ZORRO IN THE COURT OF SPAIN (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                          ZORRO IN THE COURT OF SPAIN starts rather slowly but soon shapes up into a decent little swashbuckler. Most of the movie's alternate titles seem to emphasize the titular masked hero swashing his buckles in Spain, so I've no idea why the English dub I saw claims that the action all takes place in "Lusitania," which in recent centuries usually connoted Portugal. All the names involved in the court-intrigue are almost certainly fictional, so the change wasn't made to offset political connotations.                                                       

As with some of the other "Euro-Zorros" around this time, being set in Europe raises the stakes from the more modest adventures of the California-based Fox. A new grand duke, brother of the previous and deceased duke, has challenged the widowed duchess for the throne of Lusitania. The duchess has gone into hiding with her allies, but for some reason she's separated from her small daughter, and one of those allies takes the little girl to Lusitania Capital (I'll call it) to hide her from the enemy in a monastery/orphanage. The Duke either lives in the Capital or close to it, doing various tyrannical things with the help of his main henchman Captain Miguel (Alberto Lupo), so this choice of locations doesn't seem like the swiftest idea. In due time the Duke and Miguel will get their hands on the kid in order to force the duchess to abdicate. In addition, evil Miguel has been pestering Marquise di Villa Verde to let him marry beauteous Bianca (Nadia Marlowa), despite the fact that Bianca is betrothed to marry the Marquise's son Riccardo (George Ardisson), also Bianca's cousin. Riccardo comes to the Capital just in time for all these events, having been to Mexico for training as a young cavalier (one of two major flippings of the usual Zorro-script).                                                 

     
Apparently, Riccardo and his factotum Paquito got some advance intel on the troubles in Lusitania, because as soon as he arrives, he's already got the whole Zorro idea thought out. He immediately plays the part of the jaded aristocrat with no interest in local politics, so as to allay any suspicions from Captain Miguel and his sister Isabella, who oddly is currently married to the Marquise. The father of Riccardo and Isabella have no interpersonal relations, though, so this may be a change made by a translator. Some Zorro-stories give the main heroine an interfering aunt, which may be where Isabella comes from, but she only has one scene relevant to the narrative and totally disappears from the latter part of the movie. Anyway, Riccardo's louche act alienates both his father and Bianca, but it works to allow the hero to listen in on the plots of his enemies and work to counter them as-- Zorro!                                                           

   
   The fight-scenes are passable and Ardisson makes an okay masked avenger, even though he gets more mileage out of the Riccardo role. But the most interesting change is that although the heroine goes through the usual process of rejecting Riccardo while going gaga over his costumed identity, this time Zorro marries the heroine in his non-costumed identity.    No rationale is presented, though possibly Riccardo does this to block Miguel from forcing Bianca to marry him. Riccardo, knowing that Bianca doesn't love his false identity, refrains from making her share his marriage-bed. But of course, once he rescues the little girl from the evildoers and gives the duchess the chance to oust the evil Duke, Zorro can unmask and the two enjoy connubial bliss. The villains are not very stylish this time, but the romance is much better developed than in the majority of B-Zorros.

KONG: THE ANIMATED SERIES (2001/2005-06)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological. metaphysical*

As a metaphenomenalist, I don't mind it when a show asks me to believe twelve impossible things, whether before breakfast or any other time. But even in a cartoon series aimed at kids, I could wish those impossible things added up to something more than ordinary.

It's curious that the writers even bothered to connect their KONG to the primal 1933 masterpiece, which related the complex but straightforward fable of an island where prehistoric life survived, and where a primitive Black tribe sacrificed women to the appetite of their gargantuan simian god. But that's the setup: after the 1933 Kong fell from the Empire State, a scientist, Lorna Jenkins, took a DNA sample from the big ape. She also did a lot of research on the renamed "Kong Island," where she found no primitive African tribe, but objects called "Primal Stones," which hailed from ancient Atlantis. (Kong Island is now located in the Bermuda Triangle, which I guess excuses the DNAPE's association not only with Atlantis but a host of other New Age concepts.)

Why Lorna does all this comes down to "just reasons," and this includes waiting about sixty years before she creates Clone-Kong-- possibly so that she could mingle the original ape-DNA with that of her grandson Jason. Young Jason grows up thinking of Clone-Kong as his "big brother"-- but only until Lorna's family is endangered by a villain who wants access to the magic of the Primal Stones. So Grandma takes her DNAPE and her research to the hard-of-access island, not reaching out to her grandson until he's of college age. Not content with re-creating a mammoth monkey. she's also invented devices called "cyber-links." A human who wears such a doohickey can magically merge his DNA with that of an animal, and conjure forth a gigantic humanoid creature. Why did Grandma want such a device? Reasons.

The real extrinsic reason was to provide heaps of Big Monster Action. The aforementioned villain gets hold of some of Lorna's links, and with them he can make himself, or one of his numerous henchmen, into huge beast-men in order to catch all the Primal Stones. Only Kong, who is "The Protector" of his mystic domain, can battle such titans-- and heroic Jason gets to tag along by merging his mind (but not his body) with that of Kong, sort of a primeval mecha-pilot.

While some kid-vids are clever enough that adults can appreciate them, KONG was designed to be dully repetitive, as evidenced by the fact that most of the episodes can be watched out of broadcast order. Villain and henchmen ferret out a Stone and use the links to become temporary monsters. Kong defeats them and they transform back and escape to do the same thing next episode.  

Jason BTW has two other partners in peril besides the big monkey: his comic relief college-buddy Tann, and what appears to be the only native of Kong Island. an acrobatic, copper-skinned shamaness named Lua. The three young people and Kong provide all the hero-action, with Lua using her shaman-powers to explicate whatever needs explication.

The only other point worth making is that if I watched this as a kid, I would rather have had the DNAPE dueling with traditional monsters. But there only a few of these-- a giant Yeti, a Wendigo--to allay the monotony.

