Category: Blog

Jacking In Billy Style

May 30, 2026

The weather was nice so today I went for a walk, and after a brief stop in a hobby store I stopped at Broadmeadow McDonalds for an early lunch. I was too early since Australians apparently eat breakfast well into the lunch hour, and when I realized I couldn’t get a happy meal for an hour I became slightly irked. I ducked into the loo but the floor was slick with pee due to an overflowed urinal and when I hastily fled the store the wailing of a feral child echoed in my ears. I vowed to never enter a McDonald’s ever again.

Luckily there’s a ~~Burger King~~ Hungry Jack’s just down the street. This is a cultured dining establishment that isn’t breakfast-obsessed and I happily ordered a small Whopper Jr meal. I wasn’t bothered by the fact they forgot the tomato or that there were only eight fries since I was intrigued by the fact the frozen coke was in two cups, and had been filled by what appeared to be a nine-year-old.

There had been a frozen coke incident the other day, so I took a microscopic and very careful sip. My caution was to no avail since the beverage was just a degree or two above absolute zero. As I was recovering from the extreme agony of being momentarily cryogenically frozen I realized the child laborer had given me two cups for safety reasons.

I headed into Newcastle, walking down Hunter Street as I do every year. Two men were painting a mural on a wall that I hope looks better finished than it seems it will. Most of the street remains a near-ruin and a sad ghost of what exists only in my memories now. Those days are gone forever, it’s time to let them go. But.

I bought a postcard at The Rock Shop. It’s so sun-faded it’s probably a crime for them to have sold it at the price they did, but more the fool me for buying. I had to interrupt the cashier who was debating the relative tastiness of fast-food chicken tenders with her friend. I probably should have given her my opinion (Oporto is best) but I didn’t want to seem weird because I’m actually very normal.

A man in civic park stood next to a sign warning owners to keep dogs out of the flower patch. His dog, busy destroying the flower patch, was on a leash so long I assume the man had appropriated it from a kite. The man himself resembled a gnome, and wasn’t much larger than his dog. He could have ridden it home.

I hopped on the light rail to head to the beach, which was a fools move since I only traveled a single stop. The beach was pretty, but the waves were mighty and swimming was disallowed. Only a few brave surfers were out, and for the first time as far as I can recall I didn’t go down and touch the water. It was quite warm by now, and I was in shorts and shirtsleeves, wondering how sunburned I’d wake up tomorrow.

Gulls were everywhere sharking for man-food, but these days even the beachside kiosks sell only breakfast almost at the lunch hour. No chips for the birds today! I bid the feathery thieves farewell and headed back into town to my destination.

This was the Tower Cinemas, which has been renovated and reopened after many years of neglect. This is a wonderfully nostalgic place for me (and my ilk), since this is the very same cinema I saw almost every film of important during my formative years.

The ground level has a lot of pinball machines and a few old arcade games and I had fun playing a few of them, including the new Pokemon pinball. My score of 172,883,800 was just shy of the high score table which seems ok for a first try, but at $2 a game I wanted to try others.

The interior of the cinema is largely the same as it was, with three screens over two levels. They’ve got an amazing selection of original movie posters hanging throughout which were great to see.

It’s very likely I saw all of these films at this very cinema, and I’d like to think these were the very posters they displayed at the time. The cinema also shows newer films, but they’ve got a busy schedule of vintage films that would make this place a regular destination for me if I lived here.

On the way back I stopped at Marketown McDonalds, since Sue assured me I only had a 50% chance of dying if I entered. I have become inured to the misery of this particular Maccas, so I was surprised when not only did I fall in love with the girl that gave me my order, but that I was able to sit and enjoy it without being murdered.

And yes, that’s my second frozen Coke of the day, although happily the freezer burn from this one only nearly made me pass out.

Before leaving Marketown I bought another giant bag of Toobs, which I immediately opened and ate as I walked through the side streets back to mum’s. A guy was painting his fence and looked at me querulously so I hid my Toobs, pulled the brim of my extremely fashionable hat down and hurried on. By the time I got back I was knackered; I’d been walking for about six hours.

