Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2000
Feb. 7th, 2023 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I started roughing out a personal list of “anime I certainly wouldn’t mind going back to again, sorted by year,” I did get to thinking the list thinned out every time two digits turned over in the year. When I started sampling series from that list, I had just one title available to look at from 1970, and a certain uncertainty about how I’d react to it. For 1980 and 1990 I went back to the shows I’d sampled back in 2010, although I was able to give reasons for doing that other than “they’re all I’ve got.” As all four digits turned over in the year there were a few titles on my list, but most of them were series I still haven’t started after more than twenty years, and after all the other shows I’ve seen the first episodes of I wasn’t quite willing to take the chance on any of them winding up really impressive. Still, even if I was going to go back to FLCL as well, it offered its own compensations.
I have the impression I managed to see an instalment of this OVA at my university’s anime club in what must have been my last visit there (other than coming back years later to sell some old DVDs at a “swap meet” I’d managed to see a notice of), and yet that impression’s vague enough to bump against “its looney-tunes comedy action made a big impact and left it very popular” and leave me wondering if I’m just plain mistaken through some attempt to stretch out a connection. In any case I’m just a little more certain my DVD box set was bought from a local comics shop a few years later (which, I suppose, is its own sign of a different time). I had wondered about certain comments the DVDs didn’t look good on a high-definition television (for all that when they were new they’d escaped the condemnation of discs made just a few years before them, back when it was very easy to look at online discussions and suppose it was impossible to encode “animation” on a DVD short of doing it in Japan, putting two episodes on one disc, and selling it for a hefty price). Once I’d started watching the first episode, though, it did look more or less acceptable to me. Perhaps that’s just a sign of certain benefits to being undiscerning.
While I do remember a certain amount of the analysis of this OVA series leading to “if you pay attention and think about things a bit you can tell what’s going on and what it means,” at times it was tempting to just let the bizarreness wash over me. At another moment, I just started wondering if I’d seen “mobile phones” in any sample episode before this one, for all that I do recall them beginning to show up in other series from a few years before FLCL. I just might have escaped at the time the thoughts I’d been shaping before about this title leading to “Gunbuster 2,” which led to Gurren Lagann, after which the people who’d worked on them left Gainax for Trigger and the older studio just sort of faded away over several years. As for the lasting popularity of FLCL over here, though, it did get to the point familiar over here of “the rights holders have more of it made, even if they only bother to bring back those who’d applied the surface elements of the original.”
I have the impression I managed to see an instalment of this OVA at my university’s anime club in what must have been my last visit there (other than coming back years later to sell some old DVDs at a “swap meet” I’d managed to see a notice of), and yet that impression’s vague enough to bump against “its looney-tunes comedy action made a big impact and left it very popular” and leave me wondering if I’m just plain mistaken through some attempt to stretch out a connection. In any case I’m just a little more certain my DVD box set was bought from a local comics shop a few years later (which, I suppose, is its own sign of a different time). I had wondered about certain comments the DVDs didn’t look good on a high-definition television (for all that when they were new they’d escaped the condemnation of discs made just a few years before them, back when it was very easy to look at online discussions and suppose it was impossible to encode “animation” on a DVD short of doing it in Japan, putting two episodes on one disc, and selling it for a hefty price). Once I’d started watching the first episode, though, it did look more or less acceptable to me. Perhaps that’s just a sign of certain benefits to being undiscerning.
While I do remember a certain amount of the analysis of this OVA series leading to “if you pay attention and think about things a bit you can tell what’s going on and what it means,” at times it was tempting to just let the bizarreness wash over me. At another moment, I just started wondering if I’d seen “mobile phones” in any sample episode before this one, for all that I do recall them beginning to show up in other series from a few years before FLCL. I just might have escaped at the time the thoughts I’d been shaping before about this title leading to “Gunbuster 2,” which led to Gurren Lagann, after which the people who’d worked on them left Gainax for Trigger and the older studio just sort of faded away over several years. As for the lasting popularity of FLCL over here, though, it did get to the point familiar over here of “the rights holders have more of it made, even if they only bother to bring back those who’d applied the surface elements of the original.”