DON’T BE AFRAID, 'CAUSE THERE’S STILL TIME [507]

In the 2024 film “I Saw the TV Glow”, a trailer for “The Pink Opaque”, the Young Adult Network drama enrapturing the isolated teenagers Maddy and Owen, includes the line, “It can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them”. This hits home toward the end of the film as Owen, eight years older, having resisted the call to escape his passive small-town life, tells himself, “It’s not real if I don’t think about it.”

I heard the second line when I first watched the film, but I only caught the first line on my second viewing. Owen tells himself to dismiss Maddy’s plan to take Owen back to the world of “The Pink Opaque”, to reassume his real identity as a character inside the show itself, having been banished to the “Midnight Realm” of our world by the “Big Bad” Mr Melancholy in the show’s final episode. Hearing the first line clarified to me the peril of staying blinkered to what needs to be confronted.

Films are not made to be watched like TV programmes, screen vastly reduced in size, sound compressed and funnelled down to small speakers, viewing spaces not acoustically optimised. I expected to get the most out of “I Saw the TV Glow” with a second viewing, but I had not expected to need it. So, harking back to my film studies degree, I was in a quiet room by myself, with pen, paper and (this time) a PDF copy of the script on standby, fully prepared to rock footage back and forth to ensure I hear each line correctly. It wasn’t that anyone mumbled their lines, even if the lead characters are teenagers, but I clearly didn’t have the volume up high enough on that first viewing.

I wanted to see “I Saw the TV Glow” for some time – no physical Blu-ray release has happened in the UK, so after a year I resorted to streaming the film, and I was not disappointed. The film’s allegory for the discovery of transgender identity, which I now know is also called the “egg crack” moment, preceded it, its writer/director Jane Schoenbrun reportedly having begun writing the script at the outset of their own transition process. 

The “white draft” of the script, dated 31^st May 2022, had a lot more jumping between different periods of time, which I took as evidence of the cracks appearing in the characters’ reality appeared, but the finished film proceeds more linearly to concentrate on Maddy and Owen’s relationship with the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show “The Pink Opaque”, a title I am guessing is deliberately, well, opaque, only because I don’t know why Cocteau Twins used it as the title of their 1986 compilation album.

Aside from self-inflicted sound issues, I had some frustration “I Saw the TV Glow” on its first viewing. For instance, there is a point where shots of “our world”, presented by the film’s regular widescreen aspect ratio and pin-sharp picture, overlaps with the squarer VHS-quality picture of “The Pink Opaque”, realities passing between resolutions. The second viewing confirmed this already elsewhere as the shots of the show’s character of Isabel are shown are repeated in both forms, and in parallel with Owen in “our world”, which I should really be calling the “Midnight Realm”. Later, as Maddy – or Tara, as she is called in “The Pink Opaque” – has an almighty long speech about what happened to her, how she crossed dimensions, and how she came back to get Owen. The script had Owen watching her monologue as intently as he watched the show, physically breaking up the long passages, but none of these reverse shots made their way into the finished film, making it look easier for Owen to dismiss the story later as a long ramble.

However, what I appreciated on the second viewing were when the parallels were drawn between Maddy and Owen, and Isabel and Tara. The pilot of “The Pink Opaque” had Isabel not knowing what was happening to her as her telepathic powers became apparent, later serving her in defeating foes with Tara, who lived in a different county – in the “Midnight Realm”, Owen can’t say more than a few words to Maddy, but they communicate via cassettes of the show, left in a neutral location to pick up. 

Elements from “The Pink Opaque” also appear in the “Midnight Realm” – an ice cream van, the ghost tattoo from Isabel and Tara’s necks – to reinforce the magic link between the worlds. I never had a show I loved enough to substitute for real life – I loved “The Simpsons” at their age, but not that intently – but with Tara being Maddy’s favourite character, and with her saying the show feels more real than real life, you are primed as an audience for when reality eventually flips...

...which is why Owen, as a character, is confounding. As a trans woman, I initially didn’t have the words for what I was beginning to realise about me, but I got them in the end, and acted upon them. Owen, however, doesn’t appear to make the connection when it is presented to him. As a teenager, he doesn’t know if he likes girls or boys, but he does like TV shows, going so far as saying, “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. And I know there’s nothing in there, but I’m too nervous to open up and check” – even when he does, he closes himself back up. 

