Subatomic Brainfreeze

What Did I Waste My Decade On? ANIME CONS?

I can't remember when my first anime con was anymore. It was probably Big Apple Anime Fest '02, which I remember pretty faintly. They told me Tomino wasn't doing autographs, you know, but he was. I-- and everybody else who got one-- stumbled upon the guy in, I kid you not, the basement of a Virgin Megastore. I'd brought my Haro alarm clock and everything, so I was overjoyed to get it signed. The only other thing I remember was that the theater went into a full-on ovation at exactly the scene in Char's Counterattack that you'd expect such a thing to happen at. You know what I'm talking about.

What Did I Waste My Decade On? ANIME CLUB?

Outside of a few people on the internet, I didn't really have any friends who were anime fans back in high school. Gamers, sure, but no anime fans. Probably for the better. It was especially weird to see anime and manga become a teen fad when I was in college: I hid all this shit when I was in high school!

What Did I Waste My Decade On? GETTING ANIME?

The first decade of the millennium is rapidly coming to an end, and as part of my ongoing quarter-life crisis-- a perfect storm of unemployment and restlessness-- I thought I would try and remember what the hell I did with all that time, subject by subject. This'll be tough!

I just watched a PARTICULARLY GOOD episode of Dirty Pair

If you're not familiar, Dirty Pair is a perfectly formulaic series: two gun-toting girls in space bikinis are "trouble consultants" who solve problems at the cost of exploding everything in their path. It's not terribly ambitious, it's got no message, but it's simple, honest fun. Today I watched an unusually good episode. Dirty Pair episodes are usually stand-alone deals, so you can go ahead and watch episode seven without missing anything. I recommend you do so, because I'm about to spoil a very twisty and very silly plot. If you don't care about all that crap, then by all means continue.

Dub-only Kurokami Blu-Rays and BANDAI'S GENIUS ANTI-REVERSE-IMPORTATION STRATEGY

A lot of anime fans see US localizing and publishing outfits as the ultimate evil, citing the lousy dubs, re-editing and censorship of the old days. Even though releases have gotten a lot better over the years, the myth persists as part of that "Nippon banzai" mentality all too common to anime fans. The funny thing is, you know who'll really screw up a US release of a Japanese cartoon, if you let them? The Japanese themselves.

This is going to be a long story, so let's take it from the beginning. In Japan, home video is ludicrously expensive. Go ahead and take a look at CD Japan, where any old movie costs $40 on DVD: about double what I'd pay here in the States. The situation with anime is even worse: TV series are completely dependent on DVD sales-- not the TV broadcast-- for their profits, so prices are significantly higher. The recent Bakemonogatari, for example, is selling (very well, for anime) at about $75 for two episodes on Blu-Ray.

As such, Japanese fans had to take notice of the DVD anime boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. Even taking international shipping into account, Region 1 DVDs have always been a better deal than Region 2 discs, usually by insane margins. I bought the entire 47-episode Patlabor TV series for about as much as the previously-mentioned otaku paid for two episodes of Bakemonogatari. Because the R1 discs usually had Japanese-language audio, many Japanese reverse-imported these discs, bought Region 1 DVD players, and still paid much less than they would have for the domestic equivalent. Otaku may be suckers, but they're not stupid.

This does not make Japanese companies happy. It's why it takes so long for anime to reach the US: if Japanese and US releases were made at the same time, everybody would buy the one that costs a quarter (or less!) of the price. With Blu-Ray putting the US and Japan in the same region, importing HD anime will be no trouble at all.

(My personal conspiracy theory as to why Funimation's DVD releases have 7 episodes on a disc and have video quality on par with the average fansub is that ugly R1 DVDs are one way to get Japanese otaku buying R2s. Don't quote me on that.)

Now Bandai sells Gundam DVDs for $800 (!!!) a series in Japan. Here, I can get Zeta Gundam in its entirety and brand new for about $60. Bandai has more stake in this than anybody, and they aren't at all interested in changing the way things work on their end: specifically, making the obvious move to lower prices so that more nerds can afford more cartoons. Instead, Bandai had a truly brilliant plan: they would get Americans to pay Japanese prices for anime! I've already detailed how poorly this went in an old post.

