Review: Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles

A version of this entry first appeared in episode #42 of the RDF Underground podcast.

As you probably already know, there have been several significantly different recountings of what happened to the Robotech Expeditionary Force between the end of the Macross Saga and the end of the New Generation. First there were the Sentinels movie, and Macek's original script treatments for the rest of the show as recounted in Robotech Art III. Then there were Jack McKinney's novels, which diverged from Macek's story further and further as time went on. Then there were John and Jason Waltrip's comic book adaptations of Jack McKinney's novels, which diverged from the novels further and further as time went on—but only got about 80% done before a change in comic book company licensees terminated the project. And there was also the Palladium Sentinels RPG.

All these different versions of Sentinels history share a number of common elements—but the one common to all of them is that they are no longer 'canonical,' if indeed they ever were. In making Shadow Chronicles, Harmony Gold consulted with fans to nail down all the necessary elements of a new continuity, starting over with a clean slate so they could make sure that Shadow Chronicles was internally consistent with the rest of the series—including the parts that hadn't ever been told. The new changes would leave fans wondering: just what parts of what they read "really happened" and what parts had been retconned into burrito hallucinations. Enter Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles.

The original plan had been to release Shadow Chronicles in late 2005 or early 2006. With that schedule in mind, Harmony Gold commissioned a five-issue comic book series that would cover the REF side of events immediately leading up to the Shadow Chronicles. With story treatment by Tommy Yune, who also wrote the story treatment behind the Shadow Chronicles movie, and scripting by the Waltrip brothers, this series would retell and rewrite the events of the last portion of the Sentinels saga for a bit less fan confusion. And so the comic book came out, proudly emblazoned with "The prelude to the upcoming DVD release!" on the front cover. And then the Shadow Chronicles DVD…failed to materialize.

But let's look at Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles anyway. A few spoilers for the broad plot points follow.

The miniseries begins sometime in an estimated 2041 or 2042 by the official timeline with a gavel bang, a gunshot, a scream, and a body. Shortly afterward, military police, Rick Hunter, and Jean Grant burst into an empty office with the goal of arresting General T.R. Edwards, who has been discovered to be a traitor to the REF. What they find is the body of Lynn-Kyle, Minmei's cousin, dressed in the uniform of Edwards's own Ghost Squadron—and no Edwards. Rick realizes that if Kyle was here, Minmei had to be also, and Edwards must have absconded with her.

After crippling the SDF-3 and critically injuring Lisa Hayes, Edwards and the Regent escape to Optera with an experimental starship, an Invid Brain, and squadrons of invisible Shadow Fighters that the REF is unable to counter. And, of course, Minmei. The rest of the series chronicles the REF unlocking the research that Edwards didn't quite manage to destroy, taking the fight to Edwards on Optera, then preparing to journey back to earth with the experimental Neutron-S Missiles that Edwards created in tow. However, as the rest of the fleet is leaving, a test-firing of one of the missiles produces results that were not anticipated—or at least, not foreseen.

The last page of the last issue ends on a cliffhanger with the triumphant caption, "The Shadow Chronicles begin!" (Except they don't, actually, but we'll leave that for later.)

Because I don't like going out on a downer ending, I'll talk about what Prelude got wrong first, and then talk about what it got right.

The fundamental problem with Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles can be symbolized by its title: it's not a complete work on its own. Rather than taking a name in its own right—say, something like Sentinels: The Fall of T.R. Edwards—or even borrowing the name of one of the novels that it covers, Rubicon (and pretending the previous comic book miniseries by that name hadn't happened), this is a work that defines itself as a shadow—pardon the pun—of another work. What if Tolkien had called The Hobbit "Prelude to Lord of the Rings" instead? What if Star Wars: A New Hope had been "Prelude to the Empire Strikes Back"?

You'd expect that with a title like "Prelude to…" it would at least be written with the goal of explaining to the average potential viewer just what was going on. You know, the person who was born after Robotech stopped being shown, and doesn't have the time to watch an 85-episode TV show for the sake of a two-hour movie?

But you'd be wrong. Not only does Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles do nearly nothing for someone who's never seen any Robotech before, it even does very little for anyone who's seen Robotech but not read Sentinels. Even someone who's seen both Robotech and the Sentinels movie might be lost. Prelude starts in media res, with only lip service paid to the 85-episode TV series and no explanation of who these characters are and why they're significant. Robotech fans, who will know who at least some of these characters are, will still be left wondering things like:

What have Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes been doing for those thirty years since the end of the Macross saga?

What are Lynn-Kyle and Minmei doing on Tirol?

Why is Lynn-Kyle in a Ghost Squadron uniform? Why did Edwards shoot him? Why did he kidnap Minmei?

Who is Edwards? Why did he turn traitor? How did the REF find out?

Where did Edwards get the Invid brain?

Who is this Jack Baker person? Vince Grant? Jean Grant?

Who are the Sentinels? Why are they so willing to help the REF? Did the REF ever do anything for them?

And that's just from the first few pages. Some of this is explained later on, but by then it's too little too late, and even Robotech fans may be too confused by the time they get there. It's like tuning in for the last two hours of a ten-hour TV miniseries. Heck, I've read all the Sentinels novels and The End of the Circle (you may, if you wish, feel sorry for me) but it's been so long that I still have trouble following some parts of it.

But let's assume that you're totally up to snuff on your Sentinels reading and know everything that's going on here. What you'll find on reading is that Prelude discards a lot of the good elements of the Sentinels series—for instance, having apparently liberated their worlds without help from the REF, the Sentinels aliens are reduced to standing around providing ship-building expertise, mysterious mystical advice, or pretty looks—while keeping some of the hokier ones, such as the cartoonishly villainous T.R. Edwards complete with his "Phantom of the Optera" half-mask and obsession with Minmei. I can just see it now. [[In the podcast version of this, I inserted at this point audio clips of "Sing, my angel of music!" from the Phantom of the Opera, Minmei singing, "To be in loooove…" and then a male scream sound effect. —Ed.]]

Though, oddly enough, the crush is never actually made explicit in this miniseries, which could make the manner of his eventual defeat a little puzzling to those who don't know about it. The manner of Edwards's defeat and demise has been somewhat improved over Macek's "original" version, which involved a psychic battle between him and Rick Hunter, but is still a trifle cliche'd and annoying.

And Edwards isn't the only cartoonish thing. Several anime/manga cliches make their way into the comics' pages, including REF bridge officers with big round super-deformed "anime-surprise" eyes and sweatdrops…and even Invid Enforcers with sweatdrops. Yes, that's right. Invid Enforcers…with sweatdrops. I think the less said about that, the better. There are also some Schwarzenegger-action-movieish stunts—in particular, a certain Cyclone ride by Vince Grant comes to mind—that are a little bit hard to buy.

Also hard to buy are some of the plot points. Admiral Rick Hunter seems to be an adherent of the James T. Kirk school of admiralty, where the higher rank you are, the more rank you can pull on people who think you should be leading from the rear rather than the front. Not only does he personally lead the ground assault on Optera, at one point he even jokingly pulls rank on Vince Grant, who feels that as the captain, he should be the last one into their escape ship. "I'm an Admiral. So move it, soldier!" It's also a little hard to believe that Hunter would be so willing to authorize the use, even as a last resort, of the Neutron S missiles—doomsday weapons built by his arch-nemesis that they know nothing about and that haven't even been tested yet.