GUARDS OF SHAOLIN (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Just as this streaming flick was coming to an end, and I was thinking the film's alternate title NINJA VS. SHAOLIN GUARD was thoroughly unjustified, the four Shaolin monk heroes get attacked by a bunch of black-masked, black-clad fighters who throw shurikens and some sort of fiery powder. Still, the emphasis of the story (such as it is) is clearly upon the four stalwarts, not their enemies, so I'll go with the streaming title.

The GUARDS-- billed as First Brother (Alexander Lo Rei), Second Brother, Third Brother, and Fourth Brother-- are charged by the dying abbot of their temple to take a "Golden Sutra" to another temple. The abbot was killed by another monk at the temple, addressed as "Uncle" (though probably none of these characters are related to one another). The method of his death is one of the few things that stand out about this Taiwanese-South Korean chopsocky: Uncle's minions attack the abbot, and one of them, a woman in drag (Jin Nu-Ri), bares her tattooed breast, distracting the monk and causing his death.

The four monks head out on their journey, but with the exception of Fourth Brother, the comedy relief, they're all but identical. Ah Mei, Fourth Brother's girl-cousin from his former village, happens across them and invites them to her father's estate. However, Uncle's minions, who theoretically ought to be pursuing the four guardians, somehow decide to run ahead of the heroes and attack Ah Mei's home, killing her dad and all his retainers. This makes the young woman embittered against the Brothers, and that's a pain for Fourth Brother, who harbors a desire to marry her. However, the girl has nowhere else to go and continues with the heroes on their trek.

The rest of the film is just one attack after another, including a pointless encounter with some very solid ghosts (or maybe zombies) who pop out of their coffins and menace the stalwarts. Up until the final confrontation between First Brother and Uncle, only one battle stands out: one of the bros has a nice fight with a female opponent, possibly the same one who did the "boob-fu" earlier. This fight may have confused the streaming reviewer, since he wrote that the monks were joined by a "female fighter"-- and Uncle's minion is the only kung-fu honey, since Ah Mei can't fight. One reviewer said that Ah Mei falls for First Brother, but the film didn't bother developing the romance-angle after bringing it up in the first place. GUARDS is not the worst of the worst, but it's pretty unremarkable.

ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

If you know in advance that ANGEL is primarily a modern-day superspy flick, you may think that the title suggests a blend between that genre and the nascent genre of the Hong Kong chopsockie. What the viewer gets, though, is a pretty low-wattage effort, even if it's one of the few 1960s secret agent flicks to focus on a female hero.

Lily Ho plays Luo Na, alias "Agent 009," and her assignment is to infiltrate a gang of crooks called the Dark Angels. They really seem to be nothing but crooks, with no ties to international espionage and no plans to conquer the world. Nevertheless, even though Luo is doing the job of a police undercover agent, she has a smattering of uncanny spy-weapons, like a metal-edged card that can be used to disarm enemies or a perfume-spray filled with knockout gas. 

 I have no information on the films that director Lo Wei helmed before ANGEL, so it's not impossible that this was one of his first movies that needed strong action sequences. Lily Ho does project pretty good authority in her few fight-scenes, but the only one that catches fire is a battle with a mobster's jealous girlfriend (Fanny Fann). Later Lo Wei would distinguish himself with entries like Bruce Lee's big success FIST OF FURY and my personal favorite of the works I've seen, VENGEANCE OF A SNOW GIRL. But ANGEL is no more than a period curiosity, made risible by the repeated use of musical passages from the library of 007 cinema.       

KISS THE GIRLS AND MAKE THEM DIE (1966)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I'm using my label "eurosploitation" for this Italian-American production because KISS feels a big-budgeted version of one of Italy's cheapie eurospy flicks-- not least because it shows what I've found to be those films' worst feature: crappy villains. Conversely, despite KISS having a storyline that ought to make maximum use of beautiful actresses, I've seen a number of cheap spyflicks that did a better job with their presentations of pulchritude.

The middle sixties displayed the apogee of the superspy movie. KISS was preceded in 1966 by both OUR MAN FLINT and the first of the Matt Helm movies and followed in 1967 by the "Bond-comedy" CASINO ROYALE, which used a "world-peril" very similar to that of KISS, but did it better. By the early seventies the more naturalistic spy-films became prevalent and the superspy subgenre didn't rally until the early 2000s. KISS probably did the subgenre neither lasting harm nor any good.

The story was mostly filmed in Rio de Janiero, where much of the action takes place. The famous Rio statue of Christ the Redeemer provides journeyman director Henry Levin with what might be his only "Hitchcock moment," as American agent Kelly (Mike Connors) fights off an attacker beneath the statue's shadow. Allegedly Kelly came to Rio investigating a white slavery ring, but this mundane rationale is dropped. Somehow Kelly gets on the track of eccentric Brazilian businessman Ardonian (Raf Vallone), who's seen hanging out with a gorgeous jet-setter type, Susan Fleming (Dorothy Provine). Kelly questions Susan and learns that she's a British agent who's also investigating the disappearance of nubile young women. In contrast to most Bond knockoffs, the hero's leading lady shares the spotlight here, even though Susan tends to fight with assorted gadgets (like a ring with a drugged needle) while Kelly uses basic fisticuffs.

Ardonian may be the most under-characterized "bad spy" from this period. The viewer soon learns that he's conspired with Red Chinese agents to engineer a radiation-weapon that can sterilize all of the United States, thus putting China in the catbird seat as a world power. The Dino Maiuri script gives Ardonian no particular motive, ideological or pecuniary, for collaborating with Red China or for building a rocket-silo in Africa, in order to launch a radiation-satellite into orbit. But Maiuri's reticence stems from a "Big Reveal:" Ardonian actually plans to neuter every other man on Earth, aside from himself and maybe a few aides. But the script presents this revelation with zero insight into the villain's psychology, in marked contrast to the better-conceived motives of Woody Allen's evildoer in CASINO ROYALE. All that said, the Reveal does provide KISS with its only mythic moment: a scene in the facility showing that all the kidnapped women have been placed in frozen blocks of ice, moving on a conveyor belt like so many delicacies at the villain's command.

