#i may not agree with management giving us cross talks before we’ve seen the actors do anything but it will help get a general vibe ig

[akkivee]

it is time. stage bat time 😌:

hirono ryouta

hirONO RYOUTA

HIRONO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RYOUTA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

that’s it that’s the post lmao /j

i’ve btched plenty about kuukou’s writing in the stage but had hirono-san not been at the helm i highly doubt i would have cared for stage bat as much as i do lmao

i’ve fairly recently talked about how he defined the way kuukou moves in auxiliary media and how it brought to life how i envisioned he moved but it bears repeating hirono-san gave me everything and more lmao

like i still think about kuukou stalking up on some guy in track 3, twirling his mic and actually using it as a bludgeoning weapon with utter glee lol he’s so violent ���

i love love love the feedback loop that quietly goes on behind the scenes with kuukou’s actors lmao

hirono-san mentioned in their cross talk that hayama-san’s 5th live performance was a frame of reference for the kuukou audition iirc, hayama-san a few years later during the 9th live imitated the way hirono-san used to bow as kuukou after nurusara’s division rep battle, and the bat actors took the bat seiyuu’s very cute 9th live blunder, missing their cue to introduce themselves in sync, and owned bat’s chaos by introducing themselves with their individual quirks in their rep live lol

lol during that cross talk, hirono-san mentioned he was endlessly amused by kuukou being tied up and angrily trying to talk in bat’s first drama track and i’m very happy he got to live it for himself after being tied up by dohifu in bat vs mtr lmao

still cracks me up dohifu had their very gay my home duet and kuukou literally went ‘REALLY???? IN FRONT OF MY SALAD?????’ lmao

i’ve been trying my hardest to talk around stage kuukou’s writing but personal bangers despite are!!!!!

him trying to fight jakurai and when the man passed out without kuukou even doing anything he went, ‘bruh🧍‍♂️’!!!!!!!! him getting in hifumi’s face after being called out for his shitty attitude!!!!! him playing the bad guy to bring hitoya and jakurai together!!!!!!

kuukou: *points* HITOYA!!!!!!

kuukou: *points again* JYOOSH!!!!!!

i wish i was normal about bat’s rep live lol like while we may suspect that performance was borne out of his looming graduation, hirono-san snapped off that last remaining chain of sanity and went crazy lol

i think about him butting heads and screaming at kenta-san, one of the ddb guys who is probably the only one who could match that energy lmao, the roaring growing in frequency until he held up his jacket, nagoya side out, and yelling, ‘NAGOYAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!’ until he blacked out on stage all the time 😭😭😭

other moments from the rep live i think about lol is that skit where hitoya totally scams kuukou and jyushi lmao but when hitoya told them the statue they ‘broke’ cost like 1000000¥ or some outrageous amount, kuukou started retching and that’s so relatable LOL

and that moment during the host club invasion where he walks in and goes ‘sup btches it’s been a while 😈’ and proceeds to destroy fragrance LOL

and him stuffing like four marshmallows at once in his mouth, expecting to be able to continue being able to speak lmao

and him going so hard his rings flew off and an unplanned mini encore happened as he tried to look for them LOL

saw a report that they were going stoopid one day during their rep live run the crowd was unwilling to let them go so hirono-san convinced the producers to let them do another encore on top of the several they already had 😭😭😭

and can you believe the hype never stopped even when bat wasn’t the focal point lol i heard that man at one point needed to be dragged off the stage during bop2023 bc he staunchly said they’d have to dim the lights on him for him to stop😭😭😭😭

there’s so so many bop2023 moments i think about like his redux rock paper scissors game, or him lifting up sasara only to drop him a second later lmao, him bullying stage posse LOL, the way they let him bring the hype whenever music lulled

and ofc the nb duet lol if the stage doesn’t want to do much by way of ichiro and kuukou’s relationship, thank fck hirono-san was there to carry lmao

crying over that one day when neither ichiro nor kuukou could catch their shared coke bottle to save their lives and kept laughing at each other while performing 😭😭😭😭😭

thank you hirono-san for establishing into stage canon kuukou dropped his bandana at ichiro’s feet after their breakup and that ichiro still has kuukou’s red bandana somewhere. it may not stick but that’s such an amazing take on that bandana’s whereabouts

daigo-san’s jyushi is so BABYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