There's also the minor problem that, focussed on an ensemble cast as it is, Prelude never really has time to give any one person all that much attention or characterization. Rick Hunter, Vince Grant, and T.R. Edwards probably get the most attention; beside them, everyone else is relegated to second-fiddle status. Even Lisa Hayes only gets a dozen or so lines through the entire five-issue run, and as for Jack Baker or Karen Penn, who were intended to become the Sentinels series's main human characters? Forget about it.

Finally, and most ominously, there's a hefty dose of Haydonite mysticism about, with the faceless Veidt hovering around dispensing fragments of obscure wisdom and chatting to some ominously-unidentified entity. To think I'd almost managed to forget about Haydon, the planet-sized god-mcguffin whose appearance in End of the Circle was so annoying that I've mentally blocked exactly what he did. The implications of the mysticism-drenched final scene don't bode too well for Shadow Chronicles, either.

But it's not all bad. For a Robotech fan who has at least some idea of what's going on, Prelude does have some attraction. It's fun to see many of the old familiar faces again, even if some of them are almost completely unrecognizable. Rick, Lisa, Lang, Louie, Dana…even Minmei gets a cameo, though we never really get a good look at her face. The Sentinels of old are around, too, though in a much-reduced role from the original Sentinels fiction. Max and Miriya are conspicuously absent, though they do rate a mention in Issue 5. It must also provide a good sense of closure to fans of the Sentinels comic books to get to see them completed—sort of—after all this time.

Some of the plot points, and congruences to Robotech, are interesting, if a little troubling. One nice touch is the way Edwards plans to ascend to a higher plane to continue his evolution (as the Regess would later do successfully), but is potted by a reflex cannon shot before he can. And Janice Em refers to the test-detonation of the Neutron-S missile as "a terrible error" using an identical phrase to the Regess's description at the end of Robotech. It does make one curious to see Shadow Chronicles to see if anything comes of that, doesn't it?

The artwork is nicely done, providing a smooth transition from the old Sentinels character designs to the new in cases such as Janice Em's where the change was substantial. It's interesting getting to watch Rick Hunter go from having dark hair to having white hair, and seeing old and new ship and mecha designs in color and in action. Omar Dogan, the artist, has a good talent for drawing both people and mecha. Hopefully he gets many more Robotech assignments in the future.

If all had gone according to Harmony Gold's plan, the last issue of Prelude would have been followed quickly by a DVD or other release of Shadow Chronicles, so fans would have been able to go from reading the last page of the comic book to watching the first minute of the movie and finding out what happened next. But now it's been over six months without any trace of Shadow Chronicles.

It's really too bad that all this time couldn't have been used more productively. Instead of a 5-issue miniseries, we could have had an entirely new Robotech comic book series. Call it, say, Robotech Revisited, or Robotech: Points of View, and aim it at everyone rather than just fans. In the first issue or two, retell the Macross Saga story. Perhaps tell it through the eyes of one of the Sentinels or Shadow Chronicles main characters—say, Jack Baker or Karen Penn or maybe even T.R. Edwards. This way you both fill in newbies on what-all happened, and give old-timers a different look at the same events—and you give the storyteller character some additional characterization too.

Follow this up with an abbreviated retconned version of The Sentinels, through the eyes of its participants, a different participant each issue. Show what "really" happened and what didn't all the way through, tell us who those people are. When Dana Sterling and Louie Nichols arrive on Space Station Liberty in the aftermath of the Robotech Masters saga, have them tell about how it all happened. Maybe have one of Sue Graham's reports reprise New Generation, leaving the last two episodes to be covered in the Shadow Chronicles movie. And then finish up with the story told in this five-issue Prelude. That would have prepared all the readers for what they were going to see in Shadow Chronicles, and perhaps have generated new interest in the original Robotech as well as Shadow Chronicles buzz.

Perhaps if they had realized how long it would be without a distributor back then, they could have done something like that, instead of what we did get.

As it is now, I'm very worried about how successful Shadow Chronicles will be. In order to succeed, it can't just be a good movie. It has to be a good movie that can be understood and enjoyed as easily by newcomers to the Robotech saga as by old-timers. There can't be an entry requirement of watching an 85-episode TV series with mediocre dubbing and dated animation in order to get it, or people just won't watch—and the movie can't be successful on fan buzz alone. This is a tricky balancing act, since many potential viewers will think they won't be able to follow it without watching the original, so they just won't bother watching it. Serenity flopped at the box office for this very reason, and it only had 13 episodes of a recent Joss Whedon TV series behind it.

Now, granted, I've heard an interview from the writer for the TV movie—not the Waltrips—where he talked about using events from the last two episodes of the TV series to recap what was happening for new viewers. I know that Tommy Yune only did the story treatment, not the actual script. But still, I'm worried at how nobody at Harmony Gold who green-lighted Prelude realized that it was not going to serve the purpose a prelude should.

All in all, Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles is just that: a prelude to the Shadow Chronicles movie, aimed mainly at hard-core fans. It has good artwork and decent writing marred by only a few problems, but casual or non-fans will probably find it more confusing than enlightening, and the implications of the Haydonite mysticism that surrounds its ending make me moderately pessimistic about what might happen in Shadow Chronicles.

For more information, a fascinating page-by-page fan analysis of the Prelude miniseries, comparing it to elements from the TV show, novels, and comics, can be found linked in the sidebar of Roboblog III: The Odyssey.

Books whose author did not write them, redux

It's been some time since my post about Amazon, Lori Jareo, and Princess and Wolf—probably my most-trafficked journal entry ever—came out, and it occurs to me that I really owe what little readership I have left a follow-up. Not on the Jareo thing per se—as there's really not much to follow up on there—but on the Princess and Wolf affair.

Not too long after I wrote that entry, I went down to my local college library and sat down with their Books in Print terminal. I entered the ISBN from Princess and Wolf, 5558607068, and got this:

Search Results: No match found.
ISBN/UPC: 5558607068; Status: In Print, Forthcoming; Format: Book

Then I looked up the prefix—5-558, the part of the ISBN that identifies publisher—and got a surprise. Just when I'd thought the saga of the the book whose alleged author had never heard of it couldn't get any weirder, it turned out that the ISBN belonged to a Soviet publishing house who had only ever published one book.

Title: Signs of the Times - PPD Author: Roger E. Herman Publication Date: August 1998 Publisher: Sigma-F Market: United States ISBN: 5-558-49909-5 ISBN 13: 978-5-558-49909-4 Binding Format: Paper Text
Publisher/Distributor Information Sigma-F ISBN Prefix(s): 5-558 Type of Company: Publisher Status: ACTIVE
Editorial Mailing Address: Abramcevskaja, 3-165 Moskva, 127576 RUS

Not long afterward, the copy of Princess and Wolf I had ordered from Amazon arrived, and it turned out to be, as I had expected, The Princess and the Wolf, a romance novel by Karen Kay. And I made another discovery. The ISBN inside the book itself was 0-7394-4227-9, the book's original number. The 5-558 number was printed on a label that was pasted over the ISBN bar code on the book's dust jacket. And things started becoming clearer.