This passivity makes Owen a character without agency, consistently immobilised from saving the day, or himself – when Maddy tells him of his initial plan to leave town, he tells another friend’s mother that he “needs to be grounded”: “You can’t let me leave here with her. I don’t want to leave home.” Through the film, we see an adult Owen in front of a fire, alone in a forest at night – in the end, he puts out the fire.

This makes one scene particularly jarring upon watching it a second time, and after reading the script. Upon seeing the final episode of “The Pink Opaque”, Owen puts his head through his TV screen. His father pulls him out, Owen yelling, “this is not my home! You’re not my father!” He vomits something, obscured by the scratchy neon effect added to it – it is not just the “glow” of the TV, it is meant to be soil, from having been buried alive. You are left to assume this horrific moment was repressed by Owen, or repressed for him.

What starts as psychological horror film becomes a tragedy. The chalk drawings are topped with the message, “There is still time”. I have heard this sentiment, in the same context as “I Saw the TV Glow”, in two songs, Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home” and Lisa Lougheed’s “Run With Us” – hell, throw in Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” as well. The film does not explicitly say its story acts as a transgender metaphor, although its pink and blue colour palettes acts as a guide, but when a piece of art connects with you, you will see what you need to see, eventually.

AND ALL FOR UNDER A POUND YOU KNOW [506]

"CheapShow" album cover (art by Vorratony - vorratony.bsky.social)

You can never accuse the “CheapShow” podcast of having a surfeit of chodneys in the last ten years, and you can make of that what you will, especially I can’t be objective about how much this show means to me.

When I first wrote about Paul Gannon & Eli Silverman’s podcast in 2020, it had already evolved from its initial premise as an “economy comedy podcast” that brings you “intriguing, nostalgic and detestable items that fell through the cracks of popular culture” into a comedic assault on the English language supported by a panoply of grotty characters, like “Derek & Clive” with “The Goon Show” mixed in. I wish I could remember in which episode Paul said, “it’s all mouth talk, isn’t it”, as the phrase perfectly explains my love of “CheapShow” fringing on a Dadaist rejection of podcast norms like structure, context and sanity.

This culminated in 2023’s episode “The Wedding of Squishy Jim and Madam Ladyplops”, a kind of “Crisis of Infinite Earths” storyline – arguably begun in a 2021 episode that introduced the problematic crooner Bill Donut – that reset the podcast’s universe, leaving initially leaving jobbing actor Grumpy Sessions behind as the Psycho-Pirate that remembers what the world was like. Slowly, some of these characters have come back, as “everything old is new again”, but not as often as they once did – telling yourself not to create characters in a podcast where every utterance could become a name is not going to work, and neither should it.

Something the COVID-19 pandemic innovated in “CheapShow” were episodes that took place outside, taking in narrative-led quests, learning about the history of an area, and spur of the moment walks because the weather is too warm. It is one thing to have a podcast that can be a magazine one week, and an audio drama the next, but when you can no longer predict if the next episode will take place indoors, you realise that podcast formats have nothing against force of will. This is before you even get to the audio quality, setting a high standard that other podcasts rarely attempt, having never come across another that offered selected episodes in mono or stereo.

The level of professionalism that I find in “CheapShow” makes me also appreciate how delightfully ramshackle an episode can become, intentionally or not. The recent episode “Walk Hard with a Vengeance” was a sequel to 2021’s “Die Hard... on a Podcast”, the edifice of the podcast substituting for Nakatomi Plaza, and ending in an existential podcast void, but instead of being a tight, contained 38-minute action drama, the sequel was a two-hour-plus sprawling epic recorded on location at Crystal Palace Park, the tension coming from both whether Paul & Eli could save London from the bombs planted around the park, and whether they could hold themselves and the narrative together until they reached the final showdown, the villain having graciously given them extra time. If they were attempting a simultaneous display of anti-comedy with a critique of Hollywood action movie structure, then it worked.

“CheapShow” marked its tenth anniversary in June 2025 with a series of celebratory episodes, and with an album, released on vinyl record and MP3, available at the link through www.thecheapshow.co.uk. I cannot be objective in telling you how good this album is, and why you should buy it, collecting new and previous songs from the show like “Top Notch Western Romance”, “Teen Yeti’s Delight” and “The Lament of Captain Blueballs”, alongside new routines and interjections from Paul & Eli between the songs.

