Amiga in the movies: Robot Ninja (1989)

An Amiga 500 was spotted in 1989 splatter-comic movie "Robot Ninja" - both on screen, and behind the scenes.

Robot Ninja (1989) poster artwork (see end of article)

The movie is a very gory, but also funny and slightly tragic low-budget sci-fi/horror production. If this fits your taste, it's really enjoyable, with a lot of handdrawn comic panels thrown in, goofy, but (very) rough characters, and some actually quite ambitious, visionary storytelling, complete with dream sequence, Terminator rip-off scene, and everything.

"Robot Ninja" was written, produced, directed, and edited by J. R. Bookwalter, who also supplied some of the music. 

The opening credits might look somehow familiar to longtime Amiga users.

A couple of frames from the opening credits

The comic panel sections of the opening sequence feature some animated text - could this be some Deluxe Paint animations that we're looking at?

A couple of frames from the opening sequence, with comic panels, and animation

Only a few minutes into the movie, we get a little news report that features some sort of artwork of the "Robot Ninja". 

Is Robot Ninja connected to the Ridgeway Murders... ?

So far, all of this feels very much like something Amiga. It wouldn't be surprising if one shows up in the movie... and indeed, soon a machine can be seen that looks remarkably like an Amiga 500.

Someone is playing a game...

...on a computer with some extra equipment...

...that looks very much like an Amiga 500...

...and runs a GUI with a blue background.

So after this character has played a round of "Lords of the Rising Sun", he returns to what seems to be AmigaOS Workbench 1.x.

More artwork shows up during the movie - isn't there a faint title bar, that maybe says "Deluxe Paint"? And there's another news report, that uses a font that just looks all familiar.

The "Robot Ninja" shown on the computer display - with title bar.

The font used by this TV station looks very familiar.

We get to see more of the computer equipment. There seems to be a dot matrix printer on the left side (maybe a Star LC-10?), and a floppy drive right next to the keyboard. And is there another, bigger printer, on the right side?

1989 computer workstation in "Robot Ninja"

In this sequence, the movie's anti-hero is in very bad shape after a heavy fight - he tries to decipher what's written on the computer display, but he's dizzy, and his vision is blurry.

Robot Ninja can't properly see the computer display.

But then, finally, all doubts are dispelled: Yes, this is an Amiga 500. With a red LED. 

It's really an Amiga 500, with PSU, 1010 floppy drive, and 1084 monitor!

The movie's ending credits feature some digitized images with a little bit of animation.

A couple of frames from the pictures during the ending credits.

When the credits' text (Topaz font? Opal font?) begins to roll, it gives more clues about Amiga usage during production, and some enthusiastic praise for the computer.

Amiga 500 in "Robot Ninja" ending credits

The titles, and we can pretty safely assume also the digital artwork in the movie, were indeed created on an Amiga 500, as was the music by Mr. Bookwalter. Maybe the entire editing was done with some gen-locking, VHS-recorder-controlling Amiga setup, at "The Imagination Industry" and Richard B. Perrine?

"Robot Ninja" is a very nice example of Amiga usage in movie production. Looking at its imaginative, bold style, it's a perfect tie-in with the idea of the allround-creative Amiga user. Mr. Bookwalter obviously is one such person. He felt he had to put the machine into the movie, give it big credit, and the fact that he did the work for "Robot Ninja" on an Amiga 500 is pretty cool in itself. It's proof that even the lowest-cost model, a literal bedroom-computer, can be a (low-res) film industry workhorse. 

Now, why isn't there a "Robot Ninja" game for the Amiga?

*

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100503/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Ninja

"Robot Ninja" poster image:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Ninja#/media/File:Robot_Ninja_(1989)_poster.jpg
https://theschlockpit.com/2020/03/29/in-praise-of-robot-ninja-1989/

A techno music album created with OctaMED SoundStudio (and Camouflage)

"Breathless" is an album of electro/techno music created on an Amiga computer over the latter half of the 1990s. All tracks were composed with OctaMED SoundStudio, using Amiga samples and MIDI sound devices.

