The Harvey Girls

When you think of movie musicals, what studio could possibly come to mind before MGM? After all, they brought us such classics as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, and Meet Me in St. Louis. Only Disney, and possibly RKO's Astaire-Rogers movies, can compete with bliss on that scale.

But when I think of my favourite MGM musicals, George Sidney's under-appreciated 1946 film, The Harvey Girls, always stands near the top. The film is set in the old west, and stars Judy Garland as Susan Bradley, a waitress for the legendary Fred Harvey Company. Their restaurant is in competition with the local saloon, owned by Ned Trent (John Hodiak), and needless to say he and Susan wind up married by the end of the picture.

The Harvey Girls has everything you expect from an MGM musical: memorable song-and-dance numbers, gorgeous Technicolor cinematography, and a wonderful mix of humour, romance, and pathos. It's also a western, so cowboy costumes, fist-fights, and desert landscapes are part of the package. But there are really three main reasons that I love this movie so much. Three simple reasons:

1. The epic musical number "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," which is one of my favourite songs from the MGM library.

2. More importantly, the scene where Susan learns that Ned's saloon has stolen all the Harvey House's meat, and decides to take it back at gunpoint! Particularly funny because, being a scene in an MGM musical comedy that just happens to involve Judy Garland committing armed robbery, it is treated like a scene in an MGM musical comedy that just happens to involve Judy Garland committing armed robbery.

3. Most importantly, Ray Bolger's comic dance number. He excels in that particular brand of apparent  physical discoordination that, in fact, requires the control and finesse of a ballerina. Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" might be the average movie-lover's official selection in the "best comic dance ever caught on film" category, but for me, Ray Bolger has him beat here by about half a foot. (I also think that this number surpasses anything Bolger does in The Wizard of Oz.)

That's all I can say, really. Sometimes, it's the highs, and not the averages, that work a movie into your heart.

My Fears

I need to admit that I am not the sort to get all that terrified by horror fiction. It's not that I can't sympathize with a fictional victim (I can) or that I'm particularly brave (I'm not) but, for some reason, horror usually just doesn't keep me up at night.

But, of course, there is an exception. Ghosts, the most basic of horror beasts, scare the seven circles of hell right out of me. I don't even believe in ghosts, but there's just something about them that gets to me.

I believe that all fantastic horror creatures are tied to some real-life fear. Zombies are really plagues, werewolves are reflections of our own inner demons, even the giant ants in Them! or the titular creature in Godzilla symbolize mankind's fear of science. (The monsters were created by nuclear and atomic weapon testing, respectively.) Some people would suggest that ghosts channel a fear of death, but I believe that they channel our fear of the unknown.

The part of Poltergeist that always stuck with me is not the iconic "They're here" scene, but the part near the end, *SPOILER!* after the house was supposedly clean, when the clown doll comes to life anyway. Taninga (the medium that was supposed to fix the whole haunting thing) clearly knew what she was doing and how ghosts worked, at least as much as anyone in the movie did, and seemed convinced that that the house was safe. She was the expert... but she was wrong. *SPOILER OVER!*

Of course, the tropes associated with a haunting are well-known. Weird stuff happens, it gets weirder (whether this is out of necessity or choice on the ghost's part isn't always clear), and before long an exorcist is in your house telling you who died and how and what they're gonna do about it. (Not all ghost stories follow this formula, but enough do to make a formula in the first place.) But there's no silver bullet, no wooden stake. Sometimes a ghost is exorcised through a ritual only slightly less mysterious than the floating furniture. Ghosts can walk through walls, they can float, they are invisible, they can sometimes be near-omniscient--the biggest limitation seems to be that they can't leave the house, and something about that just seems more like a psychological limitation than a physical one.

I guess that maybe that's why ghosts scare me so much--they're so incomprehensible. Their abilities, their weaknesses, and their actions always seem to exist a little bit outside our own sphere of understanding. They seem like pure emotion--a creature with near-limitless power but little reason. Ghosts scare me not only because they can do anything, but because they don't. There's no physical logic to a ghost, and no psychological logic, either.

Review: Citizens of Earth (Wii U version)

Debaters gonna debate.

Eden Industry’s Citizens of Earth is a love-letter to the console RPGs of the 1990s, especially Shigesato Itoi’s legendary MOTHER trilogy (known as EarthBound in the west). Both are comic RPGs, set in a fantasy counterpart to modern-day America rather than the traditional Medieval-style fantasies of Dragon Quest and company. However, whereas EarthBound had (and lets be honest here) unremarkable, cookie-cutter gameplay, Citizens of Earth is more ambitious, and displays a solid understanding of what makes RPGs work as a game and not just a story. With a forty-character-strong roster, interesting dungeons, and a unique battle system, Citizens of Earth has the basic ingredients of a masterpiece. And yet the end result still falls short of EarthBound's greatness.

The game opens with a delightful Chrono Trigger homage that perfectly sets the tone: the protagonist is sleeping comfortably in his bed when his Mom comes in and wakes him. Except the protagonist is the adult Vice President of the Earth. Your first challenge--the metaphorical Rats in the Basement, if you will--is to take down a group of violent protesters roaming the Vice President’s hometown. And things just get more EarthBound-esque from there, as you follow the second-most-important man in the world on an epic quest, filled with mutated animals, robots, and (of course) hippies.

A modern Fellowship of the Ring.