You see, ISBNs are expensive, but you can only purchase them from the source in huge blocks. I forget just how many numbers are in a block (100? 500?), but there are substantially more than any small publisher will ever need—especially if they've only ever published one book. What is a small publisher to do with the rest? Resell them to other people who only need a few ISBNs.

Given the paste-over label and the cheap price of the book, it occurred to me that the most likely explanation was that a bunch of overstocked copies (copies that bookstores are able to return and publishers are contractually obligated to buy back) were bought by an overstock vendor, who also bought excess ISBNs from Sigma to paste on so that the book could be sold without confusing it with its more expensive non-overstock self in bookstores' inventory tracking systems. Somewhere along the way, someone mis-entered author and title information, and the error propagated from the source to all the e-tailers who based their catalogs on the source. We'll probably never know for sure exactly what happened, but it seems like a reasonable supposition.

Not long after the earlier journal entry, Amazon corrected its page for the book to have the correct information. I went ahead and used Amazon's return option to return the book unread, citing the incorrect information to get free shipping back. And that's the story.

Robotech vs Mospeada Continued

A version of this entry originally appeared as part of RDF Underground podcast #40.

In my last entry about Genesis Climber Mospeada, I focussed on all the minute ways the first episode differed from the pilot dub and the Robotech episode. Now that I've watched the rest of the series, I'd like to talk about some of the ways the shows differ in broader strokes.

Out of the three segments of Robotech, Mospeada is probably the one that was messed with the least. It wasn't cut up into little pieces, zoomed in and airbrushed, and shuffled around as Southern Cross was, and it didn't have chunks cut out of it to drop in footage from another series as Macross did. For the most part, you see the exact same thing on the screen in both Mospeada and Robotech: New Generation, barring odd cuts here and there for time, violence, or nudity constraints.

But the behind-the-screen themes are often somewhat different, as well as some of the treatments of the characters.

As originally conceived by its Japanese creators at Tatsunoko, Mospeada was to focus on an ensemble of seven characters who make up a small resistance group that journeys toward Reflex Point, each of whom has his own reasons for going. This was an intentional homage to the Akira Kurosawa film, The Seven Samurai, which involved a group of lone samurai with different agendas who banded together for a single task. The Seven Samurai would later be remade into one of the greatest western movies ever made—The Magnificent Seven—and many other Kurosawa samurai movies would form the basis for Spaghetti westerns that followed, such as Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name trilogy.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that Mospeada's creators chose to utilize so many elements from westerns throughout the show—including one track called "Sasurai" which sounds an awful lot like the theme to the old TV and radio show Gunsmoke. The influence is more obvious in some episodes than others—such as the way the showdown in episode three takes place at the "KO Corral," or how the village where Jim Warston (rendered in ADV's subtitles as "Jim Austin"), or Lunk, tries to find Alfred would be right at home in any Clint Eastwood man-with-no-name movie—but it's there in even the little touches, too. Stick Bernard's band of freedom fighters rides motorcycles, placing them close to nature in the same way as cowboys who rode horses. Jim Warston's utility jeep stands in for a covered wagon. Even the Mospeada armor's footsteps sound like spurs jingling, an effect that is mostly lost with the Robotech remastered edition's new sound mix.

In Robotech, the Invid have come to Earth because this is the last remaining place in the universe where their food supply can be found. The idea of evolving themselves to adapt to live on Earth is more or less a side issue. But in Mospeada, the situation is quite different: evolution is the Inbit's only goal, and the quest that drives them to journey from planet to planet. They invade world after world to study its life forms in depth in their quest to seek out the "perfect" form of life, or to become it themselves, and Earth is only the latest planet in their galaxy-spanning quest. This is what the "genesis climber" in the series title means—the Inbit seek to climb the ladder of evolution, going beyond their genesis to a new higher state of being.

In order to study Terran life in its peak condition, the Inbit don't just create evolution laboratory pits, they actually clean up and purify the world with their superior life-based technology. They restore the ozone layer and natural levels of carbon dioxide, recreate plant and animal species lost to extinction, and destroy and neutralize all traces of nuclear power and nuclear weapons—here you see the Japanese preoccupation with environmentalism and the A-bomb that dates all the way back to the end of World War II. By the time they move on at the show's end, Earth has been restored to a largely primeval state—leaving mankind, whose HBT fuel is much safer for the environment than old fossil fuels or nuclear energy, in possession of a much cleaner and healthier world.

Ask any Robotech fan who the "main character" of New Generation is, the way Rick Hunter is for Macross and Dana Sterling is for Robotech Masters. Odds are they'll say Scott Bernard. But the funny thing is, according to the interviews in the booklet bundled with Mospeada, the Japanese seemed to see Ray—who we know as Rand—as being the main character. (Of course, it may simply be an error in the translation and they mean to say he is one of the main characters.) They refer to making him and Mint (Annie) cheerful types, to keep things from getting too depressing as the series progresses and the struggle for survival grows more severe.

What's more, Ray—and others like him, who were born and raised in the thirty-three years the Inbit have occupied the planet—were born with a sort of natural telepathy, apparently due to exposure to Inbit telepathic fields from the time of conception. Although this is not made an explicit plot point in most of the series, it does explain how Ray is quick to intuit out the purpose of the Inbit genesis pit with the dinosaurs, how Mint is briefly possessed by the Inbit Refless by the campfire, the significance of Rand's Viking fever dreams in the cave, and how nobody seems to get too suspicious when Aisha (Marlene) is affected by Inbit communications and deaths; Ray and the other native Earthers apparently take occasionally picking up Inbit mental communication signals for granted.

But now that we've covered differences behind the camera, let's look at differences in front of the camera.

Most obviously, each episode of Mospeada is a couple of minutes longer than it was in Robotech. This is partly due to American TV having more commercials per hour than Japanese TV, and partly due to a need to cut some things for the somewhat more rigorous American broadcast standards.

But what exactly got cut? Not as much as you might think, and certainly almost nothing that changes the story in any significant way. The cuts are more often a nip and tuck of a few seconds here and there than they are lengthy deletions—and as a result, the differences usually won't leap out at you on viewing Mospeada, especially if it's been a while since you've seen the original Robotech.

The main things to go were long establishing shots, signs and banners (especially fractured English or references to the Japanese names of renamed characters), Japanese gestures such as the V-for-victory sign, characters making silly faces (often after getting hit on the head), bits of conversations that weren't needed for the English script, flashbacks to footage we saw a short time before, parts of Yellow's songs, nudity, and blood. A lot of these clips can be seen, unsubtitled and using the un-remastered footage, on Elements of Robotechnology (the extras bundled with the Legacy and Protoculture collections) disc 7.

Some of these clips were put back in for the "Remastered" edition of Robotech, but there were only so many they could add back. The decisions on what scenes to cut had been made before dialogue was recorded, and getting the original cast back in to do additional voiceovers was not an option—so if there wasn't any English dialogue for a clip that involved speech, it didn't make the cut. Thus, the only way to see all of these clips in their original context is to watch the Mospeada DVDs.

