Shaktimaan All Episodes Mx Player

[Riley Dyen]

Hoho howdy folkses! Welcome to the Twelfth Day of The Twelve Days of Shitmas celebration for 2021! We're not gonna lie...it was tough going this year, both in terms of the wretched material we had to endure and the challenges of time, health and circumstance we've faced while trying to get these articles completed. The hurdles seemed insurmountable at times, like that unfortunate kerfuffle we were involved in at megachurch preacher Joel Osteen's house, what with all the community service requirements and steep legal fees, but it is the season of forgiveness, and even an offense against God can be somewhat mitigated by turning state's evidence and entering the Jehovah's Witness Protection Program. By the way, would you mind reading this pamphlet? It might just change your life!

Our penultimate special was a postwar family drama that tried hard to end on a hopeful, redemptive note, but bent too far trying to tie up its own loose ends and broke like a dried-up Christmas tree branch overburdened by heavy snow. Today's special starts out broken and only fragments further as it ricochets haphazardly between anemic Western superhero topes and watered-down Hindu Vedic teachings. It's like some phantasmic, dehydration-induced hallucination you'd have after two weeks of a giardia infection, which you got because you insisted on travelling to Southern Asia without getting your shots.

The War on Shitmas is real. We all lost.

We've posted a brand-new review of a Christmas special every other day since December 3rd, culminating in what we consider the worst of the bunch on Christmas morning...and that would be today, people!

In case you've been living off-grid in a dung-and-straw hut someplace in the Great Indian Desert and just happened to stumble across this one review upon your recent return to Western civilization, we've been featuring Secret Santa sneaky links in every article this year. Days one through nine featured one Secret Santa each, and each of the past two reviews have featured two Secret Santa sneaky links. To celebrate our final Shitmas offering of the year, today's article contains a whopping twelve Secret Santa sneaky links hidden higgledy-piggledy about its person.

They're not the kind of sneaky link where you're Santa Claus, and you and Mrs. Claus have been married for like three hundred and fifty years, and things started getting stale in the bedroom about a hundred years in. Despite adding a few kinks and toys, videos and vibrators, unguents and oils over the decades to try and spice things up, you stopped getting busy altogether somewhere around your 125th anniversary, and shortly thereafter you found out she'd been having an on-again, off-again fling for the past ten years with that two-faced beatnik elf Jonazar who takes care of your reindeer. You'd already been eyeing up that smokin' hot elf with the big...smile you'd hired a few months back as a quality control officer in your toy workshop, so you figured you might as well get a little grudge-hump action in and start a fling of your own. Now it's a hundred and seventy-five years later and you've been giving her your North Pole behind the rubber ball bins every Tuesday evening ever since. Time just passes differently in Santa Land.

Our sneaky links are just some plain old links hidden in randomly chosen screenshots to odd, scary or inappropriate depictions of that horny old bastard St. Nick that we may or may not have found tied in a bundle in a time capsule inside the base of the Keebler Statue in Battle Creek, MI when ANTELFA demanded it be torn down for its offensively stereotypical depiction of a non-unionized former Santa's Helper.

Shaktimaan is India's low-budget take on Superman, but with a Hindu-centric hero and a groovy Bollywood beat. Unlike most American superheroes whose powers come from irradiated animals, aliens or science gone wrong, Shaktimaan gets his powers from trancendental meditation and perfection of the seven Chakras, the energy centers of the body, and his dedicated practice of Kundalini yoga. He's thoroughly Hindu in concept and form, a reincarnation of a wise warrior from the time of the Indian epic poem The Mahabharata, chosen by a group of wise, ancient monks and gifted with shakti, or primal energy through a Yajna sacred fire ceremony, when he entered the flame and was both tempered and purified by it. He utilizes his almost unlimited powers to battle his nemesis Tamraj Kilvish, the living embodiment of evil, and teaches the children of India to be good and virtuous and avoid sinful temptations.

