Tea Vee Time.

My latest tea collection from Family Mart is a set of 6 mini-televisions showcasing classic kid's shows from NHK's library. Admittedly, I haven't seen any of these shows, but they do look kind of cool in a Beany & Cecil/ Kukla, Fran & Ollie/ HR Pufnstuf/ Davey & Goliath vein.




There's a little writeup on each show, but unfortunately it's beyond my capacity to translate it for you.


The first one up is called
はたらくおじさん (hataraku oji-san), a cute puppet show about a guy in a balloon that ran between 1961 & 1981.






Next up we have ひょうたん島 about some dudes on an island. (Here is a pretty funky version of the theme song sung by Go!Go! 7188.)





Check out the コケッコソング (Kokekkon song) for your listening pleasure:




Here are a few minutes with Noppo-san and Gonta-kun from できるかな (dekiru kana)



#4 is いちにのさんすう or ichi-ni no sansuu. Looks kind of like a ghost-rat, but it appears that Tap-kun helps out Dr. Einstein with science and math.






The guy who has YouTubed these has disable the embedding but check out this link, Niko-Niko-pun for a snippet of にこにこ-ぷん.







The last one is called おーい！はに丸 (o-i! hanimaru) and looks like there's some kind of Trojan Horse thing going on.



If you go here, you can play a game with all these characters!

As Captain America Throws His Mighty Shield...

When I spoke last of the Captain, it was to mourn his passing in the comics. This time however, I'll take the opportunity to showcase some of Jack Kirby's terrific artwork on his greatest creation.









So without further ado, here some scans of his Kobunsha book. I've included the cover and the first few pages in colour. After 16 pages, it turns into a cool purple-tone so I stopped the story and added in the splash pages from issues 101-109 that Jack drew.



























































































Though few of them are actually done by Jack, you may enjoy my previous post on Propaganda Cap-covers. I've got a few more of these Kobunsha books, so we'll see more of them in the future...

Lest We Forget...

C'mon down to Shaft tonight for a special Saturday edition of Echophonyk! One of the djs will be my new boss (Jools-definitely not the same as the old boss!)

Act quickly by signing up on the guestlist and you'll scam a free cd that DJ Mixture has been frantically burning the midnight oil burning.







If you're out of the country, you can always listen to the Podcast and since I'll be on the dance floor most of the night, you may catch me making sarcastic comments about the guests!



Be there or be a waffle iron! (You see, waffle irons are square.)

Across The Rainbow Bridge of Asgard.

In honour of Jack Kirby's birthday, I thought I'd treat you to a few covers & panels from the マイティ　ソー (Maiti So- better known as The Mighty Thor.) I learned of his birthday via Bully's Blog who has chosen several Fantastic Four panels in tribute to the King.

I've gone a different route, thus we have a few pages in colour and several B&W covers and splash pages from the Kobunsha & Marvel Comics collaboration of issues 158-166 of THE MIGHTY THOR! (Click on any of the pics to make them Mighty-sized!)




















































































BTW, what is Thor's Canadian connection, you might ask? Well, none other than his 1966 appearance on the Canadian produced The Marvel Superheroes cartoon and voiced by Brit turned Canajun, Chris Wiggins. Those of you too young to have watched this show in its initial incarnation can hear the nifty theme song or watch the YouTube below to understand the title of this post.



While I'm on a Canadian kick, here is TVO's Captain Rick Green's interview with Jolly Jack:



Man, I miss Prisoner's of Gravity!

Tomorrow: キャプテン　アメリカ!

Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts.

Without going into an elaborate recap of the origins of the Olympics, I thought I'd show you a few of the characters I've acquired over the years.

Up first would be the founder of the Olympics, Zeus.











Now comes the time where I make up a whole lot of facts just to justify scans of really goofy pictures. Therefore we have 6 of the Greek Gods responsible for the games (citation needed.) I have translated these from the Japanese (who took their language-version from the original Greek, so cut them some slack) thus some variation between this and your childhood knowledge may occur.

Starting upper left and going clockwise, Aporon アポロン, Zeusu ゼウス, Poseidon ポセイドン, Afurodaichi アフロダィチ and Sentauros センタウロス and Atena アテナ. (I assume you can figure out their English-language counterparts as: Apollo, Zeus, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Centaurus and Athena.)






In case you hadn't noticed over the last few weeks and ending Monday, there was some minor sporting event going on in China. I thought I'd give you my choice for the modern day equivalents of the above gods. Since Apollo is primarily a god of light and the sun, music, poetry, and other artistic endeavours, the only sport he was involved in was Archery. So let's go with this year's Gold Medal winner, Viktor Ruban of the Ukraine.

Next up, we have Zeus. Since one of his symbols is a Thunderbolt, who better to choose than Usain Bolt of Jamaica.



Poseidon of course has to be represented by the new Aquaman, Michael Phelps.

Here is a close up of Aphrodite surfing half a shell. Since she is the Goddess of love, lust, beauty, and sexual reproduction, there isn't any real Sporty equivalent. So I'll just randomly choose some Japanese woman winner. It definitely won't be Saori Yoshida, so how about Emiko Suzuki?

Japan has other ideas of who is beautiful as this attests:



We'll let our Centaur friend as spokesperson for the Equestrian events, so let's choose a fellow Canadian, Eric Lamaze.

Finally, it's hard to figure out a specific sport associated with Athena, so I'll just leave you with some Stormtroopers:

An Oz-some Birthday.

Way back here, I promised that I'd treat you to the story of オズのオズマひめ (Ozu no Ozuma hime) or (Princess) Ozma of Oz. (Click those links to either buy the book, or read it in English.) Since last Thursday was her birthday, now's as good a time as any to do it. I started reading this story, but gave up half-way (I really need to get my electronic dictionary fixed) so I'll just give you the pics, commentary free. (To look at the pictures in order, start at the upper right and read Right-Left.)






























































































































Please note that the above Ozma is in no way associated with: DJ Ozma!