Category: Evangelion

Only just recently, I dropped a post about impressions concerning Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0, You Can (NOT) Advance. There’s a lot to speculate on, and I’ve been poking around the internet for some decent reviews with mixed results:

A spoiler-less review that is a tad cursory, but gives you a good idea what to expect left me wanting a little more. A far more detailed review gives a lot deeper analysis of the characters, new and old, how they’ve changed, and the difference in tone between Rebuild and the original source material. I actually had to stop reading that one though, because I don’t want the story ruined for me.

…It does, however, put me in pain for wanting to see the original, despite the fact that they’re still in Kirksville! Damn. I never quite forget how much I like Eva, but sometimes I do get a reminder that proves to be annoyingly painful. So anyways, that’s all I’ve really got to report about 2.0. The real meat today concerns 1.0, which you might have thought was old news!

Au contaire! I went looking for the above Evangelion news (mainly, reviews of 2.0 which was released in late June) and some how stumbled upon this trailer:

[NOTE: I actually found it at the Apple Trailer Site for Evangelion 1.0, where it is available in high quality]

Imagine my surprise! I had not heard so much as a peep about a North American release, and I was beginning to give up on one. Turns out that I found this on July 3rd, and the official press release was only published on the second. Go me for keeping up with the times, for once. Anyways, Funimation was just releasing the English Language cast and director, and noted at the bottom that it would be in theaters this summer.

It looks like the English language cast from the series has come back, for the principles at least. I’m really excited that we’re going to get the film, and that it’ll be here as soon as this summer. The DVD can’t be far off, which is the real goal, for me at least. I heard that they just released the film in Japan again, but this time as a BluRay. It’s funny that I could care less about regular films in that high of quality, but I’m pretty curious to see what Eva in super-monster HD looks like.

There are no additional points of speculation, as I’ve already talked 1.0 to death, but the last thing I’ll encourage you to check out Funimation’s Events Page to see if Evangelion is playing near you. By some fluke of time, space, and luck, Evangelion 1.0 is showing in Boston on August 14, the day before I get on a plane to leave! I’m very, very excited, and already have my ticket, because I wouldn’t miss this for the world. Granted, I’ve already seen it once, but that was a grainy torrent back in the Summer of 2007, and I can barely remember even watching it, so this is well in order.

Anyways, I’ll report back after I see it in August, and give you the full run-down of my thoughts on what will undoubtedly be a fantastic film experience!

Another one of my long-time loves, Evangelion, is showing some signs of life these days. The new film comes out at the end of June, and in anticipation, Kaiyodo is releasing new toys! I have a weird sort of addiction to these figures, called Revoltech, but only the Eva ones, for some reason. The humanoid stuff they release is cool, but from shows I don’t care about. And the Macross stuff they put out is only in the robot mode, and that’s not really too fun to me if it doesn’t change back into a space-plane like it should.

Anyways:

Unit-01 Figure

They’re re-releasing Unit-01, AGAIN. This drives me crazy. This is nearly identical to 2007′s initial Rebuild line of toys which included Unit-01, Unit-00, and the Positron Rifle Set. So now they’re releasing yet ANOTHER iteration of this toy, with few updates, if any. The best I can tell from the photographs, the only new thing that comes with it is a second set of shoulder armor to totally replace the first (the first edition didn’t have this at all; the second only partially replaced them to expose the prog. knife.). These appear to hold a full progressive knife each, unlike the previous one, which only sported a faux knife handle. Cool, but I’m still angry that I might cave and buy Unit-01 for the third time.

OK, this is the part where I completely negate what I just said. The pictures seem to indicate that the jaw of the eva will be ARTICULATED, so it can just drop down to go all berserk. Nice. Now that might get me to purchase a third one.

Unit-02 Figure

Next up is what I was pretty excited for: Unit-02. Red’s my favorite color, and I always felt like Asuka’s eva had the best action sequences (See: 25′: Air). First impressions of ‘rebuilt’ Unit-02 come almost entirely from THE HORN. Man, check it out. It’s done the most justice by the profile pictures further down. So that’s just a near stylistic thing.

Next up, there’s a bunch of equipment that pertains to the aerial drop sequence. An entire shoulder-armor set is devoted to over-sized rocket boosters that would aid the Unit in descent. There are also another set of fore-arms that act as control surfaces, which I thought was a nice touch, and not immediately apparent.

The last part that I can’t figure out is how the progressive knife-holders factor in. Are the their own separate set of shoulder-armor, or inserts into a partially articulated that can open to accept to knives and their sheaths? Not sure on that one. Also, in terms of weapons, we have a CROSSBOW. The damn thing is nearly the length of the eva’s leg, and way longer than even the standard pallet gun (which is included, along with the axe). So I’m majorly pumped about Unit-02, and getting it for sure (as I passed on the End of Evangelion Movie Version, which was the first to feature the knife-in-the-shoulder-pylon thing that’s become a staple).

