Latest / Meet Your Double Feature | Movie Reviews & Forgotten Films / Mighty Morphers from Around the World - Mechanical Violator Hakaider (1995) vs Super Inframan (1975)

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Mighty Morphers from Around the World - Mechanical Violator Hakaider (1995) vs Super Inframan (1975) · Meet Your Double Feature | Movie Reviews & Forgotten Films

• 0:09
  Tonight on Meet Your Double feature, an amnesiac Android
• 0:13
  joins a band of rebels to take down the evil ruler of Jesus
• 0:17
  Town. It's a fight for free will in
• 0:20
  mechanical violator Hikaider. Then a heroic Android leads a
• 0:24
  band of fighting scientists in a battle against ancient demons.
• 0:29
  It's a fight for survival in Super Impriman.
• 0:33
  It's a Mighty Morphing Double feature, and it starts right
• 0:36
  now. Hello and welcome to Meet your
• 0:45
  double feature, a double-blind movie review podcast.
• 0:48
  My name is Thomas, joined as always by my brother Frank.
• 0:50
  Frank, how are you? I'm.
• 0:52
  I'm good, you know, I'm pretty well hydrated.
• 0:55
  Hydrated. Yeah.
• 0:58
  OK, I mean. That's good.
• 1:01
  I'm excited. I'm excited.
• 1:02
  He's. Excited.
• 1:03
  There it is. Okay, I'm gonna say this is what
• 1:05
  our 19th episode is. Just gonna drop the I'm excited
• 1:08
  bit. I was just gonna make it.
• 1:09
  I'm hydrated. That's my new thing, just always
• 1:12
  coming. In Water Children.
• 1:17
  All right, Frank's excited. I'm excited.
• 1:19
  We are back with another episode.
• 1:21
  In case you have never listened to Meet Your Double feature
• 1:23
  before. First of all, thanks for joining
• 1:25
  us. The way our show works is that
• 1:26
  every episode Frank and I will exchange recommendations for
• 1:29
  films that neither of us had ever previously seen and then
• 1:32
  talk about those two films on the show to figure out which of
• 1:35
  us gave the better blind movie recommendation.
• 1:38
  It's like gambling, but for nothing of value.
• 1:41
  Wait, wait, wait. It's like gambling.
• 1:45
  Well, it's like, that's the double, but it's like a blind
• 1:47
  bet where you where you wager without knowing what it is.
• 1:51
  We don't know if the movie's good.
• 1:53
  Yeah, right, right, right. I was like, how much money you
• 1:55
  got on this? Anyway, we are back with the
• 1:58
  third episode in our ongoing season talking about forgotten
• 2:01
  superhero films. Essentially any superhero movie
• 2:04
  that is not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or released
• 2:07
  in the past like 6 months, I would say counts as forgotten
• 2:10
  because it's the only thing people talk about.
• 2:12
  So Frank, First off this episode I'm going to hand things over to
• 2:15
  you to talk about the movie I recommended, 1995's Mechanical
• 2:21
  Violator. Kaider.
• 2:23
  Possibly the weirdest movie title ever.
• 2:27
  Question mark. I mean, it's cool.
• 2:29
  It's definitely a mouthful. It's, it's difficult to say
• 2:32
  quickly, but it was an interesting movie.
• 2:35
  Where, where did you find this? What?
• 2:38
  What brought you to this? It's a great question.
• 2:41
  I had done a lot of research before the season began looking
• 2:44
  for examples of what we would call like a forgotten superhero
• 2:47
  film just to have like a pool of choices to pick from.
• 2:50
  And oddly enough, totally outside of that effort.
• 2:52
  I came across like a Reddit post talking about this movie and I
• 2:56
  saw the title in the post and was watching this little clip
• 2:59
  that they were showing that looked like it was a scene from
• 3:01
  like aliens or something. It was just like humans in army
• 3:05
  gear with like sci-fi weapons. And it wasn't until like 45
• 3:08
  seconds in that Hakaider shows up and I was like, oh, this is
• 3:11
  like a Super Sentai movie. What on earth is this?
• 3:14
  So the the total shift there was very curious to me because as we
• 3:20
  have documented a two dozen times, you and I really liked
• 3:23
  Power Rangers growing up and watched it all the time.
• 3:26
  And so every now and again I get to see one of these Japanese
• 3:28
  films that's kind of in that same genre.
• 3:30
  And I just love all of them. So I'm excited to see what this
• 3:33
  one does differently. Yeah, totally, 100% agree on
• 3:38
  that. And and I think we, we preface
• 3:40
  this in our previous episode, we're, we're going to be
• 3:42
  pronouncing several things incorrectly.
• 3:45
  I I assume. Oh absolutely.
• 3:47
  I'm I'm pretty sure Hakaider is correct, but we'll see.
• 3:52
  We will see. People will let us know.
• 3:55
  Yes, because that character is actually from a different series
• 4:00
  like which is really interesting and I and I didn't know this
• 4:03
  until I looked up the film afterwards.
• 4:06
  I think you may have mentioned it before that he's like an anti
• 4:10
  hero in a previous series. He was in a, yeah.
• 4:14
  Like a, the, the broader term here is a tokusatsu series,
• 4:18
  which is essentially anything you might recognize as looking
• 4:21
  like Power Rangers. If it's it's if it's people
• 4:23
  morphing into battle suits and doing martial arts, that's
• 4:27
  basically it. And so I guess there was some
• 4:29
  sort of TV predecessor that this character was part of, and then
• 4:32
  he got his own spin off and I cannot imagine how he deserved
• 4:36
  that much attention. Well, yeah, yeah, we, we, we
• 4:41
  will get into into Hikaiders specifically.
• 4:43
  But to, to touch on your previous point about the
• 4:47
  connections to Power Rangers is probably the easiest entry point
• 4:51
  that people would understand in, in the West.
• 4:54
  I mean, the Power Rangers itself was a phenomenon, but it it is
• 4:59
  adapted from the Japanese series Super Sentai.
• 5:03
  And so in doing research for this, I realized that the
• 5:08
  Hakaider character is was from a series called Nikaider.
• 5:15
  I'm sorry, Kickaider. Yeah.
• 5:19
  Yeah. And he was, he was just like a
• 5:22
  bad guy in that He wasn't even like an antihero.
• 5:24
  He was he was like he worked for the villainous organization in
• 5:28
  that show. And then this movie is sort of
• 5:31
  like a almost what if story where it's like he's the good
• 5:36
  guy, which I think is kind of fun.
• 5:38
  OK, so he's going on like a, he's on his like Shadow the
• 5:41
  Hedgehog redemption arc. You see, I'm glad you brought
• 5:44
  that up because something I'm going to get into with this
• 5:46
  movie is just all of the things it reminded me of, which I
• 5:52
  thought was interesting because it's like, I feel like you can
• 5:54
  almost see direct lines of inspiration coming from this in
• 5:59
  a good way, though, because it was all things that I was
• 6:02
  previously familiar with that I liked.
• 6:04
  And I was like, Dang, did they just steal that from Hokkaider?
• 6:07
  Like, Oh my God, did he just do it all first?
• 6:10
  But but to touch on on the the the tokasatsu series quickly
• 6:15
  this that that series Kukaiter and and by extension Hokkaider
• 6:19
  was created by Shittoro Ishinimori, who is a very
• 6:24
  interesting person and and very relevant.
• 6:27
  I think for this season that we're doing of like forgotten
• 6:28
  superhero stuff because he is known in Japan as the king of
• 6:35
  manga, OK, and is essentially like he would be like the
• 6:39
  equivalent of like a Stanley Jack Kirby in Japan.
• 6:44
  That's how like synonymous he is with like their comic industry
• 6:50
  of manga. But he was also the creator of
• 6:54
  Common Writer and Super Sentai which has spawned this this
• 6:58
  whole sub series of tokusatsu. Yeah, because Common Writer is
• 7:02
  like the, I think they're both like 50 plus years old now, both
• 7:06
  of those franchises. And Common Writer also had a bit
• 7:08
  of a breakthrough in the West. There was like a Common Writer
• 7:10
  TV show around the time of Power Rangers.
• 7:12
  It just didn't last for as long. Yeah, well, and currently in
• 7:15
  Japan especially, the Super Sentai series just ended for the
• 7:19
  first time in like 50 years, and Kamen Rider is having a huge
• 7:24
  surge of popularity over there right now.
• 7:26
  And I think that's spilling over into the West a bit too.
• 7:29
  So they've kind of flip-flopped a bit there in terms of like,
• 7:32
  which is the more popular series.
• 7:33
  But they were both originally created by him, and he even
• 7:37
  worked directly on some seasons of the Power Rangers adaptation
• 7:41
  here. He worked on.
• 7:43
  Really. Yeah.
• 7:45
  He was on Zeo Turbo and in Space Seasons.
• 7:49
  That OK, we're going to quickly pull up our Power Rangers season
• 7:53
  tier list. Those are pretty high.
• 7:56
  Those are good ones. Those are good ones.
• 7:58
  Yeah, the first like 5 or 6 years.
• 8:00
  People generally liked those. Turbo less so, but in space?
• 8:04
  In space, pretty good. Space is what turned the whole
• 8:07
  franchise around. It was It was on the verge of
• 8:08
  being cancelled actually. But then the In Space season was
• 8:11
  so popular that it kept Power Rangers going for another 20
• 8:15
  years after that. Wow, so that can OK so just to
• 8:18
  recap this for my own understanding, the person who
• 8:21
  worked on a Kaider like helped create that character is the
• 8:26
  same man that was responsible for like common rider Super
• 8:29
  Sentai and had some role in Power Rangers itself.
• 8:31
  So he's just. The Big Boss, Yeah.
• 8:34
  And on top of all that was a huge name in the world of like,
• 8:40
  manga, like Japanese comic books as well, Like several like manga
• 8:46
  and anime series that people would be very familiar with
• 8:49
  would cite him as like a direct inspiration.
• 8:51
  And, and I think the one that I guess I would be the most
• 8:55
  familiar with in terms of works he's created in that space would
• 8:58
  be Cyborg 009, which I don't know if you.
• 9:02
  Remember, I actually don't remember that.
• 9:05
  It it had a Toonami adaptation. It wasn't one of their more
• 9:09
  popular series, but I think I tried showing a little bit of it
• 9:12
  to you one time. Oh wait yes no I do remember
• 9:16
  this. It was we watched like the first
• 9:18
  couple episodes. Yeah.
• 9:20
  OK, OK, I'm back in. All right, so it sounds like the
• 9:24
  person behind Hekaider and the show he originally was part of
• 9:27
  is just a Stanley level like creative influence over the
• 9:30
  entire genre, which I assume means that Hekaider is amazing
• 9:35
  and really good and really cool. It actually is all of those
• 9:38
  things. Oh, nice.
• 9:43
  It's it's like, I'm not. I'm not sure where to even begin
• 9:48
  with this because it is a pretty simple narrative for this movie.
• 9:52
  And I think again, the character Hekaider was a bad guy in this
• 9:56
  other series, but I think this story is completely independent
• 9:59
  from that. I think they're just like taking
• 10:02
  that character and putting him in a new space where we follow
• 10:05
  him as the good guy. But basically the the rough
• 10:10
  beats of the story are we're it's like a dystopian sci-fi
• 10:17
  setting, which is always fun. It was more fun before it
• 10:21
  started to resemble the real world, but it it used.
• 10:23
  To be really fun. It was cool when it was like a
• 10:27
  what if and not a what now. Yeah, what do we do now?
• 10:32
  But no, it's a, it's a really fun looking setting and they're
• 10:37
  the way we were introduced to our titular character is there's
• 10:41
  a group of like, I don't even know what to call them.
• 10:44
  Like, it's just like a, a group of like scavengers who, who are
• 10:50
  like looking through this abandoned laboratory because
• 10:54
  they believe there's treasure there and they're using like
• 10:57
  explosives to like dig deeper into this abandoned space to see
• 11:02
  what they can find. And underneath the laboratory is
• 11:05
  where they discover Hekiter and he's just like chained up.
• 11:09
  And so they inadvertently like, release him from his prison, I
• 11:14
  guess. So he's like the mummy?
• 11:16
  He's kind of like the mummy. Yeah.
• 11:18
  That's that's that's a fair, that's a fair comparison that.
• 11:21
  That you mustn't read from the book and then.
• 11:23
  Yeah, I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 11:26
  If that if that what is what makes sense to you, then then
• 11:29
  yes. But actually I will say even
• 11:34
  even before that, 'cause that's that's like our first real
• 11:36
  scene. But the first thing you see is
• 11:38
  that the Toe logo, which is, is the production company that
• 11:43
  released the movie, which I don't know if you're familiar
• 11:47
  with, but it's usually like the logo comes up over this sort of
• 11:51
  B roll footage of like the ocean in Japan.
• 11:55
  Yeah. OK.
• 11:56
  Yeah. So it's so it's cool.
• 11:57
  And so I'm like, all right, all right, Toei, you know, you I've
• 12:00
  seen this before. But the way this movie starts is
• 12:02
  like the logo comes up and you see the ocean and then we just
• 12:06
  like whip pan to the left. And that's where the the
• 12:09
  abandoned science lab is. So I was like, oh, that was
• 12:12
  really cool. Like it made it seem like we
• 12:14
  were in that space that the that the logo is.
• 12:18
  And I was like, I've never seen that before.
• 12:20
  That was really neat. So canonically, any time you see
• 12:23
  the toe logo, you just assume Akita's slightly off screen.
• 12:26
  He's slightly to the left, yeah. He's a little bit over there.
• 12:30
  Yeah, it's like that one secret cutscene in Halo Reach where you
• 12:32
  can see Master. I was about to mention this.
• 12:36
  I was holding an in because I was like, we don't talk about
• 12:37
  video games, but they're in. Yeah, no, I'm with it.
• 12:40
  Yeah, yeah, I will say this, this is another movie that has a
• 12:44
  video game adaptation too. It does.
• 12:47
  I will have to see if I can get footage captured for that,
• 12:50
  doesn't it? Like from what I remember, it's
• 12:53
  kind of in the style of one of those like arcade gun games
• 12:55
  where it's just people poking around corners and you have to
• 12:57
  like, shoot at them. Yes, I I believe that is true.
