1 Ooooh. Please don't do this to me when I'm in caffeine withdrawal.

1 Lynx is one of the best-written NPCs in the game. Even her voice acting works with the concept, where most of the voice work they've added so far just makes me cringe.

-j

1 If I recall correctly, one of the groups fansubbing it gave up towards the end because they were offended by excessive loli content. The company who licensed it for the US still has it on their "coming soon" page, which means that they haven't updated their site since early 2008...

-j

2

I haven't seen any lolis. None at all.

The licensing company did make a deal to allow a dubbed version to be shown by Joost, but that appears to be the only R1 release of the title. As far as I can tell it never saw DVDs.

3 Ah, found it. Shinsen-subs is the group who was offended by Koi Koi 7. The original article isn't on their site any more, but someone still had it on the AnimeSuki forums: "Episode 11 was basically child porn. Shinsen-subs does not subtitle child porn."

No idea how true it is. They apparently came up with a Gainax ending, but I don't know any details.

-j

4 I just looked at that one and they're being hypersensitive. It's only one scene and it doesn't really show anything. (It's a character named Gantai, and I think she's a robot.)

5 I like how the infirmary is decorated.  I feel a fever coming on...maybe I should visit.

And if SS has issues with that, they'd better not be doing Bakamonogatari, or they'll freak when they hit episode 9...(link probably NSFW)

1 It looks like a pumkin to me. They sometimes come green like that.

2 If it were really a pumpkin and she dropped it four feet, it would have splashed.

3 I'd guess it's an acorn squash. The appearance fits, and they're fairly firm.

4 Likely some variety of what a USAan would call a squash, yes. There's a number of similar varieties, many of them are that shade of green. I'd guess it was supposed to be a buttercup or something similar; acorn squash come to more of a point at the non-stem end. Assuming it's supposed to be an accurate picture of anything, and not just random anime food... heh.

And most are surprisingly misnamed, since they're very hard to squash. (I'm likely to start with a meat cleaver against a raw one... they're a lot of work even with a big chef's knife.) Structurally similar to a pumpkin though... stringy seed glob surrounded by "meat" surrounded by waxy skin. Squash are much denser and much thicker-walled than the jack-o-lantern/pumpkin-pie variety, so you could probably drop one ala MSLNA's and not do more than bruise it lightly.

Based on watching Iron Chef, the Japanese might use the same word for what Americans separately call "pumpkins" and "squash". (Either they actually do, or the translators/dubbers for Iron Chef messed it up... what were clearly squash on that show got called "pumpkins".)

5 I did some googling and I can well believe it's supposed to be a buttercup squash.

6 Or one of these. Anyway, I'm satisfied with this answer.

7 Looked at the link.  Guess acorn squash can be round, too. The ones I see in the stores around here are always shaped like their namesake. You learn something new every day.

8 It's called a kabocha in Japanese.  They're usually cooked by being skinned (more like debarked), cut up, steamed, then simmered in a sauce of mirin, soy, and sugar.  It's surprisingly tasty.
And yes, they are hard as hell.  I bet they'd survive a trip to the kitchen floor 99% of the time.

9 Someone should answer that 'enforcer' question before this finishes turning into the first episode of Lucky Star...

10 If I had a link to Youtube, I could give it a try.

11

Sorry, folks. If I had some sort of tool, that worked, with which I could extract out a small segment of a video file I'd post an example.

But the only thing I have which does that is Vidomi, and getting the audio to work with that is always hit-or-miss. I've pretty much given up on it. (About three quarters of the time the result is audio which warbles, i.e. an audio codec mis-code.)

I downloaded Handbrake, and it works really well, but only for transcoding full files. As far as I can tell it doesn't have any way to extract out a small subsection. (Or if it does, it has to be done using the CLI and there I do not wish to go!)

12 It's situmukan - 執務官.

13

OK, dig out the old dictionary...

執務 shitsumu means "performance of one's official duties"

官 kan means "government service"

So it sounds a lot like it means "bureaucrat". But almost certainly it's not intended to be read literally.

14 By the way, thanks!

15 I had "enforcer" on my list of Official Nanoha Names, so I went with it. Nanoha seems to put 'em about half JAG and half CIA - independent investigators who don't operate as an integral part of a unit. (Which is one reason they're more powerful on average - they're expected to get into situations where they're forced to operate without support.)

I suspect the translator saw the term in the fansub and decided to go with it; too much of a coincidence otherwise. Eh, it works for me.

