Anime World Order Show # 102a – Subatomic Trivia Skirmish 9001

We missed a month. And another. We thought we could quickly record something where we just read emails. We were wrong. Gerald and Clarissa recorded in the same room, so the sibilance on those “s” sounds is much higher than normal. Every once in a while there’s an echo. As such, any promises by Gerald of reviewing Gunpla Builders made at the start of this recording shall remain lies until the release of the second half of this recording. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, Gerald instead deployed a series of anime trivia questions of his own devising upon our unsuspecting selves. The results…are as follows.

This is a pale shadow of the Atomic Trivia War 9000. Did we forget to mention the recording ended up being three hours? We split it into two for ease of listening; this is Part One and Part Two will follow next week or so. We also forgot to mention that our special guest host is Erin Finnegan, whom nobody would know about were it not for us mentioning her a lot and conscripting her for Otaku USA (new issue’s out soon!), thus making her cool enough to become the writer of Shelf Life for ANN. At least, that’s OUR version of history.

33 Replies to “Anime World Order Show # 102a – Subatomic Trivia Skirmish 9001”

  1. I would have totally failed the test, outside of a couple of lucky guesses (amounting to roughly half of the Gunbuster questions or so), but the trivia was still fun and oddly educational. I suppose Gerald deserves a lot of credit for that.

    Also, bonus points for the brief Flight of Dragons mention. I’ll admit that most of my appreciation for it is out of nostalgia, but the film had excellent animation and the story tried to address a couple of issues that weren’t/aren’t too common in contemporary children’s entertainment. I’d say it definitely is pretty enjoyable.

  2. I’m still listening to this, but regardless:

    – I probably would have gotten only a few questions right, at best. The quiz segment proved to be an entertaining listen. The quiz also feels like a throwback to some of the past, recorded episodes.
    – The 666 Satan manga sounds like O-Parts Hunter, from the brother of the man who makes that crazy popular ninja manga, Seishi Kishimoto. Viz did wind up releasing the entire series in North America.
    – Some smart librarian or library frequenter has stocked my local library system with CPM titles, most of them considered to be the good titles, if memory serves me correctly. Swan is still there, and this serves as further reminder to get around to reading it one day.

    1. I think you mean CMX and not CPM. CMX seemed to hit the library market hard, or maybe people just donated CMX books to libraries all the time.

      1. Hahaha, I do not know how that escaped the second scanning of my post. Thanks, Erin.

        My suspicion is that either a smart librarian working for my municipal library system or a fan with good taste was the cause of their CMX collection. I mean, Swan, Eroica, Emma, Apothecarius Argentum, a good chunk of the decent stuff is there!

        On another note, the Media Blasters manga title sounds like Akibahara@Deep, but that’s moreso a hunch than a definitive answer.

        Looking forward to Part 2!

  3. Great that a new episode is out. I was losing hope already. 😛
    I liked the trivia based format. I learned some interesting facts about the history of anime in USA.:) The only answer I knew myself was the Kenji Kamiyama Mini-Pato one.

    Hope the second part comes out soon. Keep up the good work!

  4. I would have answered every question with “Ya tatatatatatatata!”

    The Sorcerer and the White Snake made me wish I was watching Ultraviolet. The next ten good movies I see from China will be 20% worse simply by proxy. I would rather watch a thousand Bollywood American Ninja rip-offs than ever even read the title of The Sorcerer and the White Snake.

    It was, however, better than Storm Warriors.

  5. I just found in my office today a copy of the first U.S. Manga Corps release–so old-school that the blurb on the box is from ANIMAG.

    Gerald, you could have also accepted as a correct answer for the first U.S. subtitled anime release Dangaio, as I believe it was a simultaneous release with Gunbuster vol. 1 (both were from U.S. Renditions). Both Anno and Ohata worked on Dangaio, and they were both Bandai Visual titles, so it was a fairly natural combo. Gunbuster, by the way, was translated by Toshifumi Yoshida and Trish Ledoux (this was when they were both working on ANIMAG, and a few years before they would join Viz).

    As you mentioned, subtitled tapes were sold at a at a higher price point than dubs on VHS. Gunbuster and Dangaio were both US$34.95 in 1990. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about US$60 today for the two episodes you got on each tape–which just goes to show that asking American fans to pay Japanese prices is nothing new.

    1. (Jerks hand up, spitting, stuttering, eyes bulging) Clarissa is right that Gunbuster, in its original videotape release, predates Sailor Moon. I believe the science lesson that referenced it was a bonus one made for the LD box set, at which point Sailor Moon had begun, but the Outer Senshi hadn’t been introduced yet.

      1. Carl, I still remember selling you my Gunbuster VHS tapes like 20 years ago. You sent me a note with a little sketch… Where does the time go?

        I remember when Dangaio and Gunbuster were released (and the “See Noriko run” ad). My memory might be fuzzy, but I think the catalog number on Dangaio had a 1 while Gunbuster had a 2, so numerically Dangaio might have been the first.

