Friday 29 April 2022

Sheena: Characters

The Human Characters of Sheena 

The Cardwell Era 

Hannah Cardwell: Hannah Cardwell is the daughter of dead drunk scientists living in the Ugandan wilderness with her mentor Koba Bazira and his own family of fellow hard working warriors. 

Koba Bazira: Koba is a flawed although otherwise smart old man trying to survive years and decades of political conflict. Before Hannah’s parents died, he noticed the absurd drunkenness and other awful behaviours of his former friends; which explains why Hannah the Sheena was raised by him after her parents passed away drunk and in awful condition. He was an omufumu (meaning ‘shaman’ in Tooro). 

Robert Reynolds: Hannah’s great white safari guide boyfriend. 

The Collins Era 

Jenny Collins: Jenny is herself raised by Ella and her gang of friends in the savannah.  

Ella Bazira: Koba’s daughter and Jenny’s mentor/foster mum. 

Jason Rayburn: Jenny’s great ranger of a boyfriend, Jason Rayburn  

Madelyn Zebba Wyler: 

Richard Thorne: Richard Thorne is from Dublin in Ireland. 

Rochelle Rayburn: 

The Ames Wynn Era

Janet Ames Wynn: Janet Ames Wynn is the daughter of brown haired Betsy McCook and ginger Philip Ames. She wants to go back to where she came from, and ultimately has succeeded at the end with her boyfriend turned spouse Jonathan Wynn.  

Jonathan Wynn: Tom Casey’s boisterous best friend. 

Ms Konga: Ms Konga is a matronly bush elephant who is Ms Marmalade’s (Marmo for short) granddaughter.

Lia Din: Janet Ames Wynn’s mentor and Rashid’s mum, who happens to be a member of the Gujarat diaspora via her dad. She inherits her beauty from both her Kutchi dad and her converted Nkore mum. 

Mekuro Gizzard: Mekuro is the youngest child and only son of Kapo Musa and Koosh Gizzard. It was she who let him kill one of his own older half brothers because the latter was an an outcast in terms of anything. He was more messed up than even Ngama since he also put his body upon Koos Van De Groot and a ton of older women. In comparison, his uncle impregnated mainly impressionable (and often pretty young, if not below 16) one night stands (albeit only six in total) because he also had two dead partners; both of whom were friends themselves.  

Matsuni: Mainly known only by his Japanese alias, he is a villain who has lost his own friend to the latter’s own half sibling Mekuro Gizzard. 

Koos Van De Groot: an amoral pale skin South African soldier of Afrikaner roots. 

Tom Casey: Tom Casey is a reporter in an east Africa already wrecked by highly abused institutions and foul fundamentalism as well as having an engrossed elite that divided way too well. He also was assaulted by Mekuro Gizzard because his privates were delicious to him. 

Dominic Jorgensen: Dominic Jorgensen, a outcasted convict from Sweden, was best friends with fellow terrorist Koos Van De Groot. 

Koosh Gizzard: 

Zinda: Zinda is a rather foul mannered and wicked middle aged woman, although it’s largely because she was a frequent assault victim (of Kapo Musa herself) trying to survive living without all of her dying friends at once. 

The Hamilton Era 

Shirley Cheryl Hamilton: At age 7 years old, poor Shirley lost her mentally traumatised parents to their suicide at an avalanche spot after spending her time with them in Tigora for about two years. As a result, she was brought up by Judi and her husband Lucius Mwesigye. 

Roger Hamilton: Roger Hamilton was Shirley’s brown haired father.

Ekaterina Kopra: Roger Hamilton’s ginger Karelian wife. 

Judi Mwesigye: Shirley’s firm but warm hearted mentor and foster mum with mental health issues. 

Lucius Mwesigye: Judi’s distant husband. 

Kiro: Shirley's epic badass buddy, who is not only known to be loud and proud as a strongwoman, she’s a tough act to follow. Frankly, her early life was quite tragic in all accounts. Her dad likely destroyed her senile mum’s life; as well as abandoning her with glee, thus a majority of the story’s locals disparagingly know her as a feral street urchin in her youth, temporarily living with gorillas and the like. She’d been bitten by various cryptids before, which means that she uses her then-newfound animal powers to survive in such a cruel world. 

