A Curious Synchronicity
Jan. 9th, 2024 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerChecking Satellite News a few days ago, I noticed an item that the latest release from Rifftrax involved an animated Little Mermaid movie; not the animated Little Mermaid movie, of course, but an older film acknowledged as having been animated in Japan. I thought a bit of how I’d dared myself to chance Rifftrax at last when they’d taken on something that was part live-action Japanese special effects, part Japanese animation, but also a bit of how I hadn’t gone on from there to see if any of their other feature-length “riffs” also refrained from what I’d react to as “cheap shots at specific familiar targets” (and others might react to me with “good grief, he’s still dwelling on that.”)
I was, in any case, thinking ahead to a “Discotek Day” streaming presentation where the company’s personalities announce more anime they plan to release. I enjoy the presentations; they can get me buying titles again on the promise of high definition improvements or on sheer whim at the real risk of winding up with marginal stuff, whether softened by “it’s from the twentieth century” or not. In any case, I was interested in the opening announcement of Urusei Yatsura OVAs to round out “the 1980s anime” (even as I wondered just a little bit about how much Lum’s character had been revised since the very first TV episodes even with all the warnings out there about “2D complexes”), was curious about a giant robot series for the specific reason that, as the presenters mentioned, it wasn’t as well-known as some, and took that much more interest in the announcement of Albegas. I’d been one of the kids in the mid-1980s who’d just happened to see (in my case on the toy shelf of a hardware-and-farm-supply Co-Op in my home town) robot toys said to combine into a third Voltron. Many years later, two episodes of the anime I’d learned had provided the toys but never been dubbed had been made available on YouTube with official subtitles, and I’d at least noticed speculation that limited release meant the series might be licensed.
After that, the presentation showed a long clip from a live-action Japanese special effects series, only for this to shut down the presentation because of automated copyright monitoring. Instead of waiting for the stream to come back, aware of how early I’m getting up for work these days I told myself Albegas was sufficient for me to leave off on and turned in. When I checked Anime News Network the next morning, the remaining announcements of the presentation included a title “everyone” was supposed to be interested in, the original Berserk anime (although there I thought more of how I’d never quite watched its dark fantasy action at my university’s anime club until I agreed to sit in on the concluding episodes to describe them to someone else who couldn’t be there for that part of the show; after the that much darker and more fantastic closing bloodbath I’d been ready to suppose the episodes of Cardcaptor Sakura scheduled afterwards had been deliberate counterprogramming). I took more interest in an announcement of the second Nanoha magical girl anime (for an audience starting to drift in a more skewed direction), but also took notice of an announcement of a now-familiar Little Mermaid anime movie. For a little while I wondered if this had something to do with Rifftrax’s own announcement, and then I saw that Discotek had licensed the movie for release on DVD years ago and was moving on to Blu-Ray now.
I was, in any case, thinking ahead to a “Discotek Day” streaming presentation where the company’s personalities announce more anime they plan to release. I enjoy the presentations; they can get me buying titles again on the promise of high definition improvements or on sheer whim at the real risk of winding up with marginal stuff, whether softened by “it’s from the twentieth century” or not. In any case, I was interested in the opening announcement of Urusei Yatsura OVAs to round out “the 1980s anime” (even as I wondered just a little bit about how much Lum’s character had been revised since the very first TV episodes even with all the warnings out there about “2D complexes”), was curious about a giant robot series for the specific reason that, as the presenters mentioned, it wasn’t as well-known as some, and took that much more interest in the announcement of Albegas. I’d been one of the kids in the mid-1980s who’d just happened to see (in my case on the toy shelf of a hardware-and-farm-supply Co-Op in my home town) robot toys said to combine into a third Voltron. Many years later, two episodes of the anime I’d learned had provided the toys but never been dubbed had been made available on YouTube with official subtitles, and I’d at least noticed speculation that limited release meant the series might be licensed.
After that, the presentation showed a long clip from a live-action Japanese special effects series, only for this to shut down the presentation because of automated copyright monitoring. Instead of waiting for the stream to come back, aware of how early I’m getting up for work these days I told myself Albegas was sufficient for me to leave off on and turned in. When I checked Anime News Network the next morning, the remaining announcements of the presentation included a title “everyone” was supposed to be interested in, the original Berserk anime (although there I thought more of how I’d never quite watched its dark fantasy action at my university’s anime club until I agreed to sit in on the concluding episodes to describe them to someone else who couldn’t be there for that part of the show; after the that much darker and more fantastic closing bloodbath I’d been ready to suppose the episodes of Cardcaptor Sakura scheduled afterwards had been deliberate counterprogramming). I took more interest in an announcement of the second Nanoha magical girl anime (for an audience starting to drift in a more skewed direction), but also took notice of an announcement of a now-familiar Little Mermaid anime movie. For a little while I wondered if this had something to do with Rifftrax’s own announcement, and then I saw that Discotek had licensed the movie for release on DVD years ago and was moving on to Blu-Ray now.