Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1993
Jan. 31st, 2023 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt wasn’t just to prove “there are still some differences between the thirtieth anniversary of Mighty Atom appearing on TV and today” that I opened up an OVA I’d had waiting for quite some time. Years before getting those DVDs in a last-chance sale, indeed around the time of that “thirtieth anniversary” just mentioned, I was picking up promotional brochures from Dark Horse Comics from my home town comics shop and noticed them referring to manga. I suppose I might even have taken slight notice of a title named Oh My Goddess! in them; it would have been after their first issue, though, so I never really looked into it. (Before leaving high school I did find two “introductory issues” of different manga series in the comics shop’s dollar bin, but they happened to be of “fanservice titles,” terrifying me to the point of handing them on to someone else at high school who’d occasionally commented about anime videotapes at a video store in the next town over even though I never quite followed up on that. My more comfortable experience with manga back then amounted to finding an old HyperCard stack on a shareware CD-ROM that had presented a scanned-in issue of Appleseed...)
At university I did pick up on a few more references to the OVA adaptations of the Oh My Goddess! manga, and it also so happened that I ran into a MSTing of a Robotech fanfic I’d just happened to have tried to make sense of before (which made the MSTing’s humour that much more welcome, and indeed got me solidly interested in them in general) that included a “guest character” in the form of the goddess Belldandy. Before university was over I’d managed to find and buy a Dark Horse paperback collection offering an introduction to the series; I’d also rented a single episode of the OVA, but not the first (the “third goddess” Skuld, enthused about by engineering students, hadn’t shown up in that collection). Rather later (and having sorted out that original Dark Horse collection had skipped early chapters to get to the point of introducing the goddess Urd and spicing things up) I bought more manga collections as release formats changed, even if I kept trailing off at different points partway through the series.
Remembering how the OVA had been tied up with things even so, I did manage to buy AnimEigo’s DVD collection of them on an announcement it was going out of print. Watching the first episode of it at last, I did recall comments seen “it was an OVA because that was the only way to pay for animating hairdos so elaborate” (although there was a TV series about a decade later). That polish was relatively charming (even on DVD in an age of some OVAs getting scanned off their original film onto Blu-Rays), but I have to admit to being conscious of the “too good to be true” wish fulfilment boiling off the story for all that it was a decently contained adaptation of the manga’s beginning (and would have covered something that very first paperback collection didn’t). Looked at in a certain way, it’s a very “main, and male, character perspective only” tale. I am inclined to remember Belldandy sometimes showed a little bit of temper in a few early chapters of the manga, even if not over anything like “career changes.” Of course, a five-episode OVA isn’t as much to get through as some of the series I’ve begun this month.
At university I did pick up on a few more references to the OVA adaptations of the Oh My Goddess! manga, and it also so happened that I ran into a MSTing of a Robotech fanfic I’d just happened to have tried to make sense of before (which made the MSTing’s humour that much more welcome, and indeed got me solidly interested in them in general) that included a “guest character” in the form of the goddess Belldandy. Before university was over I’d managed to find and buy a Dark Horse paperback collection offering an introduction to the series; I’d also rented a single episode of the OVA, but not the first (the “third goddess” Skuld, enthused about by engineering students, hadn’t shown up in that collection). Rather later (and having sorted out that original Dark Horse collection had skipped early chapters to get to the point of introducing the goddess Urd and spicing things up) I bought more manga collections as release formats changed, even if I kept trailing off at different points partway through the series.
Remembering how the OVA had been tied up with things even so, I did manage to buy AnimEigo’s DVD collection of them on an announcement it was going out of print. Watching the first episode of it at last, I did recall comments seen “it was an OVA because that was the only way to pay for animating hairdos so elaborate” (although there was a TV series about a decade later). That polish was relatively charming (even on DVD in an age of some OVAs getting scanned off their original film onto Blu-Rays), but I have to admit to being conscious of the “too good to be true” wish fulfilment boiling off the story for all that it was a decently contained adaptation of the manga’s beginning (and would have covered something that very first paperback collection didn’t). Looked at in a certain way, it’s a very “main, and male, character perspective only” tale. I am inclined to remember Belldandy sometimes showed a little bit of temper in a few early chapters of the manga, even if not over anything like “career changes.” Of course, a five-episode OVA isn’t as much to get through as some of the series I’ve begun this month.