Wow, talk about some great music! Okay, the merits of Taylor Swift’s tunes may be arguable, but hearing a couple of characters perform “Shake It Off” in Sing got me hooked on this one. It is the most recent song on the whole list. Hmm, that could be taken as a commentary on a lot of modern music, could it not, readers?
Have fun dancing to the beat – and don’t forget to “Shake It Off”!
Here are some more “oldies but goodies” for you to enjoy, readers! Is it just me, or is this stuff better than a lot of the newer music being produced by a lot of companies today?
Don’t get me wrong – I like several new artists very, very much. But they’re few and far between; music like this just strikes a better chord with me. (Pun intended, more or less.) There’s just something about these songs that makes them superior to a lot of the new noise being created now, in my opinion.
Anyway, here are some “retro” tunes to brighten your day, readers. Enjoy!
The Mithril Guardian
All Out of Love – Air Supply
Making Love Out of Nothing at All – Air Supply
It’s All Been Done – Barenaked Ladies
Better Not Look Down – BB King
The Tide Is High – Blondie
One Way or Another – Blondie
You’ve Made Me So Very Happy – Blood, Sweat, & Tears
Yes, I saw the film Mamma Mia! No, that is not where I first heard ABBA. Did you know ABBA was offered about a billion dollars to go on tour again, but they all turned the offer down? Talk about class!
Want to know something else interesting? Not one member of ABBA could speak English when they were originally performing. They memorized and sang the words for their songs, but they did not actually understand English. You would never know that when you heard them perform, though! 🙂
Okay, history lesson over. Go have fun thanking ABBA for the music!
Every child is influenced by the entertainment they are shown. I am fortunate in that I saw many Disney movies as a child. I do not like every Disney movie out there, but most of them are hard to dislike. After all, Walt Disney was not in the habit of writing trash. He was one of those rare entertainers who earned money as a reward for telling a good story, not telling any old story just to make a dollar. *Sigh.* We could use a few more storytellers like that these days!
Anyway, readers, here are some more Disney songs which I would like to share with you. I hope you enjoy them! After all, it’s…
“A Whole New World!”
The Mithril Guardian
Brave
Touch the Sky
Aladdin
Arabian Nights
One Jump Ahead
Friend Like Me
Prince Ali
A Whole New World
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
I’m Wishing
A Smile and a Song
Whistle While You Work
Heigh-Ho!
Scrub in the Tub
The Dance in the Dwarfs’ Cottage
Robin Hood
Ooo De Lally
Love Goes On
A Pox on that Phony King of England
Not In Nottingham
The Jungle Book
Elephant Patrol
Bare Necessities
I Want to Be Like You
That’s What Friends Are For
Mulan
You’ll Bring Honor to Us All
Reflection
I’ll Make a Man Out of You
A Girl Worth Fighting For
True to Your Heart
The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride
We Are One
Upendi
Not One of Us
Love Will Find A Way
(I know it’s not technically a Disney movie, but they are the ones who translated it into English, so….)
Years ago, I met a group practicing for a play. It was a Gilbert and Sullivan play, but I did not know that at the time. I enjoyed the singing and the lyrics, and one of the friends with me at the time said that I had to see The Pirates of Penzance.
I was more amenable to the idea than I might normally have been. There was something in the practice session that hinted at a great story worth seeing, and so I readily agreed to watch a film of the play.
A film copy of the play was found soon after. Starring Kevin Kline, Rex Smith, Linda Ronstadt, Angela Lansbury, George Rose, and several others, it promised to be a great deal of fun. And that, I soon discovered, was the understatement of the year. As the story started I began to smile. Within five minutes I was choking on giggles. In ten, I was laughing out loud.
For those of you who do not know, Gilbert and Sullivan were two playwrights who wrote comedies in the late nineteenth century. Both were knighted and neither of them could stand the other. They each had aspirations to be the greatest in their respective fields and this meant that neither of them wanted to write comedies, especially if it meant they had to work together all the time. This was in spite of the fact that they were making a veritable killing at this work. The weary duo ended their partnership some time before they died, to the dismay of their fans. Sullivan, who was the younger, died first.