While Bandai Visual USA was dead on arrival, Bandai was still thinking of ways to avoid a dark future of affordable anime. Their latest hit came today. Sunrise's recent bomb Kurokami will be released on DVD in a few months as usual: however, the Blu-Ray release will feature English-dubbed dialogue only. The idea is clearly to prevent reverse importation by simply leaving out the Japanese-language dialogue.

This is actually not the first time Bandai has pulled this one: back when the original Mobile Suit Gundam met with disastrous failure on Cartoon Network, the DVD release was dub-only. Bandai's US people lied about the reasons for this, insisting that the audio materials for one of the most important and successful anime in history had been, uh... lost somewhere. Right. Years later, of course, Mobile Suit Gundam came out on DVD in Japan for 800 dollars as usual, with the original dialogue intact.

Now Kurokami sucked anyway, so this isn't a huge loss in and of itself. However, one has to wonder what this means for the future. If a shitty show like this gets this treatment, is it fair to assume the same will happen with shows people might actually want to reverse import? Gundam Unicorn is just around the corner, you know, and the Japanese release is set to have English subtitles. It will also cost $50 for one episode. As of yet, there are no details about the US release of Gundam Unicorn. It would make absolutely no sense to sell a new show directly targeted at diehard fans of the old Gundam anime dubbed-only, but you know what they say: nobody fucks up anime releases like the Japanese.

Kimi ni Todoke: EVERYBODY'S SO NICE

The other thing I'm bothering to watch this anime season is Kimi ni Todoke (Reaching You), an almost unbearably sweet shoujo romance. It's relatively uncommon to see shoujo manga adapted to animation, and it's even more unusual that big-deal studio Production IG is handling something like this. Watching this show kind of makes you wish they did it more often: I haven't read the original (I think I'm going to be doing that soon), but it's clear that IG has nailed the atmosphere of Karuho Shiina's original work. I mean, everything's so shiny and everybody's so nice!

The gimmick-- you can kind of tell this started out as a one-shot-- is that our heroine kind of looks like Sadako from the Ring (Samara in the US remake, if I recall?), who would crawl out of your TV and kill you. The people around her are either shitty to or terrified of her, completely socially isolating her. It goes without saying that Sawako isn't scary at all: she is meek and sweet and stupidly earnest. Eventually she meets a guy who's about as earnest as she is, and I presume that they will dance around whether or not they are dating for the rest of this show. Together with the girls who appear mean but are totally nice and the cool, silent guy (who's probably really also really nice), a little Sawako clique forms and the girl starts to learn to break out of her shell.

As I hinted before, things move as slowly as I usually see shoujo move. The leads can't seem to figure out they're in love. The current arc is about Sawako being accused of something that she obviously didn't do, and her friends tormenting themselves with "what if she did it" even though they themselves have figured out she didn't do it. There are vague statements spun off into emotional meltdowns, there are super-deformed heroines worrying, and there are sparkles. None of it is really outside the standard, but the execution is so solid and the characters are such nice people that I really can't say anything against it. It's like watching puppies and kittens go to high school.

Trapeze: YOU'RE FABULOUSLY GOOD AT GIVING INJECTIONS

A lot has been said about how weak the current anime season is. To this I say "shut up, I'm watching Sunred." It's hard not to see a wall of shitty late-night porn game adaptations and moe exploitation and lose all hope for the medium, of course, but don't all of us right-thinking people just skip that stuff anyway? Let's talk about a good cartoon.

I was interested in Trapeze from the moment I saw the trailer, in large part due to Denki Groove's involvement with the music. If Denki Groove is down for something, it's probably a safe bet, I figure. As you can see here, it's a heavily stylized live-action/animation hybrid. This is not exactly a Roger Rabbit situation: rather, in one shot we see an actor, in another we see a cartoon, and in others, the same person is a little bit an actor and a little bit a cartoon. It also happens to be about a psychiatrist in a bear (?) costume who gets off on injections.

In this first episode, Ichiro Irabu's patient, a trapeze artist, has a pretty mundane problem with a mundane solution. You're probably not going to notice, though, because the way the story is told is so strange. It isn't hard to follow, mind you, just strange. As I mentioned before, everything is constantly changing: the doctor him/herself takes three forms and seems to be voiced by three different people. The show's running theme appears to be multiple personalities and the way people subconsciously become different selves, but it remains to be seen where that goes. Until then, I recommend you kick back and enjoy the music.