THE top line i always think about is him joyfully walking into hitoya’s office in bat’s rep live and going, ‘hitoya-san!!!!! i’ve come to play!!!!! 😃😃😃’

previously that had been me crying anytime i thought about him skipping into hitoya’s office in track 3, cheerfully calling for him only to switch mid sentence into vkei mode once he noticed hitoya has guests lmao

his kuukou impersonation is legendary no joke lmao

AND SO IS ANY MOMENT WHERE HE PICKS KUUKOU UP LONG CAT STYLE SHOUT OUT TO BOP2023 SPECIFICALLY WHEN HE SWUNG HIM AROUND A LITTLE BIT TOO 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

that’s the second most bat moment i think about lol

i like how sometimes daigo-san’s default jyushi expression is the equivalent of this lol

another top moment i think about is him yelling how much he loves kuukou and hitoya during bop2023 😭😭😭

especially when you think about those early days of bat???? his first stage role ever was track 3 and he talked about learning the ropes from ruito-san, late night train rides with hirono-san after rehearsals and sharing his insecurities, bonding with them both despite the two of them being shy and UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH

like I COULD CRY about daigo-san incessantly commenting under hirono-san’s posts after track 3 and finally hirono-san went, ‘bro what gives???’ and daigo-san went, ‘i’m trying to be your friend lol’ 😭😭😭😭😭😭

all that bonding culminated to a point daigo-san can make fun hirono-san in his most trying hours lol (he lost a lot of money gambling LOL)

forever haunted by him commenting he and sakakihara-san had an in depth conversation about jyushi after track 3 and we never had them in the same room 😭😭😭😭

i also think about this one report i read where hitoya and kuukou were beefing as they usually do so he sat himself aside and lol when kuukou asked him why’s he sitting over there he responded, ‘well i didn’t want to get in the way of your flirting 😒’ LOL

jyushi being hitoya’s (current) number one fanboy is my canon lol so i’m happy he got a whole solo about hitoya lol

another top moment i think about is jyushi dramatically crying he’s going to die alone in shinjuku because he got separated from kuukou lmao

will forever and always be bitter the mtc rep live with bat as guests wasn’t available for stream so we missed kuukou bullying samatoki by repeating everything he said, kuukou and jyushi getting chased around by juto and rio while samatoki and hitoya waffled (and samatoki oogled hitoya’s body lmao) and jyushi got arrested by juto so he started crying for kuukou who came out asking what was wrong as he piggybacked rio LOL

idk if you can tell but i like stage jyushi lol he’s very funny

both hirono-san and daigo-san are so down bad for ruito-san it’s so funny but i don’t blame them LIKE HAVE YOU SEEN HIM LOL

it’s so funny to see it bleed into their kuukou and jyushi like we ain’t ever getting over them essentially grinding up on him during one of bat’s songs in track 3 LOL

ruito-san is too peak for hitoya frfr lol ain’t no way we’ll get another hitoya who can do synchronised backflips with kuukou 😭😭😭😭😭😭

i almost forgot lol hirono-san commented that after track 3, he got stuck calling himself ‘sessou,’ kuukou’s personal pronoun lol, and similarly, ruito-san has a hard time not touching his chin like hitoya does LOL

stage hitoya is fascinating, simply bc of how much more adjusted he is than canon hitoya lol

like i cannot stress enough how the best morally grey hitoya was written when he scammed kuukou and jyushi into doing good deeds and favours for him lmao

since he’s so well adjusted, some of his and kuukou’s heart to heart changed in execution, but it was neat seeing him call out kuukou for assuming people can be effortlessly strong like him, and have that thought come back when he’s facing jakurai

idk if i have a preference between the stage vs canon on how they resolved hitoya’s and sensei’s relationship but i still think the stage absolutely cooked lol

will always be crying over kuukou’s jakurai impersonation lol and how he revealed it by teasing hitoya for having a date but kuukou apparently got the details wrong so he confidently corrected him that they had gone out for strawberry milkshakes