In interviews with Greg Snegoff and other writers for the original Robotech TV show, the writers talk about the dialogue for the original Japanese anime being sometimes almost comically bad, so they ended up having to throw it out entirely and rewrite the shows from the ground up. I have to admit that sometimes I can see what they mean, but only in rare instances, such as Jonathan Wolf turning traitor because he needed to stay alive long enough to "get his power back" to face the Inbit one last time. The funny thing is, though, comparing the episodes of Robotech to the subtitled episodes of Mospeada, the conversations still often end up being remarkably similar—probably about 90 to 95% faithful in most episodes, assuming the subtitles are correct. The differences are often in small details, as when Mint or Annie decides that Jim or Lunk is no longer the man of her dreams. In Mospeada, Mint says she thought Jim had a house, and she doesn't want to marry a vagabond. In Robotech, Annie says she's decided never to marry a soldier. And of course Protoculture is HBT, a hydrogen-based fuel that isn't manufactured by the Inbit, but is tightly controlled by them because of its use in military hardware.

However, Robotech often adds dialogue where Mospeada doesn't. This commonly happens with flashbacks, as when Rand realizes the Invid can sense protoculture reactions, or Lunk thinks back to when his friend died. Robotech has the characters talk over the flashback, explaining it, whereas Mospeada is content to let the footage do the explaining and have the dialogue before or afterward clarify it. Furthermore, Robotech's characters are a lot more talky in general—especially the Regess, who can be heard saying something practically every moment an Invid is on the screen. It may come as a surprise the first time you view Mospeada and hear absolute silence when the Inbit are flying around. Also, some conversations that incorporate long, thoughtful silences have no silence at all in the Robotech version.

Still, it's hard to get too irritated at Robotech for adding all this extra speech given that it meant they could have the characters say whatever needed to be said without having to worry about matching lip flaps. Still, at least one scene was rendered eerily more effective by the lack of dialogue—the episode-ending footage of the Inbit surrounding Jonathan Wolf's town after Wolf had been killed and could no longer buy its safety.

In regard to character treatments, most of the characters in Mospeada are fundamentally the same as they are in Robotech, even if their names are different; however, Mospeada deals with a couple of them very differently than Robotech did. For example, Mint is not just exuberant and love-struck like Annie; she's also prone to babble nonsense words when excited or surprised. Series composition designer Yasuhiro Tomita calls these interjections "cries of the heart," words that come from Mint's soul without conveying any logical meaning. He says, "This means Mint's words cannot be a means to communicate with other people. They are the words to express feelings of joy and anger straight from the heart."

The other character who gets a surprisingly different treatment is Yellow Belmont, aka Lancer/Yellow Dancer.

We've all heard Cam Clarke's portrayal of a slightly effeminate male voice, which doesn't change much from when he's being Lancer to when he's being Yellow Dancer—and Steve Bradley's not-feminine-at-all singing voice. It is hard to imagine either one of these voices fooling for a single moment anybody who wasn't suffering from a severe case of heatstroke—especially since, as Robotech viewers, we've heard this voice before coming out of Max Sterling's mouth.

Mospeada, on the other hand, uses a remarkably different treatment. After Stick tells Yellow Belmont he has no room in his party for another woman, Yellow says, still using the female voice that she has been using all through the episode, "Then I'll become a man."

Then she goes over to her jeep and strips, removes her makeup, and then turns around and reveals that "she" is really a man. Yellow then says, in a deep masculine voice, "I am Yellow Belmont. I am really a man. Let me go with you to the Inbit's headquarters in North America."

And Ray's poor little heart is broken into a dozen pieces.

That's right—Mospeada uses two different voice actors for Yellow—an actual female voice for his bishonen side, and a deep masculine voice for his male persona. It's a startling portrayal, and one that I really wish Robotech had kept. Michael Bradley is a great singer, and Lancer's songs are probably the best music Robotech has to offer, but still, the all-male Yellow Dancer in Robotech completely spoils what should be a shocking moment for the audience at the end of episode 3. We should have no idea that this hot lounge-singer is really a guy until he reveals his true nature—but Michael's and Cam's voices give it away right off the bat. And it makes the entire rest of the cast look like idiots that they couldn't tell from his voice that he was a guy in drag.

Amusingly enough, Michael Bradley wasn't told about Lancer's dual nature when he was called upon to write and perform his music. In the Robotech 20th Anniversary Edition Soundtrack liner notes, Bradley writes:

If I recall correctly, [Lancer] was described as a kind of "Top Gun" jet pilot type of guy (not sure if that was very accurate). No one ever mentioned that he also wore a bra and pretended to be a woman when he was performing as a rock star. If I had known that, I probably would have sung the vocals a little more feminine (I was also an actor, after all) or, at the very least, I would have dressed as a woman in the studio. :o)

Aside from making for a better and more believable cover identity, this also allows Yellow to use his female voice for teasing the other members of the group, such as when he's taking a shower with that pierced bucket and tells Jim Warston to stop peeking. It's a much more believable portrayal than Robotech's.

All in all, watching Genesis Climber Mospeada is a pretty neat experience; it's almost like getting to see Robotech for the first time all over again. And at only $25 at The Right Stuf dot com, Robotech fans have no excuse for not having it on their own DVD shelves.

Episode Comparison: Robotech New Generation vs Mospeada Episode #1

(A version of this review, with audio excerpts from the show, originally appeared as part of one of the RDF Underground podcast. Not sure which one, I think maybe in the #34-#36 range.)

As you may have guessed from my Internet handle, I’m a big fan of a TV show called Robotech. Robotech is an 85-episode daily-syndication TV series from the 1990s that was originally formed by merging three separate and unrelated weekly-syndication animé (Japanese animation) TV series. This has been a bone of contention in animé fandom ever since, as it became fashionable to hate Robotech and its creator Carl Macek for this act of “butchery” once he was no longer the sole purveyor of Japanese animation to the western world. Much of this hate comes from fans of the Super Dimensional Fortress Macross series, the most well-known part of Robotech, and the only part that was successful in its own right over in Japan. They seem to feel that Robotech traded on Macross's success, and maybe they do have a point.

But for the two less famous TV series, Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada, inclusion into Robotech was probably the best thing that could have happened to them. Mospeada was only barely successful when it originally aired, and Southern Cross was such a monumental flop that it was actually cancelled halfway through its planned run—something that normally just wasn't done for animé TV series. Southern Cross and Mospeada would probably have passed unnoticed into obscurity, not even considered worth bothering to fansub, if it hadn't been that they were incorporated into America's first smash hit animé TV series.

Instead, twenty years after they would otherwise have been forgotten, they were completely remastered so that a remastered version of Robotech could be made. And, as a convenient side-effect, box sets of Southern Cross and Mospeada were released for the enjoyment of fans of the original animé. Animé vendor rightstuf.com is offering them for $25 each—about a third of their list price. That's less than you would pay for the Robotech version.

The New Generation was always my favorite part of Robotech. Giant transforming fighter planes were nice and all, but they always seemed a bit…inaccessible. It was hard to imagine myself piloting one, but very easy to imagine what it would be like to ride a motorcycle that wrapped itself around me to become a suit of powered body armor. And an earth-based resistance operation, and all those ruins to explore, were more exciting ideas to me than those far-off space battles. Now, after all this time, I finally have the chance to watch the original version and see how it holds up by comparison.