There are a few decent moments of action and comedy in KISS, but they're drowned in lots of dull, pokey scenes, suggesting that often Levin was just marking time. There's also a senseless incident wherein Kelly enters a beauty's room, saves her from a deadly scorpion, and then-- tells her to leave her own room? Half a dozen lovely actresses appear in KISS, but the only ones who have half-decent roles are Provine and Marilu Tolo, the latter playing one of the villain's Chinese contacts.

VIRTUAL COMBAT (1995)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Hyde Park Entertainment came close to PM in terms of churning out reams of STV products for cable and video rental stores. PM tended to concentrate on action movies, while Hyde emphasized softcore thrillers like the NIGHT EYES series. That said, the redoubtable Don Wilson made three flicks for Hyde Park. I've found a number of Wilson programmers to be passable formula entertainment. But though I've not seen them all, VIRTUAL COMBAT may be the worst thing Wilson ever did, though the fault surely lies with the guys behind the camera.

COMBAT takes place in the near future, and like most such action-fare, it's really just the modern world with one or two SF-tropes added. VR technology has become the big thing in future-Las Vegas, so much so that local cops like David Quarry (Wilson) and his partner John spend most of their time hanging out in V parlors-- though John avails himself of VR sexcapades, while David hones his martial skills by battling VR opponents. One opponent is Dante (Michael Bernardo), and he kicks real boy David's ass in their first bout. Unfortunately, a world-beater named Burroughs (first and middle names "John Carter," hah hah) has his scientists invent a way of bringing VR programs into the real world-- sort of the 3-D printing of the 1990s. Burroughs' main purpose seems to be to corner a new market on VR prostitutes, both creating regular good-lookers like Liana (Athena Massey) and "specialty types" like whip-wielding dominatrix Greta (Dawn Ann Billings). But the same tech that births cyber-babes also unleashes cyber-villain Dante, and one of his first actions is to kill David's partner.

Avenging his partner then becomes David's only motive in life for the rest of the film, though he finds a little time for a nothing sex scene with Liana. But director Andrew Stevens's idea of a plot is that of providing minimal connective tissue between a bunch of mediocre fight-scenes. Even Liana and Greta get to throw down a little. But only the climactic combat between David and Dante shows decent choreography, which may stem from the two actors working to their strengths. But Dante's never very threatening, not least because he doesn't utter his own lines, but strides around close-mouthed while his dialogue is uttered by the booming voice of Michael Drn.

Eventually all the rogue programs are destroyed, even "good VR" Liana, though David can still visit an iteration of Liana. Where? Why, in the VR sex parlors! And so COMBAT ends by coming "full circle"-- or is that "full-circle jerk?"

HONOR ROLL #303

 It's not the cat, but Michael Dorn, who caught the tongue of MICHAEL BERNARDO.

MIKE CONNORS and DOROTHY PROVINE play a pair of swingin' sixties spies.  

FANNY FAN plays a dopey-dope opponent of the main heroine.

JIN NU-RI is kung-fu fighting, and that's about it.

Despite his ties to the 1933 film, KLONE-KONG may be the least faithful relations of the Big K.

NADIA MARLOWA: another of Zorro's many foxy conquests.

  

SANTO VS INFERNAL MEN (1961)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Seven years after Rene Cardona offered the iconic wrestler a shot at the silver screen, Santo finally took the plunge-- sort of.

I reviewed the first of these two Cuban-location films, and now I found on streaming a subtitled copy of SANTO VS INFERNAL MEN. Both movies decline to call the performer in the silver mask "Santo," and his character in both movies is a subordinate to another police agent-- Fernando Oses' "El Incognito" in BRAIN, and Joaquin Cordero's mufti drug-cop "Joaquin" here. The mad scientist plot would become far more typical of Santo's adventures under producer Rene Cardona, starting with SANTO VS. THE ZOMBIES.

Unfortunately, INFERNAL is dull from start to finish. I'm sure the producers of the Santo series threw in these mundane crime-films from time to time to save money, but I doubt any of them are very noteworthy. The only interesting aspect of the film is how many performers went on to play key roles in the Cardona lucha-verse: Gina Romand, Joaquin "Doctor Satan" Cordero, and Enrique Zambrano. In addition, one story is that while wrapping up INFERNAL, the movie crew found that Castro's forces were taking over the country. The story of the crew's escape from that entanglement would probably make a better movie than anything in this infernal waste of time.  

XTERMINATOR AND THE AI APOCALYPSE (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

I know nothing about the origins of this low-budget CGI oddity. But just as a guess, it looks and sounds as if writer/director/voice-actor "BC Fourteen" started out trying to make a fan-film about the armored adversary from George Lucas' prequel STAR WARS series, General Grievous. Then he reworked his CGI model into a more skull-faced humanoid and dubbed hm "Xterminator," but kept the raspy, acerbic voice-characterization.

The setting is some futuristic sparse-opera-- my new term for a space-opera so sparse in details that it might as well be a western. Almost all we see of humanity are various armored soldiers, under the command of one Grace Sherwood, and her raison d'etre as a commander of Earth-forces is to play "Thunderbolt Ross" to the robotic villain Xterminator. He calls himself "X" for short, but he's an apocalyptic AI who despises humans as much as humans despise him. So who does Sherwood call upon when her creator obliges her to rip off "Escape from New York" and send someone to Mars to rescue a missing diplomat? That's riiiight...

While X is on his Mars mission, motivated by both carrot and stick, Sherwood decides to hedge her bets by unleashing an intelligent shark-monster. Megalodon, to ambush X. Why does Megalodon exist in this sparse-opera? Same reason Sherwood confers with an intelligent Bigfoot: a director's silly in-joke. because he worked on an early CGI junk-flick, BIGFOOT VS MEGALODON. For good measure, Sherwood also arranges a Martian jailbreak to add to X's headaches.

