The Day I Died - Top Documentary Films. A bright light, inviting presence of a tunnel, and calming inner peace are just a few of the remarkably similar experiences that have greeted those who have died and been resurrected. Are these visions merely a trick of the mind, a verifiable cerebral response, or genuinely spiritual in nature? The medical community, which was long been skeptical and dismissive of these claims, has begun to devote more resources to uncovering the truth behind near- death experiences. The template for our understanding of near- death experiences comes from one of the film's interview subjects - Dr. Bruce Greyson. Beginning in the early 1. Greyson Scale. Subjects offered tales of levitation outside of their physical bodies, awareness of their own demise, and a general feeling of acceptance and peace in response to these profound transitional events. Jack McCall (Eddie Murphy) is a literary agent who uses his "gift of gab" to get various book deals, and he is not afraid to stretch the truth to get them.The prominence of this study empowered others to come out with their own similar stories, and led researchers to a conduct additional investigations in this arena. The filmmakers profile one such study involving cardiac arrest patients who were officially pronounced brain dead prior to their resuscitation. Doctors wanted to pinpoint the precise moment these visions of an afterlife took place. While they were unsuccessful in their ultimate goal, they did receive numerous testimonies that could not be explained or dismissed. Researchers had better luck in what is by far the most gripping anecdote featured in the film. A young mother underwent an intensive procedure to remove a deadly brain aneurysm, during which she was rendered completely lifeless for over an hour. When the woman awakened, she reported an out- of- body experience during her surgery which allowed her to detail many of the goings- on in the operating room with stunning accuracy. How was this possible when her eyelids were sealed shut and she harbored zero brain activity throughout the duration of her procedure? The Day I Died touches upon an endlessly fascinating and confounding phenomenon of the human experience. Directed by. Kate Broome. ![]() W ithout question, Allan Holdsworth is one of the most unique, engaging, and adventurous musicians to ever pick up an electric guitar. The accolades and acclaim that. ![]() Oh, the places you'll go. See the full list. West Yorkshire Regiment in the Great War, The Wartime Memories Project. Yahoo!-ABC News Network . All rights reserved. ![]() Captain Harlock & the Queen of 1. Years. Possibly the most literal title of any show ever. This series is, in fact, Captain Harlockand. The Queen of 1. 00. Years. Two different Matsumoto anime shows with nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Two great tastes that taste utterly confusing together. This series was produced and distributed by former Streamline exec Carl Macek, then of Harmony Gold, which was enjoying a mild and surprising success with Robotech. To hear Macek tell it, the origins of the show were as follows: he had been heading into the crapper when he met another HG exec on the way out, who asked him what other anime shows he thought were good. Macek said he liked Captain Harlock, the other dude said . Macek pointed out that there were, in fact, only forty- two episodes of the original Harlock series, and the company was suddenly forced to find a way to pad out the series. Toei was asking too high a price for the second series featuring Harlock, Endless Road SSX (which, combined with Space Pirate, still would've only totaled sixty- four episodes), and so the only option left was to acquire the forty- one episode Queen of 1. Years series and try to combine the two. The production rate on the series was only two days per episode, resulting in a rather rushed pace that didn't have the luxury of looking too far ahead, and as such the series was a bit of a confusing mishmash that was in no way whatsoever Mr. Macek's fault. Now even for the most trusting and credulous individual, this explanation seriously begs believability. That a company would sell a commodity on which they had not conducted even the most minimal and basic amount of research is, while not totally implausible, nevertheless certainly less likely than the alternate possibility: that the company knew from the start how many episodes they would have with the Harlock series, knew also that they'd need at least sixty- five in order for the show to be desirable for syndication purposes, and intended to combine it with a second show all along, as they'd done with Robotech for the exact same reasons, and then failing to acquire the one other series actually containing Harlock, went to plan B and did an intercut job with an unrelated show by the same author. Macek is notorious, or was back in the days when he was still alive and people knew who he was, for either accepting or declining credit for a particular dub job based upon the receptivity of his then- current audience. Hence, for example, Streamline Pictures was either fully responsible for or completely unconnected with the initial dub of Akira depending whether or nor you appeared to like it. With Robotech, the changes to the overall stories of the three series comprising it were relatively minimal, owing to the sequential, generational approach that was taken with their fusing. In Harlock/Millennia, the two stories are supposed to be happening concurrently, resulting in numerous problems- not the least of which being the fact that it only took a new viewer a couple of episodes to notice that the characters were rigidly divided into two camps that never met. The fact that the protagonists of Harlock spent most of their time in space and the protagonists of Millennia spent most of their time on Earth was a minor saving grace, but it was also unavoidably noticeable that the two alien races that were simultaneously invading Earth, who were supposedly allies, also never met. The two series also featured sharply disparate levels of technological advancement, since Harlock was originally set in 2. Millennia in 1. 