In light of that, I decided to examine the first episode of Mospeada, "Prelude to the Attack." Thanks to the Robotech extras discs, we have two different ways to do that, even if you don't count the Robotech version of the episode: the first episode from the boxed set, AND the unaired Harmony Gold pilot episode from back when they had planned to do straight Macross and Mospeada dubs.

First off, let's look at the quality. The subtitled Mospeada from the boxed set uses the same remastered video footage used in the remastered version of Robotech, and looks quite crisp and sharp. The audio track is a clean, good-sounding stereo, without much directionality in the dialogue. It doesn't have the roomshaking surrounds of the Robotech Remastered version, but for an early-80s TV show, it still sounds pretty good. The Harmony Gold dub, on the other hand, looks and sounds pretty bad by comparison. It lacks the opening and ending credits and the episode title, and appears to be a transfer to DVD of an old videotape recording of a telecine from unremastered film. But still, as the old saying goes about a dog walking on its hind legs, the remarkable thing about this dub is not so much that it be done well, as that it's done at all.

In terms of dialogue, the dub seems to be about 75 to 80 percent faithful to the translation as given in the subtitled version. A lot of little things remain the same, a few major things don't. One thing is that the main character in Mospeada is named Stick Bernard, and the dubbed version of the episode "sticks" with this name. However, in the subtitled version, Harmony Gold and ADV chose to render it as Stig, S-T-I-G. Stig is actually a common Scandinavian forename, and seems to go reasonably well with the Germanic surname of Bernard, even if it may not necessarily be what was originally intended. The dub also called a character originally named Ray "Randy," which was shortened to Rand in Robotech. And Marlene is referred to in the dub as "Marlin." But if you think that's bad, in the booklet of translated interviews and articles that was bundled with the DVD set, she is referred to as "Marine".

The Harmony Gold Mospeada dub seen here predates the decision to make Robotech. As such, it features some different casting and writing decisions than the "Invid Invasion" episode that we all know so well. In fact, about the only actor in the same role in both the Robotech and Mospeada versions is Mike Reynolds, better known as Dolza and Senator Russo, who plays the shuttle captain. It's a little startling to hear Melanie McQueen—Lisa Hayes and Marlene—providing the voice of the Regess (or Refless, as Mospeada calls her). And Cam Clarke—Max Sterling and Lancer—is also recognizable as one of the shuttle's flight crew.

But the real kicker is where they have Dan Woren, aka Roy Fokker. Some folks who've seen the Macross Plus dub felt that Dan was miscast there as the voice of teenaged aerospace design genius Yan Neumann. But in the Mospeada dub, he is cast as Stick Bernard—by comparison, Yan Neumann was who Dan was born to play!

One of the first things you notice when you watch the episode is that Stick and Marlin were interrupted in the middle of their love chat in the corridor by another crewmember, who dropped down out of a hatch in the ceiling and told them to get a room. If you're positive you don't remember that from Robotech, you would be right. American TV had more commercials per hour than Japanese, so they had to lose some footage from each episode to fit into the timeframe. It probably would have come back for the remastered version of Robotech, except they never recorded the dialogue for it in the Robotech dub so didn't have anything to put there. Mospeada's the only place you'll find it.

The voice acting in the Mospeada dub is by and large not quite up to the standards seen in the Robotech dub of the same episode. By the time they did that dub, the actors had been working on the Robotech project for months and gotten in a lot more practice. Here, they more often seem to be phoning their performance in. For instance, Dan Woren's acting when Marlene's shuttle goes down is particularly flat; it detracts from the emotional impact the scene is supposed to have. In short, the dub is fun to watch to see the original casting choices for the characters…but it's also a little painful. The subbed version is better for casual viewing.

But let's move on from the dubbing to the episode itself.

The music for Mospeada is very different from the Robotech soundtrack. It has a bit of a harder edge, and more of an authentic jazz feel to it. You may be surprised to learn that the composer and arranger for the instrumental music is none other than Joe Hisaishi, better-known for scoring all of Hayao Miyazaki's movies since Nausicaa. Nonetheless, there's a track or two that sounds like it might have at least indirectly inspired some of the Robotech music—and that's not even counting the reuse of the "lonely soldier boy" phrase from the opening titles.

Quite a few differences between the Mospeada and Robotech storyline are seen in this episode. The biggest difference is that the Invid—or the Inbit, as they're called in the original series; I guess Invid was easier to pronounce—have been occupying Earth for some thirty-three years as of the beginning of the TV series—not just the dozen or so years as from Robotech. Instead of a returning Expeditionary Force, mankind is attacking back from Mars Base, the colony outpost where many of mankind's survivors fled. Instead of being born "in deep space on a Robotech ship," the members of the returning shuttle fleet were born on Mars. The Alpha and Beta fighters are the Legioss and Tread, and the Cyclone is the Mospeada—Military Operation Soldier Protection Emergency Aviation Dive Auto. As originally conceived, the show was hardly going to feature the Legioss and Tread at all, and be more of a Seven Samurai with transforming motorcycles—which is why the show is named after the motorcycles. But the creators came under pressure to make it more like Macross, and so gave the planes a bigger role.

But back to the episode differences. In Mospeada, when the shuttle goes down, it's not because they're re-entering too fast, as in Robotech—it's because the atmosphere is thicker than it should have been at that altitude. At the time, they think it's some kind of Inbit weapon—but the actual reason is that the Inbit, being super-environmentalists, had returned the atmosphere to its original state before mankind had depleted the ozone layer and caused the greenhouse effect and so forth. This is a change that I kind of wish Robotech had kept, as it makes the Invid into more of a force to be reckoned with rather than placing the blame on the captain's incompetence. And Stick doesn't believe that Marlene is dead, at least at first—he says to the locket, "If you're alive, I'll find you." Interestingly enough, in the Mospeada storyline, she may actually be alive after all, judging by one of the articles in that translated interview booklet…

The most interesting difference to me comes when Stick encounters the desert at the edge of the forest. In Robotech, Scott is excited to see it because it reminds him of home (though why he'd know how vast Venus was, or be homesick for a "Martian landscape," when his home was Tirol or a Robotech ship is never adequately explained), and then as he drives across has the internal monologue about ghosts. In the Mospeada *dub*, he's worried about the heat, and resolves to think happy thoughts of Marlene to help see him through it. And so he imagines Marlene there, babbling to him about the wedding. In the Mospeada sub, he is impressed at how big the desert is, then drives across it without speaking—and Marlene appears, floats around the bike, and wafts away in complete silence (apart from the soundtrack). Of the three different interpretations of this sequence, this one is definitely the most effective; it gives me goosebumps just watching it.

In fact, there are a lot of places where excess dialogue was added in Robotech or the Mospeada dub. More in Robotech, though. For instance, when Stick saves Ray from the Inbit, he doesn't say a word from the time Rand sees him up to when he fires his last missile—unlike in Robotech, where he keeps up a steady stream of banter as he hops around and blows the Invid away. It's a little hard to get used to, but after a watch-through or two, the subtitled version proves that less is definitely more.

