Key the Remix
When I was in my senior year of high school, my favourite TV series was Key The Metal Idol, a 1994 series from Japan about a robot girl trying to make 30,000 friends before her battery died so she could become human. In late September 2010, I was able to finally order a copy of the last DVD in the series - printed in 1997 and fairly rare - and all I could think about was Key that Autumn.
On the evening of October 1st, I had one of the most vivid and unsettling dreams I'd ever had at the time. I still have the date recorded from when I had to write down the dream in full.
I dreamt that I was working in the Photographics room at school one day, when a classmate named Brittnie came up to me with something in her purse. Now, Brittnie was more popular than me and disliked me for some reason, but I always tried to be polite to her to try and win her respect.
But, she had a video tape for me. Brittnie was over at her aunt and uncle's house on the weekend, helping move stuff from her cousin's room, and she'd found a video and thought of me. It was titled "Key the Remix", a 23 minute special episode about what Key's life would be like if she were always human. Brittnie had recognised Key's face on the tape sleeve from my cameo of her in a photo collage I'd made a month ago, and was willing to give it to me. Her cousin had let her take it, mentioning that he'd imported it from Japan and only watched it a third of the way through before declaring it "boring" and never trying to finish it. I was overjoyed and accepted the tape.
Key The Metal Idol only had fifteen episodes, the last two being ninety minutes long, and nowhere had I ever seen documentation of this special. I put what knowledge of the Japanese language to work and reviewed the tape sleeve...the packaging was clearly an official Studio Pierrot and Pony Canyon production, made in 1998, the story being about Key at school. It was made long after the series ended, and what made me wonder was why the tape came in a thin cardboard case (think of what cheap eighties movies were released in) rather than the hard black clamshell case the rest of the Key episodes came in. I assumed Pony Canyon didn't want to risk a lot of money on the packaging or something, and kept the tape safe at home until I'd have an opportunity to watch it.
Some days later, my parents asked me to babysit while they went to my mother's formal workplace party at the University of Saskatchewan. The night went pretty good, and my brother and sister went to sleep around 9:45 that night, leaving me in the living room with our main VCR. I started to watch the tape, and surprisingly, it was starting off as an adorable little episode. Key was a human girl at the same age as she was at the start of her series, but she was rather popular with her homeroom class, most of her family was alive, his assistant Tomoko was more of a father to Key than a bodyguard and analyst, there were no robot or psychic elements, and the main villain of the series didn't even exist. The intro was a more comedic version of the actual series intro, but with different characters and designs.
There were no subtitles. From what I could grab from the episode, Key was told that her family would be moving to Kyoto at the end of her school year, and she was reluctant to leave her friends in Mamio Valley. She was going to join the school culture festival and present something so she'd leave with a bang. She chose two reclusive kids in her class to help her out...Toshio, a reclusive punk with surprisingly good grades, who had thick black Robert Plant-esque hair, and Hae Juun, a pudgy little art nerd who got bullied by other kids for being Korean. The story flowed along nicely, and I can't remember much else other than it being much happier than Key The Metal Idol.
There came a part when Key ran up the stairs at home, going to get her project, when I decided I needed a glass of water. I paused the tape and left the room. What I didn't seem to react to was the frame I'd just paused on. A live action woman was staring at me kindly; her was face chubby and oval, long straightened black hair, and very faint black lipstick and eye makeup. The shot of her was from just above the shoulders, and her collar was grey. I went into the kitchen and got some water, returned, and pressed play.
Immediately, the woman focused more on the viewer, her face fixated with an angry glare. She was talking but I couldn't hear anything, due to the poor nineties equipment she must've used, making everything she said sound like a hissing whisper. The screen was shaking, as if there was a translucent second frame of her overlayed over the shot. The shot began flickering, and I could make out a handful of words.
"You all...filth...what can...bones...vomit of..."
Something flashed on the screen. It looked like a red loop over a black screen. When it returned again amidst the words "find you", I picked up the remote and fast forwarded, disgusted. Something was flashing over and over again to the point where the woman was a blur between red shapes and tape fuzz.
And then, the episode resumed, right at the point where Key was running up the stairs. I wasn't sure how the woman could have had this footage cut into a tape without recording over the material, but feeling angry at the woman now, I adjusted the volume a little and tried to watch the rest of the episode. Key's presentation went very well, Toshio was moving to Kyoto for a job too, and the credits music was pretty. This was all about nine minutes of video, and I relaxed, enjoying Junko Iwao's singing as it faded off to black.
A godawful choked groan came from the TV suddenly, as nothing but a green triangle displayed on screen. The audio was muffled again, unfortunately making the groan sound as if it were slowly hacking out some sort of liquid. A poor video effect made the triangle look as if it were melting downwards, the groan beginning to gurgle in agony. I'd had enough, and I pressed channel up on the remote, turning the screen into vague static.
I woke up at about four in the morning afterwards, my blankets twisted around me. Some of the plushes at the side of my bed had tipped in the night and were propped against my head. I rolled over and was able to get back to sleep with an uneventful dream soon after. What bothered me the next morning was how during the dream and in my drowsy waking state, I only felt irked that Key the Remix had been interrupted. I wrote down everything in as much detail as I could and let it sit on my blog for over a year.
Key the Metal Idol: Singing, disc three, arrived in the mail for me a week later. And, there is no girl named Brittnie in real life. She's never been in my classes and as far as I know, such a girl has never existed.
Credited to Robotkat
| Comments • 0 |
Loading comments...
|
