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Why did two months pass without a new episode? Some cartoons break even the strongest of spirits. But finally, Clarissa reviews Go Nagai’s precursor to Devilman, Demon Lord Dante.
Introduction (0:00 – 42:45)
Now that we’ve made it back from AnimeNEXT and the latest issue of Otaku USA Magazine is arriving in subscriber mailboxes, we have time to record a new episode! For those itching for CONTENT, in the interim Daryl was a guest on the Zannen Canada Podcast to talk about Mobile Suit Gundam SEED to the best of his unreliable memory. This discussion was edited down to 2 hours and 40 minutes. Over in the emails, we puzzle over the intentions of a question regarding well-realized fictional sociopolitical landscapes in Japanese animation. Golgo 13 was not mentioned, since its sociopolitical landscape is nonfiction, despite all “this work is fiction” disclaimers it alleges.
Promo: Right Stuf Anime (17:38 – 23:46)
We kind of organically mixed this one into the introduction, hence the overlapping time codes. Right Stuf is having their month-long 31st Golden Birthday Sale throughout July, where not only is practically everything on sale all month, but every day there’s also a Mega Deal (and Adult Mega Deal) on popular items. Since the discounts are already quite high, the Got Anime? membership discounts will NOT stack with the Mega Deal, Featured Products, or Bundles. But it will work on the other items, including preorders. GET YOUR ANGEL COP BLU-RAY AND BEAST FIGHTER THE APOCALYPSE DVD PREORDERS IN NOW. But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves:
Review: Demon Lord Dante aka Mao Dante (42:45 – 1:37:55)
You’ve got to hand it to Clarissa, because after this one the few remaining strands on the low thread count sheets of sanity are just barely hanging on. With everyone being so keen on Devilman Crybaby this year, we figured we may as well go back to Go Nagai’s initial concept which was later retooled to result in Devilman. The original story got abandoned for 40 years before being resurrected in the early 2000s, and that means THEY HAD TO WING IT~! FOR THE ENDING. Listen on as the structure and fabric of the universe fade away in this 100% spoiler-filled review slash synopsis. Perhaps someday, this will end up streaming on Midnight Pulp alongside other titles by Discotek as well as Animeigo, but for now it can only be seen by those bold and daring enough to own it on DVD. ALL YOU CONTENT CREATORS WHO GO VIRAL AS A RESULT OF TALKING ABOUT THIS CARTOON HAD BETTER REMEMBER WHO POINTED YOU TOWARDS IT.
Otakon is a few weeks away, and the schedule is live! Our panels are as follows:
Friday 9:45 PM: History of Hentai (18+)
Friday 12:00 AM: Twenty Years Ago: Anime in 1998
Saturday 9:00 AM (no 8 hours sleep for us!): Cancelled Anime: Gone Before Their Time
Saturday 11:00 PM: Anime’s Craziest Deaths (18+)
Sunday 12:45 PM: Outsourced: The Japanese Animation of “Western” Cartoons
Hmm. We should probably uh, get started with working on those…HEY WAIT, WE FORGOT TO MENTION THAT WE WERE PANELISTS AT CEO GAMING! We did the panel “Fighting Game Anime: It’s (Mostly) Terrible” and this is the list of titles that we showed there:
Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie
Street Fighter V (that’s the letter V, not the Roman numeral V as the current Street Fighter game is known)
Street Fighter Alpha
Street Fighter IV: The Ties That Bind
Darkstalkers
Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture
Fatal Fury OAVs
Samurai Shodown
Art of Fighting
King of Fighters: Another Day
Battle Arena Toshinden
Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer
Virtua Fighter
Power Stone
Tekken: The Motion Picture
Tekken: Blood Vengeance
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the ultimate teens in the post apocalyptic anime, Cross Ange. I expect you to edit this into the episode. You’re welcome. [Cross Ange is not set in a post apocalypse, and while you may think it the height of edginess to mention that show, it has no effect here because Gundam SEED Destiny inoculates from anything further Mitsuo Fukuda can do. –Daryl]
It sounds like Nagai-san was doing mountains of cocaine when he wrote this.
I was thinking about Go Nagai a couple of days ago whilst watching the new Broly movie trailer. The face close-ups & thick brush character outlines reminded me so much of Shin Getter Robo, hopefully this’ll start a chain of new Super movies like the 90’s DBZ films. That sucks that trying to interview Go Nagai was such a pain, I love the interviews y’all do for Otaku USA.
Here in the South West there’s no Lew Siffer, but we do have Lucy Fernández, he’s usually whatever current Texas governor is in office’s lawyer. And “pterodactycal” sounds like a gnarly word Bill & Ted made up while traveling back in time with George Carlin in the late 80’s.
Great episode, I don’t usually laugh this hard ‘cept when y’all review Koike and MD Geist. By the way, the dude that wrote the MD Geist screenplay also did the Dragon Quest: Dai’s Adventure manga… both the anime & manga was a superb Toei/Shonen Jump series back in the day! Crossing my fingers Discotek will license it one day.
