I have been watching Soda Master/Ramune Monkey on Netflix as episodes come out. I was lucky enough to catch the first episode on its debut week, and have been watching each episode when it is released on Sundays. I know the Japanese airings are a little ahead of Netflix, but only by a couple of weeks. I've been avoiding spoilers.
My experience with the show has been a mixed bag. I am enjoying it, I look forward to the new episode every week. But I feel like I may be heading for a disappointment with the show overall. The very first scene in the show seems to be setting up a more fantastic, sci-fi tinged show. After watching "Extremely Inappropriate!"- also from Japan, also on Netflix- which centers on time travel, it didn't seem crazy that the show could be sci-fi mystery. But that element, which was what drew me in, was almost immediately subverted.
The basic plot is that three middle aged men (Yun, Chen, and Kinpo) reunite to investigate the disappearance 37 years ago of their film club advisor, after human remains are found on a construction site in their old home town. This discovery reminds them that the disappearance happened at all, which they had basically forgotten about. Themes of remembering/forgetting/misremembering, and of nostalgia, are a huge element of the show. But I'll discuss this is more detail under the cut.
**Warning, I'm going to discuss a few key spoilers now.**
So the first scene of the show is the three main characters as children, and their teacher, "Matilda". They're on a cliff at night, and the teacher says she is going away. She says she has to erase their memories of her, then she walks over the cliff. Seconds later, we see a spaceship and we see the teacher being lifted into the ship. The ship then zooms away. I can't stress enough that this is the opening scene... it sets the tone of what the show is, at least it seems to.
But it turns out that the scene is a shared delusion. It never happened like that, although all three men remember the alien spaceship. It's only later in the first episode that is established to actually be a delusion, dismissing the idea of sci-fi. From then on, each episode starts out with a similar kind of misremembered event from that same period, which blends fictional tropes and real events.
In the first episode, the alien spaceship is fictional but the teacher saying goodbye to them at night on a cliff overlooking the town did (apparently) happen. In a later episode, one of them remembers being chased by a mummy/zombie after sneaking into the town factory. This is fictional, but he did get confronted by one of the factory workers who was heavily injured and bandaged after having an accident. The men misremember aliens, zombies, having superpowers, supervillain cult meetings, slasher villain attacks, etc.- each turns out not to be true, but is based on things that actually happened that are being dredged up by their investigation.
This kind of trope is fine once you know it's established, but that first scene still hits a bit different. Also, it's never quite fully discussed or explained why they have forgotten so much, or misremembered so much, or especially how they all ended up sharing different delusions. They all share the memory of their teacher being an alien and leaving in a UFO.
They also all share the memory of screening a film that they made. In this shared delusion, almost everyone they knew in the entire town showed up to watch their amateur movie. This turns out not to have happened, since in fact they never even finished or edited the movie they worked on with Matilda. They had also all forgotten that Matilda had suddenly disappeared in the first place, kind of overlaying this happy ending of a town screening of their film on top of the mystery of their mentor disappearing and being rumored to be murdered.
Anyway, rather than being a sci-fi murder mystery, the show turns out to be a character study and meditation on aging. There's nothing wrong with that, it's still a good show. But I'm almost afraid that the last semi-fantastical element of the show, the murder/disappearance, might end up being subverted too. They have never 100% confirmed that the remains found were their teacher's, so I half expect the show to end with them finding out she is still alive. We shall see!
Some other random thoughts:
Will they find VHS #12 of the amateur film raw footage? It's the only one missing. If they do find it, what will be on it?
Will Yun go to prison for bribery? His company, including his brother, seems willing to throw him under a bus.
Will Matilda's disappearance even be a murder? An accident? A suicide? I have a little theory that she might be the murderer, and the remains her stalker or ex-husband.
Are the poor memories/false memories of our main characters because of trauma? Did they see something they blocked out/suppressed? Or is it just a matter of aging and nostalgia?
Another Strange Oz movie that is practically nothing like the book, this one mainly focuses on Larry Semon's character rather than Dorothy or the Wizard. This is also the first Feature Length Oz film!
In the Film, Dorothy is revealed to be the long lost Princess Dorothea. Larry Semons Character is in love with Dorothy, who is actually smitten with Oliver Hardy's character.
Ambassador Wikked from Oz comes to the Farm to kill Dorothy, only for a tornado to hit and it whisks them all to Oz, where the three Farmhands (Sermon, Hardy, and the only one with a proper name, Snowball) are accused of Kidnapping her. Wikked orders the Wizard to turn them into monkeys, which he is unable to do, but Sermon disguises himself as a Scarecrow, and Hardy improvizes a costume made from a scrap pile. They are given a trial, the 'tinman' accuses the 'scarecrow', and Sermon and Snowball are thrown in the dungeon by Prince Kynd.
The Wizard helps Scarecrow and Snowball out by giving Snowball a lion costume to scare the guards. Scarecrow escaped, but is led into a cage with a real lion, but He and Snowball end up escaping.
The Scarecrow is heartbroken to discover that Dorothy has fallen for Prince Kynd. He then flees up a tower from the Tin Man, who tries to blast him with a cannon. Snowball flies a plane overhead, and the Scarecrow manages to grab a rope ladder dangling underneath it. However, the ladder breaks and he falls.
Dorothy marries Prince Kynd and they live Happily Ever After!
(And this is all a story a Grandfather has been telling a little girl this whole time. She even has Merch!)
1991. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks issued the first three of the Twin Peaks Gazette. These are the original newspapers sent to subscribers. A truly bizarre mish mash of fact and fictional. Real news re the series and it's possible return to the screen (didn't happen for 20 years) is merged in with fictionalised news from the town of Twin Peaks.
GEORGE LUCAS: I think there is a point where, even though you love your children a great deal, you must let go, which is actually what “The Phantom Menace” is about.
BILL MOYERS: “The Phantom Menace” is about letting go?
GEORGE LUCAS: It’s about letting go.
BILL MOYERS: In what sense?
GEORGE LUCAS: In the sense that you have this young boy, who’s 10 years old, who has to leave his mother and go off on his own and the mother has to let him go because otherwise he would be a slave the rest of his life.
GEORGE LUCAS: At some point you do have to become an independent person. And it’s about learning to let go of your — your needs, so to speak, and — and think of the needs of others.
We don’t talk about Leia killing Jabba enough. Her grandmother and father were born into slavery. Her blood was that of the desert sand and the shackles of bondage. Leia was never more a Skywalker than the day she strangled her slave master with the very chains he used to bind her. The daughter of Anakin Skywalker was the one who killed Tatooine’s most notorious slaver, and I find that really beautiful.
I'm in my Oz Era and I've been mining for every type of content I can find about this world, here's some gems I found if you would like to watch some cute cartoons!!
janainaart
jbbartram-illu
dededos
origamiaround
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
snowghoul
