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Anime World Order Show # 45 – This Episode Contains More Dead Babies Than Usual

Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:24:13 — 66.0MB)

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Daryl reviews the gekiga/manga titles The Push Man and Other Stories and also Abandon the Old in Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Clarissa reviews the recent anime series Black Lagoon, and Gerald reviews the second of the Robot Romance Trilogy, Voltes V. The comics contain lots of dead babies, they probably shoot babies in Black Lagoon, and women are repulsed enough by 70s super robot anime such as Voltes V that they miscarry.

Full show notes to be added soon, though in all honesty they’re not quite done on the last several shows because there’s links to be added.

Introduction (0:00 – 33:10)
Yes, it takes us the length of most entire podcast episodes just to say what we’re going to talk about. But we also have listener feedback to go through…sort of. Naka-Kon‘s in Kansas City–not Kansas–on the first weekend of March, where their guest will be none other than Stevie B, or as they used to say in the IRC days, STEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVVVVVVVVVVVVE BENNNNNNETTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT! “Stevie B” is shorter and more accurate. For the umpteenth time, we talk about the whole issue of people using “manga” to describe non-Japanese comics, but apparently there’s what we believe and what everyone else seems to believe. They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Copernicus…and right now we’re not looking so good. And what is a TRUE cosplayer, anyway?

Let’s News! (33:10 – 54:08)
ADV has acquired the rights to release 009-1, a recent series which nobody bothered to fansub because nobody seems to ever fansub Shotaro Ishinomori-based properties. We haven’t seen the show ourselves, but it involves something ribald, no doubt. Funimation’s going to be remastering all of Dragon Ball in widescreen, except the show wasn’t originally in widescreen. We strongly suspect it to be a Project A-Ko job, since when you look at the comparison footage sections it is TOTALLY OBVIOUS THAT THE TOP AND BOTTOM OF THE PICTURE HAVE BEEN CUT OFF. Hopefully the Daizenshuu EX podcast knows the score, as their latest episode is all about Funimation’s “cover-ups” over the years with regards to releasing the series.

Actually, upon further investigation over at this forum thread on Daizenshuu EX, we were wrong. It looks as though not only the top and bottom of the picture are being cut off…BUT ALSO THE SIDES. No really, take a look at these comparison screenshots:

And Funimation’s spending HOW much money to do this? Oh, there’s also not going to be any next episode previews apparently…and the “CHA LA HEAD CHA LA” opening theme song won’t be the same version. How is THAT supposed to be a definitive release? You tell us. Oh well, other news:

Viz is going to be releasing digital downloads of Death Note, presumably in high-quality fansub format. We really hope this gets done properly (that is to say, not like how other paid anime digital downloads are), and more importantly, priced reasonably. In addition to Vertical Inc’s upcoming English-language release of the 1970s shojo manga “To Terra…”, there’s also going to be a new Towards the Terra television series. Finally, Sony really screwed the pooch on this BluRay thing. Wait a second, I thought this was supposed to be NEWS!

Promo: Weekly Anime Review (54:08 – 54:42)
Due to the grim nature of existence, Aaron hasn’t been able to do a new episode for the last month and a half, but he’s back with a review of Perfect Blue. Well, actually the review is by someone else because people record reviews and send them to him for him to play. Be sure to do that CHAM dance as you listen.

Review: The Push Man and Other Stories / Abandon the Old in Tokyo (manga) (54:42 – 1:25:17)
In reviewing these publications by Drawn and Quarterly, Daryl offers forth a brief primer on gekiga, before speaking at length about dead babies and film noir. But to be serious for a moment, while Yoshihiro Tatsumi never really got a whole lot of financial success or critical acclaim, his contributions to the development of Japanese comics shouldn’t go overlooked. That’s where we come in!

  • Gekiga: The Flipside of Manga by Paul Gravett – not safe for work; no wonder the books he writes get banned from libraries!
  • Interview with Yoshihiro Tatsumi in Publisher’s Weekly — this is how Daryl pretends to be knowledgeable; he reads things other people wrote and then regurgitates the information. What separates him from a scholar is that scholars can actually process and analyze this information. Also, they remember the things they read.
  • Dave and Joel’s Forums – I bet more people would post there if they ever mentioned that these forums existed on their show! This is the thread Daryl was ripping off from.

Promo: Ninja Consultant (1:25:17 – 1:27:04)
Erin and Noah just got back from Japan! Be sure to leave comments in their Livejournal asking them what they thought of their contribution to our one year anniversary show, because they’ve been in Japan all this time and probably haven’t heard it yet!