• 13:00
  The interesting thing about the game though, well, two
• 13:02
  interesting things because one of the other production
• 13:05
  companies listed on this movie is Sega, which I didn't know
• 13:08
  Sega was ever really in the actual filmmaking space because
• 13:12
  they're primarily a video game company.
• 13:16
  But the game is a Sega Saturn game.
• 13:19
  So there was like some brand synergy there.
• 13:22
  And I don't know in what way they were involved in the actual
• 13:25
  movie, but they're the ones that that made the game.
• 13:28
  It was a game that was really stolen in Japan.
• 13:30
  So there is there is no right so.
• 13:33
  I might not be able to actually record my own footage for this
• 13:35
  one because I do not own a Sega Game Gear, but we'll see.
• 13:39
  Yeah, but the other interesting thing I was going to say about
• 13:41
  the game from what I read is that that game, which is an
• 13:44
  adaptation of this movie, features characters from the
• 13:48
  Kekaider show that Hekaider originally came from, even
• 13:52
  though this is like a different thing.
• 13:54
  That's OK, so they're just recombining the characters back
• 13:57
  in. That's neat.
• 13:58
  This is odd lore I did not expect.
• 14:00
  There's this much like preamble about a cool guy in a suit
• 14:05
  fighting. Yeah.
• 14:06
  Well, it was all really interesting because it was just
• 14:08
  like you, you sent me this, this movie, and I'm like, what did
• 14:10
  you call me? What is that crazy name for this
• 14:13
  like? Say that on air.
• 14:15
  Yeah, so that I, so after I watched it and I enjoyed it, I
• 14:18
  had to kind of look into all this though.
• 14:20
  And I was like, this is all really interesting stuff though.
• 14:22
  So I'm I'm glad I kind of delved into this more.
• 14:25
  But to get back into the story itself, it is really
• 14:31
  straightforward, but in a way that it's still fun and
• 14:34
  interesting because as you said, they awaken the mummy.
• 14:39
  Hekiter. Yep, as he's known as he's
• 14:43
  known, I believe he he cause those those guys that find him,
• 14:48
  they like before he even says anything, I think they start
• 14:52
  shooting at him. So they they started it.
• 14:54
  And then I think, I think he kills them all.
• 14:57
  I don't really know. It might be unclear.
• 15:00
  It's kind of when we're getting like our opening like credits
• 15:03
  sequences. And it's really funny because
• 15:06
  like he was all chained up and after he like dispatches with
• 15:10
  these guys that found him, like he goes to find like his bike,
• 15:13
  his like motorcycle and it's also chained up.
• 15:16
  I'm like, why'd you have to chain up the bike like it was
• 15:18
  going? To like, get away on its own.
• 15:21
  Like is the bike sentient too? Like why is it chained up?
• 15:25
  I hope what we see next is him like looking around on the floor
• 15:28
  for the key but then the keys are chained up to.
• 15:32
  Well, it's just, it's funny, like you said, like the first
• 15:34
  thing that it made you think of was like Shadow of the Hedgehog,
• 15:37
  which I, I believe we actually mentioned in last week's episode
• 15:40
  too. So I didn't think we'd be
• 15:41
  talking about the Shadow of the Hedgehog video game so much.
• 15:43
  But here we are like the the imagery of him on the bike in
• 15:52
  this sort of like future sci-fi city that he adds into to me.
• 15:57
  I was like this. This looks really similar to
• 15:59
  like Final Fantasy 7. Oh yeah.
• 16:02
  That was like the first thing that kind of came to mind for
• 16:05
  me. And that actually continues that
• 16:09
  like imagery continues because he gets on his bike.
• 16:13
  He he literally does the Jackie Chan like who am I?
• 16:18
  Like he shouts it into the sky, or he's just.
• 16:20
  Thinking about it, he's just like, who am I?
• 16:23
  Like so he's just kind of like roaming around.
• 16:28
  And so the first thing he does is he heads into this major city
• 16:34
  that we learn is like being like the citizens are, are being
• 16:39
  subjugated by the person who's in control of the whole city.
• 16:45
  And it's a sort of thing where it's like the outside world is
• 16:48
  mostly like desolate wasteland. And so people are kind of like
• 16:52
  congregated in this one place, but there's like a sort of evil,
• 16:55
  maniacal ruler of the city. And so that's where he heads to
• 16:59
  'cause I guess he's just, it doesn't know what else to do.
• 17:02
  But when he gets there and we first see the person who's in
• 17:07
  control of this place, he's like this very fancy man.
• 17:14
  No one can escape under the Iron rule.
• 17:16
  Of fancy man, Yeah, yeah, Fancy man's in charge, but he's
• 17:19
  wearing this like suit this like this, like white and black suit.
• 17:24
  But then on, on one of the shoulders he literally has like
• 17:28
  A1 wing. So he's like A1 winged Angel.
• 17:31
  This is all very specific to Final Fantasy 7, yeah.
• 17:34
  It is. It is, yeah.
• 17:36
  And I was like, that's so interesting.
• 17:38
  And then it gets even more interesting because we're
• 17:41
  introduced to like, quote UN quote, like, evil Hikaider.
• 17:44
  There's like another metal man in a suit who they call Michael.
• 17:51
  So he has, like, an Angel name, too.
• 17:54
  Oh, OK. And then he also has like, he
• 17:56
  has, like, a thing on his back that sort of drapes down.
• 18:00
  But later in the movie, we see he can kind of, like, use it as
• 18:03
  a weapon and it becomes like a wing for him, too.
• 18:06
  So he's also like, A1 winged Angel.
• 18:08
  And I'm like, wait, yeah. Did Final Fantasy 7 just get all
• 18:12
  of its inspiration from Kiter? It does predate the game.
• 18:16
  I want to say Final Fantasy 7 came out in like the late 90s of
• 18:20
  this movie's 95. Could be on to something.
• 18:23
  Conspiracy abound. Yeah, it was reminding me of
• 18:26
  other things too, which I, I guess I won't get into too much
• 18:30
  because Final Fantasy 7 is probably the thing, if anything,
• 18:32
  that that people would be most familiar with that this is
• 18:36
  similar to. Yeah, I know it's not a movie,
• 18:38
  but go watch all the cutscenes and you'll be like, Oh yeah,
• 18:40
  that's basically just a movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 18:44
  But yeah, it's really interesting.
• 18:45
  It was really interesting to see, like the DNA of Hekiter in
• 18:49
  other things that I already liked and was familiar with.
• 18:54
  And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool, I guess, you know, this
• 18:55
  is this is kind of where. And it makes sense given, you
• 18:59
  know, what I read about the creator, you know, Shittoro
• 19:02
  Ishinamori, and how his influence is seen throughout a
• 19:06
  lot of Japanese media. You know, he's sort of like, you
• 19:10
  know, as I said, he's the king of manga and manga.
• 19:14
  So yeah, so that was cool. But then from there, the story
• 19:17
  is really straightforward because basically, like Kaider's
• 19:22
  just trying to live his life. Like he doesn't know who he is
• 19:24
  and people just start messing with him because, you know, he
• 19:29
  comes into the city, he's not supposed to be there.
• 19:31
  And so I I think this might have been the scene you had seen
• 19:34
  previously where there's all these foot soldiers running
• 19:36
  around the city. And I don't remember how he
• 19:39
  initially gets into it with them.
• 19:41
  But basically, like they all start attacking him.
• 19:46
  We get tons of fun action sequences of him beating up and
• 19:50
  killing them. He Hekider, just to touch on his
• 19:56
  look, actually briefly, he is kind of like, he's kind of like
• 20:01
  the Mandalorian. OK, that's a good comparison.
• 20:05
  Yeah, because when they first meet him, he's he had, he's
• 20:08
  just, he's wearing like all black.
• 20:10
  He almost just looks like a guy wearing like biker clothes.
• 20:12
  But then he has similar to Power Rangers, he has like a morphing
• 20:15
  sequence where he puts his like full suit on and he has a helmet
• 20:20
  covering his whole face. And that's how he spends like
• 20:23
  90% of the movie. You rarely see him with his
• 20:27
  regular human face. He's he's mostly suited up in
• 20:31
  his full Hekkaider look. And the the other character, the
• 20:35
  the Michael character who's like his, you know, main nemesis that
• 20:40
  he fights in this movie. I don't think you ever see him
• 20:42
  without his his mask on. But they're both cyborgs.
• 20:47
  I don't know if I said that before, but they're both.
• 20:50
  So he's a human looking man who transforms into the full suit
• 20:54
  but is Cyborg isn't like partially human and partially
• 20:57
  mechanical? I believe so, although he seems
• 21:00
  to be mostly mechanical like but to look like a human maybe?
• 21:05
  Like a Terminator? Yeah.
• 21:07
  How many other things can we connect this back to?
• 21:10
  What I mean, there's a lot to to me, it's like, again, I won't
• 21:13
  get, I won't get too into it because I could spend all day
• 21:15
  talking about it, but it's very Mega Man to me.
• 21:17
  Like the parallels between this and specifically like the Mega
• 21:20
  Man 0 series of games. I'm like.
• 21:23
  It's the same picture. This is the same thing, like,
• 21:27
  except it's the, it's the same picture me.
• 21:29
  But you have like two dozen pictures in your hand, right?
• 21:32
  Exactly. Yeah, it's just all of them.
• 21:35
  But yeah, I just want, I just want to point out because it,
• 21:38
  it's, I think that even in itself is a subcategory within
• 21:43
  like the tokusatsu genre, I think it's called henshin, which
• 21:47
  translates to something along the lines of like transform.
• 21:51
  Right. Because I think even stuff like
• 21:54
  the old Godzilla movies is kind of in the same broader genre
• 21:57
  category. But Henshin does specifically
• 22:01
  put you in the category of all the stuff we're talking about
• 22:03
  with like Sentai and Power Rangers and Common Rider.
• 22:06
  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's why, that's why I want
• 22:08
  to bring it up. And then from there, honestly,
• 22:11
  the rest of the movie is mostly just like fun action sequences.
• 22:17
  Like for a lot of it, I mean that that that opening sequence
• 22:20
  when he first gets into it with like the foot soldiers in the
• 22:22
  city goes on for a while. It ends with them like shooting
• 22:25
  him with a tank at one point. Like it's just like it's really
• 22:32
  intense and it's and it's very from what I saw from the movie
• 22:35
  that I recommended for you and for man, I feel like that one is
• 22:38
  maybe going to learn more into the like stunt martial arts work
• 22:43
  type stuff. This one is that, but maybe
• 22:47
  leaning more heavily into the like explosion and special
• 22:51
  effects side of things because the Kaider's pretty stiff.
• 22:56
  He's not, he's not doing like any serious karate martial arts
• 23:01
  moves. He's more like moving it like
• 23:04
  Terminator pace and but he is still punching and kicking
• 23:07
  people quite a bit. Good.
• 23:09
  I mean, this really grounds it for me.
• 23:11
  All of this stuff that we're comparing it to and all these
• 23:14
  like general genre characteristics.
• 23:16
  It's just like, what would a 12 year old boy think is the
• 23:18
  coolest thing he could possibly imagine?
• 23:20
  And it usually is some combination of like martial
• 23:23
  arts, robot, motorcycles, sunglasses, apocalypse.
• 23:28
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I still think all of those
• 23:30
  things are cool. So I'm like, I'm with them.
• 23:31
  You. Know what?
• 23:33
  Not too bad. Not too bad, Kiter.
• 23:38
  But yeah, like narratively from there, he gets involved with a
• 23:44
  resistance group within the city Avalanche from Final Fantasy.
• 23:50
  But like, they even look like them.
• 23:54
  They're even, like, dressed the same way.
• 23:56
  And I'm like, this is so interesting.
• 23:59
  But he gets involved with them there.
• 24:02
  There is a woman in that group. Her name is Kairu, I think, and
• 24:08
  there's some fun interesting sequences with her where she's
• 24:10
  having this like recurring dream about being like attacked by a
• 24:13
  monster. And then like a knight, like a
• 24:15
  medieval knight in black armor, like shows up to save her.
• 24:19
  And then she, you know, when she meets a kiter, she starts
• 24:23
  associating him with that knight.
• 24:27
  She he's, I guess the only other really like protagonist
• 24:32
  character alongside him, but even she doesn't even get that
• 24:35
  much screen time really, because I guess it's worth mentioning.
• 24:39
  The movie is not that long. It's I, I think an hour and 17
• 24:44
  minutes, but that just means it just moves it like a blazing
• 24:47
  pace. Yeah, it's actually the same for
• 24:50
  Info Man. So I imagine it's just the
• 24:52
  nature of the genres that they're very like short films.
• 24:55
  Yeah, yeah. It still hits all the beats you
• 24:58
  would expect from this story. It just moves through them very
• 25:01
  quickly, which was kind of fun. I mean, you know, like normally
• 25:05
  when we're watching these movies, I'm taking notes and
• 25:07
  stuff, and when I was watching Hekita, I got to the end and I
• 25:10
  was like, well, it's over. I'm like I only have like 2
• 25:12
  notes here. Notes.
• 25:15
  And it's just like motorcycle sunglasses.
• 25:17
  Cool. Yeah, pretty much.
• 25:20
  I was like wow, that that went by really quickly, but not a bad
• 25:24
  way because I mean it's, it didn't feel like it like how
• 25:29
  should I say this? It didn't feel like it was
• 25:30
  missing anything. It just felt like it just moved
• 25:34
  through its story quickly and it was exciting throughout because
• 25:38
  it just like it kind of moved from like 1 action sequence to
• 25:42
  the next. But like each one was unique and
• 25:46
  interesting Because once a kiter meets this group of like
• 25:50
  resistance people, they then get attacked by the foot soldiers in
• 25:56
  the city who are trying to retaliate against what Hekaider
• 26:00
  did when he first showed up. And they were also trying to
• 26:03
  crack down on this resistance group.
• 26:04
  So like most of them get killed in like an action sequence.
• 26:08
  And then Hekaider decides, OK, well, I'm going to go to the Big
• 26:12
  Bads headquarters and take care of him to avenge my new buddies
• 26:17
  that I just met in this city here.
• 26:19
  And so that's what leads into the final action sequence of
• 26:22
  him, like raiding this building, and leads to the final showdown
• 26:27
  between him and the I can't want to call this other character the
• 26:31
  evil Hekiter, but Hekiter's kind of the evil one in a way.