Though XATAA is never more than a junk-flick, I might have been slightly entertained if Fourteen had been able to deliver on all the promised action. But just as was the case with all the SYFY big-beast fests, action costs too much money for cheapie CGI movies. There's just barely enough violence for XATAA to qualify in my combative mode category. Yet while I can't recommend the film, it did make me a bit curious about Fourteen's half-dozen "Bigfoot" junk-flicks.   

    

THOR: TALES OF ASGARD (2011)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

A few years after Marvel's THOR comic became a good seller for the company, creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby instituted a backup feature, "Tales of Asgard," which also lasted a year or two before the THOR feature took over the whole book. The backup gave artist Jack Kirby the chance to focus only upon Thor's hometown of Asgard, doing his best to convey Fosterian magic and grandeur within the space of seven pages an issue.

The MCU's live-action THOR series, which began the same year this DTV was issued, barely attempted pageantry in its depictions of the Norse wonder-world. TALES doesn't manage to come close to Kirby's passionate depiction of a universe governed by magic and martial prowess. However, TALES makes a sincere effort, and on the whole looks pretty good in terms of visuals.

Now, the 2011 live-action THOR largely rejects the Norse "don't die in your bed" ethos, TALES follows that same course in large part, pushing a pacifist message. However, because this DTV is depicting Thor as a young male god seeking to prove himself within a male culture, the script doesn't quite reject all aspects of masculinity. However, there remains an orientation toward a judgmental feminism, incarnated in this video's concept of the warrior-woman Sif-- though nothing as toxic as the MCU would later embrace.

Thor's support-cast members-- adoptive brother Loki, and the Scandinavian Three Musketeers known as Fandral, Hogun, and Volstaag-- are also younger and greener, and Loki at this point is a novice schemer, still on good terms with his boisterous brother. But none of them burn to prove themselves as Thor does. However, Daddy Odin's noble brow is perpetually bent with the weight of keeping Asgard's peace with their long-time enemies the Frost Giants, so he can't be bothered figuring out a rite of passage for the young Thunder God. But there is a sort of "impossible quest" that Asgardian males are allowed to undertake, in order to satisfy their desire for adventure. Odin's troubles start when his son takes on the quest and comes back with a dangerous prize.

There's a hard-to-follow backstory about how the Frost Giants almost wiped out the Dark Elves. Apparently the Elves were allied to Asgard, but Odin's warriors didn't come to the Elves' defense for whatever reasons. So the latter made a pact with the fire-demon Surtur, which risked the survival of all the Nine Worlds. The Frost Giants annihilated most of the Dark Elves anyway, and one of the survivors, Algrim, took a position as a court advisor to Odin. However, Algrim's position in Asgard is not unlike an emigre from South Vietnam taking shelter in the US: deep down, there's a sense of betrayal by an ally who didn't live up to his part of the bargain. Thor seeks to discover the lost Sword of Surtur, but his masculine bull-headedness imperils Asgard from both the covert menace of Algrim and the overt one of the war-happy Frost Giants. In the end, Thor learns humility, at least until it comes time for him to relearn a parallel lesson in the 2011 live-action flick.

While in the regular MCU movies Sif is just One of the Boys, here she has some sort of vague grudge against the males of Asgard, and she has an affiliation with a tribe of female warriors who live apart from Asgard proper. At least some of her testiness stems from having the hots for Young Thor and thus expecting him to be more than an entitled heir. This isn't much of a conflict, even for a B-plot. Still, there's nothing actively bad about TALES-- while all of the "live" THOR films suffer from major narrative problems. 

RETURN OF THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN AND THE BIONIC WOMAN (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

"Did you want your son made over in your own image?"

This is a pretty intense line coming from a character in the gosh-gee-wowie world of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, especially being spoken by Michael Austin (Tom Schanley) to his father Steve Austin (Lee Majors). The character of Michael never appeared on the TV shows but was at some point conceived by Steve with a mother from a short-lived marriage. (She's conveniently out of the picture, of course.) The line is all the more interesting because making over this would-be spinoff hero in the image of Steve Austin is exactly what the producers of the telefilm had in mind. Thus when Michael suffers a terrible accident, he loses exactly the same body parts that Steve did-- one arm, two legs, and an eye, though Steve's son does get one extra enhancement: his eye can shoot lasers in addition to being able to see great distances. The line is also interesting because the two bionic wonders before Michael were given their makeovers by the government without their express consent, and the producers of the TV-movie apparently couldn't resist repeating the trope of the "forced conversion." (Didn't any of these people ever enter a real hospital, where the physicians almost always have to ask for consent for any operation?)

Though RETURN was conceived as a back-door pilot for a series starring Michael Austin, the first hour of the show is all about Steve Austin and Jamie Sommars (Lindsay Wagner). Both of them retired from the OSI about a decade ago, with Steve taking up some sort of fishing gig while Jamie apparently took classes to become a licensed therapist for the underprivileged. Former boss Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson) approaches Steve about coming back to the fold to stop a terrorist operation, Fortress, because Steve dealt before with its obsessed leader Stenning (Martin Landau). Though Steve refuses, he's soon forced to return to the spy biz because Stenning, despite being in prison, is aware of the bionic duo's powers and begins sending thugs to harvest their mechanical organs. This contingency forces Steve and Jamie to reunite after years of estrangement, with all the attendant emotional turmoil.

As for Michael, Steve just happens to be in the process of seeking a connection with his grown son, a pilot in the Air Force. Despite his having been raised by an aunt, Michael seems fairly neutral toward his famous sire, knowing him only as an astronaut. Shortly before Michael has his transformative accident, Steve reveals his abilities to his son. Michael thinks bionic enhancements are cool, until he's forced to get them himself. Naturally, Michael doesn't spend much time grousing about his fate. Jamie transfers from whatever her regular gig is to become the therapist to Steve's offspring. Michael makes rapid progress as a bionic wonder, all leading up to the final confrontation with Fortress. Wikipedia's assertion that the producers had the successful film "Top Gun" on their minds is confirmed when Oscar asks Michael to come work for him "if you ever get tired of being Top Gun in the Air Force." 

