Undertaker - The Phenom

In the late 90s, it was hard to catch up on wrestling storylines that had gone by. Obviously, there was no streaming, and releasing weekly wrestling TV shows on VHS would have been absurdly expensive and impractical. There were, occasionally, character-specific Tapes that would get released for the most popular wrestlers, containing highlights from the past year or two, and if you're lucky, maybe even a few complete matches. I have two of these old tapes (well, technically, I have the DVD rereleases they got when the format was new and they were just trying to get as much stuff out there for people to buy as possible), and while the other one, Three Faces of Foley, is fairly conventional in its presentation, showing promos and matches between out-of-character segments where Mick Foley bestows fatherly advice upon young Matt and Jeff Hardy, The Phenom takes a totally different approach.

There's no new video footage on this release, for example, nor are there any interviews with The Undertaker, in- or out-of-character. What we get instead are summaries of his feuds from 1996 up to the end of 1998, with Mankind, Kane, Shawn Michaels, and so on. We get to see the most dramatic parts of matches, as well as various promos and vignettes and other storyline stuff. The masterstroke, though, is in the presentation: dramatic orchestral music has been added to almost everything, and each new segment is introduced with dramatic narration from Classy Fred Blassie.

This is all incredibly effective, and makes The Undertaker, Kane, Mankind and Paul Bearer into the straight to video 90s horror icons they were always meant to be. And this DVD ends just before the formation of the Ministry of Darkness, so you get all the insane familial drama, the magically-summoned flames and bolts of lightning, and all that cool supernatural stuff that's sorely missing from current mainstream wrestling (I know there's Bray Wyatt, and he's both a talented guy and an awesome character, but the way they're booking him is atrocious).

It's been out of print for well over a decade, and it doesn't look like WWE have any interest in uploading any of their (or ECW's, for that matter) home video-only stuff to the network, but if you can track a copy down at a reasonable price, The Phenom is an excellent way to spend an hour.

Monster Princess

There's been a few times this blog's progenitor, Lunatic Obscurity, when I've been the first person to ever write english-language reviews of some games. For the first time, Lunar Garbage Hell can make such a claim, though I am cheating slightly. You see, I chanced across this one-shot story in an issue of Animedia Pocke Comic I picked up a few years ago. I then scanned it and commissioned Tumblr user and friend trubografx16 to translate it.

But that's just the surface of how obscure this comic is! Though the creator, Takashi Akaishizawa is well known for anime character designs as well as cover and promotional artwork for videogames, as a comicker, as far as I can tell this is his only comic. I say "as far as I can tell", as not only does this comic have no entry on the manga database baka-updates, but the man himself doesn't, either!

Anyway, enough of this self-back-patting, let's get onto the comic itself. It stars Nana, a somewhat naive young woman who lives on a planet of Kaiju with her parents, where she seems to act as a kind of scantily-clad park ranger, breaking up fights between the monsters, and protecting them from space poachers. A pair of two such poachers are the antagonists in this story, though they aren't looking to kill the monsters, but capture them in capsules with a shrink ray and sell them, presumably as weapons. They talk at one point about how Nana's beaten them up and seen them off before, which makes me think this comic was a pilot episode, and they were intended to be reoccuring villains.

When Nana finds them, they fob her off with a story that they're not on the planet for poaching, but just to harmlessly get footage of the monsters. Unfortunately for them, this only serves to get Nana's attention more, as she wants to be caught on film, so she follows them around until they try to "film" the monster Miguras, suddenly juming in front of the camera and getting shrunk down and capsulised herself. Then, the space police turn up because the shrink ray the poachers are using is stolen. The poachers panic, using the gun's release mechanism to release all the monsters at once, and with them, a (temporarily) giant-sized, naked Nana. The resulting confusion allows the poachers to make a quick getaway, and everything's back to normal at the end.

It's an okay story, and the art is obviously excellent, as you'd expect from an artist as talented as Akaishizawa. If it was intended as a pilot, I wonder how far it could have gone with the "poacher's zany plan of the week" format. Maybe it would have moved on to cover Nana's parent's work as scientists on the monster planet, or maybe show planets where stolen monsters had been successfully deployed as weapons of mass destruction? I guess we'll never know. Anyway, Monster Princess is no lost classic, but reading it's a pretty fun way to spend five minutes or so.