But despite Citizens of Earth's best attempts at copying EarthBound’s surreal, almost Lewis Carroll-style humour, it doesn't have quite the same charm. The Vice President frequently says something arrogant or stupid, then gets a sarcastic comeback from one of the citizens. This is more vaudeville than EarthBound generally got, and even then it's flawed vaudeville. With forty citizens, writing a separate bit of banter for each would have been extremely time-consuming, so Eden Industries just wrote a single response for each stupid VP quote, then programmed the game to randomly assign it to one of the active citizens. I suppose that's understandable, given the development teams' size and budget, but it's also unquestionably bad writing. If the citizens were intentionally written as personalityless and interchangeable I could understand, but, outside these types of cutscenes--when you're talking to a citizen on the map, for example--they have clearly-defined (and usually exaggerated) personalities and, often, distinct speech patterns, so their lines should not be this interchangeable. Grouch cannot steal Chico's jokes, but in this game, the cheerful Cat Lady, the paranoid Conspiracy Theorist, the anti-social Programmer, and the intellectual Psychologist can all, potentially, share the exact same zinger. 

But to be fair, the writing, when not being tripped up by the game's scope, does have its moments. The Vice President, being always present and thus important enough to get his own custom-written dialogue, is consistently portrayed as bumbling, clueless, tacky, and egotistical, but deep down, he’s a good man who really does want to help out. It’s easy to make a comic character--and especially a comic politician--all-vice, but this touch of goodness makes the VP genuinely endearing. The game's also a lot sparser on pop-culture references than you might expect. I mean, yes, there are a few, but they don't overwhelm everything else, and generic jokes about Internet Memes are (as far as I remember, at least) non-existent. I should probably admit that this game also enjoys its puns--the “Anchory Bird” enemy being my guilty favourite--but fortunately, Eden Industries is wise enough to use these for atmosphere rather than punch-lines. It's certainly no EarthBound, but I generally found the humor enjoyable, and even at its worst, it was never annoying.

And then there's the most important part of any video game: the interactive element. When you pick up a new title, what’s the first thing you’ll want to know about the gameplay? Are the controls tight? Are the goals clear? Is the challenge just right? All good questions, but if there’s one thing that Citizens of Earth taught me, it’s that the first question should be: how far can I get before the game crashes? When this adventure first came out, the answer was: not far enough, bud. I wanted to play Citizens of Earth so badly, but the stupid thing froze so many times that I just couldn’t finish it. It was eventually patched, reducing the glitches and crashes to a more professional level (so, yes, I did eventually finish it), but even so, that initial level of quality-control is inexcusable. 

Post-patch, the crashing is no longer a problem. Unfortunately, the loading-time still is. Like many old-school RPGs, Citizens of Earth requires a lot of screen transitions--some rooms last only a few seconds. When you have to spend a second or two on a loading screen each time that you change areas, it can feel like you’re wading through a tub of molasses. This problem also improved significantly after the patch, but it’s still noticeable, it’s still too long, and it still makes transitioning from point B to point C a huge pain in the A.

There is some solid stuff in here, though. Citizens of Earth’s most important asset is the citizens themselves, and (ignoring the aforementioned screw-up regarding their inconsistent dialogue) Eden Industries did a good job there. Since you're the Vice President of Earth, you're too important to fight yourself! Instead, you must recruit up to 40 other people to fight for you. Mom and Brother join you automatically, but everyone else requires the completion of a sub-quest. Each citizen is truly unique, packing a different out-of-battle ability as well as their own in-battle specialties. For example, the Barista has a high speed-stat, specializes in recovering other citizens’ energy (sort of like MP--more on that later), uses fire-based (well, hot coffee-based) attacks in battle, and can sell energy-restoring (and less lethal) coffee out-of-battle. The Weightlifter is physically powerful, uses muscle-based attacks, and can move heavy objects out of your path on the map, but he can’t attack and build energy on the same turn, making him a slow and inefficient brawler if someone like the Barista isn’t there to back him up. The game is generally easy enough that you can design a team around the standard “attack/heal” combo and still win, but for those who like to tweak their party and find the most brutal overkill combos, there is a lot of potential here.

When they're not in your active party, these citizens also act as the game's NPCs. Some of them can even use their out-of-battle abilities before they join you, albeit only offering the lower-level wares and services. Fortunately, none of these citizens ever have vital information, or at least not after it becomes possible to recruit them, so you don’t have to worry about walking around getting stuck just because the guy with something important to say is following tight-lipped behind you.

Incidentally, almost all the non-recruitable NPCs are benevolent versions of enemies, recognizable by the speech bubble protruding from their sprites.  Some of them give quests, or discuss some element of the plot, or provide other useful services, but if you want to go Western RPG and kill them for the experience or just out of spite, you can do that too. In fact, there’s at least one type of enemy (a rotund fellow known as the Gourmand) who--as far as I could find--can only be battled if you pick the fight yourself!

Citizens of Earth doesn't have as many NPCs as other RPGs, so the world feels a lot emptier, but then the people you do meet make up for it by being a lot more well-developed and chatty. Both approaches have their own advantages--it's all a matter of personal taste.

The battles are extremely well-done. This game has a more interesting alternative to the standard MP- and charge- systems used in other RPGs. It uses an energy system; stronger techniques use up more energy, while weaker ones recover energy. Most citizens only have three energy balls, though some reach as high as five. I just can't emphasize how brilliant this system is; most games expect you to save your best abilities, but Citizens of Earth instead encourages regular spurts of power followed by periods of restraint. And many of the energy-restoring moves are still useful, so falling back on them never feels like a punishment; you can recover energy and make real progress in one turn!  I’d even say that these battles are some of the best I've ever seen in a JRPG.

Created using the VR Arena.