The bionic stunts here are as good as anything on the older shows, and some of the dialogue is a good deal better, courtesy of Michael Sloan, who would also write the next two TV-films with Steve and Jamie (but no Michael). Lee Majors's real son Lee Majors Jr has a minor supporting role as a young agent of the OSI, and he DOES reprise that role for the other two bionic-reunion flicks. One interesting aspect of the script is that Fortress is said to be some sort of "America for Americans" reactionary group, which is a bit surprising since the TV shows usually steered clear of real-world politics. Martin Landau does his usual professional job as the Big Bad, ranting about how the country allows aliens to infect its "bloodstream," or something like that. And yes, it's fun to see the chemistry between Majors and Wagner for the first of three final collaborations.

ONE PIECE: STRONG WORLD (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

I'd never attempt to review the multitudinous productions of ONE PIECE, the still-running manga and anime, any more than I'd take a shot at DRAGONBALL, the 1980s shonen that PIECE essentially superseded in popularity. Both are just too much of a time-commitment. But I can take a shot at the various movies and TV specials.

Phenomenality in ONE PIECE is problematic at best. It's not science fiction, nor what I call magical-era fantasy. The portmanteau term "science fantasy" is best, for it represents a world where all sorts of bizarre creatures and environments exist according to whatever phenomena the author wants to introduce-- much like the Mars books of Burroughs. Some characters in the PIECE universe use technology of a sort, but it's tech-gear filtered through the lens of historical fiction-- in this case, that of the Golden Age of Piracy. To further complicate the universe, there's some entity that scatters so-called "Devil Fruits" throughout the endless islands, and each fruit can bestow a particular, unique power on whoever eats one. So PIECE crosses the worlds of Burroughsian science-fantasy with that of superhero comics.

STRONG WORLD takes place after the manga and anime had been running roughly a decade, and stars nine-- count 'em, nine-- do-gooder pirates who never seem to find time to do the sort of things real pirates do. Instead, they're forever stomping out evil tyrants, or avenging little girls who've had their dollies messed up by bandits, and that sort of thing. In this case the goody-good "Straw Hat Pirates," led by the courageous moron Monkey D. Luffy, pit themselves against Shiki the Golden Lion, a villain who plans to dominate the world with a horde of mutated animals. In addition, Shiki abducts the Straw Hats' lissome lady navigator Nami to serve in his crew and scatters the other eight heroes all over the place. Naturally, after various exploits, they converge and kick the evildoer's ass.

Manga-creator Eichiro Oda wrote the movie's original story, and those in the know can see him recycling a major trope for the character Nami. When she first appears, she's the virtual slave of a petty ruler, and the Straw Hats rescue her. So WORLD is a partial reprise of that trope, with Shiki defeating the Straw Hats at first, so that Nami has to agree to serve him to spare her friends. The various "caring moments" in the film never overwhelm the big noisy action-scenarios but do serve as a necessary counterpoint.

ONE PIECE, which has been a major success in the world manga market, arguably found a way to translate the appeal of "superhero powers" to a shonen science-fantasy universe, and more than any other manga, seems to have eclipsed the American superheroes with the younger generations. WORLD is a decent action-fantasy programmer, with the only debit being that Shiki is just your usual tinpot tyrant. But the animators did a bang-up job designing all of the Golden Lion's malicious monsters, who provide some of the film's best moments.            

GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (1993-94); GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI MOVIE (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

I'd seen a few random episodes of this anime teleseries long ago but recently decided to take the plunge and watch all the subbed episodes online, as well as comparing them to the first two years of the 1991-99 manga series. Though some anime serials change many details about the manga-stories they adapt, or even produce totally original installments, all 45 episodes of the SWEEPER series are based on the tales of Takashi Shiina. The biggest changes are slight increases in slapstick violence and the injections of support-characters not in the original stories, probably just to increase their run-time.

Most of the episodes are done-in-one, with the exception of occasional two-parters. Starring character Reiko Mikami is a "ghost sweeper" in her late twenties or early thirties, and she uses a variety of supernatural weapons to exorcise troublesome ghosts and demons who plague modern-day people and businesses. Mikami is as courageous and resourceful as the best heroes, but she's also extremely mercenary, taxing her customers with huge bills so that someday she can become a rich woman. She's also slightly larcenous-- one episode displays her knowledge of burglary techniques-- and she constantly underpays her male assistant, seventeen-year-old Tadao Yokoshima. She gets away with this because she's super-hot and knows that horndog Yokoshima will accept any wage just to scope her out. The fact that she's exploiting the youth, however, does not keep her from doling out brutal punishment to the teen any time he tries to feel her up, or even expresses a negative opinion of her. Yokoshima, for his part, is clearly meant to be the "goat" of the series, the one who has all the terrible things happen to him-- and because he's such an unregenerate perv, his sufferings are funny. As contrast, Mikami also employs a naive young female ghost, Okinu, who's much milder in temperament than either Mikami or Yokoshima, but still generates her share of difficulties.

SWEEPER's cast has a healthy variety of equally wacky support-types, and as I noted, sometimes the writers injected them into adaptations of stories where they didn't appear. Happily, unlike some later manga-concepts, the first couple of years of the manga didn't overpopulate the series so as to distract from the central star and her two primary helpers, which arguably occurred with URUSEI YATSURA. This concentration on the three principals helps generate suspense about their responses to one another. While Mikami never becomes generous, she will fight for her friends, and sometimes even for "friendly enemies." It's not clear from the first two years of stories if she becomes a syndromic sadist through her constant thrashings of Yokoshima, though it will be interesting to see if the character changes at all in the manga as a whole. She does show some regard for his welfare at times, and even respects him a bit, until he inevitably loses that respect thanks to his horniness. 

