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Post by El Borak on Dec 24, 2021 21:28:15 GMT -5
Just watching part of the video explaining the Uncanny Valley Effect gave me a very visceral Horrified response!   Really! Wow! Not seeing it myself, sorry it bothers you. I would love for walking, talking breathing Androids to be a thing. |
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Post by El Borak on Dec 24, 2021 21:44:50 GMT -5
As one of the seasoned citizens on here, I find anime really hard to look at, IMO it is a really bad form of art. To me there is just something off about it that makes my skin crawl. YMMV. I have been a fan of Anime since 1973 (Speed Racer), and still enjoy some of the newer titles. I understand, however, that anime is not for everyone. I am not one of those fans who feels the need to explain that you are wrong for not liking everything I like; that's just insane.
What seems to be happening with the live-action "renaissance" we are experiencing is that people take something you already don't like (and are therefore not less to watch) and turn it into something existing fans won't like. So the target audience was too small for the thing to make a profit.
Unfortunately, when these re-imagined properties flop, the cast and crew blame the fans. The problem, however, is that the new property has no fans. It failed to pull in the old fans (because it is so different from what they originally liked), and it failed to pull in new fans (because it is based in something that has limited appeal in the first place).
Blaming the fans really makes a statement that they were relying upon fans of the original work to watch whatever they made and called "Star Trek", "Star Wars", "Cowboy Bebop", etc... It strongly indicates they had no intention of pulling in new fans, they just figured that a Star Wars fan would dutifully watch anything with Star Wars in the title, and be grateful for it. To make matters worse, they "re-imagine" these cool old properties and "subvert expectations", which is guaranteed to reduce the number of older fans who watch your show because they liked the original concept.
I did not know Speed Racer was Anime, but it is a toned down version without all the sharp edges and big boobs. |
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Post by ironnerd on Dec 26, 2021 17:10:41 GMT -5
Speed Racer's real name was Go Mifune (thus the "G" on his shirts). It was a pretty early Anime and is in the pre-boobtacular era, along with Yamato, Dougram, the original Gundam, and even Macross (Robotech). Around the 1990's the animators seemed to discover breasts (or "Fan Service"). They did get carried away with the boobies from time to time. There was an anime called "Plastic Little". The DVD included a "Jiggle Counter". It was apparently animated by (and probably for) some very lonely men.
Cowboy Beebop's Faye Valentine was pretty boob-centric. It was always my opinion that they were enhanced, as the rest of her looks so much like a fence post. Then you start talking to girls who like Beebop, and they are opining about where Faye shaves and to what extent. Of course some girls figured out very quickly that cosplaying as Faye got them a LOT of attention.
While my friends were watching Beebop, I was watching 8th MS Team, Gundam 0083, Ranms 1/2, and (of course) Record of Lodoss War. We were all watching Neon Genesis: Evangelion.
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Post by ironnerd on Dec 26, 2021 17:16:28 GMT -5
I also found myself thinking "Firefly did this better". Well . . . while I am definitely a big fan of Firefly, there are a couple of things that Cowboy Bebop [at least the live action version and at least IMHO] did a bit better: 1) Space Drive Tech: The spaceships in Bebop (at least the ones we see being used) are all essentially short-range shuttles. These get literally thrown between planetary destinations by an external gate apparatus, which appears to accelerate/decelerate them through a dimension where the distance covered is shortened. Distances which would require months of real space travel are thus crossed in mere minutes. This makes more sense than the "hard burn" drives of Firefly, which required a substantial amount of handwavium to justify when discussed in the roleplaying game rules. Of course, both ship drive methods are very much plot devices: Cowboy Bebop's drives are fast because little of each story takes place aboard ship, whereas Firefly's drives are slow because a substantial amount of story *does* take place aboard ship. 2) Terraforming Tech: In both shows, each colony world visited has been terraformed into a copy of Earth. In Firefly, entire planets have been transformed, even to the extent of providing very small worlds full normal gravity through the use of artificial gravity generators. Given how insanely expensive that would have to be, the fact that most of these worlds are then turned into impoverished subsistence-agriculture colonies is a *mite* puzzling. In Cowboy Bebop, each colony appears to cover only portions of various planetary bodies, with said colonies covered by force domes for retention of the atmosphere [and presumably also the consequent gravity] that make living there possible. This "only fix as much as you need" approach makes a bit better economic sense, although it does sort of beg the question of how at least part of each colony appears to have ended up as "the poor neighborhood." Maybe the subtext is that the rich always need to bring along the poor, so as to have a population to exploit?* *EDIT: This just occurred to me - like Firefly, Cowboy Bebop assumes some sort of disaster forced the evacuation of Earth. In Bebop, it is implied that it was mostly only the wealthy who were able to evacuate or at least were able to do so in style. Maybe the poor neighborhoods house those less fortunate souls that guilt (or government mandate?) forced the rich to take along? The two are set in very different universes. Firefly appears to take place within a single, very complex solar system with multiple stars and multiple planets orbiting each sun. In addition, there are many moons around the various planets that can sustain life. "Settlers" would just be dropped off on any of these worlds with a few blankets and some basic supplies. If they all died, the government would just round up some more undesirables and send them to the same failed colony. It's kind of implied that space travel is not much more expensive then owning a charter boat is today on Earth (Earth-that-was). Realistic? Hell no, but really fun. Someone at a convention asked Joss Whedon if Serenity had an FTL drive. He didn't know. He didn't need it to tell his stories. |
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Post by raikenclw on Dec 30, 2021 21:25:05 GMT -5
Firefly appears to take place within a single, very complex solar system with multiple stars and multiple planets orbiting each sun. From my understanding, the multiple sun/system model was created through online discussions, largely by fans of the show, in an effort to justify the space travel seen in the show in some sort of vaguely rational way. As you say, Whedon himself simply winged it, with no thought at all given to such background details. But the moons/worlds are definitely terraformed, per the various opening episode narrations: Episodes 1-4 (Shepard Book speaking): "After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths were terraformed and colonized." Episodes 5 & 6: (Captain Mal speaking): "Here's how it is: Earth got used up, so we terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths, some rich and flush with the new technologies, some, not so much. " Episodes 7, 8, 9 & 11: (Mal speaking again):"Here's how it is: The Earth got used up, so we moved out and terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths." The above quotes are courtesy of firefly2002.weebly.com
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