      2. Did a little digging, and it turns out I was wrong. Dangaio Vol. 1 was USR-VD2 and Gunbuster Vol. 1 was USR-VD1. Oddly enough, Dangaio Vol. 2 ended up being USR-VD7. Apparently they released Appleseed and Black Magic before getting back to Dangaio.

      3. Dear Ralph–well, that’s the great thing: thanks to the Internet, time no longer goes anywhere! It was typical of me that I only got into Gunbuster after Seishun Shitemasu used it for “Robotech III” (so I suppose that, technically, theirs remains the only dub of Gunbuster, just like theirs remains the only dub of To-y). At the time of their initial release, the transition between Honneamise and Gunbuster was so shocking that, never mind waiting for K-On, I thought anime was over back in 1988. I would eventually lighten up.

      4. Gunbuster 1 as USR-VD1 and Dangaio 1 as USR-VD2 actually came out ‘simultaneously’. that is they were advertised with a street date in the same month, January 90 (or December ’89). Metal Skin Panic Madox 01 from AnimEigo came out with a street date of a month later iirc.

        John O’Donnell at AnimeCon ’91 talked about USMC utilizing ‘existing talents’ out there to translate and subtitle their first titles. They had USR/Trish do Dominion 1, and AnimEigo did the immortal I Give My All.

        and for the USR/LAH stuff. USR was the original Books Nippan spinoff line, and existed until they started doing dubs (with LA Hero, bandai’s/iyadomi’s outfit. they joined forces/LAHero took over, before manga bought it all out iirc). Steve Blum’s anime voice career coincided with those first MacrossII/Guyver/Orguss dubs that made their debut at Anime Expo ’92

        enough random asides for now ^^

  6. After listening to this, I feel I’m not really an anime fan anymore, yet I could answer many of these without question.

    And yes, Peter Chung = anorexic character designs!

  7. Yo Daryl come over I’ll show you around Tokyo.

    As far as learning Japanese goes, I think the grammar is pretty easy to grasp. But I guess I studied it for like two years. My main issue now is mostly vocabulary and just getting used to listening to people.

  8. Thinking about how it takes on guy to bother scanilating something, I do know one crazy person who managed to get through the first volume of Tezuka’s “Jungle Emperor” manga before he lost interest quickly. I managed to save those pages anyway but sure I’m probably the only one ever interested in the whole thing anyway.

  9. Most of those trivia questions were way beyond my level of fandom, but it should really go without saying that it was still fun to listen to. It’s been a while.

    That question about culture and art is something I’ve thought about a lot, but holy crap you guys are definitely right that it would take at least a whole episode to even start to answer it adequately. The problem is, most of the people whom one would think would be qualified to answer–people in academia–may not have as well-rounded a picture as would be ideal, as has been proven many times by the very variable quality of material on the subject.

  10. Well! I’m about 1/3 or so thru the show and I HAVE to throw out a couple of comments just to keep on top of things!

    First up, just flipping thru my 2000 CPM retailer’s catalog, I can lay some science down on the dub/sub VHS pricing issue. While prices were pretty much all over the place, it is safe to say that, on the whole, the ‘industry standard’ was, indeed, dub VHS was $19.99, sub VHS was 29.99. This was consistent all the way to the death of VHS. The usual defense was that since dubbed VHS would sell more, there was a volume of product advantage. This, of course was pretty much ignoring retail reality. Dubs didn’t sell more BECAUSE they were dubs, overall they sold more because they were $10 cheaper.

    And that goes to the retailer as well. They’re in it to make money, remember and a tape at $19.99 clearly has a better chance to sell than one at $29.99. So the dubs got ordered in much heavier volume even to the point that by 2001 sub versions on VHS weren’t even ordered on a corporate level. So they couldn’t even be special ordered! (sez the guy who couldn’t get Outlaw Star V. 10-12 subbed on VHS, nor City Hunter 3-on or Nadia 3-on)

    Not to say that having an anime tape dubbed into English didn’t appeal to a broader market because it did, clearly. There IS a core logical truth to Macek’s assertion “people don’t want to read movies” after all. I feel that on the whole the general stat (again, promoted in the Industry) that dubs outsold subs on a 10-1 basis is very skewed by the price issue. I think that had a company priced their dubs and subs at the same that ratio would have been closer to 3-1. Man, picking up a series from Pioneer was just a brutal thing back then!

    I question the thing about that Gunbuster Science lesson and Sailor Moon. I *think* that lesson had to be something more recent, maybe for the Japanese DVD release or something, as when Gunbuster came out in ’88 those Science Lessons were a selling point on the Laser Discs.

    Nobody started calling Books Nippan ‘Crooks Nippan’ until after Yuji Hiramatsu left the company to return to Japan, Keven Seymore grasped the mail-order and book store sales in his hot little hands and the Dollar weakened against the Yen (1986 when it dropped below 200 Yen to the Dollar for the first time) so their artificial 200% profit margin suddenly became very apparent to everyone. I really need to blog about that in detail.

