Yaen DVD gallery online

For those of you interested in the Yaen DVD import I posted previously check out the screen cap gallery.

If anybody has any links to Yaen MP3s or Fansites (or Official sites for that matter) let us know. Leave us a note in the comments, thanks!

Dubs That Time Forgot at AnimeJUMP!

Mike Toole has posted a review of Toei's 1971 animated feature film THE WORLD OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, a forgotten dub if there ever was one. I'm sorry I haven't kept up with Mike's reviews of old anime oddities, but we'll try to keep you up to date from here on out...

Heino Announces Retirement

WFMU, who introduced us to Heino through Fabio's THAT'S IRRITAINMENT videos, has received word that Heino is retiring after a final tour in Germany this October. So, if you wanna catch our favorite deep voiced folk singer in concert this is your last chance!

Thanks for the memories, Heino!

AnimeHELL Video Clip of the Month: FLINTSTONES SMOKING WINSTONES

Chris Sobieniak sends more televised moments in HELL. You can find loads more video clips on Chris's Blog!

Outside Fun
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Stop watching the TV and go outside and play...in Detroit...Downtown Detroit...

Belly Bongo
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

They try so hard to make this look like fun...even if the name sounds lewd.

Winstones
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Can you remember the days when cartoons promoted smoking? A classic AnimeHELL clip, now online for your enjoyment.

Yaen DVD import

Yaen DVD import
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Just got the Yaen DVD today, look for some screengrabs later tonight/tomorrow with a review...

Snapshots from HELL

OtakuHELL at AKon16
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

After some disk troubleshooting I'm finally able to share photos from HELL. The AKon16 OtakuHELL, thanks to my friends Keith, Michael and Josh who took these snaps. Thanks Josh!

AKonHELL Podcast part two

Enjoy the second part of the OtakuHELL show at AKon16 in Dallas, June 3rd, 2005. This segment starts with the SAILORMOON SHIGGIES and ends with me handing Bruce a Strongbow. With any luck I'll be posting the AKonHELL photos this weekend.

Download AKonHELL Podcast Part Two 20.6 MB, 22 minutes and 36 seconds.

AKonHELL Twenty-Oh-Five part three

I start out the show with movie previews for THE TATTOO CONNECTION, THE STREET FIGHTER, RETURN OF THE STREET FIGHTER and SISTER STREET FIGHTER! At this point I couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting any signal from the Digi-Viewer. Examining the video switchbox It looked like I had it all connected up correctly. I started the opening of THUNDERBIRD 6 and re-examined the setup. Unfortunately the clip is too short, It stops as the laughing puppet heads dissolve so I swap SVCDs for THE SAILORMOON DANCERS, a Phil Lee clip from some godforsaken con. (Thanks Phil, you rock.)

That's when I realized the problem. I was connected to the video projector by Svideo and I hadn't hooked the Digi-Viewer into the Svideo loop. So, I scrammbled about my gear for a simple Svideo cable that I knew I had but took me about 5 minutes to find. I had packed it with my VHS tapes for some reason. But now everything was up and working, well, except there was no VCR.

I had mic'd Bruce before the show and recorded two hours and 22 minutes of banter with the intent of sharing the MP3 here:
Download AKonHELL Podcast Part One 20 minutes, 20mb

Survival Tobita, Kaiju Battler

The beasts that run roughshod over at Kaiju Big Battel better not dare head over to Japan anytime soon. Because not only does Japan get its share of kaiju attacks as it is, but they've got Survival Tobita. Who exactly is Survival Tobita? His T-shirt says it best:



Actually, I believe the real shirt may in fact say "Destroy all monsters!" but whatever. Survival Tobita ran a tiny, TINY, Japanese indy wrestling federation called Saitama Pro in which every month he'd fight a different evil monster which was set to threaten Japan's stability if not for his vigilance. Now, NON BELIEVERS may want to note that just about all of these monsters are actually another guy Naoshi Sano in some outlandish getup, but THEY'RE MONSTERS YOU HEAR ME?!

Here's some of the many foes Survival Tobita has faced off against. First, Ape Virgon, a monkey who'd hump the ringpost and has an off the top rope manuever that is just TOO DEADLY to spoil:



Then there's Automatic Warrior. I have no idea what he's supposed to be, but he has a deadly sort of "chain with a sawblade at the end" thing.



