Most Popular Magical Girls on YouTube

This interesting graphic from VirgoX shows searches for different magical girl titles on the YouTube platform over time.

It is not surprising that Sailor Moon consistently holds the top spot. Other titles switch places, but the graphic remains, on the whole, consistent across the twelve years it examines. I am surprised that Puella Magi Madoka Magica didn’t move up higher after it made its appearance. I would also have expected more searches for Pretty Cure.

Not clear, however, is how many titles were examined. There are quite a few that VirgoX presumably didn’t look at.

Chobits: Peace and Fear

I hate Chobits, as I’ve made clear more than once. I have enough on my plate that my essay on it is long in coming, but in the meantime, I recommend the above YouTube video from a user by the name of “Hiding in Public.”

Hiding in Public has a very different take on Chobits from my own, but I find it quite thoughtful, so I think it is worth hearing, and after I get my own essay up, his discussion will make for a good counterpoint to what I’ll have to say. Check it out.

Working Away

I’m over here working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which is going all right, though I’m a tad frustrated that I still haven’t heard anything from potential publishers. Anyway, while I’m writing a rough draft, I often listen to music, and I have recently found some dude on YouTube who does “ambient metal,” which is kind of nice because it’s a style I like and doesn’t have any words to distract me.

‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 3: The Director’s Cut

Before we get into a further discussion of the themes of Alien, I want to spend a little time on the director’s cut, which released in 2003. Ridley Scott went back over the film, tightening up parts and adding in a few deleted scenes. Unusually, the end result was a minute shorter than the original theatrical release.

My personal opinion about “director’s cuts” in general is that I don’t like them. In my experience, more often than not, a director’s cut is analogous to a novelist who goes over the head of his editor and includes a bunch of material he was advised to take out. More often than not, it’s material the final product was better off not having.

The biggest change in Alien is a scene near the end in which Ripley finds two of her crewmates cocooned into a wall by the alien’s secretions, a scene that anticipates the alien hive full of ill-fated colonists in the sequel—a concept James Cameron apparently came up with independently. Although kind of a welcome detail in hindsight, it disrupts the tension of movie’s climax, and for that reason the film is better off without it.

Also, I have twice now seen fans interpreting this as depicting human victims transforming into alien eggs, something that would contradict the alien life cycle that the franchise ultimately developed, though I admit this interpretation does not appear to me to be warranted by anything in the scene.

The only included scene that I thought made an improvement is after the first crewman, Brett, gets killed: Two others rush in to see the alien dragging him away, which makes for a better transition to the next scene.

Aside from that, most of the changes are almost impossible to notice except to someone who’s memorized the film.

I thought something similar when I watched the theatrical and director’s cut versions of the sequel Aliens side-by-side. Aliens is an action movie, and the theatrical version is faster-paced and more intense. The added scenes—a monologue by a marine, a pointless subplot featuring automatic gun turrets, a lengthy scene featuring the doomed colonists—accomplish nothing except slowing down the action. Again, there’s one exception, the detail that Ripley had a daughter who died while Ripley was in suspended animation, which anticipates her relationship with the orphan girl Newt.

Also, I have to add one additional curiosity: I have never thought Alien, with its deliberately slow pacing, was very scary. I recently showed it to the magical girl for the first time, and she made the same comment, that it was an impressive film but not particularly frightening. She was clearly much more moved by Aliens, which made her jump or squeal several times and during which she showed a lot more emotional engagement.

Tattoo Assassins

James Rolfe’s “Angry Video Game Nerd” is considerably more vulgar than the usual here, so I have to give a language warning. Nonetheless, I am reposting this video for the sole reason that, upon watching it, I suddenly want to see a bad-good comedy-action movie based on the never-released Mortal Kombat ripoff game Tattoo Assassins. That thing looks hilarious.

Doom Eternal: An Addendum

This came up in my YouTube recommendations because I’d been looking at so many videos having to do with Doom Eternal.

This is a video of someone playing the latest (?) version of Project Brutality, which I have previously discussed, the over-engineered mod of the original Doom.

This not only shows some impressive gameplay (the guy must have the maps memorized) but also shows just how crazy and gigantic Project Brutality has grown.

Already, in earlier releases, it had included weapons drawn from Duke Nukem 3D and probably other places. Now it includes things from Doom Eternal as well; in particular, one of the new gadgets in Doom Eternal is the “Meat Hook,” an attachment to the Super Shotgun, which fires a grappling hook on a chain. In this video here, you can see the player repeatedly using the Meat Hook, which has now been incorporated into the mod.

A Visual Montage of Magical Girl Evolution

This video by VirgoX Flow is an unusual depiction of the history of the magical girl genre. Foregoing commentary or discussion, it simply shows excerpts of major titles from 1966 to the present day, so the viewer can easily see how the style in art, the themes, and the appearance have evolved over time.

This video also shows me just how many series I still need to see. Yeesh, so many magical girls and so little time …

A Peek at Project Brutality

As I’ve said before, I’m not a gamer, but this came to my attention because I regularly watch James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd videos.

