Thanks to AFOS shuffle mode, I wonder what a Batman sandwich or a Star Trek sandwich would taste like

Even though it can occasionally be a hassle to try to keep track of 17 hours and 28 minutes of music, which is the average amount of music I calculated from the current total track lengths of the eight different playlists I keep in rotation for the "AFOS Prime" block (plus the extra hours of music that make up the five other blocks on the AFOS station schedule), running AFOS is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

Often, weird things I have no control over take place during the shuffle mode I've set for AFOS, which is how I've regularly referred to the station since 2007. It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten the station name to just AFOS because the acronym evokes the four-call-letter names of the terrestrial radio stations I grew up listening to: KFRC, KMEL and so on. But instead of a K as the first letter, it's an A. Also, the acronym can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them. Examples include "Ample Focus on Scores," "All Fantastic Original Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit."

Anyway, shuffle mode causes all these fantastic original scores to form either unintentional sets of two or three tracks by the same composer or "sandwiches," which is how I refer to cases where two tracks written by the same composer or emanating from the same movie or TV franchise appear to be sandwiching a completely unrelated track in the "last played" section of the AFOS Live365 site. I often take screen shots of these accidental sets or sandwiches.

Star Trek sandwiches happen frequently on AFOS. Mmm, Star Trek sandwich. I wonder how a Star Trek sandwich would taste. Maybe it would be like Chief O'Brien's "Altair sandwich" with no mustard from Deep Space Nine. Some Star Trek head who can't spell has defined an Altair sandwich as "three kinds of meet [sic], two cheeses, and any number of other additions." Whattup, future Super Bowl Sunday dish.

Batman sandwiches also happen a lot on AFOS. I wonder what a Batman sandwich would taste like. I figure it would be like the Batman Diner Double Beef at McDonald's in Hong Kong.

(Photo source: Geekologie)

Hold up. An egg in a burger?! I hate eggs if they're not scrambled, and even though it's scrambled in this case, eggs don't belong in burgers. I'll pass.

Occasionally, there are spaghetti western sandwiches on "AFOS Prime." Is there such a thing as a spaghetti western sandwich? Apparently, there is. Somebody blogged about a spaghetti western sandwich shop in Rome. Some of its sandwiches are named after characters from Terence Hill and Bud Spencer's Trinity movies.

(Photo source: Afar)

Here are more screen shots of shuffle mode weirdness I previously collected in 2011, joined by some new and never-before-posted screen shots of more weird music sandwiches and combinations.

There have been unintentional time travel movie theme double shots.

Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.

Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.

Same thing with the movie Wild Things...

... or the end credits music from the first Thor flick.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Never-ending Dandy, Baby"

This is the 100th edition of "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" (formerly known as "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner"), in which I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

I can't believe it's taken me until "Never-ending Dandy, Baby," the final episode of Space Dandy, to finally notice that the first Japanese lyric in the opening theme "Viva Namida"--"Doko kara kita ka nante wakaranai hodo no hibi de" ("These days, I don't know where I've come from")--ties in to Dandy's lack of knowledge about his origins. Although "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" doesn't explain where Dandy came from--his past remains a mystery, and thankfully, in this way-too-origin-story-obsessed age of entertainment, the series finale doesn't care that it remains that way--it does conclude Space Dandy's run on a spectacularly animated and entertaining note that's most fitting for an anthology-like show that, like I said last week, has captured the adventurous and exploratory spirit of both The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the original Star Trek. In "Never-ending Dandy, Baby," Space Dandy even finally shouts the original Trek out in an eyecatch where the show's title is displayed in the classic Trek typeface.

In a nice bit of role reversal, Dandy, who was about to be captured by the Gogol Empire when Space Dandy last left him, is the damsel in distress for most of the episode, and Scarlet and Honey, the characters who would usually be the damsel in distress in a story like this, are instead given the task of rescuing him together with Meow and QT by their side. The Gogol Empire has always wanted control of Dandy because the abundance of pyonium, "the God particle," in his body will give them immense power over space and time, much like how the evil corporation on Orphan Black wants to maintain control of the bodies of Sarah and her sister clones for commodity reasons (and misogynist reasons as well).

Dandy is a pawn in a battle between the Jaicro Empire, led by Johnny (Hiroshi Kamiya), the wanna-be rock star who temporarily shirked his duties as a soldier and a spy to join Dandy's short-lived rock band in "Rock 'n' Roll Dandy, Baby," and the Gogol Empire. The latter gets caught in an inner power struggle of its own, between Dr. Gel and a double-crossing Bea, whose loyalty to Dr. Gel turns out to have been an act, and Bea's actually been attempting to have Dandy all to himself so that he can gain control of the various universes on his own.

Although the space battle imagery is spectacularly visualized by the BONES Inc. animators, and the Hawaii Yankee, the Aloha Oe shuttlecraft that can transform into a Hawaiian shirt-wearing mecha, makes one last crowd-pleasing, fan service-y appearance, the battle for all existence is the least interesting part of the finale. Where "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" starts to really distinguish itself as a Shinichiro Watanabe series finale is all the material after Dandy chooses to steer Dr. Gel's Statue of Liberty ship on his own (the Aloha Oe is too badly damaged) and right into the maelstrom created by the Super Hulkider, the Gogol Empire's ultimate weapon, in order to use the pyonium in his body to overpower the Super Hulkider and save all existence. In the finale's only emotional moment, Dandy takes one last look at his four friends on the ship's monitor as he attempts to withstand the rigors of the maelstrom and pilots himself to his own likely demise (but because this is a comedy first and foremost--and because Dandy has never exactly been Alan Alda in space--he sneaks a peek at Honey's thong). He proceeds to unleash on the Super Hulkider the full power of his pyonium, but he winds up wiping out all existence.

