The Virgin With Green Hair

As someone who has faithfully played video games since his single-digit days, I've been following the progress of Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a title for the Wii that functions basically like a Nintendo version of Battle of the Network Stars, only with punching and kicking instead of athletics. The last time I blogged about this game — the third in the series so far — it was to celebrate the fact that Nintendo had finally chosen to include the bygone mascot of the Kid Icarus series, from which my former on-screen alias and the URL of this blog get their name.

Last Friday, the production team's official development blog posted more screenshots of the game-in-progress, including the following image:


The figure in the background is Pit, the hero and essentially the namesake of Kid Icarus. He would appear to be facing the game's damsel — a pseudo-Greek goddess who, in the style of many female characters created in Japan, has green hair. We can't see too much of the woman, but the hair, the toga and the armor are a dead giveaway she is Palutena, whom longtime gamers like me remember from back when she was more crudely pixilated.

Palutena as she appeared in the original game's ending.


And as she appeared in the instruction manual. (In retrospect, this piece of art may have been one of the first examples of manga-styled drawing I ever saw.)


Palutena already represents an amazing cross-section of my fields of interest — video games, things Japanese and Greek mythology — but what's especially interesting to me about this rather obscure Nintendo character is her name. (Names, of course, are also one of the subjects I tend to fixate upon.) People who make Japanese games draw upon a wide variety of source materials when they decide what might look cool reduced down to colored dots that move in concert with each other. Books, movies, religions, mythologies, world history and freaky robots join together in a mishmash. The names of these elements often recall their national origins, but they can sometimes become unrecognizable once they're translated into the Japanese syllabary and then into English. (There's a long-running sidescroller series Castlevania, for example, that features several generation of the monster-fighting Belnades family, which I just recently realized is intended to have the more common surname "Fernandez.") Anyway, if you think about what "Palutena" might have originally been intended to sound like and look at the way she's dressed, you'll realize her name is a variation on "Parthenos," an appellation that sometimes preceded Athena's name to signify that she was a virgin goddess. As in Athena's temple the Parthenon. As in the scientific term parthenogenesis, or virgin birth.

That's Pa + Lu ("r" becomes "l" and a vowel bridge gets added) + Te ("th" doesn't exist in Japanese) + a feminine ending to make her sound properly goddess-like.

In short, this silly, insignificant video game character is actually a representation of Athena, one of the more important deities in Greek mythology. So there, was that interest-spanning enough? I've been trying for new heights. If it still needs a nudge over the top, here's one last bit: Palutena's arch-rival goddess is Medusa. Triple score!

EDIT: Despite Palutena's previously mentioned obscurity, she has a Wikipedia page. I don't know why I'm surprised.

Abject Horror

More cell phone photography:


In an effort to avoid drawing the wrong kind of attention to this blog, I won't recount the story that put this expression on Dina's face. However, I will drop a few keywords: "first time," "seafood," "filled," "it went everywhere," "guy videotaping in the closet" and "she ran out with the bedsheet just stuck to her body."

The Subspace Emissary: A Shout-out to Super Mario Bros. 2 and Wrecking Crew?

NOTE: If you subscribe to the "games only" feed of this blog, you maybe be confused as to why this is showing up. In truth, this is a re-post of an entry I put up on another blog quite a while ago. However, given that Back of the Cereal Box has focused more and more on gaming, I feel like it belongs here. Consider this posted for posterity’s sake.

One of this week’s updates to Smash Bros. Dojo, the development blog kept by Smash Bros. Brawl director Masahiro Sakurai, announced that the game’s strange story mode will bear the title “The Subspace Emissary.”


Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this a pretty obvious Super Mario reference? In Super Mario Bros. 2, Mario and company could toss a potion onto the ground and create a doorway to another world called Sub-Space in which day became night, turnips became coins and the organ grinder theme of the game reverted to the original Super Mario Bros. theme. I’ve always assumed that the name Sub-Space was a play on the name of the game’s setting, Subcon, which itself was a play on the word subconscious.