Review: Voltes V (1:27:04 – 1:50:14)
We are so totally jazzed over all the hits from the Philippines that’ll inevitably result from this…MAYBE. Marvel and be amazed as grown adults talk about a show for 8 year-olds. You know it’s for 8 year-olds because the toy commercials for Voltes V teach all the important life lessons you should be aware of before you’re grown up, namely that it’s better for the robot to take the beating than you:

American Otaku People Retsuden, here we come!

Review: Black Lagoon (1:50:14 – 2:17:16)
This is one of Clarissa’s favorite shows that have recently aired. It’s one great big homage to Hollywood action movies, and you either understand this from the start or you don’t. It’s pretty violent, but if you were an 8 year-old that watched it, the lesson you’d learn would be “if you shoot enough people, nobody will notice how crappy your tattoo is, or perhaps they will notice it but they won’t bring up how dumb it looks out of fear of being killed, just like how nobody makes fun of Dio or Zangetsu the Mid-day.” Daryl can’t stop talking about Jay Karnes, unless he’s talking about the Greatest GREATEST Movie EVER of course. He’d make a damn fine action hero, that Jay Karnes. And Kenneth Johnson should be cast as Max Payne, if that movie ever gets made.

Promo: GeekNights (2:17:16 – 2:18:15)
Rym and Scott are not really a fan of playing promos, since promos people record are never indicative of the nature of the actual show (we’re living proof). It’s far more productive promo-wise to just mention the name of another podcast and talk about it positively, sort of like how in AM talk radio they just suddenly start talking about riding the NordicTrack for 15 minutes. That said, we gotta have SOMETHING to give people a break from our terrifying voices.

Closing (2:18:15 – 2:24:13)
We’re all losing our minds. See that running time? Yeah, our sanity? It’s broken. And as proof of that, THE NEXT EPISODE OF AWO IS ENTIRELY ABOUT HENTAI. Gerald, the architect of this scheme, shall be reviewing Urotsukidoji aka Legend of the Overfiend. Clarissa’s reviewing a hentai manga entitled Pink Sniper by her favorite hentai artist, Yonekura Kengo. And Daryl’s mental state is at the point where he can watch Kanashimi no Belladonna and live to tell the tale.

Brace yourselves.

61 Replies to “Anime World Order Show # 45 – This Episode Contains More Dead Babies Than Usual”

  1. clarissa… Yeah, don’t go there. There’s more than enough LoGH yaoi slash out there without having to add Yamato into the mix. (Though this does make me want to post a scan of one bit of art I have courtesy of Bill Mimbu, showing Reinhard being all jealous of an SD Desslok…)

    mc burnett… Well, to quote the snarkalicious TBogg, “that just makes my ass bleed with sadness.” Why does this make me think of other animation/celebrity crossover successes of the past, such as the classic “Scooby Doo Meets Don Knotts”?

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  2. The only problem with LoGH/Yamato is that the Yamato would be completely lost in the scale of LoGH. Y: “Fire the Wave Motion Cannon that has completely destroyed every enemy we’ve ever faced!” L: “Oh no, you’ve taken out ONE PERCENT of our fleet!”

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  3. While we’re all announcing long-awaited fansub projects: Heart of Madness finished subbing Hokuto no Ken: Raoh Gaiden over the weekend, so be sure to grab that.

    Christian: I have in fact seen Little Boy (in an American bookstore!), but the steep price tag (SIXTY DOLLARS?!) and this dismissive by Carl which I’d read prior restricted my involvement in it to simply looking at all the Daicon IV animation things. It was a year or two ago, but it seemed like it was mainly a coffee table picture book anyway.

    And there shall be no libel towards the English language dubs of Jetman or Cyber Cop, you hear me?! Were it not for me running clips of the high-budget special effects of Cyber Cop (shot using the action figures and their Chuck Norris Karate Kommando style spinning fist attacks), NHK no Patrick-u never would have approached me after my panel at AWA. Then we never would have become bros. Of course, he did import the Region 2 of Belladonna and regrets not putting it in his Top 10, so right now we’ve entered into a holy pact in which he watches The Marine Unrated Edition per my recommendation and I watch Ken Park (by Larry “you mean I’m not in jail yet?” Clark) per his.

    Steve: Why clearly, the answer is because *I* didn’t do those reviews. Actually, it was probably declared contextually irrelevant to the subject at hand and cut for time: were we reviewing Zambot 3 (which we still know very little about; we did mention Zambot 3 at the start of an early episode), the “Nippon Sunrise cut their teeth on Combattler/Voltes and now they’re doing Zambot 3” observation would be more fitting.

