Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Very often entering a used or remaindered-bookstore results in me leaving having bought something, although sometimes that just feels like fulfilling an obligation. When I saw several copies of Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic marked down not that long ago, however, the “that’s for me!” feeling did seem quite strong, and I picked one up.
( A return at last )

At the beginning of the year, I watched for the first time an animated feature film made in Japan half a century ago. Horus: Prince of the Sun did seem an interesting piece of work and one step along a path leading to today (although I certainly haven't taken in every other step along that way). The supplementary material on-disc, though, in trying to build up just how important the movie had been, mentioned another animated feature film from 1968 with comments I might risk paraphrasing from memory as "Yellow Submarine was a cheery holdover from 1967's doubtless chemically enhanced optimism; Horus was a display of 1968's grittier, violent, protesting mood." At least sometimes a little resistant to feelings of being hard-sold (especially when it seems to include bonus putdowns), I got to thinking about that other movie and how long it had been since my family had taped it off the educational channel's movie show (along the way, I've collected the canonical central albums of the Beatles discography), and before the year was out I'd got around to ordering a Blu-Ray of it. (In the meantime, I'd watched a third movie first opening in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey, over again. Michael Benson's book Space Odyssey had mentioned some people had gone straight from working on Stanley Kubrick's movie to Yellow Submarine, managing to find a more interesting job than tracing and painting black mattes over endless frames of model photography to aid in compositing the special effects.)
( Memory and influence )

It was from someone I don't follow for "Star Wars news" (and, I have to admit, most of whose occasionally offered opinions on the subject I disagree with) that I first saw a report new episodes of The Clone Wars would be made. I sought confirmation from the "Prequel Appreciation Society" site (which I don't check the way I used to now that it doesn't allow comments). It was a surprise to be sure, and yet, as repellant the thought is of trying to put down the possibile genuine excitement of anyone else, I have to admit that for me there's been water under the bridge since a "final batch" of episodes were made available on Netflix and I signed up for that service to watch them.
( Some of the water )

Netflix made fewer new episodes of Voltron Legendary Defender available for the show's "third season" than it had for the first and second groups, but as I'm not really into watching lots of half-hour doses of one single program one after another, to the point of noting some trying to pack gluttonous overtones into the perhaps joking term "binge-watching," the shorter season didn't bother me too much. Once I'd watched my way through those new episodes at a measured once-a-week pace, I wound up feeling a bit impressed by how much seemed to have been put into them.
( Some of those things )

The episodes of "Star Trek: The Animated Series" were engaging enough to watch while exercising on weekend mornings; I'd been thinking a bit, more or less from the start, that they somehow somewhat dodged the sense of "familiarity" and even "set consensus" that can settle over all of the live-action series, along with "if you are convinced Star Trek 'has' to involve its original characters..." They came to an end, though (with an episode I'd read Alan Dean Foster's novelization, considerable expansion upon, and rationalization many years ago), and I did get to wondering how I'd keep myself occupied on my ski machine from then on.

Right then, however, I saw an announcement the people working on the new Voltron Legendary Defender had selected some of the original Voltron episodes to be streamed on Netflix as an adjunct to their own series. That did get my attention, although I was quite ready to remember that when the original Voltron had had its "nostalgia release" on DVD a decade ago, I'd held out for the anime series it had been made from instead. The thought's occasionally come to me, though, that I just might be dismissive of Voltron because of the accident of having had "the other Voltron" stick in my mind a bit more, and just perhaps that "other" science fiction action had been more vulnerable than the space fantasy it seems just about everyone else remembers better to having all that careful "this is a cartoon; nobody ever dies in a cartoon" redubbing stand out. I went ahead and took a chance on "Voltron '84."
( The complications of a single episode )

Several months back, when I was looking to buy a null modem cable to try and hook up my family's old TRS-80 Model 100 to a more modern computer for the first time in over a decade, I needed to fill out the online order to the free shipping threshold. At that point, I happened to think back to how the third series of the computer-animated RWBY had sort of snuck up on me and impressed me, and got around to ordering the Blu-Ray of its first series. A while after that, I saw the Blu-Ray of its second series in a local video store for what seemed a very reasonable price, and bought it as well. It didn't seem that much later that I saw the third series was now available on Blu-Ray as well in the same place. Then, with the impression it wouldn't be much longer until a fourth season began to pick up where things had left off, I got around to watching the show over again.

I'd at least been curious about something "anime-esque" in some way associated with "Red vs. Blue," a comedy series voicing over in-game recordings from usually rather sedate Halo matches. Watching RWBY's first trailers had impressed me, and perhaps I'd even started thinking this might be the very best medicine for those dwelling on quite well rehearsed complaints that anime itself "these days" depended entirely on being tailored to a handful of outright creeps over in Japan. Since those first moments, though, I do have to admit to, by the end of the second series, becoming uneasy about impressions of negative comments overheard and the feeling the series couldn't coast on "having been made on a shoestring" forever. Now, however, with the sense the series had gone somewhere, things seemed to fit together better; I was able to recognise as well that in the waits between each group of short instalments some details had faded so that some things might have missed me altogether. Even the second series seemed more interesting now. (It might not have hurt either that I'd noticed that where most of the background characters in the first series had been simple blacked-in silhouettes, work had been done after it to computer-model those bystanders in detail.) I can still suppose each "series finale" might have depended to some degree on sudden appearances, and it's an open question as to where things might go and how accepting I can be (not to mention whether the series will be available for viewing on Crunchyroll), but I can at least look forward both to what's to come and to getting back to the commentaries and other bonus features.

