This past weekend, for me, has been a shining example of why I love Japanese tokusatsu super hero shows. If you’re new to reading me, “tokusatsu” is Japanese for “special effects.” This generally applies to  the genre of live-action monster movies (example: the Godzilla franchise) and super hero shows (example: the Super Sentai franchise, where Power Rangers comes from). This weekend in particular, I finished two series I’ve been following for a while and have thoroughly enjoyed: Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger and Kamen Rider Black.

This weekend saw the end of the then-current 35th Super Sentai series - Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger (Pirate Task Force Gokaiger). The theme of the show is two-fold. One, it’s pirates, and who can’t get behind a team of pirate super heroes. Two, and more importantly, it’s an anniversary series. The Gokaiger team has the ability to transform into past rangers, and most episodes focus on a specific past team. The series even opens with every ranger of the previous 34 series fighting an army of bad guys. Point of reference, Power Rangers didn’t come about until the 16th Super Sentai series, so imagine basically doubling every power ranger ever.

The series isn’t terribly deep or complex. This pirate team brought together by their captain/red ranger Captain Marvelous (love the names) fight against the galactic, evil Zangyack Empire in the unconquered backwaters of the universe (meaning Earth). A year earlier, all 34 previous Sentai teams spent all their powers to drive back the Zangyack Empire from Earth, and now they’ve returned just as the Gokaiger team is on Earth looking for the Universe’s Greatest Treasures. Their journeys have lead them to the powers of their predecessors, and through actually meeting them on Earth, they gain more powerful abilities and a greater understanding of what it is to be a Super Sentai.

The series doesn’t necessarily require prior knowledge of any of the past shows. It’s made mostly for young kids who couldn’t have seen shows from the ’80s or ’90s, but their parents and a certain nostalgia market would. A superficial familiarity will suffice (see: Wikipedia).

The characters are all fun and generally light-hearted, which surprisingly hides a fairly dark past for most of them. Gai/GokaiSilver seems to be a fan favorite because he is the audience. He’s the Super Sentai fanboy who always wanted to be one of his heroes, and suddenly he is. Along side a team that originally doesn’t care about being heroes.

The reason to like this isn’t a hard one to grasp. It’s a tribute to the past, one that any fan of a previous series can enjoy. The characters are cool. The action is incredibly well done. It’s just an overall fun show to watch as it ramps up all the way throughout it’s explosive and exciting ending.

I also finished the series Kamen Rider Black this weekend. It is the 8th Kamen Rider series, running between 1987-1988, and I’ve been following it on and off for about three years. The story is of a young man named Kotaro Minami who is abducted with his surrogate brother on their 19th birthday by an evil cult called Golgom. Golgom plan on using these two to fulfill a prophesy by becoming mystic cyborgs and fight for the right to be their new leader and control their armies of animal mutants to wipe out humanity and rule the world. Something goes wrong in the brainwashing phase, and Kotaro breaks free and spends 51 episodes using the abilities Golgom gives him to fight against them and protect humanity as Kamen Rider Black.

It’s pretty episodic and formulaic (it is a kid’s show, after all), with most episodes featuring some kid stumbling upon a Golgom plot and Kotaro/Kamen Rider Black then stumbling upon the kid and having to take down Golgom’s latest anime mutant and teach the kid a life lesson at the same time. It also shows its age, with 80s style everywhere and heavily reused stock effects and footage. Once you’ve seen Kamen Rider Black do a Rider Punch and Rider Kick once, you’ve seen how it’s done throughout the entire show.

Where the show excels is in the acting of Tetsuo Kurata, who portrays Kotaro/Kamen Rider Black. Kurata does an amazing job conveying his emotions to the audience. Sure, those emotions are usually limited to worried desperation and serious responsibility, but he does it so well. Most of Golgom’s plots are either silly or absurd, but how Kotaro takes them seriously makes the audience take them seriously. The camaraderie and respect Kotaro feels for his few allies, especially his semi-sentient motorcycle Battle Hopper, are so genuine that the audience shares them. While his villains are often comical, his struggle feels so real that the audience believes it.

This is a guy who loses most of this family and is later forced to fight the one person he is closest with in the whole world, and the conflicting senses of sorrow and duty add a character depth that gives this children’s action drama some meat. The last ten episodes alone are just a great roller coaster ride leading up to the final climatic battle and emotional finish.

