes, of course, it reminds me of a video game. I don't know which one. Perhaps you do.

Goodbye, Mrs. Krabappel… But Hello, Lunchlady Doris?

Every time I write about The Simpsons, I feel I need to preface the post with the admission that "Yeah, I still like The Simpsons, I still watch The Simpsons, it's occasionally quite good, and I still care about what happens on the show." I've watched for twenty-five years, and it's made a more significant impact on me than most people I've actually met. So there.

It's for these reasons that I appreciated the show's farewell to Edna Krabappel. Following the real-life death of Marcia Wallace in October, it only seems right that the show should quietly retire the character that she'd voiced since the show's second episode.

Here is her brief but sweet final moment:

 

Ned Flanders's black armband interests me. If we're truly supposed to think that Edna has passed away, then that means he's been twice-widowed, which is a crueler fate than anyone might wish upon a guy who already has the misfortune of being Homer's next-door neighbor. That aside, I agree Mrs. Krabappel should go the way of Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz — gone for good, so random appearances in the background don't remind us of the decidedly un-funny death of the human behind the character.

It's for the same reasons, however, that the episode was an awkward one to have a Krabappel tribute tacked onto it. You see, it featured Lunchlady Doris in a speaking role. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Doris Grau provided the voice of Lunchlady Doris until her death in 1995. But though the Simpsons character was named for Grau, who also worked as a script supervisor on the show. And while The Simpsons seemingly retired Lunchlady Doris as a speaking character, she returned to the show in 2006, now voiced by Tress MacNeille. And that seems odd to me. 

"more testicles mean more iron!"

Of course, I didn't know Doris Grau, and I suppose it's possible that the people who made the decision to bring back Lunchlady Doris felt she'd be okay with her Simpsons counterpart continuing on without her. On my end, however, as a guy who's just been watching the show forever and ever, it's odd hearing her voice in new episodes, because I'm aware that original Doris died long ago. "Which is awkward. And not so funny," as I said last time. I still feel that way.

EDIT: As of the March 30, 2014, the showrunners seem to have kinda-sorta found a way around the awkwardness: the identical-looking Lunchlady Dora.

Either that or they just spelled her name wrong. Which would also be awkward.

Various Simpsons obscurities, previously:

• Embiggening Your Understanding of Embiggen
• Bart Simpson and the Jacket of Unrequited Love
• Ethel Gets Eaten — Nancy Cartwright and the Twilight Zone Movie
• Hooter Simpson
• Call Me Tanya... From The Simpsons

Neighbours

(What follows is an imagined dialogue that I’m sure happened exactly as I state it.)

“Oh, why good day to you, Mrs. Florimello! I have come to you in dire need of assistance! Have you any blackberry jam which I could spread upon my morningbreads?”

“But goodness gracious, Mr. Puddingwood! I have none to speak of, for I enjoyed the very last of mine on my own morningbreads just one hour ago. I ate it all up, I did, with my velvety grey tongue!”

“Well, if anyone should enjoy the last of your jams, Mrs. Florimello, I’m glad it was a soul as agreeable as you! Then I shall don my woolen hat and be off to Jeremy Noofington’s cottage at once, in hopes that he has jam to spare!”

“I wish you luck, Mr. Puddingwood! And a joyous St. Waltrude’s Day as well!”

“Tut-tut!”

{ fin }