Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1984
Jan. 22nd, 2023 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen considering how “watching one episode from one anime series to stand in for a whole year’s production” might only amount to puffery, I do get to thinking back to a weblog set up a decade ago, with each “golden anniversary” post from a different person. While the posts included much more summarizing than I’m managing here, I suppose I did keep remembering how the one for 1984 proclaimed it was going to focus on Fist of the North Star. Not having begun that post-apocalyptic martial arts epic yet (with the impression that brief summary isn’t doing it justice at least so far as someone who’d make it their sole choice for a year might react) and having already had a first taste alone of several shows in these past three weeks, I was resolved to just revisit a different series I’ve already seen. Then, as it turned out, I glanced back at the old post again and saw it did rather briefly acknowledge the existence of Giant Gorg and a few other series from the year.
The first episode of Giant Gorg doesn’t get to the point of introducing the eponymous giant robot of the series. I was therefore inclined to consider it featuring a grade school Japanese boy as its protagonist, contemplating where impressions that “a protagonist’s age sets just what the actual audience should be” might have come from. That this youth Yuu Tagami flies to New York City then got me considering the presentation of that city as “a graffiti-grimed cesspool” and where impressions like that would have come from, along with the dangers of pointing out the mote in a neighbour’s eye while ignoring potential logs in my own when it comes to “mental impressions of a particular foreign land and the unbalanced sources that formed them.” The character design work and animation was impressive but did have me reminding myself Yoshikazu Yasuhiko had also directed the series rather than just provided those character designs as in Gundam, and I just happened to dwell on Shuichi Ikeda, the voice of Gundam’s antihero Char Aznable, providing the voice of an incipient antihero here. With all of that tucked into my mind there was some further amusement in the story just happening to fall on Halloween to provide the chance to try and escape disguised and allow for further “things don’t seem quite like ‘Halloween’ as people over here would know it even then.” There was also a cliffhanger with a memorable English-language message on screen, although for the moment I don’t seem nudged to delve further into this series and confront further old memories of it.
The first episode of Giant Gorg doesn’t get to the point of introducing the eponymous giant robot of the series. I was therefore inclined to consider it featuring a grade school Japanese boy as its protagonist, contemplating where impressions that “a protagonist’s age sets just what the actual audience should be” might have come from. That this youth Yuu Tagami flies to New York City then got me considering the presentation of that city as “a graffiti-grimed cesspool” and where impressions like that would have come from, along with the dangers of pointing out the mote in a neighbour’s eye while ignoring potential logs in my own when it comes to “mental impressions of a particular foreign land and the unbalanced sources that formed them.” The character design work and animation was impressive but did have me reminding myself Yoshikazu Yasuhiko had also directed the series rather than just provided those character designs as in Gundam, and I just happened to dwell on Shuichi Ikeda, the voice of Gundam’s antihero Char Aznable, providing the voice of an incipient antihero here. With all of that tucked into my mind there was some further amusement in the story just happening to fall on Halloween to provide the chance to try and escape disguised and allow for further “things don’t seem quite like ‘Halloween’ as people over here would know it even then.” There was also a cliffhanger with a memorable English-language message on screen, although for the moment I don’t seem nudged to delve further into this series and confront further old memories of it.