• 26:34
  Like that's a good point. Like he even has a line because
• 26:38
  it which is which is cool because it to remind a little
• 26:42
  bit in in Karu's dreams where she's seeing this like Black
• 26:45
  Knight character. There's like this recurring
• 26:48
  imagery where like wherever he walks, like there's like flowers
• 26:52
  on the ground and they just like burst into flames when he's
• 26:54
  nearby, I guess. And.
• 26:56
  So in the ending action sequence with a kiter versus Michael, the
• 27:03
  Michael characters going on on this whole like monologue about
• 27:07
  how he is like justice and order and society and there's like a
• 27:12
  flower on the desk. And because they're fighting in
• 27:15
  like the fancy businessman's office and kiter like picks it
• 27:20
  up and he says if you're a justice, then I'm evil.
• 27:24
  And he just lights the the flower just bursts into flames.
• 27:31
  So they're definitely going for that like anti hero thing with
• 27:33
  him, especially because he was the villain in that previous
• 27:35
  series. But that was fun.
• 27:38
  And then that, that whole action sequence between the two of them
• 27:41
  is cool. It goes on for a while and like
• 27:45
  for the first half there's like no dialogue or music.
• 27:49
  That is a weird trend with these.
• 27:51
  I had that at Inframan 2 that like a lot of the action scenes,
• 27:54
  cut all the other sound. It's just the inserted sound
• 27:57
  effects of all the hits and that's it.
• 28:00
  Yeah, yeah, This one had the added thing like, which was kind
• 28:05
  of silly in that they were both like metal men.
• 28:09
  So anytime they hit each other, there was like this like screen
• 28:13
  effect and and sound of like metal hitting each other, you
• 28:18
  know, and they're hitting each other so much they're having
• 28:20
  this back and forth fight that it got ridiculous that it was
• 28:24
  just like how much it was happening, you know?
• 28:28
  But yeah, those two have this this fun back and forth
• 28:31
  sequence. And then this part I I will say
• 28:37
  is very it's like the most Mega Man thing I've ever seen.
• 28:40
  Like after he Hekiter that is defeats Michael, the fancy
• 28:46
  businessman who's in charge of the city shows up and he's like
• 28:49
  talking to Hekiter. And while that's happening, like
• 28:52
  a like a machine takes the head off of the Michael robot and
• 28:58
  like puts him onto like a giant like misshapen kind of creature
• 29:03
  robot. And then Hekiter has to fight
• 29:05
  like that thing. And that's like the final boss.
• 29:09
  And I'm like, that is the most like video game, like Mega Man
• 29:13
  type thing. This is very, very video game
• 29:18
  coded with its logic, which I guess kind of goes back to like
• 29:23
  the roots of all of these tokasatsu, pension, whatever
• 29:26
  films where they all just feel like a kid playing with action
• 29:28
  figures, you know? It's like the the conflict never
• 29:31
  ends until you get bored and go home.
• 29:34
  Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly it, which is
• 29:36
  which is fun. I mean, you, you kind of have to
• 29:38
  know what you're getting into when you're when you're sitting
• 29:40
  down to watch one of these. But I will say a fun thing about
• 29:44
  that particular action sequence once he's fighting like the
• 29:46
  giant monster thing is, they started introducing like some
• 29:50
  quick clips of of Claymation, which hadn't been used anywhere
• 29:54
  previously in the film as a way to kind of like show the scale
• 29:59
  of this robot that he was fighting.
• 30:02
  Some of the shots were like claymation versions of the
• 30:05
  characters were like the robot would like pick up a kiter and
• 30:08
  like throw him around the room, you know?
• 30:09
  But I was like, oh, that's kind of fun.
• 30:12
  That that reminds me of like RoboCop.
• 30:15
  The original RoboCop has a bit of that where like the order to
• 30:18
  render some of the more complicated ideas, it switches
• 30:20
  over. And honestly, all of that stuff
• 30:22
  does kind of fit together. It's like an odd combination of
• 30:25
  of qualities. But to me, this whole thing kind
• 30:27
  of just sounds like RoboCop in a in a positive way.
• 30:31
  That's a really good comparison because you're right, they do
• 30:34
  the exact same thing in RoboCop. And I think it works in both
• 30:36
  cases because the characters in both films are like robot
• 30:41
  characters. So it's like the claymation is
• 30:43
  very like stiff, you know, and it, but it kind of works for the
• 30:46
  characters that it's that it's using that style for, you know,
• 30:51
  'cause like when claymation Kiter gets picked up and thrown
• 30:54
  across the room, he barely like reacts to it in a way, but it's
• 30:57
  like, yeah, he's kind of like a robot man.
• 30:59
  So that that kind of works in that instance.
• 31:02
  I, I would say if that's where your head is at visually is
• 31:05
  comparing this to RoboCop, then you're, you're kind of in the
• 31:08
  right place. OK, that is interesting.
• 31:11
  Definitely puts it in like opposite.
• 31:14
  I don't mean to keep preempting about Inferman, but definitely
• 31:17
  kind of an inversion. Inferman is very bright and
• 31:18
  sunny and old looking, whereas this one seems to be aiming for
• 31:22
  that 90s kind of grungy sci-fi atmosphere, which I know some of
• 31:27
  the things we referenced are from the 80s, but same idea, no?
• 31:30
  Totally. And I, I think it's, I mean that
• 31:31
  that's we kind of planned last time that these two would be
• 31:34
  very, very similar for this double feature pairing a kiter
• 31:38
  and and for man. So that'll be interesting to to
• 31:41
  hear how that one's almost the opposite.
• 31:43
  But I I I feel like I've I've maybe rambled a bit about a
• 31:46
  kiter here, but it was interesting and fun despite
• 31:51
  being very straightforward and simple.
• 31:55
  Like it's something that if you are a fan of this genre or type
• 32:01
  of film already, I think you would like this one.
• 32:04
  If you especially like, as I do that like dark dystopian sci-fi
• 32:11
  kind of setting that like cyberpunk look and like machines
• 32:17
  and people fighting against evil organizations, like it has all
• 32:21
  of that, like stylistically, which really endeared it to me.
• 32:26
  So I appreciated it for that. Yeah, I mean, I normally when we
• 32:31
  finish these episodes, I don't instinctively think like, all
• 32:34
  right, now that we've talked about it, I can go watch the
• 32:35
  movie I asked Frank to watch. But I'm like looking at my
• 32:38
  schedule for this afternoon and I'm like, I think I could make
• 32:41
  80 minutes for to watch a kite here.
• 32:44
  It's just cool. Like you really would not be
• 32:48
  disappointed, you know, because it's so like you could almost
• 32:54
  watch it in the background in a way, you know, because there's
• 32:56
  not much narratively to gleam onto it.
• 33:00
  It really is mostly about the atmosphere and the action and
• 33:07
  the visuals, which I think are all good.
• 33:09
  I think it excels in all of those things that it's like
• 33:12
  highlighting for itself. Yeah, I mean, it sounds fun.
• 33:16
  I feel like I definitely can picture this movie.
• 33:19
  I've I've only seen that short clip, but like I can picture
• 33:21
  just from hearing you talk about it.
• 33:23
  Somebody listening to me is not as familiar.
• 33:25
  I think your best bet is to just picture RoboCop.
• 33:27
  But Japanese. I'm sold.
• 33:30
  I feel like there's more we could maybe get into, but sounds
• 33:34
  like you've kind of covered your main thoughts unless unless I'm
• 33:36
  missing anything. No, I mean, I was thinking about
• 33:38
  that going through this, that like, I guess anyone listening
• 33:42
  to this, it's, it's going to be a lot more accessible if you are
• 33:47
  already familiar with really any of the things I've brought up in
• 33:50
  comparison to this. But if you're totally new to
• 33:54
  this space, it's kind of hard for me to to put myself in that
• 33:57
  headspace of how someone else would react to this.
• 34:00
  Because I feel like if you're someone like us, you you got to
• 34:04
  get pretty deep into this stuff before you find yourself
• 34:06
  watching Hikiter, Yeah. That's true.
• 34:08
  That's true. I try not to take that for
• 34:12
  granted is that we mostly talk about so far lesser seen, lesser
• 34:17
  known films, less mainstream stuff.
• 34:20
  And so while we invite people to come listen who have not seen
• 34:22
  the films themselves, that kind of puts us in the role of like
• 34:26
  illustrating it. It's like a it's like an audio
• 34:28
  drama sort of where we have to paint the picture.
• 34:31
  But I would say if anybody heard maybe like our episode way back
• 34:34
  about Gamera, the like Godzilla style movie that has some
• 34:38
  commonality with these types of films.
• 34:40
  So if you went back and watched that one, you'd be pretty well
• 34:42
  prepared. And even if you've never seen
• 34:44
  one, I mean, just gave it a shot.
• 34:46
  It's like fun sci-fi that will have a lot of genre hallmarks
• 34:51
  that you might vaguely recognize from something else.
• 34:53
  But like you said, Frank, it's not it's not a demanding watch.
• 34:57
  This isn't like me telling you to go watch a foreign film where
• 34:59
  you're going to have to like, read and learn things.
• 35:02
  Well, you will have to read subtitles.
• 35:04
  This film isn't Japanese. Oh good point.
• 35:06
  Mine was dubbed so I didn't. I didn't even think about that.
• 35:09
  Oh, interesting. OK, yeah, I watched a subtitled
• 35:11
  version of this. But but I'm glad that you
• 35:14
  brought up foreign film. Just just, I guess briefly on
• 35:17
  this because like the season theme that we're going with here
• 35:22
  is like forgotten superhero films.
• 35:25
  And I feel like this is a great example of like, like if you
• 35:29
  were to put this side by side with one of the previous films
• 35:31
  we've done this season, like a Supergirl, Like Supergirl,
• 35:35
  that's like a Western adaptation of a superhero.
• 35:38
  And this is a very Eastern Japanese adaptation of a
• 35:42
  superhero. So it's like you're getting a
• 35:44
  very different cultural perspective on like the same
• 35:48
  idea. And so I think that's
• 35:51
  interesting. And I think it's an element.
• 35:53
  A lot of these Japanese style films have an element of
• 35:56
  superhero storytelling that I miss in a lot of Western stuff,
• 36:00
  which is the emphasis on in many cases, martial arts and like
• 36:03
  general action choreography. I mean, I think maybe the only
• 36:07
  like Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that had interesting
• 36:10
  action choreography to me were the the Captain America films
• 36:14
  like The Winter Soldier movie, which are a perfect thing.
• 36:18
  You can kind of transpose onto this because it's like elevated
• 36:21
  martial arts with these characters who have like
• 36:23
  superhuman strength and durability, which leads to a lot
• 36:26
  of like wire stunts mixed in. It's really fun.
• 36:29
  It's like my most, my favorite type of action choreography is
• 36:33
  that I'm so much less engaged by just like Iron Man shoot a gun,
• 36:39
  sure. Sure, there's ways to make that
• 36:41
  other stuff interesting too. There's ways to make anything
• 36:43
  look interesting, you know, if it's executed properly.
• 36:46
  But yeah, I mean, again, I'm glad you brought up Winter
• 36:50
  Soldier because that's that's possibly my favorite film to
• 36:54
  come out of the entire MCU. And and a lot of it has to do
• 36:57
  with the way that the action is like choreographed and shot in
• 37:00
  that movie. It's so much fun.
• 37:02
  And and that one just has like a fun spy espionage thing to it
• 37:05
  too. Right.
• 37:05
  That one's combining that with the espionage thriller.
• 37:07
  But I would say the action in that film, to me reads heavily
• 37:11
  as being inspired by the types of stuff we're talking about
• 37:14
  today. Just dudes in super suits doing
• 37:17
  crazy stunts and kicks and such. Yeah, exactly.
• 37:21
  It's just fun. It's like fun.
• 37:24
  It's just fun, all right? Do you hate fun?
• 37:27
  Stand out Otherwise Mechanical violator is for.
• 37:32
  You exactly the the last thing I'll say about about and this,
• 37:35
  you know, ties into the Captain America and and these movies too
• 37:37
  is that it it's storytelling through action, which I think is
• 37:43
  extremely interesting and when executed well, extremely
• 37:49
  engaging and just very visually pleasing too.
• 37:54
  Again, especially like just to quickly mention that like final
• 37:57
  fight again between Hekiter and and the character Michael, like,
• 38:02
  you know, it's like a solid 6-7 minutes with like I said, no
• 38:05
  dialogue, no music and it's just kind of these two going back and
• 38:08
  forth but telling a story. You know, it's like they're
• 38:13
  fighting and, and Hekiter's winning, but then Michael, he
• 38:16
  has that secret weapon on his back and now he has the
• 38:19
  advantage. And it's so, it's, so it's like
• 38:21
  you're watching it and it's just visually telling you this story
• 38:25
  through action and like body movement and, and that stuff to
• 38:29
  me is, is really great. Yeah, it's physical struggle.
• 38:33
  It's, it's akin to why people like sports in a way.
• 38:38
  Like it's choreographed and it's, it's more deliberate
• 38:40
  storytelling, but you can get invested in action choreography
• 38:43
  the way you would care about, you know, a, a football game or
• 38:47
  something. It's kind of just like the human
• 38:50
  athleticism mixed with the I don't know, we're driven by
• 38:54
  conflict. We're dumb, dumb people.
• 39:00
  I mean, that's conflict is the heart of, you know, that's
• 39:02
  that's film making. It's like you're looking for
• 39:05
  what's the conflict of every scene.
• 39:06
  I was also going to compare. I've always actually compared
• 39:09
  action choreography, stage choreography, that kind of stuff
• 39:12
  to dance as well. Like dance choreography.
• 39:15
  It's, you know, it's it's story through motion of like the human
• 39:20
  body, which is just very like base and very like something you
• 39:27
  can easily connect with, I think, but not easy to tell or
• 39:34
  demonstrate a story in an interesting way by doing that.
• 39:40
  It's, it's certainly not an easy thing to do in, in, you know,
• 39:44
  many cases, but you know, again, when it's done well and
• 39:46
  especially in the format of like something like this, when it's
• 39:48
  when it's shot in a way that highlights that too.
• 39:52
  And that's just some of my favorite things to engage with.
• 39:56
  Yeah, well, I feel like we've given the hard sell.
• 40:00
  Do you like fun or dancing or sports or Final Fantasy 7?
• 40:05
  Hopefully at least one that you might enjoy.