    MC Burnett: I’m afraid I can’t respond to this, as I have dove out of a window so as to escape the grim nature of reality. The comments you see me committing to screen now are actually being typed by my ghost.

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  5. rheinhard –

    Well, I am a certifiable fujoshi, and LoGH certainly makes it easy, but I’ll agree that it’s probably best to leave Yamato out of it. 😀

    Also, you have a point about the scope issue. That’s kind of hilarious and awful all at once.

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  6. H.O.M. finally subbed it? Oh happy day! I watched the baddly subtitled version and thought that it was amazing. Does anyone know when the next movie is going to come out?

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  7. As much as I respect Carl as a gentleman and a scholar, I think he’s oversimplifying at bit in that message. I also think, however, there might be a difference in context between now and when he wrote that message, because I can’t get to the text on the Japan Society’s site about the exhibit to see what they posted. Also, there’s no indication Carl actually read the book by that point and is likely not actually talking about the book so much as whatever the Japan Society had written about the exhibit.

    Basically, the point I was getting at was the attitude Clarissa was objecting to, someone wouldn’t read some comic because it didn’t look enough like whatever their ‘ideal’ was for Japanese comics and treating domestic comics as some kind of ‘inferior’ product, purely on a visual basis. One of the biggest points Murakami was making was that the traditional Japanese critical opinion placed domestically produced art behind foreign works and there was no reason for that to be the case, particularly when the rest of the world is so enamored with what’s considered Japanese ‘junk culture’ like comics and animation. Clarissa’s point was almost exactly the same in intent.

    I found Little Boy to be incredibly informative and thought provoking mainly for the expository writing in it. I never got a chance to see the exhibit in person, so I’m just talking about the catalog as a book on its own merits. It gives the clearest etymology of the contemporary use of the word ‘otaku’ that anyone could possibly come up with. That works into the evolution of the Vile Spectre of Moe and the development of the current breed of hikikomori. He builds towards identifying things that have basically sprung from this Japanese national character that’s troubled by an inferiority complex that stems from Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, but has evolved over time. Article 9 presents the connundrum of protecting the country at the same time as stunting its maturity, essentially limiting the role of the Japanese people to that of a little boy.

    The book was most fascinating to me because I’ve read plenty of critical thinking on animation and otaku culture from a person born and raised outside of Japan, but none from a native-born Japanese. For as much as someone like Patrick Macias or even Fred Schodt can explain and discuss on the topic, they’re always going to be coming at it from an ‘outsider’ view. Little Boy was that native critical view I’d never had a chance to read. For that, I found it to be worth every penny. Of course, I got the book as a gift from a friend, but I would have bought it regardless. You can even go into it cold, as he kind of revised what he was saying in earlier works in this one and gives a clear explanation of what was going on.

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  8. I didn’t get the book for Little Boy, but I did see the exhibit. It focused heavily on 3D art, and I unfortunately can’t remember a lot of the exhibits, other than that some of them were interesting but also extremely bizarre. I can’t name artist names or specifics for most of it, but a couple of the artists on Japanorama had familiar looking work when I watched it.

    What I remember most are being greeted by a 1:1 scale Zaku head, the section dedicated to Doraemon, and the giant fucking wall of Daicon IV genga and cels that the security guards wouldn’t let anybody take pictures of. What can I say, I’m a fanboy. Standing there, staring at the wall was a total fangasm, and prompted me to start our Daikon Wiki ( http://www.l33t-ninj4.net/AC/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=DaiconWiki&back=WiwiHome ).

    Murakami was apparently on site the day I went, but I didn’t get a chance to ask him about anything…he went in before the doors opened to the public and was out the other side by the time I scraped my jaw off the floor and wiped up all the drool at being three inches from the Daicon pan sequence.

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  9. I guess I was the other person who was never mentioned who begged for a Daimos review.

    I saw it as a young kid so I don’t remember much about other than a guy who plays the drums and drives a car that connects a truck or something that transforms into Daimos. And the evil alien guy looks just like the evil alien guy in Voltes V only instead of horns he has wings and different clothes. I liked it considerably better than Voltes V because I don’t think I was manly enough for Voltes and Daimos had that love story going for it. But the trade off is that there’s an annoying as hell little girl and robot or something like that.

    Is it really that hard to find Daimos? If I can find it with relative ease, I find it hard to believe elistist bastards such as yourselves have trouble finding it.

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