I am totally blown away by the sheer awesomeness of this incredible trailer for “Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie“. This is some kind of huge Ultraman movie featuring many characters from the entire scope of the 40+ years of the Japanese franchise. Being around for so long, the Ultraman mythology has become quite complex, and much of the information about it hasn’t always been easily accessible in English. I know a fair bit about it from my own reasearch but nowhere close to everything. I don’t really recognize everything going on in this trailer, but I know enough to be able to tell that whatever is going on here, it’s BIG!

WOW!
It’s like they took all the charm and innocence of the classic 60’s Ultraman style, and rather then redesign and try to make it hip, they just let it be what it should be and instead enhanced the presentation with incredible special effects and cinematography. The result is a sumptuous visual feast of Japanese Tokusatsu Superhero excellence!

There’s an Evil Ultraman! Not a clone or a fake, a real new evil Ultra character who controls an army of monsters. All the good Ultras have to stop him! Some of them have capes, because they are awesome! But then some of them go back to their human form! Other humans discover the Ultraman world! That guy at the end is the human form of a 90’s era Ultra from a different continuity! So much Ultra-stuff to digest!

Hopefully, with this level of quality, they can get the ball rolling again on more Ultraman material being released in the English speaking world. I really want to see this! But just from watching this trailer I feel like I will have to watch about a 100 billion Ultraman episodes to really appreciate the whole thing. So I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do.

Sayonara.

It’s been about 2 weeks since I put forth the challenge to the former art student known Stupid Samurai, giving him the perfect opportunity to focus his attacks and insults in a place specially designed for just such a thing. Plenty of time for him to grow some guts, load his ammo, and come at me with his greatest attack yet. I am not at all surprised that he decided to remain a coward, even though it was his idea to sign up for my largely inactive message board in the first place (which he completely failed at, by the way).

Look, I talk a big game, but I’ve got no delusions about who I am or what I do. I am the first to admit that my artwork isn’t perfect, and I have had a number of students who I tried to teach but the lessons just wouldn’t stick. That’s life. If somebody has a problem with that, and they want to confront me about it, fine. Do it! But is it to much to ask those people to do that the right way? To stand up for your own words with an actual name and e-mail address? To say your point without resorting to disgusting insults? To actually make the attempt to use proper spelling and grammar?

Well, what would be the fun in that, right?

But still, why is it that 99% of the people who have a problem with me refuse to do these things? What does that say about them? If they can’t be bothered to put forth the small amount of effort to express themselves properly, why should I be bothered by what they say?

The Stupid Samurai (it is still amuses me how he refers to himself that way) is just another in a long line of these cowards. Even when given the chance to debate with me, to validate what he says, he would rather hide behind a wall and throw rocks. Not a very samurai-like thing to do, leaving the “stupid” as the only accurate part of his name. And because he hides behind that wall, the rocks he throws always miss. He’s got no aim. He’ll never hit me, because not only are the things he says crude and relatively baseless, but also because the content of his character invalidates anything he says.

Oh yeah, plus the fact that he’s saying all these things about me based on what happened 6 years ago as if it’s still relevant. And he calls me pathetic? Ha!

So this is the final word I have on the sad tale of the Stupid Samurai. It’s too bad, because I would really have enjoyed the chance to have a conversation with someone who hates me this much. It could have been an enlightening experience, and perhaps I could have learned something. But hey, if he would like to prove me wrong, then he should know that the offer is still on the table. I’m sure that he finds all this amusing in his twisted, jumbled logic, what with his obnoxious overuse of terms like “lmao“, but I’m serious about it. If he really means what he says, he’ll post on my board and I’ll listen to him.

But he probably won’t. Because he sucks. lmao.

Sayonara.

Today is September 9, 2009.

09/09/09

999

You probably see where I’m going with this. So, let us take this day to celebrate one of the greatest anime series of all time!

Galaxy Express 999 is one of the coolest concepts in all of classic anime. It’s about space ships that look like trains, and one of them can take you away to a place where you will become immortal. However, the immortals are actually robots who lost their humanity in the process.

One day I will have to sit down and start watching all 100+ episodes, but I’ve always loved the idea, as well as the soul-stirring theme song performed by the legendary Isao Sasaki, the Frank Sinatra of Anime music.

This is just one of those endearing songs that everyone knows, and so it’s been covered many times over the years. My favorite version thus far is this awesome heavy rock ballad by Animetal.

You can watch the entire Galaxy Express 999 TV series on Crunchyroll.com, but you probably won’t get through it all in one day!

I couldn’t believe it, but it’s true. This weekend I got an e-mail from a familiar old enemy. Yes, the disgruntled former student who originally was identified only as “samurai_blade_60“, but has since come to be known the world over as the Stupid Samurai, has made a new appearance with a completely unprovoked and irrational attack. This website has been largely inactive for a long time and it’s been ages since I last got a hate mail. I never would have guessed at this time that I’d get a repeat customer out of the blue like this!