Prov. Unit-05 Figure

And this leaves us with what’s been termed ‘Provisional Unit-05′. While I’m initially nonplussed by the toy, I can’t really bring myself to be irritated with it just yet, as it is arguably the first NEW thing we’ve seen out of Rebuild. More or less until this point everything has been what we expected from the old series. Granted, it’s been sexed up a little, but mostly the same. Unit-05 was formerly one of the winged ‘Mass-Produced’ evas that served as the final instrument of SEELE. Anyways, no more!

In Rebuild, Unit-05 is this weird spider type thing with a drilling-lance apparatus on one arm, and a pincer claw for the other. What it does, I can’t tell. The arms look like something for mining, but the legs have the weird wheeled ends, which look damn near useless for moving the thing around, but I suspect that’s their function. The torso appears to be a standard eva, but that’s about the only familiar thing here. We speculate it’ll be piloted by Mari, the new girl pilot.

[The definition of "provisional" means "serving for the time being." Maybe Unit-05 is all goofy-as-shit because it was just intended to tide NERV over until the arrival of expected Units 03/04/06. After losing both 03 and 04, maybe they just wanted to roll something out to ensure there was still a Tokyo-3 to send 06 to. Hrm.]

Misc. Musings

I’m curious about how she’ll interact with the other pilots. Introducing her this early promises for some interesting reactions to what’s to come. There’s also the question of what she’ll be like. Just from the facial expressions and the pictures, she acts and dresses like she has Asuka’s confidence with a little less of the crazy. (We can only hope…) Seriously though, is she going to have deeply-seated issues with her past and parents? It seems unlikely, at least to me. Shinji and Asuka have suffered some pretty massive trauma’s in their life, and Rei… well that’s sortof a given.

How interesting would it be for Mari to show up and just completely be at a loss for how screwed up everyone is? A voice of reason to call them back from the brink of insanity. You could even do something where she slowly progresses to the point of the other children’s neurosis. I don’t know, I guess I’m just hoping she isn’t a cookie-cutter Marduk child. It’s so impossibly difficult to relate to the other kids because they act so irrationally, and so I’m holding out hope that she’s a “normal” counterpoint to the others. Sortof like Kaworu did at the 11th hour of the original series, but this time we’d get to fully explore that dynamic, plus we can be pretty sure Mari isn’t an Angel. Or is she?!

Speaking of which, Kaworu is also expected to play a bigger role in the second film, “You Can (Not) Advance,” I’m personally suspecting under the auspices of piloting Unit-06, which has been reference as “coming down from the moon,” the location we found Kaworu and SEELE at the close of “You Are (Not) Alone.” Rounding out the roster would the tragic Unit-03, most likely piloted by Toji Suzuhara as in the original series.

Unit-03 and Unit-04 Figures?

I think Kaiyodo plans to release a Revoltech of him as well, indicated by their website but not included in the sites I found featuring the other three.

I had Google translate the page, and suddenly I’m worried. It says something about this being a special for bookstores?! Damn. As near as I can tell it’s just Unit-03, but it comes with “extension parts”, which I would take to mean the extra-long arms for when it goes berserk. It also, like Unit-01 has the articulated jaw. I really would like this guy; I’d had for it to be another MP EVA w/ Lance ordeal (there was a special edition mp eva that came with the Lance, the only revoltech figure to include it this far; I’ve failed to get it, much to my ire).

Which still begs the question: Unit-04? Probably going to blow up again in Nevada, this would seem to indicate. Pitty. I wonder if they’ll release a version of it anyways like they did last time, fans for this stuff being who they are. Hell, I’d buy it. As if you needed to be told that after reading this entry.

I’m really, really pumped for these figures to start coming in, and even more excited for the chance to start seeing actual footage of the film, which hits Japanese theaters June 27. For the love of all that is good, someone needs to leak a decent, subtitled copy within a few months. The fact that there is still no English-region distribution of 2007′s “You Are (Not) Alone” is nothing short of… well I guess just irritating.

Speaking of irritating, I read that Matt Greenfield is still running his mouth about the Live Action EVA project. I wish he’d shut up until he has a director and a studio. He just gets everyone riled up and then disappointed. Don’t even get me started on Amy Grant.

So that’s our quasi-regular eva-tastic update.

Oh! Almost forgot to post the trailer:

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Things I dislike:

1. Burning the HELL out of the roof of my mouth… on poorly-warmed Pizza Rolls
2. PIZZA ROLLS. They’re disgusting, and impossible to properly warm.
3. Pre-Finals stress inevitably morphing into Actual-Finals stress
4. Everyone taking up all the computer labs because they put their work off ’til the last week of class
5. Not getting a computer because I put off some work until the last week of class…

It’s been a rough week. And it is only Wednesday Thursday.

On Monday I was just poking around the internet, reading some stuff about Radiohead, and I stumbled across this:

It is the music video for the single “Pyramid Song” off of “AMNESIAC”.
I really like the way they did this, despite it being the exact opposite imagery that I had in my head when I listened to that song on my own (fire, river Styx, hella explosions everywhere but totally muted ’cause they’re so far away… that kinda thing). Watch it, it’s neat.