Plus aside from the aforementioned stock effects, the actual action and combat are often captivating. If you’re a fan of super hero action and tons of emotional melodrama, and you can sit through repetitive plot lines, then Kamen Rider Black is a great series to pick up. One of my favorite Rider series, if not THE favorite.

That’s my tokusatsu fandom for the weekend. What have you been into lately?

This year was held at the Millennium Maxwell House Hotel, which was a bit of a nostalgia trip. My first MTAC, MTAC GO in 2005, was held at the Millennium Maxwell House Hotel. It’s been a long ride since then. It was fun returning back, but then I remembered the elevators.

The Flash Dash Speed Drawing competition yielded this gem: Pimpachu and the GMX Girls! The GMX Girls are the mascots of the convention, and the subject of this round of drawings was “a superhero team up with the GMX Girls.” What better superhero than Pimpachu?

Setting up for Saturday Morning Cartoons. I’ve done it every GMX, always associated with cereal and milk. That was gone by the first episode. We had some technical difficulties at first that delayed the event, but we got it going. Wrapped the showing with an episode of Jem and the Holograms, in honor of our guests Samantha Newark (voice of Jem) and Patricia Alice Albrecht (voice of Pizzazz).

This… Well… This is what happens at 3am Saturday night with a Twister mat open.

The hotel itself had just undergone renovations in some of the rooms. I couldn’t exactly get a picture of the persistent paint smell, but I did get one of a hastily assembled door handle.

And this can stand on its own.

You can view the rest of my pitifully few photos at my Flickr page. I really need to start taking time out of each con to take photos.

I also recommend visiting the GMX YouTube page to watch continually updated videos from the con. Especially funny ones like this clip from the exceptional Geek Slam:

(Off Topic: I am working on a new theme and design for the blog. I like this one, but the background is just a placeholder. Let me know if you have any thoughts.)

Sometimes I get so used to regular geeky/anime conventions that I forget that “normal people” actually go to cultural festivals. That happened this time with JapanFest, Atlanta’s Japanese cultural festival, where I helped with some of the anime viewing content. Turns out, Akira and New Cutie Honey aren’t the most family friendly titles (retrospect d’uh). Thanks to my good friend Jess Merriman of MomoCon with helping in the selection.

I even had to quickly end my Cutey Honey: The LIVE clips in my “Tokusatsu Heroes” (Japanese super heroes) panel because it has partial nudity (sparkles cover the NSFW bits, but still…).

JapanFest is a rather large Japanese cultural event held every September in Atlanta, GA. It’s often on the same weekend as Anime Weekend Atlanta (which I also attend). This year, it wasn’t, so I got to stay the whole time. Again the con promo thing, as well as running panels and video.

I’m often surprised by how large JapanFest actually is. Anecdotal conversations said over 10,000 people, and I believe it. We ran through most of our promotional stickers and all of our fliers at the MTAC booth, and most of that was within the first day. I’m sure not being on AWA weekend helped, but it gets fairly large numbers anyway.

As a cultural festival, the big draws are the events and the exhibitions, of which I hardly got to see. The exhibition hall was littered with vendors and sponsors selling and promoting. Including a bunch of Yamaha vehicles. More importantly and probably just as big of a draw, the exhibition holds a popular food court of various Japanese restaurants. I was able to get some delicious okonomiyaki for just $3.

It’s nice to see so many different people from what I typically see at anime and geeky conventions. As a promoter, I get to reach a slightly different audience. As a people watcher, I get to see a new variety of people who aren’t all used to the foreign and “strange” costumes and content that I more or less see all the time at anime shows.

As a panelist, it’s a different experience as the audience for this rendition of my Tokusatsu Heroes panel seemed less interactive but just as interested versus the other cons I’ve presented this at.

JapanFest falls in September every year, also known as the month I might as well live in Atlanta. As mentioned, it’s around or during AWA as well as near to Dragon*Con. All three are worth it for  the trips. JapanFest is a more peaceful show, partially because of it only being two days and no night content, but also because the crowd is calmer. I’m glad Nashville has been getting a similar event in the spring, with the three-year-old, one-day Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival, but I don’t see that supplanting the interest in going to JapanFest.

***

Off topic: how do you prefer seeing titles of works protrayed on the web?

1. Bold?
2. Italics?
3. Underlined?
4. “Quotation marks?”

It’s been a while since I’ve done an actual convention retrospective. The reason is that I’m always working cons, usually promoting MTAC and GMX. As such, for the most part, the convention experience is the same aside from the friend experiences that are uninteresting to read or insider knowledge or critiques that I don’t feel comfortable discussing in my public forum.