Notice that there's no ring. Unless invited to some other federation, rings were never used because Saitama Pro was too tiny to afford the cost of owning one. Instead, all battles are conducted on tatami mats inside high school gymnasiums, WHICH IS WHERE THE FRONT LINES OF THE BATTLEFIELD ALWAYS ARE.

Bauxite Medium carried two large metal boxes, moved at a snail's pace, and probably couldn't actually see, but that didn't mean he wasn't a MENACE.



And finally, there's Survival Tobita's most dangerous (and well-known) adversary: Mokujin Ken, aka Ken the Box. Despite not being able to actually enter inside of a ring, his devastating "Swinging Branch Punch" (which looks remarkably similar to the monkey dance) is so effective that even Survival Tobita is powerless:



CAN ANYONE CHOP THIS BIG TREE DOWN? Personally, even though Mokujin Ken is Survival Tobita's deadliest adversary, I'd say this terrible monster was the most terrifying:



I made encodes of all these "matches" (except for the one against the cosplay masker since I don't have that) to send to Phil, but Phil hasn't been answering his emails for the last few weeks. Check your inbox, man!

AKonHELL Twenty-Oh-Five part two

Bruce showed up and asked why there wasn't any audio, I turn on the mic and tell him I don't know why. Bruce goes looking for the AKon AV people. I started setting up my gear on the panel table and lining up my tapes and disks in a rough order of play. Somewhere while I did this the AKon AV crew showed up, or at least one of them. It seemed that the combination DVD/VCR player had separated outputs for both DVD and VCR. While I had switched the video to VCR the left and right audio channels where still connected to the DVD player side. Our AKon AV tech plugged the amp into the VCR audio and we had sound with our intermission clips. And a cheer went up from the growing crowd.

At this point I was still worried about the distance between the panel table where I'd set up my HELLgear and the Video Projector/Amp some 10 to 12 feet away. I didn't want to have to run between the table and the video player, ducking the video projector to swap out tapes and disks. Or possibly sit by the project plugging and unplugging the audio while juggling tapes and discs. I wasn't even sure at this point if the AKon DVD player would play SVCDs, on which most of my set had been burned to. Bruce suggested we move the panel table over to the Video projector and the projector closer to the table. So we started moving the tables when I reached down to move a cable out of the way I suddenly realize that the cable was a combination Svideo/Left and Right RCA cable that must have been 24 feet long! It was the answer to the problem! I hooked it to my video switcher an we moved the table back into it's original position. Note to self: Buy a 24 foot combination Svideo/RCA cable for HELLgear.

While bantering with the growing audience more AKon AV techs showed up with a new Video projector to swap out with the current one. I'm not sure why, but they did. They plug the Svideo cable directly into the new projector, but we're stuck with male to male RCA plugs for the audio. Luckily I'm prepared for this and dig into my HELLgear bag for a RCA female/female connector. We've got sound and we've got video from the video switcher! It looks like I'll be able to run OtakuHELL from the panel table after all. The downside is I won't be able to play any VHS tapes, so no tribute to cartoon voice actor Howard Morris with a music video of EEP OPP ORK AH-AH because it's on tape. Oh well, I'll improvise.

I've got video and sound but now I can't seem to get a signal from the Digi-viewer but it worked when I tested it only three hours before....

To be continued...

AKonHELL Twenty-Oh-Five part one

I apologize for the lateness of this report. I've been a little busy. And I'd been delaying this report in hopes of including some pictures of the show and an audio 'podcast' of the first 2 hours of the show. But I haven't gotten the pictures and I'm still processing the audio recording, you'll have to wait.

AnimeHELL at Akon16 was scheduled for 9pm, so at 7pm I was on the road to the Adam's Mark Hotel in downtown Dallas. By 7:30pm I was at the Adam's Mark Convention Center looking for a spot to park the MyRage. 8pm and I'd found a parking spot and found State Room 1. It was smallish, max capacity was listed as 149 by the lightswitch, but I figured it was ok since we could run the show as long as we wanted. I found my Color Commentator, Bruce Lewis, in the Artist Alley then it was a run up a couple flights of stairs to get the HELLgear. After about a 10 minute ride in the parking garage elevator I finally get back to State Room 1.

