Worth a Look: Sasami and the Magical Girls Club.

Most people probably heard of Pretty Sammy by way of Tenchi Muyo, not me of course. On one of my all to many vacations to the continent of Asia I watched tons of anime. Some in the language of the land such as Sailor Moon, Bomber Man, some Transformers rehash that had the copyright logos from Takara. I also got to watch a few in English and unedited like Power Stone, Samurai X, Ghostsweepers, Dual, Transformers: Headmasters(uhg,) Powermasters(YEAH!) and Victory(whoopie).

There was one interesting and pretty obnoxious series. As soon as I got home I went to the local anime store to find it. A store dedicated to renting out and selling nothing but anime. I saw the star of the series on one of the boxes for Tenchi Universe. I took the box up to the proprietor and asked:

"Do you know of a series that has this girl but she wears pink, transforms, and has a talking rabbit that meows?" He immediately takes me over to the subtitled section and points out Magical Project S.

What does that have to do with anything? Nothing. It's my time to waste and nobody's forcing you to click on this.

For many years I dismissed Sasami: Magical Girls Club mostly based on the early descriptions. Overemphasizing the cooking club bit. Which was really only a minor part. And the costumes were God awful, even for a magic girl show. I was tired of the whole "Does this lipstick go with my shoes?" routine of these kinds of shows.

One day Amazon recommended Sasami: The magical Girls Club. I guess based on the similarity to Rosario Vampire and Deathnote. I can get the whole series for thirty dollars. Well, I had been watching House for a couple of weeks and needed a change. If I don't like it, I know some guys I can give it to, or donate it to my Grandma's church rummage sale.

This ain't Pretty Sammy. This series was par excellence. For the most part. Let's start with that. After many years of Tenchi I'm used to a certain character design. This is very different. It's good, different, but good. Voices: good actors were chosen, they did a good job acting, and the correct voices were used. However, I was disappointed that Chisa Yokoyama, Etsuko Kozakura, Sherry Lynn, or Kate T. Vogt were nowhere to be found.

The next two problems are the fault of the acting and writing. I thought we were done with gross mispronunciations of names back in the 90's. "Roy-o-oh?" I can't even begin to figure out how to spell out the way they pronounced "Sasami." The thing I would fault this series for is too many characters. They get no development what so ever. You have the three other girls with Sasami and Misao. Then there's the other magic girl club. All the witches in the other world. Plus their parents, and a bad guy that looks like a good guy. They all have their own stories, which are good, but no time was given to fully develop them. They should have left it to Sasami and Misao. Which was always the strongest part of any of the Pretty Sammy series.

This is the best part. I had been thinking the whole time :"When is Misao going to get hypnotized into Pixy Misa and fight Sasami?" Never happened. Instead the bad guy used trickery to play upon Misao's jealousy and anger towards Sasami to make the decision to turn on her friends and fight against them. That in my mind made it worth suffering through the asinine little girl stuff.

Of course Misao is taken over by the main bad guy, fights Sasami, rescued, and then gets to use Sasami's powers.

While watching this, I got that feeling of déjà vu again. I definitely recognized the imagery from Pretty Sammy, and even from Tenchi in Tokyo. But, there was something else:

 NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
(Though I must say the ones on the left where both very difficult to get.)

Ravy 2011 Pg 12.

Click

Just a shout out to a character model that helped me along the way.

Here.

GoAnimate.

Friend of mine pointed me to a site called GoAnimate. So far all I've done is just peruse some of the tutorials and played around with the character maker. As far As I can tell it is something of a simplified version of Flash.

Mostly.

I say that because in one of the tutorials they kept talking about making one scene after another to get Spock and his ship to move from the back ground to the foreground. In Flash you only use one scene. Then to get both Spock and the ship to move on a path you have to coordinate them as separate objects and trust the judgment of your eye. (My eyes? You kidding?) In Flash you make a movie clip with Spock and the ship and then place them in the scene as a single object on a motion path.

The character creator was was a bit limited for what I wanted to do, but it was still fun. Though I didn't get the money thing they kept displaying.

Nurse Becky.
If she had been able to get a
job at a serious medical facility.

Angel form of Nancy Conner.
5 bonus no-points if you can
find all the mistakes I made.

This one really shows off the limitations.
I wanted an ACU pattern but couldn't find one.
Who is she?
She used to be in the comic, I'll say this, I have plans.

Thus far for a FREE program it's pretty well rounded. I haven't gone any further into it, so I really can't judge how good it is. I will at some point. Then I'll get back to you.





(By the way, it is a real pain in the ass placing those pictures, putting captions to them, and making it look somewhat comprehensible. Thank Google for that "PREVIEW" button.)

Ravy 2011 Pg 11.

Click Here.

Fairies are our friends. They are always there in our greatest times of need.

Usually because they caused it.

Runaway Freebies

Last year I saw a movie that I swear I had seen before. So when it came out on DVD I dug up the other movie and decided to do a side-by-side comparison. Of course I must share my incoherent bumblings with all the world. And it turned out to be quite the adventure in using free software.

I needed to rip the movies to my harddrive. I popped the DVDs in and turned on DVD Shrink. In the matter of mere minuets the VOB file was in a useable form on my harddrive. Next up I had to edit the first movie down to the scenes that best make my point. I have Nero, Pinnacle, and Ulead. Instead I went with Windows Live Movie Maker. I had already been using it to edit videos for some time so I was familiar with the interface. It's not as feature rich as all the others, and it is a little unwieldy, but hey, it's free. You get what you pay for, especially from Microsoft. (I think there's universal agreement that it's okay to bash Microsoft.)

Probably the one big disadvantage is that you can only have one instance of Movie Maker open at once. You can import two movies, but at four hours of videos, it's tedious enough with one movie scrolling up and down the screen looking for that one special spot. So it's best to work with one movie at a time and when you're done save it and work on the next video. However, Movie Maker can do frame-by-frame edits, add additional sounds and music, all kinds of transitions, and captions. But, I needed a fade out, and that wasn't there. Seriously, fade ins, but not outs. In terms of audio, You can change the level, which is important because the first movie had a lot of F-Bombs and was much louder than the second.

The next movie was problematic: it wouldn't open up in Movie Maker or play in Media Player. Bummer. Let's try converting them to another format. That brings us to Freemake Video Converter. If you are a serious YouTube user (unlike me) you need Freemake Video Downloader and Freemake Video Converter. Get 'em and install 'em. You won't be sad that you did.

I digress, why download videos from YouTube? One reason I will discuss at some other time, for this article I will say to save something you like in case it is removed. This does happen. The old adage is that it's on the internet forever. Not true. There's a couple of old webcomics I liked that I can't find anymore. I remember hearing a talk show host lament the fact that he couldn't find the video of a politician saying something on YouTube. So when you see something, SAVE IT.

I converted the second movie to WMV and it opened up fine in Movie Maker. I think it worked better in WMV than VOB. Got the pertinent scenes and re-imported the first movie and spliced everything up in a semi-comprehensible order. I thought I was done, you'll know me and so you know I am never done. I needed to record some audio for a colossal flash trickle of a brain storm. Audacity to the rescue.

After spending an additional several hours working on that, I finally loaded it up to YouTube. 

Programs I used:

DVD Shrink

Windows Live Movie Maker

Freemake Video Converter

Audacity

For your bemusement, my masterpiece de resistance. Of course, I fully acknowledge that I am most likely letting my over-reactive imagination trick me into seeing coincidences that just aren't there.