Unfortunately, as great as the battle system is, it doesn't completely alleviate that one great annoyance of old-school console RPGs: there are a lot of fights. They aren’t random battles--like EarthBound (and some other JRPGs) enemies can be seen and theoretically avoided--but when the areas become more crowded, and the enemies more numerous, the fights become annoying just the same. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if there was more variety in the enemies, but most areas have you fighting the same two or three baddies over and over again. And because many of these enemies have attack animations--some of them sorta long ones--and the VP repeatedly insists on exclaiming things like “Ouch!” or “Walk it off!” during the fight, things tend to drag on. The enemies themselves, although varied in both design and battle text, usually fall back on the same stock-tricks as any other RPG beast: damage-dealing moves and status-effects a plenty, with the occasional enemy who counters your attacks or calls for help thrown in for good measure. A handful of them have some very unique and interesting abilities--most notably a boss who has the ability to “remix the battle conditions,” which means that your attacks will recover the enemies’ HP rather than deplete them for one turn--but these types of enemies are not as common as I would have liked. This is not a deal-breaker by any sense of the word--Eden Industries clearly went to great lengths to make the battles as interesting as possible--but I won't deny that, after spending a lot of time in one area, I'd switch the difficulty level way down (more on that later) just so that I could get through the repeat battles as quickly as possible. (I'm not proud, but I'm honest.)

Though perhaps paradoxically, I enjoyed the VR Arena. This is a battle simulator that allows you to customize a team of monsters, then battle 'em. Most of the regular enemies and many of the bosses are available, so it’s possible to design more dangerous, or more interesting, teams than you’d ever encounter in the main game. And yes, you can keep any items, money, and experience you earn during the fight. Better yet, one of the citizens--the School Mascot--can freely change the game’s difficulty, making monsters stronger or weaker (and the rewards greater or lesser) as needed. I mostly used the VR Arena to grind my lower-level citizens, but how could I resist the occasional fight against a group of bosses? Personally, I’d love to see more games use something like this--it allows players to design the ultimate fight whenever you want!

Like Super Mario RPG or Final Fantasy VII (and, interestingly, in contrast to EarthBound) Citizens of Earth includes a number of minigames. A lot of these--including a game of Blackjacks and a car race--are presented using an altered battle engine, making the situation both familiar and new. Of course, not all minigames are created equal--there's always one or two that will make you pull your hair out. Here, it’s the Bartender recruitment quest, which is a drinking contest that takes the form of a button-mash-a-thon. It’s the sort of game that makes you think someone on the staff has a personal vendetta against thumbs. But other than that, most of the minigames are actually a pretty fun diversion.

And this game is open-ended. Boy, is it; once you finish off the bit of questing from your own neighbourhood, you can basically go (nearly) wherever you want, recruit (almost) whoever you want, and grab (not quite but close enough to) any item you want, without progressing the story one iota more, provided you recruit the right citizens. I recently finished playing EarthBound Beginnings, which is always noted for being more open-ended than EarthBound, but next to Citizens of Earth it feels like Uncharted. Of course, in a genre dedicated to growing in strength and fighting progressively stronger enemies, this magnitude of sandbox-style gameplay makes balancing difficult. It’s easier to wander into the wrong area and get stomped into the ground by a jogger or a ten-year-old camper, or to get too bulked-up on sub-quests and steamroll your way through all the killer robots and giant monsters in your path once you return to the main storyline. But try to remember that, using the School Mascot, you can weaken the enemies and strengthen them back up to compensate for this freedom, so playing the game your way is actually much more reasonable here than in most other open-ended RPGs.

Of course, like all RPGs, open-ended or not, Citizens of Earth has to end eventually. Spoiler alert: the ending sucks. (Feel free to skip this paragraph if you don’t want the ending spoiled.) Once again, it tries to draw inspiration from EarthBound, whose ending involved channeling the hopes and prayers of all your friends to defeat a seemingly invincible monster, switching from comedic to serious in the process. The problem is that EarthBound did it well; these uplifting scenes are brief, subtle, and interspersed throughout a real battle against a particularly memorable final boss. In Citizens of Earth, these scenes are much longer, with each citizen and a good chunk of the supporting cast treating you to some mawkish comment about what a great person the VP really is. I suppose that I can see what they’re going for: we’ve spent most of the game thinking of our protagonist as an egotistical, unlikable half-witted manchild who gets by on looks alone, but the very nature of the game requires that we play the VP as an empathetic hero who goes out of his way to help everyone he meets; seeing people acknowledge that there’s a very good reason this man became the Vice President is kind of sweet. But I don’t think we need 40+ people commenting on the same thing. Worse yet, all this mush is placed in the middle of an unlosable battle, which reduces the end-boss to little more than a cross between a cutscene and a stack of Hallmark cards. Considering how delightfully "video gamey" Citizens of Earth had been up until this point, I find this fumble outright stupefying. There is a real, losable boss battle right before that, and I am reluctant to say that it’s too easy since, as noted above, you can adjust the difficulty level, but I will say that if you play the game as I did, leaving the difficulty level at or near the default, completing most of the subquests, not grinding excessively, and using the same citizens for most of the game, the battle is too easy. I suppose that I can’t be too hard on Eden Industries for this one--they had a good idea--but as far as I'm concerned, the endgame is a bust.

Citizens of Earth combines everything that I love about my favourite RPGs: plenty of characters, tons of exploration, and a great sense of humour. On paper, it’s perfect. But when you take it off the paper and put it on a console, that’s when you encounter the annoying loading times, repetitive battles, balance issues, and other problems. This game is fun enough to justify at least one playthrough, but there are simply too many little annoyances for it to really reach its full potential.

