Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 11/26/21
Field Report: Central Texas
The annual WKRP Turkey Drop has come and gone, leaving tens of thousands of Americans wondering if there is an upper limit to the amount of carbohydrates they can consume without exploding like a can of sun-drenched biscuit dough.
Pictured below are the mutagenic cryopods that the Administrator made as contribution to the family dinner of the Director of Bunker Operations. The language barrier was difficult to navigate, but they were consumed rapidly, along with a series of grunts and hoots, leading me to conclude that I had successfully brokered a peace treaty between our two peoples.
In any case, I survived the encounter. They have asked me back for another holiday gathering in a month.
Giving Thanks
Everyone here at the bunker would like to take a moment to let you all know how important you are to the overall health and well-being of the N.T.A.B. and all of its inhabitants. Navigating the world is hard enough under normal conditions. These last few years have been trying, and that’s putting it very mildly.
We’ve all lost so much; So many people, gone from our lives. So much time, shared and otherwise. Our mental and physical health has suffered. Yet we continue to rebuild even in the uncertainty of a “new normal” or any kind of stability going forward. It’s just how we are hard-wired.
I’m so grateful we are on this journey together. I have gained so much strength from our shared lives. The N.T.A.B. will continue to broadcast into 2022, and in fact, we have plans to boost the signal, thanks to all of you. Thanks so much. Y’all mean the world to me.
Supplemental: Health Alert from the K9 Division
The bunker mascot spent most of Tuesday at the vet. During the morning constitutional, she was unable to navigate the stairs; her right hind leg was unable to support her weight. With forty feet worth of concrete stairs in the bunker to contend with, it was necessary for the Administrator to carry the mascot the final twelve steps, a feat that nearly killed them both.
After a round of blood work and some intravenous fluids, it was determined that the dog was dealing with arthritis in one or both of the legs. She was given pills to take (oh, joy) and told that this would be her new regime from now on.
Three days in on the meds, she is moving around much better. It’s going to be a while before we try the stairs again. Hopefully she’ll be strong enough to make the climb. I am contemplating alternatives that involve setting up a housing situation downstairs in the theater office, but I really hope it doesn’t come to that. However, she is turning twelve. She’s not a pup anymore. I need to make those adjustments in my thinking. I’m not ready for this. Not now.
In the meantime, she is resting comfortably, getting plenty of treats, and enjoying her new pink and purple collar.
Hat’s off to Friend of the Bunker Dana (of the Zuul Apocalypse Cult) for supplying me with a stock of pungent, bacon-flavored pill pockets that have made it possible to give her the necessary meds with no drama, tantrums, side-eyes, or other disapproving attitudes.
In Other News…
I am not a Black Friday person, and haven’t been for twenty or more years now. Around this time of year, I make a point of avoiding anything resembling a Big Box Retail Store until January 2nd of the following year. But through no fault of my own, I found myself at a Target in Waco, Texas, the day before Thanksgiving (or, the Pre-Pre Black Friday not-quite-a-sale), in search of a few necessities.
The store had the frantic energy of a run on bottled water during a tornado warning. Everyone was in motion, their eyes wide, their personal boundaries shattered in their need to get the thing on the shelf right next to you, even if it meant breathing on your neck to get it.
My favorite encounter of the night was the father and son team who stepped out of their aisle into the lane that we were traveling down, cart in front of us, at a rate of speed best described as a “casual stroll.” The father did a double take upon seeing us some fifteen feet away and fairly pushed his son in front of him to leap out of our way, as if we were in a careening vehicle going 65 miles an hour. He had a look of genuine terror on his face, like we wouldn’t have stopped before hitting him. I want to make it very clear that all he had to do was keep walking out of the aisle, crossing in front of us and on his merry way. But this reaction, his manufactured drama, made me suspect I wasn’t leading the most interesting life I could.