The Pirates of Penzance is one of their best known plays, along with H. M. S. Pinafore and The Mikado. In Penzance we are introduced to a Pirate King (Kevin Kline) and his scurvy crew. The crew is having a celebration for their young apprentice, Frederic (Rex Smith), who turns twenty-two today and thus ends his indentured servitude to them. How did Frederic become indentured to a pirate gang?
It turns out that his nurse, Ruth (Angela Lansbury), misheard Frederic’s father when he gave her a commission. Frederic’s father wanted his son apprenticed to a pilot, but Ruth misheard him and thought he said pirate. So she accidentally indentured eight year old Frederic to the Pirate King’s crew!
Frederic does not hold this misunderstanding against Ruth – it is an easy mistake to make, after all. He has come to know the pirates aboard the ship over the years and likes them all individually. But the fact is that they are pirates, the scourge of the sea, the plague of merchantmen, the locusts of seaports. And so in a general way Frederic hates the pirates he grew up with as the vilest scum of the Earth. And in the abstract he cannot believe that he has been duty-bound to help them ply their terrible trade from the time he was eight years old.
The pirates do not hold this against him, though, since they cannot seem to “make piracy pay.” Frederic knows why this is; because they are orphans, the pirates give orphans a free pass. And word of this nobility on their part has gotten out. The last three ships they tried to take were all manned by orphans, so the pirates spared them.
If you are saying, “Yeah, right,” you would be correct. Frederic points out that everyone knows England does not recruit orphans to crew its merchantmen; they need men with families and titles to command the ships. But because the Pirates of Penzance are known to spare orphans, the crews for these ships pretended to be orphans in order to escape them.
Once the clock strikes noon, Frederic sets out from the pirate ship, taking Ruth with him. Ruth is an older lady by now, but she is the only woman Frederic has seen and known since he was eight. He expects to marry her, a prospect she very much likes, since otherwise she will die an old maid with no one to take care of her.
But on pulling up to an English beach, Frederic espies a group of girls his own age come to the waterside to have a little fun. Finding Ruth has lied to him about her age and beauty, he casts her off before going to see if one of these young ladies will marry him.
His attempt almost ends in disaster. But one of the girls, Mabel (Linda Ronstadt), appears on the scene before all hope is lost in the young man’s heart. It seems that she lagged behind the other girls and only caught up with them to hear Frederic’s entreaty for a wife. She tells him to “take her heart,” and he is quite happy to do so…
Then the Pirates show up, and the fun kicks into high gear!
There is another version of The Pirates of Penzance which is worth a viewing as well. This one was performed in New York with Patricia Routledge, the lead actress in the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, portraying Ruth. If you ever saw her as Hyacinth ‘Bucket’ Bouquet and thought she had a terrible voice, you will be surprised to hear her singing here. She pulled a fast one on those of us who watched Keeping Up Appearances, I can tell you!
We all need a laugh every once in a while. It literally adds years to our lives. The songs below are some of the funniest I have ever heard, so I am recommending them to you, readers. Here’s hoping you are rolling on the floor laughing by the time you finish this post!
This post has an odd assortment of songs included. Below you will find Enya songs rubbing elbows with Skillet tunes and one song by Hillary Scott. Despite the strangeness of this collection, I hope you enjoy at least a couple of the songs. If you do, then my work here is done.
‘Til next time!
The Mithril Guardian
The Humming by Enya
Echoes In Rain by Enya
So I Could Find My Way by Enya
Dark Sky Island by Enya
Aniron by Enya
(The theme for Aragorn and Arwen, The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring.)
Welcome back to the wonderful world of Zi, readers! This Spotlight! post is focused once again on a zoid from that magnificent planet in the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy. This zoid, however, is not used in combat – unless combat is offered to its pilot. It is a transport zoid.
This is the Gustav. Before we go any further, you pronounce it ‘Gus-tav,’ not ‘Goos-tav.’ The latter is how you enunciate the Scandinavian name, but it is NOT how you say the name of this zoid!!!
Another way to remember the difference is, “Must have Gustav.” Must – Gust. Have – Tav. Get it? Great!
All right, now to the zoid’s specs! The first Gustav of any import was the one Van Flyheight’s friend Moonbay piloted throughout Zoids: Chaotic Century. The zoid is based on a snail and so it is not very fast, especially when it is hauling trailers. I have never seen a Gustav hauling more than two trailers; it appears that two is the limit.