The reason I cannot be objective is tracks seven and eight on side B: “Nostalgia’s Gonna Get You” and “The Mayor Requests”, both by myself. I made a video in 2021 about the former, my entry for that year's Urinevision Song Contest, titled “How to Win a Song Contest, apparently”, while the latter, my entry for the following contest in 2023, was about signs dotted around a town reading “The Mayor Requests the Participance of the Inhabitants in the Protection of the Trees” – based on a real sign I once saw on the old city walls in Chichester – and why this was “because of what happened last time”.

I am happy that these songs have been received well over the last few years, and that listeners remember them fondly, but I hope to remain bemused about being on the end of such goodwill and kindness, especially with their being considered worthy of being committed to the physical format of a vinyl record (and, in very limited amounts, MiniDisc). I remember writing and entering “Nostalgia’s Gonna Get You” to see if I could write a good song, completing “The Mayor Requests” to see if lightning would strike twice – I should write songs more often.

NOW WASH YOUR HANDS [505]

From S.C. Johnson's website - free public tours are available

There was me thinking that the word combination “cellar door” was cited as the most beautiful in the English language by T.S. Eliot, a poet, when it turned out to have been J.R.R. Tolkien, in his position as a philologist, in his lecture “English and Welsh” in October 1955.

As far as I can find, it is not recorded what either of them thought of “Swarfega”. A portmanteau of a local term for oil or grease, and a corruption of the word “eager”, Swarfega originated from Derbyshire as a hand cleaner that could remove heavy-duty dirt without risking your skin. 

 

There is a story that Swarfega was originally intended, as a cleaner for silk stockings, much like Listerine was originally used as a floor cleaner before bad breath was recontextualised as ”halitosis” - it is true that the company that made Swarfega was named Deb, short for “debutante”, but nylon stockings made it to market before Swarfega, and personal experience of the body scrub-like consistency of Swarfega means you wouldn’t use it on anything delicate.

 

The reason any of this came to mind is, well, beyond me - I must have been daydreaming, and the mellifluous tone of “Swarfega” came to mind for no reason at all, inevitably leading to my wondering what the etymology of such a word could be.

 

I feel my thoughts move faster when I am daydreaming, perhaps from exerting little to no control over them, for as soon as I found out that the Deb group had been sold in 2015 to S.C. Johnson, a family company - all their TV ads end the same way - that led me to find out they are otherwise known as Johnson Wax, meaning the ultimate headquarters of Swarfega are now found in the famous Johnson Wax Headquarters building, famously designed by Frank Lloyd Wright - now I am interested.

 

What I knew about the headquarters, a US National Historic Landmark where S.C. Johnson continues to be based, that uses brick as red as the Royal Albert Hall, was that Wright did not include windows due to late payments, using skylights instead – this one turns out to be untrue, more the result of preventing it from looking like a traditional building – and that one of the mushroom-shaped supports, columns that continue tapering to the ground, had to be built in order to be destroyed, in order to prove how much weight they could truly support.

 

Looking into the building’s design further, I am surprised by the open-plan arrangement of the “Great Workroom”, ahead of its time for its 1939 opening date, the effectiveness of the Pyrex tube-based skylights, and the display of artistry at every stage, right down to the bespoke clerks’ desks and chairs - I would like one of each. Every single part of the building could have been made more conventionally, but the consideration of whether everything could be designed a different way, with the intent of energising staff, was refreshing.

I felt energised myself by seeing these pictures, and it was down to having “Swarfega” come to mind. It pays to let your mind wander sometimes. 

I’VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING [504]

“How long is a piece of string?” is a question intended to end further questioning, as nothing specific is left to answer. Indeed, I may have asked it to myself to stop deliberating on what topic to discuss here.

As an idiom, it is used where an item, or a thought, has no finite length or end point - you could continue deliberating until you reach an actual end. That may be what I was looking for.

I couldn’t tell you when I last bought a ball of string, or what the previous ball was used for - I must have given it to someone who suddenly realised they needed some string, and I had exactly the right amount on hand. 

One supermarket I visited this week sold a 40-metre ball of string, located among parcel boxes and packing tape, and looking about the same size as any amount of string I would see in similar circumstances. Is this the median length of string, the average amount that the average person needs? Providing a longer piece then becomes a specialist operation, as must be needing it in the first place.