It would certainly go along with the general surreal feeling of Brawl’s odd single-player mode, what with the bazillion crossovers and the blending of game series that would normally have nothing to do with each other. It’s even weirder to me that Nintendo seems to be setting up this mode to be taken rather seriously.

The apparent Super Mario Bros. 2 homage wasn’t the only surprise. In the short video posted of part of a Subspace Emissary cutscene, Mario and Kirby get attacked by strange robot-looking dudes who fall from the sky and seem to assemble themselves out of nothing. They also look a hell of a lot like the Eggplant Men, the generic baddies from Wrecking Crew.

the creepo from brawl

and an eggplant Man, courtesy of gamehiker

The Brawl creatures are clearly the dumb, anonymous grunt-type enemies that so often populate video games, so maybe that’s part of the resemblance. But am I totally off base on this one? The Eggplant Man — or Nasubi Kamen, “Masked Eggplant,” as it's known in Japan — might provide a common enemy for both Mario, who battled with him in Wrecking Crew, and Pit, who fought a similar baddie in Kid Icarus, the Eggplant Wizard.

In any case, there’s some very strange and surprising stuff going with this game.

The Real Lisa Simpson

Carol, the substitute receptionist at my office told me that she read my Simpsons article and that she knows Lisa Simpson, only in the way that doesn't make her crazy. She went on to explain that when she lived down south, her daughter was friends with the daughter of Lisa Groening, Matt Groening's sister and Lisa Simpson's namesake. I find this fascinating, the idea of being able to say that you've met Lisa Simpson.

It's matters like this that motivated me to start this blog in the first place.

Pahusacheta and Jamshed, in Case You're Wondering

My only contribution to this week's Independent isn't in the news section. Nonetheless, it's something I've wanted to write for sometime. I'm not crazy about the title, but a print story is a print story.

Rhapsody in Yellow

I remember watching the first-ever episode of The Simpsons. Titled “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” this Christmas-themed pilot aired December 17, 1989 — at a time when I doubt my seven-year-old brain understood most of the jokes or could have expected how this bug-eyed, surreally yellow family would figure so largely into my life. I know, I know — it’s The Simpsons, for god’s sake, but here I am making a case for the value of this TV.

In short, I’m a diehard. I don’t claim to know everything about the show, but I’m unabashedly nerdy, for example, in my ability to name Apu’s niece and nephew. I was one of the first in line to see the The Simpsons Movie, which opened last week. And, if prompted, I’ll talk a person’s ear off about how the plot of the “Kamp Krusty” episode was initially conceived as a possible setup for a Simpsons film back in 1992. And, to me, all this is okay, because I feel this show is important not only in the scheme of pop culture but in full-on, prefix-free culture culture.

This all sounds less schmaltzy if I break it down mathematically. I’ve seen each one of the 400 episodes of The Simpsons. That’s 200 hours. However, the miracle of syndication has allowed me to watch daily reruns — religiously as a teenager, less regularly now. (Though, I must argue, I can’t watch as often now since Santa Barbara’s Fox affiliate, KKFX, swapped out the second Simpsons weekday rerun for considerably worse fare — That ’70s Show. Curse you!) I have purchased or have been given each of the show’s nine available DVD sets as well. A conservative estimate puts the total time this writer has spent watching the antics of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie at roughly 1,000 hours. Bare minimum, that’s nearly 42 straight days spent in Springfield, a city that’s so far endured floods, riots, fires, a potentially catastrophic comet, a hurricane, former president George Bush, a bear attack, the dreaded Osaka Flu, countless near-nuclear meltdowns, and, yes, the beheading of the statue of its founder.

As the show quips its way toward its 20th anniversary, I realize that even having lived in Santa Barbara for seven years, I’ve still spent more time with the Simpson family than with the majority of the people I know today. That’s scary. Another sobering thought: thousands of people throughout the world are just like me. We grew up watching Bart pull pranks that pundits once alleged would inspire copycat misbehavior and general mind-mush. And yet many of us devotees graduated college and now have jobs. And we’ll soon be succeeded in this feat by a younger generation that has never known life without The Simpsons. What then, could be the result of all this quality? And why has this show managed to make such an indelible mark on me?