Review: "Jeeves and the Wedding Bells" by Sebastian Faulks

Writing other people’s characters can be fun. I used to write fan fiction (of admittedly varying degrees of quality) so I know the appeal. For obvious reasons, it’s mostly a hobby for beginners and amateurs, but from time to time, professional writers decide to throw their hat into another author’s ring. Sebastian Faulks did it with James Bond in 2008’s Devil May Care, and again in his 2013 novel, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells. Having not read the former, I decided against reviewing it. Jeeves and the Wedding Bells it is.

The book is about British humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s most famous creations, upper-class twit Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves. Wodehouse, by the way, is probably my favourite author of all time. To say that my expectations whenever I read a new Wodehouse book are sky-high would be to grossly overestimate the sky. But Sebastian Faulks, although doubtless a very fine man in many respects, is not P.G. Wodehouse. This can’t be helped; some people are, some people aren’t. I knew when I checked this book out of the library that Faulks’ take on the characters would likely fall short of the master’s. Fortunately, Faulks also knew this, and wisely wrote the book as an homage rather than a sequel.

The plot is vintage Wodehouse: a friend of Bertie’s (Peregrine “Woody” Beeching, said to be his closest of childhood chums) is having fiancée troubles, and so Bertie, valet in tow, sets off to save the nuptials and the day. This time, Jeeves gets stuck impersonating a wealthy lord known as Etringham, with Bertie playing the roll of the gentleman’s personal gentleman! Throw in an intimidating aunt and you have a simple recipe for the most quintessential Wodehouse novel ever written by a man not named Wodehouse.

If you’ve read the originals, you probably remember that Bertie is a man who gets into and out of engagements the way James Bond does elaborate executions. Sebastian Faulks, in one of his departures from the classics, decided to introduce nature’s bachelor to a girl named Georgiana Meadowes. She’s smart, beautiful, kind, works at a publishing company, and blatantly attracted to Bertie. Part of me was afraid this sort of thing would happen. Sure, Psmith can get a girlfriend. Freddie Threepwood, too. But something about Bertie having a real girlfriend just felt so wrong, like Romeo going back to Rosaline, or Don Quixote actually slaying a giant disguised as a windmill.

But just because Wodehouse would not does not mean Faulks may not, so I’ll try to judge the romance fairly. Granted, Georgiana is not a compelling character so much as a bunch of appealing traits glued together. There are a few references to her abysmal driving, but they're infrequent, have no impact on the story, and aren't even that funny, which makes me think that they were added just to make her seem more three-dimensional. I don’t want people to think that I’m against career-women who are smart, kind, and pretty. I believe that career-women who are smart, kind and pretty can and often are a great addition to literature as well as to the real world. But the most interesting characters have more going for them than being career-oriented, smart, kind, and pretty. A career-man who is smart, kind, and handsome would not be particularly interesting without something else to define him, either. Georgiana (like most of the original characters in this book, I may as well add) feels flat.

I will say one thing about this romance, though, and that is that Faulks really sold me on the idea that a girl like Georgiana could love a man like Bertie.  A more cynical author might suggest that she could lust after the wallet, but never love the man. Mentally negligible as he (Bertie--not Faulks) may be, he is still is a gentleman to his marrow. Open to any page in any of his book, and odds are good that you’ll see him putting himself through the ringer for a chum. Georgiana also believes that Bertie possesses hidden intellectual depths, and considering he's a maddeningly articulate Oxford graduate, she just might be right.

Of course, when one sits down to read a Jeeves and Wooster story, the question is always “Is it funny?” and never "But will it melt my heart?" The answer here to the former is yes. Maybe not as funny as Wodehouse himself, but complaining about that would be like scowling at the Who because they’re not the Beatles. After all, Wodehouse’s gift for language, characterization, and plot are almost unmatched in the history of English Literature, and certainly unparalleled in the realm of comic literature. Nevertheless, I laughed at this book, and often. What I love most about Wodehouse’s writing style is the way he seamlessly combines the high-brow, the formal, and the colloquial in one sentence, and Faulks is adept at that (for example: “Between them they were about as welcoming as Goneril and Regan on being told that old Pop Lear had just booked in for a month with full retinue”). The language is probably as close to Wodehouse as one can reasonably be expected to come without actually transforming into Wodehouse. The plotting, unfortunately, falls further below the mark. It's certainly competent, and has its share of twists and turns which feel like they came right out of a classic Jeeves story. But Wodehouse didn't just write in his share of twists and turns--he turned his stories into a labyrinth of deceptions and misunderstandings, and they were all the stronger for it. Faulks only writes in what I would call a standard dose, and even then, without giving anything away, I felt that some of them fall apart a little too soon. This is a good comic novel, but I'd be reluctant to call it a great one.

This is why the more serious elements are necessary. If it’s impossible for Faulks--or any other writer--to create a worthy continuation to the Jeeves cannon, then it’s better to create a supplement. This book takes Bertie and his audience out of the comfort zone. Issues like the emotional implications of Bertie's self-depreciating jokes or the fact that his idealized Britain was almost destroyed in World War II are touched upon, albeit only for a page or two. I can't really fault Faulks, who is simply writing about things that almost certainly existed in Wodehouse’s world, but were never mentioned. Some people actually preferred this book to the originals because of the more serious, pensive tone. Admittedly, I did not, but I don’t think I would have preferred a non-Wodehouse straightforward comedy to a Wodehouse one anyway. The question is whether Faulks’ hypothetical pure-comedy book would have been better than this one. I doubt it.

Someone who has never read Wodehouse before can theoretically read Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, but they would not enjoy it as much as the old hands. This book is about laughing with old friends. Maybe they’re a bit different, a bit less fun and a bit more mature, but they’re still your friends, with whom you have shared precious memories that will last a lifetime.

