Chasing Smaller Sheep

Well, here we go, Takeshi Koike’s take on Lupin the IIIrd has finally come to an end with the release of his first full feature-length film since REDLINE. I know, I know, I of all people should be really excited about this, but… the truth is, I just haven’t been over the moon about Koike’s Lupin.

A big part of it is that I’m ambivalent on the premise of Lupin as a whole. I’ve certainly enjoyed parts of the franchise: I haven’t gotten through any of the mainline shows, but Sayo Yamamoto’s Woman Called Fujiko Mine was stellar, and I like Castle of Cagliostro as much as the next guy. It just feels limiting to attach someone as creative as Koike to a setting so grounded in reality. This is a man who can’t help but worldbuild, who reimagines a scifi version of a cigarette pack as a background gag, who’s compelled to hide intricate mechanical designs into inauspicious articles of clothing... and we’re sticking him to a retro spy series?

This isn’t to say Koike doesn’t enjoy it, mind you. It’s no coincidence that every single entry in his Lupin series has at least one car chase – even Immortal Bloodline, which is set entirely on remote Caveman Assassin Island, features Lupin drifting a WWI-era car AND a flashback of Lupin driving a classic cruiser along a winding forest road. Plus, Koike is still Koike. Reminiscent of World Record’s devoted obsession to capturing the rippling muscles of an Olympic sprinter, each Lupin OVA has a sequence clearly driven by Koike’s observational hyperfixation: Goemon’s blade shearing off slices of muscle like cuts from a filet in Blood Spray, for example, or the slow-motion detonations from Zenigata and the Two Lupins, with their shockwaves lifting snow off the branches of nearby trees before the explosion has even spread.

Unfortunately, these highlights notwithstanding, the series is visually defined by its compromises. We have sick hand-drawn car chases, yes, a rarity in this day & age, but every other vehicle is a 3D model. Zenigata showcases gorgeous effects work as mentioned before, but each other entry deploys clunky CG for explosions, waves, and water. The series is chock-full of excellent character animation and designs, then deploys stiff CGI models for background characters (understandable) and mooks (wack). I understand it’s a franchise, and some trade-offs need to be made, but it’s simply not nearly as exciting to me as Koike’s maximalist sicko shit.

The writing… woof. It’s hard for me to focus on anything other than Fujiko here, who can’t seem to go thirty minutes in this series without being stripped naked or sexually assaulted. Now, I understand that Koike’s OVAs aren’t necessarily in the same continuity as Woman Called Fujiko Mine. However, given that the success of that series – widely lauded for its mature take on the franchise and for granting Fujiko more agency and depth – purportedly led to the creation of this OVA series, it’s wild to me how little they seem to have learned from it.

The best part of Daisuke Jigen’s Gravestone, the sick-ass car chase, is constantly broken up by cuts to scenes with Fujiko, who's been stripped naked and covered in oil, as she slips and slides around a glass chamber and tries to avoid being raped / killed by a giant drill-dicked cyborg. Not five minutes after rescuing Fujiko from this, Lupin gropes her as they ride away on a motorcycle. Lies of Fujiko Mine is built around the ‘femme fatale forced to take care of kid’ trope – a premise already handled better by Yamamoto herself in Michiko & Hatchin – and still manages to make it feel sleazy and juvenile with its treatment of Bincam. The Immortal Bloodline doesn’t even have anything for Fujiko to do: despite being specifically invited on the mission by Lupin, the writers just create a flimsy excuse to strip her naked again, then she spends the rest of the movie hanging out in the background wearing an absurdly skimpy and vaguely racist outfit.

Look, Koike didn’t write these movies, so I’m willing to pin this on Yuya Takahashi, who did. All I’m saying is, when we look at the unbroken line of shoehorned pervy shit from Kawajiri to earlier Koike to now, Koike isn’t exactly beating the allegations.

This has turned out largely negative, I guess, but there’s still a lot I like here.

