HTF Anime Discussion Part VII - Page 61

ChristopherDAC · 09-04-2004, 04:24 PM

Best of Luck, Rob.

Now on to: Why I Love GUNBUSTER #43:
NORIKO: I missed out on my birthday party thanks to Time Dilation! Einstein is so cruel!
COACH: It's not only Einstein who is cruel, Takaya! Lorenz, Fitzgerald and Gamow are also cruel!

Tony-B · 09-04-2004, 08:51 PM

Quote:

Wooo! Cowboy Bebop The Movie was on STARZ-HD last night and I taped it

How did it look?

Chris: ???? I don't get it.

ChristopherDAC · 09-04-2004, 10:06 PM

Okay. Aim for the Top: GUNBUSTER is maybe the best anime ever made; it's certainly the best OVA I know of which doesn't have a decent U.S. release. One of the major driving elements of the plot is Einsteinian Nonsimultaneity.
This corollary of Special Relativity effectively states that time passes at different rates in different reference frames: that if you took off from Earth today, moving at 80% of the speed of light, and went to Alpha Centauri [the nearest star], turned around and came back, a trip requiring about 10 years, you would experience the passage of only 5 years. This is called in the show the Urashima Effect, after the Japanese legend of Urashima Tarou [sort of a Rip Van Winkle character].
Einstein didn't invent this out of thin air. After the famous Michelson-Morley interferometric experiment had failed to detect the motion of the Earth, all kinds of explanations were advanced; the one which made the most sense was that proposed by the mathematicians Lorenz and FitzGerald, who basically suggested that as things moved faster, they contracted in the direction of motion, length asymptotically approaching zero at the speed of light. Gamow was a physicist who also contributed to this work, and Einstein finally bound it all together with Special and then General Relativity.
So, main character Takaya Noriko [JAPAN] shares a birthday with fellow space-pilot Jung-Freud [SOVIET UNION], and they have arranged to hold a joint birthday party. BUT, without spoilers, she misses it thanks to spending too much time near lightspeed.
In a skit at the end of the show, super-deformed versions of the characters show up to explan the science [or pseudo-science] of what is going on, and the line I quoted appears. If you have some understanding of what is going on, it is absolutely hilarious to have the big manly Drill Instructor bellowing about how Lorenz, FitzGerald, and Gamow are also meanies. Absolutely priceless, and this kind of highbrow entertainment

is one of the things which gives the series its charm. Immerse yourself in the study of the natural sciences and their applications for a decade or so, and then watch it, and you will agree with me that it is astonishingly hilarious.

Or don't, it's all the same to me.

Eric F · 09-04-2004, 11:42 PM

Tony- It looked great- looked to be from the same master as the DVD, but in HD. The print seemed a little dirty, but it's still HD anime, which we don't get enough of.

Tony-B · 09-05-2004, 01:31 AM

CDAC: Um...if a joke needs that much explaining, then it must not be that good.

Rob Lutter · 09-05-2004, 04:08 PM

Wind died down a bit, so I took a pic of me outside...

"Emergency Kiba" 2-second cosplay

After the rain dies down and I can bring my digicam outside, I'll take some pics of any damage around me. I saw a couple rooves with massive wind damage, downed trees... but really no broken windows or major damage.

I have underground power lines and am also on the same grid as a major shopping mall (Waterford Lakes for those in the area), so I still haven't even had a flicker in my lights.

ChristopherDAC · 09-05-2004, 05:37 PM

It's a great joke... it's just that only some people will get it. The same is true of all the heavy-metal in-jokes of the series Bastard!. You'd get them easily I guess, but they would leave me in the dark. :p)

Tony-B · 09-06-2004, 12:18 AM

Dammit, now I need to see Bastard since it's got those heavy metal injokes. Alanna, you and I should buy the Bastard DVD, and between the both of us we could probably figure out all the heavy metal jokes.

Alanna · 09-06-2004, 05:37 PM

Hey Tony

Bastard! is ohne of the first anime DVDs I bought! And you can probably guess why...heheh... I think alot of the names were changed for the dub because there was supposed to be one town that was similiar (or called straight up) "Metallica" and its been changed. I'll have to go back and look into this because its been a couple of years since I watched it. Maybe with a rewatching we could figure it all out though

Tony-B · 09-06-2004, 11:05 PM

Alrighty Alanna we'll definitely be watching this one subtitled then. However, if you really want some fun, we could figure out all the jokes in BOTH versions!

I think we can do a real good job at this. In fact, whenever you guys bring up the anime Slayers here, I immediately think of the band Slayer.

OK, so what is Bastard about, anyways?

Alanna · 09-06-2004, 11:57 PM

Someone else can probably give a better description, but Bastard!! is at its basics, about a war between humans and monsters, and the humans being desperate, wakes this sorcerer (the bastard in the show's title, heh) to save the world that he tried to conquer at one point. Of course he's still a lech and just a nasty guy at heart who would rather rule the world than save it. Evil heroes are the best. It has booby shots and lots of violence if that bothers ya but I doubt it does.

Holy shit, check this out: a list of bands quoted in the Bastard!! manga: http://markbr.interfree.it/html/vault.htm they freakin' borrowed from everyone, from all subgenres of metal. Newer stuff like Stratovarius, Blind Guardian... old hair metal like Stryper... classics like Dio and Rainbow, thrash like Megadeth and Dark Angel and the incredibly suckish Heaven's Cry. I'm gonna have to buy this. And its sad because I have over half the cds on this page.