Wrapping up a Return
Dec. 1st, 2020 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerReturning to the opening episodes of the anime OVAs listed on a preserved poster for the first club show I attended at university had been enjoyable in general, in a way that seemed a bit broader than sheer nostalgia. With the rest of those series now opened up (even if not all of them had been continued that first term going by later posters), I went ahead and worked my way through them over the following months. Things stayed a bit more complicated than “resurfacing memories,” but perhaps those complications got a bit mixed too by the end.
Cyber City Oedo 808 had been the answer to a trivia question I’m not expecting to be asked. I suppose I’d just thought “coming in for the enigmatic final minutes of its first episode to start off my own first show didn’t hurt me, anyway.” The OVA did show up again on posters from a later term, but I skipped it altogether then, perhaps just counter-programming dinner against the club shows like I always did. (It did get referenced in “The Misery Senshi Neo-Zero Double Blitzkrieg Debacle,” but for no clear reason other than Peter Guerin seemed to have seen it.) Just this summer, though, I did notice the series mentioned in a presentation on “anime of 1990” at an online convention, which might have helped me see the absurd side of its very serious cyberpunk investigations (at one point, one of the convicted criminals turned cyberpoliceman trying to reduce his sentence and keep the explosive collar locked around his neck from detonating faces cyborg sabretooth tigers firing zap blasts from their mouths...)
Phantom Quest Corp had been the first full episode I’d seen; I’d enjoyed it at the time, and I enjoyed it again now. I suppose it might have come the closest to “the lighter stuff” I watch a good bit of these days, and I did note its later episodes didn’t dwell so much on the ostensible joke of its lead hunter of the supernatural Ayaka Kisaragi being a bit older than an anime teenager. The OVAs did get me thinking further back to The Real Ghostbusters, but there I did hav to dwell a bit on how, when I mentioned here having returned to a good swathe of that series on Netflix not that long ago, I couldn’t quite trust myself to articulate uneasiness about the franchise having got caught up in online performative offensiveness. Ayaka might be a bit older than a lot of anime characters, but she still dresses revealingly every so often; the double standard with male characters who don’t have to show off the same way can come to mind...
Macross Plus was the title I’d recognized to start with, and one I’ve returned to the most in the years that have followed (its DVDs were some of the first I bought, even if this was due in part to Manga Entertainment having had more of a presence in “brick and mortar” stores up here back then.) Revisiting it that often, though, might have seeded ambiguity about the assorted immaturities of its main characters. Before then, despite recalling club warnings at the cliffhanger end of the OVA’s third episode about the merely impending legitimate availability of the conclusion over here, the fourth episode had been screened at the next show (and, of course, quite likely through unofficial methods), leaving me able to note a perhaps-complaint, perhaps-demand on the Robotech Mailing List there “should” have been still frames over the end credits showing the court martial of one of the test pilot characters. I’d been a bit disdainful of that comment at the time, thinking many “it should have happened this way” lamentations more hurtful than helpful, but in the years since I’ve thought it handy the artificial intelligence singer in the series had run amok for just a bit more of a reason than “that’s what happens.”
Spacing out the episodes returned to this year, I just happened to watch one episode of 3x3 Eyes on Halloween. The assorted monstrosities of the series were a good fit for that, although another part of the general ominousness was drawn-out threats to its secondary female characters. The OVAs also didn’t so much conclude as instruct you to seek out its original source material; finding older manga can be its own challenge.
While the anime club returned to El-Hazard in later terms as more episodes became available, I’m not quite sure we reached its conclusion; I wound up buying a DVD set of its OVAs. Returning to the first of them now had been enjoyable as I compared it favourably to more recent fantasy anime I haven’t just heard about and passed by. However, over more episodes to watch than anything else I was returning to, the unfortunate feeling crept up on me something wasn’t appealing to me as much as it once had. Trying to articulate a reason for that isn’t easy, but I do wonder if it had something to do with the fantasy world feeling a bit empty around its high-place protagonists and three different adversary factions. That had me wondering in turn about old memories of a TV series in the franchise I understand to have “occupied a different continuity,” even with impressions the eventual collective opinion was of diminishing returns. The last episode of the OVA did appeal a bit more to me in the end, anyway.