I think the overall pitch of the series is clever for a franchise built around its ensemble cast: each member of the gang gets a spotlight film where they fight their doppelganger. Daisuke is hunted down by another marksman; Goemon is bested by a warrior who's powerful despite his lack of honor; Fujiko is saddled with a charge she can’t seduce while hunted by an assassin who uses coercion tactics like she does; Zenigata is stymied trying to pursue justice in a country whose institutions have none; and Lupin, well, Lupin faces off against a literal body double, just in case you hadn't picked up on the metaphor by that point.

Koike’s directorial penchant for interesting framing and tricky perspectives keeps the series consistently interesting, even in its slower moments. Plus, I love that it still gets dumb and cartoony despite ostensibly being a more adult, ‘hard-boiled’ take, like Goemon using his sword like a paraglider in Immortal Bloodline or this fucking shark.

Plus, credit where it’s due, they let Koike get fairly weird – Immortal Bloodline is a movie whose primary antagonist is an immortal kung-fu neanderthal, and features an assassin with really really hot hands whose combat style is speedwalking up to people and holding them with his hot hot hands, and I have to respect that at least a little bit.

Still, I can’t pretend – my favorite part of The Immortal Bloodline’s release is that it means my boy is finally free after being trapped working in the Lupin mines for over a decade. I’m happy Koike had a stable recurring gig while he was raising his child, now let’s get fucking weird again!!

Earliest known prototype of Super Mario Kart, recovered from development files surfaced in 2020. At this point in development, the characters were generic racers instead of human characters, and Mario Circuit 3 was the only track implemented.

You may have noticed that Mario Circuit 3 appears more times in the Mario Kart series than any other track, appearing in Super Mario Kart, Mario Kart: Super Circuit, Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart Tour, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Mario Kart World (as 1/3 of the Mario Circuit track).* It is theorized that this may be due to the developers' sentimental connection to this track as the first one ever made for the franchise.

*Note that SNES Rainbow Road also appears 6 times but only if its Mario Kart 8 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe appearances are counted as separate, while Mario Circuit 3 actually appears 6 times in completely separate games.

Source: TailsLaboratory3322

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

me: hi there, you’ve got TST-

him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*

me: hey, is everything o-

him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!

you've probably already noticed that turn signals ("blinkahs") don't serve their usual function here - a common saying on the server is that using them as intended is just giving information to your enemies. you may be tempted to conclude that these "blinkahs" are useless. not so! they are exclusively used for parrying cars audacious enough to think they can just drive past you. the timing is a five-frame window beginning when you can first see the approaching car in your sideview mirrors. simply engage your blinkah and then immediately jump out in front of your opponent. if you get the timing right, you will build super meter. if you're too early, you've accidentally performed a safe traffic maneuver, resetting your meter to 0. if you're too late, you crash and may have to transition to direct PvP, which is outside the purview of this guide.

yellow lights can also be parried by running them, with the amount of super gained determined by how far you make it through the intersection before the light turns red. the ideal window you're aiming for here is between your front and back wheels crossing the white line

you can use your super meter to cast a variety of spells to hinder your opponents. popular meter-efficient spells include mainstays such as "Summon Double-Parked Uber Eats Driver", "Line-Skipping Merge", and "Greater Unmarked Cop". if you max out your meter, you can cast the legendary "Power Word: Storrow".

the super meter system works differently for bikes. obviously, since they lack blinkahs and run red lights anyways, they can't build super in any of the normal ways. instead, they build it up passively, since their very existence enrages every driver around them. to offset this, the spell list for bikes is a lot lower-power than the spell list for cars, mostly being focused on mobility or utility instead of offense (although there are some notable exceptions like "U-Lock Missile"). the capstone spell for bikes is, of course, "Post Misleadingly Edited GoPro Footage On Reddit".

CHARACTER OF THE DAY: Georgio Manos

Series: Roundabout (Video game)

SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium