Coolest Card Games

I’m not really one for comic book movies, as a general rule. I know for a fact that all efforts to bring Japanese animation into live-action have ended in abject failure, with the sole exception of Beth Boat. And to be fair, that was still a failure. It was just so bafflingly bad and tone-deaf that it passed as entertaining.

So now they’re adapting the classic series Cool-i-Oh, the cartoon that set the world on fire with its depiction of competing air conditioning servicing companies. Sydney is going to be the setting for the live-action movie though, for…some reason. I think they got some kind of grant to film in the city, and I guess air conditioning in Sydney makes more sense than down here where summers are unpredictable. But a crucial part of the original was how hot and uncomfortable Tokyo can get during the summer, especially with so many people living in high-rise apartments, so how they’re going to bring that through in the live-action version is…well, actually, Sydney can get pretty muggy.

We had to fly up for Aunt Maybelline’s funeral, and it rained the whole time, but it was still muggy as anything. Made me wish there was a guy with crazy hair, possessed by the spirit of an ancient Greek emperor, who could come and play a card game that introduced air conditioning to the whole area. I was trapped in a room with nothing but a portable air conditioner, and to work it had to be going out the window, and it sounded like a freight train.

If Boogie had been there, he would’ve said his signature line- “It’s time to cool!” – and played a card game with the magic spirits making it all hot and stuffy, which would introduce air con to the room.

The dub may have been terrible, but I remember it fondly from when I was a kid in school. I even went through about a three-month phases where I wanted to work for an air conditioning repair company. Sydney wasn’t my destination…it was Tokyo, obviously, but that should be obvious.

That dream didn’t last. Mainly because I found out that air conditioning repair does NOT involve card games or magical powers.

-Dylan-kun