In both Robotech and the dub, Stick or Scott comes off as decidedly unfriendly to Ray or Rand, mistaking him for an inattentive soldier and grabbing at him in anger. In the sub, though, he seems to know Ray is not a soldier right off the bat—maybe it's the clothes—and just grabs him in order to get his attention away from the cool new bike. Consequently, in the episode of Robotech Scott seems to come off as a little self-important, even a bit of a showoff; but in Mospeada Stick's a more focused soldier.

It's going to be interesting to compare the other differences from Robotech to Mospeada as the show goes on. The one problem I really have in watching it is that thinking of everything as a part of Robotech, and placing it in relation to the other two series, is so ingrained in my mind that it's hard to separate the unique and different background that Mospeada has. Guess I'll just have to work on that.

At any rate, the Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada DVD sets are being sold by Right Stuf for $25 each. Buy them both and you get free shipping. At that price, every Robotech fan should have them in his collection.

Review: Tempus Fugit, by Lawrence Lee Rowe, Jr.

The title, Tempus Fugit, has a double meaning…because not only does "time fly" for its protagonists, it also flies for the reader who turns its pages.

I do have to start off by admitting that it is regrettable that it was advertised by spamming. [Note: Since writing this review, I have heard from the author. He noted that the spam was sent without his authorization by an overzealous employee, who is now an ex-employee.] Indeed, I found myself in a bit of a moral quandary as to whether or not to purchase it when I found the solicitation in my email box. On the one hand, I intensely dislike rewarding spammers; on the other, the premise was completely fascinating, and one about which I had often wondered, and if not for the spam I would never have heard of the book. And at least it wasn't another ad for prescription pharmaceuticals of uncertain provenance and even less certain spelling.

To resolve this quandary, I searched Google for reviews, figuring that if it got good reviews, I would spring for it; if it was decried as tripe, I would not. As reviews of people who actually read the book were uniformly positive, I was now insatiably curious, and so I sent in my order right away. Now, having obtained and finished the book, I am very glad indeed that I compromised my principles a tiny bit just this once.

The premise on which Tempus Fugit begins is that three of our Founding Fathers—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—are duplicated out of time by some unknown agency, a year or two before their respective deaths, and deposited together in the modern-day United States at the Mount Rushmore monument with $100,000 in seed money. The story follows their adventures as they learn to cope with and try to blend into this brave new world and find answers to the primary question on their minds: what sort of nation has their fledgling Republic grown up to be? They also wonder about the identity of the strange agency that brought them to this new time, and what its purpose might have been, though answers to that question are less forthcoming.

Tempus Fugit is quite well-written, structurally and dramatically. The prose is neither amateurish nor impenetrable. Even the 18th-century-idiomatic dialogue of the Founding Fathers is surprisingly readable; where context does not suffice to illuminate meaning, the author provides convenient footnotes to explain obsolescent usages or historical contexts. In fact, there is so much historical information that the book sometimes seems like 2/3 novel and 1/3 political history textbook. However, it manages to present the history very naturalistically, only resorting to footnotes when character dialogue does not cover it completely.

Reading the book, one has the sense that Rowe put a great deal of research into its writing, learning our Founding Fathers inside and out. He does not pull any punches, either; the threesome are presented as human beings with feet of clay, rather than the idols whose faces we carve into mountains and put on currency. Washington is a man of more action than thought, who can act impetuously and without mercy when necessary. Franklin is a genius, but a very lecherous and bawdy one who is prone to earthy humor and whose occasionally scathing wit can cause even his best friends to cringe. And Jefferson is a childish, hypocritical racist who can't change his thinking no matter how hard he tries—and his attitudes get both him and the others into trouble more than once. The trio of Founding Fathers do not get along perfectly; they sometimes bicker over group decisions, and an old grievance causes tension between Washington and Jefferson despite Jefferson's attempts at reconciliation.

It should be noted that the book doesn't pull punches where obscenity is concerned, either. The F-word is used from time to time, and "nigger" is used frequently. This may seem jarring to modern readers, but "nigger" was simply a word in common usage in the Founding Fathers' time, and even in Mark Twain's; it was only later that it came to be considered an epithet, and the book does make this clear. There is also some graphically-described violence, as the threesome are accosted by a pair of thugs who discover the hard way that it's not wise to mug even a 65-year-old George Washington. And at times the book's humor becomes a touch earthy, especially on the part of Franklin.

But despite these unpulled punches, the book is great fun. The Founding Fathers come across as real people, with their little foibles and idiosyncrasies. It's amusing to watch them make guesses based on incomplete information and get some things wrong, but a lot of things remarkably right. Rowe doesn't present them as some kind of backwoods bumpkins; he reminds us that Franklin and Jefferson were among the brightest intellects of their time, classically educated and keen thinkers—and if Washington wasn't as brilliant, he was at least blessed with abundant common sense. Placed into this strange new situation, their reactions are clear-minded and rational as they set out to learn as much as they possibly can. And some of the situations they get into along the way are absolutely hilarious—for example, the Founding Fathers' reactions to daytime television are not to be missed.

If the narrative has any serious flaws, they are only that from time to time incidental characters spout off dialogue that sounds incredibly artificial, almost like they were giving a prepared speech. People don't talk like that in real life, but it is necessary that the points they make be overheard by the Founders so that they can discuss what people think of them, or of events that happened after them. Also, the book is obviously the first in a series, so it does not so much end as come to a good stopping point.

All in all, Tempus Fugit is a great work of historical speculative fiction, and much the sort of thing I would have expected to come out of a political SF house like Baen, rather than being self-published. I'll be looking forward to the sequel, which is apparently due sometime in spring, 2007.

The first chapter may be read in its entirety online.

Review: Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc & Edgar Jepson

In live theater, every action has to be broad. When you wave, you don't just flick your wrist, you move your whole arm. The audience is sitting at least a few yards away from you and you're only life-sized; in order to see the significance of your action, every motion has to be exaggerated.

Perhaps this can explain to a certain extent the exaggerated characterization in Maurice Leblanc and Edgar Jepson's Arsène Lupin (otherwise known as Arsène Lupin: The Book of the Play—and not to be confused with the very first Lupin book, the collection of short stories Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar). This work of uncertain literary pedigree is based on a 4-act theatrical play Leblanc wrote with Francis de Croisset in 1909. Unlike other English-language Lupin novels, this is apparently not a direct translation of a French volume, but rather an early example of "novelization"—written solely by Jepson but based on Leblanc's play. As such, its writing style is significantly different from Leblanc's other Lupin works. I'd love to know what Leblanc himself thought of it.

The story's origin as a 4-act play is readily apparent; the action is limited to only about three primary locations, and mostly takes place at the Paris townhouse of a millionaire businessman, M. Gournay-Martin, whose millions are not sitting lightly on his head: having been robbed once, three years before, by Arsène Lupin, he has now received word that he is to be robbed again. Lupin has promised to rob him not only of valuable furnishings and artwork from his Paris townhouse, but also of a fabulous coronet, valued at half a million francs, that he prizes most highly. And all this comes at what should be the time of Gournay-Martin's greatest happiness, as his daughter Germaine is soon to be wed to the handsome young Duke of Charmerace, newly returned from a 7-year expedition to the South Pole. Charmerace races to the scene of the crime in Gournay-Martin's only remaining car, but is too late—the house has been stripped clean by the time he arrives, with the exception of the coronet—locked in an impregnable bedroom safe.