and fanboy jyushi fell to his knees crying how cute that was, he gets it LOL

there’s this motion stage hitoya does in his courtroom solo i think, where he stands with perfect posture and tilts his arms that makes him look like a scale ⚖️ and it’s so good lol symbolism in DANCING

so more on hirono-san and daigo-san loving ruito-san lol i always think about them gassing up the role he landed in a drag production 😭😭😭 hirono-san didn’t want to miss it and daigo-san eloquently used 🔥🔥🔥 in his hype, amongst other borderline thirst tweet shenanigans LOL

was that their last interview together……….???? but that video of them painting walls together where ruito spills paint all over hirono-san, daigo-san gently caresses paint onto ruito-san’s face, and hirono-san crushes daigo-san’s balls truly lives rent free i’m going to miss the three of them as bat so much 😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💔😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜😭💜

[mst3kproject]

Dance Hall Racket

Remember Timothy Farrell as gangster Umberto Scalli from Racket Girls? He's back with a new scheme in Dance Hall Racket!

What's that?  You want to know how he could be back in 1954's Dance Hall Racket when he was shot and killed in 1951's Racket Girls?  So do I.  My first theory was that Dance Hall Racket was actually a prequel to Racket Girls rather than a sequel, but he dies at the end of this one, too.  Farrell also played Scalli in a third movie, 1949's The Devil's Sleep (which I guess is actually the first Scalli movie, being as it was made before the other two).  I haven't seen that one, but I'll look for it, and if he doesn't die at the end I will be extremely disappointed.

Scalli's scheme this time is using a nightclub as a front to launder the money he makes by smuggling diamonds inside dogs' ears (this actually happens), but if he wants his longtime girlfriend Fortuna to marry him, he's gonna need more than that. An old friend of Scalli's, Victor Pappas, is about to be released from prison – if Scalli can make Pappas tell where he hid the loot from their last heist, he'll be rich enough to win her over, but little does he know, his criminal empire is about to topple (again). Undercover cop Charlie Edson is investigating him, looking for the murderer of a sailor.  You'd think being killed once would be enough to teach Scalli that crime doesn't pay.

The cops use the phrase 'sea men' to refer to sailors.  I'm imagining Tom and Crow snickering over that while Joel tries his best to keep them from making jokes too overt for television.

“But Joel, he said...”

“I know he did, Crow, but there are kids in the audience!”

I went into this movie trying not to remember the pain of watching Racket Girls, but I really expected more of the same.  Because of this, the first quarter hour or so of Dance Hall Racket was actually a pleasant surprise.  Racket Girls began with a scene of wrestling that really contributed nothing at all – Dance Hall Racket, however, got right on with actually telling its story!  The exposition about Scalli, Pappas, and Fortuna wasn’t too annoying, we got to see the sailor killed and Edson sent in undercover, and I began to hope that this might be an actual movie. Sadly, having set up all of that, the story came to a dead screeching halt and began puttering around killing time.

It does this in two main ways: one is watching women change.  These scenes are filled with weird cuts in which the characters’ clothes appear and vanish again, while the actresses remain standing in the same spot.  They’re often not wearing any less clothing, and the dialogue continues, so we’re not supposed to think that any time has passed.  I think the cuts may have less to do with modesty than with a camera that could only film a certain number of seconds in one take.  There’s also a scene in which two drunk women have some kind of limp-wristed parody of a catfight which is so bad it’s actually laugh-out-loud funny.

The other way the movie fills time is with Punchy, a supposed ‘comic relief’ character who is so devoid of humour I think I’ve forgotten how to tell a joke.

So yeah, all this goes on for another half an hour, during which time very little happens that’s actually relevant to the plot.  Occasionally hints of it peek out of the foliage, but mostly we’re listening to Punchy fail to be funny, or watching Scalli’s goons threaten women with knives when he thinks they’re stealing from him (like Jackie and her Swanky Apartment in Racket Girls, I guess).  Then when we’ve almost forgotten about him, Pappas finally shows up and the movie actually takes a surprising turn, when jealous and trigger-happy thug Vinnie takes exception to Scalli appointing his girlfriend Rose as Pappas’ date for the evening.

