LAST EDITED ON Apr-02-10 AT 01:59 PM (EDT)
17 Kane's World is named for Bob Kane, the creator of Batman. The Conroy Sector is named for actor Kevin Conroy, who voiced Batman in Batman: The Animated Series and its various dependencies.68 Not that it does really matter, but at this point Dorothy has been online for about ten years.
140 A common sight in facilities employing a lot of automatic machines - like my local paper mill, which has a fully automated wrapping system that bundles up rolls of paper in labeled brown wrappers for shipping. Industrial safety signs are an endless source of entertainment for the wordplay-minded, especially when a mechanical character is involved. Dorothy owns a number of them, all with one degree of innuendo or another - "CAUTION: HOT"; "DANGER: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY"; "CAUTION: CAUSTIC". (She doesn't wear the "DANGER: CONFINED SPACE - ENTRY BY PERMIT ONLY" one in public.)
351 R.D comes from an episode of The Big O, in which Roger Smith encounters a psychotic serial killer he initially believes to be Dorothy - until Dorothy unexpectedly shows up in the same place. Her presence is never explained in the original series (it might be in The Big O II, I don't know). Her arc in UF is new construction, as it were, though it has echoes of the longstanding beef between Noonian Soong's two creations, Lore and Data, on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
449 I couldn't resist throwing in a Tick reference (though at least this flagpole doesn't spend the rest of the story going "wub wub wub").
464 Echoes R.D's last line in her Big O appearance, terrifyingly delivered by Lia Sargent in the English version: "Goodbye - NEGOTIATOR!"
493 Not a word one gets many opportunities to use.
587 Pound for pound, Tiny Robo is the most powerful robot in the universe.
687 This is not based on any one Batman costume seen in other media, though it takes styling cues from the Evil Alternate Universe Batman seen in that one Justice League: The Animated Series story arc and from the armored Batman costume in Batman vs. Predator.
727 Early in William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, he describes the light-polluted night sky over Chiba, Japan - in his near-future setting, an overcrowded urban hell - as resembling an untuned television. The description is so evocative that I doubt it can be bettered for a night sky like New Gotham's.
751 qeylIS Iw: Klingonese, "Kahless's blood." A common Klingon expletive along the same lines as "Holy smoke."
840 This is a full-grown version of Terry McGinnis, the Batman of Batman Beyond.
924 J is based on the robot protagonist of Heat Guy J.
1017 Kaitlyn's idea to build what amounts to a neural MIDI system is left over from a much earlier version of her design, and took considerably longer than the rest of that version to go by the wayside... but eventually, as we see, her life evolved to the point where she had to, if not let it go, at least put it on hold.
Well, that's the way life is, sometimes. And at least the current version of Kaitlyn can admit it, and work around the changing situation. PJM
1037 Naturally, Sumire is talking about the Kanzaki Studios in-house orchestra, one of the best on Ishiyama.
1045 Given the sort of person she is and the environment in which she grew up, it should be no surprise that Kate's seen This Is Spinal Tap.
1100 Big Country's "Wonderland" evolved considerably over that band's lifetime - a fact reflected in the lifespan of the UF version, which is a Kaitlyn original.
1321 Just another nice "Awwww" moment that could bear illustrating. PJM
1351 Saionji's remark notwithstanding, the IPSF's regulations do not include the droit du capitaine.
1353 Utena would have thrown something, but that would have woken Wakaba up, and someone that comfortable shouldn't be disturbed for love or money. PJM
1444 A technique derived from the calibration process developed by the Royal Salusian Navy to calibrate the visual targeting systems of their SPARTAN-2 supercommandos' MJOLNIR Mark V armor, later adapted for the following marks of the MJOLNIR series, which after the Mark V were full-body cyborg replacement systems.
1481 Like most people who didn't grow up there, the Duelists find the local system of currency in use in the Empire of Morita a bit baffling.
1596 This look for Kori was immortalized in one of the EPU 2004 calendar pages by Dave Menard.
1690 Sumire quotes Auric Goldfinger, the villain of the piece, in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger. Goldfinger is more famous for his line later in the movie: "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."
1731 The Rescuer's Medal is a Maltese cross because that is the traditional symbol of firefighters and search-and-rescue personnel.
1751 Larcha is a mild psychoactive/hallucinogen, used to put a bit more of an edge on some of the Dantrovian high holidays. It's almost never encountered off-planet, partly because it's illegal most everywhere else and partly because it just doesn't ship very well.