Rolfe recently produced a review of Chex Quest, a re-skin of Doom that was put in boxes of Chex as a prize, and which was good enough to get its own cult following.

Here’s the video. For courtesy’s sake, I should probably give a language warning:

Toward the end of the video, he mentions that the game is compatible with a mod called Brutal Doom. When this mod is plugged in, it removes the nonviolent component of the Chex Quest game and instead allows you to slaughter your enemies with wild abandon.

I am old enough to remember when Doom first made its appearance. It was mind-blowing at the time, and it was also unusually hackable, producing a huge community of modders creating their own levels, weapons, enemies, and other features. Non-gamer though I am, even I screwed around with some of the mods lurking on the young internet and built a few custom levels. I may or may not have seen the original Brutal Doom—I don’t rightly remember—though I saw other mods that upped the gore or improved the arsenal. In any case, Brutal Doom is one of the most popular Doom mods of all time.

Because of Rolfe’s videos, I discovered something called Project Brutality, an ongoing effort to build on what Brutal Doom got started. Currently, Project Brutality 3.0 is in its beta phase, and videos showing it off have appeared on YouTube.

Some of these videos vary considerably in how they look. I’m not sure if the players have multiple mods going at once or if these represent different stages of this one project. Some seem to be playing through a version that combines all the levels into one continuous map, and others (such as the one below) are not.

In any case, the modified game is stunning.

Watching this player, I have to wonder just how complicated are the controls for this game, seeing all the different things he can do from throwing axes and grenades to kicking enemies in the face to pulling himself up platforms to switching to third-person.

I’m astonished at this player’s skill, but even more than that, I’m astonished at how completely the modders have modded the game. I mean, holy heck. It’s recognizably Doom, but the vast array of added features is incredible. Some of the added features are listed on the Doom Wiki.

And of course there’s the gore and the bird-flipping, but those juvenile bits are hardly noticeable amidst the attention to detail in the animations, weapons, and gameplay.

Watching this recaptures the feel Doom gave when it first came out, when we said, “I can’t believe this game!”

‘Sailor Moon’ in Italian and Spanish

I don’t actually know what this is, but I saw it, so now you have to see it, too:

It is at least an homage to Sailor Moon. Maybe it’s a rendition of the theme song of the Italian version, but it seems too long for that.

In any case, if that’s not to your taste, you can instead watch this Spanish version of “Moonlight Desetsu,” which is an excellent metal cover:

A Comparison of ‘Smile Pretty Cure’ and ‘Glitter Force’

Don’t you cry tonight.

A vlogger calling herself MagicalGirlStarlight produces this handy video making a comparison between the original Smile Pretty Cure and its localisation Glitter Force, which was produced by Saban and Netflix. Most of the changes she discusses I was already aware of, but one I wasn’t—Glitter Force eliminates or heavily edits the show’s more emotionally fraught scenes and removes references to death.


She ends the video by asking the haters to please show some restraint. I generally agree with the sentiment, and I’m not one of those weebs who think the English language is an abomination that besmirches all Japanese media it touches, but I will say that I find heavy-handed localisations like Glitter Force to be wrongheaded. The show tried to eliminate Japanese references and change the setting to the United States, apparently to avoid confusing American children, but everything is so obviously Japanese, the alterations only make it more confusing.

For example, there is an episode in which the characters take a school trip to Kyoto. Glitter Force changes this to an Asian expo. But to get there, they ride in a train past Mount Fuji, and then they walk through a bamboo forest. So where the hell in America are they?

Glitter Force is intended for children, not weeaboos, so some changes are understandable. For example, I like the changed title; “Glitter Force” sounds like a sparkly team of action girls (which it is), whereas, to the English speaker, “Pretty Cure” is mere nonsense. (It’s actually a pun when pronounced by a Japanese speaker, but most non-Japanese people have no way of knowing that.)

I also don’t really mind the changes to the characters’ names. Japanese names can be a mouthful to small children who don’t speak Japanese.

But they should have kept the Japanese setting simply because they had to go to absurd lengths to hide it and it was futile in the end anyway.

Also, although I refuse to enter the sub vs. dub debate, the dialogue in Glitter Force frequently makes me grit my teeth. Watch the video above and wait for the scene comparison at the end, and I think you will see what I mean. The English lines are obviously wedged into a scene that wasn’t meant for them, and this is typical of the show as a whole. If you’re going to dub, fine, but try to respect the lip flaps.

Finally, the change to the show’s emotional tenor is unnecessary and even cowardly. I mean, it’s freaking Pretty Cure. It’s not exactly edgy. Agree with it or not, I can understand why they censored half of Sailor Moon back in the nineties, but Pretty Cure? What angry phone calls from parents were they anticipating over Pretty Cure? This is the network that green-lit Big Mouth for Pete’s sakes, but they think a little crying is too much for kids to handle.

So in the warped world of Netflix, you can masturbate in front of children but weeping in front of them is totally off-limits.