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krpalmerI managed to surprise myself when, after six months of worrying how most capsule descriptions of new anime series weren't grabbing me, I filled a fair slate of shows to watch weekly. There were more series yet that sounded interesting but wouldn't fit in, in part because I was also still intent on watching shows on DVD. Indulging in something apparently rare the way certain people dwell on it but quite possible for me, I started off these latest three months shifting back and forth from right now to the late 1970s.
I've long heard here and there about Captain Harlock, aware in a general way the series and the character himself were known and notable in the formative days of anime fandom over here, and yet it always seemed out of reach... until Discotek continued its strategy of appealing to a possibly small but nonetheless vocal slice of fandom by licensing the original series. I was fairly quick to get around to buying their release and a bit quicker yet to get around to opening it, but I have to admit that as I started watching certain comments about it I'd just heard, couched with a "distaste for the recent" (and not just recent anime), were still grating on me.
I don't know if it was just that that made the first few episodes seem just a bit harder to really get engaged by than some other openings of old anime series I've seen. The theme of a casually decadent Earth's active and absolute obliviousness to the impending and announced invasion by willowy, combustible plant-women aliens seemed a little too overstated somehow. That, in turn, had me thinking Captain Harlock being a "space pirate" seemed more just another way to set up the familiar tale of "one starship alone against impossible odds," which then reminded me of recent thoughts that Bodacious Space Pirates was just a little easygoing compared to what I'd made of rumours about older "space pirate" shows... I might have found the most amusement in those early days in thoughts the tiny moppet Mayu seemed more than a little "proto-moe" (or to define that in a few more words, just about the same as the current stuff but in a show from "the good old days.")
Knowing that Leiji Matsumoto had been a vital creative figure connected to both Captain Harlock and the just-earlier Space Battleship Yamato may at first have just had me thinking Yamato's more military take on things appealed to me more, but maybe too a less essential and rather stranger connection was also affecting my reactions. I've heard that Carl Macek and Harmony Gold tried to follow up Robotech by interleaving episodes of Captain Harlock with a similar-looking but otherwise unrelated series, stretching "we can make these foreign cartoons long enough for syndication over here!" past the snapping point in the perhaps biased narratives; I do wonder, anyway, if the attempt not really getting on TV can be conclusively linked to opinions of intrinsic wrongness, just like with "Robotech: The Movie." All of that, though, just might have made me think straight off the series didn't look quite as sharp as I'd imagined, as much as that does sound like the constant accusations against the philistine "fans of recent anime only" that I seem to see more of than actual "I thought it looked kind of old" dismissals. After a while, though, I did get to noticing how the translated credits mentioned "Studio Nue," who I knew had worked on Macross (and had provided Harlock's starship Arcadia with a cameo in the ultimate battle of that later series). Thinking the small details of some minor costume designs reminded me of Macross's costume designs left me with the intriguing sense of Captain Harlock linking two notable space opera anime.
To sum up, as the series progressed and Captain Harlock spent more time away from Earth and the overused-in-the-70s idea of "ancient astronauts," it did seem to grow on me. That its appeal was almost intuitively grasped makes it hard to articulate, but perhaps that sense I'd had right from the start of "old-fashioned simplicity" and some distinctive oddness wound up feeling like a strength.
I've long heard here and there about Captain Harlock, aware in a general way the series and the character himself were known and notable in the formative days of anime fandom over here, and yet it always seemed out of reach... until Discotek continued its strategy of appealing to a possibly small but nonetheless vocal slice of fandom by licensing the original series. I was fairly quick to get around to buying their release and a bit quicker yet to get around to opening it, but I have to admit that as I started watching certain comments about it I'd just heard, couched with a "distaste for the recent" (and not just recent anime), were still grating on me.
I don't know if it was just that that made the first few episodes seem just a bit harder to really get engaged by than some other openings of old anime series I've seen. The theme of a casually decadent Earth's active and absolute obliviousness to the impending and announced invasion by willowy, combustible plant-women aliens seemed a little too overstated somehow. That, in turn, had me thinking Captain Harlock being a "space pirate" seemed more just another way to set up the familiar tale of "one starship alone against impossible odds," which then reminded me of recent thoughts that Bodacious Space Pirates was just a little easygoing compared to what I'd made of rumours about older "space pirate" shows... I might have found the most amusement in those early days in thoughts the tiny moppet Mayu seemed more than a little "proto-moe" (or to define that in a few more words, just about the same as the current stuff but in a show from "the good old days.")
Knowing that Leiji Matsumoto had been a vital creative figure connected to both Captain Harlock and the just-earlier Space Battleship Yamato may at first have just had me thinking Yamato's more military take on things appealed to me more, but maybe too a less essential and rather stranger connection was also affecting my reactions. I've heard that Carl Macek and Harmony Gold tried to follow up Robotech by interleaving episodes of Captain Harlock with a similar-looking but otherwise unrelated series, stretching "we can make these foreign cartoons long enough for syndication over here!" past the snapping point in the perhaps biased narratives; I do wonder, anyway, if the attempt not really getting on TV can be conclusively linked to opinions of intrinsic wrongness, just like with "Robotech: The Movie." All of that, though, just might have made me think straight off the series didn't look quite as sharp as I'd imagined, as much as that does sound like the constant accusations against the philistine "fans of recent anime only" that I seem to see more of than actual "I thought it looked kind of old" dismissals. After a while, though, I did get to noticing how the translated credits mentioned "Studio Nue," who I knew had worked on Macross (and had provided Harlock's starship Arcadia with a cameo in the ultimate battle of that later series). Thinking the small details of some minor costume designs reminded me of Macross's costume designs left me with the intriguing sense of Captain Harlock linking two notable space opera anime.
To sum up, as the series progressed and Captain Harlock spent more time away from Earth and the overused-in-the-70s idea of "ancient astronauts," it did seem to grow on me. That its appeal was almost intuitively grasped makes it hard to articulate, but perhaps that sense I'd had right from the start of "old-fashioned simplicity" and some distinctive oddness wound up feeling like a strength.