Category: Classics

Posted on

Anime World Order Show # 34 – Haibane Renmei, Captain Harlock, and Chun Li’s Tatas

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:43:46 — 47.5MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

Finally, a normal format episode again! Gerald lets us know all about the uncut version of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, Clarissa kicks it old school with My Youth in Arcadia (aka Arcadia of My Youth), and Daryl offers his own unique insight on Haibane Renmei!

Next week is Anime Weekend Atlanta! We’ll all be in attendance; be sure to attend Daryl’s Panel OF DOOM Saturday night, and if you REALLY love punishment, stop by at the Anime Podcasting panel on Sunday morning at 11 AM. Don’t worry, the Waverly offers late checkout.

Introduction (0:00 – 24:02)
We don’t mind that Chris Sabat is the voice of like, every other character in Funimation’s dubs since face it, he’s one of the best actors they got there anyway. We answer more emails here than we got through in the entire last episode, and it seems that a few people are actually watching the shows we discuss! First off, relatively new anime fan Milla writes in to tell us her thoughts on They Were Eleven (reviewed in Show # 5) and Genshiken (Show # 22). As a public service announcement, Daryl reminds everyone that the Television Without Pity forums and website is 90% female, 100% stupidity. Dedicated listener Erwin writes in to tell us about how much he’s enjoying Monster after hearing our review, and the Ninja Consultants need to watch Voltes V. Alex writes in to let Daryl know that he watched Fist of the North Star per his recommendations, not knowing that it’s an anime where people’s heads explode. Clearly Daryl has failed on his mission, so it’s up to Tim Eldred to school us all by talking about how there’s a Roman Album for the first Fist of the North Star movie in what will be a trilogy (plus two).

Let’s News! (24:02 – 35:02)
They’re making four more Evangelion movies. That’s what the modern-day Gainax does best: coast along on the glory and reputation of their previous successes. Works like a charm, seeing as we spent 11 minutes talking about just this. But who knows? Maybe they’ll surprise us and shut down the fanservice aspect of Evangelion once and for all! And then go bankrupt. Again.

Promo: Weekly Anime Review (35:02 – 35:36)
After a lengthy summer hiatus, Aaron is back and he’s hitting on all cylinders with reviews of Angel’s Egg, Castle of Cagliostro, and…uh, Speed Grapher. Fine, so someone else mailed him the Angel’s Egg review, but it’s not like WE’VE done a review of that, now have we?! Why the heck is that? What is it we’re talking about that’s so much more important than Angel’s Egg, huh?!

Review: Street Fighter II the Animated Movie (uncut) (35:36 – 56:55)
Oh. Man, if this keeps up, we won’t be able to keep pretending to have the anime intellectual high ground when the other anime podcasts are continually beating us to discussing Wings of Honneamise, Tezuka’s experimental short films, Angel’s Egg, and so on! And without that, we’re nothing, you hear me? NOTHING! Be that as it may, Street Fighter II is probably the best of the “fighting game to anime” adaptations. Not like that’s exactly hard, but hey.

Review: My Youth in Arcadia [Arcadia of My Youth] (56:55 – 1:21:36)
Clarissa struggled hard with this one, knowing full well that Captain Harlock is one of the most iconic characters in all of anime and that she’d better do him justice. Of course, despite being one of the most iconic anime characters, we guarantee you that if you showed most anime fans a picture of Harlock and said “who is this guy,” they would not know, so now you know the reason why this segment had to happen. This ran pretty long, so all the bits about Daryl talking about how Leiji Matsumoto is still really mad about World War 2 have been excised because they were irrelevant. In its place is even more audio from the Ziv International dub. A vast improvement if ever there was one.

Promo: Blood, Crack, and Anime (1:21:36 – 1:22:39)
Wait, did he say “in a world fermented by jaded oldschoolers”? It’s a bit hard to hear him over “Invoke.” Wow, how many anime podcasts have been started thanks to the Anime Pulse podcast’s forums anyway? Anyway, “One Sin” and “Saito-chan” (real names unknown) have released two episodes (plus one Gundam SEED karaoke) so far, so let them know what you think! We actually haven’t written them back yet ourselves, but GAAAAAAH OH CRAP ANIME WEEKEND ATLANTA IS IN SEVEN DAYS

Review: (1:22:39 – 1:40:52)
Daryl reviews one of the most beloved “slice of life” anime series of the last five years. A lot of people are super-duper fans of this show, and lots of them listen to this podcast. This will go well.

  • Reki’s Imco lighter – I believe the model pictured is the Imco 6700 Super: you can use Zippo lighter fluid with this and even disassemble and reassemble it while having it remain lit

Closing (1:40:52 – 1:43:45)
Next time, in an effort to imbue humor to a man who has none (due to his heritage, you see), Gerald will be reviewing Cromartie High School. Is Cromartie funnier than Gerald is dull? TIME WILL TELL! Clarissa continues on the ABe route–the two capital letters in the name is assuredly a pornstar name gimmick waiting to happen–by reviewing the much-requested Serial Experiments Lain, and Daryl realizes that he’d better justify that press badge by telling everyone THE TRUTH about Metrocon 2006 before Metrocon: Amano’s World happens later this year. Oh, who are we kidding? THE TRUTH doesn’t justify anything.

