Gently Disturbed

For some reason, I have a feeling of disquiet this evening.

Seriously. I just sort of feel as though I'm freefalling, as though I'm shaken by some enormous event that happened before I could notice it, or that perhaps hasn't yet happened.

Seriously: When I speak of momentous things happening before you can notice them, I mean the things like the time that you turned the corner just before the accident happened. The day that you beat out your sister to the pic-nic table, and she got the sandwich with the really, really warm mayonnaise.

Hmm. Bloggus interruptus for long pointless phone call with friend. However, the random conversation got me onto another topic:

Y'ever ask someone if they remember something from your kidhood? I mean someone your age--what your parents remember is, for the most part, a pleasant fiction designed to account for your transformation from dribbling baby to surly teenager to unaccountably responsible individual--or in some cases quite the reverse.

Anyway, I had asked people over the years if they remembered a cartoon called "Speedbuggy". No-one did, and I found myself wondering if I somehow had imagined it.

Turns out I didn't. The car was voiced by the "Man of a Thousand Voices" himself, whose other major character was dis guy. Check out the theme tune, by the way. Kinda catchy.

But it got me to thinking: What about "Princesse Saphire"? This was an anime series I remember seeing when I was a kid.

Again, no-one had heard of it. But thanks to the miracle of cyberspace, where glurge and nostalgia are the second-biggest industry after porn, I can look it up!

By the way: Why people would pay for porn when there's quality stuff available right here beats the hell outta me. Oops--I meant here. . .or maybe not. It sure ain't here.

(Why, by the way, would anyone be nostalgic for the 80's? It was, as Garry Trudeau once put it: "A kidney stone of a decade". Disco became entrenched, syntho-pop enjoyed its heyday, and Reagan was president for most of it.)

Turns out the show was retailed to North America as "Princess Knight". because I saw it in French (at which I had, at the time, seriously limited skill) I thought the disguised Princess was a guy for a long while. With 20-20 hindsight I faintly remember my relief when I realized "he" was a "she"--'cos I always thought that girl was beautiful.

The series was one of the creations of master pioneer animator Osamu Tezuka, who redid "Metropolis" in anime in the nineties shortly before passing on. He also put together this guy. Tezuka's major creations were mostly published as manga in the fifties before he turned to animation.

While I'm on the topic:

I knew this guy as Albator. Who translates these names anyway?

This was Goldorak

Battle of the Planets was the first anime I ever saw in English. Until then, I'd assumed it was an exclusively French medium.

That's a geocities page, so it's a bit annoying with all the little banners. But it has a really good version of the theme. This one's pretty good.

Well rooting around online for the dregs of my childhood seems to have dispersed that malaise I was into earlier--maybe I just got a bad burrito somewhere.

See ya.