Then a certain narrator who's been a part of almost every Space Dandy episode and has been the most Douglas Adams-esque element of the show summons Dandy and presents him with a huge offer. The narrator reveals that he was God all along, which means that when the narrator turned into a zombie at the end of "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," an early episode that remains the show's funniest half-hour, not even God was immune to becoming a zombie, which may just be the nuttiest thing this show has ever accomplished. Try to beat that, American Horror Story.

As a reward for sacrificing himself to attempt to save all existence, even though he didn't exactly save it, God offers Dandy the chance to replace him as God and be in charge of a bunch of newborn universes when the current ones cease to exist. But when Dandy learns becoming God doesn't allow him to touch any kind of matter, particularly breasteses, he rejects the offer. Dandy basically tells God to fuck off, without exactly saying so. He'd rather be a free spirit than an authority figure tied down to obligations like overseeing the universes, so the option he non-verbally chooses instead is to return to the Aloha Oe, at a point in time that resembles his normal state at the start of the series, with no Meow on the ship (heh, Meow got screwed over again), with just QT in tow and with a course heading for Boobies the restaurant.

That point in time reveals that what has taken place is the longest non-Futurama time jump in recent TV history, longer than either the five-year time jump on Young Justice: Invasion, True Detective season 1's 10-year time jump from 2002 to 2012 or the 100-year time jump during the end credits of 30 Rock's series finale. The show has skipped ahead to 14.8 billion years (!) after Dandy rejected God's offer, which means the various--as well as now God-less--universes have survived countless attempts by the likes of the Gogol Empire and its descendants to destroy them. It's not specified if Dandy has already experienced a lifetime's worth of adventures after his encounter with God or if Dandy's about to start a whole new cycle of adventures, but the ending confirms two things: Dandy never ages--another clue, along with the lack of DNA, the pyonium in his body and the ability to cross dimensions, that he's some sort of godlike being--and in a sign that Dandy has grown and softened a bit after his heroic deed, his fetish has changed from boobs to a less juvenile fetish for ladies' calves.

Dandy's refusal of godhood is another example of how he's a Captain Kirk type through and through, and that's why the Trek-style eyecatch (which is followed after the commercial break in the finale's Japanese airing by a Star Wars-inspired eyecatch) is a perfect eyecatch for this finale. He's too much of an adventure-seeking spirit, and an authoritative desk job like God's would be too stifling for him. His rebooted life also leaves open the possibility of either an animated feature film version like Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop: The Movie or a series of OVA (original video animation) projects like the direct-to-video Futurama movies and Warner Bros. Animation's direct-to-video DC Universe Animated Original Movies (that's the format I'd prefer to see Space Dandy come back in rather than as a theatrical feature). The "May be continued?" title card after the end credits is basically an invitation for the show's non-Japanese fans (it's more popular outside of Japan than within it) to make enough noise to cause BONES to bring back Space Dandy in some form.

But would a two-hour animated theatrical feature--which, like the Trek movies, would have to be designed to satisfy two different audiences at the same time (the show's fans, the mass audience that's not so familiar with Space Dandy)--be an effective representation of what made Space Dandy enjoyable on the small screen? I don't think it would. What made Space Dandy stand out was its anthology nature and the week-to-week unpredictability of not knowing what to expect from whatever idiosyncratic special guest animator was recruited to direct, and the only way a theatrical feature could capture that essence of Space Dandy would be to do it as an anthology in the style of Batman: Gotham Knight and Robot Carnival, rather than as a straightforward sci-fi actioner that's more in the vein of this action-heavy finale and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Otherwise, just like the literal throne that Dandy declined to accept from God, the two-hour format would be too constraining for what Space Dandy is capable of when it's at its best.

Plus I'm satisfied with the 26 episodes we've got, even though some of them didn't always work, particularly the earlier ones that preceded "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby." Twenty-six episodes are the perfect length for marathoning an entire run of an animated show, especially Watanabe shows, and Space Dandy is no exception, although the more self-contained nature of its episodes would have made it better suited for an additional 13 episodes or more after the initial 26 than either Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo were. Bebop and Champloo finished off their 26-episode runs at logical endpoints for Spike Spiegel and the Fuu crew, respectively, while Space Dandy wraps up its run with Dandy and QT off on another adventure, even though it's just another visit to Boobies.

Although the end credits sequence for "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" is neither as moving as the Bebop finale's end credits nor as uplifting as the Champloo finale's end credits, it's my favorite end credits sequence out of all the different ones Space Dandy has done this season. The sequence is nicely soundtracked by the '80s freestyle throwback jam "Space Fun Club" by Japanese rapper Zen-La-Rock (with an artist named Robochuu as the guest feature), a tune that falls under Watanabe's unusual mandate that no piece of music on Space Dandy can contain any instruments that were built after 1984. The "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" end credits are a terrific way for the animators to convey that life goes on in space while Dandy and QT continue living their free-spirited lives off-screen, as the sequence scrolls past nifty glimpses of an outer-space drive-in, a few other similar examples of Futurama-esque architecture and a school of giant space swordfish.

About halfway through Space Dandy's first season, I wondered if the show would emerge as another Watanabe classic. Now that its run is over, I can safely say that after following up first-season high points like "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby" and "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" with a bunch of equally distinctive installments like "The Big Fish Is Huge, Baby" and "A World with No Sadness, Baby," yes, Space Dandy can now take its place beside Bebop and Champloo as a Watanabe classic.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Kimiko Ueno is a writer to watch. She's responsible for two of Space Dandy's funniest episodes, "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby," a frenetic half-hour that's grown on me since its airing in July, and last season's "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," a riff on the zombie genre that features the show's most sublime use of its Douglas Adams-style narrator (his matter-of-fact narration is an element of Space Dandy that plays better in subtitled Japanese than in English because matter-of-fact foreign narration, whether it's delivered by a Japanese announcer or a British documentarian, is just funnier, and not for xenophobic reasons).

In "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby," the pulling of "cosmic pubes" caused Dandy, Meow and QT to ping-pong back and forth between other dimensions. In those other realities, they had awkward and often argumentative encounters with their parallel counterparts, who were completely different from all the other much more identical parallel counterparts we saw in previous and subsequent episodes, that is if Space Dandy viewers' theory that each episode takes place in a different reality is a correct one (the counterparts Dandy, Meow and QT met in "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" more closely resembled the stars of animated shows that are way more popular in Japan than Space Dandy, which has failed to catch on with the Japanese public and is a more popular show over here in America). For instance, in one reality, Meow was a sexy woman in a dance leotard instead of a male cat, while in a much more emo reality, he was a terrifying-looking cyborg with a frozen smile who spoke only in creepy-sounding electronic meows that would constantly drive his morose shipmate Emo Dandy to want to kill himself. And like "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" made sublime use of the narrator at one point and had him bickering with his parallel counterparts as well.

Ueno also wrote "Rock 'n' Roll Dandy, Baby," a Behind the Music-like rockumentary parody where would-be rocker Dandy spent more time bickering with his bandmate over what to name their band and how their merch should look than actually creating music. "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby"--in which Scarlet (Houko Kuwashima), the prim Alien Registration Center clerk who always rejects the unregisterable creatures that Dandy brings to her, pays the pompadoured alien hunter to pose as her boyfriend in order to ward off her stalker ex-boyfriend Dolph (Kazuya Nakai)--isn't quite as funny as those three previous Ueno episodes, but it reteams Ueno with director Masahiro Mukai, who helmed the chaos of "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby."

Mukai brings much of his visual panache from the cosmic pubes episode to this one as well, especially in any scene involving the machine gun-wielding silver and red mecha from the show's opening titles, which finally makes an appearance here and turns out to be piloted by Dolph. Because this is a sci-fi comedy show full of spaceships and giant mechs, instead of stalking Scarlet in a tourist disguise or in a Spider-Man costume, Dolph spies on her from the cockpit of his floating mecha, the winner of the least conspicuous stalker vehicle of the year.

You keep expecting Mukai to stage a battle between Dolph's mecha and Dandy's Hawaii Yankee, a Hawaiian shirt-wearing mecha that's been absent this season, but they never get to the fireworks factory, and "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby" is the lesser for it. However, "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby" scores points for getting a man and a woman who's constantly repulsed by him to bond over the film and TV work of Chuck Norris, action genre veteran, famously wooden actor, ubiquitous Internet meme and right-wing nutjob.

For most of the episode, Dandy and Scarlet have nothing in common, and Dandy is constantly at his worst behavior during their pretend dates on the romantic getaway planet known as Trendy. He spits game at some other hottie in the middle of his beach date with Scarlet, which sends her unleashing her fury at him, while my favorite running gag has Scarlet frequently apologizing to little kids for Dandy snatching their belongings from them and making them cry.

But then Dandy unearths Scarlet's DVD copy of Missing in Action from the mess he's made of her house after he tries to protect her from a man-faced spider straight out of John Carpenter's The Thing (if that house is a vacation rental, I can't wait to see the discussion she'll have with the constantly broke Dandy over how to cover the damages), and their adoration of the Missing in Action star begins to bring them closer together and raises the possibility that this fake couple could turn into a real one. Dandy and Scarlet also out themselves as fans of the short-lived Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, an actual kids' cartoon and one of many inspirations for Adult Swim's upcoming '80s cartoon spoof Mike Tyson Mysteries, which will star the voices of Mike Tyson and Norm Macdonald.



For some reason, I'm having flashbacks to Chris Rock's old "Terry Armstrong" bit about athletes who always refer to themselves in the third person. Chuck Norris' intro for Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos makes Chuck Norris' show look like a fake Chuck Norris cartoon from Robert Smigel, but it's not a Smigel TV Funhouse segment about the Chuck Norris-ness of Chuck Norris. Karate Kommandos was an actual half-hour piece of shit from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, whose Ruby-Spears studio also produced the inexplicable Rambo cartoon, which was a 30-minute commercial for a Rambo action figure line, and the occasional TV Funhouse target Mister T, which starred the A-Team scene-stealer as the coach of a multiracial team of mystery-solving gymnast kids (Mister T makes the Brady Kids Saturday morning cartoon look like Shakespeare).

If Dandy and Scarlet bonded over the much more revered Bruce Lee, whom Spike Spiegel idolized and emulated during Space Dandy general director Shinichiro Watanabe's more serious Cowboy Bebop (and is far less problematic to Asian Americans as a martial arts hero than his white Way of the Dragon nemesis), it wouldn't be as amusing. Because Dandy the bumbling lout and Scarlet the lonely office drone are kitschy Watanabe characters, as opposed to badass Watanabe characters like Spike and his femme fatale love interest Julia (although Scarlet has a badass side that she expresses in her Jeet Kune Do skills), it makes more comedic sense for Scarlet and Dandy, who's delusional about his prowess with the ladies, to idolize the similarly delusional Norris than to idolize Bruce. The star of both Karate Kommandos and the frequently ridiculed Walker, Texas Ranger was under the delusion that America would take seriously his warning that re-electing President Obama would bring about "1,000 years of darkness." (Dandy's also delusional about being an intergalactic celebrity, just like how Peter Quill thinks "Star-Lord" is a name everyone in space is familiar with during Guardians of the Galaxy. Junichi Suwabe, the Chris Parnell-esque voice of Dandy in Japan, is great at portraying this delusional and self-absorbed side of Dandy, so it's fitting that Suwabe was chosen to dub for Chris Pratt in the Japanese release of Guardians that's opening over there tomorrow.)

The references to a real-life obscure cartoon instead of a made-up one with a dumb-sounding and unconvincing fake title are a nice touch in Ueno's script, as are Scarlet's evident fetish for '80s action stars (it's not surprising that one of her exes is a blond jerk named after Dolph Lundgren) and the episode's open ending, which was clearly influenced by Watanabe's love of ambiguity. For anybody in the audience who might be a shipper of Dandy and Scarlet (and I keep coming back to this, but God, the word--and very concept of--"shippers" make me wish they never existed), the ending is pure torture, but for the rest of us, it's one of many reasons why Watanabe, whose work has proven that he's as far from the dark ages of Ruby-Spears as one can get, makes several of the best animated shows to come out of Japan.

According to Space Dandy's alien alphabet, the logo on Scarlet's bikini says "Elle."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "A World with No Sadness, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Vox posted an intriguing and controversial profile this week about Sopranos creator David Chase that's key to understanding "A World with No Sadness, Baby," the occasionally confusing but visually sumptuous Space Dandy episode that takes place on a mysterious planet of the dead and is one of the few Space Dandy episodes written by general director Shinichiro Watanabe. The part of the lengthy Chase profile that everyone on the Internet is most interested in--other than for click-baity, traffic-generating reasons--is Chase's latest reply to "Is Tony dead?," the question that's nagged Sopranos fans since "Made in America," The Sopranos' divisive, open-ended final episode, wrapped up the mob drama's run seven years ago, to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'."

Chase's laconic answer was "No, he isn't." But after the publication of the article, he immediately retracted his answer. "To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer," wrote Chase's publicist in a statement to the press. Whether or not Tony got whacked in the diner always mattered to Chase the least (I never gave a shit about whether or not Tony got whacked either, just like how I don't give a shit about the overly giddy, "look, Tony died in that restaurant because look at all the clues in the restaurant and look at that line about how you don't see it coming when you're whacked!" camp). Chase blurted out "No" to the Vox interviewer, not to reassure the Sopranos fans who cared only about the most lurid moments of The Sopranos, like who got killed this week or who Tony is banging this season, but simply because he's tired of being asked that question (they're the kind of fans who want everything to be spoon-fed to them--I wouldn't be surprised if they moved on from The Sopranos to more subtle fare like Jersey Shore and Keeping Up with the Kardashians--and they've failed to grasp the ambiguity that Chase emulated from European cinema, which is why Chase has contempt for them).

What clearly matters more to Chase than "Which characters will live and which ones will die?" are the fallacy of the American dream that Chase's hardware store owner father bought into, the emptiness of post-WWII prosperity and the search for enlightenment (Chase is an agnostic who became alienated by the Catholicism of so many Italian families like his own; he believes that enlightenment is found not in God but in art, whether it's an Antonioni movie or Parisian ruins). They're themes that permeated not just The Sopranos but also Chase's lukewarmly received debut as a film director, 2012's Not Fade Away, and even--and this isn't mentioned in the Vox profile--the episodes Chase wrote earlier in his career for The Rockford Files, particularly "Quickie Nirvana," the 1977 Rockford episode where Chase expressed skeptical opinions about both cults and organized religion that make you say, "Wow, how the fuck did NBC allow much of this to air?" As The Sopranos' run wore on, Chase became more interested in those profound themes of artifice and enlightenment and much less interested in the mob soap opera stuff (this is why all the Sopranos clones that emerged on network TV due to The Sopranos' popularity sucked so much: they only cared about who lived and who died, and those shows' creators and their network bosses didn't understand that the scenes of Tony or Carmela in therapy and the conflict between Tony and his cantankerous mother Livia were what made The Sopranos unique and popular, not the violence).