I can only answer personally, as I don’t have the means to poll every person whose time watching The Simpsons registers in the quadruple digits. (Nor the interest, honestly, as I fear that group might include far too many people who talk, look, and think like Comic Book Guy, the show’s resident gastropod trash-culture glutton.) But if I had to hazard a guess how The Simpsons came to surpass Ozzie and Harriet as the longest-running American sitcom — and back in 2004, no less — I’d say the answer lies in the level of comfort the show provides.

Though I still watch new episodes if I’m unoccupied at 8 p.m. on a Sunday, I’m the first to admit the jokes don’t fall quite so perfectly from the overbite-afflicted mouths of the show’s characters as they did once. Like many fans, I can even pinpoint when I started to believe the sentiment that the show’s longevity might stem more from the money it rakes in rather than the Fox network’s intent to deliver a quality TV show. Nonetheless, it’s still funny.

Even more importantly, the show feels familiar to me in the way few other things can be just by virtue of its lengthy existence. I hear those nasal Simpsons voices and bam — I’m a kid again, sneaking into a vacant room to watch the show my parents told me not to. Since I moved away from the town where I grew up, I don’t regularly encounter such well-honed memory triggers. But even if I decide I have something better to do on my Sunday night, I’m comforted by the fact that I could have stayed home, watched Homer injure himself in a way that should have killed him, and connected it to a time I saw a similar gag 12 years earlier.

My personal happy place can’t keep a show on the air for two decades, of course, so I suppose the key to The Simpsons’ staying power lies in its seemingly paradoxical ability to stay timeless while being topical. The members of the Simpson family themselves don’t age, creating chronological puzzlements like Bart being 10 years old when the show began 18 years ago but 15 years younger than me today. However, this anomaly hasn’t prevented the show’s writers from ably taking shots at three U.S. presidents — the only three to exist in my consciousness of political events — and various crises facing the country, with The Simpsons Movie humorously addressing the planet’s looming environmental apocalypse. (Trust me: In 100 years, humankind will either regard the underlying warning as either delightfully quaint or grimly accurate.)

As difficult as it may be for the uninitiated to swallow this notion of The Simpsons-as-culture, it’s just as strange for me to look back on my relationship with the show. In the end, I can’t yet state what the net result of my avid watching might be, aside from a tendency to bond with complete strangers over verbatim recitations of the bits we love. Part of me wants The Simpsons to continue on forever. I’ll probably watch until the end. And from then on, I suppose I’ll have some wonderful memories — shaded, of course, in trademark Simpsons yellow.

The Dusty Little Mermaid

Given that I had to read The Rape of the Lock twice in my academic career, you'd think I would have gotten the joke sooner. I don't know how many times I've watched "The Deep South," the Futurama episode in which the crew discovers the lost city of Atlanta. But upon seeing it yesterday in rerun form, I finally noticed that it manages to reference both Rape and Disney's The Little Mermaid — a commendable feat.

In the episode, Fry meets and marries the mermaid princess of Atlanta. Voiced by a drawling Parker Posey, this one-off character is named Umbriel. In Rape, the protagonist-idiot-heroine, Belinda, is attended chiefly by two spiritual guardians, the airy-fairy sylph Ariel and a dustier, more earthen and far less beautiful gnome named Umbriel. (As far as I can remember, Umbriel doesn't do much useful except return from the Cave of Spleen with far more aggravation for Belinda once her lock's been raped. Umbriel's name would seem to come from the Latin word umbra, meaning shadow. We get "umbrella" from the same root.) In any case, the Futurama mermaid being a slightly off version of the main character from The Little Mermaid, the name "Umbriel" is doubly appropriate. Clearly, Alexander Pope's dust fairy Umbriel has gotten way more mileage than cameoing attendant fairies Brillante, Momentilla, Crispissa, who are referenced nowhere outside of Rape.

And who says you can't do anything with an English major?

Also: I feel weird about abbreviating The Rape of the Lock to just "Rape," but I refuse to write it out.

Bacon Machine

It makes me laugh.


It makes me wonder why I had never thought of it before.

[ Source: Botinok ]