Tets watches Transformers War for Cybertron Siege the cartoon or maybe anime that has a long name.

TWar for Cybertron:Transformers: Siege

An anime with many names made by Netflix and watched by me.  I’ve found myself enjoying Netflix shows.  Well the few I’ve watched anyway and think good things when I hear about them making something (Loved Voltron Legendary Defender).  Netflix recently debuted Transformers Siege the cartoon and I watched it.  Below is a summary of my feelings.

It was a thing that I watched.

Really the show wasn’t terrible by any means, but it wasn’t good either. Coming off the corpse that was the Power of the Primes cartoon (THAT was a bad show), it’s kind of hard to go downhill, so you could say I was looking forward to this one.

6 episodes of about 20 minutes each.  Essentially a movie, challenging, but by no means impossible.   Brief summary of the story is it is Autobots vs. Decepticons before the Autobots try and escape Cybertron.  Er, so like the WFC/FOC games then? Why yes! But different.

It uses the actual computer models of the toys in it which was pretty cool, but then also allowed me to have a decent look at the tetra-jet seeker shape and yeesh, it really is a folded up robot underneath the angled wings.  I also realise that their character roster is therefore limited because of that, but that’s cool.  Beast Wars had a limited character roster and that was a cool show.  Also some really awesome movies have a very limited character roster and have been good too.

Essentially though this show feels like fan fiction.  There are too many Macguffins, characters are (on the whole) annoying and some incredible leaps of faith are required from the viewer.  While I do understand that I am watching a show about living robots in space, I also believe that plot points need to flow from one thing to another with a reasonably logical sequence.

WFC Transformers Siege, an anime manages to make one too many “Happy coincidences” and one too many “suspensions of disbelief” for me to take.

Now for the spoiler section.

Tets goes to "The World of Transformers"

A Transformers 35th Anniversary Exhibition.



15th of March 2019 Opening day!

Today I hauled my butt out to Ikebukurou (twice in 1 week!) to go to the Parco Museum to see this gallery they had set up.  It only really grabbed my attention when I saw the (catchy) artwork advertising it in the elevator when I went to the Bumblebee cafe.   Boy am I glad I went!

Once again preparations began early, with pants selection:

Luckily the morning wasn't as bed comfy as before, so I was able to arise and wander off a little earlier from my house.

Knowing the gallery is in the same building as the BB cafe, I had no trouble finding it and when I first spied it, I was a little disappointed.



It cost 700 yen and at the counter looked a little sad. I prepared myself for feelings equal to my BB cafe experience. i.e nice but not exciting.

Luckily it was
More than meets the eye!  (Collective groans go here)

Legends Dinasaurer, Titans Returns Trypticon Review.

Finally, my video review of the mighty Legends Trypticon is finished and man it took me a while to make.  However the reason it did so was because I spent a lot of time doing it.  Obviously....

I am rather pleased with the result.  So, may I present my Legends Dinosaurer or Titans Returns Trypticon video review. 

Incidentally, from my brief googling, it's probably the shortest video review of this guy on the web.  Just a shame my video doesn't seem to show up in the web searches.  Probably because I don't post enough, but hey.  The little guy keeps on working.

Enjoy and leave a comment if you like.

LG38 Condor and Apeface Comic Translation

Due to me liking a challenge, I went ahead and translated the comic for Apreface and Condor (laserbeak) of the Transformers Legends Headmasters line.   

At first, I was going to make this a full video review, but after testing myself and trying to make a motion comic, I started filming the footage for the toy and came across a problem.

I love Apeface.

I hate Laserbeak.

I ended up with about 15 miinutes of some rather boring footage which I could use, but it would suck.  So I stuck with making the motion comic and am currently thinking about re-doing the toys themselves.

So, here we go.  Enjoy the video, I had fun working on it and it took a rather long time.  If you want to read the comic, I’ll have the translated version below.

Once again, thanks for looking.






And finally, the original version.

Cinema Screen sizes, an explanation.

A conversation I often have with people is about screen sizes of movies.  As I used to work as a projectionist, it annoys me greatly when dvds/blu rays are played in the wrong ratio, resulting in a distorted picture.  It also annoys me even more when a show that was originally designed for a certain ration is pushed into another. 

So with that in mind, I made up a chart using the wonderful technology of a ruler, paper and a pencil, Scanner came along later (Changed to something nicer because my hand writing is nasty) so that the explanation will become easier.

