Sporadic Ramblings and Nerdery

These are supposed to be the same guy!

Planet Prince (top) was originally a 1958 television series from Senkosha, the same people who gave us Moonlight Mask, aka Gekko Kamen, the year before.

Planet Prince was created to cash in on the success that the studio Shintoho was having with their Super Giant (Starman) films. Planet Prince has a similar costume and power set (super-strength, flight and invulnerability) to Super Giant, and he helps out a lot of kids over the course of his 49 episodes.

Similar to what was done with Moonlight Mask, movie studio Toei brought Planet Prince (bottom) to the big screen in two films released a week apart in 1959. However, whereas the Moonlight Mask films had kept the same costume and concept as the TV series (albeit using different actors), darn near everything was changed about Planet Prince. Gone were the super-powers (replaced with a little laser wand), the costume was replaced, and he flew around in the space equivalent of a Toyota Corolla.

Most people are familiar with the Toei version of Planet Prince because the two films were edited together into a single feature, subbed in to English, and released in the States as Prince of Space (1965).

THEN THERE'S THIS GUY

Planet Prince 2021 (2021). A goofy re-imagining of the original television series from director Minoru Kawasaki.

How goofy is it? Well, I've yet to view the film, but based on the trailer below, I imagine it's pretty silly.

(Static #1, June 1993, written by Dwayne McDuffie and Robert L. Washington III, drawn by John Paul Leon, Steve Mitchell, and Noelle C. Giddings)

(Static #5, October 1993, written by Robert L. Washington III, drawn by John Paul Leon, Steve Mitchell, Noelle C. Giddings, and Jason Scott Jones)

(Static #6, November 1993, written by Robert L. Washington III, drawn by John Paul Leon, Steve Mitchell, Noelle C. Giddings, and Jason Scott Jones)

(Static #8, January 1994, written by Robert L. Washington III, drawn by John Paul Leon, Shawn Martinbrough, Noelle C. Giddings, and Jason Scott Jones)

(Static #11, April 1994, written by Robert L. Washington III, drawn by Wilfred, Rober Quijano, Prentis Rollins, and Tom Roberts)

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

“Mothman being just an owl would be boring…”

Florida voters who were in support of President Donald Trump during the last presidential election are now bashing him after learning how much he made during the first year of his second term.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday made a claim that lit up social media, given how unlikely it seemed. 

Except this one was ― sort of ― true. 

Trump bragged that he had a conversation with President Teddy Roosevelt, which seemed unlikely given that the 26th president died in 1919 and Trump wasn't even born until 1946. 

But earlier in the day, Trump visited the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, which is opening this weekend and features an interactive AI projection of the former president.

If that thought gives you an all consuming sense of dread, do not worry

Neuromancer Season 1 Teaser 2 | The Next Chapter Is Loading'

Yeah, cassettepunk Neuromancer let's go!

Have to say, the design choice to have the Neuromancer show look like the 1980s idea of the future (thus making the presence of rotary phones and the famous opening line make sense) was a great choice, even if, as of late, cyberpunk works are leaning more into the retrofuturism aspect that has developed within the subgenre.

See also the new Ghost in the Shell show and the Cyberpunk 2077 game.

Although admittedly that's kind of as a consequence of the cyberpunk subgenre coming out of the 1970s and 80s as a reaction to said decades (the heavy use of Japanese signage and imagery coming from concerns in the West over Japan's economic boom in that period... a boom that ironically ended in the 1990s right when MOST Western science fiction from Batman Beyond to Sherlock Holme sin the 22nd Century were adopting the aesthetic), so while the themes of cyberpunk still hold true (especially today) the works that informed the subgenre are somewhat anachronistic?

This is also held up in the Neuromancer show in an amusing way, as I know that they filmed partially around the Isle of Dogs in London around the Canary Wharf area. For context, in the Thatcher years London's docklands were aggressively gentrified as working class families were pushed out of the former industrial parts of the city lining the Thames, with the Isle of Dogs in particular intending to serve as the new financial centre of the city as various corporations got new (for the 80s) purpose built skyscrapers for this purpose... BUT, in the decades sense with the advent of the internet and especially as working from home became more viable after Covid, most of these purpose built buildings that they displaced communities to build are standing increasingly derelict or near abandoned, with people trying to float ideas such as converting them back into housing.