The TSAB seems to have easy transitions between branches, far more than most Earth militaries. Chrono is an Enforcer in A's but an admiral by Strikers, and all of the aces swap services at least once.

16 I suspect that's an adaptation to the situation:  powerful mages are rare, but also necessary for a variety of functions.  So, the rules for fitting them into the hierarchy are looser, both so they can fill more roles, and also as a perk for the mages due to their value.

Add to that a smattering of the old school British navy command independency ( due to communication speed limits ), and there you go.

( well, its not strictly due to comm lag, per se, but interdimensional travel seems to be of widely varying speed and safety, and that applies to comms too. . . so being cut off is not unlikely, particularly in the situations TSAB fleets and operatives would be expected to deal with )

17

The whole business of them using kids like that was always a bit creepy. The reason for it was easy: it's a mahou shoujo show, so of course the protagonist has to be a kid.

But you could retcon it with the same logic that Strike Witches used: the power of a mage peaks in their mid-teens. That wouldn't explain why Precia was so damned strong, but maybe she was even stronger when she was young.

Anyway, if that was true, then you couldn't really afford to wait until age 18 to recruit promising mages like Chrono. At age 18 his best years (as a mage, anyway) would already be behind him.

I'm not arguing that the series plotters had that in mind. Just it's one way of explaining it for the first two series.

18 Not a bad thought, except as of StrikerS, the major cast members are, if anything, massively more powerful than they were years earlier.  I suppose they could be just coming to the top of their peaks, theoretically, but I suspect its just something you have to SD on.

19 I haven't seen StrikerS and I understand it plays pretty considerable games with the continuity established by the first two series, especially regarding the general character of the Bureau.

20 I just found "Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vivid" in the new manga section of a scanlations site I visit.  I haven't seen StrikerS yet myself, and about three pages into Vivid I was utterly confused and convinced that I didn't dare read any further until I'd caught up.

Does anyone know how close the manga and the anime stick to each other?  It's kind of hard to figure that kind of thing out from the wiki's without getting hugely spoiled.

21 I don't know that it does, actually. The Bureau's not an evil organization, but it's clearly prepared to countenance bad things. Lindy makes a couple of cold-blooded decisions, and Graham intentionally sets down a path of massive dishonor and shame, even though they're both good people acting from good motives. Nothing that happens in Strikers portrays a Bureau that is any different (though in Strikers the antagonists are not also good people, for the most part.)

That said, Fate and Nanoha joining up at that age was just plumb abnormal - Teana and Subaru don't start formal military training until 13 or 14, and don't actually get a posting to a real unit until 16 (and that wouldn't have been much more than a militia unit, with their abilities, if they hadn't been headhunted at the beginning of Strikers.) Still a little younger than we run things, but not so far out there. Elio and Caro are younger, but they're atypical in their own ways.

It's -really- clear that in certain ways, the TSAB is a lot looser than a normal military organization. No prohibitions on nepotism at all - not just Chrono, but Admiral Leti's son too, as well as Subaru's dad and sister. Which makes sense if you're running your army as a big social network. We have good reason to believe that magical ability is hereditary; strong mages are rare and the TSAB has good reason to surround them with other strong mages at that time of life and encourage, heh, the production of more strong mages.

22 Good gravy, don't read Vivid until you're done with Strikers. It's not an altverse, it's a sequel, and most of the characters in it are introduced in Strikers. (The ones that aren't, were introduced AFTER Strikers, in drama CDs...)

The manga that's out there is mostly meant to supplement the anime, so it's "some stuff that happened between S1 and A's" and "some stuff that happened after A's and before Strikers." It's apparently canonical. There's even a chapter that focuses on the bad guys in Strikers, kind of like a Yagami family episode from A's, that was released right in the middle of Strikers.

There are two new Nanoha manga series: Vivid, which is the Vivio story (you don't know who she is and there's no way to explain it without massively spoiling Strikers), and Force, which looks to be more serious in tone and might not feature as much in the way of old cast. Vivid's pretty light material so far, lots of "where are they now" fanservice.

23 I always figured that the TSAB/Midchildia civilization operated off of differing standards of responsibility adulthood than ours. (There are various different sorts of adulthood, legal, responsibility, military, physical and sexual, etc...)