My second favorite encounter would have to be every single Target employee with an overstuffed metal cart, galloping through the store like they were driving in the Cannonball Run, and the the last gas station for three hundred miles was right up my ass. I’ve never felt so endangered in a Target before in my life. Come to think of it, maybe the father and son team glanced at us and thought we were Target employees, out for blood, a la Deathrace 2000.
Y’all be careful out there. To survive the Pandemic and die in a Wal-Mart, trampled underfoot, is a horrifying thought. And please, when you can, shop as locally as you can.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Cowboy Bebop (Netflix)
Spike and Jet are bounty hunters, flying through the galaxy in the Bebop, picking up scumbags, and staying one step ahead of their creditors, their past lives, and all of the syndicate bad guys who want to kill them.
(Administrator’s aside) There’s already been one teapot tempest online prior to the release of the show: Daniella Pineda, who plays Fay, isn’t wearing the highly revealing, gravity-defying, skintight, um, outfit of her animated namesake. For any number of a thousand reasons. But the Sturm and Drang that went up by the various stunted man-children of the Internet was, in the end, totally expected.
Never mind what the show got right; visually, that is. The ship, the preservation of the character designs of Jet and Spike (right up to and including that goofy-ass curling beard Jet is sporting that only appears in anime and manga), the opening credits, the music (!), the adaptation of familiar plots, iconic characters, all of that. The girl wasn’t naked enough so someone’s childhood is ruined.
If we, as a subculture, can’t be any smarter than that, and we only examine and critique at the most surface and superficial level without any context, nuance, or awareness of the different story-telling mediums, then can we all at least agree not to give these nattering chuckleheads the bandwidth to eructate their nonsense into reasonable people’s feeds? I really don’t care how stove-pipe stupid anyone is; I just don’t want to have to see it for myself. (end aside)
This long-awaited, highly anticipated live-action adaptation of the cult classic anime series of the same name is The Force Cave of 2021: What’s inside? Only what you take with you. If you’re looking to be disappointed, don’t worry, you will be. If you’re wondering what the big deal is, you may be nonplussed by the answer. If you were really excited about Cho as Spike, and loved the teaser of the opening credits that looked really like the opening credits of the anime, well, good news, this show delivers the goods.
I’m not sure what to tell you that would work in a capsule form, so bear with me for a minute. The reason why anime is so, so, so, well, so anime-like, is because it utilizes the sensibilities of another culture’s storytelling tools. It’s the reason why it first got a toe-hold in America when it did; as bastardized as Star Blazers and Battle of the Planets were, they did not look like anything else we’d ever seen before. And the stories were also very different; characters would die! In a ‘cartoon,’ man! So us early adopters were the ones who made Akira a cult classic when it finally came to America, and as the 1980s progressed, the culture’s fear of a Japanese take-over, and the media making Japan the new bogeyman, only made these Japanese cartoons more attractive to us Gen-X ne’er-do-wells. They were subversive. Our parents didn’t “get it.”
Fast forward to now. There are Cowboy Bebop fans who have never known a world without Anime and Manga at their fingertips. Moreover, there are anime fans who have watched thousands of hours of Anime, and maybe hundreds of hours of everything else. And we all know that the Internet is literally strewn with twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who consider themselves to be experts in all kinds of things, like media, for instance, but have not consumed it widely nor deeply.
Now. I told you that to tell you this: I am not gatekeeping in the least when I say to you that there are people online right now, talking about what a failure Cowboy Bebop is, that have no idea what they are talking about. Maybe they are anime fans who are unfamiliar with all of the sources the original series was swiping from. Maybe they were too young when the Wachowski’s Speed Racer came out in 2008 to “get it,” or worse, were way too old. Maybe they are people who haven’t even seen Cowboy Bebop prior to this (oh, heaven forfend!) and don’t know exactly quite what they are watching.
It reminds me a bit of the criticism surrounding the Sin City movie when it came out. Everyone over the age of 30 tagged it as being overly derivative and a blatant rip-off of every better film noir movie ever made. People who weren’t familiar with Frank Miller’s homage to the cinema of cool were like, “Black and white?! What is this, the 1950s or something!?” And there were fifteen people propping up comic book counters across the country going, “It looks just like the comic book come to life!”
