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krpalmerBy just about any measure I’ve been watching anime for a long time. Weighing explanations for this (that don’t cast me in too bad a light, anyway), I’ve pondered whether I avoided “aging out of a teenaged diversion on realising I’d grown older than the typical ‘anime character’” through not having seen any of it in high school (save for a few videotaped relics of the mid-1980s “giant robot boom” I was then only just sorting out had come from Japan and been followed there by much more animation). On arriving at university, though, I noticed posters for an anime club, and all of a sudden one long showing a month was available for the reasonable price of a membership. It was significant enough I’ve been making an indulgent deal of “five-year marks” since (save for that first “five years later,” when I was getting some working experience too far from university to drop back in on friends on the weekends of showings but supposing my salary too low to start building a personal collection) and working out various “personal showings.” Now, after returning to memorable titles from the club years and after, sorting through my growing collection by years of production and picking “one sample episode a year” (my collection has stretched on either side since then), and settling on “one long series per decade,” I contemplated a preserved poster from the club’s old web site for the first show I attended and realised I could return to what had been shown then. It would be just a bit more than “seeing what I’d seen then,” too.
Penny-pinching to the point of preferring my residence’s cafeteria meal plan over the pizza and pop promised at the show, I’d decided to skip the first episode shown for dinner; however, I still made it to one of the biggest lecture halls on campus to walk in on the last minutes of Cyber City Oedo 808. It was enigmatically violent and gruesome at the time; now, though, I was able to see the cyberpunk setup, with three convicted criminals trying to work off their centuries-long sentences by hunting down criminals not caught yet. As for the first full episode I saw then, Phantom Quest Corp was rather lighter and entertaining regardless of how obscure it might now be, with an attractive female hunter of the supernatural (although it’s an ostensible joke she’s older than an “anime teenager”) with a lipstick that turns into a lightsabre, trying to make more in fees than she has to pay out for expenses and damages. Back then the club had shown the dubbed version (which Pioneer LDC had made English-language opening and end songs for); now, I have to admit to watching the subtitled Japanese-language version, still clinging after all these years to the distinction “I haven’t been hectored to the point of ‘disliking dubs’; I just want to keep from getting there by accident.” That might, anyway, have helped me through the “anime bust” and not everything getting dubbed afterwards.
With that, it was on to the main draw of the show for me. A crucial moment in “sorting out anime” had been spotting “Macross II: The Role-Playing Game” previewed in a comic book shop catalogue; having (however oddly) collected a number of Robotech RPG volumes not to try and play them (I would have needed closer friends for that) but just to suppose I knew what the machinery looked like, I sought out the book and discovered it pointed to new animation from Japan (without being quite clear on the story you were supposed to be role-playing). With the usual quick dismissals of that part of the franchise ever since, though, it might have been for the best I never happened on the tapes then. However, when I saw Macross Plus mentioned in a magazine from a supermarket newsstand browsed through a while later, that piqued my interest again, and seeing the club had it scheduled for my first show was my strongest pull in. The OVA is the one part of that first term’s shows I’ve gone back back to several times in the years since; however, I’ve come to think that while its characters are a bit older than the “average anime character,” old enough to start off with enigmatic problems in their past, the OVA’s Top Gun undertones might make them a bit less appealing to me than the music and animation...
In charge of my own scheduling now, I left the remaining titles from the first show for the next day, and picked up again with 3x3 Eyes. As grainy as the archived poster is, that title provided the artwork on it. The show itself is a little tricky to describe, at least as it starts off. A strange, childish girl named Pai emerging from the wastes of China seeks out the son of the deceased professor she’d been journeying with; the son turns out to be working as a hostess at a drag bar (and hurries to explain it’s just to make ends meet). After a monster packed into her staff happens to escape and kills him, a third eye opens in Pai’s forehead as her voice gets harder and more mature, and she brings him back to a cursed-to-immortality life, gruesome demonstrations of which happening as they go looking for a statue said to be able to make her human. After that, El Hazard was a bit lighter. It’s an older example of “someone stumbles out of contemporary Japan into a fantasy world” (if not the oldest to be found), but refreshingly light on sheer power fantasy (the teacher in the little scattered group of accidental displaced persons develops superhuman strength, but only when he’s sober, a distinctly unpleasant thing for him) and with enough Arabian Nights impressions to its lush fantasy world to seem distinctive. The character designs had an “of their time” familiarity, but I did wonder a bit about the artwork taking on the clean and bright yet somehow also a little drab feeling I can associate with anime from just past the millennium. That might have added to a few thoughts about the title having had some significance in its day but fading since then; not that long after, though, I did see a reminder it had recently been “license rescued” by Right Stuf’s production arm.
That was all of the titles I could remember having seen at the time, but on taking another look at the poster I’d been intrigued by seeing Castle of Cagliostro in its list of promised titles. The list might have come up against the constraints of show time (I did notice El Hazard’s first episode also listed on the “second show of the term” poster I have saved), or I might have both arrived late and left early. In any case, an excuse to watch the Lupin the Third adventure again seemed welcome enough. This time, I decided to try the “1980 subtitles” Discotek had found, transcribed, and included on their Blu-Ray as an option. With oddly large text everything was kind of terse, but I was able to follow the story without too many thoughts of “hilarious badness” (save, perhaps, for the director being credited as “Shun Miyazaki” and Inspector Zenigata being called “Ed Cott.”)