In our society, due to a combination of how children are sometimes raised, child labor laws, and the screwed up nature of our educational system, we tend to delay every form of maturity except maybe for physical and sexual. A lot of people aren't really good until say 25 or 30, and some never reach it. Other societies have had massively different standards. (Except for physical, as that process does not seem to vary so much.) One example that comes to mind is the goose boy or shepherd boy, who fulfills adult levels of responsibility while still being to small of frame for more difficult tasks.

In Mid society, this seems to be different. Up until watching Nanoha, I had always considered 10 a good practical minimum military age. Besides the skill with which the creators have presented their hard work, there are a few reasons why I found it so convincing. 1. The high intelligence, good grades, and language abilities of the young powerful mages have convinced me that the magical technology allows for earlier and more rapid education. For example, a telepathic interface might allow the understanding of complicated writing and the operation of complicated computers before they would otherwise be able to write. Nanoha is still a freak by this criteria, but maybe not as bad as Tom Kratman. (I do expect that the Mid Kids in the military do not have as broad an education as they might otherwise.)

2. Responsibility comes from partly from being in a position to succeed or fail, where not failing is important. Mid Kids with powerful magic are in a position to do as much harm as an adult, perhaps an armed adult. If they could not develop restraint to the extent that armed adults do, it would be a very different series. (Disturbed magical child 'soldiers', of the Joseph Kony/Nepal Maoist kind might be as reasonable a story to tell, but I doubt very much that any of us would like it.) 2b A fanfic author I know has postulated that magic drastically increases the mental maturation rate by altering the internal mechanisms. I don't feel this is actually has to happen for everything to make sense, and for them to be satisfying for me.

3. Normal militaries tend to be made up by very young people backed up by or using as cadre much older people. If there is some acceleration of maturity do to education, culture and life style, then there is might not be all that much functional difference between the TSABs general 14ish versus the US Military 17. In real life those two or three years are very important. Without faster development of some sort as a general rule, the TSAB may just be happy with the drawbacks. If they are a small fraction of the organization, they might not get out of hand, and the leadership might just want some people who will do what they are told without thinking about it, ala the HJ.

4. The very young and very powerful mages who star in Nanoha are pretty clearly not statistically representative of the TSAB as a whole. Generally they are *Spoiler*, raised abnormally, warped by growing up with unusual at an early age, and/or just a monster in general. There also seems to be an implication that precocious brightness and discipline are also needed to develop magic power beyond a certain point when young.

24 I got a text exceeds maximum limit message. Continuing from above:

In addition, the TSAB is not really a warfighting organization. I imagine that like for the third world militaries, the TSAB has elements of a jobs program for powerful mages who would otherwise be unemployed and a danger to the regime. Since they already need a low minimum legal age so they can stop some overpowered runt from cracking the universe because the voices tell them to, lowering the military age to the one where practicality suggests they can be held responsible for their actions seems a bit of a no brainer. I imagine that the older and more competent heads give the ones who cannot justify the position on their own merits make work to keep them busy and learning until they are more trustworthy.

It has been said about getting into the modern American military, that there is a waiver for everything except for not being well enough educated. Given everything else in the series, I would expect the TSAB to have a much lower minimum age for the form parents sign to allow their young children to enlist. Given what Triangle Hearts reveals, I imagine the Takamichis would have signed, and every other young person so enrolled is either an orphan (and hence legally competent to sign for themselves) or under the guardianship of someone who would sign.

I suspect that I may be overthinking things. Or it may be that I was an unusually incompetent child, and I don't see much difference between Nanoha Takamichi and Dido Twite.

25 I'll agree that the TSAB isn't really a war-fighting organization; it looks a lot like the modern Japanese military (perhaps unsurprisingly) with some British Navy tacked on. On the other hand, while you can pick holes in its tactical doctrine all day, you can't just conclude "man, Nanoha would do better to have read up on the US military". Specifically, I would hate to be the guy responsible for coming up with military doctrine that was effective against small forces that can teleport, fly unassisted, pass as little civilian girls, and leave large holes in the landscape. (And do all sorts of other funky things that we've seen Nanoha characters do...)

We do know that kids with magical talent in Mid itself are identified early, and have special schools available to them; on the other hand, at least at young-Nanoha's age, they're not in any sort of military or even pre-military.

