Bonus Video - The Hidden Metropolis Beneath Kansas City

One-hundred-fifty feet below Kansas City, in a 270-million-year-old limestone deposit, more than 1600 people work in the world’s largest business labyrinth. They basically work in the Batcave, and it's probably more interesting than your office.

:01 Twilight Zone
:20 Naked Barbie Doll
:30 Destination Moon (rocket)
.33 MTV logo
.35 Trip to the Moon movie
.36 Lost In Space
:47 Logans Run, Back to the future, Men in Black, Eye of HAL, Rollerball
.55 Nineteen Eighty-Four, MSTK3
.57 Dr. Who phonebooth, THX 1138 on the wall
1:01 Battlestar Galatica tattoo, BB8 from Star Wars
1:04 Matrix (red/blue pill in glasses reflection)
1:08 Armageddon or Independence Day.
1:11 5th Element
1:14 Patches (Prometheus, Silent Running, Alien)Major Tom Logo On Space Suit.
1:14 Star TreK (USS Enterprise (NCC-1701))
1:21 Posters (War of the Worlds, Body Snatchers, Soylent Green)
1:28 Area 51, Alien Autopsy, Logo from Lost
1:54 and 2:00 Day The Earth Stood Still robot
2:16 Barbarella
2:22 Metropolis
2:23 ET
2:24 Forbidden Planet (Robby The Robot)
2:25 Outland and Enemy Mine posters
2:29 Close Encounters (Devil's Tower)
2:41 Time Machine (on left), 2001 monolith, Star Trek
2:43 Max Headroom
2:35 Alien
3:04 Buckaroo Banzi Ending
3:18 Dr. Who (dalek)
3:36 Flash Gordon rocket ship

1:28 the logo on the suits is from Lost.
1:33 is Alien Autopsy
1:55 Day the Earth Stood Still
2:22 Metropolis
3:04 The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

The tattoo is just Starbucks tattoo from BSG

Watch image is from Metropolis, I think.

Origami is from Blade Runner, car too I think.
Quark was a bar tender on Star Trek : Deep Space 9

Also pretty sure the lab techs have Dharma Initiative patches from Lost

The way some people have written about "destroying" North Korea, it would make you think that we haven't been talking about a weapon of mass destruction which would indiscriminately incinerate women, children, pets, and leave swathes of radioactive land uninhabitable which would then leak mutation/radioactivity into the rest of the world's ecosystem.

Western civilisation has surely succumbed to some kind of mental sickness, turning us all into mindless clones repeating "the greater good" when we get promised large, colourful explosions. When war after war ends in disaster and further misery, we continue to talk about "bringing an end to suffering" everywhere in the world as though it's both a duty, and something we haven't catastrophically screwed up time after time. Worse is the underlying pride in that perceived duty; "We're gonna make their lives better whether they want it or not! OORAHH!"

The moralising about whether or not they deserve it is an exercise in narcissistic god complexes, covered with a veneer of regret, "oh no, we should have gone to war years ago, now it's too late, should we? shouldn't we?" Like it's great fun to discuss whether or not people should burn and rot to death over the course of weeks, from the comfort of your breakfast table back in good ole metropolis.

And if you decide to bomb? Ah well, it had to be done. Yes, it's a terrible burden, the kind of pain that people burning to death will never understand or thank us for. But we'll continue, because we're the hero they need not the one they want.

Trump's handling of the NK situation is a perfect marriage of the worst elements of the usual neoliberal approach (pro- profit & power orientated) and the thuggish exaggerated threat approach favoured by teenagers in playgrounds.

Our own countries are in an absolute SHIT state. With our indifference towards global warming, the developed nations are the most dangerous threat to life on Earth for *every* country. Why do we still have the arrogance to go around discussing how to improve countries that we've never even fucking been to?

I suppose if you're allergic to dihydrogen monoxide, attempting to erect a metropolis in a desert might seem like a sound plan.

Approaching 5 million hits on YouTube. *quality



More from an interview of Ladybeard by Forbes:

Forbes: How old are you?

Ladybeard: I’m five years old. I’m a five-year-old Japanese girl mysteriously from Australia with the appearance of an older Australian man. But Ladybeard is a five-year-old.

Forbes: How the idea of Ladybaby come about?

