Naruto was (accurately) described to me as Harry Potter, but with ninjas. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d like, I highly recommend giving it a look-see.

It takes a while to get going — an incredible amount of time is spent hammering home each character’s back story and personality quirks, to the point of it being annoying. (Yes, we get it, Sasuke is moody and unfriendly because his life is dedicated to revenge, Naruto just wants people to acknowledge his worth, and Sakura is in love with Sasuke and lacks self-confidence. WE GET IT. CUT TO THE NINJA BATTLES.)

Eventually the action kicks in, and awesome new details are revealed about the back stories, and everybody fights everybody, and there are ninja dogs, and creepy puppets, and a giant frog with a sword, and reanimated corpses, and so on and so forth. Well worth the wait.

And that’s a nice-guy promise. Believe it! (Inside joke for Naruto nerds.)

2. I’ve crammed so much ninja into my skull recently that I was rewarded this morning with an unburied memory from my childhood: At some point there was a ninja supply store in my neighborhood.

Not a martial arts supply store. Not a Japanese weapons store that had some ninja-related items. A god-damned NINJA SUPPLY STORE. My memory is that children weren’t allowed to go inside without adults, but that I got to go in at least once. I also have a vague impression that my parents disapproved of grown men who called themselves ninjas. Probably because ninjas are semi-magical assassins who run around in masks, heavily armed. In retrospect, my parents were wise.

Possibly not a real ninja.

]]> http://www.morganphillips.com/archives/552/feed 5 http://www.morganphillips.com/archives/432 http://www.morganphillips.com/archives/432#comments Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:59:15 +0000 Morgan http://www.morganphillips.com/?p=432 I feel like Hulu is sitting on a gold mine; giving bloggers the ability to post out-of-context clips (of their own choosing) from classic TV shows is genius. It’s just a little too clunky, at the moment. Personally, if anything embeds less smoothly than a youtube clip, I get annoyed.

Despite the clunky-ness, please enjoy the following clip of the Hulk being shy at a disco.