Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:45:13 — 75.8MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS
It’s the 7th annual trivia episode! For this edition we’re joined by Ryan aka BlacOtaku1 on Twitter and Oldtype/Newtype on Tumblr. How infuriating will the categories be this year? ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT.
Introduction (0:00 – 37:09)
We talk to Ryan about his interests in anime, digital archiving efforts, why you should USE YOUR DAMN STICKERS ALREADY, and perhaps even how he became Cassette Guy from his home base in North Carolina. Then over in the emails we hear a similar story from someone thousands of miles away. Ryan’s on his phone for this, so there’s a lot of pops and the like which we did our best to reduce, so if you want to know what title it was that he recommended it was the six-part OAV Kyomu Senshi Miroku. It’s another masterpiece from the one and only Ken Ishikawa of Getter Robo and Beast Fighter: The Apocalypse fame. To give you an idea of what you’re in for from this man whom we’ve described as “the Venom to Go Nagai’s Spider-Man,” the analogy goes something like this: Mazinger Z is to Getter Robo as Devilman is to Beast Fighter: The Apocalypse as Black Lion is to Kyomu Senshi Miroku.
Promo: Right Stuf Anime (37:09 – 40:00)
As Black Friday sales are ongoing and Christmas sales are about to commence, we figure now is a good time to take up the suggestions made in the comments section from the previous episodes and note that Right Stuf does give the option to make payments on orders over $150 using Sezzle, a service which lets you pay the price of your order in 4 interest-free installments over the course of 6 weeks. That way, you just pay 25% of the total every pay period rather than one giant chunk. Good to know with all these Ultra editions and bundles and figure preorders etc going on while other sites are having THEIR sales concurrently.
Trivia! Round One (40:00 – 1:24:12)
We promise the episode title and the significance of the embedded MP3 image will definitely make sense after listening to this. We considered using the other category names but we’re pretty sure every podcast directory would have simply blanked it out on us. Jerks. This one features an audio category!
Trivia!: Part Deux (1:24:12 – 1:51:04)
For Round 2, we face our greatest challenge of all, since now we must contend with LISTENER-SUBMITTED TRIVIA QUESTIONS~! WHO will survive? (We always felt that was less confrontational to the viewer compared to “Will you be able to survive?” a next episode tagline which Tomino should have saved for his future series.) If you make it this far, you’re probably due for a drink. Here’s the other side of Ryan’s flask.
Trivia! Part 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1:51:04 – 2:45:13)
Community marketing is a strategy to engage an audience in an active, non-intrusive prospect and customer conversation. Whereas marketing communication strategies such as advertising, promotion, PR, and sales all focus on attaining customers, Community Marketing focuses on the perceived needs of existing customers. This accomplishes four things for a business:
–Connects existing customers with prospects
–Connects prospects with each other
–Connects a company with customers/prospects to solidify loyalty
–Connects customers with customers to improve product adoption, satisfaction, etc.
There are two types of community marketing. Organic or natural marketing occurs without the assistance of the company. Organic marketing is word-of-mouth marketing and is one of the most effective marketing methods. Sponsored community marketing is promoted by company through activities like investments in the local community improvement initiatives or corporate social responsibility. Skepticism among consumers as a result of blatant advertising and other unethical communications has affected the success of the sponsored form of Community Marketing. Continuing success in community marketing strategies has been found in engaging and cultivating the natural communities that form around their product/service.
WELL PLAYED, MILES CRUNCHYROLL. WELL PLAYED INDEED.
Ryan reminds me that I once owned CLASH OF THE BIONOIDS on VHS, which I found at a Kay-Bee Toy & Hobby at some mall in the 80s or 90s, and threw it away in a move at some point, probably figuring VHS was obsolete and surely we’d eventually get a legit version of DYRL on a modern format in the coming years, and joke’s on me, huh?
“The idols are the side dish”–I see, as the youth say, what you did there. But weren’t idols centered even in the original Macross? Minmay wasn’t just a pop star or entertainer; she gradually becomes a key figure in the ideological clash of civilizations between the Zentradi and humanity, and the omnipresence of the final battle of the first space war, in which even the most acrobatic turns of the Itano circus only maneuver through her song, broadcast everywhere.
