Anime World Order Show # 11 – Death Note, Zipang, and the Unlabored Flawlessness OF TRUTH

We’re testing to see if recording in mono sounds better or worse. PLEASE let us know if it sounds bad. This week we read lots of email, Gerald conveys his thoughts on Zipang, Clarissa finally reviews Death Note, and Daryl’s search for THE TRUTH continues!

Introduction (0:00 – 32:08)
Hey, we got mentioned on Ain’t It Cool News! We love to read your email and play your voice mail messages, and it shows since we spend more and more time doing it each week. Among many other things, we talk about some of our favorite opening credits sequences, dubs vs subs (AAARGH), how Daryl’s giving gekiga a bad rap, and THE SECRET BEHIND DOG SOLDIER!

  • Definition of what an Internet Male is
  • The Yoko Kanno Project – page with lots of Yoko Kanno stuff; she did the music for Stand Alone Complex, Cowboy Bebop, Escaflowne, Macross Plus, and lots more
  • Official Witch Hunter Robin page (the original official page has expired so I guess this show’s pretty much forgotten even though it was THE hot show just a few years back)
  • Fiction Junction: Yuki Kaijura’s Official Homepage (she seems to be the queen of doing excellent music to shows that are, more often than not, terrible)
  • Susumu Hirasawa’s Official Site (he did the music for Berserk, Millennium Actress, Paranoia Agent, etc…wait, didn’t we cut the part where we talked about him at length?)
  • Anime News Network’s entry for Magical Project S, a show which most of the pedophiles didn’t even buy (actually it’s not bad for what it is)
  • Interview with ADV voice actor George Manley as conducted by TRUTH purveyor Chuck Shandry
  • ANN entry for Dirty Pair Project E.D.E.N.
  • ANN entry for Noriyuke Abe (he’s the guy who directed Bleach, Yu Yu Hakusho, Flame of Recca, etc)
  • The Comics Interpreter
  • Links to buy The Push Man and Other Stories (by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the inventor of gekiga)
  • AnimeHell.org (wait a second, all my “what time does Midnight Madness start” jokes got cut out for time?! NO MORE EDITING OF THE INTRO BY PEOPLE WITHOUT AN ULTIMATE EYE)
  • ANN entry for Minna Agechau
  • ANN entry for Dog Soldier (one of the worst anime ever; expect Daryl to review this at some point)
  • What ZRO Limit Productions has worked on
  • What Animaze has worked on
  • A page about what anime is released in Sweden

Let’s News! (32:08 – 40:53)
Just as Daryl predicted, Wallace and Gromit won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Plus, we’re not generally ones to mention videogame news, but Super Robot Wars Original Generation 1 and 2 are coming out for the Gameboy Advance! Too bad they’re the Original Generation games (which means there’s no pre-established anime characters in them), but the gameplay, animations, storyline, etc are still top-rate, so place your preorders now lest you not get a copy once it goes out of print within a week after coming out! Last but not least, Dark Horse Comics has put up a 2002 interview with Kazuo Koike, and they talk about AIUEO Boy aka The Starving Man! If you connect the dots, read between the lines, and believe hard enough, we’ll be getting The Starving Man in English in no time!

Promo: Weekly Anime Review podcast (40:54 – 41:27)
A pretty sizeable amount of people get to the AWO webpage via the Weekly Anime Review site, and with any luck, the opposite is true as well.

Often Overlooked: Zipang (40:53 – 55:08)
Proof positive that “Often Overlooked” does not necessarily imply “oldschool,” Gerald talks about this military science fiction series from about two years ago which seemed to slip under the radars of many people. And it’s not like you can use the “well, that’s what submarines are supposed to do” excuse like in Silent Service, either! Listen and find out what you’re missing.

  • ANN entry for Zipang
  • There would have been a link about Eagle here but it’s not on Viz’s site anymore, WTF man do you guys hate America or something

Review (manga): Death Note (55:08 – 1:13:08)
People weren’t too keen on the decision to omit the 20 minutes of Clarissa talking about Death Note from last week’s episode, so we’ve moved it here instead. Actually, we should have just pasted in what we’d already recorded, but instead we just talked about it again. This one’s pretty massively popular with the fangirls due to the artwork, but don’t let that scare you off guys. After all, this is a Shonen Jump property with a fair share of well, death. And notes.

And the POUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNCE.

PERIOD.

