Summary:
Sharivan meets a little girl named Kumiko at a greenhouse. He goes to her house to eat ham and eggs before giving her what is essentially Jimmy Olsen's Superman watch for help whenever she needs it. Sharivan saves her father who she never sees because of his "work," which is him being forced to work with Madou to fire a missile at Sharivan's spaceship the Grand Birth. Kumiko is gone. Luckily she has the "call Sharivan" device that Den Iga forgot.
The surface narrative from my first experience watching the episode:
Madou'd have a more devious plan if the Uchu Keiji Sharivan's writing weren't written so haphazardly. I personally did not like the surface narrative of A Clockwork Orange a lot, and this episode seems to suffer from the same sort of odd narrative choices that they made on a supposed kids show. They really don't like to do surface level exposition, so don't let them. Let them just do fighting scenes.
Sharivan shoots a Demon's own machine guns against them, before morphing into Sharivan in a really cool morphing transition. Some of the effects for fighting in the episode were still off, but an improvement, so easily forgivable. There's a humorous clip of the Demonster flipping before being unable to get up that is cut.
The scene where Kumiko is dragged out of the house by Madou's power is hella friggin crazy too. Probably looks too fake if you think about it too much. Don't! Enjoy!
Beyond the surface narrative aka the insanity of PRPHD:
I'm probably reading too much into this series, but it was essentially my experience watching "Alpha's Magical Christmas" after watching "Barney's Magical Christmas," where I had lost my sanity while watching the episode, since I tend to watch deep multi-layered films such as Inception, Pulp Fiction and other auteurish works. But my gosh, the first five minutes were a bit difficult to get through. Sort of why The Shining probably got the Golden Raspberry Award for 1980.
But maybe it has to do with the Rob Ager theories regarding the Shining. Stanley Kubrick films are very rewarding regarding the amount of depth. They can be found here, albeit IT IS A LOT MORE REWARDING DISCOVERYING THE THEORIES YOURSELF. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Sharivan's pedophilic encounter with Kumiko:
There is this creepy music being played in the greenhouse, where lots of flowers, Shakespearean symbols of female fertility are present. Then there is the sound of crying. Sharivan asks the little girl, Kumiko inside the greenhouse if she had been talking to flowers. Also, to note are the trees and plants inside Stanley Ullman's office in the Colorado Hotel.
After the opening, Sharivan asks the girl where her parents are. He then enters the house without it being camp.
The girl then willingly invites Sharivan to make ham and eggs for him.
After eating Kumiko's ham and eggs, he responds at how good of a wife she would be some day.
Sharivan then puts the tracker up the doll's skirt. It's a bear, like in the Shining.
Dreams:
As mentioned by Youtube celebrity movie interpreter, Rob Ager, a slight detail in Stanley Kubrick films are the mention of dreams as well as Stanley Kubrick's ability to put clues in on what happened to something/someone after the event already had happened.
Kumiko has a dream of a monster attacking her father. Was her encounter with Sharivan also a nightmare as well? Perhaps all of that was a dream from King Psycho's hallucinations.
The faked moon landings?
Her father is revealed to be kidnapped by Madou by making a rocket to shoot at Space Sheriff Sharivan's ship, Grand Birth. Also, in the Shining book, the name of the room that Danny becomes traumatized in is in Room 217, instead of 237. There is other evidence as well in the film that is referenced in the Rob Ager's Collative Learning website in case you wanted to learn. WARNING: it is a lot more interesting to observe by yourself than seeing it on Ager's website, so I highly recommend multiple viewings of the Shining prior to giving up and looking on Ager's site!
There were many theories as to whether Stanley Kubrick had made faked moon landing footage on the moon during the creation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. One ponders if the writer or director noticed these theories as well. Not too far away as this series was made in the early 1980s and 2001 was made in the later 1960s.
Is it a hallucination or a demon?
One of the mysteries of the Shining was whether there really was a Delbert Grady or not as well as whether Jack Torrence went crazy or he was actually seeing ghosts or both.
This episode has a similar mystery: Is it Sharivan that has the Shining or is it King Psycho?
Sharivan has a device that allows him to communicate to Kumiko by clicking on a button.
However, King Psycho also has a similar power, by communicating to visions to not only Sharivan, the Demonsters and Kumiko, but the audience as well. He could be seen as a sort of monolithic figure from 2001: A Space Odyssey, except with more devious ideas.
I could be wrong but the episode definitely has that confusing plot that needs to be watched multiple times to be understood feeling. Hopefully, we will get back to it another day.