SWEEPER is always light-hearted and non-serious, though manga-artist Shiina comes up with some creative concepts from time to time. For instance, when the team accidentally injures Santa Claus. they have to complete his rounds for him, though Shiina mentions that in modern times there are so many kids in the world, Santa has to choose recipients by sheer chance. A wilder sort of folklore-crossover has Mikami take on the Pied Piper of Hamelin-- albeit one put through a mythic mix-master, since his abilities include the power to turn adults into little kids (Mikami being his first victim) and to summon rats as his minions. The final episode adapts a story in which the ghost-sweepers get trapped inside a movie, interacting with fictional characters who are fully aware of being fiction. Something about the way treats the movie characters reminded me of the Japanese folklore-idea of the *tsukumogami,* an inanimate object that takes on a pseudo-life thanks to associating with humans. Neither the manga nor the anime is interested in any existential questions. But even ideas with potential unused can supply a sense of the creators' raw creativity. In conclusion, even before finishing my survey of the manga series, I like SWEEPER enough to say that its feminine protagonist ought to rank more highly in the lists of "best heroines ever."

ADDENDUM: After the teleseries ended the producers finally wrote what seems to be, from available info, an all-original story for the franchise. This hour-long OAV is also a very peculiar crossover, for it pits Reiko and her team, as well her usual support-cast, against the vampire Nosferatu. There's no resemblance between this monster and the character from the silent film classic, but it's implied that the spirit of the vampire somehow traveled to medieval Japan and possessed the body of the famous lord Nobunaga Oda. A contemporary exorcist seems to have slain the vampire-lord, but he reincarnates in modern Japan, along with his aide Ranmaru. Both Nobuaga and Ranmaru were real historical figures, though so far as I can tell most later expansions on their careers were not "fictionalized" enough for them to comprise crossover-icons. Anyway, the dead exorcist also appears in modern times and gives Reiko a magical spear with which to vanquish the demon. Reiko is her usual money-grubbing self but still steps up when Nosferatu endangers her world. None of the support-characters do much and Reiko's cowardly assistant Tadao only gets substantial time because the exorcist-ghost possesses him, using his body to help Reiko. The film recycles the usual tropes of the manga with no originality, though anyone in 1994 "shipping" Reiko and Tadao would have been pleased that when Reiko's life stands in danger, she thinks of her assistant moments before "he" shows up to save her. This Galahad fantasy, however, does not keep Reiko from beating up Tadao several times for his horndog behavior. There are a few decent scenes but overall, the movie-- given the subtitle "The Resurrection of Nosferatu" in a dubbed English version-- lacks the charm of the teleseries and the original manga.             

                                     

HONOR ROLL #302

 No exorcist was ever sexier than REIKO MIKAMI.

"And an Ell-A-D-Y, NAMI's not shy."

  TOM SCHANLEY joined the Bionic Bunch, then vanished-- just like Cousin Oliver!

All WARRIORS THREE for one and all that stuff.

XTERMINATOR-- never learned the correct spelling of his name.

ENRIQUE ZAMBRANO appeared in a Santo film-- and you can tell it was a bad one, since I chose him to represent it.

THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, SEASON ONE (2006-7)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

At some point of my hardcore comics-fandom, I remember thinking that DC Comics' LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES ought to have been perfect for a Saturday morning kids' cartoon. After all, the Legion had started in 1958 as a toss-off notion in a SUPERBOY comic. That one story-- which showed three superheroic teens from the 30th century interacting with 20th-century Superboy-- grabbed enough fans that DC developed the idea of the Legion into a successful franchise, still being published today.

Since the Warners Animation series lasted two seasons, it can't be considered a total failure. Still, it can't be called a success either, and since producer James Tucker has a fair range of good and bad in his animation career, I tend to think that the juvenile fantasy of the sixties LEGION just wasn't transferrable to the "future" of the 21st century. The teen heroes of the comics were barely even one-dimensional as characters, so their appeal in the Silver Age depended largely on writers being able to come up with ingenious uses of their multifarious powers, linked to a few very basic "teen torment" tropes regarding guilt, sexuality, et al. 

Tucker's LSH, though, tries a little too hard to quickly re-imagine the Legionnaires as two-dimensional characters, but without really coming up with anything compelling. Though many members make token appearances in the show, the producers sought to concentrate on seven core Legionnaires-- Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Bouncing Boy (the inevitable comedy relief for the most part), Phantom Girl, Timber Wolf (given a Wolverine-ish makeover), Triplicate Girl, and Brainiac 5 (who's a cyborg rather than a humanoid with a computer-like intelligence). These characters are also the gateway for 21st-century Clark Kent as he joins the future-supers club-- though, for reasons that may be tied to a trademark challenge around that time, the hero is always called "Superman" rather than "Superboy," despite the fact that he looks to be as much a teen as the other heroes.

The main problem is that in the first season at least, the stories just seem overly derivative, and that might be the main reason that young viewers just didn't choose LSH over whatever competed with it on other channels. There's a "haunted spaceship" episode, a "crisis of confidence" episode, and an "interfering parent" episode. The writers loosely adapted some decent comics-stories-- the origin of Timber Wolf and of the daffy "Legion of Substitute Heroes," the Legion's struggle with the colossal space-monster, the Sun-Eater. However, at no time does the series seem grounded in even a very simple space-opera universe. There's also a near-total avoidance of the romantic element, which I think was a crucial reason the sixties series both caught on and prospered for decades. Ironically, though I'll be reviewing the second and final season separately, I have a feeling I'm going to see the same flaws in that review-- a show that needed to reach young viewers, but may be greater interest to old farts, who get the in-joke when the "haunted spaceship" is given the name "Quatermass."

                    

RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

DEGENERATION was the first motion-capture animated film based directly on the popular video game, and the first time an adaptation linked up the game's protagonists, soldier Leon S. Kennedy and scientist Claire Redfield. That means that viewers like me-- who only knew the series that starred original movie-character Alice (Milla Jovavich)-- had to go Alice-less.