I would also feel like I was cheating my audience if I didn't mention the hot nurse. Damn.

I have a confession to make: THE FANDUB OF PRINCE OF TENNIS IS MY ANIME HOLY GRAIL

Well, alright, it's second place, next to an uncensored print of the Fist of the North Star movie suddenly appearing out of nowhere. But every time I recall this oddity, I wish I had it again, and I look for it, and there's nothing.

Yes, it's awful. The fansubbers at Anime-Otakus, who had translated the entire TV series, saw fit to dub an episode, despite lacking things like actors. What resulted was 25 minutes of a fansubber reading his own script emotionlessly for every single guy in the show. There was a girl to cover the two female characters, and did I forget to mention that the fansubber also dubs the opening and ending theme songs?

The great thing about this dub is how strictly it adheres to the rules for fan subtitles, utterly ignoring how things actually sound in English. There is no rewriting of the fansub script, highlighting the fact that the average fansub script sounds nothing like a conversation between human beings. Segments of dialogue are even timed to when one would imagine the subtitles appear on screen. The coup de grace is that the hero's catchphrase, "mada mada da ne"-- which is a "you've got a long way to go" kind of statement-- is left untranslated. It is the absolute height of hilarity to hear this line spoken in English in the middle of conversation. I can't explain it. It's too wonderful.

It's a pretty amazing watch for a bad anime enthusiast like me, and I can't find it anywhere. I just spent the afternoon digging through my archives from around the time it came out, and there's nothing. The only things that come up on Google are little posts like this: the fansubber appears defunct, and I really doubt they were proud of this after the kind of feedback they must have received. Note the comment on that post: apparently there were three episodes of this.

So, in conclusion, I'm putting out a formal call to the entire internet: if you have any or all of Prince of Tennis fandub by Anime-Otakus, kindly hook me up. I miss it so, and the internet will be a better place with it freely available on, say, Youtube or some such.

Shin Mazinger Final Episode: One Hundred Rocket Punches GET HYPE

I hope you didn't find out anything about this episode during the wait for its release: I know I avoided every place that might possibly have been talking about it. I was pretty sure of the big thing (we'll get to it), but the rest of it was a series of very happy surprises.

Dr. Hell's King of Hell (which has faces on the sides of its face) is rampaging around, and both the Mazinger Army and the fancy new weaponized Photon Power Labs are completely useless against it. Obviously, it falls to Kouji to take care of it.

 Now this is where the Baron Ashura Show (and make no mistake, we were warned halfway through the series for very good reason) gets complicated: it is revealed that Ashura had actually joined forces with Tsubasa and Kouji, unbeknownst to everybody, when they were inside the Mycenae pillar. Why would this happen? Remember that there was a part of the Kedora's memories that we were never shown: Kouji would just say "we saw a lot of things in there I don't wanna talk about." What they actually saw was grounds for Ashura to backstab Dr. Hell. Remember that Ashura is supposed to be a fusion of two half-rotted bodies, and that the rotting is never really accounted for in the story of this show or the original Mazinger. It just kind of happened.

The truth is much nastier: Dr. Hell and Kenzo Kabuto actually half-rotted the bodies themselves so as to have one less person to deal with when they stitched it back together. For good measure, they obliterated the remains of the Mycenae civilization that was preserved inside of Bardos. So, as it's all part of the plan, Ashura fishes a waterlogged Kouji and his Pilder out of the ocean to fight Dr. Hell. But wait, Mazinger's still down there! What the hell is Kouji going to do from his Pilder against this mightiest of evil robots? Isn't it obvious? He's going to punch it. Over and over again, in the most awesome way possible. No, seriously, if you haven't seen this, then don't let me be the one to tell you how it happened.