Speaking of neat things, did you know there is a Watered-Down-Wikipedia? It is called the “Simple English Wikipedia,” and it seems to be written for kids and people who don’t speak a lot of English. My initial reaction was “How incredibly dumb. What use does that have?” Well, the English one does squat for me when I can understand full and well the fully-fledged one. However, I had the idea to check the German one.

Which I understand almost.
Which made me shut up and realize the value that it has.

So I’ve been poking around on that, trying to hone my language skills auf Deutsch. It’s been kinda fun. I suggest you check out your language of choice and give it a spin. Es ist spass.

Most of the remainder of this deals with Evangelion comments I have.

I kinda forgot about EVA for a few months there. Which is cool, because nothing’s really been happening. However, I got to wondering about it today and decided to check up on it. As near as I can tell, there is no good cut of the small preview for Rebuild 2.0. The best I’ve seen are fans who’ve seen it, and approximate what they saw with old footage from the series and stills from released production work for the new stuff.

Below is a set I dug up from some blog, and I wanted to offer some comments or speculation.

The top two frames deal, I believe, directly with Unit 05. This is one of the promised “New Mechs” we’ve heard were coming. So far, it’s been described as “provisional”. I have no clue how to interpret that. Did they just scrap it together after Unit 04 is lost and Unit 03 is destroyed by Ikari? I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll get a little more to go on than that. And the question also remains: who’s piloting it? I’ve also seen it identified as 06 in some YouTube trailers, but the description I read stated that it was the one with “extended arms”, which fits that picture pretty well.

According to what I’ve found, the other Eva and it’s pilot come from the Moon. Which is pretty wild. To give some context, apparently 1.0 ends with SELEE meeting with Kaworu on their lunar base. I wasn’t aware they even had one, but I’ll roll with it. It will certainly change the dynamic in episode 22 where Rei throws the Lance into orbit to kill Arael. It eventually lands on the Moon, which really angered SELEE in the series because they had no way of retrieving it. Maybe this will be a non-issue now that they have a base up there…

In any case. To the focus: Eva 06 (I believe pictured in the third row, left) and it’s pilot (bottom row) will come from the Moon (pictured with blood all over… which is curious, but not all that surprising, given Eva…) and land on the Earth (depicted as a cross-shaped explosion). How or why they were up there in the first place still remains to be seen.

However, I’m for it. They had to tred very carefully in making this so as to not disturb many of the original elements. (It’s interesting how well some things match up though. In the aforementioned episode 22, Hyuga mentions that the parts for partially-constructed Units 05 and 06, the ones which feature in this new segment, were scrapped to repair Units 00 and 02. Huh. I guess NERV is less thrifty in this new version) But I’m a huge fan of the lunar base. EVA in space sounds pretty rockin’ to me.

Oh! I almost forgot. The little blob-dudes are “ADAM” according to the trailer. More than one of him? I don’t know… this is all pretty crazy. Good of them to expand on Adam/Lilith though. That part always was a bit sketchy, despite numerous iterations in media and fan-formed-theories to explain them.

If you can’t tell, I’m already getting WAY excited about this, despite probably having to wait another few years before it makes its way over to the United States. It will eventually though, and it’s fun to follow this from its formative stages.

I think that’s it.

So, not much else for today. I need to get some sleep, because tomorrow is the grand finale of Demo Thursdays for Sami’s class!

P.S.: How about that thrashout at the end of My Iron Lung? I like the first half of the song a lot better, but I feel like the second half getting all crazy is a nice counterpoint to offset the calm of the opening. Just a thought.

I’m happy to say it; We’re Back in Business!

After three really intense days I’ve beaten WordPress into behaving how I want it to, the archives are all integrated with the old material, and I’ve made some aesthetic changes as well:

The Navigation buttons above have been scaled down so they take less bandwidth and load faster, which I’ve been meaning to get around to for a long time. Additionally, we’ve got a new set of banners up top (also scaled down in terms of size, but hopefully not noticeably in quality), which I’m quite pleased with. I also updated the F.A.Q. and the About pages to reflect the recent changes and upgrades in the site.

All-in-all, Tuesday’s little mishap with Graymatter turned out to be really a blessing in disguise. WordPress is a really cool utility that I’m excited to use more. In the process, I learned a lot of new things, and got some older skills back into shape. It was a fun experience. I’m also going to keep tweaking this layout (in particular, the comments form is sorta rough; I’ll get to it soon), but for the most part, it’s squared away.

[If you check more towards the bottom of the page, I've actually posted the post that incidentally killed Schrödinger's Blog v.1.2.]

But, that said, I’d like to introduce Schrödinger’s Blog, version 2.0!
[Please Also Note: You'll need to subscribe to the new RSS feed, just as you did the old one. They look the same, but feed from different sources, and the previous one will not be updated anymore. Thanks!]

Additionally, for anyone that cares, there’s a new clip out for Evangelion 1.0: YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE-