It's Been A Long Time, Jack, Welcome Back

Conrad The Thief
Your Humble Scribe has been purloining a couple of concepts of late, though it's not reeeeeally stealing because I admit it, plus I have a winning smile.

See?

     So, I admit that today's title is in fact one of the lines from "Mad Jack" by The Chameleons, and it seems peculiarly appropriate.
     "Which Jack, O Aged Scribe Of Grim Demeanour?" I hear you quibble, and, pausing only to admit that mine is a face not made for smiling, I shall explicate.
     "Samurai Jack" is the chap in question.  Art?

Jack, with the demon Aku in the background

     Conrad loved this animated series.  The synopsis is that Jack, armed with an enchanted sword, takes on the time-travelling demon Aku, who is attempting to plunder and destroy Jack's medieval Japanese homeland.  Close to defeat, Aku hurls Jack through a time portal, sending him thousands of years into the future.  There, Jack must learn to survive in a world dominated (if rather chaotically) by Aku, forever trying to find his way back home.
     The series ran for four seasons and is highly regarded both for it's storytelling and animation; it scores 8.5 over at IMDB.  However, it finished without any kind of resolution or closure in 2004, which was a real ache in the bottom.

Sorry, Jack.

     Then Conrad discovered it was revived for a fifth and final season, one intended to really wrap things up and tie up all the loose ends.  A gap of 15 years is quite the intermission, but I'll forgive Mister Tartakovsy (the creator).     One thing of note is that this series is much darker than the Cartoon Network seasons, mostly because it was run on the Adult Swim channel, where there were far fewer restrictions; we see Jack kill real, live people for the first time, as an example.  The animation is well up to scratch, too.  Check this out - Art?

     You lose a lot of the effect thanks to it's being static; I like this scene, though.  Very reminiscent of "Sin City".  I'll get back to you about the White Wolf when I'm yarking on about the Coincidence Hydra - but of that later.

"DID SOMEONE CALL FOR MAD JACK?!"

     Okay, motley; can you eat your way through that litre tub of ice cream before I gorge myself silly on this giant jar of pickled gherkins?

What Have I Stumbled Into?
Typically, I cannot find what I'm looking for.  Whilst scouring the internet for pictures of insanely large Lego creations, and on one website in particular, I recall there used to be a little inset animation of a Lego flail tank flogging away at a Lego landscape and knocking a layer of loose tiles everywhere.
     Can I now find it?  No I cannot!
     On the other hand, I did discover a couple of brick nerds who were enthusing about their adaptations to a standard Lego tank.  Art?

M4 Sherman Crab flail tank

     They are demonstrating what their add-on kit does for the tank, and it's not a bad likeness.  One of them demonstrated the flail action -

Crank, baby, crank!

     He has to wind a little handle on the side to make the flails move; doing the same via a power source that rotated the drum automatically and electrically would, he said, have been very tricky and also expensive, so - a hand crank instead.
     For mine-sweeping, before you ask.  The chains would detonate any mines in their path, without damaging or destroying the Crab, thus beating a path across minefields.  There aren't many clips of Crabs in action, I'm afraid, so I'm not going to post one*.

The World Is Back In It's Rightful Place
It feels that way.
     Okay, earlier this week - code for I can't remember when and cannot be bothered to look - I mentioned that the Lego Shop beneath the Dark Tower had carelessly allowed one of it's large exhibits to fall over.  The 'large exhibit' being a Star Destroyer, they will have had to re-erect it verrrry carefully, lest it fall apart in their hands.  Art?

Restored

     Ignore the legs in frame, ta very much.

And Back To The Battlefield -

"Battlefield Earth", that is.  If you remember, I was remarking upon the intervention of Franchise Pictures who came in to save, if not the day, then at least John Travolta's vanity/pet project, BE.  They did this frequently, with verrrrry complicated financial packages that, in this case, off-loaded 35% of the film's financing to a Teuton company, Intertainment.

The film industry's lifeblood

     All would have been well if BE had done even reasonably well at the box-office, but of course it tanked - do you see what O you do - to a remarkable degree, which is where the suspicious Intertainment now started to poke around and do some forensic accountancy.  They then discovered that, rather than forking out 35% of production costs, they'd been underwriting more than 85%.  Not good!
     There's more.  An investigation by the FBI, no less, found that Franchise  had blatantly lied and defrauded about BE's budget.  Instead of being £45 million, as they claimed, which is still rather on the low side for an epic blockbuster, they'd only actually paid £30 million and the remaining £15 million went straight into their pockets.
     Oops.

Blood transfusion

      No wonder it looked rather cheap and nasty.
     Intertainment sued Franchise and were awarded £75 million, eventually, after a long court case, and by 2007 Franchise went bankrupt**.
     This kind of "creative accountancy" is why film studios hate, hate, HATE having their accounts exposed to public view, as it reveals all their dirty little tricks, which is what makes it so darn entertaining for the rest of us.

Heh.

Finally -
Dog Buns!  I had my nose in that much-esteemed tome by Professor John Buckley, "British Armour In The Normandy Campaign", wherein he was assessing the combat performance versus morale of various British and Canuckistanian armoured units, with a lot of details and tables and extrapolations and - you get the picture.  Complex.  So, I was busy examining these details even as the bus went swanning past that poster with "Russian.  Ruthless ", and I only realised half a mile further on <sad face>.
     Still, it does allow me to put up a picture of a ruthless Ruffian, so it's not all bad.  Art?

A Ruthless Ruffian.
Stop smiling, dammit, you're spoiling the image!

     That's Comrad Botvinnik, chess champion extraordinaire, who would leap over the chess board and rip his opponent's throat out with his bare Bolshevik teeth beat his opponents by a wide margin.

 

*  I'm horrid like that.
**  They were lucky.  Intertainment were aiming for £220 million