99. And the sharp- eyed viewer wouldn't have too much difficulty in discerning two different animation styles and two different directorial approaches as well, no matter how similar the character designs might have been. Of course, the fact that the two casts never interacted didn't stop the show from claiming that they did, in fact, meet and chat on occasion. The ubiquitous narrator (a device which had been overused in Robotech and was heinously overused in this show) would often recap previous episodes by describing events that were nowhere to be seen in the episodes themselves, including Harlock meeting Queen Promecium/Yukino Yayoi (renamed . This is most problematic for Queen of 1. Years, for while the Harlock half of the story reached its finale at the American show's terminus, there were still seven episodes worth of content in Millennia still left to go by the end (but for a few of the penultimate episode's least essential scenes), and as a result, that half of the story simply stops dead in its tracks right in the middle of the action, with no real explanation as to why, apparently, that the giant La. Metallian battleship on its way to Earth isn't worth worrying about and doesn't merit being dealt with before the wrap- up. On the other hand, it's notable that while the Queen of 1. Years episodes ran pretty much in the correct order, the Harlock episodes were shuffled all to hither and yon in the middle. Clearly wanting a convenient reason as to why Harlock never appears around the Earth during the Queen of 1. Years parts of the story, the plotline involving the kidnapping of Mayu by the Mazone, which ran seven episodes in the original, was stretched to thirty in the Americanized version. For nearly fifty percent of the show, Harlock is supposedly searching through the Horsehead Nebula, the obvious appearances of the planets Jupiter and Saturn (and even a bit of Earth) notwithstanding. Needless to say, this part of the series could get rather tiresome. In addition, the editors took great pains to remove certain characters entirely, including the Arcadia's cook and Yayoi's adoptive parents, due to their stylized . The fact that both the Arcadia's Dr. Zero and Millennia's Professor Amamori (. Those stories, at least, weren't meant to be taken as a whole. This one obviously is, and yet fights against clarity more valiantly than any story I've ever heard or had nightmares about. The interpolation itself aside, neither show bears any similarity to its original version. Robotech at least relied a great deal on the original scripts, but Harlock/Millennia was written by simply watching the episodes with the sound off and making shit up, by Macek's own admission. Consequently, Harlock is no longer really a pirate; the Earth government has supposedly . Queen Millennia herself is no longer even the queen, but a princess waiting to ascend to the throne. The planet La. Metalle (pointlessly renamed . Harlock now has psychic powers (no, I'm not making that up), and Professor Amamori is no longer Hajime's uncle, merely a family friend. Why did they bother with changes like these, which had nothing to do with blending the two shows? Beats the hell out of me. The writers were clearly none too familiar with the anime they were writing to, and the fact that some story points were ultimately clarified quite obviously by the visuals meant that they often wrote themselves into painful messes. Queen of a 1. 00. Years' Millennium Thief, or . Similarly, the Mazone spy Shizuka Namino (. When a colleague of . Whatshisname just before he died, which Corman didn't personally hear but later claims he did. And over everything else hovered the narrator, whose job often seemed primarily concerned with convincing the viewer that what their own eyes were telling them was untrue, and that something else entirely was happening: thus we are informed that Harlock's asteroid base accidentally crashes into a Mazone planetoid for no good reason, whilst our peepers and logic circuits are screaming out that it's the two planets in the binary system we've been seeing the whole damn time that are being deliberately driven towards each other as part of a trap. The fact that Harlock's base still shows up in later episodes doesn't help explain anything either, nor is there any discernable point to this clumsier- than- a- drunk- centipede rewrite, unless the screenwriters were paid extra for obfuscation. Heretical as it may sound, this show really needed more editing if it was ever going to work. A good editor could've contrived new scenes showing the Arcadia battling La. Metalle ships, or transmitting messages to Corman's observatory, or anything to place the two plotlines closer together. Both series, for example, feature ancient, stone cities on Venus, which could've yielded some possibilities for an editor worth his salt. Instead, the Venus- centered Harlock episodes were dropped entirely, and in the Millennia episode Venus is said to be La. Metalle, even though La. Metalle looks absolutely nothing like this in any other episode. As with Robotech, Harmony Gold decided to chuck the original music for their own, but while they did write a considerable amount, much of it was simplistic and repetitive, and all of it was synthesized, which simply couldn't compare with the full orchestra that performed the Japanese score. One must also wonder at the decision to have Harlock and Mimay play completely different pieces of music simultaneously, instead of accompanying parts. Harmony Gold is, in theory, primarily a music company after all, and should be familiar with the notion of, well, harmony. Was there anything good about this show at all? Yes, there were a few things. First of all, the fact remains that even badly butchered Matsumoto was still worlds better than the animated fare that was being dished out in the states at the time. Unlike the two approaches tried by ZIV before them, the HG version was neither wooden nor played for laughs. Some of the dialogue was decent, and did tend to boast a good number of big words like . Both the voice actors for Harlock and Yayoi did pretty good jobs and had voices well suited for their roles, and many of the supporting characters had reasonably good voices, as well. And there was a then- unprecendented amount of violence left intact, with the Mazone still burning and screaming upon their deaths and human characters being allowed to show blood.
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