Frank Miller intentionally borrowed heavily on film noir to make Sin City. Comic book people lost their minds because they weren’t familiar with film noir and so, for many of them, this was their introduction into Film noir. That’s a big fish in a small pond. But Sin City has to contend with being compared to other movies, including, you know, every single one of the films Miller pulled from to make the comic book. For some people, it falls flat, even though it’s a fantastic and faithful translation of comic-to-film, thanks to Rodriguez’s extensive use of highly stylized digital sets that let him replicate the look of the comics in exacting detail.
Speed Racer flopped at the box office because no one in film criticism understood that they were trying to make an anime out of live-action elements. Now it’s being hailed at a masterpiece.
Cowboy Bebop is running into the same problem as these two other projects. In trying to maintain some fidelity to the anime, it’s showing all of its cards, tipping off all of the film noir influences that made the anime so interesting, so different, so unique. Twenty years ago, there weren’t very many (if any) anime pulling influences from film noir and the Cinema of Cool. I mean, it’s no great secret; the opening credits alone sets you up for exactly what the show is about. And the jazz music! One of the best soundtracks to write to. Fun Fact: “bebop” refers to a specific kind of up tempo Jazz from the 1940s and 1950s...you know, when film noir was being invented.
You don’t have to know all of that to decide whether or not you like Cowboy Bebop, of course. I just think that sometimes, context is a big factor in deciding how one feels about something.
What I admired about the show was how much of the anime storytelling style they kept. Those short establishing shots, used to denote a passage of time. Long close-ups that seem to go on for a beat or two longer than they need to. Primary colors, stark lighting, split focus and rack focus shots. The lingering displays of hyper-violence, and all the rest of it. This may seem derivative if you’ve never seen the Cowboy Bebop anime and don’t know what the series creators were trying to pull from to make their anime cool and different.
I can only tell you that I liked the show; it’s got more of a cyberpunk slant, and they have mooshed some plots together from the anime, but it still looks (to me) like an anime, made live-action. Apparently, it’s not anime enough for the anime crowd, and it’s too wonky and disjointed for the people who don’t like anime. Note: when viewed by the staff from Bunker Operations, they concluded that the guys in the show were “Kinda sexy” and deemed it quite watchable, not knowing anything about the original anime.
Hopefully, you’ve got enough context now to decide if this is something you want to see or not. I think if you liked how Sin City and Speed Racer was handled, you will most likely enjoy this, too.
Tiger King Season 2 (Netflix)
I do not think I’m the kind of person that would stop and gawk at a train wreck. But when that train wreck is a circus train, and there’s a bunch of clown running around trying to put out a giraffe that is on fire, and they are all using their squirting flowers, to no effect, I defy anyone to not stop and stare in goggle-eyed wonder at the tragic spectacle unfolding before them in a grim panoply of nightmarish images, backlit by the hellish glow of a burning giraffe.
With that in mind, if you’d like more of my thoughts on Tiger King, Season 2, let me know in the comments and I will spill the beans. Otherwise, you can surely get the gist of Season 2 from the above analogy.
Glad to hear Sonja's getting better on the meds. My stepdaughter has an old rescue named Mal who was suffering a similar infirmity, compounded by having to negotiate a ramp down to the dog yard (And she's blind in the bargain). But the medication definitely helped her. Only noddingly familiar with Beebop, seen a few episodes, liked it ok, but have been lukewarm about watching the live action. Having digested all of the Harley Quinn animated, followed by all three seasons of Doom Patrol (both of which I hope continue) I think I need to go finish reading that five hundred page tome on the Lincoln brigade in the Spanish Civil War before I go back into the pool...Happy Thanksgiving, amigo-be well
Poor thing! I hope the meds continue to improve things for her and that, as creative as you'll no doubt be in handling this, the moving-downstairs-thing doesn't become a necessity.