But never fear—the French police are on the case, in the form of Examining Magistrate M. Formery and Chief-Inspector Guerchard. Formery and Guerchard do not get along well; Formery is so short-sighted and full of himself that he could be considered a progenitor of The Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau; he largely serves as comic relief. Guerchard, however, is significantly more competent, and is clever enough to be one of the most challenging adversaries that Lupin has ever faced. It is likely that Guerchard, described by one of the characters as "the greatest detective we've had in France since Vidocq," is more than a match for any ordinary criminal—but Lupin has never been merely ordinary.

But then, as they investigate, another message from Lupin comes: since he wasn't able to get the coronet earlier that day, he's going to strike a third time—showing up between 11:45 and midnight to steal the crown in person. Tension mounts as the hour draws near. Will Lupin show his face, with the police ready and waiting? Will he capture the coronet, or will Guerchard capture him?

The peculiar thing about Arsène Lupin is that the titular character barely appears in the book at all. Instead, we follow the household—Charmerace, Germaine, and Gournay-Martin in particular—as it is stirred up by Lupin's promised burglary. Then we follow Charmerace, Formery, and Guerchard as they investigate the case. It is only at the climax that we actually get to see Lupin…or is it? He is a master of disguise, after all…

The book is written to try to keep the secret of where Lupin is and what he is doing while the household is thus agitated, only hinting here and there and then springing it on the audience at the end as a surprise. But to be honest, this book was written at a less-sophisticated time, and today's readers—having been innoculated by exposure to thousands more twisty plots (thanks to television, movies, and mystery books) than the average reader of that day could have known—will probably guess where Lupin is hiding before the end of the second chapter. (You probably have a pretty good idea already just from reading this review.) But even if you guess, you can still enjoy the book simply as a police procedural (or perhaps I should say "criminal procedural"), like Columbo or Jake and the Fatman where you already know who committed the crime and the pleasure is in watching the police unravel it. That is, if you can get past the uneven writing style.

The first chapter or two are, to be honest, not terribly prepossessing. Characters are not so much characterized as they are semaphored at you. Not a single mention is made of Germaine Gournay-Martin without belaboring the point of how totally spoiled, self-centered, and all-around disagreeable she is; not a single mention is made of Germaine's servant Sonia Kritchnoff without expressing how melancholy and oppressed she is by being subject to Germaine's whims. And it is blindingly obvious from the first time we meet him that the Duke of Charmerace is far more taken with Sonia than with Germaine, as they cast wistful looks at each other behind the self-absorbed Germaine's back (or even in front of her face). It's so over-the-top that it descends into melodrama; you practically expect a mustachio-twirling villain to step through the door and tie Sonia to the railroad tracks. Leblanc's other Lupin stories, even via their varied translations, are never so cheesy as this; it is largely this that leads me to believe Jepson wrote this work himself, with Leblanc's only contribution being the dialogue and stage direction.

Another difference is that the humor seems to be broader, and more blatant, than in the other Lupin stories—sometimes bordering on the farcical. This can be partly explained by it being an adaptation of a play; for the play to keep people entertained, the playwrights would have had to throw in jokes every now and again, as well as comic-relief characters. It could be that these jokes were put in by Leblanc's writing partner when the play was originally written, and were then translated to the page by Jepson with the rest.

And some of these jokes may be a trifle obscure to the modern audience.

For example:

"I mean to marry my daughter to a worker—a worker, my dear Duke," said the millionaire, slapping his big left hand with his bigger right. "I've no prejudices—not I. I wish to have for son-in-law a duke who wears the Order of the Legion of Honour, and belongs to the Academie Francaise, because that is personal merit. I'm no snob."

A gentle, irrepressible laugh broke from the Duke.

"What are you laughing at?" said the millionaire, and a sudden lowering gloom overspread his beaming face.

"Nothing—nothing," said the Duke quietly. "Only you're so full of surprises."

Modern-day readers, especially American readers, might not get the joke to its fullest extent—the Academie Francaise is the redoubtable French organization that, among other things, polices the French language, insisting that people use good old-fashioned French rather than English loan-words like "hot dog" or "Walkman." Thus, not only is it snobbery, it is the very height of snobbery—and that's the real reason why Charmerace is laughing.

And then there's the servant who was arrested twice—once for participating in a Socialist demonstration, and once for participating in a Royalist demonstration—when he worked in the service of Socialist and Royalist politicians, respectively.

"You don't seem to have very well-defined political convictions," said M. Formery.

"Oh, yes, sir, I have," the concierge protested. "I'm always devoted to my masters; and I have the same opinions that they have—always."

Many characters are none-too-subtly ridiculed by the narrative—especially when the characters are themselves comic relief. For example, the bumbling M. Formery is described as "[appearing] to be of the opinion that Nature had given the world the toothbrush as a model of what a moustache should be." Gournay-Martin—a self-important, florid-faced, overweight fellow with close-set eyes, is another favored butt of narrative jokes; when he receives some unwelcome news and sits a touch too heavily in an antique chair, we are treated to a physical description of a slapstick gag. It probably worked much better on the stage than in print.

But once it settles down, comedy elements aside, the story is compelling. Despite Lupin's apparent absence for most of the book, he serves as a sort of larcenous Godot—the fact that he's coming drives the narrative; the characters become more anxious as the hour of his scheduled arrival draws nearer. Guerchard, at first so calm and analytical, begins to lose his cool as all of Lupin's detective adversaries invariably do—even the great Sherlock Holmes, ahem, pardon me, "Herlock Sholmes." And there's also the matter of the Duke of Charmerace's growing attraction, despite his impending nuptuals, to Sonia Kritchnoff—and Sonia is hiding a secret that could cost her, and Charmerace, dearly.

As an Arsène Lupin novel, Arsène Lupin is atypical. Not really written by Leblanc, it's rather like a novelization of a James Bond movie script (oh yes, they do exist—I own the one for The Spy Who Loved Me), or "Bram Stoker's Dracula by Fred Saberhagen"—a story written at one or more removes from the original author's work. It's not really a mystery, despite the presence of a criminal and a detective; it's more of a drama about the duel between these two larger-than-life personalities. It is a trifle melodramatic and farcical, and it probably worked significantly better on the stage than on the page. (I dearly wish I could see an English-language version of the play staged; I'll wager it would be great fun.) But even considering all of that, it has a compelling story and snappy dialogue, and is worth reading on that count alone.

(If I weren't so terribly modest, I'd also point out that the fact that you are able to read it, if you read it via Gutenberg or another public domain repackager, is at least in part attributable directly to me; I'm the one who volunteered his copies of Arsène Lupin and The Hollow Needle for scanning and addition to Project Gutenberg. You can see the scans at Greg Weeks's website.)