It's about 8:20pm or so, I turn on the lights and drag my set up to the front of the room. People immediately start coming into the room and finding seats while I'm assessing the situation. The video projector, VCR/DVD player and amp is set up on the side of the room, and 10 feet from the A/V set up was the panel table. I turn on the projector and fire up the VCR/DVD player and pop in a tape of Intermission clips. The first problem came up, no sound. I picked up the microphone and turned it on. It worked, so I knew the sound system worked, it was time to call the AKon AV crew.

To be continued...

PacMan Fever has no cure

Chris over at Studio Toledo shares some old school video game commercials. See PacMan in other countries! See the roots of evil which have brought us to the brink of technological breakdown today!

Atari_PacMan_Italy
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Best Nightmare Fuel Ever.

Atari_MsPacMan
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

"Are you trying to seduce me, Ms PacMan?"

Atari_PacMan_UK_1
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

The ultimate truth of PacMan: Consume or be consumed...

Atari_PacMan_UK_2
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

This PacMan is much more entertaining then the 2600 game it's trying to sell.

Atari_MsPacMan_Europe
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Show us your pixels sweetheart!

Atari_PacMan_West_Germany
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

PacMan was the reason the Berlin Wall came down. Or maybe it was Tetris...

Atari_PacMan_HK
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Gwai Lo sit in what looks like darken opium den playing for their very souls!

Atari_PacMan_USA
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Enjoy a nice game of PacMan with Sesame Street's Mister Hooper [R.I.P.].


Have a video you'd like to share in HELL? Send us your shorts!

Cartoon Intermission HELL!

Chris Sobieniak sends us some more gems of intermission animation as a reminder that you still had to sit through 20 minutes of commercials before the feature started in the last century.

JoinTheBand_40sec
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Look into the dead souless eyes of those patrons tempted by hot buttered popcorn!

CopsNRobbers_40sec
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

A critical view of law enforcement and those who steal movies....snackage!

ComeAndEnjoy_16sec
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Don't look into the light!

RocketToOuterSpace_40sec
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

UPDATE! Ths just in: The physics in this cartoon are about on par with the STAR WARS movies, just lean out your rocket window and grab a fistful of cosmo-snacks!


Have a video you'd like to share in HELL? Send us your shorts!

Join the AnimeHELL Army!

Do you have a LiveJournal? Then why not join the LiveJournal AnimeHELL Community! Now fortified with LJDrama!

Nocturnal Intermissions

While I was recovering from A-KonHELL Chris Sobieniak in Toledo sent us some intermission clips:

IntermissionUFO_50sec
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

I showed An alien walks into a snack bar before the show at A-Kon while trying to fix the sound.

LetsAllGoToTheLobby_30sec
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

Sing along with the Intermission classic "Let's all go to the lobby"

Pepsi_RefreshementTime_40se
Originally uploaded by tohoscope.

And take a quick bong hit before watching Pepsi Freakout


Have a video you'd like to share in HELL? Send us your shorts!

Look Around You

It's been a while since I've done an update, so I figured I'd talk about something that so far hasn't really been on the Hell circuit aside from my panels. Look Around You is a BBC series, of which there have been two so far. The first, which was from about three years ago, consisted of nine 9-minute shorts, and much like how the Weird Al DVDs have those fake 50s B&W educational films, each episode was essentially a fake version of those 1970s "For Schools and Colleges" instructional science videos. The absolute best part of Look Around You is that there's no laugh track, watermark, or anything to suggest that it's fake or being done for laughs other than the sheer absurdity of what's being said and done on the screen. I like to just clip the experiment portions of the episodes (which run about one and a half to three minutes) and show those.

Here's the proper way to dispose of lab materials:



This is what happens to people after they drink champagne with sulphur mixed into it (a concoction scientists call "sulphagne"):



So far, I've used the brain experiments in my lineup, to great success. But I think my current favorite Anime Hell clip (I've sort of made it my key piece this year) comes from the second series, which utilized a different format. The second series was 6 30-minute episodes in length and aired earlier this year, and was done in the style of the very long-running BBC program "Tomorrow's World." Most people don't like the second series nearly as much as the first since the 30 minute format forces them to drag out the punchlines over an entire episode, but the buildup is what makes the particular clip I chose so great. It's for a diet shake called "Slimby" in which you're instructed to drink a glass worth before looking at the SPECIAL PICTURE which is SO TERRIFYING that your body just forces the fat out from under your skin in fright as per the diagram:



So what exactly IS the special picture? Well that's the punchline, so I won't give it away here (and if you've seen it, don't ruin it for others!). This clip makes even my jaded self laugh uncontrollably, much like the Pranksters skit on SNL starring Christopher Walken which I ran last year. I don't plan to bring back Pranksters this year, since it loses its impact once you've seen it once and now it's out on DVD. Hopefully people will forget about it after a year or so.