• 40:11
  Still the weirdest title. Mechanical violator Akiter.
• 40:15
  With that, Frank, I think we're we're clear to head into our
• 40:18
  intermission and on the other side of the break, we'll get to
• 40:21
  hear about the other side of this tokosatsu coin when I talk
• 40:23
  about 1975's Super Infoman. So stay tuned for that.
• 40:27
  Yep. Yeah.
• 40:31
  Frank will be there. All right, little bit of late
• 40:41
  breaking news here during our intermission segment.
• 40:44
  The film that Frank Co produced that we have been talking about
• 40:47
  ever since our podcast began is now finally available to rent or
• 40:51
  to own through Amazon Prime Video.
• 40:53
  That film is entitled Nate and Mariah in Venice.
• 40:56
  It is an independent drama shot entirely on location in Venice,
• 40:59
  Italy, about a dysfunctional couple that travels to Venice in
• 41:02
  order to rekindle their relationship as sort of a last
• 41:05
  ditch effort before things fall apart completely.
• 41:08
  It is a fantastic film. I, of course, have seen it.
• 41:10
  I might even be in the special thanks at the end.
• 41:11
  You'll have to watch it to find out, but again, if you want to
• 41:14
  see the film and you want to support independent creators, it
• 41:17
  is available now to rent or to purchase through Amazon Prime
• 41:20
  Video. And it's a sardonic motion
• 41:22
  pictures production. And again, my Co host Frank was
• 41:24
  the Co producer on it. So please go check it out.
• 41:26
  Link is in the description for this episode.
• 41:28
  Thank you. All right, it's coming back from
• 41:34
  the other side of the break, Frank.
• 41:35
  Now we turn things over to the movie you asked me to watch,
• 41:38
  1975's Super Info Man. Remind us and the folks at home,
• 41:43
  what was the inspiration for selecting Inframan?
• 41:47
  Well, I think maybe both of us had a similar idea when we were
• 41:51
  talking about the theme of this season.
• 41:53
  I certainly knew going in I was like, I I'm going to try and
• 41:56
  find something from this genre, you know, like a like a
• 42:00
  tokusatsu superhero movie. And I don't remember exactly how
• 42:06
  I stumbled on Inframan, but I do remember seeing a Roger and
• 42:12
  Ebert review of it. And you say Roger and Ebert,
• 42:16
  sorry. Siskel and Ebert, Yeah, it's
• 42:19
  just like it was just. Roger Ebert, one man for those.
• 42:23
  He was just, he was just doing that like golem thing in the
• 42:25
  water where? He was talking to himself.
• 42:27
  He stole it from us. Like one of them's like talking
• 42:30
  about Inferman and then the other one's just like nobody
• 42:32
  likes you. It was the review was funny to
• 42:41
  me because you know, he's just like, he's like, this is crazy.
• 42:46
  It's so wacky. There's never been anything like
• 42:49
  this before. And then, you know, Siskel, I
• 42:52
  think I might have been confused, but I think it's
• 42:54
  Siskel. You know, he just jumps in
• 42:56
  because they're always, they were always so sassy with each
• 42:58
  other. And he's like, well, no, I mean,
• 42:59
  there's Ultraman that existed already.
• 43:01
  But anyway, just kind of like shuts him down.
• 43:06
  But it's funny because neither of them, like even in that
• 43:09
  retort where he's like, oh, Ultraman's a thing.
• 43:11
  It's like, well, there's also a ton of other things too.
• 43:13
  Like this isn't a whole thing in Japan that they had.
• 43:15
  This was like their first time experiencing it.
• 43:18
  That is interesting. I did find actually a different
• 43:21
  point of reference about Roger Ebert's thoughts on Infra Man
• 43:24
  after I was done watching the movie.
• 43:26
  Because I guess it was one of the only like recorded instances
• 43:29
  where he like revised a score for a film later.
• 43:33
  And apparently like 20 years after he first reviewed it, he
• 43:35
  bumped it up like half a *. Really.
• 43:38
  Wait see. Like that's so funny to me.
• 43:43
  That's why I think that this episode is a good idea.
• 43:45
  And like I said, why I wanted to come in with one of these
• 43:49
  because I feel like it's something where if like people
• 43:52
  are only familiar with like Power Rangers to be like that
• 43:55
  was a show for kids or that's a show I saw when I was a kid and
• 43:58
  then stopped watching. But there's a lot of like,
• 44:02
  entertainment value here. And so I, I, I, I think more, if
• 44:08
  more people saw it, I think more people would appreciate it for
• 44:11
  what it is. Yeah, I do think that Info Man
• 44:14
  being from the 1970s helps that impression for Ebert make more
• 44:18
  sense because I definitely would assume that like Japanese film
• 44:23
  and TV exports had increased by the time he reached the mid 90s.
• 44:26
  And it was more like, I don't know, like we had a better
• 44:29
  understanding in the West of like, their kind of pop culture
• 44:32
  exports. Whereas in the 70s, it would
• 44:33
  have been probably genuinely baffling just sitting down to
• 44:36
  watch a movie that had been localized for here and sing
• 44:39
  Inframan because you think what on earth is happening?
• 44:42
  Like, it's so unlike anything the West had ever created.
• 44:46
  And it's also so different to now.
• 44:47
  We're like, media is so globalized that, like,
• 44:50
  everything feeds on it itself and turns into kind of like
• 44:53
  hybridized content. It was so explicitly foreign.
• 44:58
  You know, it was probably sitting down to watch this movie
• 45:00
  in the 70s that I can only imagine Eber just being like wow
• 45:03
  I've never seen this in my whole ass life.
• 45:08
  Yeah, and I do wonder too if like, would it have been the
• 45:11
  dubbed version of it then or I don't know if the dub came
• 45:17
  later? I do have some some pre
• 45:20
  production level context about in for man in the in the version
• 45:24
  that I saw. I watched the movie.
• 45:26
  I rented it through YouTube I think.
• 45:28
  I think it's one of those ones you can rent for like 3 bucks
• 45:31
  for 48 hours. And I didn't know when it
• 45:33
  started that a. This is actually not a Japanese
• 45:36
  production. It was made in China.
• 45:38
  Like it's a Hong Kong martial arts film first and foremost.
• 45:43
  Oh, OK, cool. All right, right.
• 45:45
  Yeah, 'cause I didn't know that. Most of these are Japanese but
• 45:50
  in the 70s in Hong Kong stuff like Ultraman and Kamen Writer
• 45:55
  was so popular that they made their own and like copied the
• 45:58
  style and essentially just created their own original
• 46:01
  character. So Inframan stands alone.
• 46:03
  It's like a Hong Kong produced movie that obviously shares the
• 46:07
  same DNA but the original film was in Mandarin.
• 46:10
  And then the movie that I watched the other day only
• 46:14
  available as an English dub which was very interesting.
• 46:16
  I thought nowadays it was more common to find original audio
• 46:20
  with a subtitle option, which I would have used.
• 46:22
  But instead I got literally the most stereotypical Kung Fu movie
• 46:27
  dub experience that people used to make fun of all the time,
• 46:30
  where you'd watch an old martial arts movie on TV and it would
• 46:32
  just be this like horribly matched English dubbing.
• 46:35
  So right away I was like, oh gosh, is this going to like mess
• 46:38
  with my experience of the movie? And it did not because a, there
• 46:42
  was a weird authenticity to it where like in a lot of examples
• 46:46
  of this, they would change the character names to be like
• 46:48
  really American. There'd just be this Chinese guy
• 46:50
  named like Derek, you know, or like something that clearly
• 46:53
  didn't fit. But in Super Infoman, the
• 46:57
  characters all still have their Chinese names and they're also
• 47:00
  pronounced correctly, which I was impressed by.
• 47:02
  I was like whoa, they like tried to actually do this correctly
• 47:06
  rather than just butchering it with some like terrible
• 47:09
  localization. So it is dubbed, but it's a good
• 47:11
  dub. Well, that's, that's good to
• 47:13
  hear. I mean, it's also really good to
• 47:15
  hear that this is a Chinese produced.
• 47:17
  I actually never would have thought of that.
• 47:19
  I just, I just saw it and assumed it came from Japan
• 47:23
  because because of what it was. Rightly so, 90% of them do,
• 47:26
  especially at that time. But it was made by like the Shaw
• 47:28
  Brothers production company, which at one point in time is
• 47:32
  like the biggest production company in China and is
• 47:35
  essentially credited with like inventing the Kung Fu movie
• 47:39
  genre. They made like hundreds of those
• 47:41
  films for decades. And so this just kind of slots
• 47:45
  right in alongside all of those, but with the added flavor of
• 47:48
  being like a henshin Power Rangers esque story instead.
• 47:53
  Oh, cool. All right.
• 47:54
  That's great. I'm I'm right.
• 47:56
  It's interesting. I'm more into it now.
• 47:58
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 47:59
  The other reason it didn't matter that it was a dub is
• 48:02
  because much like the one you talked about Hakaider, very
• 48:05
  little dialogue and virtually no story to tell.
• 48:09
  I mean, this movie, nothing happens.
• 48:12
  It's like outside of the context of why there's action on screen,
• 48:16
  the setup is bare minimum. The movie begins, you're seeing
• 48:20
  a a school bus full of children singing in Mandarin because they
• 48:23
  didn't want to dub that part. And then a Godzilla pterodactyl
• 48:28
  monster just like, crashes in front of the bus and like causes
• 48:31
  an earthquake. And they're all like, ah, and
• 48:33
  then we cut away from that. We never see those people again.
• 48:35
  Presumably they all died. I don't know.
• 48:39
  And then we cut straight from that to some city that is just
• 48:45
  engulfed in flames, completely beyond saving.
• 48:48
  Everything's on fire. People are running.
• 48:50
  We cut away from that once again.
• 48:51
  We never see that again. Just 20 seconds in, they're
• 48:56
  like, you don't understand monsters.
• 48:58
  That's all we need to communicate.
• 48:59
  There's monsters now. And then, like the other 95% of
• 49:03
  the movie takes place at this, like, scientific research base
• 49:06
  in front of a big satellite dish.
• 49:08
  And the whole time I was like, are we going to go back to those
• 49:11
  people that were on fire? And I was like, Nope, That was
• 49:13
  just just some set dressing, just to give you an idea.
• 49:17
  Somebody like surrounded by fire like man, sure wish there was a
• 49:21
  inferman around here. Yeah, now Inferman is not
• 49:24
  helping anybody. Inferman does not save anybody.
• 49:27
  He just fights people. It's just a hooligan.
• 49:32
  Just a hooligan like this story becomes so narrow that it much
• 49:35
  like the one I was talking about with you.
• 49:36
  It feels like a kid playing with action figures who only has so
• 49:39
  many resources. Because once we get that bizarre
• 49:42
  hasty introduction to the concept that monsters have
• 49:46
  appeared on Earth, the only two sets we ever really get are this
• 49:51
  scientific research base that is just this cartoonish enormous
• 49:55
  room full of like glowing lights and buttons.
• 49:57
  And the Super villain base, which is this really cool, sort
• 50:01
  of like he man Masters of the Universe looking set with like
• 50:07
  skull face doorways and like a, a flowing like bubbling river
• 50:11
  that's all pink. It's super cartoonish.
• 50:14
  And those are kind of like our 2 ends of the spectrum.
• 50:17
  We're just watching the villains try to attack the base and
• 50:20
  occasionally the good guys try to attack their base and that's
• 50:23
  it. So the villains are are new
• 50:28
  here. They just showed up and started
• 50:31
  causing havoc like. Yes, that's a good question.
• 50:34
  So the villains, as is hastily explained by these completely
• 50:39
  unintelligible job that the main characters have, like they're
• 50:42
  wearing lab coats, sort of, but they almost look like
• 50:44
  astronauts. And they work underneath a big
• 50:46
  satellite dish. But the guy in charge is called
• 50:49
  a professor instead of like, a commander.
• 50:52
  Essentially, they're just like science Kung Fu fighting force.
• 50:55
  And they awesome discover. Yeah, I know, right?
• 50:58
  They discover that monsters have risen from beneath the Earth
• 51:04
  that pre like predate all recorded history like they
• 51:08
  quickly surmised that these things have been buried
• 51:10
  underground since like before the Ice Age and have just
• 51:13
  appeared for some reason and are here to like enslave humanity.
• 51:18
  Cool. OK, that's great.
• 51:20
  And it's a very, very amusing crop of characters that make up
• 51:25
  the bad guy team because it really just looks like somebody
• 51:27
  rated a costume store and just added everybody they could find.
• 51:31
  Like, you know how in Power Rangers, like serialized TV
• 51:36
  shows in this genre, there's like a monster of the week kind
• 51:38
  of mechanic or just some weird like turtle monster guy shows up
• 51:42
  with no background and we blow him up and then the next week
• 51:44
  it's like a handbag monster. You know, just random nonsense
• 51:48
  handbag monster. They do that if Power Rangers,
• 51:50
  they're always turning like everyday items into creatures.
• 51:53
  So it'll be like, Oh no, my purse is now personator.
• 51:56
  Like Personator. I like that.
• 52:00
  I like, I like personator. We should, yeah.
• 52:03
  And they have the power to impersonate people.
• 52:06
  Hear me out. Are you sketching?
• 52:10
  Personator, That's going to be our new original tokazatsu
• 52:14
  villain. Personator, I can I can
• 52:18
  impersonate you or hold money. For you, I could be your bank.
• 52:23
  I could be your bank. Yeah.
• 52:24
  Anyway, Personator TM. So those are the villains in
• 52:29
  Super Inframan. There's like henchman army of
• 52:31
  like little skeleton guys in like party city outfits and then
• 52:35
  there's like 8 or 9 totally unrelated monster dudes that
• 52:40
  just hang out with the main bad lady who have no cohesion in
• 52:44
  their designs at all but just kind of attack Super Inframan
• 52:47
  one at a time. OK, Yeah, as you do one other
• 52:51
  time. We got to play it fair, play it
• 52:53
  fair. They got to play fair.
• 52:55
  I think at the end they go for a 2V1, which they probably were
• 52:57
  like we didn't want to do this but we're low on resources.
• 53:00
  We're running out of time. Running out of time this movie
• 53:03
  is 80 minutes long so the main main bad person is just this
• 53:10
  human looking lady who has like an evil outfit on.
• 53:13
  And the Doug did change her name.
