Friday Night Fights: Make Yourself Ready

In this week's contribution to Bahlactus's cosmic throwdown, World Welfare Work Association ("3WA") troubleshooter Yuri engages in a little workplace hostility with her partner and fellow "Lovely Angel," Kei.

(from Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels #5, August 1991; by the incomparable Adam Warren)
I think it sums up my feelings regarding this current example of fanboy stupidity rather nicely. (Besides, there's nothing I could add that Charlie B. hasn't already said.)

While my interest in anime is pretty much nil these days, there will always be a place in my heart for the Dirty Pair. I was thrilled to discover that Dark Horse has begun to release translations of the original Japanese novels featuring the adventures of the ill-omened duo, whose nickname refers to the catastrophic collateral damage that inevitably occurs in their wake. (Now if only Amazon could get its shit together and ship me those novels, considering I ordered them over a month ago....)

The tendency by certain sectors of fandom to reduce the franchise to "that thing with the semi-naked chicks carrying big guns" is somewhat irksome. I'm not claiming that I'm above paying notice to Yuri and Kei's choice in attire, but space-bikinis aside, the real draw is the entertaining blend of comedy and science fiction on display in both the animated and comic book versions of the Dirty Pair. The American Dirty Pair comic miniseries helmed by Adam Warren are packed with visionary concepts taken from contemporary hard sci-fi, and Warren manages to strike the perfect balance between techobabble and T&A. (Masamune Shirow could take some pointers on that front.)

There's also a very personal and sentimental reason for my affection towards the Dirty Pair. As I probably mentioned in a previous post, the painting on the back of my punk jacket came from the cover of the third issue of the first Dirty Pair miniseries.


I chose the image because I wanted something a little different from the band logo or album cover route, and even though the thought never crossed my mind, it also captured the my "one foot in punkery, the other in geekery" stance damn near perfectly. When another punk-geek hybrid in my extended circle of collegiate acquaintances recognized the painting on my jacket and asked to see it, it was my first inkling that this particular individual, a dark-haired woman by the name of Maura, was interested in me (though it took a while before that realization managed to penetrate my thick skull).

Nakahara Meiko - Ru-Ru-Ru-Russian Roulette (from the Dirty Pair TV series OST, 1985) - This is the full-length version of the show's opening theme, and like most j-pop from that era, it manages to sound both timeless and incredibly dated at the same time. DANCE! DANCE! CHANCE! CHANCE!

don't need the masters

It's an all right place to visit, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there.

Today was supposed to be fairly quiet and uneventful, what with the wife away negotiating the cosplay-and-body-odor-heavy seas of the Anime Boston convention and little old me being left to my own devices here at our house on the hill.

Not that I'm unhappy with how things turned out. I could have done without the family hassles which manifested themselves and the dinnertime encounter with the Church of Latter-Day Saints' black-suited community outreach program. The visit from my brother was a nice surprise, though, especially as it included the gift of a stack of old Marvel comics from the 60's and 70's and a marathon sibling co-op session of the Xbox 360 version of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

The Pillows - Little Busters (from Little Busters, 1998; also available on Fooly Cooly OST 1: Addict, 2004) - I didn't accompany Maura to today's convention because that particular form of salinity lost its savor for me sometime in the early 1990's. It was a combination of popcult saturation fatigue (coupled with the ubiquitous shallow Japanophilia in the fan scene) and the simple fact that my personal tastes and prevailing trends in manga and anime have diverged a great deal over the years. (I'm an unreconstructed old school mecha jockey and space opera enthusiast.)

There are a lot of things of note out there at the moment, but very little that appeals to me personally with the exception of occasional works like Youtsuba&! or the not-that-recent, but wonderfully bizarre FLCL, which featured today's song (as well as several other gems) by the Japanese indie rock outfit The Pillows on its soundtrack.

better rev it up and put it to use

Today we have an excerpt from Andrew's Notes on the Grand Unified Theory of Pop Culture:

Even before production finished on 1982's Nick Nolte/Eddie Murphy cuss word vector, 48 Hrs., director Walter Hill, screenwriter Larry Gross, and producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver has already started work on their next project, a "rock and roll musical" intended as a big budget follow up on the cult success of Hill and Gordon's 1979 film, The Warriors.

The end result was Streets of Fire, an art-directed mess of a film and one of the the summer of 1984's bigger cinematic bombs, grossing a little more than half of its $14.5 million production costs during its initial run. Frequently evoked as a poster child of the style over substance ethos and as a cautionary example of adhering to an "MTV" aesthetic, the film has since gone on to be a modest cult favorite, spurred on by countless showings on basic cable during the late 1980's and early 1990's. Fans of the film tend toward rabidity, while the unconverted tend to just shake their heads sadly whenever the subject is brought up.

