Well… I thought it was going to be one, but nope! After I browse the material on CartoonLeap’s link on this subject, I was totally gutted that Apple hasn’t gotten on the next product phenomenon with this. It would be nice to see if they can produce another i-series product line in this phase since Sony has ceased their revolutionary humanoids of robot lines, Aibo, a few years ago. This should be Apple’s next greatest chance of product development in place!
But, sadly… No. It’s not going to be like. Instead, someone took their ‘creative’ trouble to make full use of Iphone applications to come up with something like this.
Seeing as how ‘inventive’ the Japanese has gotten far with this clever attachment of Iphone onto the electronic equipment and computed its apps to operate its limbs accordingly, I reckon they should come up with top ten new applications when attached to a robot. It would be far more entertaining than what other technie review site could say about iPhone’s best apps. I mean wouldn’t it be interesting to have your on robot that’s got best functionality of ins and outs of iPhone, without needing you touching the screen? Â Also, think about the pros and cons behind these and somehow we can formulate advantages that benefit us mankind hugely! Â Not convince?
Well… Let me see. What are the top best iPhone apps you can go with this?
Vacuum the carpets (while you go watch your favour program on tv)
Wash the gutters and drains (no more back stretching)
Wash the car (hey, it may work out, you never know)
Lawn the mower on Sunday ( which you never ever bother to do them many summers ago)
Get the newspapers (Okay, a little lame, Â but I needed to put something on this list!)
Give you a massage (Well, still better than playing a masseuse, if not affordable)
Does grocery shopping for you (Nice!)
Clean house ie bathtub, toilets, sink etc. (Make sure the model’s water-resistant. Highly recommended!)
Take your pet for a walk (I don’t have any pets of my own, but you get the idea :))
And lastly, it goes to work on your behalf, while you stay at home with your jammies on, watching Dr Phil. (This deserves two thumbs up, IMHO.)
So there you go, top ten useful applications with Iphone robot. Â What more could you better ask for? Technology is after all there to make our lives easier and grant us more stress free and hopefully someone out there would think far ahead with these ‘useful’ suggestions.
Otherwise, we can always refer to this as well, if we can’t get everything above. Â We’ll be very self-sufficient from the start.
Seriously. I never thought this would be possible. Having Bandai Visual boasting about having to compress all 400 mobile suit gundam models into 6 DVDs. It sounds incredibly unbelievable when I first heard about it from this link from Animenewsnetwork.com
The official Japanese Gundam website has announced on Thursday that the Gundam MS Movie Files (Gundam MS DÅga Zukan) video profiles will get DVD and UMD releases. The website has been posting approximately 30 to 80 seconds of video (viewable from Japanese Internet addresses only) about each of the various robotic mecha in Gundam — about 400 mobile suits in all. The videos, which are narrated by Nobuyuki Hiyama (Gundam: The 08th MS Team’s Shiro Amada, Gundam Seed’s Muruta Azrael), are compiled from footage in the various television series, video projects, and theatrical films in the franchise.
Bandai Visual will start shipping the seven monthly DVD/UMD releases on October 27; the distributor aims to produce 200,000 copies overall. The discs will feature the files and mecha database information, divided by timelines and eras, in an interactive menu.
The Mobile Suit Gundam robot anime franchise celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
It’s crazy. But nevertheless, it’s worth to find out wouldn’t it? I’m hoping there’s plenty of copies left for me to pick before the deadline approaches. I really want to grab hold of it so I can compile all the great mecha ever produced in the real robot series as much as with super robot series as an my own online encyclopedia. Or in this case, ‘mechapedia’. :)
Just as I was to put up another post today (starting to feel better now that mild cold is gone. Been dragging on for weeks, without end!), I bumped into my friend’s link about a dance tribute to Michael Jackson many weeks ago. And I thought myself “Michael Jackson Dance Tribute? What on earth could they be doing to pay tribute to MJ?” So I looked up his link, opened it up….
And here it is.