• 53:15
  I think in the original Mandarin she was called like Princess
• 53:20
  Elzebub kind of in the line of like Beelzebub the devil.
• 53:24
  But for some reason in the English dub, her official name
• 53:28
  is Princess Dragon Mom. Dragon mom?
• 53:32
  Yeah, she's she's Khaleesi. Good one.
• 53:41
  Thank you. I I kept seeing that in the
• 53:43
  captions and assuming that it was wrong because they were like
• 53:45
  YouTube captions. I was like, OK, it's probably
• 53:48
  like dragon ma, like MA. And I was like, no, no, no
• 53:51
  dragon mom, Mother of Dragons, even though she's a dragon and
• 53:54
  nobody else's. Anyway, Princess Dragon Mom is
• 53:59
  just like your classic regular villain with no real motivation
• 54:03
  beyond just being an evil person, and she has an army of
• 54:05
  these like villain of the week monsters and then a henchman
• 54:08
  army of little skeleton dudes. So that's the bad guy team.
• 54:11
  The good guy team is the scientists who all know martial
• 54:14
  arts, one of whom becomes Super Infoman and the rest of whom
• 54:18
  still help. Oddly enough, it's not a one man
• 54:21
  show. Oh well, because I mean, they
• 54:23
  know martial arts and they're scientists.
• 54:25
  They're. Scientists, but they're the
• 54:26
  military, but they have martial arts abilities, but they're
• 54:31
  astronauts. I don't know.
• 54:33
  And with these these to rewind the skeletons, the little
• 54:36
  skeleton people that that Khaleesi has, like those are
• 54:40
  like putties. Would they be the equivalent of
• 54:42
  that? They are the equivalent of
• 54:44
  putties. They are the like boring foot
• 54:45
  soldiers that you can easily dispose of and then the villain
• 54:49
  of the week monsters are varying levels of power and throughout
• 54:52
  the movie actually try to enact like a number of different
• 54:54
  schemes to destroy the like science research base.
• 54:58
  So it's like there's a tier system.
• 55:01
  Cool. OK, great.
• 55:02
  And so the scientists, they can help fight the skeletons.
• 55:05
  They're like, they're, they're like science punch, like science
• 55:08
  kicks. H2L.
• 55:15
  Write that down. Write that down.
• 55:17
  There's holding like beakers full of chemicals and just like
• 55:20
  punching you with those. Yeah, pretty much.
• 55:23
  So the thing that makes the story focus very funny to me is
• 55:26
  that there's no reason why the villain should be so concerned
• 55:30
  with the scientists. It should only be the other way
• 55:32
  around. Like of course they observe
• 55:35
  where the monsters came from under the underneath the surface
• 55:38
  of the Earth, and they know where their base is.
• 55:40
  But the only explanation we get for why the villains target them
• 55:43
  is that they know they're observing them like Princess
• 55:45
  Dragon Mom. It's like we don't want them
• 55:47
  looking at us like that, so we have to destroy them before we
• 55:51
  do anything else. Even though our ultimate goal is
• 55:53
  to enslave the Earth, but we have to blow up this one
• 55:57
  research base because they keep pointing that satellite at us.
• 56:00
  I mean valid quick what you're looking at like mind your
• 56:04
  business. Mind your business.
• 56:06
  I just found that part so funny because like, there's a sort of
• 56:09
  implication and given those bizarre scenes at the beginning,
• 56:12
  that maybe like, there is other violence happening all around
• 56:15
  the world and we're just not seeing it.
• 56:17
  But the way the movie is depicted, it's as if everything
• 56:20
  stops until this particular turf war between science fighters and
• 56:24
  the villains can be resolved. Well, yeah, so the the monster
• 56:30
  that like attacked the school bus in the other city that was
• 56:34
  related to what Khaleesi is doing or no that that was.
• 56:39
  It all happened at once, the monsters all spawned at once and
• 56:42
  Khaleesi is in charge so presumably it's all connected.
• 56:45
  But First off, that monster that crashed in front of the school
• 56:47
  bus immediately despawns. He just disappears.
• 56:50
  He was like dead but for no reason.
• 56:53
  Oh, OK. So maybe the monsters fight each
• 56:57
  other sometimes. It's completely unclear.
• 57:00
  He got dropped off the battle bus and then he got sniped.
• 57:03
  He got sniped from the battle, but he didn't even hit the
• 57:05
  ground. He just was like he didn't stay
• 57:08
  to watch the rest of the match either.
• 57:09
  He was like, I'm just getting back in a matchmaking and then
• 57:13
  it was just like Spider Dino 27 has left the game.
• 57:19
  So that's I think an important piece of context.
• 57:21
  This is technically a global catastrophe that will end life
• 57:24
  as we know it, but really it feels like a gang war between
• 57:27
  Team Science and Team Monster that only encompasses like 1
• 57:30
  square mile of the Earth. It's very important.
• 57:34
  I mean, they were looking at him funny.
• 57:37
  They're looking at him funny. They're like, stop observing me.
• 57:39
  You're going everywhere. Everyone's observing you.
• 57:42
  But they're like, yeah, but they pointed that big dish at us and
• 57:45
  I don't like. It I don't like that big dish.
• 57:47
  Don't like that dish? So the rhythm of this is that at
• 57:51
  the beginning of the story, Super Inferman does not exist.
• 57:54
  But after the initial attack on the earth with the de spawning
• 57:58
  Dinos, there's this professor guy.
• 58:01
  For some reason, he's called a professor even though he seems
• 58:03
  like he's more of like a science officer in charge of a research
• 58:06
  facility. He in the classic fashion,
• 58:09
  again, kind of like Mega Man again, he's been devising A
• 58:12
  schematic to create a superhero called Inferman who?
• 58:15
  Oh my God, hold on. I'm going to quickly look up
• 58:18
  what he says powers Inframan, because I want to say Inframan
• 58:22
  is powered by a nuclear reactor. Yes, nuclear man, it's just like
• 58:27
  the quest for peace. It's just like the quest for
• 58:29
  peace. That's a good point.
• 58:30
  Let me make sure I have that right.
• 58:31
  I'm. Just thinking about what this
• 58:33
  guy could be a professor of, I'm imagining him as a professor of
• 58:36
  karate. He's just like a professor of
• 58:40
  these hands, and then he just goes out fighting people.
• 58:43
  These hands, yeah, it's like, wow, he's so smart.
• 58:46
  He punched me real good. Dang, now I'm Dumber than he is,
• 58:49
  so I guess he is smarter than. Me now that's a good gimmick.
• 58:53
  He takes IQ points off every time he lands a hit and you're
• 58:56
  like quick cover up. Cover up, I forgot how.
• 59:03
  OK so I was correct that Inframan is powered by robo
• 59:08
  parts adrenaline. They specify adrenaline and
• 59:11
  third thing a miniature nuclear reactor.
• 59:14
  Nice. Oh, so it is also.
• 59:15
  It's also like the Shadow where he's like, so you're talking
• 59:18
  about some kind of nuclear bomb bomb when he said atomic bomb?
• 59:22
  Yeah. I just found that really funny
• 59:25
  that the key ingredients are miniature nuclear reactor
• 59:28
  parentheses. Just regular adrenaline.
• 59:30
  Yeah, he's got to drink some surge.
• 59:33
  Surge, it's like also we need your testosterone to be like way
• 59:36
  up. All right, you got to get high
• 59:37
  tea and also a nuke going. To get your T so high it's going
• 59:44
  to be a nuke. It's.
• 59:45
  Going to be crazy. Your I QS can go crazy.
• 59:50
  IQ is going to go crazy. It's like that's a little too
• 59:53
  high. We got to knock him on the head
• 59:54
  a few times. Bring that down a bit.
• 59:58
  So that's the initial setup including a lot of extraneous
• 1:00:01
  details, but essentially after the first attack on the research
• 1:00:04
  base, right, The best Kung Fu science man that they have.
• 1:00:08
  Is given the opportunity to become super Inframan and they
• 1:00:11
  do the classic thing where they're like, this is going to
• 1:00:13
  be a really dangerous procedure. You could die you're going to
• 1:00:16
  feel extreme pain. And so this gives you this
• 1:00:18
  extended sequence where the base is already being attacked while
• 1:00:22
  they're trying to finish the procedure to create Inframan.
• 1:00:25
  And then, like, the other scientists have to, like, fight
• 1:00:27
  to keep the power on so that, like, they can finish the
• 1:00:30
  procedure. And then lo and behold, Inframan
• 1:00:32
  is born and immediately, like, turns the tide.
• 1:00:34
  And that's kind of just the rest of the movie.
• 1:00:36
  Well, that sounds great. I love that.
• 1:00:39
  It's really a honestly the the first word I have to describe
• 1:00:42
  that scene is adorable because adorable.
• 1:00:46
  OK, first villain of the week monster that Princess dragon mom
• 1:00:51
  Khaleesi sends in looks like somebody took the Statue of
• 1:00:55
  Liberty and like halfway melted it because it's just this big
• 1:01:00
  green tentacle plant monster with like a sunken in face who
• 1:01:04
  looks really goofy. But much like in Kaider, when he
• 1:01:10
  starts trying to infiltrate the base, he like digs into the
• 1:01:13
  floor as like a plant root and then pops up inside the
• 1:01:17
  building. But they do that using like
• 1:01:19
  claymation, stop motion miniatures and it just looks
• 1:01:22
  really cute. Yeah, OK.
• 1:01:25
  I mean, claymation is is kind of adorable.
• 1:01:27
  It's like you can't really take it.
• 1:01:29
  It's kind of creepy sometimes, but like.
• 1:01:31
  It's creepy, but it's really funny just watching him like
• 1:01:34
  drill it to the ground and then he pops out again.
• 1:01:36
  But that scene does kind of go bigger than I think it's going
• 1:01:39
  to because he's like a human sized monster.
• 1:01:42
  But then he shrinks down and then instead of him appearing,
• 1:01:45
  you just see all these giant tentacle arms start showing up
• 1:01:48
  that are like crazy big. Like he essentially envelops the
• 1:01:51
  entire research base and he's like tentacle arms are like
• 1:01:54
  shooting through windows and people are like holding on to
• 1:01:56
  them and getting thrown around the room.
• 1:01:58
  So it's this very chaotic scene that is juxtaposed with like
• 1:02:01
  Inferman being born. So it's pretty effective.
• 1:02:03
  Action beat in the first act before our hero even really
• 1:02:06
  arrives. That's great.
• 1:02:08
  I feel like, given that this was like China's first attempt at
• 1:02:13
  like a tokusatsu superhero movie, I feel like they went all
• 1:02:17
  out, You know, they, they, they put their whole personator into
• 1:02:21
  it on this one. Like their?
• 1:02:23
  Whole personator in it. I swear by the end of this
• 1:02:25
  episode we're going to have artwork for Personator.
• 1:02:27
  It's going to be awesome. Yeah, I mean, good for them.
• 1:02:31
  That sounds great. It is fun.
• 1:02:33
  That's probably my favorite of the villain attack sequences in
• 1:02:36
  the movie because eventually Inferman is born, he comes out,
• 1:02:40
  he starts helping them like beat all the tentacles.
• 1:02:42
  And he, because we often talk about superpowers, he does have
• 1:02:46
  X-ray vision. So he's able to see inside the
• 1:02:48
  plant arms to where the like heart of the monster is and he
• 1:02:51
  attacks there, which forces it to revert to like it's human
• 1:02:54
  sized form. And then they can just have like
• 1:02:56
  a classic kind of 1 V 1 martial arts fight.
• 1:02:59
  Oh nice. Well that's because his T is so
• 1:03:00
  high. That's how he can see through.
• 1:03:02
  Testosterone is so high he can see through walls.
• 1:03:08
  Wait, wait. And why did they pick him again?
• 1:03:10
  Was it because he was the smartest scientist or the best
• 1:03:12
  at karate? Best at karate.
• 1:03:14
  These guys don't do any science, OK?
• 1:03:16
  Don't let don't let them tell you otherwise.
• 1:03:18
  There's no beakers, they just have buttons.
• 1:03:21
  They got a bunch of glowing buttons that clearly don't do
• 1:03:23
  anything. The bad guy also has a console
• 1:03:25
  full of buttons that don't do anything.
• 1:03:28
  They're starting to look good. They're just to have some sweet
• 1:03:30
  LEDs. They're just there to look cool.
• 1:03:33
  But to answer your question, yes, the main guy, who I believe
• 1:03:36
  the character's name is Les Ma, played by actor Danny Lee, just
• 1:03:40
  is chosen because they're the protagonist and they're the
• 1:03:42
  best, and they're going to take on the mantle of being Inframan.
• 1:03:46
  It's very much like a heroic moment where he's like, I don't
• 1:03:48
  care if this procedure kills me, I want to save the world.
• 1:03:50
  Or at least this one square block we're fighting over.
• 1:03:54
  Did they name him like beforehand?
• 1:03:56
  They're like, you're going to be Inframan.
• 1:03:59
  Like this is the the name we voted on.
• 1:04:01
  Or the Professor IQ man says that the design is for the
• 1:04:06
  inframan, and even at the end of the movie The bad guy's trying
• 1:04:09
  to get him to make another one and she just says make me a new
• 1:04:11
  inframan. So it's like, if you're in the
• 1:04:13
  suit, that's your name. OK.
• 1:04:15
  And everybody just knows that everyone is familiar.
• 1:04:18
  Instantly familiar. He never said his name out loud
• 1:04:21
  but the bad guys see him and they're like ah he made an
• 1:04:23
  inframan so I guess it's a known thing.
• 1:04:27
  Yeah, he's got to go get his ID changed at the DMV.
• 1:04:30
  Yeah, that. That's why he misses the first
• 1:04:32
  battle. A long line A.
• 1:04:35
  Long line, Yeah. So everything past this point, I
• 1:04:39
  think, starts to line up with a Kaider story where it's like,
• 1:04:42
  now that the action has begun, it kind of just never stops.
• 1:04:45
  The rhythm of it doesn't make any sense because, like,
• 1:04:49
  Inferman fights the the melted Statue of Liberty guy, and much
• 1:04:53
  like the scene you were talking about, the music cuts out.
• 1:04:55
  There's no dialogue. There's just these bizarre
• 1:04:59
  abrasive sound effects constantly playing while they're
• 1:05:01
  hitting each other, which maybe got better by the 90s.