Kouji makes it rain. Inside the mechanical corpses of the defeated Mazinger Army are hundreds of Rocket Punches, which fly up and fall onto the King of Hell from the sky. Kouji wrecks the body with a machinegun hail of Rocket Punch fire. He then calls back all the punches to become one huge Rocket Punch, which he then flies directly through the King of Hell's body before completely obliterating it with a Big Bang Punch. Meanwhile, the show is hinting that this was actually a terrible idea, but I, the viewer, cannot bring myself to care because what just happened is so fucking awesome.

Well, it was a terrible idea anyway, and here's why: this was all stage two of the Baron Ashura Triplecross. Let's give Baron Ashura a hand: for all the scheming that was going on in this show, Ashura, of all people, ends up the decisive winner. It turns out that Dr. Hell's goal was not to take over the world and Photon Power for its own sake: it was to take over the world and defend it from the Mycenae with Photon Power. Oh, Dr. Hell. You could have been less of a dick about protecting the earth from giant god-monsters. If you'd just sat everybody around a table and had a talk, maybe they could have worked this out. But they didn't, and Dr. Hell's death actually makes a huge mess of everything. Remember how Ashura couldn't commit suicide as long as Dr. Hell was alive? Well, that's pretty important, because as it turns out, it is Ashura's blood that is necessary to revive the ancient gods of Mycenae. As the credits roll, Ashura tears itself in half with its bare hands, and an army of seven appears before Kouji. They are led by the Grand General of Darkness (Ankoku Daishogun), who, in the final moments, unsheathes his sword and slices Mount Fuji in half.

And that's exactly where it ends. I had said a few posts back that the best possible conclusion would be a revisiting of the fantastic 70's movie Mazinger Z vs. Ankoku Daishogun (which transitions from Mazinger Z to Great Mazinger) in the form of a movie or special, and this has got me very hopeful. This show isn't over. Great-hen is probably going to happen, and there's a possiblity of the movie or special I was talking about, but nobody's said anything and any new stuff is probably a ways off. You'll live.

So how about this show, you guys? Putting the inconsistent animation aside, this was a hell of a ride all the way through. Giant robots are fun and all, but as Tomino will tell you, they're not enough by themselves. This show really sold on its twisting narrative, strong characters, and, of course the fact that nearly every episode had some kind of "oh my god holy shit" payoff. It's great to see Imagawa get to make an epic again, and I really hope everything continues to go as planned. For the time being, though, these writeups will end and I'll have to find something else to talk about. Oh well!

Shin Mazinger Episode 25: Blade GETS HYPE

Well guys, Shin Mazinger Shougeki Z-hen on television is over, and seeing as I've been busy anyway-- I have grown a serious blogger backlog that I haven't been too great about clearing up-- I decided to do a special double-post for the last two episodes. Hope you guys enjoy.

Boy, things were still a total mess last week, weren't they? Kouji and Mazinger were mobbed with robo-monsters, the Photon Power Labs self-destructed, and only the Kurogane Five stood between Ashura and Kurogane House. Well, as it turned out, the God Scrander Cavalry saves the day courtesy of Computer Grandpa, there's a real Photon Power Lab under the old one that's way better anyway, and the Kurogane gang are protected by the, uh, capable Boss Borot. The fight between Dr. Hell and everybody else is still hurtling towards its conclusion.

This Blade appearance is exactly the same as the Blade appearance from the very first episode, but he gets the Hype Award for killing Pygman as abruptly and effortlessly as possible. As the narrator hypes him up, Blade cuts out as quickly as he appeared, leaving Anokuji to remind the audience that this is a story for another time. Sorry, Great fans, but if you wanted to know any more than this, you're just going to have to wait. Great-hen has been repeatedly hinted at by the mechanical designer and is very likely to happen given the success of Z-hen, but Giant Robo fans remember that time Imagawa promised a sprawling epic. We remain cautious.

Running out of options and generals, Dr. Hell desperately launches Bardos Island... which was exactly what Tsubasa had wanted him to do. Everything up until now has just been part of the plan: even Kouji rushing into battle instead of going with "the plan" was completely intentional. Once Bardos is up in the air, the reinforced Mazinger Corps surround and bombard it. But wait! Taking down Bardos Island was part of Dr. Hell's plan all along! Wait... what? Behold the final Dr. Hell robot, the King of Hell! Plus there's nothing left of Kenzo but the Kedora! I don't even know anymore, man! Good thing there's another post coming...