First of all, let’s get some clarification on the terms I will use:

• Ratio is the comparison of the sides of the screen, i.e height and length. A Widescreen cinema picture has a ratio of 1.85:1.  If 1 = 1 metre, then it will be 1 metre high and 1.85 metres long.
• Masking is fabric on the sides and sometimes top of the cinema screen that is used to sharpen the edges of the projected image.  Often mistakenly called ‘the curtains.’
• Widescreen [cinema]  (Shortened to “WSC”) is the image on screen with a screen ratio of 1.85:1
• Cinemascope  (shortened to “CS”) is the image on screen with a ratio of 2.35:1

Cinema screen ratios differ from the size of the screen on TV.  When the screen length widens this is often interpreted by the average viewer as widescreen, but is in fact cinemascope.  This confusion partly stems from the TV sizes, as a TV ‘widescreen’ image is 16:9, which is terribly close to cinemas 1.85:1, but not perfectly so. 

When the cinemascope size is seen on a TV, the image will have black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.  This is usually referred to as ‘anamorphic’ in dvd cases.  Some examples of dvds that show in cinemascope on the TV are the Pirates of Caribbean, Transformers (2007 onwards) and Harry Potter movies. You can test these yourself to see the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, showing an image that is longer than it is tall.

When watching a broadcast of these movies from most TV channels, I have noticed that they will go and make arrangements to have the image fill the whole screen of the TV, thereby cropping the image quite a bit on the left and right hand sides.  Apparently to avoid missing any important details on the sides of the picture, they will scroll the image across if need be, thereby cropping the opposite side even more so, but since the point of interest is focused, the cropped section is not missed.  If you watch carefully, you will often see a slight distortion on the credit roll as they often just force it into TV widescreen to fill the screen.


To illustrate the cinema sizes, I have made up a little chart.

So as you can see, Cinemascope has the most length, Widescreen has the most height (In regards to picture volume) and the other is so rarely used, I wonder why I put it on the chart.  In case you are wondering, these are all in scale, with a side height of 1.


Here are the screen sizes for TV.



So now the common TV ‘widescreen’ image is 16:9, which comes down to 1.77:1 (Cinema W/S is 1.85:1).  Which is close, but not quite the same. However a WSC cinema image will look almost exactly the same.  So therefore, to get the CS format on a TV,  black bars need to cover the space at the top and bottom of the screen.

For TV 4:3 is the standard format of the old ‘square’ CRT TVs.  A good example of this format is most early cartoons are in this size.  Watching them on a 16:9 TV will result in back space on the left and right of the screen, but you can force them to the 16:9 ratio, however the image will be badly distorted.  This applies to most old video games as well.

Be aware that a lot of enhanced Blu ray releases force shows into 16:9 when they shouldn’t be.  For example, I have Transformers the Movie from the 1986 cartoon on blu ray and it has been forced to a full screen image on a 16:9 display.  This has cropped a massive amount of the picture, as it should be shown as a 4:3 image.


Extra Bit

I included masking in the terms, but see I didn’t mention it.  In the days of film projectors, masking was often used to keep the edge of the image sharp.  Masking would consist of thick black fabric and depending on the setup of the screen be at both sides of the screen, or at the top and bottom.

In the case of the side masking, CS would allow for the largest picture, whereas in the case of the top/bottom masking, WS would allow for the largest picture.  In modern cinemas (That is ones that use digital projectors) the projected image is sharp enough on the sides to get away without using the masking, but masking does manage to make it look just that touch nicer.

Kill La Kill Ryuko Matoi from figma

A lot of people seem to think that I am a hardcore anime watching madman.  However the opposite is closer to the truth than one would expect.  I am rather fussy about what I watch and it’s pretty rare for me to grab on to an anime and watch it from start to finish, and even rarer for me to recommend it to others.

Kill La Kill is one of the few that I have watched all the way through and enjoyed.  It’s quirky, visually interesting, has cool fights, manages to talk up the characters quite well, has a nice theme that carries along the whole show and is generally pretty damn clever.  I was naturally stoked when I saw that the main character Ryuko Matoi got slated for a figma release.  Let’s check out how she looks hey?

Excellent Model Risty

I have a soft spot for Queen’s Blade.  I suspect that it’s entirely due to the ridiculousness of the idea.  Aside from that though, it ha brought up some nice statues for the characters and this is one I have known about and wanted for a while, Risty the bandit.  I found out about it after it’s initial release and it grew rather expensive on the after market um market…  Luckily a re-release was done with slightly different colours and so I snapped one up. 

AT last Transformers Animated Season 3 GET!

YEEEEEES! 

 

That is all.