The supermarket’s string would have cost me £1.45 - discovering I had no conception of how much string should actually cost, I also realised I had no idea of the price of a pint of milk, but when I don’t have milk in my coffee, that left one less question to answer.

There is one way to answer my ultimate question, following a cursory search online: two hundred metres. This was for a roll of green-coloured garden twine, and while I could see deals on multiple rolls of string, no single roll exceeded this length. 

There does appear to be an answer for at what length does a piece of string become commercially unviable - anyone needing more than that probably owns the means of production to make it themselves. There are numerous claims, mostly in the United States, to the largest ball of twine on Earth, but I couldn’t verify if various pieces are being tied together in these cases, or if fibres are being twisted together to continue the original piece, and am I sure I want an answer to that? The spectacle of the ball’s eventual size appears to be what’s most important here.

Aside from whether twine counts as string, and avoiding further idioms about “the ties that bind” and so on, the human capacity for curiosity will continue asking questions beyond the point where the answer is found, as I know from experience. If your mind doesn’t like being still, it will look for stimulus from itself. Asking a question that stops debate only invites questions about that question. Here’s a question: did the first person to ask about the length of a piece of string actually need an answer, or was the request then kicked into the long grass. Did they have to call it a day before someone read the riot act to them?

How long is a piece of string? Exactly as long as I need it to be.

YOU’VE MADE ME SO VERY HAPPY [503]

YouTube has become my main portal for listening to music, apparently by mutual agreement.

I still own a Sony Walkman MP3 player, holding thousands of songs in CD-quality FLAC format, alongside the CD themselves, but I mostly have only my phone while on the move, along with the headphones that connect only to that phone. I also still subscribe to YouTube Premium  which, in addition to removing advertising from around all videos, allows uninterrupted listening while my phone is in my pocket. For someone who once said that music is their drug of choice, this is a beneficial arrangement: Google gets my money, and I get unlimited music in good enough quality against the outside noise.

YouTube’s 2024 Recap pegged my listening habits as “The Time Traveller”: “my listening traversed the decades, melodically exploring eras all year long”. The words “lively”, “giddy”, “hopeful” and “rock” were given as overall descriptors. Musical moods were classified, in descending order, as upbeat, uplifting, happy, fun and energising. I was also in the top 0.1 per cent of listeners to Sir Elton John, with Madonna, XTC’s psychedelic pastiche project The Dukes of Stratosphear, and Tears for Fears not far behind. I found myself taking pride in what the data proved and affirmed.

Despite a separate YouTube Music app has been available since 2015, I only use the main app to listen to songs like they were regular videos. Non-music videos are also mostly watched via my television, where I also only get recommended videos based on my subscriptions list, once I blocked several news channels first. This has created, for the YouTube app on my phone at least, an algorithm trained only to recommend music to me – looking at the main page of the app on Friday 4th July 2025 recommended songs to which I had previously listened, songs like them, songs used in other videos I had been watching while using YouTube on my television, or songs I haven’t listened to in a while. The only deviations from this are a strap of the top news stories, from the channels remaining unblocked, and a video titled “Analog[ue] tricks that make a song great”, in case I want to try it myself.

The YouTube algorithm has been so useful to me that the music recommendations it had made has become articles here: “Breaking Down Barriers”, Sir Elton John’s opener from his album “The Fox”, came from recommending the videos made for that album, while a link to his buried psychedelic album “Regimental Sergeant Zippo” alerted me to its existence. My love of the Japanese synth pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) was triggered by one track, “Rydeen”, being used as the background to a video of computer-generated animation. I may have heard “Take Me Home”, from Phil Collins’ enormously successful album “No Jacket Required” on the radio first, but listening to it on YouTube led me the ultra-infectious songs “Only You Know and I Know” and “Who Said I Could”.

I haven’t created a single music playlist in all the years I have used YouTube, only using the generic “Favourites” playlist, where songs sit among regular videos. I find myself sometimes going along with the mixes generated automatically by YouTube if I see songs I want to hear, but I most often make last-second decisions on what to hear next, sometimes acting upon the app’s suggestions. A recent lunchtime at work ran as follows: “Injected with a Poison” by Praga Khan (heard on the radio), “Break Out” by Swing Out Sister (YouTube suggestion), “Fire Brigade” by The Move (suggestion, heard previously), and “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News (suggestion, heard previously).