It's not bad for what it is, a minor action/romance timewaster set in a very 1980's reimagining of 1950's Chicago. Tough but tender mercenary Cody (played by tabula rasa Michael Paré) returns home to rescue his old flame, rock goddess Ellen Aim (played by the stunningly gorgeous Diane Lane)...

...from a pack of fiendish bikers led by the lean and fearsome Raven (played by Willem Dafoe, who rocks the "shirtless in pleather overalls" look like no one's business). The battle between good and evil culminates with a sledgehammer fight beneath the El tracks, which is how more movies ought to end. (I'm talking to you, P.S. I Love You.)

It's certainly not the worst way to spend ninety minutes, and there's plenty of fun to be had in spotting the supporting cast members, which include, among others, Robert Townsend (as a doo-wop singer), Rick Moranis (as Ellen Aim's manager), Fear frontman Lee Ving (as Raven's lieutenant), Elizabeth "E.G." Daily (as a groupie), and the always welcome Bill Paxton (as "Clyde the Bartender").

The film's soundtrack also encroaches (cheesily, but still) on excellence, which is kind of important for a quasi-musical -- sorry, a rock and roll fable (as opposed to an acid jazz parable or a jump blues syllogism.) The only track from the score that registered on the popular consciousness was Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You" (lipsynched by a moonwalkin' doo-wop act in the film and music video) which made it into the Top 40 charts, making it a bigger success than the film itself. The Fixx and The Blasters also contributed songs, but the movie's signature sound (apart from Ry Cooder's distinctively twangy score) comes from the tracks "performed" by Ellen Aim and her band, The Attackers (played by Boston new wave outfit Face to Face), particularly the two bombastic rock tracks ("Nowhere Fast" and "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young") penned by Jim Steinman (the man who gave Meat Loaf his flavor) and performed by Fire, Inc., a front band featuring frequent Steinman collaborators Holly Sherwood and Rory Dodd.

Fire, Inc. - Nowhere Fast (from the Streets of Fire OST, 1984) - Judging it as a rock song, I'd have to say it makes a perfectly adequate show tune.

Ellen Aim's other overdubbed efforts featured vocal performances by Face to Face's Laurie Sargent and Maria (Lone Justice) McKee. Oh, and guitarist/Weird Al collaborator/pinball wizard Rick Derringer was also involved in some capacity.

(On a side note, the movie's title and ostensible inspiration were drawn from Bruce Springsteen's "Darkness at the Edge of Town," but The Boss balked over the proposal to have other performers rerecord the song for the film.)

As I mentioned before, the film tanked at the box office. "Tonight is what it means to be dead," remarked Joel Silver upon seeing the initial grosses, paraphrasing the movie's tagline. I can remember hanging out on the roof of a friend's garage with our neighborhood gang back in the summer of '84, arguing over what movie to see. We split along gender lines; the girls wanted to see Streets of Fire and the boys wanted to see (I swear, though the release dates don't line up) Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. The boys won, as much as sitting through a lousy Charles Band 3-D sci-fi flick can be viewed as "winning."

Though unappreciated upon its release, Streets of Fire went on to have a significant influence in Japan, where its hyper-stylized aesthetic dovetailed nicely with contemporary trends in anime. (You can't go wrong with bad boys and idol singers in that market.) The first installment of Megazone 23 features a scene where the principal characters attend a showing of the film, but the original Bubblegum Crisis OVA series took the homage a couple steps further with the character of Priss Asagiri...

...a rock singer-slash-cyberpunk avenger whose look and sound are directly patterned after Ellen Aim's.

Priss and The Replicants - Akuma to Tenchi no Kiss (from Bubblegum Crisis: Complete Vocal Collection, 2000) - A case of going one better than the source material, I'd argue. The band's name is a clever (well, I thought so) homage to another, equally art-directed 80's flick.

The trans-Pacific love for Streets of Fire wasn't limited to anime offerings, either. The lead designer of Capcom's Final Fight, the quintessential example of the co-op "beat 'em up" videogame genre, was very much smitten with the movie. That would explain why the game features a character named Cody, a scruffy street fightin' man with a more-than-passing resemblance to Michael Paré, punching and kicking through a city full of thugs in order to rescue his girlfriend. (He is assisted in his efforts by a ninja and a pro wrestler -- thus providing a wonderful capsule view of the late 80's zeitgeist. All that's missing is Fido Dido.) Personally, I lament the fact the game didn't feature a playable analogue for Amy Madigan's tough-as-nails mercenary character from the film.