Apparently, it’s a group of dancers that were secretly practicing the dance moves from one of MJ’s killer Thriller’s singles, where MJ flips right hand outwardly, and then raised left and right arms exchangeably at the same his feet slide side to side. Sure enough the music opening sequence was sure a giveaway, so you wouldn’t need to second guess that it’s Beat It (see video below). According to the video, it took 300 plus dancers less than 30 minutes to learn the moves and prepare the dancing ’stage’ less than one hour! Not bad for that kind of training and choreography. Intensely well-timed! While I was watching it in utter amazement, towards the end of the video (spoiler warning!!) there’s a message saying the dance group encouraged the rest of the world to perform the same.
So I ‘youtubed’ it online further and heres what I uncovered…
Canada…
Taiwan…
Hong Kong…
Russia…
Germany…
UK…
OK! So the last one is out of the theme compared to the rest! But still it is MJ and it’s all about him and this tribute is taking everybody by storm to do everything what they can pay respect for the great legendary music icon of our time.
MJ, though you may have lived your life in what appears to be having gone the ‘wrong direction’, but make no mistake you’re still the man in making the music so memorable and spectacular. You’re just as irreplaceable as Princess Diana (died in a car accident in 1997) who also touched so many people lives and made such an ‘impactful’ difference.
It’s been over 25 years since Macross Super Dimension Fortress (SDF) appeared on our tiny television sets, broadcasting after school hours. And technology were not that advanced as compared to today’s.
It’s amazing to note while I was googling through web pages on Macross, I keep thinking back about the sweet melodic voice of the singer-actor who’s the one that made the series such a masterpiece worth the while to remember. It was the same strong reason why and how I got so hooked into super robot and mecha anime since then. The story, the action, the the drama, the planes-turn-to-robot sequences. Everything… I absolutely adore it. And so sure for other fans worldwide as well, including the ones from the unrelated disjointed Robotech series.
Japanese singer, Mari Ijima, the sweet 19 year-old-then girl, who lent such incredible voice when she went for the audition in the set of Macross to sing the main theme of the series as part of the selection process just like what they did with Sakamoto Maaya in Macross Frontier.
If you play from above clip, listening from beginning till the end, I would find it hard not to ever get tranced by its deep, soothing voice of Mari. It’s spellbound. Â In my humble opinion. And that’s the greatest winning formula that sealed the Macross series’ fate as the greatest anime of all time that’s ever produced in anime history. Shoji Kawamori pulled out all the best works into Macross franchise and having Mari dragged in seemed like it was the best investment he’s ever made. Have a look at this 1984 live footage of her singing “Ai Oboete imasuka (Do you remember love)”.
That was Mari in his her late teens before hitting major stardom.
25 years later, this is her now…
Okay. It’s quite an appearance change from her sweet 19 years of age to her today’s present form. She looks though as if she’s keeping up to the fashion trends of modern casual clothing (and she’s even wearing a sports beanie). Guess you’re never too old to wear anything that’s super trendy and fashionable of today, even for Mari. Come to think of it, looking at Mari Ijima in her new video clip, she hardly ever ages at all! Honestly, in general sense without sounding too stereotypical, asian women usually look younger than their actual ages compared to other women in from other races. That means her voice is still keeping strong and fresh as ever!
I say ‘Bravo’ to her! I’m glad she’s moving ahead in times and she’s handling very well. The above video Mari was playing a piano, was held at the Rock and Jazz Live Festival in 2008 where she gave her singing performances on all her songs, mostly in English, since she moved to USA many years ago to learn English. She moved so she could launch her music career in the hopes to find greater fame and fortune thanks to the success of Macross, which was responsible for making her life possible till now.
Wow! This is it! The 2.5 metre-height of Mitsuteru Yokohama’s late Tetsujin 28’s head is now put on a public display. Well sort of, judging by the look of these pictures from CartoonLeap.com
The unveiling sure is a giveaway. Â As this suggests the whole Tetsujin 28 construction is currently underway so what better way to generate public interests is to grant them a glimpse view of its incredibly believable head design of Tetsujin 28.
It is a magnificent thing to view. Said to be weighing at least 50 tonnes. Considering all the parts they had to use to make his limbs less than 8 weeks ago, it would make a complete sense how the building engineers have come up with a figure summed up like that!  The Kobe Project was estimated to be worth around 100 million yen to construct and build and most of these funds come from donations of individual and corporate firms.