It could just be a case of rarity. Nanoha and Fate, and Hayate especially, are powerful enough that the TSAB just can't afford not to use them where it can, even if two of them are former OPFOR. AAA-ranked mages are thin on the ground (S-ranked even thinner, of course), and doubtless there are more calls for that kind of ability than people to fill the slots. There's a long, long distance between AAA-rank and plain ol' A-rank; Signum and Vita (AAA themselves) were a match for any number of the mooks they encounter in A's (and we know they're minimum A-rank themselves).

Too many A's!

If it's a question between "get fifty long-service men killed for nothing" or "send in the loli", well, I'll hold her stuffed bunny. ;p

26 One other thing that encourages putting the young girls into service: what ELSE do you do with a magical girl that powerful who has already shown she's not inclined to sit on the sidelines and play with dolls?

Co-opting them into your force and dealing with any consequences seems far preferable to me than ending up using other already scarce high powered magic users to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't get into trouble.

27 #26- Especially in cases where you don't necessarily *have* people capable of monitoring and restraining the girls in question. . .

28 I'm not saying that saying more US doctrine should be brought into things. An alien society will produce a military or military substitute based that society, which may well be very different from a military produced by another society. The TSAB is in a dominant, satisfied position, and is mainly concerned with keeping the bandits down, so they don't accidently blow everything to kingdom come. This will, of course, be different from America's military, whose motivation is different. I don't know how to put it, but we know what happened to Rome, we've gotten our current position cheaply, we cannot predict the future, and we expect to fight more than bandits before we are dragged (hopefully fighting, and centuries in the future) into the dustbin of history. (And we also hope to take many tyrants and such with us along the way. I am not in the military, merely an American.) Tom Kratman writing his stuff, and the creators of Nanoha continuing their excellent work will both sell better to the markets than Tom Kratman writing Magical Girls. (However, given that he writes schoolboys and women as soldiers, only the magic is far off)

metaphysician: They have limiters, but I imagine people with the technical knowledge can break them. Then I imagine there would be some who would be tempted to use their hard earned skills to make money on the private market, ala the Russian/Soviet security forces and the Mafia. Lay offs cause a spike in organized crime, especially youngsters that don't have any salable skills other than fighting.

Not employing Nanoha or leaving either Fate or Hayate in prison might have had bad long term consequences for the stability of midchilda society. Idle hands, grudges and alienating salvagable fighters have taken down more than one real world government, even without the overpowered kiddies.

Ideas, Ideas.

29 Well, it's still Nanoha, which means that one effective method of restricting a mage is to keep them away from devices by locking them up. That's effective in the short term if you have to do it. But it's a poor solution long-term, because it creates a sub-population of embittered mages who don't like you very much, and will either get out one day to create havoc, or remain as a possible resource to be used by a "liberator" with the guts to strike at a TSAB prison.

(TSAB prisons are NOT nice facilities, and are kept in orbit around uninhabited planets.)

"Device control" doesn't work either, because the technology isn't secret, the tools aren't unavailable, and it's a big multiverse. Precia was able to make a device for Fate without much trouble. We know that minor mages have devices without the full capabilities of an Intelligent Device like RH, but which operate on the same principles.

So yes, it's probably much more effective to co-opt them than it is to try to stop them. (The appropriate metaphor is wholly inappropriate for use in a conversation about magical girls, but you get the idea.)

30 I think its even worse than that, re:  "Device control."  Midchildian technology and infrastructure seems to be based off the same principles as mage Devices.  It wouldn't shock if a mage with some technical competency could put together an improvised Device out of random salvaged parts.

IOW, hard enough to keep such from being done by inmates in high security prison; utterly impossible regarding the general populace.

P.S.:  *looks around sheepishly*  What?  I really like Nanoha, and don't mind extensive world debates. 

31 Leaving aside whether those factors also apply to real world gun control, I am not sure that a gun is the best analogy for a device. A device seems to be something take requires strength developed earlier to make use of, and requires learning to be truly effective with. IIRC Yuuno could not use Raging Heart to its fullest. With a gun, anyone can use one, with instruction if they have the certain minimum of manual ability. As with every human weapon, the greatest users will have aptitude and build on it through hard work and thinking. Other possibile cognates include the bow, the sword, the spear, the club, armor, power armor, and the boxing glove.

It does not take a long cultural immersion to become somewhat skilled with a gun. (Now, the most effective soldiers, regardless of weapons system, seem to need a cultural and institutional heritage to really develop.) It is not clear what the case is with devices. On the one hand, they were originally alien to Nanoha. On the other hand, she is a freak, and the basic teachings of the Takamichi sword style may be usefully similar to say Lindy's combat mage style. It is said, to get a longbowman, start with his grandfather, and swordsmen seem to take at least a lifetime.