Where this Vox piece on Chase ties in to Space Dandy--and this is the moment that fascinates me way more than "Is Tony dead?"--is Chase's statement that "I'm not a religious person at all, but I'm very convinced that this is not it. That there's something else. What it is, I don't know. Other universes. Other alternate realities." Chase's fascination with alternate realities explains not just the unusual 2006 Sopranos episode "Join the Club" (where a comatose Tony dreams of an alternate life as a salesman with no ties to the Mafia and no Jersey accent, so "Join the Club" offers glimpses of how the late James Gandolfini sounded in real life, without that accent), but Watanabe's similar fascination with alternate realities in Space Dandy episodes like "A World with No Sadness, Baby" as well.

Like Chase, who's a fan of the ambiguity of Antonioni movies like Blow-Up, Watanabe traffics in ambiguity, and it's part of why Watanabe's work fascinates me more than the work of other Japanese animators. Cowboy Bebop opened and closed with a badly wounded Spike Spiegel at the brink of death, and Watanabe said he left it up to the viewer to decide if Spike really did die when he collapsed to the ground at the end of the Bebop finale. "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is more conclusive about Dandy than either Spike's collapse or Tony's last scene in the Sopranos finale: Dandy's clearly dead from the first moment we see him marooned on Planet Limbo after a dangerous encounter with a "dark nebula" (by the way, the visuals of the planet of the dead that were crafted by BONES Inc. and guest director Yasuhiro Nakura are extraordinary; we're talking feature film-quality visuals here, and they're given pitch-perfect musical accompaniment by guest composers Ogre You Asshole, a Japanese rock band that counts Johnny Marr as one of its fans).

We also learn from Poe (Kaori Nazuka), the entity who's fallen in love with Dandy and is the physical manifestation of both Limbo the planet and Limbo the plane of existence, that Dandy is a much more powerful being than he realizes, and that power of his has something to do with his parallel selves. The absent-from-this-episode Dr. Gel and the Gogol Empire's relentless pursuit of this unlikely "chosen one"--a vain idiot who's a dick to his shipmates on the Aloha Oe and cares only about "food and boobs" (he's basically an overgrown teen)--makes more sense now.

Where "A World with No Sadness, Baby" gets ambiguous and open-ended is the final scene of Dandy back on Limbo, the reason for a bunch of "What happened to Dandy after his time on Limbo ended?" comments and theories on Reddit and other forums. Here's how I interpreted the moment: what we're seeing is a flash-forward to the very last scene of the entire series, at a point in time after Dandy's actual final death, as well as long after Dandy--or one of his parallel selves--was accidentally whisked off to the distant future at the end of "A Race in Space Is Dangerous, Baby." Dandy's returned to Limbo, but at a point in time before the planet used up all its energy and ended up destroying itself to send Dandy back (but as a comatose Dandy) to the Aloha Oe to save Meow and QT from the dark nebula. He's there to reunite with Poe and the rest of the friends he made on Limbo and then take them along with him to heaven. So it's basically the second-to-last scene of the Lost series finale, but without the hugginess and hokey, New Agey sentimentality.

I might be wrong about the final scene--and we have a few more episodes to go before I'm probably proven wrong--but it implies that Space Dandy will be headed towards a more profound direction for the remainder of its run. It's a good thing I read the Vox piece on Chase after watching "A World with No Sadness, Baby" because Chase's alternate realities discussion helped clear up the confusion I initially had about both the final scene and Dandy's reappearance on a planet that ceased to exist. The scene seems to be hinting that the show's closing arc will be the redemption of Dandy the asshole, as Space Dandy starts to delve more into Dandy's parallel counterparts and perhaps will show how Dandy's inevitable reunion with his other selves mirrors his growth as a person, like how the Sopranos characters' discussions about "What's the purpose?" echoed Chase's preoccupation with "this is not it."

The "redemption of an asshole" arc is kind of a tired one. But I like how Watanabe handles the arc in "A World with No Sadness, Baby" in his typically open-ended way, by fracturing the time frame and leaving all the moments of Dandy's maturation from vain idiot to selfless person (who, if I'm not mistaken, will end up saving the universe from the Gogol Empire) off-screen. Watanabe's basically done a series finale before the final episode has even aired. It's a ballsy move. (The odd placement of that final scene on Limbo has also made me realize that Tony's subconscious yearning for an uncomplicated alternate life in "Join the Club" is more of a conclusion to The Sopranos than the actual final episode itself. Tony's scenes as Kevin Finnerty of Kingman, Arizona could be interpreted as a visit to the future heaven of his choosing, that is if he ever stops being an evil bastard after the events of "Made in America.")

"A World with No Sadness, Baby" is an interesting turning point in Space Dandy's run--and at such a late point in the run too. Thanks to the questions of life and death pondered by Dandy and the Limbo inhabitants in "A World with No Sadness, Baby," this slapstick animated sitcom about an alien-hunting idiot who hops from planet to planet and dimension to dimension without ever really experiencing any growth as a person has proven naysayers like the Gray Lady wrong (care to take back those words about the show being nothing but cringe-making fan service, Gray Lady?) and suddenly turned into something more meaningful. It's like when The Sopranos quickly proved to be more than just the "Look, it's Analyze This on a weekly basis!" gimmick that was emphasized in HBO's misleadingly lighthearted, Get Shorty-inspired first-season promos and emerged as something richer and more complicated: a darkly comic and often brutal exploration of seeking enlightenment and realizing the fallacy of the American dream.