It sure has come a long way since they began this project back in June. Â But it’s worth the wait to see the finale of everything once its final construction gets done by September! Â Fingers-crossed!!
Less than a week ago, Danny Choo, Earth’s greatest otaku expert, just announced that there’s a Gundam Giveaway contest, currently hosted by Tamashii Robot website. There are 3 Gundams to give away. The contest involves having the participants to design a Gundam model of their own and they must submit them to Tamashii Robot by a certain cut-off point. Once submitted, Tamashii will review the designs and decide which of three them deserves the best looks so they could claim ultimate prize. I would love to give a go but I’m still new to Gundam Kit modelling so I have to sit this one out. :(.
Been meaning to post on Saturday evening, however it became such a mission for me to upload the photos on my Wordpress online, I realised this is not gonna be an easy 5 minute job…. And finally here I am.
This is something I dont’ see that often. For the past 15 years since I live in the ‘land of the long while cloud’, anime was word that’s unknown to many general people of NZ and certainly the contrast was incredibly obvious between my adopted country and home country of Malaysia, where anime is seen as a common household product in the neighbourhood of 20 million plus people. Here, to get a manga book was certainly a rarity for these and the closest thing you can ever find them (which I vaguely remember) is from a Taiwanese shop that sells parallel imported goods or from Taiwanese high school friends I used to went out with, and they get the latest trends of manga imports.
Now fast-forwarding the clock 15 years later…. Things have changed. It has changed a lot.
Thanks to the introduction of Pokemon and Dragonball Z into the NZ youth market towards late 90s, the anime space was exploding that was never seen before. It broke all barriers and soon many new young New Zealand fans are spreading the word of ‘anime’ in the community like wildfire. They learn many things about manga, otaku, shonen, doujinshi, cosplay and the culture of Japanese animation so quickly. I feel like I’m no longer a visitor to my new found homeland anymore. Â Everything I do here is almost like being back at home! And what better way for them to get into this pop culture phenomenon, is to have our very own local anime convention centre in the Southern Hemisphere, right in the heart of Auckland City.
It’s probably our first anime convention centre ever in New Zealand’s history. At least, that’s what I found from this link at AnimeCons.com. So New Zealand has come a long way with this and we see a rising number of young fans that mould in very well in this array of ‘Japan-esque’ fun everything from dressing up your favourite anime characters as for eg Sailor moon to owning your very first 1/1 scale Mobile Gundam model! (I was kidding about the 1/1 scale part. Lol.)
Nevertheless, my curiosity for discovering the world of anime in New Zealand never dissipates so I decided to venture out on the quest to see just how much New Zealand as a whole learnt much about anime.
And after the first two hours of almost non-stop (well not really, I had to recharge my parking fare every hour (long story) so I had to rush out and rush back in) photo-taking, and a few hundred of photos later, and countless hours of uploading, here’s the entire album below. Â Broken into 4 categories.
Note: It may take you a while to get used with this photo navigation setup. As you click one of the categories, a screen will refresh and the album disappears (!!) but the link to the gallery is there that says ‘Show Picture list’. Click on the link, you will have the overview of some of the photos previewed. Â There’s an option for you to view the photos in a slideshow format, which is good since I have so many photos and it would be cumbersome to view the individually. Â If you want to see other galleries of the original album, you must click the orginal link of this post so the album gets refreshed.
This is great start for New Zealand. Â As I walked around the room, letting my curious gaze linger from one desk to another, prying on the marvellous artworks by these bright intelligent artists, who clearly show their desire and passion in drawing, I sense something’s good is bound to happen for these talented young guns. Â I asked every person I met on each desk about their age and how long they love to drawing, and you hear the same answer over and over. Â 14-18 year olds love to drawing since they were little kids getting their first drawing pencils and continue to excel their ’scribbling’ into great works of anime/manga art. Â They’re incredible, I tell you. Â (which you will soon see after you look into my album).