Modern Major Genwunner

It's funny how public opinion changes over the years. When Buster Keaton released The General, critics panned it; today, it's celebrated as his greatest work. Rolling Stone magazine named Weezer's Pinkerton the 3rd-worst album of 1996, then called it the 16th-greatest album of all time a mere six years later. Herman Melville's Moby Dick was torn apart by contemporary readers, and hailed as one of the greatest American novels within a century.

The first generation of Pokémon games (released in 1996 in Japan, 1998 in America) have had an interesting variation. The games have always been divisive among gamers, today as in the 90s. The only difference is that these critics and supporters have switched positions.

Modern fans of the first generation of Pokémon games (Pokémon Red, Pokémon Blue, and Pokémon Yellow), often known as Genwunners, are infamously snobby. For these people, no Pokémon game after the first gen is worth playing. There are only 151 (or 152) Pokémon. "New Pokémon are based off of ice cream cones instead of whack-a-mole machines. Q.E.D.," You'd have better luck convincing the Catholic Church to canonize The Life of Brian than getting a Genwunner to acknowledge that Lucario or Blaziken are legitimate.

For modern gamers, Genwunners are a popular stock-villain, like mustachioed men who tie women to railroad tracks, except more fun to hiss at. This is because, like many retro-gamers, Genwunners are often self-righteous fanatics.

Needless to say, being a self-righteous fanatic--or even being remotely unpleasant--doesn't seem to be an official part of the definition anymore. Hating all the Pokémon games is perfectly acceptable, as is liking all of them, or even only liking the newer ones. Anything else is frowned upon.

In other words, Genwunners have ruined it for the Gen 1ers.

When you see a Genwunner coming at you in a dark alley, frothing at the mouth and brandishing a picture of a Charizard, the best way to freeze 'em in their tracks is to turn the tables and insult the first generation. I understand that, for most Pokémon fans, this is hard--it's the sort of thing the Jigsaw Killer always made people do. Earliest instalments of any franchise generally get some reverence, however better the later ones may be. But with time it gets easier. A lot easier, in fact; for some people, Pokémon Red and Blue have become almost as loathed as the Genwunners themselves. Fans of the newer games have been known to denounce the earliest instalments with ferocity to match even the angriest Genwunner. As far as these people are concerned, there's no reason for anyone to play the first generation at all since it was remade with the third gen's engine in 2004.

Fighting monsters and gazing into voids and all that, I guess.

I'm not going to say that Pokémon Red and Blue were beyond criticism. There were lots of very noticeable problems with design in general and balance in particular, as well as a fairly impressive troupe of glitches. The legendary Missingno. is the least embarrassing of them. The best way to sum up everything wrong with the first generation is to simply look at how psychic-types were handled. In theory, psychic-type Pokémon had two weaknesses: bug- and ghost-types. In practice, they didn't have any; all the bug-type attacks were too weak to actually help, and a glitch in the game's programming made psychic-types immune to ghost-type attacks. And a lot of newer Pokémon fans love to point these problems out. As much fun as I had playing these games, I don't think that it compares to the fun the more militant Ruby/Sapphire fans have tearing them apart and watching the Genwunners' smiles melt.

All long-running video game franchises have their nostalgic cynics. Many Legend of Zelda fans insist that A Link to the Past is the best game in the series, and that the newer Zelda games are unfailingly unremarkable. Final Fantasy VI sits on a similar pedestal compared to VII onward. Yet Genwunners are widely considered the worst of the lot. This sort of elitism may be perfectly acceptable for fans of literature, film, or music, but gamers are not willing to tolerate it and Pokémon fans less willing than most. Red and Blue, being popular and influential games with more problems than Jay-Z, reflect everything modern gamers hate about retro-gaming. (What future gamers will think of today's "modern" games is an interesting question, but off-topic.)

I think the Genwunners' biggest mistake is that they picked the wrong Rapidash to back. Retro-gaming elitism typically starts at the second or third entry in a series, because the first usually has the most rough edges. If Donkey Kong fans went around trashing every new Mario game since Super Mario Brothers, declaring that the Mushroom Kingdom is not canon, and complaining that all the new characters are just turtles or mushrooms, we'd all be be complaining about "Deekayers" now.

Fortunately, and despite the Genwunners' best efforts, Pokémon (even Red and Blue) is now recognized as a classic gaming franchise, alongside Doom, King's Quest, and Sonic. This is why it can be so hard to remember that, in the 90s, Pokémon was basically the Justin Bieber of nerd culture.

The problem then was essentially the same as it is now: old versus new. Pokémon became extremely popular extremely quickly, especially with younger people, so fans of older video game franchises dismissed it as a fad that would die out in a few years. Sure, people had all sorts of complaints against the franchise--some legitimate and some stupid--but the word "fad" was always on the lips. The stuff that mature gamers of 13 and 14 grew up with--like Super Mario or Metroid--would always be classics, but Pokémon, it was predicted, would be gone soon. Fans of Pokémon Red and Blue were mocked for being silly fad-chasers, and assured that if they even remembered those games ten years later, it would be with embarrassment.

In other words, the people who were attacked back then for playing a faddish new game instead of the classics are now being attacked for playing that now-classic game instead of newer titles.

Why Waste a Perfectly Good Notebook?

I have a confession.

I am addicted to buying stuff on Amazon.

Okay, not "addicted to" so much as "fond of," and not "." so much as "every few weeks or so." Nonetheless, there is an eternal struggle between my id and my pocketbook. I compromise by buying the cheapest copy possible. I'm not the sort who insists that all my books and DVDs are in mint condition, so this usually works out pretty well, as even the cheapest items are functional, however vandalized and ugly they may be on the surface.

