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Wishful Thinking Pays Off For Once
The strongest reason I have for following the "Anime on DVD" message board (still called so for all that it's been folded into a larger site) seems to be that, compared to a lot of the other anime message boards and communities I'm at least aware of, most of the regulars seem to enjoy what they watch instead of always complaining about some recent trend they don't like. However, the community may have influenced other parts of my interest in anime, one of them being that I do take notice how interested everyone else always is in the DVD releases the licensing and production arm of the "Right Stuf" online store puts out, and how the people from that store help keep up that interest by interacting with the community. I can't fault the effort put into the releases from packaging to disc content, but I suppose I'm a little aware I've ordered some of those recent releases not so much because the way others talk about them makes me really want to see the title, but instead just to hit a pretty high free international shipping threshold if while doing my part to hold up one part of the industry other people seem a bit more attached to than I am...
Therefore, when the constant cryptic promises that one of the company's potential licenses had been worked out after much negotiation at last turned into a countdown to an official announcement, I was interested but unsure how taken I'd be with how it would all turn out in a few days even as I saw the posts of speculation pile up about the clues provided beforehand to build up the buzz. The clues did seem complicated, but one person happened to notice one point of extreme obscurity about the way they were being given and speculate that it might be a date. When the anime that had premiered around then was looked up, one of those titles was the "Dirty Pair" television series. Some years ago, ADV had managed to license the OVAs, movies, and movie-like OVAS from that franchise (and I managed to pick up those releases rather later), but the apparent prize of the television series eluded them. Having to admit that I also managed not that long ago to see "fansubs" of that series from the 1980s, I can add my private reaction was "wouldn't that be something!"... but, of course, to build an airy castle on what seems one fragment of considerable speculation then seems very much like setting yourself up for disappointment. I kept supposing it would be "another" quiet, low-key, perhaps even "slow-paced" series that lots of people on the message board would be pleased to see but which would leave me wondering if I really wanted to see it. (I suppose I've found the two "quiet, low-key, perhaps even 'slow-paced' series" from them that I have managed to watch interesting, though.)
Then, after getting back from work yesterday, the day the guessing was supposed to end, I happened to think right before heading off to the message board that I ought to look up what the title was. The first words I saw were "Dirty Pair"... and that, as I'd thought, was something. This, at least, is going to be one release I'm not going to drift into getting just to reach the free shipping threshold; I can even imagine ordering it and paying shipping on it. I suppose that after everything, Dirty Pair was a series that, on first seeing it myself, I understood just why the North American anime fans of the 1980s had been so enthusiastic about it in those trailblazing days; it might not be "profound," but it does seem a lively, quite manageable step up from the appeal but also the patterns of "animated action series" from back then. (This doesn't seem "automatic" for me, too: beyond never not quite liking constant criticism of recent anime to hold up older works, when I saw Zeta Gundam, a series of comparable vintage to Dirty Pair, my ambiguous reactions to it left speculating on why it turned into an unassailable icon a lot more abstract and academic.) At the same time, I'm quite aware that I at least became aware of the series years before I managed to see most it through noticing much enthusiastic promotion of a magnum opus of "fanfics" crossing over everything that, at the beginning of it all, had started off as "the Dirty Pair run into the college students writing the story." Unfortunately, that colliding with my reading lots of MSTings of "self-insertion" stories where other characters with what seem very close connections to their authors wind up romantically entangled with female fictional characters amid lots of other self-indulgence might have left me less willing to be as caught up in the story as so many others were, and I wound up writing a MSTing of the story's very first instalment and collaborating on a group MSTing of the second... When I did manage to see the series itself, I admit to being pleased it didn't seem so much "the two troubleshooters with the nasty nickname accomplish the letter of their assignment but leave everyone around them dead by contrived accident" as the story had left me concerned it might be. And, if nothing else, I'm sort of interested in seeing a "professional" translation to the lyrics of the opening theme; something about the translation in the fansubs has long seemed a little sketchy to me.
Therefore, when the constant cryptic promises that one of the company's potential licenses had been worked out after much negotiation at last turned into a countdown to an official announcement, I was interested but unsure how taken I'd be with how it would all turn out in a few days even as I saw the posts of speculation pile up about the clues provided beforehand to build up the buzz. The clues did seem complicated, but one person happened to notice one point of extreme obscurity about the way they were being given and speculate that it might be a date. When the anime that had premiered around then was looked up, one of those titles was the "Dirty Pair" television series. Some years ago, ADV had managed to license the OVAs, movies, and movie-like OVAS from that franchise (and I managed to pick up those releases rather later), but the apparent prize of the television series eluded them. Having to admit that I also managed not that long ago to see "fansubs" of that series from the 1980s, I can add my private reaction was "wouldn't that be something!"... but, of course, to build an airy castle on what seems one fragment of considerable speculation then seems very much like setting yourself up for disappointment. I kept supposing it would be "another" quiet, low-key, perhaps even "slow-paced" series that lots of people on the message board would be pleased to see but which would leave me wondering if I really wanted to see it. (I suppose I've found the two "quiet, low-key, perhaps even 'slow-paced' series" from them that I have managed to watch interesting, though.)
Then, after getting back from work yesterday, the day the guessing was supposed to end, I happened to think right before heading off to the message board that I ought to look up what the title was. The first words I saw were "Dirty Pair"... and that, as I'd thought, was something. This, at least, is going to be one release I'm not going to drift into getting just to reach the free shipping threshold; I can even imagine ordering it and paying shipping on it. I suppose that after everything, Dirty Pair was a series that, on first seeing it myself, I understood just why the North American anime fans of the 1980s had been so enthusiastic about it in those trailblazing days; it might not be "profound," but it does seem a lively, quite manageable step up from the appeal but also the patterns of "animated action series" from back then. (This doesn't seem "automatic" for me, too: beyond never not quite liking constant criticism of recent anime to hold up older works, when I saw Zeta Gundam, a series of comparable vintage to Dirty Pair, my ambiguous reactions to it left speculating on why it turned into an unassailable icon a lot more abstract and academic.) At the same time, I'm quite aware that I at least became aware of the series years before I managed to see most it through noticing much enthusiastic promotion of a magnum opus of "fanfics" crossing over everything that, at the beginning of it all, had started off as "the Dirty Pair run into the college students writing the story." Unfortunately, that colliding with my reading lots of MSTings of "self-insertion" stories where other characters with what seem very close connections to their authors wind up romantically entangled with female fictional characters amid lots of other self-indulgence might have left me less willing to be as caught up in the story as so many others were, and I wound up writing a MSTing of the story's very first instalment and collaborating on a group MSTing of the second... When I did manage to see the series itself, I admit to being pleased it didn't seem so much "the two troubleshooters with the nasty nickname accomplish the letter of their assignment but leave everyone around them dead by contrived accident" as the story had left me concerned it might be. And, if nothing else, I'm sort of interested in seeing a "professional" translation to the lyrics of the opening theme; something about the translation in the fansubs has long seemed a little sketchy to me.