The Stupid Samurai was made famous by a little article I wrote 6 years ago called “Stupid People HATE Ninjatron“, where I publicly responded to some of the hate mail I had gotten at the time. As a refresher, here is that original text from years ago, presented again in a completely unedited form.

i dont really your art you rely to much on style pluse you think your japanese but your not first of all its good you shaved your head bald but you think that makes you a monk. any if you taught more about the anime structure then every one would be good at it. but you think oh they’ll learn how to draw anime the first class. then you tell us yo draw chibi’s thats cool and all but how the heck do you draw a chibi in perspective and you should teach the class how to draw male and female anime character but comic book masters only focus’s on male. and last but not least teach hte class how to draw muscles.PS: your the GAIJIN!!!!

Wow, it blows my mind trying to read that even today.

The point seems to be that he took my how to draw anime classes at the now defunct Comic Book Masters drawing school and did not enjoy the experience. Now, based on the utter incoherency of this text and complete disregard for spelling and grammar, it was pretty clear at the time that this Samurai was, shall we say, a little slow. Fair enough. But taking 6 years to respond? That’s something else!

But, perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps in the past 6 years, the Stupid Samurai had taken the time to examine himself, to become more educated and articulate, and to gain a more mature mind set. Here is a small sample of what he had to say to me in a recent correspondence. Once again, this is completely unedited. You be the judge.

You may remember me sending you a message a few years back, one in which you attached a faggy ass picture titled stupid samurai. If you don’t remember to bad because you were the joke of the year at comic book masters back then. I guess it’s childish to insult you once more, but what the hell your face annoys me. Stop trying to be asian, seriously I can not stress this enough, The asian community is pretty close to slicing off you egg rolls with a samurai sword. The bandana has got to go you like ***** Axel rose!

Hmm, it’s a little easier to read, so I’ll give him that much. But in these past 6 years, he has clearly become a very angry youth! He even admits that it’s childish to insult me, and then litters the entire message with vile, disgusting, childish insults, completely baseless and without any point behind them. And he apparently speaks for the entire Asian community as well, though I am sure that the Asian community would much prefer to be referred to with a capital A in Asian, seeing as it’s a continent and all. Not sure what Axel Rose has to do with any of this, but I’m pretty sure he’s not Asian so I’m confused as to the direction of where this is all going.

I’m not going to post it all here, but basically everything he’s sent me thus far is nothing but insults. The jist of it being that I’m a bad artist, a bad teacher, that I want to be Asian, and that these things must mean that I’m gay, apparently. News to me on those last two, but whatever. All this anger is based on things that happened more than 6 years ago, and I have not had any contact with him since. Pretty sad, really. I’m sure he thinks he has an actual point, but he hasn’t expressed it to me as of yet. So I am left to wonder just what brought on this unprovoked attack and just what is he trying to accomplish with it?

Anyway, he closes by saying not to bother responding to the e-mail because the address he used is fake, and I should do it on my website should I chose to respond, but that he doubts I will. Well, how’s that for courage! Yet another in the legions of morons who act like tough guys on the Internet but can’t be bothered to stand behind their words with a proper e-mail address. Well, I’m used to that. Besides, as if I would ever ignore a new message from one of my favorite flamers ever!

So, presented here to all is my official response to The Stupid Samurai.

Dear Stupid Samurai.

Below is my official response to your comments from this past weekend.

Bite me.

Regards,

Ninjatron.

Short, simple, clear, and concise.

That’s all I really need to say to him right now. I’ve got no interest in defending myself against baseless insults made by someone like this. If he doesn’t like my artwork or teaching, then that’s fine. Chances are that he hasn’t seen anything I’ve done in the past 6 years, so whatever. It’s his opinion, and he’s entitled to it. It’s a subjective opinion, so it doesn’t bother me. Since he presents his opinion in a crude, crass, ill informed and insulting way, my opinion is that he’s an idiot. But my opinion is not subjective, because it is a fact that his usage of spelling and grammar is pathetic. If he were not an idiot, he’d have at least attempted to spell properly and would have proved his point so without resorting to childish insults. And so, based on the materials that he himself provided to me, I have no choice but to form the opinion that his opinion is garbage.

But wait, there’s more!

It seems our little Samurai is not content to just send his insults though e-mail. Not only has he also taken the fight to my guestbook, but he’s got his sights set on my message board as well! The message board hasn’t gotten a new post in over a year now, but that hasn’t stopped the Samurai from registering for an account. He’s actually using the game “Stupid samurai”, which amuses me greatly. Well, he’s attempting to, anyway. You see, in order to register for a message board, you must first have a valid, working e-mail address. The Stupid one has certainly lived up to his name by trying to sign up using the same e-mail address he said was fake. Silly Samurai, everyone knows you need a real e-mail to use a message board! You fail at Internet!