While the character design of Claire Redfield has a stronger vibe than I've seen in a lot of motion-capture animation, the story is a fairly dull setup of all the basics of the franchise. The viewer learns how an evil corporation designed the insidious T-virus, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning its victims into killer zombies. If one doesn't want to hear that much about the mechanics of who did what to whom, DEGENERATION fails to provide much in the way of dynamic characters or situations.

Its most positive aspect is that this film got all the exposition out of the way, so that the next in the series, DAMNATION, offered a lot more of the kickass action integral to the live-action movie franchise.      

QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE (1935)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

There's just one element in this 12-chapter serial that renders it marvelous: a short sequence in which two people in the African jungle are pinned down by some sort of "strangler vines." To the best of my knowledge there exist no such plants, so QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE is marvelous. But most of the significant phenomena are uncanny, so as I occasionally do on this blog, I include labels for those tropes for my own reference.

QUEEN gets a "fair" rating for mythicity just because it manages to touch on five or six major jungle-adventure tropes. Nevertheless, the serial is a mess. It recycled footage from a 1922 silent serial, JUNGLE GODDESS (now lost), which was noteworthy in its time for having been shot on a forested backlot in the U.S. and for having a better than average budget for a chapterplay. But in the 1930s silent films were unmarketable. So a producer named Herman Wolk chose to cannibalize certain sequences from GODDESS and to shoot a lot of matching sequences on soundstages. This leads to a lot of padding with the use of stock jungle footage, none of which includes either old or new players. This creates one amusing sequence in which a chimp, cornered on a high rock by hungry lions, is rescued by a helpful elephant, who's never in the same frame with the lions.

Two of the major jungle-tropes used here are that of the "lost city" and "the white goddess." To be sure, there are actually two bizarre African cultures crammed close together. In the ERB tradition, there's a small coterie of White people-- far from the usual "city"-- that have somehow established a priesthood over their Black neighbors. To be sure, the two groups are never seen together, aside from an early scene in which the Black chieftain confers with head priest Kali (Lafe McKee), so apparently this mirrors the original plot of GODDESS. The White priests all wear big conical hats that I suppose are meant to look vaguely Semitic, but their only cultural identification is that they consider themselves citizens of "Mu." Since this legendary locale did not appear in print until one James Churchward wrote a book about it in 1926, I think it's safe to assume this tidbit is a 1935 interpolation.

The more numerous Black natives venerate a huge statue that sometimes shines deadly rays from its eyes. Since the viewer eventually learns that there's a radium deposit nearby, in the so-called "Garden of Rad," possibly the original idea in GODDESS was that the statue was inhabited by minions of the priesthood. The statue is seen to move its hands a little, which sounds like real votive statues (albeit much smaller ones) that were designed to "come to life" and impress the gullible. Did GODDESS originally include the idea that priests inside the statue somehow projected energy from raw radium through the statue's eyeholes, in order to create lethal rays and execute sacrificial victims? Hard to say, for that serial's gone, and QUEEN never explains the statue at all. ("Rad," by the way, is the name of the priesthood's god, so maybe they're supposed to be Latinate Romans?)

The white queen comes to the Black tribe by accident. As a small child, Joan Lawrence is taken away from her parents, and from neighbor-kid David, when she's caught in a hot-air balloon. The balloon's descent into the territory of Mu impresses the Black tribesmen and they raise little Joan to be their queen (Mary Kornman), even referred to a few times as "The Queen of the Jungle." 

Little David, however, grows up to be Adult David (Reed Howes). Joan's parents could never find her, or the radium mine that the father came to Africa to locate. Yet David apparently takes that right turn at Albuquerque, since he makes his way to the Mu territory with no big hassle. He does however get captured and slated for sacrifice by radiation-gaze. Adult Joan at first seems totally okay with the White guy getting burned to ash. Then a crawl asks rhetorically if her "White blood" will allow Joan to endure such savagery. By the next episode, naturally, Joan rescues David.

Despite the fact that Joan has forgotten the English language, and David doesn't speak the local Swahili, the young hunter talks the Queen into leaving the only people she's ever known. More oddly, they agree to let her go with no fuss. However, the writers, probably loosely following the earlier movie's template, did this so that Joan and David could be attacked by diverse menaces on their trek back to civilization. I think Kali is at least responsible for some assaults, because he's afraid David will bring back other invaders and mess up Kali's setup-- but the continuity's excruciatingly hard to follow. In addition to the aforementioned strangler vine, and the usual jungle-animals, David is attacked by a pair of natives who are implied to live beneath the surface of a river (no, no explanation of that either) while minions of Kali blind Joan with radium, stick her in a canoe and send her careening toward a waterfall. For a time White hunters capture Joan and David to find out the mine's location, I think because they've been sold minute quantities of radium by Kali. But the funniest assault comes when a native somehow manipulates a chimp into attacking Joan with a knife. David's priceless line as the chimp runs away: "I wonder who put him up to it."

Since Joan never learns English "on the road," her personality is confined to that of wide-eyed innocence. She's not any sort of fighter, but her scenes in Mu make the loose implication that she MAY have a psychic connection with elephants for some reason. She's seen commanding a trained elephant in Mu, and then later, on the hunters' ship, she actually commands an elephant whom the hunters have taken captive to do her will-- that is, by reaching its trunk through a porthole to strangle a bad hunter-guy. David therefore shoulders almost all the action-scenes herein, and Reed Howes acquits himself quite well, given that most fights in thirties' serials were spottily choreographed. He's seen to be a stand-up guy, tempted to take advantage of Joan's innocence but not yielding to the temptation.

Whenever the 1935 producers utilize footage from 1922, they don't bother to synch the two, so the viewer sees various scenes of "undercranking," resulting in characters moving like jumping-beans. The longest scene from GODDESS is one in which Kali tries to make his fellow priests think that Kali's own little boy is a god made flesh. But there's a mixup and the priests get the idea that a chimp is the new god in town, so there's an amusing moment where the simian cavorts around the room and the priests imitate his holy actions. However, Kali, like a number of other characters, just disappears from the story when it's convenient for the filmmakers, and so he never pays for his crimes.