To prepare for the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, I recently bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird for one cent. I'm sure there's a perfect explanation for how anyone can profit off a one-cent book, presumably relating to a combination of shipping fees and bulk sales, but I haven't taken economics since High School, so I couldn't tell you what it is. Needless to say, anything that can go for one cent is likely to be in less-than-mint shape. I believe that the item was listed as "acceptable" condition, which here translates as "all the pages, and a bunch of extra words in the margins."

This is clearly the work of a literature student, or perhaps an aspiring writer, or at the very least an extraordinarily bored airline passenger. Truth be told, I found it more charming than troubling. I could still read the book perfectly (and it was still a masterpiece, if you're curious). The notes in the margins are really just the sprinkles--though to be really accurate, this metaphor does call for the sprinkles to be on, say, a vacuum cleaner.

I would never scribble in the margins of a novel myself, but I was impressed by how thorough the pro-scribbling previous owner was here. Words like "foreshadowing" or "symbolism" appear on nearly every page. About 68% of the text is underlined. Every time an adult tells Scout off, the notes point out that this person is an authority figure. It seems that, if there is even the slightest chance of something coming up on a test, there's an annotation for that.

Once I got over my initial amusement, I realized that this might well be why I was averaging a "B" in University. Sure, I believe that one set of text is enough for any work of classic literature, and still maintain an anti-annotating policy when it comes to my treatment of my personal library. But trying to climb a ladder without stepping on some rungs is as ludicrous as an egg-free omelette. Perhaps if I had been a bit more ruthless with my own books--allowing my handwritten observations to coexist with the retyped words of Milton, Faulkner, and Swift--my  grades would have gone up. And from, there, who knows? Better career prospects? A better life? Enough money to buy full-priced books on Amazon?

I do not know who my mysterious annotator was, and so I cannot say for sure that he or she has ever won a Pulitzer, but I have witnessed a work-ethic that puts my own University-self to shame, or at least mild insecurity. One should always strive to do one's best, of course, and I always thought that I was. But it's a humbling experience to realize just how much better the other guy's best was.

Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger -- A Review

I mentioned about a month ago that I was having an attack of Power Ranger nostalgia. I ordered Shout! Factory’s new, subtitled release of the original series, Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, from Amazon, and over the course of a few weeks, watched it in its entirety. It was an interesting, surreal experience to see something that is both familiar but different. I imagine that Marty McFly felt the same way back in the 1950s.

I should mention again that my last viewing of Power Rangers is old enough to drive, so I can’t compare the two shows in much detail. I did notice that Zyuranger is darker than Power Rangers at times, and just as wacky at times, and that a lot of the footage makes a lot more sense in its original context--for example, the Tyrannosaurus' fight against Giant, in which Tyrannosaurus never turned into Megazord. (In Zyuranger, this was the first giant-fight, and the Zyurangers didn't have any other mecha yet.)

As a stand-alone work, Zyuranger is (allegedly) seen as a mid-tier Super Sentai series: not terrible, but not great. I haven’t seen any other Sentai series to compare, but if I were to compare it to everything else I've ever seen since the beginning of time, that's about how I'd classify it. This isn't a masterpiece, but I did enjoy it.

Super Sentai is a tokusatsu series. In Japanese, tokusatsu means “special filming,” and refers to a special-effects-heavy live-action TV series or movie, but English-speakers use the term to refer to a Japanese-produced special-effects-heavy live-action TV series or movie that uses rubber suits instead of CGI. Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and Godzilla belong to this genre. If you've seen Power Rangers, you know what to expect with Zyuranger: spandex-clad martial artists, cheap special effects, and clunky robots fighting sluggish monsters.

Those Mighty Morphin' Zyurangers, before morphin'.

Mighty Morphin’ borrowed a lot of footage from its eastern cousin, but most of the suitless scenes were re-shot, and the series as a whole was rewritten, sometimes beyond recognition. In America, Zordon forms the Power Rangers from a group of five teenagers with 90’s-brand Diet Attitude. In Japan, there's no Zordon. There's just Barza, played by actor Jun Tatara, who you may recognize from Kurosawa’s landmark film, The Seven Samurai, where he played “Coolie A." While Barza is not a Zordon-style giant head in a tube, and has only enough magic left to grow his ear comically large, he did have the foresight to bring his own warriors with him instead of relying on a pack of high school athletes. They're the Zyurangers: TyrannoRanger Geki (Yuuta Mochizuki), MammothRanger Goushi (Aohisa Takayasu), TriceraRanger Dan (Hideki Fujiwara), TigerRanger Boi (Takumi Hashimoto) and PteraRanger Mei (Reiko Chiba). If the actors’ ages are any indication, only about two fifths of the Zyurangers are teens; the rest are in their twenties.

The villain is a Witch named Bandora, played by Machiko Soga. In Power Rangers, she's named Rita Repulsa, but the footage is taken from Soga’s work in Zyuranger, which, if I am not mistaken, makes her one of the only actors or actress (along with Ami Kawai, who played Lamie in Zyuranger and, by extension, Scorpina in Power Rangers) with a visible face to appear regularly in both versions of the show. Bandora will feel familiar to Power Rangers fans. Like Rita, Bandora’s campy, immature, and dangerous. She’s also a petty bully who hates children. Trapping them in trees, feeding their souls to a goblin, sending a pig in a roman centurion helmet to steal their food--anything for a laugh. Rita at least has the decency to pick on teenagers, but Bandora learned villainy from Roald Dahl.

This could have ruined the character, but Machiko Soga is a wonderful actress, and her hammy portrayal makes Bandora one of the best parts of the show. (She even sings a few times, which is itself worth the price of the DVD!) Yet when she does get to do dramatic work, she nails it. I’m not going to spoil anything else, but if Machiko hasn't made you weep like George Harrison's guitar by the end of the series, then you should see a ca

rdiologist, because you clearly have a heart of stone.

