Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

With all the video streaming services online these days, being picky about subscriptions seems the frugal solution. When it comes to the “older anime” service RetroCrush, though, much of its catalogue leaves me aware “I’ve already bought that title on Blu-Ray from Discotek,” an older and possibly more enduring yet also more expensive path. An announcement a Japanese TV special about Hideaki Anno working on the final “Rebuild of Evangelion” movie would stream on RetroCrush did start me thinking all the same. With Sony’s consolidation of the anime industry over here resulting in it winding down the Funimation brand name it’s owned for a while for the sake of the Crunchyroll brand name it’s just acquired, I could at least keep from renewing a Funimation streaming subscription and suppose that money redirected towards an independent option. A “new subscriber special” for RetroCrush was the last push I needed.
( Some time later... )

When I started seeing notices the first online anime convention I’d streamed during the hunkered-down days of last spring would be returning for its second year, that got my attention. Things are a bit different now as I count the days until it’ll have been two weeks since my second vaccination, even contemplating a thing or two I haven’t or hardly haven’t done in over a year, but as I’ve supposed before “a passel of fan panels you don’t have to travel to see” can be handy regardless of still not having the online accounts that would let me join in group chats. As the list of panels filled in, spending a weekend tuned in to the stream did get to seem appealing, even if on the weekend itself my certain peculiar way of viewing meant I didn’t see every panel that had caught my eye right then.
( References and fan wants )

Five of the six movies in the latest series of Mystery Science Theater 3000 were revealed a little while before they went up on Netflix by a British ratings classification site. Some of the titles got my attention because I'd heard at least a bit about their reputations before. As I've already said, I'd seen "MAC and Me" described as an "E.T. ripoff with even more product placement" years ago. For the second episode of "The Gauntlet," though, having heard about the title not quite as many years ago had me wondering just a bit about how things would turn out, and without happening to notice a perhaps overwrought reaction from someone else.
( There's cheesy, and there's other stuff )

A while ago, I commemorated the tenth anniversary of a notable MSTing and then took the opportunity not that much later to mark the same anniversary for the first "solo MSTing" I'd written. I did write a few more MSTings after "Undocumented Features," but marking each of their tenth anniversaries did seem a bit grandiose. Now, though, it's been ten years since the last MSTing I completed going by the date stamp on my personal file of it, which does feel a bit more significant in its own if somewhat dowmbeat way. In accepting the opportunity, though, I did get to thinking I could say something brief about each of my solo MSTings preceding it anyway.
( 'When military schedules meet the MTV generation, something's got to give.' )
( 'The miracle acrylic bubble locks his hysterical sobs away.' )
( 'He's not even going to dignify that with a putdown, I see.' )
( 'Something of a war poodle cut, then.' )
( 'Abstract is this season's post-minimalist.' )

It's been quite a while since I first bought the first volume of the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga, back when anime came on VHS tapes (and they seemed too expensive for a university student like me, especially given I'd have to buy thirteen of them to get the whole series) and manga came in trade paperbacks, art mirrored and retouched to make it more like comics as everyone thought of them. Since then, I've managed to get all of the anime series on DVD and bought the first volumes of the manga over again when they were reissued to match more modern, cheaper ways of publishing the stuff, but the manga is still unfinished even with the latest volume just out.

Of course, with the manga's artwork by the character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto himself, the manga can't be easily dismissed one of those knocked-off adaptations of an original anime meant for the cheapskates who won't buy it on home video. It's also been different enough to seem distinct from the anime, even if there I'm always left admitting MSTings of ridiculous Evangelion fanfics have left me willing to handle less extravagant departures from the hard truths of the series. With the previous volume having moved into adapting The End of Evangelion, though, I am left to face my uncertainties about that movie that, while the original television episodes may have confronted people with the series really being about the built-in problems of the characters and not just their struggles against external forces, the movie leaves me with the hard-to-shake feeling that the characters are belittled by forces they weren't aware of before and aren't capable of stopping in the slightest.
( Things are given away within )

When I heard that the second "Rebuild of Evangelion" movie was coming to a theatre near me just as the first one had, I decided I would go and see it as well. Memories of anime club showings at university accompanied me, and it did seem to be something of a "college-age crowd" there, which left me remembering how I'd first learned of Evangelion from the anime club's newsletter magazine, complete with somewhat inaccurate backstory.

The showing was once again via a Blu-Ray disc, and I can understand that given the cost of making film prints for one-time showings all at one time. This time around, though, I might have started wondering if I could see the picture was less impressive than an actual movie. There was a surprise on the audio side, though, because we got the Japanese language version with subtitles (although the first few lines of dialogue are in English, which left people guessing for those opening moments...) A few people were vocal in their appreciation of that; but even as I wondered if a part of me had been "bracing" myself beforehand for the "dub," another part of me was left wondering what the dub would have sounded like. It's just possible the subtitles were drawing my attention away from the rest of the big picture. Still, the DVD will be out before too long, and I already have a preorder in for it...

Beyond the minutiae, I do have to admit I'd already seen a "fansub" of the movie (as had others who informed the audience to not leave when the credits, still in Japanese, started rolling), and my reactions may have been in general terms. I do wonder about the whole "Evangelion as blockbuster movie" experience, even as I try not to reject it any more than the original. At the same time, I do think back to the "anime MSTings" of Evangelion fanfics, which would introduce absurd new characters to "save" at least the characters their authors liked, and I wonder if in some ways their extremes might inoculate me against any thoughts the characters "can't advance," because whatever they manage to do isn't bad as what happened with "help..." Still, one small detail and one very major plot point in this movie do continue to remind me of particular changes in one of the most infamous stories involving the surface details of Evangelion...