Although he is hardly remembered today outside of France, save for his role as the predecessor to the popular Lupin III anime, Arsène Lupin used to be an absolutely huge part of French pop culture, and to some extent still is. The play upon which this book was based was adapted for film and television numerous times, including three silent films and an early 1932 "talkie" that starred John Barrymore as Lupin and Lionel Barrymore as Guerchard—their first appearance together in a motion picture. (The Barrymore picture is not terribly faithful either to the play or to real life; it features Lupin stealing the Mona Lisa by rolling up the canvas on which it is painted—except that in reality, the Mona Lisa is painted on a sheet of wood.)

And Lupin inspired more than just Lupin III. It is at least possible and on the whole quite likely that he inspired Leslie Charteris's The Saint, and Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat can only be one of Lupin's direct descendants. Come to think of it, since he was among the very first modern criminal heroes, every heist or caper film ever made probably owes something to Lupin—particularly that David Niven/Peter Sellers comedy about the debonair ladies'-man jewel thief who matches wits with the semi-competent French Inspector. Yes, that one. (Especially since I seem to recall that in at least one of the Lupin novels, Lupin also romanced the wife of the Inspector who was trying to catch him.)

For more information on the original Arsène Lupin, and how he compares to his modern-day anime descendant, check out the MP3 commentary track I recorded for Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro. Be sure and watch the movie without it first, though!

Review: The Eight Strokes of the Clock by Maurice Leblanc

This review was originally written for posting to alt.pulp, but given that it's been a while since I updated this journal, and I enjoyed writing it, I should go ahead and post it to this journal so that more people might see it.

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I am told that Maurice Leblanc once bemoaned that writing so many novels about master thief and adventurer Arsène Lupin had spoiled him for writing about anybody else: the protagonists of any other books he tried to write invariably turned into Arsène Lupin, no matter who they had originally been supposed to be. Perhaps this explains the curious little author's note that begins The Eight Strokes of the Clock:

These adventures were told to me in the old days by Arsène Lupin, as though they had happened to a friend of his, named Prince Renine. As for me, considering the way in which they were conducted, the actions, the behaviour and the very character of the hero, I find it very difficult not to identify the two friends as one and the same person. Arsène Lupin is gifted with a powerful imagination and is quite capable of attributing to himself adventures which are not his at all and of disowning those which are really his. The reader will judge for himself.

—M.L.

A thematically-related series of eight short stories that originally appeared in Excelsior Magazine in 1922-23, Eight Strokes has the distinction of being the last Arsène Lupin novel to fall before the Bono Act public domain cut-off date—if, indeed, an Arsène Lupin novel it is. The eight tales follow the adventures of "Prince Serge Renine" (exactly what kingdom he's supposed to be a prince of is never explained—it could well be that "Prince" is just his given name. I guess that would make him "the Prince formerly known as Lupin") and his assistant, Hortense Daniels, as they unravel eight perplexing mysteries—or, rather, as "Renine" unravels them and Hortense tags along. Chronologically, the stories are set in 1911, between Lupin's retirement from crime at the end of The Hollow Needle and his greatest adventure of all, 813.

In the first story, "On the Top of the Tower," Renine prevents Hortense from eloping with a man she actually finds distasteful, but sees as the only way out of her distressing home life. (Hortense lives with her appointed guardian, an uncle whom she does not like.) He accomplishes this feat by shooting out the tires of the car in which they are leaving—and when Hortense chases him down to berate him, he charms her into accompanying him in exploring a nearby abandoned chateau. In this chateau they discover a still-running clock that chimes the hour of eight o'clock—twenty years after it should have stopped—a hidden telescope…and an ancient crime.

The solution to this mystery frees Hortense from her uncle, and Renine strikes a bargain with Hortense: as the clock struck eight times, she will accompany him on seven more adventures. At the end, he will recover a precious heirloom brooch that was stolen from her years before—and in return, she will give him…he's too much of a gentleman to say exactly what it is he wants, but they both know exactly what he means.

And so their adventures begin, as they proceed to solve seven more mysteries together, each more mysterious than the last. How was a box set on fire when there was nobody in the room? How was a man stabbed in the back when nobody went into or out of his cottage after he entered it? Why are women being systematically murdered with identical hatchet blows to the forehead, several months apart? And will Hortense overcome her reluctance to meet with Renine as the adventures come to a close and the time to honor their agreement draws near?

Arsène Lupin is a product of the same literary period as Sherlock Holmes, albeit from the other side of the English Channel. As a result, their adventures end up being a trifle similar; as with Holmes's Watson, Lupin often adventures with a less adroit companion—be it his girlfriend of the moment, a police inspector, or even Maurice Leblanc "himself"—to throw his cleverness into relief. In this case, the role is served by Hortense, for whom Lupin has fallen as he did for so many other women before or since. Hortense is a typical Watson in that she is invariably mystified by Lupin's leaps of intuition, and dazzled by the cunning that he applies to solve crimes and catch true culprits. This isn't to say that she is stupid, just that Lupin has the sort of pure brilliance that—just as with Holmes—can only be explained by the writer "cheating" and setting up the mysteries just so his protagonist can knock them down.

Perhaps it's just that I've been watching the new Doctor Who and Doctor Who Confidential series lately, but it seems to me that there's something of the Doctor about Arsène Lupin, in the way he will take on companions (and paramours) to dazzle with his whirlwind manner, amazing intelligence, and leaps of intuition for the space of an adventure or two—before moving on to someone else. Even his romance with Hortense, whom he woos over the course of the eight mysteries in this book, is fated to last only a short while before Lupin finds new loves in 813 and The Teeth of the Tiger. (Lupin's previous lovers having died through natural causes or accidents, or rejected him when they found out he was a criminal, or even run away to a convent(!), it can be said that Arsène Lupin does not tend to have the best luck with women.)

Some of the mysteries seem quaint when viewed from a century later. In "The Tell-Tale Film," Renine correctly identifies a supporting actor's obsession with a silent film's leading lady from the out-of-character smouldering glances he casts at her in the scenes they share on film. (The medium was so new back then that they could get away with that; these days, they'd call that either "bad acting" or "bad directing.") Subsequently, Renine and Hortense discover that the actor has indeed kidnapped the actress and is hiding in one of the locations where the film was shot—this apparently being before studio movie sets were in common use.

In another story, the hatchet-wielding serial killer turns out to be an insane sociopath. It's not a terribly surprising explanation, and one could say it even presages modern-day literary serial killers such as Hannibal Lecter—but all the same, it's rather disappointing in a series that is generally characterized by adversaries who are fiendishly clever rather than just off their nut.

Apart from the author's note at the beginning, and a couple of gratuitous references stuck into the story, there's nothing really in this work that specifically requires Renine to be Lupin, apart from exhibiting the same cleverness, cunning, and personality. Renine is always referred to as Renine, though this is nothing new—Lupin is generally referred to only by his alias even in books when we already know exactly who he is (such as The Teeth of the Tiger).

All in all, the mysteries are entertaining, and the romance with Hortense is diverting, but the stories are not as interesting as Lupin's longer novels, where more time can be taken to set up the crime and its solution, nor are they as fun as Lupin's earlier career where he debonairly commits the most outrageous crimes while thumbing his nose at the inspectors sent to track him down. Still, as a collection of short stories, it can be read in more than one sitting without losing track of the story, and Leblanc had quite a gift for coming up with clever crimes. It's a shame that the Arsène Lupin tales have been largely forgotten over the years.