I'll tell you up front here that I have a thing for ancient epics, Hindu spirituality and eastern philosophy. If I'm anything at all in a spiritual sense it's something between a fairly crappy Buddhist and a semi-fraudulent Hindu, with a heaping helping of Godless heathen asshole thrown in, just to sort of balance things out and keep the Christian Fundies in a perpetual state of exasperation and moral outrage. I've studied both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the two great epics forming the foundation of Hindu thought and culture. I own three separate translations of the Bhagavad-Gita. I've read the Vedas, Upanishads, and Dhammapada and I even have a complete, six-volume translation of the Buddhist Jatakas. I've also seen my fair share of outlandishly campy and garish Bollywood productions, so I came into today's weird pseudo-spiritual melange with a fairy solid base of experience to try to make some sense of what I was about to see.

None if it helped one whit. This show is the weirdest, most disorienting experience I've had in my entire tenure at Million Monkey Theater. It makes Winterbeast (1991) look like a master class in narrative clarity, and its special effects make 70's Doctor Who seem like it had cutting edge CG by Weta Digital. It proves the old aphorism I just now made up that it's easy to sound wise while still being unfathomably stupid. As George Harrison once wrote "Arrive without travelling, see all without looking, know all without knowing," and after watching the Shaktimaan Christmas episode I suddenly feel like I no longer know much of anything at all.

The opening theme song extolls Shaktimaan's many powers and virtues through breathless superlatives, including that he is "indomitable, incredible, courageous," and also has "really nice hair," and I have to admit his late 90's feather-back do is nigh-on irresistible. We also learn that he is both "a hope to dying humanity," and "a blessing of the power of the universe," which not only lays it on pretty thick but also sets our expectations almost impossibly high. What kind of wondrous hero could live up to such outlandish claims?

This kinda doughy-looking guy right here, that's who.

We also see some scenes from other episodes, including the introductory story where the secret consortium of monks chose and anointed him for the task of purging the darkness from an increasingly wicked world.

When the story begins we're dropped right into the action, such as it is, with Shaktimaan standing in a courtyard holding some kind of small, plush doll. He stares at it a moment then does a whirlwind-color-spinny-top thing that is apparently his primary mode of travel.

It features all the colors of his vomit from when he suddenly stops spinning.

He zips up into the air, and when he lands and stops he's in a foam and fiberglass cave with stringy vines and eerie artificial lighting. There are fake stone faces on the fake stone walls and a fake stone staircase leading up from the fake stone cavern. Shaktiman wanders around a bit, then looks up to see a bunch of dolls identical to the one in his hand, all hanging from partially visible strands of fishing line. The doll he's holding leaps from his hand and joins the others, and we hear a child call out to him from across the cavern.

That's what I was screaming the whole time I was watching.

Suddenly the dolls start jumping down and "attacking" Shaktimaan, their technique involving somebody off-camera throwing them at him, and him pretending they're stuck to his face and clothes. Each time he dislodges and throws one down it explodes, but more and more of them appear, swooping and clinging and gripping and shuffling towards him in all their felt and nylon terror.

One of them grows a pair of extra long poly-filled arms and grabs at his neck, but Shaktimaan tears the arm right off and throws it to the ground.

"Well I hope you brought a sewing kit, mister."

More and more of the little dolls come flying down the staircase and soon Shaktiman is overwhelmed by them, pinned in place by their wicked plush mittens and bulbous cotton noses. He pulls off more soft, silky arms and rolls over on top of more dolls which causes them to burst like finger poppers. He jumps up and kicks them out of mid-air, and zaps them with little red lightning bolts from his fingers, and after about five minutes of man-on-terry-cloth carnage he's finally destroyed them all and grabs the kid from the cage.

Before they leave the child tells Shaktiman there were demons there plotting to kill him, then a monk came and said he had been waiting for Shaktimaan six thousand years, and told him that only Shaktimaan could destroy the evil Tamraj Kilvish.

"Then I got bored and started playing with my mom's lipstick."

Shaktimaan tells the kid, whose name is Appu, that he talks too much, then he picks him up and does his colorful spinning top Chakra routine to take them to what appears to be a school cafeteria or maybe a children's social center--it's never made clear--where a bunch of other kids are hanging out and talking, playing games and just generally shooting the shit in a low-key, waiting for the director to yell "Cut!" kind of way. As soon as Appu and Shaktiman appear everyone stops what they're doing and shuffle over to their blocking marks to hear the boy's story.

It seems Appu had found one of the dolls in the road and shoved it in his pocket. When he and his little friends were playing blind man's bluff he felt a tickling and pulling in there, which doesn't sound very savory to me, and I'm thinking a call to Child Protective Services, Mumbai might not be amiss.

