Or that at least is how this particular tube-girlish device is identified at a now closed blog associated with artist Rik Rawling (who has a new cool blog).
Though I fear I don’t know much provenance beyond that. Meanwhile, someone somewhere else on the web was offering a different interpretation (not endorsed by me!).
Following up a lead at i09.com (source of all sorts of awesomeness) I took a look at the first volume of the anime Angel Core, an example of erotic mad science at work. A very literal example thereof, for the most part.
The first episode is some thirty minutes, but I must confess I extracted the purchase price in the first sixty seconds or so. An evil “United Empire” is drafting pretty girls into a very sinister scheme. I mean, it must be sinister, because they all dress like Nazis, which shows that perhaps this anime has a strong Nazisploitation pedigree:
Yes, mad science is making people into weapons for a nasty military regime. Perhaps not an unfamiliar theme if you’ve read Fullmetal Alchemist. This is a bit different, however. Fullmetal Altchemist has a vast cast of richly-realized characters embedded in a web of deep, complex human relationships in a highly-detailed fictional world. Angel Core has lots of gratuitous nudity and sex. Also tube girls, of course.
The aim of all this tubey naked stuff is to extract some sort of glowey blue sphere which is used (I think) to power/animate giant killer robots.
The maturation of the sphere requires the girls to have lots and lots and lots of sex. Because that’s the way things like that always work, no?
It is a measure of my own perversion that after the sixty feverish seconds of mad science exposition at the start that I found myself fast-forwarding — yet again! — past lots of sex scenes that didn’t really interest me that much. At least we got confirmation that our heroines are girls in peril with the glowey blue sphere thingy inside of them.
Please, animators, more mad science! (You can at least catch some video over at io9.)
Browsing over at Renderotica recently, seeking out clever folks using technology to make their own, I can across a very classy madlab by artist KristinF, which I present here with the kind permission of the artist.
(Click on the image to see larger.) This is mad science not playing around. Not only do we have someone strapped to a table about to undergo…well, I’m not really sure what but I’m sure it will really advance human knowledge — and two tube girls. Or perhaps one tube girl and one tube futanari, which would be even cooler. Someone’s been doing her homework!
To me, this is a triumph of the CG artist at work. You can see more of KristinF’s work either at Renderotica or by looking here at EroticIllusions, which I strongly encourage if you’re a fan of this site.
Following up on yesterday’s theme:
This might be a whole new sub-genre! Found at the site of a company called Eurotubes, naturally.
This post image and yesterday’s leads to a further reflection on the whole girls-and-tubes meme and its relationship to erotic mad science. I’m pretty sure that my surface analysis stands. The “tube girl” illustration was probably primarily created as a getting crap past the radar means of doing implied nudity in pulp art, as well as an interesting variant on ever popular notion of the pretty girl in bondage/pretty girl in peril theme. But of course the mad science thematics do go beyond that: in the age in which the pulp art was created the core electronic component was the tube — the vacuum tube. And of course a core bit of chemical apparatus was also a tube — a test tube. Any self-respecting mad scientist’s laboratory would doubtless have been full of both kinds of tube.
No wonder I spend so much time on the strange (perhaps dumb) theme.
Whoever posted this might have been unclear on the concept at first, but got it in due time: “Now I know why tubes are sexy!”
Found here.
A sharp-eyed commenter recently brought my attention to another tube girl.
Standing alone, this illustration would have merit in a exhibition of tube girls, because demonstrates with unusual clarity a classic property of the tube girl illustration. Namely, the way that it was used to get as much nudity as possible on the cover of something without actually showing something that would attract the attention of the constabulary. We are given to understand that the woman in the tube is naked, but the tube has opaque structural elements which just so happen to be in the line of sight between the viewer and the woman’s naughtier bits. The viewer’s imagination is allowed to gratifyingly fill in the rest.
But what’s more interesting about this image is that it’s actually from a rather interesting collection of Australian pulp fiction covers at the University of Otago in New Zealand, one which I believe a post of Bacchus’s at ErosBlog quoted recently as well. It’s a small world after all.
Indeed, smaller than one might think. Is it a coincidence that Otago’s philosophy department is home to a metaethics guy whom I have reason to like? (Well, yeah, it probably is but I can’t help but notice stuff like that.)
Coming up now, a trio of posts on Paul Morrissey‘s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), sometimes known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. This a a seriously weird version of what is already a strange story. Even if we never were to get in the lab, we have a setting of adultery, murder, and incest (Baron Frankenstein is is married to his sister) in a crumbling castle set (presumably) somewhere in the Balkans.
Of course, since we’re into the mad science here, our first stop should be Frankenstein’s laboratory.
Baron Frankenstein’s objective here is not just to re-animate the dead, but to create a mated pair of creatures (notwithstanding the two children he’s had with the Baroness). This pair are to become the progenitors of a master Serbian race. Why Serbian? Some things only the screenwriter was meant to know. In any event, this means making a female half of the pair, which gives director Morrissey an opportunity to provide an early live-action variant on the tube girl meme, as our female half (played by Dalila Di Lazzaro, if you must know) is preserved in a vat of something.
Once she’s lifted out we see a laboratory setup which is one of the coolest we’ve seen since James Whale was directing Frankenstein movies.
Of course it wouldn’t be a Frankenstein movie without electricity providing the spark of life.
It gets squickier tomorrow, I promise.
One good lab scene deserves another.
Squick or squee!
Is she being prepared for the tubes or has she just been decanted?
Provenance really not known.
Another Japanese-language blog called (I think) “Breaking Peach” goes for anime tube girls with an obsessiveness that has me gasping with admiration. One sample which is as Erotic Mad Science as it gets, is this:
The post with all of them (many, many) can be found here.
You know, maybe TV is better in other countries. The German television program Liebe Sünde (literally “Love Sin”) which broadcasts on the VOX channel provides us with an example of a live action tube girl, which is rare but not unknown. One screencap:
And another:
Found here.