They got a number of cosplays going on there from Japanese high-school outfits to one guy dressing up as Vincent, a character from Final Fantasy VII.  Plenty of dances going on too (which I need to find the time to upload, if I’m lucky enough to be busy).  And last, but not least, there’s a section of all mecha toys and models that I could finally find (YES!!!) in our local shores, ie no need for E-bay buying anymore for sure.  Apparently, NZ market is actually small so having a NZ as a young market for youth products like this is a foregone conclusion.  There’s still potential for this before we could rival our so-called “big brother” of the Oceania region and their much bigger show of anime. (see Youtube clip below).
At the end of the day, I did not go home empty-handed, for I certainly did make lot of purchases, if anything not overtly-exorbitant like buying myself a 1/1 Gundam model and put in my frontyard! I’m planning to post this on another page as there’s a lot of great material including magazine of Japan’s wonderful world of modelling hobby.
American film studio company, Summit Entertainment, recently announced two Hollywood A-list stars to feature in Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy as a voice cast at the comic book convention in the USA. The details of their roles are unknown at this stage. But as time progresses we will find out for sure. The movie producers are rounding up all the A-list actors including the likes of Nicolas Cage, Donald Sutherland, Eugene Levy and many others for this Japan’s golden animation classic, and Charlize and Samuel are the latest people to throw into the mix of voice cast.
Charlize Theron Samuel L. Jackson
There’s interesting rumour that Samuel Jackson is a long time otaku fan and with his recent success of his voice casting in another anime called Afro Samurai, very popular in Japan and other Western countries, it’s a little surprise why he should have no problem in getting through this ‘unchartered’ medium of pop culture.
More news on their roles for the film wil be revealed as we approach closer to the film’s deadline in October.
As soon as I read this RSS link feed from the CartoonLeap.com, I was completely left flabbergasted and stunned. I never would imagine that Hollywood producers would be seriously considering this as the next potential for bringing all the retro kids’ TV programmes onto the big screens.
Well…. For me. They’re not just any kid programme. They’re the super cool programmes that gets people in my generation talking about it for years.
Seriously! We’ve seen so many DC and Marvel comic characters and superheroes being brought to life into Hollywood films in the last 4-5 years as part of Hollywood’s business strategy to entice the demographics from the comic book industry, seen as a niche market (and being successful, nonetheless). And now they’re pursuing this? Retro classic cartoon robots?
Goodness. If there is such thing as a twist of fate in my life’s journey with cartoon robots, I gotta say I’m lucky to know my blog turns out to be a blessing.
Voltron Wall Poster
After watching the lion-combining-into-robot-Voltron sequence (see Youtube clip below) over and over again, nostalgism soon became my best friend. :) Sweet old childhood memories of my former life starting to resurface, and they instantly flashed right before my very own eyes. It had me thinking, “Did those robotic ‘cats’ really did merge into one big robot?” Each of them transform into a limb of an arm, leg and a body. I never thought of it that way before. But back then it was so absolutely cool. Revolutionary even! In that form. Oughta give credit to Go Nagai’s Getter Robo with the combine concept. If this is the beginning of many retro robot shows getting a major revival or a comeback, then there’s gotta be endless excitement with the developments of old-school mecha that will keep old school mecha fan happy-tappy. New mecha fans should get into it as well. They gotta love it.
Which begs me another question in regard of this new project developments Hollywood are planning to do. Some suggest Michael Bay to provide some ‘directorship’ influence on the Voltron film. But to me, I’m thinking why…? Why not somebody else this time? We’ve already seen him making two Transformers film (and now a third one coming. ) So why should he taking another retro-robot movie adaption project again, even though it’s a different title. After all, they are so many talented directors out there in the US showbusiness like Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, Sam Raimi etc.
Sam Raimi? Now that’s my kinda pick for good Voltron movie director. I wish.
After all, Michael shouldn’t have all the fun with this. Let other directors have a go with them.
In its third week, Eva 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance has been notched down to number 2 on the box office rankings, raking nearly $2.8 million USD in over 120 screens all over Japan. Their total earnings now stand at a figure of $20.5 million USD. A live-action theatrical-based film, Gokusen, that’s mainly about high school drama took over the number 1 sport, earning around $5 million USD in its first weekend, spanning over 409 screens Other films, Rookies and a film adaption of Osamu Tezuka’s MW, came amongst the top 10 films in the same week. Â For more info, check out at Animenewsnetwork.com