All the kids apparently saw Appu disappear right in front of them, but they're all pretty blase about it like maybe that sort of shit happens all the time when Shaktimaan is your pal. Appu says the doll took him to the scary cave with scary demon people who wanted to eat him, and then Shaktimaan came and rescued him and brought him back here.

Shaktimaan waves his hand and Appu and all the other children forget everything they've seen and heard, and we're apparently suppose to forget about it, too because we never see nor hear another word about it...and that's ten whole minutes of this thing gone and I have no idea what the fuck is happening.

Look how smug he is about it. I think he's deliberately wasting our time.

Now we cut to the same room some time later, decorated for Christmas with a lime-green plastic tree and some of the most tacky and gaudily bright ornaments I've ever seen. It's like a polymer products promotional film, where they show us a chintzy parade of cheap, meaningless goods while an officious narrator lists all the ways consumer plastics can enhance the quality of our cheap, meaningless lives. The kids are shuffling around the tree in a circle like zombies, just barely muttering Jingle Bells, tunelessly and indistinctly as if they'd just learned the English lyrics phonetically five minutes before the cameras rolled.

It's gonna be hard to jingle all the way if they've only got one bell.

One of the kids has a Shaktimaan doll and Appu wants it real bad, in fact he demands he give it to him, and his playmate is like, no way dude, this Shaktimaan is my Shaktimaan, so if you want a Shaktimaan you'd better get your own Shaktimaan, maan.

Appu doesn't like that answer, so he grabs the thing and tries to run off with it, his friend shouting at him to give it back.

The kid in the plaid looks like the 48 year-old owner of a bait and tackle shop.

Appu doesn't get very far, as the commotion has attracted the attention of a professionally dressed woman whom I initially assumed to be one of their teachers, but as it happens she's Appu's sister Geeta, who actually works as a newspaper reporter. Why she's here, ostensibly in charge of a bunch of kids, is a mystery I can't be bothered to solve with a mere two days left to finish this article, but I will mention that the actress, Kitu Gidwani only played the role for the first eight episodes of the program, with this being her very last appearance.

Yeah, she looks about over it.

Her successor Vaishnavi Mahant-Macdonald would prove more popular and enduring, playing Geeta for the subsequent four hundred forty-one episodes made between 1997 and 2005.

The owner of the disputed toy comes running up to explain to Geeta how the Shaktimaan doll is his sovereign, legal property, and the rights of ownership still mean something in this country, despite the best efforts of the heathen left to promote their Godless communism. Geeta agrees and tells her brother to give the doll back, but he stubbornly refuses. He says he was the first of them to see the real Shaktimaan, and he's asked her again and again to buy him a Shaktimaan doll, to no avail, so he feels the doll should be his by commonlaw squatter's rights.

However novel a basis for the redistribution of wealth and property it may be, it just doesn't hold any water in a legally binding sense, so she grabs the doll from him and hands it back to the other kid, causing Appu to burst into hot, bitter tears over not being able to have whatever the fuck he wants whenever the fuck he wants it no matter who the fuck it belongs to. He even pulls the old "If mom and dad were still alive they'd have bought me one already" bullshit, which seems to sting Geeta straight through her otherwise cold and totally over-it heart.

It's times like this she wishes she were an only child.

Later we're in Geeta's office, where for reasons I can't quite fathom she's second guessing herself about having smacked down her selfish little shit of a brother and put him in his place.

Suddenly a buck-toothed geek with a Moe Howard haircut, thick granny glasses and used car salesman sportcoat walks in.

It's Jerry Lewishaktimaan.

This is Pandit Gangadhar Vidyadhar Mayadhar Omkarnath Shastri, a photographer for Geeta's newspaper and intellectually-challenged comic-relief buffoon, who also happens to be Shaktimaan's Clark Kent alter-ego.

It's clear Geeta has little time or patience for him, but he insists to know why she's so sad and prates on and on with some sing-song, needling nonsense until she can't help but giggle at how impenetrably stupid he is. Since she figures he won't understand most of what the hell she's saying anyway she might as well use him as a sounding board to help her organize her thoughts.