Here we both are, and don’t you agree mum looks a bit like Doctor Who in this photo? Tonight we’ll watch TV and I’ll write postcards and maybe even begin the other op-shop puzzle. It shall be a relaxing evening 🙂

Eight Antiques

May 25, 2026

Today we drove from Katoomba to Dubbo via Orange, and the total trip took about 6 hours (including charging stop) and I took nary a photo! So instead, today I’ll showcase a few interesting items I saw at antique shops these past two days…

Typewriters are a surprisingly common items at antique shops here, but this one in particular caught my eye due to the Kmart badge on it. The tag identifies it as a ‘Nakajima’ brand device from the 1970s and says it’s been restored and tested. In other words, you could write a book with it!

I know even without opening the box that this would have the thinnest of gameplay and contain fragile paper game pieces and a near-generic board. But licensed games like this one always catch my eye, and remind me of how undemanding we were as fans back in the ancient age.

Even though this was a common style back in the early 1980s, this one reminded me a lot of the devices that Bernard and I had as kids. This one appeared to be in extraordinary condition, but it didn’t say whether it actually worked or not.

I’ve never seen a Commodore 64 game for sale at an antique (or retro game) store in the USA, so it’s always a treat to see them here. But $75 for this? It was part of a larger collection of (mostly PC) Microprose games, all of which seemed overpriced.

I was tempted by these Japanese phone cards, but the store was a bit fancy and they didn’t have a price so I moved on. Years ago when I went to the stamp show while I was here there were also Japanese phone card vendors so it seems collecting these this was a (niche I’m sure) hobby in Australia at some point.

The store had three different sets of these, all labeled at $150 and the red one described as ‘incomplete’. The price was outrageous for the condition, but I would have liked to see inside regardless. Perhaps I should have asked?

I don’t remember ever seeing anything like this when I was young. Like most of the world, Australia no longer broadcasts analogue TV signals so this would be useless for TV viewing, but it very likely has an RF connector on the back so could work as a portable monitor for a retro game system. As a child, something like this would have been the dream!

This is the English version of a Japanese fantasy board game from 1986. The game asks players to survive a haunted house and apparently plays like a simplified version of Talisman. It has a beautiful big board, hundreds of tokens and cards and a large plastic spinner with an evil face on it.

The copy at the antique store wasn’t in perfect condition, and the spinner was extremely dirty, but had I seen this in America I would have been tempted even without knowing it was complete. Since the store hadn’t been able to verify that yet, it wasn’t yet priced or on sale.

59.5 Hours of Kamen Rider!

May 16, 2026

2025 was “the year I got into Kamen Rider” and indeed I did! I invested heavily into DVD sets and started watching the new series as it was released. Here’s the first in a series of my thoughts, presented in the order in which the shows/films were released.

Kamen Rider Black (1987, 51 episodes, 21.5 hours)

The DVD sets I own spanned decades, and for no particular reason I began with this one from 1987. It tells the story of a Japan besieged by an evil group called Gorgom who kidnap two brothers and turn them into cyborgs. One (Kotaro) escapes and becomes ‘Kamen Rider Black’, destined to fight Gorgom to prevent them from destroying the world.

This is a fantastic series! It’s dark and violent with many horror elements and Kotaru’s struggle (as Kamen Rider) against Gorgom seems futile and almost never gives him any respite. The story is insane, with elements like the ‘Century King’, the ‘Sword Saint Bergonia’ arc and the takeover of Gorgom by the evil cyborg ‘Shadow Moon’ but it somehow works and builds toward a superb conclusion.

Many elements of this show reminded me of the classic series Monkey we loved as kids, and of course I already did a blog post about its beautiful closing theme. Black is hailed as one of the greatest Kamen Rider series of all time for good reason, and the only negative about me watching it first was my realization that I may have hit the peak at the very start!

Kamen Rider Black RX (1988, 47 episodes, 19.5 hours)

Black was a success and for the first time in the series history the network wanted a sequel. It was decided to tone down the violence and horror, and add elements to make the sequel more marketable to children. While it has the same actor playing ostensibly the same character, Kamen Rider RX is a very different series.

The cult Gorgom is gone, replaced with an extradimensional invasion from the ‘Crisis Empire’. The bizarre mutant monsters from Black are replaced with robots, and Kotaro is now living with a family and flying helicopters for work! His history fighting Gorgom is given token mention only, and he’s never referred to as a cyborg at any time. Indeed his powers now come from the sun!

While this is undeniably inferior to Black, I still greatly enjoyed RX. The fight scenes are great, and Kotaro still struggles against a vastly more resourceful foe. But he’s received many upgrades, and the lightsaber effect of his ‘Revolcane’ sword in particular is too-good for TV circa 1988.