In all these cases, it was down to personal discretion as to which versions of the songs I heard. From searching artist and song names, do I then hear the official upload made fifteen years ago, or the alternative from an unknown channel from only three years ago? Sometimes, you must wade through numerous uploads to find the official one or settle before you get there. Age of video aside, the highest quality of sound available on YouTube, 256 kbps in AAC format, is equal to an iTunes download, and while I have gone on to buy a CD release to have the better quality, like “No Jacket Required” and “Regimental Sergeant Zippo”, there are many cases where I am not there yet. 

What I am finding myself increasingly doing is using YouTube for music at home as a shortcut over my Walkman – if everything is there, why go to my own library? If the quality is good enough for right now, why delay satisfaction until you get the best quality sound?

The recommendations themselves may also be of concern. I was recommended Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of “Fanfare for the Common Man” – the single edit, thankfully – but follows other recommendations from the 1970s and 80s: ELO, Swing Out Sister, Matt Bianco, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, ABBA. The Carpenters, the theme to the BBC drama series “Howard’s Way”... Have I created a greatest hits radio station in my phone without realising, and should I consider it a problem?

This is why I always listen to the radio in addition to YouTube – you need to have someone share something new with you, because they won’t know what you have and haven’t heard.

I’D GET IT ONE PIECE AT A TIME [502]

As far as I know, the 8.2 litre V8 engine found in the gargantuan Cadillac Eldorado coupé and cabriolet from 1970-76 is the largest found in any production car. Originally rated at four hundred brake horsepower, regulatory changes in both emissions and the measuring of a car’s power reduced this to as low as 190 bhp, before Cadillac made the Eldorado an overall smaller car. Performance is unimpressive when viewed today, taking approximately 12.8 seconds to reach 60mph, on its way to a top speed of 110-115 mph, with an average fuel consumption of nine to ten miles per gallon.

In the eyes of a British person, that level of gas guzzling makes it cheaper to take the bus, before I also realised that figure is in American gallons, equivalent to about 7.5-8.3 miles per imperial gallon. Even if you don’t care about the environment, those figures would make you weep.

The existence of these different units of measurement can be found in the UK’s Weights and Measures Act 1824, which introduced standardised Imperial units for use throughout the British Empire. Meanwhile, the United States customary system of units, themselves standardised in 1832, derive from the previous British system that remained in use after the US became an independent country.

Encountering American units is a novelty for me because while imperial measurements have remained alongside the metric system in the UK, efforts to make businesses voluntarily comply with the system ended in 1980 [https://www.leighspence.net/2022/06/sixteen-tons-and-what-do-you-get-347.html], while certain units like cubic inches, bushels, furlongs, hundredweights and stones were prevented from use in trade by the Weights and Measures Act 1985, despite a 2020 amendment making them permissible to use as supplementary to other units. 

Therefore, a bottle of Diet Coke being described as twenty fluid ounces, or 1¼ pints, rather than just 591 millilitres was, for me, funny at the time, but also completely wrong. There used to be different measurements for different uses, like troy ounces and pounds for precious metals, and apothecary units for medicines, but the existence of separate wine gallons and ale gallons before Imperial standardisation explains why the American pint measure is too small: Britain continued with an amended ale gallon, adopting the standard 568 ml pint, while the Americans continued using the wine gallon.

Looking at Cadillac’s website today showed their non-electric cars’ engine capacity is now described in litres – the 8.2 litre Eldorado engine had instead described in advertising as 500 cubic inches, using the more common unit for car engine comparison at the time. Their page for the 2025 Escalade-V instead puts power output (682 bhp) and torque ahead of engine capacity, an added supercharger making the 6.2 litre engine size less of a factor in overall power. Elsewhere, the vehicles dimensions, from length and width to legroom and cargo space, is quoted in inches, or hundredths of inches (front legroom = 44.51”).

The most visible attempts at metrication in the UK was the decimalisation of Pound Sterling in 1971 [https://www.leighspence.net/2019/03/five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-i-love.html], followed three years later by teaching metric weights and measurements in schools. Meanwhile, the metric system in the United States was legally recognised and protected in 1866, and the Metric Conversion Act 1975 made it the preferred system for weights and measures in US trade and commerce. 