I was prepared to hate "A World with No Sadness, Baby"--the episode preview's images of an unkempt Dandy in longer hair that's more fitting for Emo Dandy from "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" had me worried that the episode was going to be an overly dour one--but for an installment centered on the heavy subject matter of mortality, "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is surprisingly not-so-dour. The show's sense of humor remains intact, like when a pack of what I assume to be grief counselors confers with a depressed bar patron ("Keeping death at a distance and not thinking about it--that is like averting your eyes from death")--but they do so completely in song--or when Dandy responds to Poe's admission of love for him with "Well, I'm so handsome you probably couldn't help it." "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is more entertaining and satisfying than any episode about a sentient planet/plane of existence that falls in love with a lead character who's just died (and wants to be alive again) has any right to be. Space Dandy never fails to surprise. "Don't stop believing," indeed.

Stray observations:
* I'm fond of the '50s War of the Worlds ship-style creature design for the Limbo inhabitants who ended up destroying most of their homeworld through warfare.

* I'm also fond of how the magazine Dandy and Meow are ogling during the preview for next week's episode, "We're All Fools, So Let's All Dance, Baby," is a mag full of spreads featuring '70s and '80s Japanese swimsuit model Agnes Lum.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "The War of the Undies and Vests, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

The premiere of the slapstick anime show Space Dandy generated a considerable amount of buzz at the start of the new year. Space Dandy follows the interstellar adventures of Dandy (Junichi Suwabe), a pompadoured free spirit and captain of the spaceship Aloha Oe who makes a living out of tracking down new alien species and registering them at the Alien Registration Center--which, on the spectrum of outer-space heroics, is equivalent to stripping copper wire and selling it. It's animation director Shinichiro Watanabe's first sci-fi show since Cowboy Bebop, a beloved classic both in and outside Japan, and the new show involves creative talent from both that landmark 1998 work and the beautifully animated Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Adding to Space Dandy's buzz is the fact that it's actually airing first on Adult Swim in America, as part of Adult Swim's Toonami block, before it airs the following day in Japan. Even the New York Times, which rarely does pieces on anime, devoted a few paragraphs to the Space Dandy premiere, "Live with the Flow, Baby" (the Gray Lady reviewer gave the episode, the only one scripted by Watanabe so far, a mixed review and disliked the amount of lady flesh on display at the Hooters-inspired Boobies, Dandy's favorite "breastaurant").

Now that the hype has died down a bit, how does Space Dandy hold up so far as a Watanabe show? Unsurprisingly, Space Dandy is another visual knockout like Bebop, Watanabe's Bebop follow-up Samurai Champloo and Watanabe's last show, the coming-of-age '60s period piece Kids on the Slope. While Spike Spiegel, Jet Black and Faye Valentine never encountered alien life during their travels on the Bebop (other than one notable exception in the Alien parody "Toys in the Attic"), aliens are everywhere in Space Dandy's much less grounded and much more fanciful sci-fi universe. Perhaps to avoid the sameness in alien character design that made viewers of the '90s Star Trek spinoffs think, "Wow, is everyone who's neither human nor Vulcan born with an Ore-Ida Golden Crinkle fry on their face?," Watanabe has assigned a different creature designer to work on each new alien world that's depicted on the show. You want to hang around forever in this inventively realized and sumptuous-looking universe that's been crafted by the animators at BONES Inc. (the same studio that collaborated with Bebop's Sunrise studio on the Bebop feature film), even though that means putting up with Space Dandy's pompadoured anti-hero, who looks a little too much like Jeffrey Wells, so he has a face that's as punchable as that of either Shia LaBeouf, Ted Cruz or the How I Met Your Mother head writers.

Writing-wise, Space Dandy, which is Watanabe's first largely comedic show, has had a rough start. For a couple of episodes, it looked like Watanabe and his crew were being afflicted with the same ailment that hobbled Steven Spielberg when he made 1941: they're better at creating action or drama with comedic elements than creating an out-and-out comedy. It wasn't until Space Dandy's fourth episode, "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby" (which was scripted by Kimiko Ueno), when the humor started to really click and Space Dandy proved it's got more to offer comedically than just Benny Hill-style horny slapstick. It also made better use of the rather forgettable and nondescript villains from the Gogol Empire, represented by the powdered-wig-wearing Dr. Gel (Unsho Ishizuka) and his skull-faced superior Admiral Perry (a reference to Commodore Perry?), whom the continually oblivious Dandy doesn't know are targeting him and his ship for reasons that have yet to be explained.