However, even though I might be asking for trouble, I fully encourage Stupid Samurai, all of his like-minded friends, and anyone else who has a problem with me, to sign up for the message board so that we may have a conversation about how terrible I really am. In fact, I have taken the liberty of creating a brand new forum: The Anti-Ninjatron Clan! This is a forum especially for insulting me. This way, you can say what you like, I’ll have a chance to respond, and everyone can enjoy the proceedings. Anything goes in there! Who knows, maybe I’ll agree with you! Just be aware, the first post of the Anti-Ninjatron Clan is mine, and anyone else who posts there will have to top it if they even think they’ve got a chance at defeating me!

So there you have it, Samurai. This lowly Ninja has given you the perfect opportunity to attack me head on. Samurai code, no matter how stupid you may be, demands that you answer this challenge.

See you on the battlefield!

Sayonara.

So, as I was saying last time, this past week I was teaching a how to draw anime class as part of a special summer camp program for a kids’ art studio in Toronto. It was a long trek back and forth every day, and a few of the students were most certainly not on their best behavior, so it was quite an exhausting experience. Plus, it wasn’t just limited to me going in there and teaching. I also had to set aside time for the kids to have a snack, which I expected, but at the very last moment I was told that I also had to supervise the student’s lunch and walk them to the park. That was something of a surprise. I didn’t have a problem doing that, but still, I’m just an art teacher. Anyway, despite the student’s ages being much younger than I’d have liked to teach this material to, most of them actually did some really good artwork all things considered. Well, the ones who were well behaved did a good job. The ones who didn’t behave… not so much. Funny how that works, huh?

There was this one kid who was just the biggest pain. His mom brought him in on the first day and said that he loved stuff like Pokemon and that she had actually taken him to see Ponyo. He was the oldest student there and with all this in mind I figured that he’d be a good one, exactly the kind I like to teach. Boy was I wrong. This kid was incredibly obnoxious and clearly had some kind of attention problem, as he was always twitching, looking away, and interrupting everything with his own conversations. As the week wore on, he kept on yelling “Picklejinx” for no reason. When he was told to stop, he tried to find other ways of saying “Picklejinx” without actually saying it, including saying “Pumpkinjinx” or writing “Picklejinx” on a piece of paper. Before he left on the last day, I guess he figured there were no more rules, so he just kept on yelling “Picklejinx” over and over again. Now, was his artwork any good? Of course not. There was a definite improvement over the week, but he still refused to take the time and make the effort to do a good job. If he used all the energy he wasted being a brat on drawing instead, he’d have been much better for the experience. But no matter how much time I took to speak with him and demonstrate the techniques, he always went back to his old disruptive tricks. It’s too bad, but really, he’s got no one to blame but himself. Kind of reminds me of somebody else I know. But more on that some other time.

Anyway, I didn’t go right home after the last lesson on Friday. I headed straight for the convention center and got in line for Fan Expo! I enjoyed it this year. The convention is really expanding with a lot more corporate sponsorship. Kind of like San Diego but with 90% less Twilight! Some of the highlights for me included:

– Seeing the English dub of the recent Neon Genesis Evangelion re-make movie on a big screen with a huge audience of fans. It was a gooooooooooooood movie! I thoroughly enjoyed watching it there.

– Linda Hamilton and Bruce Campbell each had panels that I went to. Linda’s was very cool, informative, and funny, and Bruce basically insulted the audience at every turn and we all ate it up.

– The masquerade on Saturday was a lot of fun, with a totally excellent 1800’s steampunk style X-Men group stealing the show. Also there was a very funny Watchmen group that was “interrupted” by a guy with a “The End is Nigh” sign, causing Nite Owl to go insane using the audio from the Family Guy parody of Christian Bale chewing out the lighting guy. I almost choked with laughter.

– The TMNT 25th anniversary panel. This was the part of the whole convention that I was most looking forward to, and it didn’t disappoint. There was a loosely edited preview of an upcoming documentary about the Ninja Turtles and their fans, and it looked like a really exciting project from what I saw. There was also about 20 minutes of the upcoming “Turtles Forever” animated movie, where the modern animated Turtles meet the 80’s animated Turtles! It was AWESOME. I can’t wait to see the whole thing!

– I bought 6 wristbands, a few artbooks, and a Transformers Universe Ironhide, which I had been trying to get for months.

All in all it was a good time.

So, now that I’ve written all of this, I can move on to talking about other things. You see, this is very exciting, because someone from the past has returned! An infamous figure that I know you all remember!

Don’t you fret now, Mr. “Stupid Samurai“. I’m sure you understand that I needed to take care of all of this stuff for my blog first. I will get to you in due time. Look forward to it.

Sayonara.