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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1987
Although it’s been a little while since I took a chance on watching two episodes of anime from one year in one evening and then pushed myself to type out some thoughts about them, the temptation to do that has come up again. This time it’s not so much a matter of “wanting to finish one two-part story” or “trying to weigh two different things against each other” as just “not quite wanting to distinguish between what seems two just about as good choices.” I did also wonder if both Kimagure Orange Road and City Hunter have stuck in my mind because both of their first closing themes just plain seem catchy to me.
It’s been rather longer since I got around to Kimagure Orange Road than when I started watching City Hunter at last. For all that the first is a “teenage romantic comedy that just happens to be complicated by the main character and his family having psychic powers” and the second makes a certain show of being set among crime perhaps over the top enough to seem unthreatening, I have had a sense of both of them having a sunny, everything’s-swell feeling, a feeling only a few years away from bursting just like a bubble. Maybe that does embed them in a specific time that much more. I do know Kimagure Orange Road was available legitimately over here sooner than City Hunter (becoming one extended TV series in the mix with shorter, slicker OVAs and movies), but I have happened to see the made-in-America Dirty Pair comic from Adam Warren that happens to quote a bit of the English words in City Hunter’s end theme, one more thing to gratify those who were in the know back then, perhaps.
Getting back to Kimagure Orange Road did give me a sense (for the second day a row) of some of the character voices not quite matching what I’d been imagining. As well, while I’d been nodding to myself over the previous impression the personalities of the main characters, copied many times into other anime and worn down in the process, would have wound up more or less some of the overfamiliar and decried “anime character types,” at the very beginning at least Hikaru didn’t seem so much of a lightweight as I’d supposed her to be. As much as I was also supposing English-speaking fans had picked one side in the love triangle of the series and stuck with it, for one moment I was a bit more uncertain (if still wondering whether “things were different over in Japan,” with a thought or two about just what happened when Macross was turned into Robotech: The Macross Saga...)
While City Hunter was more familiar, I still had the sense there was a bit of edge to its first episode that was soon smoothed off one way or another, with several murders and a visit to a cafe with topless waitresses. There was also a bit of business with the City Hunter Ryo Saeba himself firing a bullet through his hand to not have it go through his target in turn and perhaps hit a bystander; that did lead into the comedic flip side of his character bursting forth again, though.
It’s been rather longer since I got around to Kimagure Orange Road than when I started watching City Hunter at last. For all that the first is a “teenage romantic comedy that just happens to be complicated by the main character and his family having psychic powers” and the second makes a certain show of being set among crime perhaps over the top enough to seem unthreatening, I have had a sense of both of them having a sunny, everything’s-swell feeling, a feeling only a few years away from bursting just like a bubble. Maybe that does embed them in a specific time that much more. I do know Kimagure Orange Road was available legitimately over here sooner than City Hunter (becoming one extended TV series in the mix with shorter, slicker OVAs and movies), but I have happened to see the made-in-America Dirty Pair comic from Adam Warren that happens to quote a bit of the English words in City Hunter’s end theme, one more thing to gratify those who were in the know back then, perhaps.
Getting back to Kimagure Orange Road did give me a sense (for the second day a row) of some of the character voices not quite matching what I’d been imagining. As well, while I’d been nodding to myself over the previous impression the personalities of the main characters, copied many times into other anime and worn down in the process, would have wound up more or less some of the overfamiliar and decried “anime character types,” at the very beginning at least Hikaru didn’t seem so much of a lightweight as I’d supposed her to be. As much as I was also supposing English-speaking fans had picked one side in the love triangle of the series and stuck with it, for one moment I was a bit more uncertain (if still wondering whether “things were different over in Japan,” with a thought or two about just what happened when Macross was turned into Robotech: The Macross Saga...)
While City Hunter was more familiar, I still had the sense there was a bit of edge to its first episode that was soon smoothed off one way or another, with several murders and a visit to a cafe with topless waitresses. There was also a bit of business with the City Hunter Ryo Saeba himself firing a bullet through his hand to not have it go through his target in turn and perhaps hit a bystander; that did lead into the comedic flip side of his character bursting forth again, though.