I’ve been going through the book “Watching Anime, Reading Manga,” and I think again about how my so-called old school fandom in the 1980s was already years behind that of Fred Patten’s generation—heck, his chronology reminds us that the C/FO predates Animage magazine. It’s startling to reflect that the opening episodes of Aoi Honoo are taking place in the exact same year that Osamu Tezuka and Go Nagai were guests of honor at San Diego Comic-Con (and of course, all this was a full decade before A-Kon 1, sometimes considered the first anime con as we now experience them).
When you look back on it, you realize that although by the end of the 1970s the US side of the anime industry was still only sparsely present (no licensed home video yet, and only a handful of shows on TV, viewable in certain local markets), the fans themselves were making all kinds of connections with their Japanese counterparts, as well as with Japanese creators, studios, and magazines. It used to also be said that fans of that era were sometimes uninformed and ignorant, fooled by mistranslations or rumors that got passed along, but if that was the case, I wonder how much things have really changed; fan beliefs, true or not, can spread faster than ever today.
Maybe the 1980s fans such as myself were, ironically, the first generation of fans to have a previous one to see as “old.” And that’s the thing; it’s hard for me to criticize the perspective of a zoomer weeb when I’ve had the experience of being a 13 year-old at a C/FO meeting being run by people 20 or 30 years older than me. If in 1984 I could already feel that I couldn’t relate to the older generation of fans either personally or in their aesthetic tastes, then why would I expect different from a fan to whom anime from the 2000s are already old school? If they do have broader tastes, that’s a good thing, but mine weren’t all that broad; I was much more interested in contemporary (i.e., 1980s) anime as a teenager than anime from the 1960s and 70s, no matter how famous or foundational it was.
You discussed the challenges of finding anime with adult protagonists, and I believe it is a real artistic criticism of anime that it remains so heavily weighted towards teenage characters, in as much that this represents only a limited portion of that range of human experience we would hope any artistic medium can address. You often hear these days anime praised or criticized for its inclusion and representation (or lack of it) when it comes to people of different identities, but it seems to me this discussion rarely also contemplates diversity of age, even though age is an illuminating spectrum that surrounds and adds dimension to all identities.
However, I also believe this same criticism isn’t necessarily all that meaningful when you happen to yourself be a teenager, as anime fans so often are. You could make the argument that anime is such a rich medium for a young adult audience precisely because it redirects the attention and narrative energy that, in live-action TV, would be spread across works for a wider age range, and instead invests it overwhelmingly toward teenage characters (It may be more a question of balance, but as for high school anime, Urusei Yatsura was arguably more important to Japanese fans in the 1980s than was Macross, although in later decades, of course, Macross became a continuing, dynamic franchise whereas UY remained a beloved vintage show of its era).
—C.
P.S. You mentioned Space Brothers, and it’s cool to note that the most experienced astronaut currently onboard the International Space Station made a cameo in the show–Soichi Noguchi, just arrived on the Crew Dragon.
This is the 4th time I felt asleep without finishing the podcast & it is NOT because its boring, just lots of work. So far, what I have been catching from the podcast hits me and takes me to memory lane with the exception that I haven’t heard of somebody mentioning “Princess Knight.” Also Hajime No Ippo is now available on Blu-Ray via Discotek. Right Stuf has it.
One correction to the question about the first French-Japan co-production: It wasn’t The Mysterious Cities of Gold (1982), but Ulysses 31 (1981). I was a huge fan of both as a child when they aired on Australian TV in the mid 1980s. Producer Jean Chalopin worked on both series. Ulysses 31 was, obviously, based on Greek mythology, and Cities of Gold was inspired by (definitely not based on) the 1966 historical children’s novel The King’s Fifth by Scott O’Dell.
I maintain my annoying opinion that the PLANETES manga is better – the anime is restructured to feel like prestige TV and every episode is an annoying emotionally manipulative drama. On the other hand, the manga feels very personal, by which I mean the author keeps putting in jokes that are only funny to him and stories where the moral only makes sense to him. There’s a joke chapter where they meet Elvis in space and a serious chapter where the moral is “you should own a bunch of dogs and keep them in your tiny apartment”.