So how'd A-Kon go? And nobody here would happen to have Beyond Reanimator on DVD, would they? I simply must have that music video.

the northern exposure

Hell was at Anime North last weekend; in a medium-sized video room (seated about 200, filled to capacity, standing room only, people lying down in front, staff at door keeping people out) and I 'd have to say it was a big success. Even though only about 4 people in the audience had ever been to a Hell before, the room was packed before the show even began, so either word has spread or my flyers were particularly good this year.

I started off with JUMPING, which shuts people up and they really enjoy after a minute or so of going "what the hell is this?" The DAICON FILM continues to really impress even the jaded anime fans of the 21st century. CARTOONS AND YOU gets laughs, and people seemed to recognize GENRE. Japanarama's ULTRAMAN segment is popular. There were a lot of people at the con wearing DOMO-KUN T-shirts so the video seemed like a natural. EK's FAILED EXPERIMENTS IN VIDEO EDITING takes people a minute to wrap their heads around, but they like it. Regular GI JOE PSAs resulted in shocked recognition and laughs, and the NENSLER GI JOE PSAs astonished the crowd. CARTOON ALL STARS TO THE RESCUE continues to amaze and amuse in a big way. BRING ME THE HEAD OF CHARLIE BROWN gets big laughs with the violence. The LIVE VS ANIME segment was a first for Toronto and a lot of the material was either brand new or something they'd heard of and never thought they'd see (the Sailor Moon pilot, etc). The 3D GUNDAM that Neil found was a big hit. I think any short film where people zip around via stop-motion animation is always fun. The crowd enjoyed CORN DOG SEVEN and INDIANA JONES AND THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD (the swastika smoke and the snowmen got big laughs) and I ran the COOL BREEZE trailer before DESSLOK'S BIG SCORE and it seemed to make some kind of sense. Since there actually is a "Liberal Party" in Canada, the JAPANESE LIBERAL PARTY TV AD got an amazing reaction. The FAKE EDUCATIONAL FILMS from Weird Al's TV show got good laughs, and the GUY JUMPING OVER A CAR followed by HOW TO JUMP OVER A CAR was educational and fun. MOCK FIVE got big laughs. People were familiar with Dexter's Lab. GO GEORGE CLOONEY didn't get quite the laughs it gets in the States. I guess nobody up here really knows who Gary Burghof is. DEEP BROWN SWAMP got laughs, especially the inflatable crocodile and the destruction of Earth. FORKLIFT DRIVER KLAUS continues to garner standing ovations; I think people have been downloading it because there were quite a few gasps of recognition at the opening logo. HEINO singing "Blau Blumt die Enzian" from THAT'S IRRITAINMENT gets laughs, because (a) Heino looks funny and (b) this one is edited funny. DIG DUG was followed by PONG and for once DIG DUG got more laughs, but that may have had something to do with the sound (there was a short in the channel where the AV was plugged into, so I had to ride it and sometimes stereo turned into mono, etc). Everybody loved GOD'S TOP GUN and FARTING TILTON got both groans and laughs. I think it gets more laughs when you either have a bitter hatred of televangelists (not a big problem in Canada) or already know who Tilton is. The JAPANESE PEN AD ("Power Tank") is always a big hit.

I ran over a bit, and the last thing I can remember showing is the TRIUMPH AT STAR WARS clip, which everybody freaking loved. One guy asked if it was "Triumph from Late Night in Montreal". Wrong city, wrong show.

It was a real education to show this stuff to people who haven't ever seen it before, who don't have years of hearing about Hell, who haven't been preconditioned to shout "Dog Bite, Dave!" and who haven't been told Heino is funny. Sometimes I wish all audiences were this unspoiled.