After a nine-year abscence, Cody (now an escaped convict) went on to join the cast of Street Fighter Alpha 3 before appearing as a supporting character (and 'roided up monstrous adversary) in the excremental Final Fight: Streetwise. As of late, Michael Paré has been working with director (and I use that term in the loosest sense of the word) Uwe Boll in films such as BloodRayne (I and II), Far Cry, and Postal, which, I have to admit, is an even worse fate than the one suffered by his videogame counterpart.

...and that thing is not starring in horrible videogame-based movies made for tax write-off purposes...

a steaming bowl of ramen

Ocassionally, I'll come across a piece of sequential graphic art that manages to pierce though my crusty shell of jadedness and remind me why I fell in love with comics in the first place. It doesn't occur that often (and I'm willing to split the blame for that equally between myself and the current state of the comics industry), but it did happen last Thursday, when the fifth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&! I ordered arrived in the mail.

I'm a pretty reserved guy, and it's a rare occasion where I find myself laughing out loud over something I'm reading, but this...

(It's manga, so read right to left.)
...had me in stitches. Granted, I have a weakness for scatalogically-themed humor, but it was more than that; few works in any media have been able to capture the spirit of childhood as well as Yotsuba&! does, and that sequence in particular nailed that special mix of immaturity and whimsy (and adult exasperation) perfectly.

PINE*am - Get a Choco (from Pull the Rabbit Ears, 2005) - Imagine Ladytron run through a slight J-Pop filter, and you'd have something close to this track. Highly recommended.

you know that talk is cheap

It's another trip to the well of unfunny humor otherwise known as Marvel's Crazy Magazine. From the June 1980 issue of the magazine comes a selection of parodies of contemporary hit songs. The bar for successful song parodies isn't that high. Few can reach the level of a Spike Jones or a Weird Al, but several meticulous studies have shown than even taking the low road of scatalogical-themed puns and word substitution can be counted to generate some cheap chuckles. ("The owner of a lonely farrrrrrrrt!" HA HA HA HA!) It's a process that innumerable boys aged from 8 to 14 are intimately familiar with, yet it was apparently beyond the Crazy Magazine staff's ability to grasp, as the following bitter nuggets of joylessness illustrate.

Here's the Village People "Pillage People" performing "In the Navy" "Join the Navy":

Readers: How many clichéd and/or stale gags can you spot in the above panel? (Answer: Too many by far.) The amalgam of service-related gripes and anti-military slogans had me wondering if my WWII vet grandfather and an a community college-grade campus radical had collaborated in writing it: "No blood for oil!" "Pipe down, pinko! I wasn't done tellin' ya about the shit they used to call food back in The Big One."

I'm having difficulty parsing the "You'll be safe from guys like us" line. What do they mean by that? That the Navy doesn't recruit flamboyant disco performers who starred alongside Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner in a Nancy Walker film? I'm sure there are more than a few seamen who fit that criteria.

Pink Lady - Pink Typhoon (from Best, 2005) - In which j-pop's original idorus, Mie and Kei, transform the Village People's ode to hijinx on the high seas into their own personal anthem. Puh-rin-ku rei-di!

Thank you, internet, Cheap Trick Truck says, "Goodnight!" Watch out for the "Dream Scream Police!"

ANDREW TO CRAZY MAGAZINE: DROP DEAD

See the odd-looking creature in the insert boxes up there? While it would be completely understandable to think that it's Barney the Dinosaur channeling Hunter S. Thompson, it's actually "Behemoth Jack," the host of this feature. That is the level of humor we're operating on here: one that features a nonsensical dinocentric caricature of Wolfman Jack. Sheol help us.

I would also like to point out that the cartoon version of Rick Nielsen possesses a degree of sophisticated dignity lacking in the real-life model.

Lambretta - Dream Police (from Breakfast, 1999) - These Swedish pop-rockers are more sweater vests than Cardigans, if you catch my drift. Sartorial humor rocks, and so does this cover -- to a certain mild degree.

The Knack Knock...and how to get rid of it:

Why does this seem so familiar to me? To be fair, the serendipitous Sharona/bologna rhyme connection was a pretty obvious avenue of satiric attack, but that doesn't excuse it's dismal execution in the above panel. Additional points were also deducted for the use of "BARF," the red-headed stepchild of the scatological reference family.

Moderatto - Chaperona (from Greatest Hits, 2007) - I had considered going with the Dead Kennedys' "Pull My Strings" (which features a send-up of the song redone as "My Payola"). However, I ended up keeping with the unintentional and unofficial international theme for today's musical selections and went with this reworking of "My Sharona" by a Mexican glam metal band which initially began as a parody act and ended up becoming superstars.