Dragon*Con 2011 is my fourth, and it’s the first vacation con I’ve had since probably the first one, except I still volunteered at that one. Honestly, I expected to be somewhat bored, but that didn’t happen. That’s the great thing about Dragon*Con. There’s so much to do and see at the con that boredom rarely happened. What downtime there is was spent resting and recuperating (and chowing down on sandwiches we made in the hotel room).

(It’s also the 25th Dragon*Con, which means it’s as old as I am. Slightly intimidating, but not near as much as its tens and tens of thousands of attendance.)

That’s not to say I don’t have fun at the cons I go to working. Just ask the folks at Seishun Con. The freedom of responsibility is liberating though. If I had to put a name on a specific thing, it’s getting to sleep in.

The con was not without any work though. As I mentioned two posts ago, I performed two panels: DC Animated Universe and Tokusatsu (Japanese Super Heroes, kind of thinking THAT should be the name for now on). Both went very well and had decent attendance. I constantly find my weaknesses in public speaking and preparedness, but the feedback was positive, so I know I’m on the right track.

(In the middle of my toku panel, my friends made a drinking game out of every time I said “Power Rangers” or “Kamen Rider.” They ran out of their drinks in a matter of minutes.)

Along with not working with a con, I got to experience the dreaded walk-in registration, which wasn’t all that bad (except for my wallet *ouch*). I got through it in under an hour. Dragon*Con’s walk-in process is interesting in that there are three unique stations (each with multiple staff and terminals) to process the walk-ins: the payment station, the registration station and the badge pick-up station. You pay at the first station, divided into cash and credit. Then you take your registration form you fill out in line for the registration station to enter that data in its systems. Finally, you are sent to badge pick-up where the relevant data is printed onto a sticker and put on your badge. Now you’re good to go.

Everything I’ve heard about pre-registration is that it breezed by compared to years past, as long as you had your postcard. Dragon*Con switching to a barcode scanning system so they just scan your card, hand you your badge and send you on your merry way.

Recreationally, I spent the con hanging out with many good friends. I didn’t even go to as many panels and events I expected myself to do now that I could. I did make time for two TWiT panels: Tech News Today and NSFW (both of which are available online, being free podcasts and all). Both were pretty interesting, and the NSFW one was really funny with a dancing Red Skull and a xenomorphic alien trying to make out with Veronica Belmont.

Speaking of guests, my roommate passed by probably the best Felicia Day costumer at the con… who turned out to be Felicia Day. Seeing guests randomly walk by is one of the biggest attractions at Dragon*Con. It’s such a party con, a social con, and that possibility of socializing with your favorite TV stars is very alluring. I always feel off around people I watch on TV or follow online, never wanting to say anything for fear of seeming fanboyish.

Not that there is any shortage of people to mingle with anyway at a 50,000-person convention. It’s in fact the best part of the con. I spent all of Saturday night running into person after person I knew and catching up with several of my friends I rarely get to see anymore. People have their conventions made by meeting a beloved guest or snagging some awesome swag, but I love just goofing around and being geeky with all my friends.

But I also snagged some awesome swag. See you next year, Dragon*Con.

Check out the rest of my Dragon*Con pics at flickr.com/nikoscream

Godzilla rampages through the Marriott Marquis during Dragon*Con 2011.

Suddenly, something catches the eye of the King of Monsters…

FREE HUGS!

If there’s anything Godzilla loves more than stomping on Godzooky’s face, it’s free hugs from cute girls.

Thus Godzilla is pleased with this year’s Dragon*Con and leaves Atlanta (mostly) intact.

This year, at least.

It’s Labor Day weekend again, which means thousands and thousands of geeks and nerds will descend upon downtown Atlanta for the 25th annual Dragon*Con, a large multi-genre fandom convention.

It’s also the first con since 2007 that I’m going to and not promoting. Thanks to the very capable staff that MTAC and GMX has been amassing, it’ll be in good hands. While this will be my “vacation” con, I’ll still be doing some work in panels. Check below to see my panels and those I’m helping on.

My panels:

• DC Animated Universe
  Friday at 2:30pm in the Dunwoody Room at the Hyatt (Animation Track)
• Tokusatsu Heroes
  Saturday at 7pm in the Dunwoody Room at the Hyatt (Animation Track)

Panels I’ll sit on:

• How to Run a Convention
  Monday at 1pm in the Courtland Room at the Hyatt (Anime/Manga Track)

Panels I helped on:

• OTAKU JEOPARDY: Live-Action Edition
  Sunday at 5:30pm in the Courtland Room at the Hyatt (Anime/Manga Track)

If you’ll be in the area, hit me up on Twitter @nikoscream.