However, this voluntary nature, and the continued teaching of both American and metric measures in schools, means both Britain and America are content to use two concurrent systems, the metric system linking them both. That the United States dollar has equalled one hundred cents since it was introduced in 1792, before the metric system was adopted by either country in any other form, appears to be a total anomaly.

THE BLAST THAT TEARS THE SKIES [501]

Before today, I have only seen Katsuhiro Otomo’s 2004 anime “Steamboy” once, just after its English dub had been released. I remember it wasn’t in ideal circumstances: it is one of only two films I have seen while on a plane, the other being “The Matrix”, but while I had seen that film many times - I hoped the gun fire would keep me awake during the long-haul flight - I was also able to fill in the detail lost by the reduced resolution of the smaller screen and the drone of the jet engines. Therefore, while I have watched “Steamboy”, I have only seen as much of it as watching it on your phone would allow today.

This would not do considering the level of detail in Otomo’s production, rivalled in animation perhaps only by his own masterpiece, “Akira” (1988), effectively the cyberpunk counterpart to “Steamboy’s” steampunk portrayal of industrial Manchester and London. I can now properly see the application of computer-generated imagery in whirling cogs and machinery, and into the moving of our view within spaces, or around objects. Over four hundred shots in “Steamboy” use CGI, and these can only be noticed closely through how these elements move ever so slightly differently from hand-drawn elements, none of which you can see on a smaller screen.

The science fiction author K.W. Jeter coined the term “steampunk” in 1987 to group together “gonzo-historical” works by the likes of himself, Michael Moorcock and Faren Miller, while a tradition of Japanese fascination with Victorian industrial Europe was evident in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky”, released in 1986.

What I remembered of “Steamboy” was its having been set in the UK, and an “Akira”-like build-up and explosion. Watching it for the second time confirmed Manchester as the base where which the Industrial Revolution continuously pushed steam power as far as it could go - the Steam family is at the centre of these developments, in rivalry with Robert Stephenson, the real-life son of George Stephenson, around which a web of military and corporate espionage rages. The MacGuffin of the story is the “steam ball”, a pressurised power source with near-unlimited energy that defies explanation, Working much like a battery, three “steam balls” power a “Steam Castle”, built as a private pavilion at Great Exhibition taking place in London, which sheds its conventional armour to become a fortress that flies uncontrollably into the centre of London, destroying buildings as it goes.

I loved the film, with its sense of family humanising the machinery. I watched the full-length English dub of the film, with Sir Patrick Stewart as grandfather Lloyd Steam, Alfred Molina as father Edward Steam, and Anna Paquin as James Ray Steam, all highly inventive and intuitive about steam power to make science seem like magic, the metaphor of man becoming machine rendered literally in Edward to his detriment. The emotional pressure to succeed in their ambitions and to save the day helps to explain and mask the literal pressure of the machinery, which I only understood as far as the story needed me to understand it. However, having the corporate element of the military industrial complex being represented by a conglomerate head’s daughter, an analogue and namesake of Scarlett O’Hara from “Gone with the Wind” was a strange choice, but with there being no other female character for much of the film, you let that flourish slide.

The voices of Stewart and Molina, using their own accents, was perfect casting, but the Victorian industrial and imperial British setting was a lot to take in. I am very aware of my country’s history, but I know not to choke on the nostalgia of it: I visited post-industrial Manchester in 2019, stayed in a hotel that formerly housed a bonded warehouse and a hat factory; saw a still-working loom in the Museum of Science of Industry, with George Stephenson’s Rocket in the foyer; followed the disused train tracks alongside the new tram lines; and saw the rejuvenated media centre of Salford Quays, alongside the gallery of works by L.S. Lowry. Meanwhile, the might of the Royal Navy pored over in the London scenes highlighted both how much of its income the UK spent on defence at the time, and how many wars it expected to fight simultaneously at the drop of a hat.

I will be watching “Steamboy” again, but not until I see “Akira” once more. Ultimately, I spent much of my time watching the film thinking there will come a time when someone discovers electricity, and everything I have seen so lovingly depicted here will be wiped away, but I am more cyberpunk-minded than steampunk. Watch “Steamboy” for the family, but not for the nostalgia.