Zombie genre parodies may be as tired as Her parody videos, but "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby" brought a clever spin to zombie comedy, first by killing off Dandy, his robot pal QT (Uki Satake) and their catlike Betelgeusian sidekick Meow (Hiroyuki Yoshino) in the first act--as part of Space Dandy's disregard for continuity, it's the third episode that's ended with either one or all of the three principal characters dead--and then by transforming in the brilliant second act into a bizarre mockumentary about the newly undead Aloha Oe crew's adjustment to zombie life while the zombie epidemic Dandy and QT failed to stop spreads to the rest of the universe. Zombie life turns out to be not all that different from the mundane lives Dandy, QT and Meow led before they were turned. My favorite gag in "SYCLWDB" is the revelation that zombie groans and expressions aren't meaningless. "At first glance, it may seem like zombies just groan, but it has been discovered that zombies actually communicate with their own language," says the show's regular narrator. "Their senior zombie said, 'It's not that bad being a zombie. First of all, you don't have to spend much on food... While it may not be true for all zombies, I eat yogurt every day, and it makes me feel healthier.'"

The equally good episode that followed the zombie story, "A Merry Companion Is a Wagon in Space, Baby," was a complete departure from the Dawn of the Dead-inspired black comedy of "SYCLWDB." It centered on Dandy's reluctant friendship with Adelie, a lonely orphan girl who hates adults like Dandy and possesses unusual mind-swapping powers, and it brought some heart to Space Dandy without unconvincingly changing Dandy's jerky, self-centered and misogynist self (the show has started mocking his misogyny like what Johnny Bravo used to do with its title character, instead of further glorifying Dandy's frequent objectification of women, which was the Gray Lady's biggest beef with "Live with the Flow, Baby"). This week's Space Dandy episode, "The War of the Undies and Vests, Baby," in which Dandy gets teased by his friends for being a poser--he's brought along surfboards with him but has never used them because he's waiting to trot them out for some "out-of-this-world big wave"--while they stumble into a senseless, 10,000-year-old space war, lacks the cleverness of the zombie episode and the energy of the road-movie-ish orphan episode. But in a week when almost all the animated shows are in reruns due to the Winter Olympics, "The War of the Undies and Vests, Baby" is the only entertaining game in town, baby.

With its genre shifts from creature feature to road movie and now to anti-war satire in "The War of the Undies and Vests, Baby" (story by Michio Mihara; teleplay by Dai Sato), Space Dandy is essentially an anthology show, with Dandy, QT, Meow and the Aloha Oe as the only constant. Like last week, the trio's search for unregistered aliens to make some quick cash is disrupted by having to be separated from their ship, which, this time, has been damaged by warfare raging above the last remaining moon of Eden, a desolate planet torn apart by the 10,000-year conflict. Only two survivors of the war remain: an old alien soldier who favors undies over vests and his enemy from the side that prefers vests, who have both been fighting since birth over which garment is better. Dandy, QT and Meow attempt to broker a peace treaty between the Undie and the Vestian partly because it's a stupid conflict that needs to end ("If the war were over, you could do all sorts of fun things... You can go to the restaurant Boobies," says Meow to the Vestian), but in keeping with their previous jerky behavior and their desperation for cash, they're brokering the treaty mainly because uniting these aliens would be their ticket to getting them registered.

Star Trek has done this kind of war allegory dozens of times before, with results that have varied from gripping ("Balance of Terror," DS9's "Duet") to unintentionally silly ("Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"). Fortunately, "The War of the Undies and Vests, Baby" opts to be intentionally silly. I just wish it were as genuinely funny as "SYCLWDB" or as interesting as "A Merry Companion." While I like how the soldiers' simple-mindedness is conveyed by having their dialogue written in broken English for the subtitled version of the show, I find it difficult to be as invested in this one-note pair of warriors as I was in the character of Adelie during "A Merry Companion."

What actually makes "The War of the Undies and Vests, Baby" worthwhile are, once again, the epic visuals, particularly during the episode's last two minutes, my favorite bit of animation on the show so far. The Undie and the Vestian, two old dogs who are unwilling to learn new tricks like compromise and peace, wind up accidentally killing themselves at their badly botched peace conference and have rigged the moon to explode. Dandy and Meow's only way of escaping the destruction is one of the surfboards that Dandy was being needled about earlier, which QT jettisons from the Aloha Oe to help them return to the ship. The force of the moon explosion results in the out-of-this-world big wave Dandy's been waiting for, and the ensuing space debris-surfing sequence is spectacularly animated by BONES and accompanied by a Japanese disco ballad about "walking towards the future in search of the selves we'll become." In those two dazzling and dialogue-less minutes, the conclusion does a better job of conveying the episode's message of "Don't waste your life" than any of the prior scenes with the Undie and the Vestian.

The disco music on the show, which defines Space Dandy like how jazz defined both Bebop and Kids on the Slope and instrumental hip-hop defined Samurai Champloo, is why I prefer watching the subtitled version of Space Dandy that's on FUNimation and Hulu instead of Toonami's dubbed version. The FUNimation-produced dub omits both Yasuyuki Okamura's Gloria Gaynor-inspired opening title theme, "Viva Namida" ("Viva Teardrops"), and Etsuko Yakushimaru's even more charming end title theme, "Welcome to the X Dimension." The theme tunes are replaced by forgettable lite-funk instrumentals (Toonami viewers are also deprived of the awesome visuals that the animators created to accompany "Viva Namida" and "Welcome to the X Dimension"). But don't count out the Space Dandy dub. It's better-voiced than most dubs, and my favorite touch in the English version is the Auto-Tuning of cast member Alison Viktorin's voice as the bumbling, technologically outdated QT. Like Hov said about the scourge of Auto-Tune four years ago, good riddance to Auto-Tune, but it works wonderfully here for such a technologically outdated robot character.