I am surprised you found the new Purge “decent” and “relevant”, when both movies are really poo poo garbage. “Oh, but that’s where we’re going with Drumpf and his Nazi party!” No. Not even close. In the most Nazi country that ever existed, Nazi Germany (you cannot go any Nazi-er than the original, baby), such a thing would never happen. Because rule #1 of any state in human history is “thou shalt not do harm unto members of your own community”. Of course, you can rape and pillage THE OTHER GUYS, but NEVER your own. That is why this new Purge fails to make sense, or in its “relevant message”.
And the reason this bothers me, is that I have always found your tastes to be exquisite. You know what good writing is, and when you review crap, you call it out for what it is. Why then you sometimes just drop your standards of quality with certain works? How can you be so smart, yet turn your brains off for SOME forks? The Purge movies?? Anything but crap?? Come on, next thing you will be calling the Matrix sequels deep works of serious philosophy.
[“No. Not even close” is correct. Because the phrase I said was “the Republicans.” YOU interpreted that to be equivalent to “the Nazis” just so you could write this indignant reply. It’s an easy and understandable thing to do, given how many actual Nazis are running for office as Republicans now. In any case, I categorically disagree with your “rule #1 of any state in human history,” as the people who ascribe to it have to split hairs over the definition of “own community.” Also, there is no dropping of standards; Frank Grillo is a high watermark of quality! Oh, and there are more than two Purge movies. –Daryl]
For the reader question on believable and fully-realized political worlds in anime or manga… well, you knew *I’d* say this, but the Muv-Luv visual novel franchise has some really thorough world-building that’s kind of a fusion of the Cold War and 9/11, based in an alternate timeline where humanity has been slowly losing a war to alien invaders since 1973. The listener seems particularly into the political side of things, so he or she might want to hop right in with 2016’s “Schwarzesmarken” anime, which is set in East Germany in 1983. Along with giant robots fighting aliens, you also get immersed in the Cold War politics of the time, with the East and West just as determined to beat each other in a propaganda war as they are to beat back the alien BETA. A lot of the details are spot on—for example, the titular squadron has as a member a “commissar”, a Communist Party officer assigned to a military unit to ensure that its activities further the political goals of the party. Which was actually a thing in the Cold War.
The downside of diving directly into “Schwarzesmarken” is that you miss out on being slowly introduced all the BETA-verse world-building through the VNs, and that was a big turn-off to the ANN preview guide writers, who dismissed it as edgelord grimdark (although, given that they appeared to not even understand the real-world history of the division of East and West Germany, they don’t exactly earn a lot of credibility points in this preview). Still, if alt-timeline stuff like “The Man in the High Castle” or “The Handmaid’s Tale” is your thing, you’d probably dig “Schwarzesmarken”.
Went and marathoned the show before listening to the review…..wasn’t expecting a show named Demon Lord Dante to have overly cheerful background music with steel drums and peruvian flutes.
Your description of Mao Dante’s plot made me think of how someone might try to relate the exciting conclusion of the Bible: “And then this SWORD comes out of Jesus’s mouth, and there’s this angel who starts yelling towards all the birds to come down and eat everybody’s flesh, because this is God’s supper…” Regarding Mao Dante and Satanism, I remember seeing an article on Nagai in the early 1980s that gave the title of the work in English as “The Satan Dante,” which I guess is reasonable enough, as Mao refers to the lord of demons, although those backyard smelters he made everyone build were certainly very impressive.
I do remember Go Nagai from Anime America ’94, rather early in the US anime con scene (Otakon, for example, made its debut that year). I should say that at least at the four cons I’ve attended at which Yoshitaka Amano was a guest, there was never any rule that you could only ask him about a single project, or his latest project.
At AX 2016, the fans in line for signing had an incredible variety of items for Amano to sign (I heard a fair amount of Spanish being spoken, and they were usually the otaku with the Time Bokan gear). Not only did he sign everything, when the 90 minute signing session was over and there were still fans waiting, he stuck around another 42 minutes (I counted) until the rest of the line was taken care of, and *then* before leaving the DH booth, signed all of his books remaining for sale. Just to let you know what sort of fellow Amano-sensei is.
I can perhaps understand the reasoning if a guest is there specifically to promote a certain project (and if there’s a project a guest would prefer not to talk about, I think one should have courtesy) but, as you said, a sense of perspective is in order when you have a.) such an influential creator, b.) a first US appearance in almost 25 years, and c.) a recent show that’s getting a new generation into him, and yet none of that is considered when setting the ground rules.
By the way, I wanted to thank you for taking me along to Shoji Kawamori’s panel. I think we can all agree that whatever his philosophical views on food and the ecology, it seems to be working for him, as he has what at Anime Boston they refer to as “vigah.” If we get the chance to see Tomino in the near future and it turns out he also exudes the glow of rude good health, perhaps we should reconsider his views on mothers.