Mainly, I think the device protects and enhances an already dangerous as a weapon combat mage rather than being a complete weapons system in its own right. Remember Nanoha bouncing the can at the start of A's? Well funded top of the line soldiers and warriors will pay quite a lot for effective armor, even if it doesn't do anything for their ability to cut people down. While all of the characters tend to be top of the line, and well funded, I am not trying to argue the power of the mages versus that of the devices to that extent.

I also seem to recall something in one of the mangas about the TSAB knowing of 4-5-6 hundred different methods of magic. I think I've seen about six, which implies that there may be some quite deadly deviceless methods. And then there are all the mages floating around that can't really be disarmed that way without near killing them.

32 Guys? Hey, guys? Whose blog is this?

1 A good choice, in my opinion.  Deathly Hallows has a lot of action scenes in it, and those take up huge amounts of screen time.  Goblet of Fire, book four, also had a lot of action, and I thought the movie really suffered because there was so little time to do anything but action sequences.

On the other hand, I thought Order of the Phoenix, book five, made a good movie despite being such a long book.  A lot of that length is Harry being an angsty teenager, and the story is both shorter and more enjoyable without it.

2 I bought Goblet of Fire but have never watched it. So I didn't bother buying movie 5, and probably won't bother with any of the others.

3 I rather liked part 4 and thought they did a great job condensing one of the longer books into movie size. I will admit that the ending of the film was somewhat anti-climatic, but that's a case of something that simply worked a lot better on the page than it does onscreen. The 5th movie did a fantastic job cutting down on the repetitive whining that plagued the book. To be honest, I think the 7th book would be better off as a single movie, for a couple of reasons. First, the 7th book reminded me a lot of the 5th, in that there was a lot of repetition and whining for a good portion of the book. It doesn't really kick in until the last 300 pages or so, and I think the movie could benefit from cutting some of the initial stuff. Second, I'm not sure there's a natural place to split the story into two separate movies (though I could be wrong on that). At this point, I feel like WB is attempting to just wring out as much as they can from the (enormously successful) franchise, but perhaps I'm being overly cynical.

4 From the previews, they're playing with part 6 quite a bit to add more action.  I suspect that they'll take the first 2/3rd of Deathly Hallows, spice it up with more action and call that a movie, ending around the action at the Gringott's vault.  Then the final movie can focus purely on the return to Hogwarts and the final confrontations.  That would probably work as well or better than just truncating out a lot of the first half of the book, and of course lets them keep the franchise active for another movie.

5 Careful with potential spoilers, please... I for one have not yet read books 6 and 7...

Carry on.

6 In fact, let's not talk about the details at all. (Thread closed.)

1 I quite enjoyed Bolt, I'm surprised that you'd like a preview, but something, and then not watch it based on reviews.  There are several scenes similar to the clip you saw, and almost all the characters are quite engaging, some of the hamster bits are hilarious, and the running gag with the pigeons is also amusing.

2

What I saw, and wanted to watch, was a story about a superpowered dog and a girl with nifty high tech gizmos.

What I didn't want was a Disney road movie about someone who is out of touch with reality.

I didn't want to watch this movie. I wanted to watch the TV show the girl and dog were in. That's what I saw at the store, and I wanted to watch that story.

I know from what I read that there are other scenes from the TV show in the movie, but that's not the point.

3 I know how you feel.  Years ago I bought Pohl's Black Star Rising because its cover showed insectoid aliens raising an American flag a la Iwo Jima and the slug on the back made it sound like these aliens freed America from invaders.  In fact it wasn't anything like that; it was disappointing.

4 I had exactly this experience with a Bolt preview on a plane. I was all interested and stuff, until it turned into a rip-off of The Incredible Journey, with an insane dog.

Ah, well... the odds of Disney successfully pulling off that awesome movie anyhow are pretty low. Dreamworks maybe and Pixar for sure (and yes, I know Pixar is owned by Disney but it's still not the same), but not Disney.

5 Well, I too want to watch series where Ryomu is huggable. You know, like in top.jpg.

6 The official Disney theatrical trailers were quite clear about the premise of Bolt.  Even the extended trailer that focused on the nifty chase sequence had enough other scenes to make it clear what the show was really about.  I wonder if the resellers are showing a different set of clips to try and jack sales?

