Going One Better Than The Magnificent Seven

Pivotal 1971 Hong Kong action flick, The Invincible Eight, is getting a swanky UK Blu-Ray release on March 16.

Directed by Lo Wei before his Bruce Lee hits The Big Boss and Fist of Fury, The Invincible Eight is a classic Hong Kong wuxia adventure from Golden Harvest’s earliest years.

Starring Nora Miao (The Way of The Dragon), Angela Mao (Hapkido), Paul Chang Chung (Police Story), and James Tien (Yes, Madam!), it follows eight warriors seeking revenge on a ruthless general protected by the Imperial army and deadly whip-wielding henchmen.

Featuring legendary fight choreography by Sammo Hung, who also stars as one of the villains, The Invincible Eight helped cement Golden Harvest as a powerhouse in martial arts cinema. Eureka Classics proudly presents this martial arts masterpiece on Blu-ray for the first time outside Asia.

Putting The Fun Back in Defunding The Rich, To Give To The Poor

The trailer for the new "gritty" Death of Robin Hood movie led to a brief conversation with author Phillip Reeve about the paucity of "fun" Robin Hood films that hove closer to the original legends.

This got me thinking about the wonderful vintage TV serial, The Adventures of Robin Hood, which is still a fixture of Talking Pictures TV's Saturday morning line-up years after I first found it on their schedule.

Starring Richard Greene as Robin, this is the show whose theme music became an the immortal earworm:

One of the other reasons I love this rollickin', rebellious, series from the mid-1950s is that I soon realised every episode could supply me with either a top-notch story hook or an interesting non-player-character (often both) for whatever pseudo-Medieval roleplaying game I was noodling with at the time.

After loyally watching the half-hour show, week-in, week-out, for months on Talking Pictures, I eventually invested in the 18-dsic box set, containing all 143 episodes.

My discs

The Adventures of Robin Hood is most definitely a "fun", Boy's Own Adventure take on the legends of Robin and his Lincoln Green-sporting band of Merry Men, and one of my favourite iterations of the outlaws of Sherwood Forest.

The best is, of course, the mid-80's Saturday evening TV show Robin of Sherwood, where Michael Praed and then Jason Connery (after a mystical bit of Time Lord-style regeneration) took the title role in a show that blended arcane magic and myth with traditional tropes to create a truly unique and memorable programme.

This was another show oozing with very British ideas for a particular take on Dungeons and Dragons-kind of gaming.

Robin of Sherwood

A Frieren: Beyond Journey's End Refresher

Before season two arrives on Crunchyroll this Friday, catch up on the events of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End season one with this four-minute video.

The adventure is over but life goes on for an elf mage just beginning to learn what living is all about. Elf mage Frieren and her courageous fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land.

But Frieren will long outlive the rest of her former party. How will she come to understand what life means to the people around her?

Decades after their victory, the funeral of one her friends confronts Frieren with her own near immortality. Frieren sets out to fulfil the last wishes of her comrades and finds herself beginning a new adventure…

Season Two Trailer for Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Released today, the new trailer for TOHO Animation's Frieren: Beyond Journey's End season two includes the song lulu by Mrs Green Apple.

The show's sophomore season begins, on Crunchyroll, on Friday, although currently the episode count is unclear.

MY HEADCANON: Tintin As A Reporter

An Hergé illustration of Tintin presenting Hergé with books detailing his adventures

There's a lot of good-natured 'mockery' of Tintin's "reporter credentials" in fandom, as he never really does - on the page, at least - much of what most people would call "reporting".

However, I have a theory on this, which forms the basis of my personal headcanon, justifying Tintin's right to be known as the world's most famous "boy reporter".

Tintin in The Land of The Soviets, not grasping the term 'brevity'

More attention is drawn to the act of reporting in the early albums, with Tintin attempting to file a ludicrously large pile of copy in The Land Of The Soviets  and the fact that he carries around a camera while touring The Congo.

But to my mind, Tintin isn't so much a generic hack, but rather a feature writer. He's a "gonzo journalist" (before such a term was even coined), writing about adventures he becomes a part of, rather than reporting on incidents that have happened, as seen through the eyes of other witnesses. 

"Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative."

- Wikipedia

Not only is this held up by the framing device of BBC Radio adaptations of the stories, with Tintin dictating - over the sound of him typing - to his editor the introduction to his latest yarn, but - more crucially, by the scene with Patrash Pasha in Cigars of The Pharaohs.

Patrash Pasha is a such a fan of Tintin that he has books about his future adventures!

Upon learning who his "guest" is, the Sheik proudly shows Tintin that he has been following his written adventures... by getting his manservant to bring out his copy of Destination Moon (which was, at that time, 20 years in Tintin's future, having been updated from the original drawing of Tintin in America, as the books were translated and republished out of order). 

