Gamera: The Complete Collection will be released on July 28 via Arrow Video. The box set collects all twelve films in the Japanese kaiju franchise on Blu-ray for the first time.
The set also includes a 120-page comic book including a reprint of Dark Horse Comics’ Gamera mini series from 1996 and the first-ever English-language printing of the prequel comic, The Last Hope, as well as an 80-page book featuring new writing on the series by Patrick Macias, illustrations by Jolyon Yates, and more.
Gamera: The Complete Collection is house in a rigid box featuring artwork by Matt Frank. All two films are presented in their original, uncut Japanese versions with lossless Japanese and English audio. Gammera the Invincible, the U.S. theatrical version of the original film, is also included.
Final specs will be confirmed at a later date, but Arrow promises hours of new and archival extras, including audio commentates by August Ragone, David Kalat, and Steve Ryfle & Ed Godziszewski, cast and crew interviews, and new 4K restorations of the Heisei trilogy (more on that below).
(via astoundingbeyondbelief)
Assyrian relief of a winged genie or Apkallu from room S, panel 17 in the city of Namrud’s Northwest Palace. The relief dates back to 875-860 BCE. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME.
Photo by Babylon Chronicle
U.S., Afghanistan And Taliban Announce 7-Day 'Reduction In Violence' -
npr:
Afghan forces, the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan and the Taliban militia will begin a seven-day “reduction in violence” across the country beginning Saturday midnight local time (2:30 p.m. ET Friday) — a possible prelude to a broader peace deal following two decades of war, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.
The quasi cease-fire was hammered out during protracted negotiations in Qatar that began in 2018. It could ultimately lead to a significant reduction of the approximately 12,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
(Source: NPR)
(via justsomeantifas)
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Cover art for the Arrow Video Gamera set by @spankzilla85! (x)
I am curious and excited about this, but does anyone know if there are any major differences between this and the Mill Creek BluRay collection from a few years ago? Am I correct in assuming this collection includes Gamera the Brave?
- It does have Gamera the Brave, yes.
- It’s not cramming the eight Showa movies onto two Blu-rays.
- All of the movies have at least one English dub (Mill Creek did not include any for the Showa movies).
- Kadokawa’s new 4K transfers were used for the Kaneko trilogy.
- New audio commentaries for Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (Matt Frank) and Gamera 3 (Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski), and presumably one for Gamera 2 as well (David Kalat is mentioned in the product listing). Not sure if August Ragone recorded more for the Showa movies or if they’re just reusing the ones he did for Gamera: The Giant Monster and Gamera vs. Barugon.
And that’s with most of the specifics still pending!
(via astoundingbeyondbelief)
Frederick Douglass Railed Against Economic Inequality -
Everyone knows that Frederick Douglass, who died 125 years ago today, was a fierce opponent of slavery and a powerful champion of freedom, justice, and equality for all. But when it comes to Douglass’s concrete political views, things are more complicated.
For some scholars, Douglass’s commitment to individual rights mark him, as David Blight has written, as “both a radical thinker and a proponent of classic 19th-century political liberalism.” His ambivalence toward capitalism, which he both denounced and defended, muddies the picture. Recently, some on the Right — and not just the clueless Donald Trump — have sought to make Douglass their own, arguing that “Frederick Douglass Hated Socialism,” and claiming the militant abolitionist as a libertarian hero.
That is a strange way to describe an antislavery leader who devoted his life to seeking the forcible expropriation of property worth more than all antebellum America’s factories, railroads, and banks combined. But the truth is that Douglass’s long political career was rife with contradiction. For half a century, he moved between outside agitation and mainstream political engagement; between pessimism about the depth of American racial oppression and an optimistic faith in struggle and progress; between a wary liberal individualism and a bolder embrace of utopian socialism, working-class struggle, and interracial labor organizing against the “tremendous power of capital.”
No single document, of course, can solve the riddle of Douglass’s complex political ideas. But while doing research at Yale’s Beinecke Library, I came across two articles in the 1856 Frederick Douglass’ Paper that have not, to my knowledge, been reprinted or digitized since. (Most of Douglass’s journalistic writing remains unpublished, though a forthcoming volume in the Frederick Douglass Papers should help address that problem.) Nor have they been excerpted, quoted, or discussed at length in the extensive scholarship on Douglass.
Both articles, “The Accumulation of Wealth” and “The Land Reformer,” help shed new light on how Douglass saw the relationship between economic inequality and political democracy in the 1850s. They also demonstrate that in the age of Trump and Michael Bloomberg, Frederick Douglass has much to teach us today — not only about racism and civil rights, but the acute dangers posed by “the unlimited hoarding of wealth,” and the hard truth, still sidestepped by many liberals today, that true political freedom is only possible under conditions of material equality.
In both pieces Douglass embraces the position, held by many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans (though remarkably few establishment Democrats today), that “wealth has ever been the tool of the tyrant, the readiest means by which liberty is overthrown.” He anticipates arguments that “unbridled accumulation” is simply a part of human nature: in fact, the “mighty machine” of capitalist society is an innovation, which compels, rather than reflects, acquisitive behavior. And he rejects the idea that poverty is an unchangeable fact of social life: it is, rather, the “consequence of wealth unduly accumulated.”
(via shad0ww0rdpain)
(via shad0ww0rdpain)
“When a wise man has wealth it is his slave. But wealth is a fool’s master. A wise man allows riches to control nothing, a fool everything.” — Seneca, On the Happy Life (via philosophybits)
(via philosophybits)
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