  • ANN entry for Death Note
  • Death Note page on Viz’s site
  • Review of Death Note vol 1 from Viz – I’m linking because this reviewer alleges the print transfer/quality is very low, at least on this volume
  • AoD review of Death Note vol 1 – this one does not mention low print quality, but they reviewed an advance preview package and not the shipped to stores final version
  • Obata Takeshi Wikipedia entry
  • Ohba Tsugumi Wikipedia entry
  • Death Note live action movie site (Japanese)

Promo: Happy House of Hentai (link not safe for work) podcast (1:13:08 – 1:13:30)
It’s a podcast entirely about hentai. Except it’s also got reviews of regular porn. And stuff about Hello Kitty that has nothing to do with hentai or porn. Someone’s got a Swiftboating coming their way.

The Search for THE TRUTH: Katsucon 12, Part 2 (1:13:30 – 1:24:05)
Daryl’s journey to discover THE TRUTH continues from where it left off last week. Following his unprepared exposure to the Source, he chooses instead to focus on the proliferation of the Unlabored Flawlessness at anime conventions in recent months. There are so many more TRUTH worthy pictures, but many of them don’t have corresponding interviews. There’s no telling what will be done with them at this point.

Closing (1:24:05 – 1:26:43)
We’ve gotten repeated emails from Megacon attendees that were bearers of THE TRUTH requesting their interview segments be played, but alas the Megacon segment will have to be put off a week. But fret thee not, for next week Gerald and Clarissa will both be reviewing Naoki Urasawa’s Monster. It would have happened sooner except they wanted to watch through most all of it first. Then Daryl informed them that they couldn’t talk about more than the first few episodes anyway without totally spoiling it, so here we are. Balance is key, and since Gerald and Clarissa are reviewing something as good as Monster, Daryl reaches into the “worst anime titles ever made” vault and review the Often Overlooked (with good reason) anime film…

ODIN: PHOTON SPACE SAILER [sic] STARLIGHT.

Consider yourselves warned. And since he DEMANDED to be present for the Odin love-fest, our guest will be Mike Toole, aka The Guy Who Read the Discipline Ad Copy in Show 10 (send in MORE recordings, people!). Oh, and he also runs Anime Jump which is an anime review site that all the cool people read and post on.

Anime World Order Show # 10 – The search for THE TRUTH begins

Fine, so we’re late this week. In our letters section we talk about anime fans outside of the US, then Gerald discusses the Often Overlooked Lensman (the DUB), Clarissa reviews the manga Homunculus, and Daryl’s search for THE TRUTH kicks off with Part 1 of his Katsucon experience. If you don’t normally read the show notes, now is the time to start.

Introduction (0:00 – 33:52)
We’ve got a Frappr map now, so be sure to go there and leave your comments while also voting on who is the best. Daryl was hoping that the votes would be even with him and Clarissa each having 50% and Gerald having 0%, but that’s not how things ended up. Listener email clarifies us on matters we didn’t quite get correct about Naruto and Serial Experiments Lain, then we get a brief idea of what it’s like being an anime fan outside of America as well as a possible reason for why US fans don’t seem to care about older anime titles the way the Japanese fans do. Plus, the differences between the Gravitation manga and anime and much more! SEND IN MORE READINGS OF THE DISCIPLINE AD COPY, DAMN YOU!

Often Overlooked: Lensman (the DUB!) (33:52 – 49:13)
Gerald waxes poetic over this out-of-print 1980s anime adaptation of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s genre-defining science fiction tale. Find out the secret connection between this, Clarissa, and Ninja Scroll!

Review (manga): Homunculus (49:13 – 1:02:28)
Clarissa brings us this overview of yet another masterpiece by Hideo Yamamoto, author of Ichi the Killer, among other things. This title is about this guy who’s a lot like this person who’s a friend of Daryl’s. We’d have him on the show except for the fact that he’s too much like the main character in this manga. Don’t let the name fool you: the Ultimate Eye isn’t quite the same thing here.

The Search for THE TRUTH — Katsucon 12, Part 1 (1:02:28 – 1:18:03)
Daryl embarks on his quest to save his soul and somehow escape the fate which he has been struggling so hard to overcome to no avail. He’s going to do this by finding the most Internet-worthy of anime convention attendees, then interviewing them and posting pictures of them, all the while impersonating a radio news correspondent. Man, it’s no wonder Rob Landtz voted for Clarissa over him on the Frappr map even after having met him!

Closing (1:18:03 – 1:20:05)
Something tells us that we aren’t going to adhere to this next episode preview much, but Clarissa promises a review of Gravitation, Gerald will talk about the Often Overlooked fansub title Zipang, and Daryl’s search for THE TRUTH at Katsucon will continue, just as soon as he reconstitutes his sanity and composure by rereading Volume 1 of Crying Freeman by Kazuo Koike, available now in unflipped format from Dark Horse Comics! Go and buy it now along with Cromartie High School Volume 5!