This is a surprisingly good piece of storytelling for this movie – Vinnie’s possessiveness of Rose was set up earlier, although by this point we’ve pretty much forgotten about that, too.  So much time was spent on other details of the characters’ lives and relationships that turned out to be irrelevant, we can’t be blamed for assuming Vinnie and Rose are more of the same.  Seeing it paid off like that was actually kind of satisfying.  Unfortunately, it also serves to emphasize just how many other things were set up in the movie that didn’t pay off, many of which seemed like they ought to be important.

What, for example, happened to Fortuna?  We only saw her in one scene and then she vanished utterly.  She was the one Scalli was trying to please, so you’d think we’d see her hanging around and pestering him.  What happened to Icepick, the guy who wanted to leave the racket and get married?  His story was set up in a way that makes us sure something terrible is going to happen to him, but the movie never gets around to it.  What’s up with Pappas being unable to speak?  We’re told twice that he had his tongue cut out and that really sounds like it ought to be a plot point but it never is. When he made sure Vinnie got shot I thought for a moment it would turn out that he’d agreed to work for the cops in order to get out of jail, but the movie ends without going into it.

It’s also another movie that can’t really be said to have a hero.  We don’t know Edson at all – we don’t even learn his name until well after he’s introduced and nothing he does ever gives him a personality.  He’s just A Cop.  The movie is much more interested in the various double-crossings among the nasty types who work for Scalli.  None of these people can really be considered a protagonist, since they’re all horrible and never sympathetic in the least, but they at least have relationships and motivations.

For all that, though, this is still a better movie than Racket Girls!  The irrelevant dancing is somehow much more bearable than irrelevant wrestling was, maybe because the dancing isn’t a contest and we don’t feel we’re supposed to have something invested in it when we can’t. More importantly, we don’t have a Peaches Page in this movie.  There are plenty of half-clothed women in it, and the movie leers at them unapologetically, but there’s no single one who is set up as a potential hero only to be exploited and forgotten about.  In this sense, Dance Hall Racket feels a little more honest and a little less disappointing.  It’s a terrible, terrible movie, but it’s not quite as bad as I know it could have been.

Between this and Racket Girls, I also think I’m starting to get an inkling of what, if indeed anything, the ‘Scalli Trilogy’ is trying to say.  The films are obviously about how crime doesn’t pay, but the comeuppances in them are not brought about by the police but by Scalli’s fellow criminals. Crime doesn’t pay, but organized crime in particular cannot possibly pay because everybody in the organization is a criminal, and criminals are by nature untrustworthy and therefore unable to work together.  Maybe this is what’s being emphasized by Lois the thief in this movie, or Jackie and her Swanky Apartment in Racket Girls – there can be no cooperation when everybody is out for themselves.

I also have to wonder what’s going on with the thing where Scalli dies in Movie One only to reappear in Movie Two a few years later and die again.  The two can’t possibly be in continuity with each other unless Scalli respawns like a video game character every time he’s killed, so what gives?  Is Dance Hall Racket supposed to be a remake?  That kind of makes sense when you consider how it does try to start correcting some of its predecessor’s mistakes. Is this an alternate universe, demonstrating that crime doesn’t pay in any possible world?  Has Scalli been reincarnated, only to learn nothing from the mistakes of his previous lifetime?  This fascinates me far more than it should.

You may wonder why I bother to think about it when the real answer is obviously just that the film-makers and actor Timothy Farrell were just too damned lazy to come up with a new character.  It’s true that there’s probably no more to it than that, and yet I’m not totally sure, because the movie does make a point of ending where it began.  With Scalli and Vinnie both dead and Icepick out of the racket, management of the club falls to the next guy down on the totem pole, bouncer Bert.  We’ve heard the girls who work there talk about him and how he keeps everybody in line – both the customers and the girls themselves. The policeman who has supposedly been narrating the whole story says they figure Bert is continuing to launder money and sooner or later he’ll be next on their list, and thus the whole cycle starts again.

I gotta see that third (first) Scalli movie.  Maybe that one will tell me whether there’s really anything going on there.  Or maybe, considering how much of an improvement this one was over Racket Girls, it’ll just be totally unwatchable.  The only thing I can be absolutely certain of is that Dance Hall Racket would have made for some awesome MST3K.