Ladybeard: The sponsoring company, Clearstone, is a costume maker in Japan. I had been on the cover of Metropolis, which is Japan’s biggest English-language street magazine. The CEO of Clearstone was getting off a plane at the airport and saw me on the cover, flexing in a bikini. He doesn’t speak English so he can’t read the article, but he shows the magazine to his staff, and I just happen to know some people on his staff. So they told him who I was, and he said, “Get him in for a meeting!”
So we go for this meeting, we have no idea what it’s about, and he says, “I really want to do this thing with you. I’ve got these two girls, and I want to put you in a [music] group with them. It’ll be like Babymetal except you’ll be in it. And it’ll be awesome!” That’s how Ladybaby happened.

I'm with you. I know a "cassette bomb" is a lesser used term for cluster bomb through googling. Submunition i assume because it broke apart from a larger munition. I don't know why it was a fortress for the grass though, and any higher meaning seems to be lost to me. It was a nice animation about a skeleton bombing an abandoned metropolis though.

I never had a problem with the killing of Zod. I never got those who complained how this movie killed Zod and praised the original '78 movie for the same reason he points out here, the he kills Zod in the '78 film and it is just laughed off while here he shows real remorse. My biggest pet peeve of the movie is that people complaining about him killing Zod... Never got why that upset people.

I did and still do have issue with the wholesale destruction of Metropolis in the fight, but can accept the premise of the video. But it should have been demonstrated more effectively in the film. Clark/Superman should have tried to lead the fight away from the city, then we see Zod ignore him and return to the destruction of humanity, forcing the fight to continue in the city. That simple little scene would have pulled it together and made it obvious that Zod wouldn't allow the fight to happen anywhere else but the city.

All the other issues he mentions and explained I thought were obvious and didn't need an explanation.

The answer is perilously simple: Soccer. Look at oh, I dunno, Greenbay, and the money that goes into football there. Greenbay isn't exactly a thriving metropolis, but the pride the get from having a good team outweighs the income inequality between the football haves and the spectator have nots. And if you think Americans are nuts about football, it pales in comparison to what Europeans feel about their soccer team.

But you do bring up a very valid point; crime always will flourish in harder economic times.

This is my favourite superhero film. I have watched it a half-dozen times and it really holds up. Especially the action, which is really not repetitious at all if you pay attention.

Most of the common criticisms ring false to me. Especially the ones about Superman being a murderer, not saving people, punching Zod through buildings (he puts Zod through a 7-Eleven but does not actually punch Zod through any skyscrapers in Metropolis).. etc.

The deviation from source was actually quite minimal. All the big elements of the mythos used in the movie are drawn from established canon. The major problem most people have is Superman snapping Zod's neck at the end when Zod was demonstrating his intent to kill every human on earth with his newfound powers. I'm not a big fan of the writing putting Superman into a corner like that, but it does represent a lesson learned and a starting point for the character to grow from. He was clearly anguished by being forced to take deadly action. This is a contrast to the Chris Reeve Superman who first arrived in Metropolis and revealed himself to the world as a fully formed superhero with full mastery of his powers.... who killed a *de-powered* Zod and the other Kryptonians at the end of Superman II by tossing them down a frozen chasm, then laughed about it.

DC writers sucked-ass could be one explanation as to why Marvel has always been a cut above. Part of the dynamic are the explanations of origins and powers and the more believable evolution of their characters...not to mention superior illustrators who tended to draw more FEMALE characters (HELLO!?) than the man-crushers over to DC-

DC could hardly develop suspension of disbelief with Superman...he never washed his fucking unitard for one thing, and if it was indestructible, how the FUCK did Ma Kent sew that shit from the fabric in his space pod?? That's just one small wrinkle in his whole MO, before he ever leaves for Metropolis, there's hundreds during the course of this poorly-thought-out franchise-

Oh yeah, another one that always bugged me:If Supermans' supposed to have superior intellect, how come the writers never used him as a platform to teach the younger readers anything substantial and why did Superman's dialogue always sound like some self-righteous beat cop?? Holes, holes, holes....

Couple of things that stood out most:
Michael Shannon (general Zod) apparently took voice-coaching lessons from Jeff Bridges
Superman was considerably less gay this time, and Lois Lane was soft and smooth and girly (plus Amy Adams has the natural reddish-brown hair of the comic book Lois Lane)

Otherwise the damn thing was preposterous....OH, and the CGI of the attack on the city?? Wholly unbelievable (i.e. the segment when Metropolis is under attack and all the central characters at ground zero miraculously survive).