Cool Thing: Mācuahuitls!

Theme: Axolotl - The Veils

I borrowed the background from my own WIP comic page. The actual māc is from tochtliwear.com.

Fatsoes with beard strips artfully covering their double chins have argued since the internet began about which sword is teh epicest. Typically their conclusion is the Japanese katana (because they're weebs) or some manner of rapier, but they're all wrong because swords, like fedoras and trenchcoats, are only good for looking cool, thus owned exclusively by those in deficit of cool, thus making them lame (I have a trenchcoat, but I'm the exception. Shut up).

But if having weapons from the Middle Ages were still actually cool, the most aesthetic of them all would be one that's not very good at all, actually. For the Aztecs, that most /fa/ of civilisations, never quite figured out things like steel or iron or bronze, but had a lot of shiny black volcanic rock lying around, which they creatively jammed into the edges of flat wooden clubs, which made for the best-looking weapon of the day. Sure, the mācuahuitl was no match for Spanish steel, on account of it had all the deft manoeuvrability of a cricket bat, but its obsidian blades were ridiculously sharp, to the point that Spanish eyewitness accounts plausibly claimed it could behead an horse with one stroke, raising the whimsical thought that Tom used one offscreen in The Godfather.

Since the purpose of Mesoamerican warfare was moreso to capture victims for sacrifice than to kill them upon the field of battle (in fact Mexica-Tenochtitlán would frequently declare a xōchiyāōyōtl, or flower war, with some hapless neighbour for this express purpose. They did this so often with Tlaxcala that it largely motivated the Tlaxcalteca to team up with the Spanish when they could simply have killed them following La Noche Triste), you only gained points toward ennoblement as a cuāuhocēlōtl if you brought your opponents back alive. This was much more challenging than actually merking them with your equine-decapitatory big club of glass blades, meaning, paradoxically, that the culture who fought without metallurgic weapons practiced the most metal form of combat.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Phantom of the Opera!

Theme: Five Cellars Below - Blitzkid

SPOYLORZ

"Is there a leak in here, or are you just glad to see me?" - actual dialogue.

Before it was a popular West End musical, The Phantom of the Opera was a novel of no small Frenchness. In between, however, it was chiefly known as Lon Chaney's most celebrated silentkino, which is still the best version of it of all. Like your humble blôggueriste, our titular protagonist just wants to be loved by the qt3.14 opera singer and can't understand why she can't look past my hideous countenance and rat-infested subterranean lair to see the sensitive young elderly millennial within, Lacey.

This is my go-to opener at speed dating.

While most horror literally-mes are low-functioning specials like Jason Voorhees and Leatherface, our Erik is a genius composer, much like me with my poasts, not to say engineer, whose labyrinthine cellars are bedecked with deathtraps of proto-James Bond villain scope and vision, which brilliantly serve to trip up our bumbling would-be Captains Save-A-Hoe but, alas, are not quite equal to preventing the enormous lynch mob that rampages through his tunnels at the end.

Just once I'd like to be in the mob instead of chased by it.

For the original ending followed the book in having Christine make out with /ourboi/, thus rendering him fakecel and redeeming him in the moral calculus of, I guess, those "reylo" fat chicks(?), IDK. Fortunately test audiences said "fuck that" (verbatim) so we got a much more realistic and satisfying ending in which the uggo patrol savagely beats him to death and dumps his mangled carcass in the Seine.

Average 1925 test audience member (colourised).

Naturally the great joy of this centenarian kinematographeme lies in its grandiose sets and gothic imagery. Setpieces of note include the chandelier attack and masked ball, but Chaney's makeup effects have garnered even greater notoriety, to the point where even if you are a blind homeless man in Papua New Guinea you will have seen his iconic Phantom face at some point, totally ruining the scene in which Christine just has to take off his mask because she can't decide whether she's horrified or wet af for him until she sees, which is hilarious, but at the time the hitherto-unspoilered reveal was said to send shockwaves of fainting anxiety throughout the 1920s audience. Of course, the same was said of later horror movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein and The Exorcist, so take it with a grain of salt, but I like to imagine /ourboi/ scared the hoes fr fr.

Remember: a wide berth is the same as aura.

Supermarionation Tuesdays: Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons!

Theme: The Eve of the War - Chris Brookes

It's been a while since we checked in with Supermarionation, partly because I'm still lethargically rewatching Thunderbirds in between drawing stacked chicks fighting Chinese-Incan skeletons and treating my elderly neighbours to the Kubrick stare from my window, but time and my ƃl¢gg wait for no man, so let's skip ahead to the DARKEST and EDGIEST entry in the whole puppet cycle: Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons!!!1

Holy shit, Gerry.