• 1:05:04
  In the 70's the sound design is atrocious.
• 1:05:07
  It's so annoying. Oh yeah, yeah, I can see that.
• 1:05:11
  Bells and whistles and alarms. I hate it.
• 1:05:14
  So he fights that guy, he beats him, he blows him up and then
• 1:05:17
  indeterminate amount of time passes and then the villain,
• 1:05:20
  rather than just sending the whole army, just picks like one
• 1:05:23
  other person. And he's like, now you go try to
• 1:05:25
  break down the research base. Oh.
• 1:05:29
  It literally is 1 at a time. They're just like, well,
• 1:05:31
  alright, what's your best pitch for how we can do this?
• 1:05:34
  Pretty much they're, they're outsourcing to contractors where
• 1:05:37
  like the first guy is like, I'll sneak in with my plant powers
• 1:05:39
  and then one of them is like, I'm going to blow up the base
• 1:05:42
  from underneath with TNT, but not because I'm an exploding
• 1:05:46
  monster, because I literally brought Dynamite with me.
• 1:05:51
  So just a series of plans that fail and then like the next day
• 1:05:54
  everyone just acts like nothing's wrong.
• 1:05:56
  Like in between a couple of these attacks, we find the
• 1:05:58
  professor's kids just like hanging out by the research
• 1:06:01
  base, like having the time of their lives.
• 1:06:02
  I'm like, hold on, the monsters attacked yesterday, they're
• 1:06:05
  going to attack tomorrow. Why are you just hanging out
• 1:06:07
  here? Yeah, well, it's funny because
• 1:06:09
  this this sounds like the setup for an episodic series as
• 1:06:14
  opposed to just one film. Oh, it does it.
• 1:06:17
  This feels like 10 episodes of Info Man shoved into 80 minutes,
• 1:06:21
  which makes the pacing just nonsense.
• 1:06:23
  Like the lack of clarity for how much time is passing in between
• 1:06:27
  each attack makes it sound like they keep forgetting the
• 1:06:29
  monsters exist because they'll just be like back to normal.
• 1:06:31
  And then it's like, ah, another one.
• 1:06:33
  And it's like, you know, they have another one.
• 1:06:35
  There's always another one. I don't know, keep that
• 1:06:39
  adrenaline out. Man, your tea is going down.
• 1:06:43
  It's going down, got to get it out.
• 1:06:45
  Got to go work out or something, I don't know what gives you more
• 1:06:47
  tea? That's what they're trying to
• 1:06:52
  figure out. That's what all the science
• 1:06:53
  speakers are for. They're like, I don't know how
• 1:06:54
  any of this. Works.
• 1:06:56
  I put the adrenaline in, I put the nuclear reactor as Jess.
• 1:07:00
  He used to stop high enough. So that's really the rest of the
• 1:07:05
  movie. It's just the next day another
• 1:07:08
  monster shows up. Inframan eventually gets there
• 1:07:11
  and beats him. The only wrinkle in the first
• 1:07:14
  second act is that one of the other science people gets
• 1:07:18
  kidnapped and brainwashed. So that's one of the like
• 1:07:22
  attempts is that they brainwash a science dude and they sent him
• 1:07:24
  back to the base to sabotage it. It's.
• 1:07:26
  Just like the shadow, it's. Just like the shadow.
• 1:07:29
  Exactly. The shadow might have been here.
• 1:07:30
  And I mean, it really sounds like he was involved.
• 1:07:32
  He was just off to the side. He was one of the other monsters
• 1:07:35
  and like, what's your plan, Shadow?
• 1:07:36
  And he was like, I don't really understand my own powers Even
• 1:07:40
  so. I can't help you here.
• 1:07:42
  Pretty dark out. I don't think I cast a shadow
• 1:07:44
  out here. I got a gun.
• 1:07:47
  Got a gun 2 guns. Hopefully folks at home heard
• 1:07:53
  our previous episode about the shadow.
• 1:07:54
  It's going to be really nonsensical.
• 1:07:59
  So I will I will zoom into this thing with the saboteur because
• 1:08:03
  it is pretty funny what happens to him.
• 1:08:04
  He is specified to be in for man's friend among all these
• 1:08:10
  totally like same looking people who work at the base and wear
• 1:08:13
  the same outfit. That one's his friend.
• 1:08:14
  And so he's sad that he got kidnapped, but then when he
• 1:08:17
  comes back, he's just like, they're like, what happened?
• 1:08:19
  We saw them kidnap you. And he's like, Nah, nothing
• 1:08:21
  happened. I didn't even see him, which is
• 1:08:22
  just obviously untrue. And they're like, they believe
• 1:08:24
  him. They're like, OK, cool, back at
• 1:08:26
  it. Go rest up, rest up.
• 1:08:30
  And then a. Lot of science to do tomorrow.
• 1:08:32
  A lot of science to do tomorrow. I need your tea.
• 1:08:35
  The only person who's like suspicious of this guy is this
• 1:08:40
  other character whose name I do not remember but is notable
• 1:08:44
  because they're played by an actor called Bruce Lay, like LE,
• 1:08:50
  who to my understanding made an entire career off of trying to
• 1:08:54
  slot into Bruce Lee esque roles after Bruce Lee had died.
• 1:08:58
  Oh my goodness. Like he's a knock off.
• 1:09:02
  He's like a knock off Bruce Lee because Team Teamu Bruce Lee,
• 1:09:05
  Teamu Bruce Lee and then imprimant's like, what's that
• 1:09:08
  about T They're like, no, no, no, not that.
• 1:09:12
  So Bruce Lee was very famous, obviously, but only really after
• 1:09:17
  he died and he only made a certain number of films.
• 1:09:20
  So like there was this huge market for reselling his movies
• 1:09:24
  after he passed, but people needed to make more.
• 1:09:27
  So I guess this guy Bruce lay with 1 E just started like
• 1:09:31
  slotting in because he was also a martial artist.
• 1:09:33
  He had a similar haircut. He just pretended to be the next
• 1:09:36
  best thing and he gets slotted into this movie, but for some
• 1:09:39
  reason he's not the main character.
• 1:09:40
  He's like a supporting cast guy who's just somewhat involved in
• 1:09:45
  this sequence where he realizes that the the one guy's been
• 1:09:48
  brainwashed and then he has like a couple of fight scenes, but
• 1:09:50
  nothing big. Wow, what?
• 1:09:53
  Maybe that was before he started his.
• 1:09:55
  Maybe this is where he came up with the idea and he was like, I
• 1:09:58
  could be infra Bruce Lee. Yeah, something, I don't know.
• 1:10:03
  I just found it very strange that they have this like
• 1:10:05
  specific trendy knock off martial artist guy.
• 1:10:09
  Not that he's a knock off, like he can't do it, he's good, but
• 1:10:11
  he's donning A persona that's not his, but he's not the main
• 1:10:15
  character. I'm surprised he would allow
• 1:10:16
  that. I see.
• 1:10:18
  Yeah, Yeah, That's interesting. I mean, I wonder if they still
• 1:10:22
  like, you know, if that was the plan, like if his name was still
• 1:10:26
  on the advertising, like on the the billboards and stuff, the
• 1:10:29
  posters. I don't know I'd have to look
• 1:10:31
  more into it but he is like the only other scientist martial
• 1:10:34
  artist guy with any real screen time.
• 1:10:36
  It's your main guy in for man. Your brainwashed guy and Bruce
• 1:10:40
  Lee are the only ones who really have anything to do to quickly
• 1:10:45
  recap the end of the saboteur story though.
• 1:10:48
  So that guy's plan to infiltrate fails.
• 1:10:50
  He gets found out by Bruce Lee, he runs away.
• 1:10:53
  It leads to another fight scene with one of the other villains
• 1:10:55
  who I don't know what this one's name is but like appearance
• 1:10:58
  wise. Do you remember, do you remember
• 1:11:01
  the first episode of Digimon where or land in the digital
• 1:11:05
  world and there's this giant like beetle monster that shows
• 1:11:08
  up who's like orange Kawagamon. Kawagamon.
• 1:11:12
  I have that guy that I'm about to talk about in my notes as
• 1:11:14
  Kawagaman because that's what he looks like.
• 1:11:16
  OK, Fair enough. Yeah.
• 1:11:17
  So we had melted Statue of Liberty, we had Kawagaman,
• 1:11:21
  there's a drill claw man, there's some spring head robots.
• 1:11:25
  It's very nonsensical group of people.
• 1:11:27
  But the saboteur thing like fails.
• 1:11:30
  Ultimately that guy just ends up having to hang out with the
• 1:11:32
  villains for the rest of the movie because obviously now they
• 1:11:34
  know he's brainwashed. And then they don't save that
• 1:11:37
  guy. He just dies.
• 1:11:38
  The villain just throws him down a pit and he's dead.
• 1:11:42
  Down a pit. Where'd the pit come from?
• 1:11:43
  You just had a pit on hand. She mentions earlier in the
• 1:11:46
  movie while brainwashing him in her Skeletor base that she has a
• 1:11:51
  bottomless pit that she's going to throw him into.
• 1:11:53
  And then later on she throws him down a very much bottom, bottom
• 1:11:57
  full pit that is only like 10 feet deep and has fire at the
• 1:12:01
  bottom. And so he dies.
• 1:12:02
  And I'm like, that really is not a bottomless pit.
• 1:12:04
  I could see the bottom. He's at the bottom.
• 1:12:07
  That's how that's how she tricks him.
• 1:12:08
  She's like, you'll be fine. It's bottomless.
• 1:12:10
  We'll just. Fall forever and then instead
• 1:12:13
  it's essentially the pit from like Temple of Doom where you
• 1:12:16
  just throw him to the bottom and then they burn up and die.
• 1:12:18
  So that's it. The saboteur does not get
• 1:12:20
  rescued, he does not break free of his brainwashing.
• 1:12:23
  He just outlives his usefulness and then is killed.
• 1:12:26
  Well, you know, he did a bad, bad thing.
• 1:12:28
  He shouldn't have been kidnapped and then brainwashed.
• 1:12:31
  That's kind of on him. I think the only thing he
• 1:12:34
  accomplishes is that he literally takes photographs of
• 1:12:37
  the blueprints for Inframan so that the villains can try to
• 1:12:40
  like, find a weakness. That did they do that?
• 1:12:44
  And this is very this, this part makes very little sense.
• 1:12:46
  So to kind of keep moving while answering that question.
• 1:12:50
  Inframan's finishing move for the first half of the movie is a
• 1:12:53
  wrist laser thing, where like he's mostly doing martial arts,
• 1:12:56
  like some pretty intense Kung Fu, but he'll sort of like cross
• 1:12:59
  his arms and fire a little laser out of his right wrist.
• 1:13:02
  That tends to be pretty effective.
• 1:13:04
  He blows up multiple monsters with it.
• 1:13:06
  And then the bad guy finds out that the way it's set in the
• 1:13:09
  dub, he's powered by the sun, which is not true.
• 1:13:13
  We just said he's powered by a nuclear reactor and a bunch of
• 1:13:15
  testosterone, but apparently he's powered by the sun and
• 1:13:18
  adrenaline and adrenaline. So then she blots out the sun
• 1:13:23
  like 300 and it only disables the wrist laser.
• 1:13:28
  Like that's it. He has one.
• 1:13:29
  His finishing move is powered by the sun, but the rest of it is.
• 1:13:32
  Yeah, well. And that's what she learned from
• 1:13:35
  the blueprints that the brain controlled guy got for them.
• 1:13:38
  Yeah, see, you're following the story.
• 1:13:39
  Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
• 1:13:40
  Yeah, OK. OK.
• 1:13:42
  So yeah, that's fair. I so.
• 1:13:44
  She does disable his finishing move.
• 1:13:46
  He can't hit the Stone Cold stunner anymore because he's
• 1:13:49
  blotted out the sun, but what's funny is he just invents a new
• 1:13:52
  one on the spot. He's like, oh I can't do the
• 1:13:54
  wrist laser anymore, I'm going to do a rocket boot dropkick
• 1:13:57
  instead, which is obviously better anyway.
• 1:14:01
  Rocket boot Dropkick. What it's got like Iron Man
• 1:14:04
  thrusters on the bottom of his feet.
• 1:14:06
  So he'll just jump at one of the villains with his both of his
• 1:14:10
  feet up in the air and like turn the Rockets on and then just
• 1:14:12
  like dropkick them in the chest and they blow up.
• 1:14:14
  Oh. That's sick.
• 1:14:16
  It's so much better, like if kung.
• 1:14:18
  Fu, why was your original finisher?
• 1:14:20
  I'm going to stand still and hit you with a laser beam.
• 1:14:22
  That's just when he got like tired.
• 1:14:25
  She's like, gosh, thank goodness the sun is here.
• 1:14:28
  Keeps my new beer bomb moving. He had to build up his special
• 1:14:32
  meter. He had to do enough combos to
• 1:14:34
  get the the special laser attack and then I guess the rocket jump
• 1:14:38
  attack. The rocket jump was like his
• 1:14:40
  ultimate special. That's like where it turns into
• 1:14:42
  like a cutscene. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:44
  But you still got to do the combos to build up the meter.
• 1:14:46
  To build up the special meter. Yeah, that makes sense.
• 1:14:49
  That tracks. So that's like an awkward part
• 1:14:50
  of the dub because they literally say he's powered by
• 1:14:53
  the sun. This will disable him.
• 1:14:55
  And ultimately all they mean is like, it'll turn off his wrist
• 1:14:58
  rocket, which, again, it's so granular.
• 1:15:01
  This villain is here to take over the whole world and yet her
• 1:15:04
  plan for evil spooky monster plan is like steal a blueprint
• 1:15:08
  so that I can analyze it for weak points.
• 1:15:11
  You got to start somewhere, man. She's a small business, OK?
• 1:15:14
  She's just trying to like. She's like I need data
• 1:15:19
  analytics. OK, I need to be a change agent.
• 1:15:23
  She's like, which one of you monsters can build me a website?
• 1:15:26
  Like what are we doing here? We're trying shadow put.
• 1:15:31
  Those guns away. Shadow put those guns away.
• 1:15:34
  We need to influence sentiments. We need a bot network.
• 1:15:39
  Yeah. It's bizarre.
• 1:15:41
  None of the aesthetics in the movie like kajila to anything.
