You will find this adorable, and be unable to gross yourself out by his probable sexual investment in the performance. He’s just too goddamn cute.

[thanks Jhonen!]

I’m not sure I would remain as calm if my computer suddenly sprouted a fleshy, pulsating tumor.

mechanical tumor [YouTube]

What else can one say, really? Having viewed hundreds of hours of indescribable weirdness spewed forth from The Land of the Rising Sun over a period of years, I may have finally reached my limit. I have been struck dumb with fantastical nonsense; my brain unhinged by ultra-violent absurdity. I have been laid low by RoboGeisha.

From Noboru Iguchi, director of Machine Girl, RoboGeisha is the story of a robot geisha who fights ninjas, other robot geishas and robot geisha ninjas. The trailer consists of a long list of various robot geisha attributes, read aloud by a man with a ball-gag in his mouth. We learn that RoboGeisha has swords in her arms and that she can shoot rockets. She can also transform into a car, which is especially helpful when fighting assassins with mini-guns instead of breasts. Also, tengu milk. I’ll offer no explanation for that last one, you’ll just have to see it for yourself.

RoboGeisha Trailer [twitch]

Bookended by scenes from an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, entitled “Professor Peabody’s Last Lecture” what follows is madness of the highest order. I can’t really explain what ensues but it involves J-Pop and choreographed dance moves.

Ah, the internet and its wonders.

Apologies to Mr. Lovecraft… [YouTube] : GrimReviews

There seems to be some dispute amongst the animals of the woods as to whether or not Mr. Ando is a penguin as he claims or is, in actuality, a human. There is no disputing that all of the aforementioned animals have the same, human face or that a fish sings a song about loving Mr. Ando and wishing to sleep with him even though he is a fish and smells very fishy. All this from the mind of Takashi Taniguchi.

Mr Ando of the Woods [YouTube] : Pink Tentacle

Having documented the battles betwixt warring cephalopods in Feudal Japan, and having failed to convince the denizens of Threadless of the hipster coolness of his t-shirt design, Phineas X. Jones does what he should have done all along and put out another spectacular print with which he shall drain your bank account.

Octopus Samurai [octophant[x]us]

This was going to be included in a Saturday Morning Cartoons post but really, it deserves to be seen alone, in “high quality”, not shoved inside some standard quality SMC playlist. And while it it has already spread across the tubes, it deserves to be enshrined here.

Cat Shit One — Apocalypse Meow in the U.S. — was a Japanese manga that came out in 1998. It followed the day to day routine of an American recon unit in Vietnam called, yes, Cat Shit One. The various nationalities involved are represented by different animals: Americans are rabbits, the French are pigs, the Australians koalas and so on. Interestingly, the final chapter of volume 1 is titled “Dog Shit One” and features humans.

The proposed series takes place, not in Vietnam, but in Iraq and features turbaned, terrorist camels and “middle eastern music”, which consists of women wailing in a musical way. This makes the moment when the terrorist camels gun down a kidnapped rabbit especially poignant.

Whether or not this is meant to be serious at all is unknown but I have a hard time imagining it as such. It has as much to do with the animals as anything else I suppose; the gravity of the situation undercut as it is by images of a bunny firing an RPG into a truck as camel-terrorist fly through the air with A-Team-like aplomb; and close quarters combat looses some of its oomph when Mr. Flopsy is the one wielding the M4A1. Still, we can perhaps look forward to scenes of hooded camels hooked up to electrodes. That will be fun, won’t it?

Cat Shit One Movie Trailer – The Animated Series [YouTube]

There is no doubt that the marble staircase is a watermark for high-class and sophistication. Few things convey a sense of history and taste like the finely veined, polished surface of this sought-after stone.

Yet I say to you that the vast majority of marble, while beautiful, is no better than, say, quartz or cement. I know this may seem absurd, but that is only until you see pictures like these, taken from a variety of Japanese department stores built between 1914 and 1933, because these marble skinned staircases are dotted with fossils. Most of these fossils are of ammonites — extinct cephalopods whose closest living relative is the nautilus — whose only remains are their spiral shells.

This, then, is the kind of marble that will one day adorn the main staircase of my book-lined mansion. There I will be able to examine in detail every tread and riser, to press my face against the nosing and trim without having to worry about shoppers stepping over my crouched body.

Stairways to ammonite heaven [Pink Tentacle]

As we’re fresh out of cartoon ideas lately, and we’ve already posted the first three episodes, please enjoy the fourth fantastic episode of Kimi wa Petto, the touching, perverse tale of a beautiful career woman who adopts a teenage ballet dancer as her live-in pet.

The title character from Kamen Rider X (Masked Rider X) battles Starfish Hitler, member of the evil Government of Darkness.

This is twice in one week that the Daily WTF has featured one of history’s most infamous moustachioed villains and yet, combined, they do not approach the level of WTF found in the post directly below. That, dear readers, is the work of a professional.

Starfish Hitler [YouTube] : Wurzeltod : Pink Tentacle : The Echinoblog

Kure Kure Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus) is a children’s television show that aired in Japan from 1973 to 1974, running for 260, two minute and forty-one second episodes. It featured a cast of characters led by Kure Kure Takora an octopus who has a propensity for exclaiming “Kure! Kure!” (“I want it! I want it!”) and who —along with the rest of the cast— is enamored of the pink walrus Munro. The show is delightfully bizarre in a way that only the Japanese have managed to perfect, in the sense that each episode feels like a horrible NyQuil induced hallucination featuring characters inspired by a sushi menu. All 260 episodes can be found at the link below.

Kure Kure Takora Ep1 [YouTube] : Kure Kure Takora : Thanks, bubliki!

When Eliza and I were at the Tokyo Game Show last year, we shamelessly exhorted the strange, hummingbird-like booth babes to show their solidarity with all things Eldritch with the universal gang symbol of both the Cthulhic and Cthulhoid.

Many were strangely reluctant, considering we walked amongst a race that has a cultural imperative to cram cephalopods into the gooiest of their crevices. They seemed to think we wanted them to do something embarrassing… as opposed to, you know, fucking awesome.

But we got enough pictures of booth babes willing to flash Lovecraft’s gang symbol to space out over several Cthulhu Cthursdays. Which we of course forgot to do. Consider it rectified. Pee Ess. I’m back.

This bright morn on SMC, three times three special treats: Tick vs. the Tick; Garfield vs. Lasagna Cat; Boris Badunov vs. Boris Gonunov!

And that’s just the appetizer! For the main course, enjoy the second and third episodes of Kimi wa Petto, the beautiful story of an all-too-successful career woman who finds a broken boy in a cardboard box, and decides to keep him.
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Starting off your Saturday on a bit of a down note, Ectomo presents Isao Takahata’s Hotaru no Haka, Grave of the Fireflies, based on the book by Akiyuki Nosaka of the same name. Released in 1988, with animation production by Studio Ghibli, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, orphaned after the loss of their parents in World War II; their mother in the fiire-bombing of Kobe, and their father who served in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Forced to live with a relative, who treats them as little more than a burden while selling their mother’s kimono’s to buy rice for herself, they eventually leave and take up residence in an abandoned bomb shelter.

Grave of the Fireflies is a tough film to watch, and a movie which begins with the death of the young, main character was probably not what many audiences were expecting to see when it was released in Japan as a double feature with Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. It is also the only Studio Ghibli movie the Disney does not have the rights to distribute in the U.S., meaning that it has not seen the same, widespread release here. It is a film that should be seen at least once, whether one is a fan of animated features or not, remaining just as powerful now as it was 20 years ago.

Saturday Morning Cartoons XLIV: Grave of the Fireflies [YouTube]