7 One of these days I'd like to see the movie the Mulan trailer I saw was taken from.

I notice the common factor seems to be that they're Disney productions.

8 What do you know, I found the trailer I had watched a long time ago:

http://www.meekosmulanpage.com/Mulan_(teaser).mov

Notice the relative absense of Eddie Murphy's character.

1 Good lord, was it really 10 years ago?  I was running my Wallybooks store then, and spent one Sunday night setting up the in-store display.  Life-sized combat droids, R2-D2 book displays, the whole shebang... and was dreadfully disappointed when I actually saw the flick. 

When the original came out, I was 8 or 9 years old.  When the Death Star went 'boom', the crowd went nuts and I was hooked.  I eventually saw it 12 more times in the theatre.  It's actually the first film I remember seeing.

Come to think of it... I think I've only seen it once since then, when I forced Ph.Duck to watch it for the first time a few years back. 

Huh. 

2 Re: Star Wars [ep. IV], I was 18 at the time, saw it long enough after release that the line went around the theater.  They wanted the outrageous sum of $4.00 for admission too which was twice the norm back then.  I was lucky to see it in a real movie theater with a GIANT screen (the ones that rarely exist anymore) in all it's 70mm glory.  When that Star Destroyer went overhead in the opening scene I was blown away and a fan for life.  It's an experience I've never forgotten.  I'd pay a $100.00 now to see the original on that wide screen again like in 1977.

3

The Westgate was one of the early multiplexes, back when they started taking big theaters and subdividing them. It has one big screen and several small ones, and Star Wars was on the big screen.

There wasn't any line when I saw it. In fact, the theater wasn't even full. It was like a Saturday afternoon showing the first weekend.

4 "At the Westgate Theater, in Beaverton..."  Good Lord, I wonder if we were in line together? 

5 right. I'm 35, so when it came out in 78 I was only 4 years old. I do remember seeing Return of the Jedi in the theater, that was 1983 so i was nine years old - I cant recall when I first saw Ep 4 and 5 but i was a raving star wars lunatic with the toys and the lunch box and whatnot by the time I saw ROTJ, so presumably i got indoctrinated sometime after ep5. I am guessing i must have been about 6 or so when i first saw eps 4 and 5, which means that my eldest daughter shoudl be ripe for intrioduction to the saga now, too. i wonder if it will take with her the way it did with me. She loved Sugar and Totoro and Cat Returns, but Star Wars is SO not mahou shoujo.

6 In '77 I was working in the movie business, and our booker got passes to a preview showing [scroll down to comments] the night before the formal opening. Previous trauma from exposure to drive-in grade SF films had me sitting there saying to my self, "Okay, neat start... Now how are they going to screw this one up? Well, that was pretty cool. And so was that. Hey, it's the third reel, and they STILL haven't screwed it up. Omigawd, somebody's gonna make a mint!"

And yeah, the (full house) preview crowd cheered. Multiple times. Just like a Saturday afternoon kids' show.

7 I have to say, I didn't even bother to see Ep. 1 in the theater. I also don't remember where I first saw Ep. IV on the big screen. I do remember seeing the commercials for Star Wars on TV and being absolutely drawn in by the whole idea. My best Star Wars memory was when George Lucas re-released the movie in the 90's with the added digital effects. I was working in a pro Photo Finishing lab and Lucasfilm was one of our customers. We actually had the binders with all the original movie stills and behind the scenes photos for all the Lucasfilm movies in a vault on our site! I spent a portion of my day making duplications of those originals for Lucasfilm's PR and marketing needs. I got an invitation to come attend a special screening of Ep. IV in the Stag Theater at Skywalker Ranch (the room where the THX standard is set). This was a thank-you screening for folks who assisted in the efforts surrounding the re-release of the movie, so it was mostly "insiders" and the packed house was WAY into the film! I got to see a number of movies out at the Ranch, most were screenings of non-Lucasfilm movies for the Lucasfilm employees. A great experience.

8 Ep 6 was my first on the big screen, although by around 1980, we kids were thoroughly indoctrinated by the SPACEBALLS THE FLAMETHROWER.  Heck, radio stations would even run the entire teleplay and people would tune in, with no special effects but what they conjured from their memories.

Then, it only got worse, when HBO started showing Ep 4 almost non-stop for free on C-Band satellite around 1986 (a few years before they came up with scramblers and started charging money).