I am an unapologetic Gundam fan.

The video above (via Anime News Network) is of a dismantled full-scale replica of the main Gundam mech (RX-78-2 Gundam) from the original 1979 series Mobile Suit Gundam. In both the show and in real life, the Gundam stands almost 60 ft. high. In this display, however, the Gundam is in parts to allow people to get an up-close look at the famous mech that they couldn’t when it was originally unveiled as part of Gundam’s 30th anniversary.

Honestly, the part that keeps getting me is 1.15 minutes into the video, where people are actually sitting in the Gundam’s hand. That’s just awesome.

See the video below for the RX-78-2 Gundam standing tall, as well as a replica core fighter that serves as both jet and cockpit for the mech.

The show features mankind split between the Earth and giant, man-made space colonies, with war breaking out and a group of rookies and civilians getting caught in the middle with the Earth Federation’s newest weapon – the titular Gundam.

It was a ground-breaking show, ushering in the real-robot genre in anime as giant robot shows that focused on more methodical and realistic machines, character intricacies and the harsh realities of war. This is opposed to the hot-blooded and exaggerated nature of the super-robot genre, but even that’s not to say the two don’t mix (looking at you, G Gundam).

It’s awesome to see such a societal dedication to a fandom as to actually build this giant robot (albeit not functioning… supposedly). Sure, we have had mainstream societal dedication to fandoms before. Heck, Spider-Man and Mary Jane got married at Shea Stadium (thanks for screwing that up, Joe “Mephisto” Quesada).

Thankfully, locally, we’re trying our hand at real-life embodiment of the mechs of our youth. Nashville local special effects whiz Rick Prince is working on a life-size transformed Bumblebee (the Beetle, not the Camero). Rick is taking donations through KickStarter and hopes to unveil the project at this October’s Geek Media Expo in Nashville (disclaimer: I work with GMX). Hopefully Bumblebee 2.0 will transform.

What would you like to see from your childhood made into a tribute of your fandom?

Basically, you can’t click hyperlinked text on paper to open a new page (not yet, anyway).

First off, if you’re going to copy something straight from a browser (and you have permission to do so), paste it in Notepad or a similar program to clean it up and remove the formatting. You can reformat the text however you wish once it’s a clean slate again.

If you want to include a link, that’s fine. Instead, somewhere within the copy, simply list the desired URL (example.com). Bold it or italicize it or do something to bring added attention, although I still recommend against underlining unless it’s a title, as it will still look like you just copied off a website.

If you don’t want that link to appear at all in your copy, simply don’t use it. If it’s essential to citing a source though, you may want it somewhere though (think about footnotes).

Alternatively, give your audience tablets. Problem solved.

Does any of this sell you on DC Comics though? Do these trailers or any of the news you’ve heard made you care in the slightest? Is DC seeming to be achieving their goal in attracting a new audience, or do you seeing this falling on its face?

Maybe I’m just bringing my own biases into this, but I don’t see anything in this trailer selling the New 52 initiative. It’s familiar superheroes (mostly familiar with Superman in a tee shirt) beating up people and things. The shorter TV commercial is even less enticing. What’s new? What is the selling point of getting new and fallen-out readers to these books?

New books at #1 isn’t an irregular thing. Marvel essentially did the same thing with The Mighty Thor #1 and Captain America #1, yet these are not restarts or even soft reboots. These are new volumes, picking up at a fresh story for new readers while still embracing everything that has happened even within the previous issue of the last volume.

So why should I care, DC? Especially since you’ve screwed around with the Batman bits I was really digging, such as Dick and Bruce co-existing as Batman and Bruce Batman’s nifty new suit with the Bat signal chest. Why should I care? Why should the new and the old care? And why isn’t THAT in your trailers and commercials?

The real sticking point though is that DC pulls a quote from the New York Times to promote their initiative as being “audacious.” Let’s look at that for a moment.

Audacious:

1) Showing a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks
2) Showing an impudent lack of respect

Yeah, that fits.

The 2010 documentary covering comic writer/auteur Grant Morrison, complete with interviews with other noted comic industry names as well as the thickly-accented Scotsman himself, is now completely available on HULU. Click the image or this link to watch.

If you want to see if it’s worth your time, give a quick read through to my November 2010 review at CineGeek.com.