Oh, to be honky-tonkin' on Lower Broadway this weekend when 7,000 costumed Cowboy Bebop fans start streaming into Tootsie's. This weekend is the 12th Middle Tennessee Anime Convention, running Friday through Sunday at the downtown convention center, and there'll everything available from all-night gaming and live hip-hop (The Notorious MSG!) to kinky costume events and a human chessboard.
What's the one thing that could make this better, you ask? Wrestlers in monster suits staging a live-action kaiju eiga smackdown with scale buildings and neck-breaking moves — and the fate of the world in the balance:
Kaiju Big Battel is a modern conflict of epic proportions. Planet Earth is under threat: scattered throughout the galaxy is a monstrous mob of maniacal villains, menacing alien beasts, and giant, city-crushing monsters that are waging war against one another. Presiding over this mayhem is the Kaiju Commissioner, an enigmatic human-arbiter appointed by a clandestine cadre of world leaders to regulate Kaiju rage. If the Kaiju Commissioner doesn't do his job perfectly the entire world could get caught in the crossfire. Currently, the Kaiju Universe maintains an active roster of approximately 30 monsters, including a blue alien-glutton named Sky Deviler, a factory-worker-turned-soup-can called Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle, a dirty hare-sage dubbed Dusto Bunny, Uchu Chu the Space Bug (self-explanatory), and a despicable, square-headed mad scientist known as Dr. Cube. In addition to the Kaiju Commissioner, a few other privileged humans also get a piece of the action, including Referee Jingi, a mustachioed official who enforces fairness and civility in the ring, Anthony Salbino, an urban renewal expert who reconstructs crumbled cityscapes between Battels, and one tuxedo-wearing, mouth-running MC.Kaiju Big Battel
will be doing demonstrations all day Saturday; the event you really want to see is the match 6 p.m. Saturday at the convention center where they go head-to-tentacle with real live wrestling stars appearing across the hall at the
Full Moon Tattoo & Horror Festival. Ask yourself this question: Could I live with myself if I found out the next day I could have seen somebody like Jerry "The King" Lawler or Diamond Dallas Page whoop intergalactic ass on French Toast, Dusto Bunny and the Steam-Powered Tentacle Boulder?
One-day admission to MTAC is $25 at the door.