Masuya Suruma: Bakari Suruma’s slightly younger sister.

Amanda Prentiss Barman: Amanda is the ex wife of Matthew Cutter and wife of her jerk with a heart of gold ex-CIA bodyguard Justin Barman. She was impregnated by him after divorcing Matt, thus birthing a loud and hammy daughter named Linda Barman. 

Linda Barman: Amanda and Justin's daughter.

Matthew Cutter: Matthew Cutter is a guy who's been groped upon, bullied and perhaps mindwiped by almost anything considered a threat to his own life. 

Luke Mendelssohn: Matthew Cutter's sometime mechanic from Colmar in France, who happens to be partly deaf. 

Rashid Din: Lia’s handsome and rather kind Park Ranger son. 

Kamon Suruma: Kamon Suruma is like Scrooge in which he deeply likes becoming rich, but what he doesn’t know much about is that, while he is a bit too embezzled in embracing tradition at times and is quite a big bully when not in a good mood, he secretly doesn’t want to cause a regional civil war or even a national conflict at all, given his days as a child being neglected by his own corrupt mum. His children by his sole dead wife are Bakari and Masuya Suruma, who are a recurring sibling duo in this serialised story.

Bakari Suruma: Once a promising student at a broken down secondary school, Bakari is now a world weary atoner. 

Getu and Marali M'Buli: Getu and Marali M'Buli are cunning ethnic Swazi expat brothers from the same nation as Sidiam Khumalo, South Africa. 

Sidiam Khumalo: Sidiam is a South African Zulu bandit turned expat, living in the corrupt lands of the Baraya. His only regular childhood friend is Syma Coetzee. 

Syma Coetzee: A Cape Coloured from South Africa, Syma is friends with Sidiam Khumalo despite being segregated for a long time. 

Ngama Joost Van Der Westhuizen: Born in Uganda as the product of a one night stand between a part-Afrikaner perv named Dick Van Der Westhuizen and a Loopy Chieftain’s Screwed Up Daughter named Kapo Musa, Joost had to assassinate his own mum and then became Tigora’s then current dictator in 1970. Fortunately, due to his messed up nature gone too far, he was mind raped and eaten to death by a water monster cryptid who lives in the local swampy forests next door. 



Monday 25 April 2022

TIGA’s acquired works

TIGA’s forcibly acquired international works are; a couple of Ultraman and Kamen Rider shows (somewhat forcibly adopted by TIGA from the infamous Chaiyo Productions machine), Pororo (licensed from Iconix), many older Detective Conan movies (licensed from TMS), Secret Jouju (licensed from Young Toys), Bakugan (licensed from Spin Master), the Sailor Moon franchise (licensed from Toei animation), Kuu Kuu Harajuku, the Garfield Show, Fairy Tail, Digimon (also licensed from Toei animation), numerous Lupin the Third movies (also licensed from TMS), Doraemon (licensed from Shin Ei), Attack On Titan, Naruto (licensed from Pierrot), Hitman Reborn!, Bleach (also licensed from Pierrot) and the Dragon Ball franchise (again licensed from Toei animation). Not only are these works dubbed by TIGA into the Thai language, they also are the ones with much bigger Thai fandoms than the company’s own cash grabs. 

Thursday 21 April 2022

A politely skeptical TIGA analysis

As a Hong Kong based (albeit founded and once owned by former employees of the more blatantly corrupt Chaiyo productions) business which frankly deserves just as much friendly bantering and chuckling from people like me (it’s mostly because respecting most of the less messed up Thai Royals is a lot of hard work, even though what it does require, in a good mood, sometimes contains healthy amounts of both politeness and sanity in the nation as a whole!), TIGA entertainment is known in its home nation for having politely tenuous links with both Toei and TMS, which (kind of) explains why it regards many of its own cash grabs as shabby old secrets which ain’t allowed to be uploaded (even outside of Thailand) without the company’s own officially explicit permission. Rose media and entertainment is also its friendly rival, so that’s kind of necessary. 

