'Tornado' to Touch Down on Sundance Now in August

"Tornado Season" refers to the time of year when storms that can result in funnel clouds are most prevalent. Here in the contiguous 48 states of the U.S., that's typically from early March (see also: coming in like a lion) through to the end of June, when the heat reaches a point that the wilds tend to die down. However, in Europe, Tornado Season doesn't begin until August and runs through mid-autumn. Not that Europe or the U.K. get many tornadoes (hence why Dorothy was from Kansas, not Coventry). But when they do — more frequently now as climate change continues — they usually pack a punch. That makes Tornado's forthcoming streaming premiere in August right on time.

Most people would naturally assume a story about a Japanese-born Samurai living in the U.K. and working as a traveling puppet master in the 1790s is completely fabricated. But, as period piece TV series have been recently reminded us, it was not. Although the first Japanese immigrants were not recorded as arriving in the country until the 1830s, the Japanese feudal system was in a constant state of flux, and older warriors often left their homeland to find work as mercenaries.

Most of them stayed in and around the Asian continent, but a few traveled further west. Although there's no official record of Japanese arrivals in the U.K. during this era, it's possible that such arrivals occurred, and that was sufficient to introduce this samurai style to the West and set it on the roads to London.