Posted on

Anime World Order Show # 29 – Better Late Than Never

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:30:05 — 41.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

Better late than never, I guess. Daryl reviews the horror anime Requiem From the Darkness, Clarissa reminisces on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya now that it’s ended, and Gerald talks about his favorite anime of all time, Gall Force.

Introduction (0:00 – 25:10)
Gerald starts things off by making a joke about how “Ichi” is pronounced the same as “itchy” that’s so subtle he didn’t even know he was doing it. In the emails department, Patrick M. writes in to tell us all about the other Osamu Tezuka that was mentioned back in the Shadow Skill segment of Show # 26, the Popcorn Samurai likens Gerald to Eagle from The Muppets, Area 88 mega-fan Cloudy-Sky likens Gerald to Butthead and Stephen Hawking while expressing approval over Daryl’s review of Area 88 back in Show # 4 (by the way, it’s out on DVD now!), and we explain the reason why we haven’t reviewed too many television series to date. Plus Keith over at Teleport City reveals an even grimmer secret about MD Geist that we neglected to reveal in our recent review. Since there’s really no news this week, we close things off by mentioning that Intersound Inc, where the Harmony Gold/Streamline Pictures releases were dubbed, is going out of business and is selling off all their equipment. This leads into a brief discussion on anime dubs.

Promo: Fast Karate for the Gentleman (25:10 – 26:14)
Dave and Joel’s gaming and anime podcast is one of Daryl’s favorites, and it’s not just because they frequently talk about how awesome Daryl is. It’s because they provide him with jokes to steal. If you’re going to Otakon, stop by the Artist’s Alley and check them out!

Overlooked: Requiem From the Darkness (26:14 – 46:40)
In an attempt to be more contemporary, Daryl talks about this 13-episode horror-themed anime series released by Geneon about a year or two ago which absolutely nobody cared about except for about three of us over in ADTRW. He was planning to show a clip of it at Anime Festival Orlando, but ran out of panel time. Laugh to yourselves as a guy who knows nothing about art or visual aesthetics tries feebly to describe a show whose primary characteristic is the fact that it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before! Sample screenshots are posted below.

Screenshots don’t adequately reflect the effect that the CG and camerawork has on the show, but there’s quite a bit of that too. After this segment had finished recording, Gerald mentioned how he thought the style of this show was just too confusing to follow what was happening. He should have mentioned it while the recorder was on!

Review: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (46:40 – 1:05:11)
Clarissa trumps all of us in attempting to review something recent for a change by tackling what was the most popular anime series in Japan last season. We weren’t sure whether to bother with it since everywhere you go there’s people who won’t shut up about this series, but apparently people want to hear our thoughts. This one was pretty tough to review, since roughly 15 minutes were excised from this segment for the sake of removing spoilers.

Promo: Popcorn Samurai (1:05:11 – 1:06:39)
Here’s a brand-new podcast that just started up which is all about samurai movies! In the first episode, he talks about Seven Samurai and starts off the first part of what will be an extensive piece dedicated to the Zatoichi films. Hmm, now that we’ve got a podcast all about chambara, I wonder if there’s anything out there dedicated entirely to 70s Shaw Brothers kung fu pictures? Could this be a job for Jules Carrozza aka “Kojiro Abe”?! Note to self: get the Celestial remastered version of Heroes of the East.

Review: Gall Force (1:06:39 – 1:25:25)
Gerald reviews what is his favorite anime ever, the OAV series Gall Force. Despite being OAVs, Gall Force is not his favorite OAV series–Gunbuster is–and by his own admission, Gall Force is not the best anime ever made. This also ended up being a really long segment: for time constraints, all instances of screaming about how awesome laser beams that fire out in one direction then change direction are have been removed. That alone probably took up ten minutes.

  • Gerald’s personal and never updated page on Gall Force (It’ll happen one day)

Closing (1:25:25 – 1:30:05)
It’s 1:30 AM as I write this, and the gist of the matter is that we were all occupied with getting ready for our panels at Anime Festival Orlando this weekend. I had 24 hours to compile, capture, then author a DVD containing two hours of assorted video clips. Did I mention I didn’t actually know how to not suck at authoring DVDs? It took me 3 days to put together a DVD that ended up being about 30 minutes. It’s not the DVD layouts and menus that’ll kill you, it’s encoding/converting everything over to MPEG-2. Gerald and Clarissa had similar obligations, and on top of that both of them are experiencing grievous computer hardware troubles.

So basically, that’s why Show # 29 was late. Actually, this is all a lie; all of the segments were complete days ago with the exception of the Gall Force review and the closing. Anyway, next time on AWO, it’s one of two things. Either we’re fast-tracking our Anime Festival Orlando coverage–probably no TRUTH report this time around since Daryl ended up becoming part of it–or we’re reviewing the things we mentioned in the show. Daryl’s going to be talking about another Geneon series which nobody bought, New Getter Robo. People clearly mistakenly thought it was about robots when it is really about KARATE. Another fine offering from Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa. In stark contrast to that, Clarissa’s going to review the manga Antique Bakery, and Gerald’s going to review the limited edition box set of Patlabor the Movie 2, which is one of our favorite films.