The fact is she thinks she was too harsh on her brother and shouldn't have scolded him so much for his obdurate theft of his friend's toy. He's a child, after all, she naively convinces herself, and children can be stubborn...and larcenous, and occasionally evil. Plus he's just a pathetic little orphan and they only have each other now that their parents are gone.

I disagree with her overly-sanguine assessment. He's acting out and it's only going to get worse if she keeps overlooking it. I don't see how any of her rationalizing excuses his brattish behavior, or why the heroic Shaktimaan, who loves truth and righteousness above all else, would choose to condone it, even through his other, dumber identity. Still, the ways of Dharma are indeed mysterious, and Shaktimaan's Chakras are way more polished than mine.

Geeta lies awake nights dreaming of polishing Shaktimaan's Chakras.

Geeta immediately regrets taking the time to talk with Pandit when he goes off on a minutes-long, utterly bizarre tangent about the moon being made of an upturned bowl of porridge and his mother scooping out a bowl of it for him whenever he got stubborn as a child in an effort to keep him from eating the whole thing at once and ruining the moon for everybody.

I think it's supposed to be a "wise fool" kind of thing, where he makes up some secretly clever nonsensical parable to make her think up a way out of her conundrum, but maybe something got lost in translation because in english it mostly sounds like shizophrenic word salad, but then again, maybe I'm just too distracted by his godawful teeth to process what the hell he's saying.

They're really freaking me out, man.

Mercifully his massive torrent of hot, folksy bullshit comes to an end, and I can't help but feel that maybe they played the "blithering idiot" card just a little too hard. Clark Kent may have been clumsy and shy sometimes but he was still a decent reporter and a believable, relatable person. Pandit is such an excessively moronic caricature it's impossible to take anything he says or does seriously, and his facial expressions, posture and pinched, whining voice combine to make him an ear-splitting, eye-burning irritant every time he appears onscreen.

Geeta decides the only way to shut Appu up is to go ahead and get the him the fucking doll, but she doesn't know where to go to buy one, being as they've been a pretty hot Christmas item and most of the stores are sold out. Pandit thinks he knows where they still have some and offers to take Appu to go get one, but when he and his greedy little pal get to the store, the shop clerks flat-out laugh at them, saying everyone in the whole damn city has been out of Shaktimaan dolls for weeks.

It will be a miracle if I make it all the way through this special with my sanity intact.

Pandit now crouches down behind a rack of sari fabrics and cries over his lifelong bad luck. Whenever he waited for a bus, he complains, it never came, whenever he opened an umbrella it never rained, and whenever he sat on a sofa, bedbugs came out of it, the last of which which sounds more like a failure of personal hygiene than anything having to do with ill-luck or outrageous fortune.

A swanky-looking kid with slicked-back hair and a trendy popped collar overhears Pandit's lament about not finding a Shaktimaan doll and steps over to comfort him. He says he knows where he can get one, and he'll take them there...but only him and not Appu. Oh, and Appu's hot sister can come too, because she's hot.

Maybe there's a brisk black market trade in toys over in India, because that sounds an awful lot like a setup for a police sting operation where they're waiting in a closet to jump out and punch the piss out of some poor consumer who's willing to get a Shaktimaan doll at any price...or maybe it's a bait-and-switch for an organ harvesting ring. Either way Pandit had better watch his kidneys.

Instead of the combination opium den, brothel, massage parlor and discount mattress outlet I expected, it's just a normal-looking house, but with a shit-ton of Christmas presents lying around, a bunch more of those tacky plastic holiday decorations and a Santa suit hanging on a hook on one of the walls.

Geeta asks the Kid if all these presents belong to him, but he tells her they belong to his Grandpa. Dim-bulb Pandit asks why his Grandpa still plays with toys at his age, and is he senile or stupid or something, but the Kid says no, his Grandpa is Santa Claus, and he points to a picture of Kumar Kringle himself hanging on a wall across the room to prove it.

Is that his "sees you when you're sleeping" or his "knows when you're awake" stare?

When Pandit and Geeta turn back around Grandpa himself walks in, looking more like a Florida retiree than Jolly Old St. Nick. The Grandson Kid tells his Grandpa they want a Shaktimaan doll, and it turns out he's the one who's been buying them all up and hoarding them so he can give them to all the children that year.