In-universe, Barza, Bandora, and the Zyurangers were around 170 million years ago, during the Jurassic period--an era of great fascination among paleontologists because it's the only know time period in which dinosaurs co-existed with mammoths, humans, and mecha. Through a combination of suspended animation and immortality, the cast reappear in the 90s. At first blush, this doesn't seem like a big deal--and by that, I mean that it should be a huge deal that influences the Zyurangers’ interaction with the world around them--but the fish-out-of-water angle is never explored or even acknowledged. This makes it a little harder to see the Zyurangers as real people at first, but it sort of makes sense; they awoke to save the world, not live in it. There is drama, of course, but it usually relates to combat and death, not the Saved by the Bell-style antics of Power Rangers.

But if you do want lighter drama, don't worry--that's what the dozens of kids the Zyurangers are always hanging out with are for. In a lot of episodes, these children get more screen time than the Zyurangers. The heartache of puppy love, the anxiety of harsh parenting, and the terror of being hypnotized into thinking that your father is a vampire, are all legitimate plots for these youngsters to wrestle through, with a little help from the Zyurangers. Whether or not this is a problem is a matter of personal taste. I didn't mind the children per say, but I did think that the best and most emotionally satisfying parts involved the Zyurangers themselves, which makes the children's plots suffer by comparison.

A lot of people think that the highlight of the series is Burai, the DragonRanger (played by Shiro Izumi, who, according to all the sources I've seen, was around thirty at the time). Burai is a badass loner and a fan-favourite, but unlike so many other badass loners who inexplicably become fan-favourites, he's actually interesting. Power Ranger fans will remember Green Ranger Tommy, who starts off evil then becomes good then loses his powers. In Zyuranger, Burai has a similar story, but darker and (with maybe one exception) better. (To avoid spoiling too much, I am going to fall back on the old web practice of making the font and background the same colour. Highlight to read, at your own risk.)

Geki and Burai are brothers, but Geki was adopted by a royal family and raised as a prince. Their biological father led a rebellion, but died in the process, and Burai swore vengeance on the King's family. When the Zyurangers were put into suspended animation, Burai followed them. Unfortunately, at some point in those 170 million years, there was an earthquake. Burai died, but the gods, knowing that he would be needed to defeat Bandora, decided to give him some extra time on Earth.

Once he wakes up, Burai joins Bandora and helps beat up the Zyurangers for a while, but eventually Geki's power of brotherly love wins him over to the side of good.

Now that Burai is a hero, and the Zyurangers (and presumably the audience) have decided to forgive him for all the people he attacked and tried to kill, the writers decide it's the right time for him to find out that he's living on borrowed time, and in fact is down to only 30 hours of it. For the time being, the best solution is for a spirit named Clotho (played by child actress Mayumi Sakai) to show up and take him to a magical chamber where time doesn't pass.

No, I don't know how that works, either. But the result is that Burai spends most of his remaining life sitting alone in an empty chamber, emerging only when the Zyurangers need him to save their butts or when the boredom and loneliness get too strong. 

At first, the other Zyurangers don't know any of this--they probably assume that he's just too cool for school or something. They do find out eventually, and, through hard work and hours of research, find out out about a magic elixir that could save his life. And surely they get it, right? I mean, the good guys can't die, can they?

Of course they get the elixir. But just a second too late--Burai dies, and the Zyurangers end up using the elixir to save some kid who probably hasn't destroyed as many buildings as Burai, but is a considerably less interesting character nonetheless. I doubt that long-time Power Rangers fans, still remembering what happened to the Mighty Morphin’ Green Ranger, will be too surprised when all that DragonRanger footage dries up, but for a first-time viewer, it must have been a shock.

My only real problem with Burai's character arc is that he's forgiven too easily. Tommy was brainwashed; Burai was just a jerk. But then none of the other Zyurangers ever had believable characterization, so why should I expect that to change now? Overall, Burai is probably the best part of the series. And I'm saying that as someone who usually hates the "anti-social bad boy who is so strong and so cool OMG!" cliche. But with Burai, it works. 

The other Zyurangers aren't exactly living it up, but Burai has it worse. The Zyurangers have each other in their moments of peace. Burai would like to have company like that. He'd like to be with his brother. He doesn't want to be that guy that stands in the corner, arms crossed, scowling and acting all Vegeta-like. The life he's living in that chamber is no life at all, and he knows it. But he wants to do the right thing, and fight alongside the Zyurangers, and that means that what's left of his life will consist of long stretches of loneliness interrupted mostly by giant mecha fights. He could leave that chamber, and try to live his last day out in peace and something resembling happiness. If nothing else, it would shorten his suffering.

But he doesn't. He stays in that chamber, and for days on end he suffers in solitude. He does it willingly, but he does it for other people--not himself. And as far as I'm concerned, it's this level of superhuman self-sacrifice that makes him a hero, and probably the most compelling character in the series. Like many anti-social fan-favourite heroes, Burai has done some awful things, but how many others have given nearly as much as him to redeem themselves? We may question how easily the others forgive him, but you can't deny that Burai is doing his best to deserve it.

Surprisingly, there was one thing in this series that made more sense in the American version than in the original: the nature of the giant robots themselves. In Mighty Morphin’, they were called Zords. They were non-sentient machines, like an AT-AT or any other traditional mecha. But in Japan, they’re called Guardian Beasts, and are sentient, and are gods, while Daizyuzin (Zyuranger’s version of Megazord) is the head god. But the designs and much of the footage are the exact same, which means that people in the Jurassic era apparently worshipped Autobot-like mechanical dinosaurs, complete with cockpits, who merged into their version of God. 

