Protocol Penguin

The franchise is called Masters of the Universe, not He-Man. Considering even back in the ‘80s they moved onto new villains, Hordak and later the Snakemen, it’s fair enough to vary the heroic protagonist. Nothing’s more boring than a franchise repeating the same material and characters.

Seen that sorta grift before, being a Transformers fan. Some alt-right/GGish type will make ‘content’ complaining about any new media in the franchise (mostly the IDW comics in the case of Transformers). Because they know that some old nerds will never be happy with anything being different to how it was in 1985.

I’m… Not terribly impressed by the new series? In fact I’m finding it not particularly watchable. They’ve kept the ‘zany’ cut and paste style from the previous series and Toys That Made Us, but with a British narrator who sounds like he dubbed over the original American narration track. Doesn’t work. The jaunty CBBC-ish voiceover doesn’t gel with the style that this series of documentaries are edited in.

These people sound worse than “Geewunner” Transformers fans.

What happened with this one? Still MIA?

Disappointingly, that’s Jelly Boy, not Jerry Boy (aka Smart Ball). Weird selection of games – Bombuzal was one of the earliest thirdparty games released for the Super Famicom in Japan.

Perhaps we’re actually aware that these are “comic book action movies”, but expect a certain level of consistent quality? I mean, we know that the MCU and similar genre fare aren’t high art, we’re under no illusions about that. However what we’ve seen over the last decade or more is cinematic adaptations of comics being taken to new levels, better quality entertainment than we’ve ever seen before. We’ve seen the MCU do much better. Popular mass-market entertainment needn’t be crap.

As a more casual fan (seen all the MCU films and TV shows, but haven’t read any Marvel comics since the turn of the century), I’d be annoyed if the multiverse ended one of the main appeals of the MCU, whereby it’s all part of an ongoing interlocking storyline. Would quickly lose patience if every MCU film and TV show going forward ended up in its own isolated mini-continuity, DC-style. Just putting it out there.

Kindergarten Cop I… Don’t get who this was aimed at. It doesn’t work as ‘action’, or comedy, or action-comedy. Or action-comedy with romance subplot. It fails to land on every level. Most of the supposed comedy comes from Arnie’s wackily-accented fish-out-of-water reactions, or the kids saying toe-curlingly ‘cute’ embarrassing stuff. Which if anything else is excruciating. The love interest character obviously can’t stand Arnie, and the villains come straight out of a low-quality American network television show. It’s genuinely one of the crappiest films that I’ve seen recently, and I can’t think on any level that it made for decent viewing even thirty years ago. 1/5 Total Recall (1990) This is great, and I regret not having seen this years ago. Quite subversive using Republican Arnie in a film with blatant anti-capitalist, alter-consumerist and anti-colonial messages. A must-watch for fans of Robocop (1987). 4/5

Another YouTube channel I had enjoyed, until they went all advertorial last year. Oh well.

Noticed some Gundam movies on Netflix now. Are they watchable without having seen the series? (Basically all I know of Gundam is that it’s a famous big mech suit anime that had some tie-in video games, and that’s it.)

I felt totally Turok 2’d by the press reviews for Skyward Sword in 2011. Made me once again realise how far the games media is just there to give glowing reviews to products with the ‘right’ brand name because their audience expects it of them. Hated every second struggling with the controls with that game. Never again.

Panic and guilt about owning too much is why from day one I deliberately limited my retro collection to certain formats – Super Famicom/Super NES being the core of my collection, being my favourite games system ever. Currently it’s that, GameCube (NTSC system and games bought for pennies in 2010), PC Engine (games easily storable in CD racks), and Game Boy (a dozen loose carts). The Mega Drive actually kicked off my modern retro collection, being cheap and plentiful in 2009, but the games went towards a mortgage deposit. With retro gaming inflation as it, I’ll probably not be able to expand my collection again really. Unless unforeseen windfall, or an eventful purchase of a MiSTer unit counts as retro equipment somehow. Or both. edit: of course I’m still gutted that I sold my expanded Amiga 1200 for thirty or forty quid back in 2003. I’d have had that recapped, Gotek added, the works, if I still owned it.