Cyber City Oedo 808 had been the answer to a trivia question I’m not expecting to be asked. I suppose I’d just thought “coming in for the enigmatic final minutes of its first episode to start off my own first show didn’t hurt me, anyway.” The OVA did show up again on posters from a later term, but I skipped it altogether then, perhaps just counter-programming dinner against the club shows like I always did. (It did get referenced in “The Misery Senshi Neo-Zero Double Blitzkrieg Debacle,” but for no clear reason other than Peter Guerin seemed to have seen it.) Just this summer, though, I did notice the series mentioned in a presentation on “anime of 1990” at an online convention, which might have helped me see the absurd side of its very serious cyberpunk investigations (at one point, one of the convicted criminals turned cyberpoliceman trying to reduce his sentence and keep the explosive collar locked around his neck from detonating faces cyborg sabretooth tigers firing zap blasts from their mouths...)
Phantom Quest Corp had been the first full episode I’d seen; I’d enjoyed it at the time, and I enjoyed it again now. I suppose it might have come the closest to “the lighter stuff” I watch a good bit of these days, and I did note its later episodes didn’t dwell so much on the ostensible joke of its lead hunter of the supernatural Ayaka Kisaragi being a bit older than an anime teenager. The OVAs did get me thinking further back to The Real Ghostbusters, but there I did hav to dwell a bit on how, when I mentioned here having returned to a good swathe of that series on Netflix not that long ago, I couldn’t quite trust myself to articulate uneasiness about the franchise having got caught up in online performative offensiveness. Ayaka might be a bit older than a lot of anime characters, but she still dresses revealingly every so often; the double standard with male characters who don’t have to show off the same way can come to mind...
Macross Plus was the title I’d recognized to start with, and one I’ve returned to the most in the years that have followed (its DVDs were some of the first I bought, even if this was due in part to Manga Entertainment having had more of a presence in “brick and mortar” stores up here back then.) Revisiting it that often, though, might have seeded ambiguity about the assorted immaturities of its main characters. Before then, despite recalling club warnings at the cliffhanger end of the OVA’s third episode about the merely impending legitimate availability of the conclusion over here, the fourth episode had been screened at the next show (and, of course, quite likely through unofficial methods), leaving me able to note a perhaps-complaint, perhaps-demand on the Robotech Mailing List there “should” have been still frames over the end credits showing the court martial of one of the test pilot characters. I’d been a bit disdainful of that comment at the time, thinking many “it should have happened this way” lamentations more hurtful than helpful, but in the years since I’ve thought it handy the artificial intelligence singer in the series had run amok for just a bit more of a reason than “that’s what happens.”
Spacing out the episodes returned to this year, I just happened to watch one episode of 3x3 Eyes on Halloween. The assorted monstrosities of the series were a good fit for that, although another part of the general ominousness was drawn-out threats to its secondary female characters. The OVAs also didn’t so much conclude as instruct you to seek out its original source material; finding older manga can be its own challenge.
While the anime club returned to El-Hazard in later terms as more episodes became available, I’m not quite sure we reached its conclusion; I wound up buying a DVD set of its OVAs. Returning to the first of them now had been enjoyable as I compared it favourably to more recent fantasy anime I haven’t just heard about and passed by. However, over more episodes to watch than anything else I was returning to, the unfortunate feeling crept up on me something wasn’t appealing to me as much as it once had. Trying to articulate a reason for that isn’t easy, but I do wonder if it had something to do with the fantasy world feeling a bit empty around its high-place protagonists and three different adversary factions. That had me wondering in turn about old memories of a TV series in the franchise I understand to have “occupied a different continuity,” even with impressions the eventual collective opinion was of diminishing returns. The last episode of the OVA did appeal a bit more to me in the end, anyway.