• 1:15:44
  They all look very charming like this. the Super villain hideout
• 1:15:48
  base is awesome. There's like an entrance where
• 1:15:50
  you walk in through a staircase into like the mouth of like a
• 1:15:55
  skeleton of a monster. It's so crazy cool.
• 1:15:59
  I mean, that's that's right. Sounds like awesome.
• 1:16:01
  Production design, it's awesome. Like it's so cartoonish and like
• 1:16:05
  I said, kind of reminds me of like the He Man.
• 1:16:08
  Like, it looks like a toy set. Like even at the end of the
• 1:16:10
  movie, the last big action sequence, which covers the last
• 1:16:14
  like 20 minutes, is that the professor is captured along with
• 1:16:18
  his daughter. And so Inferman has to go rescue
• 1:16:21
  them, but he brings his whole science squad.
• 1:16:22
  And then there's just like a turf war fight with all these
• 1:16:25
  putties that takes place in like a skeleton graveyard.
• 1:16:29
  There's all these like unearthed monster skeletons that are
• 1:16:32
  really big and they're fighting in this.
• 1:16:34
  Like it kind of looks like the elephant graveyard from Lion
• 1:16:36
  King I guess. OK.
• 1:16:38
  All right. Sick.
• 1:16:40
  And they just have this giant like 50 on 50 brawl that
• 1:16:43
  Inframan is just in the middle of, and then he kind of moves on
• 1:16:47
  from that into the base to go do his final series of fights with
• 1:16:50
  the remaining villains. But that's maybe where the
• 1:16:53
  action peaks for me because the first couple of bits, like
• 1:16:57
  special effects wise, they were fun, but the actual martial arts
• 1:16:59
  is pretty simple. This part at the end does
• 1:17:01
  ratcheted up quite a bit just by going nuts.
• 1:17:03
  They're just throwing people into stuff and off ledges.
• 1:17:05
  This seems very like like loose kind of dangerous martial arts
• 1:17:09
  choreography. Like, just go out there and have
• 1:17:13
  fun, guys. So I'm like, shouldn't we plan
• 1:17:14
  this? No, no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:17:15
  Just have fun. Just kick the person nearest to
• 1:17:18
  you and just see what happens. Just power of tea and Kung Fu
• 1:17:21
  and you'll be fine. I will say as a point off and
• 1:17:26
  for man, for some reason there's oddly repetitive fight
• 1:17:30
  choreography in here. Like they clearly have sequences
• 1:17:34
  that they know how to do and they'll repeat them way too many
• 1:17:36
  times. Like the skull soldier dudes,
• 1:17:39
  right? Just like the low level grunts.
• 1:17:42
  Most of them have these little like Spears and there's a
• 1:17:45
  sequence they keep doing over and over again where two of them
• 1:17:48
  try to stab him for man at the same time and he grabs both of
• 1:17:51
  the Spears and blocks them. And then kind of like karate
• 1:17:54
  chops both dudes in the neck at the same time and they fall
• 1:17:56
  down. And I swear they do that six or
• 1:17:58
  seven times. Oh well, they had to reuse the
• 1:18:01
  animations. It is just like the old He Man
• 1:18:03
  show. You just do like the stock
• 1:18:07
  animations, but it's a real man, so I just don't understand.
• 1:18:10
  It felt like, again, they weren't choreographing
• 1:18:12
  individual fights. They were just using their
• 1:18:14
  general kind of like martial arts exhibition skills and just
• 1:18:19
  plugging them in where they could.
• 1:18:20
  He also does like a judo toss over and over again.
• 1:18:23
  That's like really noticeable. I don't know why I draw so much
• 1:18:25
  attention to it if he's if they're going to keep repeating
• 1:18:29
  the same sequences, I. Wonder if this was intended to
• 1:18:33
  be multiple episodes of a show that got stitched together into
• 1:18:37
  a movie, because that would make sense.
• 1:18:39
  That would explain a lot of it. If it's like once per episode he
• 1:18:43
  does a judo flip, then you're like, OK, But if you're seeing
• 1:18:46
  it six or seven times in one film, it's like, why does he
• 1:18:48
  keep doing that judo? Flip.
• 1:18:49
  Why does he keep doing that same judo Flip?
• 1:18:51
  Yeah, I get he needs to build a special leader up, but come on.
• 1:18:54
  Stop being lazy, Inferman. It would also explain why I
• 1:18:57
  think we get the full super Inferman transformation sequence
• 1:19:01
  like 4 different times where he like does the pose and he morphs
• 1:19:05
  and then he does like a series of backflips and then like a bit
• 1:19:07
  of a Superman flying pose. And every time they show the
• 1:19:10
  full scene. Which also feels like a once per
• 1:19:13
  episode staple of a series and not something you put four times
• 1:19:17
  into a movie. Absolutely, that's that's the
• 1:19:20
  vibe I'm getting here. Also real quick to since you
• 1:19:23
  mentioned Superman, I did see one of the posters for super
• 1:19:25
  info man has like a a Timo Superman symbol on the the
• 1:19:31
  cover. Like it's like the Superman S in
• 1:19:36
  the shield, but it's just like slightly off.
• 1:19:39
  And so I assume that was like something in the marketing to be
• 1:19:43
  like look, this is like Chinese Superman is.
• 1:19:46
  Information maybe. I mean, Superman is the most
• 1:19:49
  like obvious superhero imagery that exists.
• 1:19:52
  And so I could see them even just for the American release of
• 1:19:55
  the film trying to be like, look, you know, it's it's like
• 1:19:58
  Superman. I do know that they gave him a
• 1:20:00
  moniker for the American release in the advertising that was
• 1:20:03
  like. The Super Bion, like the man of
• 1:20:05
  bionics or something, which was supposed to capitalize on like
• 1:20:08
  the $6 million man TV show or something.
• 1:20:11
  So they did add aspects to him promotionally for an American
• 1:20:15
  audience. So yeah, I don't know, like
• 1:20:18
  we've covered a lot of the weird, strange elements of Super
• 1:20:22
  Info, man. I feel like this one is less
• 1:20:25
  accessible than the one you talked about, Frank, where if
• 1:20:29
  you've never seen a tokasatsu movie and you start here, you're
• 1:20:32
  going to be like, what? What is this?
• 1:20:34
  Like? It's so it's so messy and odd.
• 1:20:39
  It's very creative and the Kung Fu is pretty neat.
• 1:20:42
  But it is mostly interesting, more so for Someone Like You or
• 1:20:46
  I who has seen a lot of these things before and would be
• 1:20:49
  curious to watch like, you know, the Chinese attempt at the same
• 1:20:53
  idea or just like this character who never really came back and
• 1:20:56
  is only in this one film. It's a novelty, but definitely
• 1:21:00
  not as obvious of a crowd pleaser I think as the one that
• 1:21:03
  you watched. Well, it's also really early
• 1:21:06
  like I, I want to say, you know, common rider Super Sentai was
• 1:21:11
  like late 60s, early 70s when it started.
• 1:21:15
  So this one adapting that or, or, you know, being it it's own
• 1:21:20
  interpretation of that it, it's a very early adapter as well.
• 1:21:23
  So I mean, even if you were watching like early Japanese
• 1:21:27
  tokusatsu, you know, it would be from like this the 70s.
• 1:21:32
  So I imagine that's all very rough, you know, because it's
• 1:21:35
  sort of like the foundation of of that that sub genre, which is
• 1:21:41
  kind of why I picked this one though, almost because that was
• 1:21:43
  interesting to me. I was just like right out of the
• 1:21:46
  gate. What are they?
• 1:21:47
  What are they doing with this you?
• 1:21:48
  Know I liked it. I I liked having a chance to see
• 1:21:50
  something this like comparatively unpolished and
• 1:21:54
  also more tied to some of the aesthetics of like the 70s.
• 1:21:59
  I found it very charming, not always super engaging.
• 1:22:03
  It genuinely found a way to sort of drag despite being less than
• 1:22:07
  90 minutes long just because there wasn't enough of that like
• 1:22:11
  atmosphere to keep it engaging in the slower beats.
• 1:22:15
  But it's still fun. Like if you like this kind of
• 1:22:17
  thing you might enjoy super info man.
• 1:22:19
  If you're really not that well versed, you'd be better off
• 1:22:22
  sticking to something like more recognizable.
• 1:22:25
  Yeah, between, I guess between the two, if we're introducing
• 1:22:28
  them to a newcomer to this type of film, I guess the kiter would
• 1:22:33
  be the better choice. But Inferman sounds great to me.
• 1:22:36
  I'm I'm I'm going to order my Inferman action figure right
• 1:22:38
  after this so. Oh, that's a good idea.
• 1:22:41
  Yeah. It does not have a video game.
• 1:22:42
  I don't even know if Inferman ever returned.
• 1:22:44
  I I think the movie did well, but I don't know that it ever
• 1:22:46
  spawned any other media. People liked it, but it is very
• 1:22:52
  dated. And so you can kind of take that
• 1:22:53
  what you will. I am trying to remember now
• 1:22:56
  because I did look up a Roger Ebert quote about the movie.
• 1:23:00
  And I think the context for why he changed his rating was that
• 1:23:04
  at the time, he gave it like 2 1/2 stars out of four.
• 1:23:07
  And he was like, this movie's crazy.
• 1:23:08
  I can't believe it. And then like 20 years later, he
• 1:23:11
  was at a showing of a different tokosatsu movie that was being
• 1:23:15
  shown in the US, And he gave that one a three and wrote some
• 1:23:18
  article where he was like, you know, what did he say?
• 1:23:21
  He was like, not a month has gone by that I have not thought
• 1:23:24
  about Inframan since I saw it, which is insane.
• 1:23:29
  And then he was like, I guess for anybody who's ever curious
• 1:23:32
  if I've ever like, revised a rating, I can't give this one.
• 1:23:35
  I just saw a higher rating than Inframan.
• 1:23:37
  So in retrospect, I'm going to bump Inframan up to a three out
• 1:23:40
  of four. Oh my God, we found the true
• 1:23:43
  love of that man's life. Was Inframan.
• 1:23:46
  He knows nothing else about the genre, but he really liked
• 1:23:49
  Inframan because it was. So I think he was often coming
• 1:23:53
  from this perspective of like, it's not just about the like
• 1:23:56
  academic structure of what makes a good movie.
• 1:23:58
  It's about unique experiences told in film format.
• 1:24:02
  And he felt that Super Inframan for that time was so daring and
• 1:24:06
  unlike anything he had seen that it just kind of had to be seen
• 1:24:10
  to be believed. And I totally respect that.
• 1:24:13
  So I think it deserves its place.
• 1:24:15
  It's also the first Chinese superhero movie, period.
• 1:24:18
  Cool. Yeah, see Inferman.
• 1:24:21
  He he has a place in history, which is good.
• 1:24:24
  He's, you know, even to this day we could bring it back to sell
• 1:24:28
  testosterone supplements if he wants He's.
• 1:24:31
  Going to keep them all for himself.
• 1:24:33
  He needs those or he's going to explode or something.
• 1:24:35
  I don't remember the. Nuke the nuke goes off.
• 1:24:37
  Impersonator is going to get him.
• 1:24:38
  I don't know. Wow, that's so funny that
• 1:24:42
  Inferman came like all the way around to being like high art to
• 1:24:46
  Roger Ebert. He was just like, this is the
• 1:24:49
  best thing I've ever seen. And I do this for a living.
• 1:24:58
  So what Inferman says is he's shoveling testosterone.
• 1:25:03
  You can't take that many total T pills in for a man.
• 1:25:06
  Your heart's going to explode. And he's like with Justin I.
• 1:25:13
  Don't know this. This all seems a little loose.
• 1:25:16
  Funny. I don't know if you know what's
• 1:25:17
  going on here. Oh, man, I mean, that's it,
• 1:25:22
  right? That's the end of that part.
• 1:25:24
  Yeah. Hey, Frank.
• 1:25:32
  I think we've talked about both of these films in enough detail
• 1:25:35
  to give people an idea of what each one is.
• 1:25:37
  So let's move now into our final scores and then after that, we
• 1:25:40
  will select our films or the other person to watch for the
• 1:25:43
  next episode. I will throw it over to you
• 1:25:46
  first since you did the first half of the show.
• 1:25:48
  Final thoughts and a score out of 10 for mechanical violator
• 1:25:52
  Hakaeder. As always, this is difficult to
• 1:25:58
  score. This is always the hardest part
• 1:26:01
  of the show. That's.
• 1:26:03
  Why we do it? That's why we do it.
• 1:26:05
  Yeah, I I enjoy to kiter. It was very simple and it's
• 1:26:16
  execution. But as I mentioned in the
• 1:26:19
  review, it just, it just evoked a lot of things that I was
• 1:26:23
  familiar with and appreciated just like tonally, visually.
• 1:26:28
  So it kind of falls into a weird place for me.
• 1:26:31
  I want to say like 5 out of 10 for Hikaider feels about right.
• 1:26:36
  5 out of 10, OK. Yeah, because it just, it was
• 1:26:39
  good. I I really enjoyed it for what
• 1:26:41
  it was. It just didn't, I don't know.
• 1:26:46
  It didn't do enough to kick it up into a next gear for me where
• 1:26:50
  I was like obsessed with it, you know, and and to give it like a
• 1:26:53
  really high score, I would say. OK, that's lower than I thought
• 1:26:57
  actually, but I could totally see why because I'm sort of in a
• 1:26:59
  similar spot with Inframan. Like you and I are not novices
• 1:27:03
  to the we're not Roger Ebert, who's never seen a a henshin man
• 1:27:06
  in his life. And it's just like, what does
• 1:27:08
  that mean? Like we.
• 1:27:11
  Right. Exactly.
• 1:27:12
  Yeah, totally. Because like, because like for
• 1:27:14
  me, it's like I I almost don't want to give it a bunch of extra
• 1:27:17
  points just because it's similar to other things I like, if that
• 1:27:20
  makes sense. No, yeah, the rating is sort of.
• 1:27:23
  I will compare against other things usually as a way to kind
• 1:27:27
  of knock points off of a of a film, because it's like, if this
• 1:27:31
  exists in similar format but better, it can sort of in
• 1:27:36
  comparison make the thing we're talking about look worse, right?
• 1:27:39
  Which is not always fair, but you know, it does.
• 1:27:42
  Like like you said, we've we've been exposed to a lot of this
• 1:27:44
  type of media and this I would watch it again for sure.