The year is 2068. Earth has a single government and the first manned expedition to Mars is now underway, led by Captain Black, who is on the Spectrum. The Spectrum is Earth's comically understaffed counterintelligence agency, whose elite agents are colour-coded and go by Captain [insert colour], except for Lieutenant Green and Colonel White. They also have a jet fighter squadron crewed by supermodels known as the Angels, and they all live together on a floating cloud base.

I love their see-through helmets so you can appreciate the time they put into their hair.

While this likely isn't really any sillier than the arrangements in previous series, Captain Scarlet generally has a more srs bsns tone and the puppets are more realistically proportioned, so it seems moar silly by contrast, but none of this occurred to Colonel White, because he's on the Spectrum.

You have to be a colonel to get a chair with a back to it. Lower ranking officers sit awkwardly on little bar stools.

Anyway, on Mars, Captain Black encounters a mysteeeriously glowing city populated/haunted by the disembodied(?) Mysterons, so named because they are very mysteeerious. If they have any corporeal form, it's never seen, and their presence is indicated only by two little glowing circles, like this:

"WooOOOoooOOOooo" - the Mysterons.

In a misunderstanding worthy of Tucker and Dale Vs Evil, the Mysterons turn a camera or telescope or something toward the Earthmen, which Captain Black takes for a weapon, so he fires first, blowing up their city. The Mysterons then rebuild the entire city in like five seconds with their mysteeerious powers, and declare eternal war against Earth in retaliation for our completely ineffectual attack. It's not even really clear why the Mysterons needed to use the machine Black mistook for a weapon to view the humans anyway, because throughout the show they seem to be able to see things happening as far away as Earth just fine, but the catch-all excuse is that they're so mysteeerious that trying to make sense of any of this is a waste of time, which is definitely true, but then, I'm on the Spectrum.

The Mysterons then somehow turn Captain Black into their permanent zombie agent, and briefly do likewise to Captain Scarlet, but he gets better and in the process becomes "indestructible", allowing the writers to kill him off and bring him back constantly. What, if any, limitations this regenerative ability has are about as unexplored as the extent of the Mysterons' powers. If he were cut down the middle, would both halves regenerate, leaving two Captains Scarlet? I don't know, and nor did Gerry Anderson, and I don't care, and nor did Gerry Anderson.

The Captain puts his feet up on the boss's desk. Like what are you gonna do, kill me?

Each week the Mysterons would come up with some new terrorist scheme to wreak havoc on Earth, which involved killing or destroying a person or object, often a vehicle, and then replicating it and using the fake and gay version to carry out an even more devastating attack somewhere else. Captain Scarlet and his colleagues on the Spectrum would attempt to stop the second attack, usually succeeding, although there were a few episodes where the Mysterons just won outright, and even when they failed, they still killed or destroyed the original target, so the stakes were noticeably higher than in other shows.

I hope they're alright.

Earth had very little recourse to strike back against the Mysterons, but there were a few episodes in which our heroes would learn something that would help even the odds, like Mysteron copies of people they had killed not showing up in photographs, like vampires. It was vaguely implied that the skinwalker people they created were actually inhabited/possessed by Mysterons, which presumably died when the body was destroyed, which was entirely deserved, especially since Earth arranged peace talks in one episode only for the Martians to betray them and keep waging their deranged vendetta anyway. I feel there's an important lesson here: if someone feels entitled to unlimited revenge against your civilian population, and won't be satisfied no matter what you do to try to please them, stop trying; they're just evil.

You Earthmen, A. Mysteron, pub. 2068 (colourised).

There are some pretty striking stylistic elements in Captain Scarlet, like the signature transition that quick-cuts back and forth between one scene and the next to the beat of a musical motif, sometimes interspersed with the logo of the Spectrum:

No, not that one. This one:

You can definitely appreciate the team pushing the boundaries of the format. There's a lot less intentional humour than in Fireball XL5 or Stingray, and the opening titles seem to evoke the spy thriller and even horror genres. If Scarlet is only a partially successful variation on a theme, the scope of the ambition behind it easily absolves it of its odd bum note. Just like previous shows, Scarlet ended with a fake-out dream sequence episode in which they got to blow up all their sets and a clip show, but no real resolution to the central conflict, meaning it continues to this day, so pour one out for all our brave lads on the Spectrum.