Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1996
Feb. 3rd, 2023 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter watching the first episode of an anime series probably not the most overwhelming and impressive of its year (although to be fair the TV animation of Slayers followed two OVAs and could have suffered just by comparison, and Naomi Miyata’s character designs for it just might set one definition for the way “1990s anime” looks) in part to not go back to the series I sampled in 2010, I’ve moved on to another series I chose to represent its year that first time around. All in all, though, I think I might have been a bit more interested in going back to The Vision of Escaflowne.
My university’s anime club had started mixing “runs of TV series” in among OVAs and the occasional movie while I was going to it, but Escaflowne was the first show I remember them showing every episode of over two terms (even if people on co-op might not have been on campus for both of them). I also remember its “fantasy mecha adventure” being popular, regardless of whether we all fell into the stereotype of “not as interested in ‘romance’” back then. Not that long after I had a steady job and could afford to buy my own anime I got a DVD set of the series, and when a Kickstarter was announced by Funimation many years later to pay for a new dub I paid into it just for the sake of getting Blu-Rays. There was some sort of mix-up getting the set delivered, though, and I wound up with “the standard box” with cover art distinct from the “bonus original dub on DVD” case I did manage to receive, a bit more caution about paying into Kickstarters, and the Blu-Rays packed away for quite some time.
Back in 2010 I’d watched the first two episodes of the series because the second episode had got to the point of bringing its teen heroine Hitomi to its fantasy world and putting its own take on mecha into action. Thinking about writing this post, I decided just to stick with the first episode this time, but it did have high school romance, just a bit of “sports,” a psychic flashforward to mecha action, and an inversion of “an ordinary person is precipitated into a fantasy world” to get some more conventional fantasy action under way. All in all things did look a bit more “refined” than Slayers, although Nobuteru Yuki’s character designs were memorable in their own way with their pointed noses and the occasional exaggerated facial expression early on. I suppose it’s one more series I wouldn’t mind getting back to in full for all of the possibilities already lined up ahead of it.
My university’s anime club had started mixing “runs of TV series” in among OVAs and the occasional movie while I was going to it, but Escaflowne was the first show I remember them showing every episode of over two terms (even if people on co-op might not have been on campus for both of them). I also remember its “fantasy mecha adventure” being popular, regardless of whether we all fell into the stereotype of “not as interested in ‘romance’” back then. Not that long after I had a steady job and could afford to buy my own anime I got a DVD set of the series, and when a Kickstarter was announced by Funimation many years later to pay for a new dub I paid into it just for the sake of getting Blu-Rays. There was some sort of mix-up getting the set delivered, though, and I wound up with “the standard box” with cover art distinct from the “bonus original dub on DVD” case I did manage to receive, a bit more caution about paying into Kickstarters, and the Blu-Rays packed away for quite some time.
Back in 2010 I’d watched the first two episodes of the series because the second episode had got to the point of bringing its teen heroine Hitomi to its fantasy world and putting its own take on mecha into action. Thinking about writing this post, I decided just to stick with the first episode this time, but it did have high school romance, just a bit of “sports,” a psychic flashforward to mecha action, and an inversion of “an ordinary person is precipitated into a fantasy world” to get some more conventional fantasy action under way. All in all things did look a bit more “refined” than Slayers, although Nobuteru Yuki’s character designs were memorable in their own way with their pointed noses and the occasional exaggerated facial expression early on. I suppose it’s one more series I wouldn’t mind getting back to in full for all of the possibilities already lined up ahead of it.