The show struggled during its airing, and this is apparent with some tonal shifts (they introduce Shadow Moon and even 10 older Riders to lure back viewers) and even though it gets increasingly goofy (adding sidekicks like a token ‘psychic girl’) it never lost its charm for me.

RX was the last Kamen Rider produced during the Showa Era and it would be more than a decade before another TV series would be made. During that period three films were released:

Shin: Kamen Rider Prologue (1992, 1.5 hours)

This is an unusual addition to the franchise, and one of the few Kamen Rider shows where the rider himself is biological rather than cybernetic. The story is that a mysterious group (‘The Syndicate’) is creating soldiers by fusing humans with grasshoppers, and one of their creations manages to escape and thwart their plans. I’ve extrapolated a bit there, since motivations and intents are a bit lost in the script, and overall the story is a bit muddled.

This is a horror film, with not only the villian but also very much the Rider himself being grotesque. There’s a very Cronenbergian feeling to the film, with lots of violence and a shocking (for this franchise) amount of blood. It’s not (close to) great, and I’m not even sure I’d say it’s good – mostly because I don’t like the Rider design – but it was entertaining regardless.

Apparently this was intended as a sort of pilot for a series or film sequel, but was not successful enough for either. As such, it remains a strange oddity in the larger franchise.

Kamen Rider ZO (1993, 1 hour)

This second film was released a year later and the story is even more barebones than the previous. Once again we have a hero becoming a Rider after a scientist grafts grasshopper DNA into him, but his fight to protect a child from the evil ‘Neo-life form’ named Doras raises more questions than it answers.

Regardless, this is a stylish film of near-endless action scenes where ZO faces off against several monstrous threats brought to life with clever use of practical effects and stop motion. The spider creature in particular is extremely well done even today and would have been a real thrill back when the film was released. While short, this was a fun watch.

Kamen Rider J (1994, 1 hour)

The next year we saw yet another new short film, and this one is very similar to ZO from the previous year. The origin story now is that our hero is killed defending a young girl from a space entity named ‘Fog Mother’ and is promptly resurrected by ‘The Spirits Of The Earth’ into Kamen Rider J, who must save the world from ruin.

There’s lots to like here, from the extremely impressive creature suits to the fight scenes to the stop-motion cute sidekick ‘Berry’ the grasshopper! Toward the end it even gets a bit too close to Ultraman when J becomes massive to fight the gigantic Fog Mother. Another fun film.

Shin Kamen Rider (2023, 51 episodes, 2 hours)

This is the third in the series of tokusatsu films made by Hideaki Anno and given the two previous were Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman (my favourite film of all time) I had high hopes to say the least.

It’s a retelling of the original Kamen Rider premise: an evil organization named Shocker is creating mutant/cyborg hybrids to take over the world, and a lone hero – Kamen Rider – fights to stop them. There’s a lot more to it than this of course, including the usual Anno weirdness, but this is a film that asks the viewer to turn off their brain and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

And what a ride it is. This is crazy and weird and wonderful and in my opinion a successful reimagining of the franchise in a way respectful of both experienced and unfamiliar audiences. It was a success theatrically, although rumours of a sequel seem to have amounted to nothing so far. This one is free on Amazon Prime if you haven’t seen it.

Kamen Rider Zeztz (2025, 34+ episodes, 13+ hours)

This is the latest Kamen Rider series and is currently screening (for free) on YouTube weekly. The gap between current franchise entries and the Showa series I’ve already seen is immense, but – much like Ultraman – the same DNA is there and this is still recognizably Kamen Rider.

This time the hero assumes the role of a secret agent in his dreams, and can transform into a powerful hero called ‘Zeztz’ to fight various evildoers. I’m 34 episodes in and loving this show for its characters and stylish visuals and genuinely impressive storytelling. When – more than twenty episodes in – the show revealed everything that had already happened was (spoiler) one lengthy dream I was genuinely surprised! I’m looking forward to buying some Zeztz merchandise during my upcoming Japan trip 🙂

Nearly 60 hours in and I’ve only just started with this decades-old franchise. I won’t be stopping! And yes, I’m still watching Ultraman and I’ve already got a decent DVD collection of old Metal Heroes series as well 😉

Robot Claw