You can carry almost anything on the trailer(s), from another zoid to a container full of ammunition. The armor on the Gustav is what weighs the transport down. While it protects the zoid and the pilot against most missiles and ammunition, the fact is that it weighs several tons! This is the factor which lowers the zoid’s speed the most. The trailers and their cargo add to the weight.
These are the features which relegate the Gustav to transport status and which make it a less-than-optimal combat zoid. Nevertheless, the zoid can enter battle zones. The pilot just has to know what the zoid can and cannot handle as well as think quickly in a combat or high-adrenaline situation. Moonbay was capable of all of this and then some. That girl, as Irvine was wont to say, could “take care of herself in dangerous situations.” Sometimes it seemed that “dangerous situations” were where she functioned best!
That green antenna which you see projecting from behind the cockpit of the zoid is a sensor array. It allows the Gustav to scan the surrounding area, projecting what it sees to the cockpit. If this antenna is shot off, then the pilot for the Gustav loses scanning and visual capabilities throughout much of the cockpit.
The antennae extending from the non-existent mouth of the Gustav are said in one profile to be mine detectors. I never saw them used as such in Chaotic Century or any following series, but the name makes sense. When Moonbay lost her primary antenna in one episode, she still had partially functioning scanners in her cockpit. So it seems reasonable to conclude that these other antennae serve as some sort of sensory units for the zoid, mine detecting being one of the purposes which they can be tuned to perform.
Moonbay’s Gustav also came equipped with a hidden double barrel cannon, positioned below the antenna and above the cockpit. The rounds were not high yield and would not do much damage to bigger, predator-based zoids. But anything the size of the Gustav that was also lightly armored would not fare well against this intrepid little cannon. It was hidden behind one of the green “joints” keeping the Gustav’s “shell” together, and Moonbay did not use it all the time. But when she used it, she made her shots count!
Unlike most other zoids, the Gustav does not make sounds like a real animal. This is doubtless because snails in real life do not make any noise. They simply slide along the ground. The most noise I recall hearing from a Gustav was the whirring of its wheels.
This means, obviously, that despite being based on the snail the Gustav does not slide like one. It is instead propelled by two large wheels under both sides of its shell, with two or perhaps four smaller wheels beneath the cockpit. In spite of its low speed, the Gustav can be relatively quick in tight spaces. Moonbay, a former professional racer, was able to coax quite a bit of nimbleness out of her Gustav when fighting within tight quarters.
The cockpit for the Gustav is beneath the orange canopy you see on its head. It can seat up to six people, maybe eight in a pinch. The rear seat is a bench seat; the forward seats are bucket seats. The controls for the Gustav can be moved from one of these seats to the next via a track system in the “dashboard” of the cockpit. This means that the pilot of the Gustav need not remain confined to one particular seat. In fact, there seems to be no law confining a Gustav pilot to the left or right front seat. Moonbay is seen in either of the front bucket seats of the Gustav during Chaotic Century’s run. She prefers neither the left nor the right seat to the other, switching between the two for no apparent reason every episode or so.
Gustav cockpits are not reinforced, as the rest of the zoid is. Why I cannot say; I only know that one well-placed shot – especially from a high-yield round at a rather short distance – will put a hole in the cockpit or obliterate it altogether. This is something Gustav pilots have to keep in mind, though even then it is not always possible to avoid getting hit.
Most Gustavs have armor that is painted grey/silver. The colors of their cockpits are not always the standard orange; Gustav cockpits within all the Zoids’ television series have been orange, green, and blue. Other colors are likely available as well.
The one Gustav we saw which had a unique armor paint scheme was Moonbay’s. This Gustav was fuchsia, a flamboyant color which grabbed the eye and made the transport stand out from the crowd. Moonbay was like that, too. The zoid’s coloration was just another way that she made people sit up and notice her.
Moonbay’s Gustav retained this color until the second half of Chaotic Century, when she used her zoid to protect Van’s damaged Blade Liger. This resulted in an armor patch for the Gustav which was painted white. To those accustomed to the previous color of the armor, the contrast seemed a bit blinding.
Why did Moonbay leave the patch white instead of having it repainted? It was never brought up in the series, but perhaps it was something she considered a badge of honor. She may have kept the patch white the same way a warrior bears an old scar. Having defended Van when he was down, she might have decided that the difference in color could stand as a testament to the strength of their friendship.