So, while Tintin may file the occasional front-page story about a crime or major incident, I see him more as a feature writer and journalist in the mould of Hunter S Thompson and PJ O'Rourke, throwing himself into quirky and dangerous situations so he can write about them (i.e. the illustrated books we call Hergé's Adventures of Tintin).

This is why we rarely see him actually "reporting" in the pages of the albums, because the important writing comes afterwards.

He has to experience the adventure before he can type it all up.

As his very first album shows, he doesn't have the time to actually file copy during his usual non-stop, breath-taking antics. 

It also wouldn't make for an interesting break in the rhythm of the story.

Thus, we've established he's a reporter in his early outings, and get the occasional reminder as the series progresses, meaning there's really no need to keep to returning to the minutiae of 'genuine' journalism. 

For me, this is why, even though he becomes more of a pulp "adventurer" as the albums progress, he is still regarded as the celebrity "world-famous boy reporter" - both within the world of Hergé's books and our own world. 

In my headcanon I firmly believe that between his daredevil escapades, Tintin squirrels himself away with a typewriter, in a quiet room in Marlinspike, bashing out the next book based upon his thrilling exploits.

We may not see him interviewing many people, taking copious shorthand notes, checking sources etc, but Tintin still managed to inspire many of us, from an early age, to pursue a career in journalism.

Eclectic and Beautiful Fantasy Movies From The 1970s

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TINTIN!

Joyeux anniversaire, Tintin: Ninety-seven years old today... and he wears it well!

On this day in 1929, young journalist Tintin and his faithful wire fox terrier Snowy set out on their first adventure, travelling to "The Land of The Soviets" at the behest of the editor of Le Petit Vingtième to unearth the truth of what was happening to the country under Bolshevik rule.

Appearing in the weekly children's supplement of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century), Tintin was initially very much a right-wing, anti-communist propaganda tool.

And yet from this unlikely start a global star of children's - and adult's - literature would eventually blossom, as he shook off those initial influences and became his own fully-developed person in later stories.

Created by 21-year-old Belgium cartoonist Georges Prosper Remi aka Hergé, the eternally young protagonist and his growing family of friends and associates would go to star in 24 canonical adventures (although the final one, Tintin and Alph-Art, was unfinished at the time of Hergé's death in 1983, and remains so).

A stipulation in Hergé's will was that no-one else could create fresh Tintin adventures and so this canon of two dozen stories will remain sacrosanct for the foreseeable future, with any upcoming projects only drawing on plots that have already been set in stone by Tintin's creator.

The animation below was created for Tintin's 90th birthday celebrations back in 2019:

Happy 90th birthday, Tintin!!! Our tribute.#tintinbirthday #Tintin90 #Tintin @SCMPgraphics pic.twitter.com/mBqLxh8hge

— Adolfo Arranz (@adolfux) January 10, 2019

How I Met Your Dungeon Master

One of the (many) reasons I loved the sitcom How I Met Your Mother was its core reliance on one of my favourite narrative tools: the unreliable narrator.

The entire show, in a nutshell, was a selection of anecdotes that the character Ted was telling his two children in 2030 building up to the moment that he met their mother (the clue's in the title).

This gave the show the ability to take 'pauses' mid-episode, rewind time, tell stories multiple times from different viewpoints (through the filter of how they were relayed to Ted) and generally play around with the Truth of "what really happened".

It also allowed for stories-within-stories as characters, already in Ted's story of the week, then recounted their own (sometimes equally unreliable) accounts of something else that happened to them.

One of the other reasons
I loved the show

These 'stories-within-stories' then gave those characters the chance to break the fourth wall and talk directly to their audience (who are technically the primary characters of the show rather than us, the viewers, if you follow me).

But could you simulate this in a roleplaying game?

Does it muck around too much with the unspoken social contract that everything the Games Master tells his players is fact (in some shape or form)?

Would just one of your players be your "Ted" (i.e. the character who has achieved his GOAL and is now telling the tale of HOW he achieved it)? Or could everyone in your game be a "Ted"?

I realise there are probably modern/indie story games that use a model, at least vaguely, resembling this story structure, but could it work in a more classical, old school-style game environment?

I'm guessing not for something like Call of Cthulhu or Dungeons & Dragons as success is never guaranteed, but there must be some systems - and genres - this would work with (most superhero games? Cinematic Unisystem?).

As ever I welcome your opinions and feedback.

"Our Future Death Is Hunting Us!"

A misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon a cursed object, an ancient Aztec Death Whistle. They discover that blowing the whistle and the terrifying sound it emits will summon their future deaths to hunt them down. As the body count rises, the friends investigate the origins of the deadly artifact in a desperate effort to stop the horrifying chain of events that they have set in motion.

Cursed magic items are like catnip to me when they crop up in horror movies like this, because of the possibility of 'translating' them into treasure items for Dungeons and Dragons-style roleplaying games..

Starring Logan's Dafne Keen and Shaun of The Dead's Nick Frost, Whistle has a great pedigree and is due in cinemas on February 6.