9 I can only remember one "theater bursts into applause" moment. It happened during Char's Counterattack at Otakon. If you've seen it, you know who got offed. ;p

Star Wars... I never saw the original three in the theater at all ('course, the first one I wasn't around for). Played the VHS until they wore out, though. Waited in line for ep 1, and shouldn't have bothered; 2 and 3 were perfectly all right in the sense that they were worth the price of admission in an entertainment sense, but they weren't worthy of the name.

10 I was in Jr High when I saw episode IV in the theater.  There was certainly a lot of expectations by everyone and the line was so long even after it had been out for weeks.  It was my first time seeing any movie on the giant curved screen of the Denver Cooper theater (long since gone).    Basically it was the 70's version of the IMAX screens. For more information look up Cinerama theaters.  I remember waiting and waiting for the super long preview of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to end so that the actual movie would start.  My mind was blown during the showing, it was so grand in scale.

11

There was actually one other case where I saw that kind of audience reaction.

I went to a wargame convention in SF one time, and they showed "Waterloo". The crowd treated it like a sports event, and (of course!) were rooting for the French. So, for instance, they cheered when the French lancers counter-charged the Scots Grays.

But that wasn't really the same kind of thing.

12

Shows my youth in that my first exposure to the Star Wars universe were the Ewoks and Droids cartoons in the late 80's (Ep 4 was out 4 years before I was born). Wierdest event at a cinema was when I went to see ep 2 at a midnight screening during my final year of uni, and 2 guys in jedi costumes had a duel in front of the screen before the programme started.

13 My daughter liked ep.6 because it had little cute furballs (who almost murdered everyone on the main cast I should add).

14 Andy, being young is no sin. Anyway, you'll grow out of it.

15 I remember seeing a brief commercial for Star Wars before it came out.  It showed a little bit of the Tie fighters chasing the Falcon, then a brief shot of the Falcon cockpit with Chewie as co-pilot.  Even in that 2 second shot, I could tell that Chewie was being treated a character, and not as "scary monster costume".  I also remember reading a movie review in Time magazine before the film opened which declared it "movie of the year".  The Time reviewer had watched it in a sneak preview in some suburban theater, and had been amazed at the cheering.

I didn't get to see it until after the craze had started (just  a kid with no car back then), but I was hooked as soon as the camera panned to show the desert planet from orbit, and it looked so real....

16 I never watched a SW movie again after the Ewoks Fiasco.  Fool me once....
The biggest audience cheer I've ever personally encountered was during the scene in Indiana Jones where he caps the guy with the sword.

1 Ooooh.  If I were his employer, I'd be taking a "dead peasant" life insurance policy out right about now.   He REALLY doesn't like Nimoy, does he?

2

I was interested right up until I read "time travel."  Larry Niven once said that to write time travel SF, you didn't need to be a good writer, you just needed a good history text.

In any SF story it's a lousy crutch, but in the Star Trek 'verse it's a pimped out electric wheelchair.

3 They're using time travel as an excuse for trashing canon. The universe has forked, and future movies will be on a separate branch, where events will take a new course.

4 Honestly, I don't think its a bad idea, at least in theory.  Star Trek has accumulated a *lot* of cruft over the decades.  Resetting to the early TOS era, and starting from there again?  Has more potential than trying to work through the post-Voyager post-Enterprise mess.

5 They didn't need to do the time travel wheeze to reboot the franchise.  BSG didn't use it and did just fine (at least until season 3 when it became obvious the writers had no idea where they wanted to go).  But even the initial time travel incident was tolerable.  It was the second time traveller that nearly sank the movie - the initial time travel incident having already forked the timeline it was completely unnecessary to play deus-ex-time-travel again.  Had events at the snowbound station played out without his assistance (the engineer having come up with the critical equation over the preceeding months of boredom instead of having it handed to him on a plate) then the movie and characters would have come across much more strongly.

1 So, are you saying they've ran out of artistic skill, or that they've discovered a new and innovative way to lose money? 

2 I think the answer to your question is "yes".

3 "Via" in "the link is here", or "Via" as in "I'm cursing like I've been in Hammer's Slammers for ten years"? Either works...

4 "Via" is what I use now instead of "On screen".

5 "Via" makes more sense, since it's a blogging standard. The "On Screen" was supposed to refer to Startrek somehow, but I could never figure it out. Usually the captain calls "on screen" to bring up a visual to the big screen, and somehow this does not click with "I have received this information thanks to...".