• 1:27:49
  Like you might watch it like it's just a great thing.
• 1:27:52
  To I really might throw on. You know, yeah.
• 1:27:54
  So it's cool. It's definitely cool.
• 1:27:56
  It's not, it's a, it's not a bad, it's not a bad 5.
• 1:27:59
  It's a good. It's a good five.
• 1:28:00
  It's a good five in case people don't know this 5 is a
• 1:28:03
  commendable score. This is not your 5th grade math
• 1:28:06
  test. For anything less than 80% they
• 1:28:08
  have to call your parents. OK, they said.
• 1:28:11
  That's not. That's not a personal anecdote,
• 1:28:13
  don't read into that. 5 out of 10 is good.
• 1:28:17
  That just means you made a movie, and it's a good, good,
• 1:28:20
  solid movie. You didn't, you did more than
• 1:28:22
  make a movie. If it's five out of 10, you, you
• 1:28:25
  made a movie that like, yeah, it's serviceable.
• 1:28:28
  People are going to like it. Like that's, that's a good
• 1:28:30
  score. Just want to clarify that in
• 1:28:32
  case people think we're being harsh or not.
• 1:28:34
  Like would you recommend Akiter to someone who would be a fan of
• 1:28:38
  that genre? Because I assume you would.
• 1:28:41
  Absolutely. But to compare this to the score
• 1:28:42
  I gave, like the Shadow last week, which I believe I gave a
• 1:28:45
  six out of 10, that one got a little bit higher because for a
• 1:28:49
  good portion of that movie, it was like I was like baffled and
• 1:28:53
  and like confused and like, you know, like excited because it
• 1:28:57
  was showing me things I felt like I'd never seen before in
• 1:28:59
  that configuration. And Hekiter didn't do enough of
• 1:29:02
  that. Not that that's always what you
• 1:29:04
  have to aim for, but like, you know, just for my own kind of
• 1:29:07
  understanding, like that's why that one scored a little higher
• 1:29:10
  compared. To this well, it made you feel
• 1:29:12
  something which, you know, that's harder to do almost if
• 1:29:15
  you're really familiar with a genre to be surprised.
• 1:29:20
  And I think that, yeah, kiter's just like solid, but not
• 1:29:24
  groundbreaking, you know, like relative to your experience.
• 1:29:27
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a good way to put
• 1:29:29
  it. All right, 5 out of 10 for her
• 1:29:31
  kiter. There's gonna be a close one.
• 1:29:34
  Super in for Man coming in, I was kind of waffling between
• 1:29:37
  scores in that kind of middle range because much like a kiter,
• 1:29:41
  I was like, it's not the best example of this type of film.
• 1:29:45
  It has some obvious flaws. There's like nothing to latch
• 1:29:48
  onto character wise. The main character doesn't have
• 1:29:50
  an arc. There's not like the supporting
• 1:29:53
  elements that would take this cartoonish spectacle and kind of
• 1:29:57
  ground it just a bit and make it more engaging.
• 1:30:01
  But it's truly baffling. And I think especially in trying
• 1:30:05
  to recount it to you, I was like, honestly, this thing's
• 1:30:07
  going to be not a month is going to go by that I'm not going to
• 1:30:10
  think about because it's so weird.
• 1:30:17
  So my score, and I've written this down before, you scored
• 1:30:20
  yours. I'm giving super info, man.
• 1:30:22
  A six out of 10. Oh, wow.
• 1:30:24
  OK. Which is exciting because that
• 1:30:27
  is exciting. Frank.
• 1:30:28
  That means you've won the episode.
• 1:30:30
  Wow, this is such an unfamiliar feeling.
• 1:30:32
  I don't. First time all season.
• 1:30:36
  Your recommendation? Your blind pick scored higher
• 1:30:39
  than mine, so that makes you the winner.
• 1:30:40
  How do you how do you feel? This is my post game interview.
• 1:30:44
  It's your post game interview. So you played the sport today
• 1:30:47
  and you won this part because you did better.
• 1:30:50
  But like, how did you do better? Well, see, we had more points
• 1:30:54
  than than the points that. The points that we had.
• 1:30:56
  OK, yeah. So are you going to Disneyland
• 1:31:00
  or what? What are we?
• 1:31:01
  How do we do this? Yeah, Next week we got to do, we
• 1:31:04
  got to do that again. We got to get more points than
• 1:31:06
  than they get. Yeah, do about that.
• 1:31:08
  We're not focused on playoffs, all right?
• 1:31:10
  We're just playoffs. Nobody 's going to get that
• 1:31:16
  reference. Nobody's going to get that
• 1:31:17
  unless you're watching Sunday Night Football in like 2008 and
• 1:31:22
  just like, tuning into the commercials.
• 1:31:24
  Anyway, Frank, you're the winner of Episode 3 of this season of
• 1:31:27
  Meat and Double Feature. Congrats on that first win of
• 1:31:29
  the season. What that means is that you get
• 1:31:32
  to make the next pick or the 1st pick for our next episode.
• 1:31:35
  So what would you like me to watch for next time?
• 1:31:38
  You are going to want to watch 1990 twos sticking to the 90s
• 1:31:48
  Doctor Mordred? Dr. What?
• 1:31:53
  Doctor Mordred MORDRID. OK, this has not come up in my
• 1:32:01
  research so far. Anything you want to preface
• 1:32:04
  about Doctor Mordred? Yes, this to my understanding
• 1:32:10
  started production as a Doctor Strange movie and part way
• 1:32:16
  through I think they didn't have the rights or didn't get the
• 1:32:21
  rights to Doctor Strange so they just changed some names around
• 1:32:26
  and made the movie anyway. And that's why it's Doctor
• 1:32:29
  Mordred. That is the superhero tradition
• 1:32:32
  right there, copyright infringement issues.
• 1:32:35
  But but the two leads of the movie stand out to me because
• 1:32:42
  the main protagonist of the the film is played by Jeffrey Combs,
• 1:32:47
  who you may know that name because he is Wei Yoon on Deep
• 1:32:53
  Space 9 and. Who's?
• 1:32:56
  Wait hold on, which deep space 9 character is this?
• 1:32:59
  He's the actually, he might not even be a primary character at
• 1:33:04
  the point of the show that you're at, actually.
• 1:33:06
  I'm midway through my deep space 9 watch.
• 1:33:08
  Is he? Is he there by season 4?
• 1:33:11
  I feel like he's probably made an appearance by season 4.
• 1:33:13
  He becomes more of a central character as the show goes on
• 1:33:16
  because he's part of the Dominion.
• 1:33:18
  Oh OK. I swear, one of these days if we
• 1:33:21
  ever start like, supplementary content, it's just going to be
• 1:33:23
  us talking about Deep Space 9 for six hours a day.
• 1:33:26
  It's already what we do on this. Show so OK, so it's there's a
• 1:33:32
  Deep Space 9 alone starring in Doctor Mordred.
• 1:33:34
  I say no more, say less, I'm in. OK.
• 1:33:38
  I was going to say more, but you go ahead.
• 1:33:41
  Oh, sorry, who's the other actor?
• 1:33:42
  Sorry I. Didn't say there was 2 but.
• 1:33:46
  You cut me off. The other actor, who's the
• 1:33:51
  antagonist of the film, is played by Brian Thompson, who
• 1:33:56
  while himself has appeared in several 90s Star Trek episodes
• 1:34:01
  as a Klingon. You and I would would know him
• 1:34:04
  more as Shao Khan from Mortal Kombat.
• 1:34:07
  Oh, OK, I was starting to. He's also Ian Lionheart, the
• 1:34:11
  Jean-Claude Van Nice, nice, nice.
• 1:34:16
  I'm completely sold on the cast for that one.
• 1:34:20
  I don't know how that I I can't wait to see T MU Doctor Strange.
• 1:34:24
  Yeah. That's exactly.
• 1:34:27
  What it is so funny because nobody would have known that
• 1:34:29
  character at the time anyway. Like he was not popular in media
• 1:34:33
  outside of comics. So like, you know what I mean?
• 1:34:35
  Like you wouldn't even know what you were getting.
• 1:34:37
  And like, like audiences wouldn't know like, oh, this was
• 1:34:40
  clearly supposed to be a this because unless it was like
• 1:34:42
  Spider Man, you wouldn't know them anyway.
• 1:34:45
  I I think there was a 1978 Doctor Strange movie, but again,
• 1:34:51
  it it's not, that's not something that would have been
• 1:34:53
  part of mainstream culture. Yeah.
• 1:34:55
  So people wouldn't even know what they're getting The bootleg
• 1:34:57
  version of you're. Right.
• 1:34:58
  It'd be like if we released a film and we were like,
• 1:35:00
  originally this was going to start Personator, but we had to
• 1:35:02
  rewrite it to be like the same. But you know who star who?
• 1:35:06
  I'm sorry, the what? What do you call me?
• 1:35:08
  Personator, he's going to steal all the tea so that info man has
• 1:35:11
  no power. It explodes.
• 1:35:14
  We don't know. We don't know nuclear energy.
• 1:35:19
  So OK Dr. Mordred 1992 we're a 90s podcast.
• 1:35:23
  We can't escape it. I'm in I have I have a
• 1:35:28
  controversial pick. I think because controversial we
• 1:35:32
  listen, we might need to pull up our rules graphic again because
• 1:35:35
  the premise of the season is OK boss, here's the. 1.
• 1:35:39
  I'm the one making the graphic, all right, because of our season
• 1:35:43
  is forgotten superhero movies. But I don't know if it's
• 1:35:46
  possible to say that a movie has been forgotten if it released a
• 1:35:49
  year and a half ago. Oh my.
• 1:35:52
  Goodness. OK, I feel like you're not going
• 1:35:54
  to. I really don't think you're
• 1:35:55
  going to disagree with me when I say that your forgotten
• 1:35:58
  superhero film for next Time is 2020 Fours Craven the Hunter.
• 1:36:04
  Oh my gosh. Not true.
• 1:36:10
  People will know that Sony, who owns the rights to like the
• 1:36:14
  Spider man catalog but not Spider man himself, keeps
• 1:36:18
  releasing movies about spider man villains as stand alone
• 1:36:21
  films and a couple of them, they're all terrible but a
• 1:36:24
  couple of them have been like memed into being notable.
• 1:36:27
  We kept we've been talking off air all day about Morbius, which
• 1:36:31
  was so bad but then turned into a meme and convinced Sony to re
• 1:36:34
  release it 'cause they thought people would go for the lulls
• 1:36:37
  and then it just bombed again. Even Madam Webb got a bunch of
• 1:36:43
  Flack for it's like terrible trailer and for being like kind
• 1:36:45
  of a bait and switch movie that didn't have any superheroes in
• 1:36:49
  it. But have you heard anything
• 1:36:52
  about Craven Hunter? Dude, honestly, like that movie,
• 1:36:56
  so like nebulous to me. Like I remember hearing about it
• 1:37:01
  a little bit before it came out and like maybe even watching a
• 1:37:03
  trailer for it. But hearing you say that that
• 1:37:04
  movie came out in 2024, like you could have told me that movie
• 1:37:09
  has not yet come out and I would have like believed you see.
• 1:37:13
  That's why I knew you would not disagree.
• 1:37:14
  Maybe people in the comments and if you're mad in the comments,
• 1:37:17
  let us know. It boosts our engagement.
• 1:37:20
  I think this counts. It's a forgotten film.
• 1:37:23
  It got forgotten in record time. But nobody's talking about it,
• 1:37:26
  not even as a joke. And so that's why I need you to
• 1:37:28
  watch it, because there's got to be a reason for that.
• 1:37:31
  Wow. Yeah.
• 1:37:33
  All right. Yeah, that's right.
• 1:37:38
  We're not a 90s podcast. We're a 2020 fours.
• 1:37:41
  Podcast 2020 fours yeah that's OK no that that that's in the
• 1:37:45
  rules all right we got we got the rules up here that that
• 1:37:50
  counts that counts rule #4 Craven the hunter is a loud yeah
• 1:37:55
  specifically it's weird we wrote that in back in 2024 but.
• 1:37:58
  Yeah, OK, great. I feel like that'll be fun.
• 1:38:02
  We have not talked about, we have not covered a movie outside
• 1:38:05
  of our bonus episode where we talked about the Neutron film.
• 1:38:07
  We have not covered a movie for our main programming that
• 1:38:10
  released this century, so this will be fun.
• 1:38:17
  We can talk about stuff like digital cameras, color grading.
• 1:38:23
  Yeah, yeah, we'll get into it. We'll we will.
• 1:38:26
  Yeah, we'll get into. All that into it.
• 1:38:28
  So stay tuned for that for now, that'll bring us to the end of
• 1:38:31
  this episode. Frank, do you want to just roll
• 1:38:34
  right into social media plug real quick and then we can just
• 1:38:37
  bow out? Yeah, wow.
• 1:38:39
  Sometimes I do this as a separate segment, but just
• 1:38:41
  really quickly, first of all, thank you for listening to our
• 1:38:44
  show. If you liked it, please consider
• 1:38:46
  liking the video, sharing it with a friend, telling somebody
• 1:38:49
  you know about our podcast. It is very helpful for expanding
• 1:38:52
  our reach. Very much appreciate that
• 1:38:53
  support. If you'd like to follow us on
• 1:38:55
  social media, we are available in a few different places.
• 1:38:57
  We're on Instagram at Meet Your Double feature, we are on Blue
• 1:39:01
  Sky at Mydf Pod, and we're also now in Letterboxed so you can
• 1:39:06
  find written review summaries of the films we cover on the show
• 1:39:09
  by going to Letterboxed and searching again for Mydf under
• 1:39:13
  score Pod. Basically just search Meet Your
• 1:39:16
  Double Feature, you'll find all of our links.
• 1:39:17
  Or you can go to our website, meetyourdoublefeature.com, which
• 1:39:20
  will sort of serve as a link hub to reach any of those other
• 1:39:23
  places. Again, thank you so much for
• 1:39:25
  listening. Frank's going to close this out
• 1:39:27
  today by finishing that explanation about who that Deep
• 1:39:31
  Space 9 character was. It's morbin time.
• 1:39:35
  OK, see you later. Coming up next, it's Doctor
• 1:39:52
  Mordred, followed by Craven the Hunter on Meet Your Double
• 1:39:57
  feature.