Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1971
Jan. 9th, 2023 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter a certain number of admissions to watching “fansubs,” while it might not act as absolution I was able to put my Blu-Ray player to use at last with the new release of Lupin the Third Part I from Discotek. Lengthy antique anime series would seem to be tricky to make a profit on over here, of course. Given the first Lupin series leads into a long-running franchise, its relative brevity at twenty-three episodes might not be all that significant in its having been licensed; nor can I make too much of a connection between that brevity and the series direction shifting from Masaaki Osumi to Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. After being tempted to suppose the last few series I’ve watched were “beginning to shift towards different audiences,” though, it’s then tempting to keep pondering about this series having tried to go too far too fast.
I decided to take another chance and watch not just the first but also the last episode of this particular series before getting around to typing up some thoughts. Having watched it before on DVD eases my mind there. The first episode didn’t involve a lot of “super-thievery”; I was more inclined to think of its auto racing, infiltrations, and explosions as a stronger dose of “James Bond chic.” Skipping ahead to the last episode, which did involve a major heist and attempts at counter-plotting, meant going from a long-haired Fujiko Mine to a short-haired Fujiko, if not quite as “wholesomely dressed” as I’d supposed her to have got. In any case I hadn’t remembered much of the last episode, which did indeed have a certain sense of farewell to it. I would have been just as content if it had just been “an example of the protean nature of Lupin,” though; for all of the different series and instalments that follow in the franchise, I plan to keep delving on to different titles.
I decided to take another chance and watch not just the first but also the last episode of this particular series before getting around to typing up some thoughts. Having watched it before on DVD eases my mind there. The first episode didn’t involve a lot of “super-thievery”; I was more inclined to think of its auto racing, infiltrations, and explosions as a stronger dose of “James Bond chic.” Skipping ahead to the last episode, which did involve a major heist and attempts at counter-plotting, meant going from a long-haired Fujiko Mine to a short-haired Fujiko, if not quite as “wholesomely dressed” as I’d supposed her to have got. In any case I hadn’t remembered much of the last episode, which did indeed have a certain sense of farewell to it. I would have been just as content if it had just been “an example of the protean nature of Lupin,” though; for all of the different series and instalments that follow in the franchise, I plan to keep delving on to different titles.