6

I have a bad feeling about this movie.

They can't make Americans the good guys anymore, so expect to see all sorts of angst as the Wolverines wonder if they're on the right side and also expect to see the politicians working with the enemy as thinly disguised Republicans, extra points if they get Teh Fred to play one.

Nope, Hollywood is far too political to ever allow a movie with unashamed American values free.

Heck, it would surprise me not at all if this remake is set in Iraq or Afghanistan and the Wolverines are fighting against the Imperialist Americans with Israelis playing the part of the Cuban allies.

Quick question, which one (1) movie since 9/11 has America as the good guys in the War on (Some) Terror?

Team America, the one with the non-anatomically correct puppet-sex scene.

In all the rest, we're the bad guys.

7

Yeah, the post I linked to said:

The cause of the invasion? Oil, of course. There are hints that America is kinda to blame, too. In today’s PC environment, that’s not too much of a surprise.

As you say, making America or American's heroic is just not acceptable in this day and age. Americans are supposed to doubt, apologize, and do penance. The only good Americans are anti-American Americans.

8

Without getting into the politics of it all, I remember seeing the movie at the theater and laughing through the opening invasion of Colorado by the Cubans. It was the one scene where the commander stoops down and takes a pistol from a dead citizen. As he does so, we see the bumper sticker on a truck.  "They can have my guns when they pry them from my cold dead hands!"

I cracked up and said to my friend "this film has to have been financed by the NRA!"

Funny how you don't see that bumper sticker around so much any more...

9 One of the things about it that didn't age at all well was the fact that a lot of the invaders were Nicaraguans. That was topical when the film was made (this was in the era of the Sandinistas) but seems strange now.

10 Robocop might also be remade ("might" because Sony said "no", but MGM said "yes").

I'd rather they just make a Robocop IV than rehash the original.

1 I can think of a lot of things I'd rather do than go see the new Star Trek movie.  Molt.  Pick nits out of my wings.  Disembowel myself with a melon baller.  That sort of thing.

2 From what I've seen of the snippets at their website, I'm going to hate it. That's not going to stop me from seeing it. I've never missed a Star Trek movie, not even The One That Shall Not Be Named. (Hint: Shatner directed.)

I still wonder if it's entirely a coincidence that I got horribly ill for two weeks after seeing it...

3 I don't know if I'm going to see it or not. I keep thinking of it as Big Gay Star Trek*, ever since I've seen the first publicity stills (and the first trailer, even more so.) I wonder how many of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are by people who are longtime fans of the series (too lazy to check.) *Not that there's anything wrong with that.

4

I saw it last week (sneak preview). I really enjoyed it, though I should note that I'm not a fan of the original series (but I loved TNG). I'd be curious to see what someone who loved the original series thought, as JJ Abrams did change some things. It's also more of an action movie than other Star Treks, but that worked fine for me.

With apologies for self promotion, there's a mostly spoiler free review at my blog.

5 Hm, it turns out that longtime fans hate it: Fans hate new movie(video)

6 Rick, that's the Onion.

7 It is the Onion, but the Onion's whole trade is being uncomfortably close to the truth. I recall their piece on NASA's safety inspector delaying launch. Their inspector was a copy of the actual inspector.

8

Yes, but the point of the Onion's segment was that fans were bashing on it because it was good.  Whether it is or not, I will know in a few days, but the point it made about TOS and TNG was spot on.  The fight with the Gorn had me grinning like a madman.

And from Mark's review, I gather they're actually going to address the retelling in such a way that any canonical differences going forward are actually addressed.  (Although they'll still find ways to violate canon, anyway.)  I've followed it closely enough that I have an idea why, though it's a spoiler. The previews allude to it; the plot of the movie is that someone is coming back into the past -- multiple times -- to make damn sure the career (if not the life) of "the Federation's greatest captain" gets stopped before it gets started. Wonder if the Temporal Corps will be involved?

9 I got started on TNG and quit watching Trek during the Voyager years.  Voyager highlighted everything wrong about the franchise.

10 Here's another review, very upbeat.

11 Steven: yes, I know it's the Onion. Like ubu said, the premise was that fans hated it because it was good, and that Paramount said it would seem just as cheesy as the original in a few years. That's wildly funny. Especially to me, since I dislike the pompous blowhardiness that took over the series when Captain Surrender was in charge.