I had learned that Amiga computers are great for sound and video. Demos like "Desert Dream" and "Lethal Exit", and esp. the intro music of the game "Epic" had left me very impressed. So I got an Amiga 600 and started playing with OctaMED. A MIDI interface and a Roland Juno 106 analog keyboard were added soon after, then a Yamaha FB-01 synth module, followed by a lot of other devices.  

Over a couple of years, many pieces of synth music were created, all of which were more or less experimental. Until a handful stood out, and I thought it would be nice to put together an album. A few more tracks were created on-the-fly, to give the album more playing time - I just like music to have a little extra time to develop.

Around 1999, when finishing the album, I had expanded my setup to an Amiga 4000 with graphics, network, and Prelude 16-bit soundcard, and added a PC for recording and post-production. I had also upgraded the software in use to the latest version of OctaMED, called SoundStudio, and great audio/MIDI program Camouflage.

The music was initially composed with OctaMED SoundStudio (OMSS), using a mix of entering notes step-by-step, live jamming with MIDI-recording, and a few longer audio samples. Some of the tracks were then played back in OMSS, and recorded as audio tracks in Camouflage, to free up MIDI instruments and add more sounds.

A couple of notes on individual tracks:

Track 1, "Where the sun shines", features the Amiga playing back a catchy synth riff sampled from a Roland Juno 60 keyboard, and some speech samples.

Track 3, "Too hoppin' mad", is a spiced-up remake of an older track called "Hoppin' at the spot", and it has a funny story: The idea was to have some rhythmic chords, played on a Roland JX8P keyboard, enter on the first breakdown, and continue over the groove. But I forgot to switch on OMSS' "chord mode" - when MIDI-recording the chords, all (most) notes ended up on one track in OMSS in near-random order. When listening to the result for the first time, I was pleasantly surprised, and added distortion from a guitar effects processor to intensify the effect. The string/pad segment was mostly created in Camouflage, using OMSS as a "looper" for the MIDI instruments. 

Track 4, "Into the ominous" features some random bleeps: These are created by just some random notes played on a Yamaha DX7 II keyboard: The battery was old, it had lost its memory. The sound is the result of an undefined state of one of the synth's memory slots. (Except for a handful that I had restored or overwritten, they all sounded pretty much the same at that point: random bleeps. lol.)

Track 7, "Breathless" is the most Amiga of the tracks on the album. The idea was to create an "epic" (?) acid track, it was initially called "Hildesheim", and it's a bit noisy. OMSS is playing back sampled synth sounds, and controlling a Kawai XD-5 drum synthesizer. Lots of samples were taken, in an attempt to recreate the filter sweeps of an analog synth. There's also a tiny bit of live filter mixing - you can probably recognize it by the better sound quality.

Track 9, "Farewell" is a groovy, simple track, that serves as a basis for some acoustic guitar solo jamming.

All tracks were recorded and "mastered" on a PC using Samplitude. I'd have loved to finalize the tracks using the Amiga version, but at the time PCs had become so fast, that they could handle a handful of audio effects in realtime, whereas an Amiga would require minutes to do the calculations. EQ-ing, compression, extra panning, and reverb was added, and the final tracks exported, stored, and burnt to CD.

In hindsight, everything could've been done better. The reverb is too much, it makes everything sound quite muddy. But it also enhances the hi-resonance synth sounds on nr. 7, "Breathless". The mixing and mastering has lots of flaws - there's some heavy banging, around 500Hz or so, on some tracks, sometimes created by individual sounds, sometimes by the mix. And so on - but overall, and as an entity of different compositions, I think it turned out somehow listenable, and, in parts, even a little catchy or moody.

The entire album has just been uploaded to YouTube. The videos were created with Blender in 2024, as a little "visualizer" for the music.

"Breathless" CD cover front / inlay / back

"Breathless" album playlist on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Gy7PSuZtfIULzpMRIN2RU_JwjGSheOv

YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@SchwabingDeepSpace

"SchwabingDeepSpace" blog:

http://schwabingdeepspace.blogspot.com

One of the few physical copies of "Breathless"