While fair dealing (although rather weak) does exist in practice (but not in law) for Thailand, it’s also lovely that Japan strongly tolerates safe for work Doujinshis of tv shows and mangas because, most of the time, it regards a huge majority of them as affectionate parodies rather than legal threats, albeit it’s only as long as they’re aren’t made for profit, which is fine. 

Even then, the company’s own (often pretty scummy) lawyers are often (like their counterparts from Japan) taking brutal lengths to hide videos of the Thai cash grabs from internet surfers; and that’s supposedly (although rather likely in turn) to prevent a ridiculous amount of (perhaps mostly frivolous) lawsuits from the lawyers of TMS and Toei animation, which compete with each other on a regular basis. 

Another major reason for the cash grabs being mostly hidden away from home video for a long while (resulting in them becoming pretty much forgotten outside of Thailand, but that’s mostly due to murky legal reasons), is that many if not all of them are fairly blatant knockoffs of Anime shows and the like. Also not helping is that the Thai entertainment industry is known for being very corrupt, as with others from the rest of Southeast Asia. 

Sunday 17 April 2022

A brief TIGA report

TIGA entertainment, aka Thailand’s own equivalent to Video Brinquedo as well as both Ocean Studios and Crunchyroll, is one of the country’s fastest evolving entertainment companies.

Frankly, what’s now TIGA entertainment’s domestic (albeit Made In Thailand) animation division was first known as GMA Toons; which is another one of Thailand’s entertainment companies with a decent amount of international potential. 

Overall, despite its notorious publicity and labour rights violations (along with the somewhat less blatant IP and merchandising violations) being on par with that of many Indian films (of the 1930s to present) in general (along with fellow big bad flaws, such as its managers badly mistreating the animators below them, which partly results in highly off model cash grabs), some of its own creatives do learn a couple of complicated lessons from their friends, while also making (mostly affectionate) take thats at their own audience alienating era (which is the best known one to fellow foreigners like me); as a result, it’s still damn corrupt while not as legendary (in its memetic exploits) as Thailand’s all time most notorious entertainment company by far, Chaiyo Productions. 


Wednesday 13 April 2022

Jan of the Guyana Highlands: Characters

Characters who appear in Jan of the Guyana Highlands. 

Jan Neels: Jan Neels is the unlucky product of a marital violation between a platinum blonde Dutch bodice ripper from the Netherlands’ Fundamentalist Bible Belt and a deaf-blind senior woman from a rather screwed up Amerindian family in the Guyana-Brazil-Venezuela border. Said deaf-blind woman grew up with the Guyana highlands jungle animals, just after running away from the horrid neglect of her family. As indicated by his complicated background, it’s fairly likely that he is a chest pounding half Pemon ginger with green eyes. 

Cordelia Adams: The bubbly future jungle nurse of the Guyana shield frontier. 

Gemma Kimana Andrews: Cordelia’s tomboyish friend. 

Korkan: A dragon-like elf man. 

Ramona: Ramona is the Loud and Messy mannered mermaid princess of a defunct kingdom, who happens to be the best friend of Jan Neels. 

The Anti Villains 

Lon Bracken: 

Tory Neels: 




Saturday 9 April 2022

Mr Mitsuaki Suzuki

Mitsuaki Suzuki was a little known manga artist who lived from 1936 to 2004. He is known primarily for a ton of relatively obscure mangas based on Japanese folktales, as well as being the creator of Super Detective Momoko and Super Mimiko, two characters who have a few references in Tumblr’s Maho no Manga site, even though they’re otherwise not magical girls. 

Friday 1 April 2022

The Metropolis Quintet

Two Tezuka versions, two Harbou works, and a single Madhouse film. 

As both the movie screenplay and its literary source material will become copyright free in 2025 for most nations, the flexibility of Metropolis as a story is remarkably well proven for the internet age.