QUEEN is a real curio. It's not good, or even "so bad it's good." But it's not as dull as some serials out there, and that's something.

BEASTMASTER: SEASON 3 (2001-02)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

In the ranks of syndie adventure-serials, it's a rare bird-- or beast-- that survives to three seasons. I'd like to report that BEASTMASTER's last outing was at least as good as the first two. Unfortunately, though Season 3 wasn't plagued by as many cast-shakeups as Season 2, Three ends up feeling like the writers and showrunners were just spinning their wheels. Based on the fact that Season Three displays what might be a record number of clip shows in one season-- at least I think three might be a record-- I hypothesize that the show might've had its budget slashed. That sort of cost-cutting can eventuate in the creative people losing focus and hacking things out.

A slight improvement is that the Ancient One disappears or dies by the time Season 3 begins, and the original Sorceress (Monika Schnarre) escapes the prison her tutor placed her in. Both Marjean Holden and Stephen Grives get main-credit billing this season. However, Holden's Arina is never truly integrated into the series, appearing whenever writers choose to inject her. By contrast, Steven Grives's despicable King Zad gets a lot more time here than in either previous season, and Grives makes the nasty conqueror so vital, he's almost likable. 

On the minus side, out of nowhere Zad has now become the servant of a gimcrack demon-lord, Balcifer. (Ooohh-- Baal + Lucifer-- bet that took a whole ten minutes to come up with). As for the Sorceress, the writers aren't able to come up with much for her to do. They use her to get rid of a leftover demon-woman, "The Apparition," from a previous season, and she duels another demoness, Yamira, in order to help Dar. However, she also betrays Dar in an attempt to restore the eagle Sharak to his human form. Sharak, however, sacrifices his humanity to redeem Dar's quest. With the Sorceress' "Ladyhawke" arc concluded, the character fades from the series before the climax.

The biggest change is one derived loosely from the first movie. Rather than being simply the last survivor of a tribe that Zad exterminated, Dar is now an "orphan of high estate," the son of a noble slain king, Eldar. A cocky older man named Dartanus (Marc Singer, the original Beastmaster) informs Dar of his special destiny: to prevent Balcifer from gaining dominion over the world. To do this, first Dar must reclaim the magical sword of Eldar (which he does, though Dar still doesn't kill his enemies with said weapon). Second, Dartanus reveals that five of Dar's proximate relatives didn't die as thought but were transformed by Dar's adoptive tribe into ordinary animals. Most of Season 3 involves Dar, Tao and Arina attempting to round up these creatures and place them in a magical Crystal Ark. This ark will redeem the world not by preserving animals but by allowing Dar's family to transform back into humans, which event is crucial to Balcifer's defeat. Occasionally this running plotline is diverting, but often it feels undeveloped and low-energy.

I no longer felt that Dar's world was as mythic as in the previous two seasons, in the sense of "anything might happen," and no episodes met my criteria for high-mythicity. Too many of the stories were dull, not even counting the clip shows, and there were only a handful of tales with fair mythicity. For instance:

"Slayer's Return"-- Dar and Tao once more encounter Princess Zuraya, for whom Dar had a small thing. Zuraya is getting married to another noble, but wouldn't you know, he's a pawn of Balcifer, who wants to be reborn in the child he spawns in Zuraya. (Devotees of the first "Ms. Marvel" will find this concept a tad familiar.)   

"Serpent's Kiss"-- the succubus Nadeea offers her services to Zad to drain the souls of the heroes

"The Alliance"-- Dar has a fractious first meeting with Princess Talia (Gigi Edgley of FARSCAPE fame), but it seems to bode well that her brother Galen pledges the armies of his kingdom to aid in the war against Zad and Balcifer. There's also an old marriage contract between Galen's kingdom and that of Dar's people that would bring Dar and Talia into holy matrimony, and this prospect makes Talia even more quarrelsome, though she naturally comes around somewhat. However, Galen's a servant of Balcifer, and Talia sacrifices her life to destroy her corrupted brother.

"Double Edged"-- a teen girl dressed like a ninja steals Dar's magic sword, hoping to use it to kill Zad. Instead, she ends up leading Zad to the village of the people who made Dar's fateful blade. 

Lastly, Season 3 introduces one decent recurring character for three episodes: Callista (Mel Rogan), Zad's half-sister. Rogan and Grives seem to be having great fun trading acerbic jibes, up until the final section, where Callista tries to kill both Zad and the Beastmaster. It's not clear why the evil female-- another dang Balcifer servant--chains the two of them together, unless she-- or her writer-- had just watched a telecast of "The Defiant Ones." Still, it's fun to see Dar nearly rolling his eyes at the venomous intensity of Zad's malice. Zad, of course, doles out an impressive punishment to his errant sibling. 

The two-part finale is somewhat listless and doesn't even give Zad a very dramatic finish. In a conclusion that seems to come out of nowhere, Dar, in order to rule over his restored people, must leave his fantasy-world for another realm, accompanied by his animal friends but not by his two main human friends. Since the regular BEAST-verse is only occasionally said to be trending toward some quotidian fate, this conclusion is not quite the same as its likely LOTR inspiration, where Frodo Baggins goes off into the mists of the past because the world is changing. It's more like, by thwarting Balcifer, some Camelot-like regime has been restored-- though originally Dar's people were just regular folks in the BEAST-verse. So it's not clear why the New Realm is set apart in such a way that Tao and Arina can't just drop in and visit when they please. Yet I find I kind of liked the ending, since it hearkened back to the quality of the first two seasons, where everything was a bit mysterious and many phenomena didn't admit of simple explanations.  

As I said, the mythic resonance of the previous two seasons is largely absent, and, aside from the usual quota of sexy, scantily clad women, Season Three's best element is finding out how many different ways Steven Grives can put maximum spitefulness into uttering the name "Beastmaster!"