1863 Echoes a conversation Corwin's father once had with Li Kohran.
1875 Colonel Grayson Death Carlyle (2170-2237), first commander of the Gray Death Legion, a mercenary Destroid outfit that did some work with the WDF back in the Golden Age. The Legion is best-remembered in the 25th century for its 2220 discovery of a lost stockpile of ancient Salusian military hardware on Ice Planet Halloran V. They were destroyed by GENOM forces in the early 2300s and now serve as an Einherjar unit.
1878 Corwin has just finished the preliminary design for the FNR-5 Fafnir assault 'Mech, as seen in MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries. A heavily-armored, surprisingly mobile 100-tonner with a pair of heavy gauss rifles, the Fafnir is not something you want to see coming after you.
1944 "How'd you know she was a Nazi?"
2025 Maria originally comes from Novaya Rodina; she fought on the wrong side in that world's 2350 Bolshevik revolution and had to flee to her father's homeworld, Ishiyama, to escape the Neo-Soviet death squads. In the event, she didn't quite manage to outdistance them - but by the time they caught up with her, Peter Moreau and the Hanagumi were there to make their jobs a lot harder than they expected.
2036 As the owner of a nicely preserved WWII-vintage Nagant, I can testify that the trigger mechanism is also hella stiff. It's a lovely piece of work and a great little chunk of history to own, but I would not want to have to rely on my Nagant to defend myself.
2046 Novaya Rodina's arsenal cities were quite deliberately named after old Russia's; there's another called New Izhevsk.
2132 Given Don's background and the nigh-infinite internal geometry of a TARDIS, it seemed only logical that he'd have various simulated-environment training rooms tucked away in there.
2203 One of my favorite bits of descriptive imagery, and a sequence I'd love to see animated, perhaps even more than some of our action scenes.
Heck yeah. It's the kind of imagery you expect to see behind the opening credits of a TV or OAV series. PJM
2248 Jack Ryder, also known as The Creeper, is a deeply quirky DC Comics C-lister and a creation of the late, great Steve Ditko. Unfortunately, modern treatments - with the notable exception of the one that appeared in the last season of Batman: The Animated Series - always tend to be these hideously dark, psychedelic brainfucks; apparently Ditko's subtler determinism is just too rarefied for today's LOOK AT ME! I CAN DO LURID IMAGERY! comics writers.
2250 Continuing the theme of naming New Gotham place names after people who've worked on Batman, Miller Street is named for Frank Miller, who wrote Batman: Year One and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
2275 Vintage Jim Steinman, this track headlines Streets of Fire and was also performed, with rather different lyrics, by Meat Loaf.
2282 Sumire Kanzaki wore this same dress as Ellen Aim in the Imperial Theater Company's 2354 production of Streets of Fire, which also starred Kanna Kirishima as Tom Cody and Sakura Shinguuji as Raven Shaddock.
2380 Another Big Country cover of a Neil Young song. As far as I'm concerned, Young primarily existed to write songs for Big Country to cover.
2422 Koriand'r paraphrases Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott's introduction of drummer Rick Allen during the 1988 concert video In the Round, In Your Face. Between the 1983 release of Pyromania and 1987's Hysteria, Allen lost an arm in a car accident and had to basically figure out how to be a drummer all over again, with the aid of what was for the time a very sophisticated suite of electronic drum equipment. Elliott's dubbing Allen "the Thunder God" led ReRob to call his modified Beta Legios bomber Thundergod One back in the UF Core.
2534 It remains my abiding sorrow that the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation never saw fit to do this, since Lore was a very entertaining character and would've done quite well being used as something other than a psycho-killer foil.
2553 In the early episodes of The Big O, Dorothy is sometimes referred to as "Dorothy-2"; initially, the implication is that the "1" refers to the real Dorothy Wayneright, but it is later revealed that Dorothy-1 was a giant battle robot Timothy Wayneright built for his criminal masters. Naturally, Roger and Big O destroyed it.
2578 The steam vents on Dorothy's shoulder blades are covered by armored louvers beneath her synthetic skin; they only open when she vents excess pressure in her reactor core, as here. When closed, they can't be detected - her new form's biomimicry is as perfect as the old one's when she's not at full combat power.
2751 I know what happens to Dorothy-1 next; the story revealing what she becomes over the course of the next year is well along in development.
3000 I get teary-eyed when I read this. Always. And you better believe Seven's going to be well-cared for. PJM
3085 Cold enough that the Valkyrie don't patrol that road on horseback, as they still do many of the secondary roads in Asgard and Vanaheim.
3097 As seen in the Star Trek episode "Arena".