Even without the possibility of Castle of Cagliostro competing with Macross Plus for a “first off title” (to say nothing of missing the promise of “more Ranma,” perhaps beginning a personal habit of missing out on to winding up skipping certain “really big titles” from Dragon Ball Z to Inuyasha to Naruto and beyond), the show did obviously work well enough to get me coming back for the next one, and so on from there. I’m certain other people have different starting-out experiences of comparable impact; it would be nicer yet if they turn out as able to return to them with interest.
Penny-pinching to the point of preferring my residence’s cafeteria meal plan over the pizza and pop promised at the show, I’d decided to skip the first episode shown for dinner; however, I still made it to one of the biggest lecture halls on campus to walk in on the last minutes of Cyber City Oedo 808. It was enigmatically violent and gruesome at the time; now, though, I was able to see the cyberpunk setup, with three convicted criminals trying to work off their centuries-long sentences by hunting down criminals not caught yet. As for the first full episode I saw then, Phantom Quest Corp was rather lighter and entertaining regardless of how obscure it might now be, with an attractive female hunter of the supernatural (although it’s an ostensible joke she’s older than an “anime teenager”) with a lipstick that turns into a lightsabre, trying to make more in fees than she has to pay out for expenses and damages. Back then the club had shown the dubbed version (which Pioneer LDC had made English-language opening and end songs for); now, I have to admit to watching the subtitled Japanese-language version, still clinging after all these years to the distinction “I haven’t been hectored to the point of ‘disliking dubs’; I just want to keep from getting there by accident.” That might, anyway, have helped me through the “anime bust” and not everything getting dubbed afterwards.
With that, it was on to the main draw of the show for me. A crucial moment in “sorting out anime” had been spotting “Macross II: The Role-Playing Game” previewed in a comic book shop catalogue; having (however oddly) collected a number of Robotech RPG volumes not to try and play them (I would have needed closer friends for that) but just to suppose I knew what the machinery looked like, I sought out the book and discovered it pointed to new animation from Japan (without being quite clear on the story you were supposed to be role-playing). With the usual quick dismissals of that part of the franchise ever since, though, it might have been for the best I never happened on the tapes then. However, when I saw Macross Plus mentioned in a magazine from a supermarket newsstand browsed through a while later, that piqued my interest again, and seeing the club had it scheduled for my first show was my strongest pull in. The OVA is the one part of that first term’s shows I’ve gone back back to several times in the years since; however, I’ve come to think that while its characters are a bit older than the “average anime character,” old enough to start off with enigmatic problems in their past, the OVA’s Top Gun undertones might make them a bit less appealing to me than the music and animation...
In charge of my own scheduling now, I left the remaining titles from the first show for the next day, and picked up again with 3x3 Eyes. As grainy as the archived poster is, that title provided the artwork on it. The show itself is a little tricky to describe, at least as it starts off. A strange, childish girl named Pai emerging from the wastes of China seeks out the son of the deceased professor she’d been journeying with; the son turns out to be working as a hostess at a drag bar (and hurries to explain it’s just to make ends meet). After a monster packed into her staff happens to escape and kills him, a third eye opens in Pai’s forehead as her voice gets harder and more mature, and she brings him back to a cursed-to-immortality life, gruesome demonstrations of which happening as they go looking for a statue said to be able to make her human. After that, El Hazard was a bit lighter. It’s an older example of “someone stumbles out of contemporary Japan into a fantasy world” (if not the oldest to be found), but refreshingly light on sheer power fantasy (the teacher in the little scattered group of accidental displaced persons develops superhuman strength, but only when he’s sober, a distinctly unpleasant thing for him) and with enough Arabian Nights impressions to its lush fantasy world to seem distinctive. The character designs had an “of their time” familiarity, but I did wonder a bit about the artwork taking on the clean and bright yet somehow also a little drab feeling I can associate with anime from just past the millennium. That might have added to a few thoughts about the title having had some significance in its day but fading since then; not that long after, though, I did see a reminder it had recently been “license rescued” by Right Stuf’s production arm.
That was all of the titles I could remember having seen at the time, but on taking another look at the poster I’d been intrigued by seeing Castle of Cagliostro in its list of promised titles. The list might have come up against the constraints of show time (I did notice El Hazard’s first episode also listed on the “second show of the term” poster I have saved), or I might have both arrived late and left early. In any case, an excuse to watch the Lupin the Third adventure again seemed welcome enough. This time, I decided to try the “1980 subtitles” Discotek had found, transcribed, and included on their Blu-Ray as an option. With oddly large text everything was kind of terse, but I was able to follow the story without too many thoughts of “hilarious badness” (save, perhaps, for the director being credited as “Shun Miyazaki” and Inspector Zenigata being called “Ed Cott.”)
Even without the possibility of Castle of Cagliostro competing with Macross Plus for a “first off title” (to say nothing of missing the promise of “more Ranma,” perhaps beginning a personal habit of missing out on to winding up skipping certain “really big titles” from Dragon Ball Z to Inuyasha to Naruto and beyond), the show did obviously work well enough to get me coming back for the next one, and so on from there. I’m certain other people have different starting-out experiences of comparable impact; it would be nicer yet if they turn out as able to return to them with interest.