Whether subbed or dubbed, Space Dandy has started to live up to its hype in the last three weeks. Space Dandy began as a bit of a disappointment because its first few episodes were more juvenile than Watanabe's previous works, but ever since the zombie episode and the orphan episode, the material has started exhibiting the same kind of range that distinguished Bebop but without becoming a retread of Bebop. What remains to be seen is whether the rest of the series can--to borrow Dandy's own words--go with the flow of those two standout episodes and lead to Space Dandy emerging as another Watanabe classic.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a new AFOS block, begins this week

(Photo source: Precious Bodily Fluids)

After upgrading AFOS to stereo over the weekend, I didn't notice until this morning that so many "AFOS Prime" tracks come from animated shows and movies, whether for adults (The Venture Bros.) or adults who have to give their hyperactive kids something to sit through to keep them from destroying shit (Ratatouille). There are enough tracks from animated works to fill a new AFOS block I'm calling "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round."

In addition to all the score cues from Venture, Pixar, Bruce Timm shows and Cowboy Bebop, the new block will contain some tracks that are exclusive to "Brokedown Merry Go-Round" and aren't in rotation during "AFOS Prime," like music from You & the Explosion Band's disco score to Lupin the 3rd. The smooth Lupin R&B instrumental "Magnum Dance ~ Lonely for the Road" is like the perfect break for DOOM to spit rhymes to. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" airs weekdays at 2-4pm.

Every day I'm shufflin'

Even though trying to keep track of the nearly 64 hours of music that are stored in A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" playlist (plus the two hours of music that make up AFOS' "Rock Box" playlist) can occasionally be a hassle, running AFOS(*) is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

(*) It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten it to just AFOS because the acronym AFOS can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them (examples: "Ample Focus on Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit"). The current iTunes Radio description of "Fistful of Soundtracks" is nine years old (it's taken from a summary of AFOS that I typed into Live365.com when I first launched AFOS over there in 2002, back when Live365 wouldn't let radio stations have names longer than 22 letters for some stupid reason). iTunes has never bothered to replace the old description with a present-day one.

Sometimes, weird things I have no control over start to happen on AFOS when it's in shuffle mode.

Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.

Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.

Same thing with the movie Wild Things...

... or the end credits music from Thor.

Two different incarnations of Batman getting streamed back-to-back always amuses me...

... as does Angel, Batman and Zorro getting streamed in the same hour. (Angel is like the Batman of the Whedonverse. Batman was modeled partly after Zorro. Also, in DC's pre-"New 52" continuity--I'm not sure if it's been changed in the current continuity--Bruce Wayne lost his parents to a mugger after they attended a Mark of Zorro screening. If it were a Legend of Zorro screening, all three Waynes would have lost the will to live and killed themselves afterward.)

Live365 occasionally does screwy things to the Bollywood-centric "Chai Noon" block. Das racist!

The Palace: So This Is Where the Asians Hang Out? begins June 14 and concludes June 20 at afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com

I hate inking my own webcomic. It takes forever to do. Instead of adding ink directly onto each original sketch that I did in blue pencil, I place a tracing pad sheet over the sketch and redraw it in ink. (Even though the time-consuming process drives me crazy, I prefer to do it this way because when I scan the tracing pad sheet, the redrawn strip looks more dirt-free and clean than the version that's in pencil, so I don't have to do too much digital editing.) If one of my knuckles brushes up against a newly inked line or letter, it can smudge, so I have to wait a few minutes for the ink to dry before I resume inking. I bet this is what shooting a makeout scene with a temperamental actress who hates being touched by you must be like: a lot of stopping and starting and having to make sure your knuckle doesn't brush up against her boob because if it does, she'll throw a fit and refuse to come out of her trailer, and everything's ruined.

While scripting most of The Palace's STIWTAHO? arc a couple of months ago, I Netflixed DVDs of the surreal early '00s Britcom Black Books. A former colleague once blogged about his enjoyment of the show, and he mentioned that one of its running gags was the lead character's hatred of cell phones--something I really identify with--so I always wanted to check out Black Books, but I kept putting it off. I finally got around to Netflixing the show and enjoyed the hell out of it.

I was surprised to find that Black Books covered some of the same ground I've covered in my webcomic. The Dark Knight watercooler talk ban that Connor--an Irishman like Bernard Black--enforced at his business in The Palace's In the Shadow of the Bat arc is like any one of Bernard's various rules at his bookshop ("No mobiles, no walkmans, none of that or any of the others...").

When I came up with the concept for The Palace, I set it at an independently run art house/repertory theater that's barely scraping by instead of a successful multiplex that shows current blockbusters because struggling or failing always makes for more interesting material than being at the top (a reason why I got bored with Entourage). Black Books star/co-creator Dylan Moran must have been aware of that too. He said he set his show in an indie bookshop because he was fascinated by the theme of doomed enterprise. "Running a second-hand bookshop is a guaranteed commercial failure. It's a whole philosophy," said Moran in a 2000 Guardian article. "There were bookshops that I frequented and I was always struck by the loneliness and doggedness of these men who piloted this death ship."

Is it me, or is Bernard a dead ringer for Spike Spiegel?