Or maybe she just could not afford to get the patch painted. Knowing Moonbay, though, I seriously doubt that theory. She is an expert at making money, by hook or by crook. It is impossible to believe she could not find a way to acquire enough money to paint the patch.
While it is not confirmed, a Gustav that appears to be Moonbay’s – white patch and all – is noticeable within the background of one of the last New Century Zero episodes. It is a brief glimpse which is never explained, but it is nice to think that some heir of Moonbay’s has kept the zoid down through the centuries.
This is not the only time a Zoids’ series has given a direct nod to a previous one; Fuzors and Genesis have zoids from both Chaotic Century and New Century Zero in them. But there is never an explanation of how they come into the series, nor is there a mention of who their previous pilots were. The palpable closeness between Chaotic Century and New Century Zero, however, makes it easy to think how and why Moonbay’s Gustav ended up in Bit’s era. No other hints are truly necessary.
Before signing off, readers, I would like to present you with one last tidbit related to the Gustav. Moonbay liked to sing during Chaotic Century, regardless of the fact that she never could sing on-key. It was often implied that her singing irritated her traveling companions to no end. But I found that her voice tends to grow on you after a while. Though she always sang slightly off-key, I find myself belting out the lines of her song every now and again.
Below is a video of Moonbay’s full-length debut as a singer. Here she is singing her own song – “I Am a Transporter of the Wasteland” – as she pilots the Gustav in the episode Jump, Zeke! :
I hope you liked it at least a little, readers. For myself, I enjoy hearing and singing this song, since it makes me feel like a “transporter of the wild wasteland” myself!
This is one of my favorite songs. It comes from An American Tail IV: The Mystery of the Manhattan Night Monster. The film, by Universal Studios, is also one of my favorites. It is a reminder that “if we don’t fight for what’s right” then “who will?”
The video below contains the full song, but the images are fan-made by the same person who made the video. There is no other video yet on the Internet which records the song. Not that I can find, anyway.
Enjoy!
The Mithril Guardian
Lyrics for “Who Will?”
Nellie: If you don’t lend a hand
When a hand needs lending
Who will?
–
Fievel: If you don’t help your friends
When they need befriending
Who will?
When nothing goes right
And everything’s wrong…
When the days are too cold,
And the nights are too long?
–
Nellie: If you won’t be there to stand and be strong…
Nellie & Fievel: Who will?
–
Tony: If you don’t risk your neck
When a risk needs takin’ –
Who will?
If you don’t break the rules
When the rules need breakin’ –
Who will?
You’ve gotta be tough!
–
Nellie: And forthright and square!
–
Tiger: You can’t hide your head,
And pretend you’re not there!
–
Fievel: If we don’t fight for what’s right and what’s fair…
Who will?
–
Nellie: Everyone has a hero, hiding deep inside
Waiting to appear…
But there is no time left to hide!
The moment is now, the place is here!
–
Tony: Who will risk life and limb,
Just to help a stranger?
I will!
–
Fievel: Who will walk through the dark
Even though there’s danger?
I will!
Who’ll stay by your side?
–
Tony: And take up the cause?
–
Tiger: Who’ll give you his strength, his heart, and his paws?
This inspired parody was written by masterleiaofasgard for Captain America: Civil War. I never even thought to put this song to the moment Steve and Sharon kissed – but Leia did! A master indeed, you cannot fail to enjoy her fun, witty parody, readers!
Okay, this was definitely one of my favorite scenes in the movie, and this song was the first thing to come to mind, so I thought I’d do a Civil War parody of it. I hope you enjoy. 😉
*Steve and Sharon are kissing. Sam and Bucky watch from the car*
Sam: I can see what’s happening…
Bucky: What?
Sam: And they don’t have a clue…
Bucky: Who?
Sam: They’ll fall in love, and here’s the bottom line, our trio’s down to two.
Bucky: Oh, no!
Sam: The calming beams of daylight
There’s magic everywhere
And with all this romantic atmosphere
Disaster’s in the air.
Bucky: Can you feel the love tonight,
The peace the morning brings
Sam: Wait, excuse me?
Bucky: *kicks Sam’s seat* The world, for once, in perfect harmony
Thoughts on the Edge of Forever 