The Zyurangers and Mega... I mean Daizyuzin.

Sort of like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit being separate aspects of the Christian God, I guess.

Would I recommend Zyuranger? Yes, but hesitantly, and only to fans of Power Rangers, or at least fans of camp. The show is imaginative, the costumes are cool, there are some interesting stories, the cheesy special effects have a certain charm to them, and overall none of the episodes feel really bland. It’s fun, and that’s what a show like this should be. But it never really reaches a plateau of greatness; the absolute best episodes of Zyuranger would only rate as “pretty good” on a more subjective scale. Even Burai's character arc, wonderful as it is, is only watchable if you ignore the big, glowing, pulsating problem of how quickly and easily he's forgiven. I was willing to overlook that fumble, but some will probably feel like they're expected to eat a slice of gourmet cake because it only has a live tarantula in the first bite.

Nonetheless, if Shout! Factory decides to release some of the other (supposedly better) Super Sentai series in the west, I’m all for it.

Winners Don't Use Fruit: Thoughts on Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

I've always been much more interested in prose than poetry. I’m trying to branch out, and I think that my tastes have expanded considerably in the last decade, but when all is done and said, I still prefer stories. Maybe this means that I'm the seven-billionth person on this planet who should be naming his favourite poem, but for the record, my favourite poem is the 19th-century classic “Goblin Market,” by Christina Rossetti.

The poem tells the story of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, and what happens when they meet a sinister mob of fruit-pushing, animal-faced goblins. Lizzie won't touch the stuff ("We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?") but Laura lacks her sister’s willpower. Using "a precious golden lock" in place of a coin, she buys herself something of a buffet from those goblin men. The stuff is delicious. Needless to say, she returns the next day. It is needful to say, however, that when she does return, she can’t see or hear the goblins or their market. But that's just Laura: Lizzie still can. I guess that's the sort of marketing we should expect from anyone who accepts hair as legal tender.

Lizzie tries to get some fruit for her sister, but it isn't easy; when she admits that she's shopping for another, the goblins decide to force-feed their wares to her. Fortunately, although the poor girl is drenched in juice, she doesn't swallow any. She returns home, and lets her sister drink the juice right off her body:

     She cried 'Laura,' up the garden,
     'Did you miss me?
     Come and kiss me.
     Never mind my bruises,
     Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
     Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
     Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
     Eat me, drink me, love me;
     Laura, make much of me:
     For your sake I have braved the glen
     And had to do with goblin merchant men.'

Incidentally, this seems to be where many undergraduate lit students hit on their essay topics.

The good news is that Laura not only makes a full recovery, but is now so repulsed by the goblin’s fruit that she simply can’t stand the thought of eating any more of the foul stuff. Happy ending!

I've always been really interested in fairy tales and folklore, and the “Goblin Market” is definitely built on that land. The dire consequences of eating fruit may not be the most original subject, but there’s something about the setting of this poem that I love. A group of furry, selectively-visible goblins, peddling evil fruit that doesn't kill the victim directly but makes her so dependant on the stuff that she could die without it… it’s an imaginative image, and Rossetti describes it well. And there are some obvious real-world parallels in Lizzie’s struggles; although history is not my forte, I believe that opium addiction was a big problem in London at the time, so if these connections weren't intentional, they were at least subconscious. (Okay, so I would never make my cocaine-addicted sister snort cocaine off my body to help her with her cocaine-withdrawal symptoms; I never said it was a perfect metaphor.)

Simply put, “Goblin Market” appeals to a lot of people on a lot of levels. Like beautiful, lyrical poetry? You've got it here. Looking for a good work of classic literature to write your graduate thesis on? Not a problem! If you want a simple fairy story about scary goblins and magic, there’s nothing better. Or maybe you're just a pervert who wants to read about something dirty involving two sisters and some goblin juice. Hey, whatever floats your boat. Like all the greatest works of literature and Literature, “Goblin Market” has something for everyone.

This poem is in the public domain, and can be read at Project Gutenberg.

Revenge of Nostalgia

Just when you think you have nostalgia figured out...

Okay, I'll admit that I used to watch Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. A lot. There are many passions from my childhood whose candle burns as brightly today as it did when I saw six, but the Power Rangers? Melted wax, I thought. I never hated the Power Rangers, mind you, but after I turned twelve or so I never really had any desire to re-watch it. I considered myself Ranger-free.

Then, a few days back, I found out that Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger--the Japanese series whose basic premise and footage were recycled to create the first season of Power Rangers--was getting an official, English-subtitled DVD release, courtesy of Shout! Factory. By the end of the day, I was on Amazon, pre-ordering a copy and paying far more than I'd like to admit in the process. I'm not a Sentai enthusiast, or even a Tokusatsu enthusiast, and under normal circumstances I probably would have picked something more important, like Ultraman or Kamen Rider, as my gateway Tokusatsu series.

But I grew up on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and even though I then grew out of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, that didn't stop me from spending the last few days thinking about how much I want to see the Pudgy Pig again.

Super Sentai is not Power Rangers. I know that. But I'm not going to lie--part of the reason I want to watch Sentai Zyuranger is the fun of seeing familiar characters or footage in a different story and universe, possibly in ways that will completely change how I remember the original. I mean, what was really going on?

Almost two decades after I stopped watching the Power Rangers, two decades of thinking about the Power Rangers only intermittently, two decades of trying to remember why I watched the Power Rangers in the first place, and now I'm anxiously awaiting a DVD for a TV series that I have never watched just because it's related to the Power Rangers.

Well played, nostalgia. Well played.