The computer-animated Peanuts movie that just happened to align with the comic strip's sixty-fifth anniversary seemed to get good notices, including some from people I supposed to be other Peanuts fans, but where I had bought a Blu-Ray of The Lego Movie I waited on The Peanuts Movie until I was surprised to see it turn up on Netflix. This could have had something to do with how, aware as I am of how "drawn animation" has helped shape perceptions and form mental images of the Peanuts characters, a good number of the TV specials and the four feature-length movies made years ago preceded me by enough that I'm only aware of their storylines through their storybook adaptations. It just might be that, with certain small elements condensed out along the way, they kept striking me as veering between "ultimately outright depressing" and "perhaps lightweight." (As a small example, when I finally had the chance to see "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," its concluding minutes didn't seem quite as bleak as the storybook had somehow left me thinking.) Still, I wound up taking a chance, and there were things about The Peanuts Movie I did get to mulling over.
( There was a big surprise )

A few weeks into its fall season, Crunchyroll added the third series of the computer-animated RWBY. This was just when I had dropped one of the few new anime series I had so much as taken a chance on that season, so I had the time to start watching this more "domestic" production and the readiness to see it as softening the added blow to not playing the game so many others seem to these days of gulping down great quantities of up-to-date anime. However, it was possible that one small advantage of watching RWBY was that it was just a bit easier to avoid the comments of others about it lest they grind down whatever positivity I could manage the way they sometimes do with anime series themselves.

That the people making RWBY were able to continue after the much too early death of the series creator Monty Oum was something, but I still might have been aware that while things hadn't ended with the creeping feeling in the second series that the story weren't moving forward too much and the comment "that it's done at all" was starting to feel sort of inadequate in the face of the criticisms I had seen, those points were still there to start with. When the latest series led off with a "tournament," however, I did sort of have the feeling this could play to a strength. Just as in certain anime series themselves, it could be seen as a good excuse to get to the action without needing a lot of setup or serious consequences. Over the length of the nearly weekly episodes (and the episodes did seem to be getting longer, almost to the length of "regular" "half-hour" television episodes, without dragging too much), though, the perpetual ominous setup that had been kept out of sight of the main characters started to affect larger things, and this built to a pretty serious finale, one that might even have challenged the comfortable safety of the sort of "cartoons" some of those who watch anime might yet dismiss.

From where things left off, I do have the hope some things will be put back together. If everything is "put back together," that might wind up a bit less impressive than they seem as of this moment (a moment I still haven't risked against the opinions of anyone else, anyway...) Still, it was something that could yet be "living up to a legacy."

When I decided I'd rewatched as far into The Simpsons as I wanted to, I was aware of just how sharply my viewing habits had come to focus on anime, and thought I could do well to keep up just a little variety by taking in another "designed in North America" animated series. A few shows I already had a fair bit of familiarity with came to mind, but so did Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I hadn't seen any of but which some other people seemed to have taken a good bit of interest in, including even a comment or two that this was a show "influenced by anime" that could nevertheless be enjoyed by anime fans themselves (even if they might not see it as so much of a singular without dwelling on thoughts of it only appropriating surface details like "sweat drops" and "SD mode."

I wound up returning to Batman: The Animated Series, though, and with one thing and another it took me a while to get through that show. In that time, I did manage to buy all three "books" of Avatar: The Last Airbender and conclude it would be the next thing I got to when I could, but I'd wound up sort of conscious that in the years since it had premiered the first part of its title had been appropriated by a big special-effects movie, the other half had been applied to a much less critically successful film, and while a sequel animated series had begun Avatar: The Legend of Korra just didn't seem to have won the same approval from fans. (There seems to have been just a bit of pushback against that general dismissal of late, though.) The North American animated series that anime fans took the most interest in now seemed to be My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (although as I write this, even it now seems to not quite be "the big new thing" any more). Even so, there can be something to watching a series without the pressure of other immediately available and evolving opinions, so I started into it.
( Into the elements )

There's just one episode of "The Original Series" on one of the Blu-Ray discs in the second season Star Trek collection. A partial explanation for this might be that "The Trouble With Tribbles" is augmented not just with "bonus content" but two follow-up episodes from later series. Before I bought the Blu-Ray sets I had watched my way through two "Best of" DVDs, one of which had the original episode on it, and as for Deep Space Nine's thirtieth anniversary time-travel episode I can remember having seen it years before. In between them, though, I was interested for my own reasons in seeing one of the animated episodes from 1973...
( 'That tin-plated overbearing excuse for a starship captain did it to us again!' )