When Geeta asks why he's so keen on that particular gift he goes off on a long, rambling tangent about how kids' toys are not just their happiness but their ideals as well, and what better way to foster good moral behavior than getting them all playing with Shaktimaan? Not in the same way Geeta wants to play with him, more in the traditional child's play sense.

It all seems reasonable enough, but I'm still in shock from learning that Santa Claus isn't the ancient magical benefactor I've always been told about, but just some fat old dude from Mumbai who looks like he eats too much Palak Paneer.

If you are what you eat he's 80% dairy.

Santa goes off on a tirade against violent toys like guns and pistols, and hopes through his doll-centric crusade to provide more morally centered playthings and make some small difference in the way children view the world. Since Shaktimaan is honest and courageous and good it is only right, he insists, that children should love him, because it will teach them to be honest and courageous and good, too. I think maybe that arguement falls apart when you consider Appu, whose love of Shaktimaan turned him into a selfish, covetous little shit, but Pandit gleefully agrees with Santa, and even offers that it's not just Children who love Shaktimaan. He turns to Geeta when he says it and gives her his village idiot version of a knowing wink, which I thought was a pretty nice dig, coming as it does secretly from the actual object of her amorous desires.

It ends with Santa promising that if Appu stops being a stubborn, whiny little bitch he will bring him a Shaktimaan doll when he distributes his gifts at the kids' Christmas party at the social center or school or whatever the hell the place is where we keep seeing them.

Now we cut to Shaktimaan's nemesis, the sinister, demon-like sorcerer Tamraj Kilvish, about to enact his next flagitious scheme to spread darkness and ignominy across India.

He's campy in an almost Stu Francis way.

He monologizes about how cruel and dark and goth and fabulous he is, then picks up his totally bitchen' Spirit Halloween Aquaman trident he got on clearance last November and throws it into the mouth of the cave we saw at the beginning of the episode. The trident hits a skull set on a little altar, and the skull shoots out red and green thunderbolts that coalesce into a lumpy humanoid form.

I think it's a gimp suit made out of moving blankets.

Tamraj refers to him as a "stone man," something like a golem, and explains that if his burning sight falls on anything it, too will turn hard like stone...just as he gets hard like stone when he thinks about it. He sends the Stone Gimp off to do his maliciously sexy bidding and laughs gleefully at the merry fun he's going to have watching Shaktiman get his cum-uppence.

We cut now to Grandpa Santa's house where he and his Grandson are labeling the presents for the party. The Kid finds a box he doesn't recognize, wrapped in dull gray paper rather than the colorful purple and pink of the other gifts. Since neither of them know what's in it Grandpa Santa tells him to unwrap it and have a look. Inside they find Stone Gimp, shrunk to the size of a doll.

Batteries not included.

Suddenly the Gimp sits up and begins to grow, and the two just sit and watch in mild confusion and annoyance, like they just heard a knock at the door, aren't expecting anyone and aren't in the mood for visitors, instead of, you know, fucking panicking because a tiny stone doll just came to life and is spontaneously expanding before their eyes.

Santa can't be bothered. He's got shit to do.

Grandson can hardly even stay awake.

Before you can come up with an easy-to-remember safe word the Gimp is full size and uses his stony gaze to freeze Grandpa Santa in place. He wraps his cold-stone arms around the portly old cheesebag and the two of them disappear in a puff of late-90's AfterEffects smoke.

Back in Tamraj's lair he taunts his jolly immobile prisoner. He somehow knows that Shaktimaan will be at the kids' party, even though the scene where all that gets arranged hasn't happened yet, so he plans to send Stone Gimp disguised as Santa to stonify his nemesis and bring him back as a trophy...and then the spanking can begin.

But first they've got to teach him to dance the robot so he can kinda blend in.

Grandson heads over to the kids' center, crying painted-on, glycerine tears and staring at an objectively terrifying Santa mask that's hanging on the Christmas tree.

"Aieee! Aieee! Shub-Niggurath!"

It seems the police didn't believe him when he said a guy in a puffy gimp suit kidnapped his grandpa, so he's hoping to find a little faith and a little assistance here amongst his friends. They all file in behind him, seeming to perform a weirdly ritualistic laying of hands and assuring him it's all going to be fine, that he's one of them now, and that his troubles will be gone once he's been fully absorbed into the collective.

"No m