    More later. 🙂

  11. Why is there comment after comment after comment (plus one that got deleted since it was marked as spam) correcting me on my Gunbuster science lesson response? In the episode, I plain as day said something to the effect of “you realize that you are asking about one of the science lessons that was not added until later and thus never included on any US edition until the Bandai Visual DVD release, right?” Sailor Moon didn’t even begin until the 1990s, a few years after Gunbuster ended. My reason for why Noriko gets confused is 100% accurate. Why are so many people “correcting” me with exactly what I said?

    [goes back and listens] …I see, nobody is actually correcting the question or the answer. Everyone is correcting Gerald saying that Gunbuster came out concurrently with Sailor Moon in response to Clarissa and Erin saying it was older (it is older). You have to specify these things! This is like that time when Dr. Franken could only get out “Stop Shizuma…” thus resulting in a grand scale equivalent of those episodes of Frasier where he misinterprets what someone else said. (I suspect that’s every other episode of Frasier.)

  12. Correction on the first anime DVD to be released in the US, guys: It was definitely Toshinden. I remember this clearly because John O’Donnell was really hot to jump on the DVD bandwagon first, so he rushed that disc out. The release date on Toshinden was March 1997, while Art of Fighting came out in October 1998. My copy of the DVD was one of the very first, handed to me by JOD himself at a convention.

    1. So, none of the Streamline licenses released by Image made the cut? Nope, guess not. CPM retailer’s catalog 1998, right there on page 42, Toshinden.

      And then there was the cutting edge MPEG CD-ROM release of same! Cat. number SSLM-3045, only $19.95! Windows AND Mac compatible! Ah, the ’90s. 🙂

  13. Further:

    Sizzlers weren’t *just* a car, it was the branding for Mattel’s line of battery powered cars (and trains and earthmovers). These cars used a small Ni-Cad battery that was charged (from various sources, the most common was the petrol-pump shaped charger, but the best was the one that plugged into the wall) and then ran like crazy on regular Hot Wheel tracks. But the famous orange track wasn’t enough to contain them, so the amazing Fat Track, 3 cars wide of MANIC racing action, came into being. Man those cars could really go.

    Of course, being the early days of rechargable NI-Cad batteries they would ‘short cycle’ like nobody’s business and soon not be able to hold a decent charge, and they weren’t replaceable, so kids ended up with useless cars. I’m sure that helped kill the line after only a couple of years.

  14. That Gunbuster science lesson with the Sailor Moon reference first appeared on the “Okaerinasai” LD-BOX. You can tell which ones were done later by the “cleaner” animation.

    True story: One day in Japanese class I had to write “Okaeri nasai” on the blackboard. Of course, I had to the “i” backwards like Jung. The teacher got on my case, but I knew the deal.

  15. AWO came just in time to lift my January doldrums! And with Erin? I’m loving it.

    For Clarrisa and Erin: I used to be a horrible reader, but now I’m just a poor reader. Don’t give up!

  16. You guys need to tell me when you talk about Swan on the show! I blame you for this delayed comment. Back in 1997, I found volumes 4-15 of Swan in a random imported from Japan shop where I also picked up my copies of Rose of Versailles. I’ve never managed to find copies of the rest of the series, but I told myself that I’d get around to ordering it from Books Japan eventually. Then CMX started releasing it, so I bought the English version, thinking I’d finally get to finish off the series. CMX closed its doors at roughly the same time as Books Japan, so now I’m faced with overseas shipping. Sigh.

    All of that obscures the key point which is: Daryl, did that comment about the wrong guy indicate shipping preferences, or are you just concerned about having the optimal dance partner?

    On the art reflecting society tip, there was a book published in the late 90’s/early 00s on Japanese pop culture in general that had some really cool information the way Japanese ethnic minorities and disenfranchised groups embraced manga like Star of the Giants and Dagger of Kamui as stories about ethnically Korean and eta protagonists, kind of a Celluloid Closet situation. I don’t remember the other series that were mentioned, nor alas the title of the book. Since societies and cultures are pretty multi-faceted things, I think that commercial products aimed at children and adolescents tends to give you a pretty diluted picture of the society that produces it. Since there’s a simultaneously a larger and more diverse audience for manga, it gives a better look at particular attitudes or ideas.

    One resource that I’ve found extremely useful in reading manga in Japanese is the wwwjdic. When there aren’t any furigana, I find it much easier to use its radical look-up system with the little check-boxes than a kanji dictionary since I’m lousy at judging what radical a particular character will be associated with. I’ve never had the guts to take the JLPT. I did once impress a student with my performance on the Japanese language SAT subject test, but that’s not even the same league.

    Now that there’s not a Japanese bookstore in town, I really begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff I’ve bought over the years. I recent lost a volume of Kawahara Izumi one shots to a tragic leak, and the fact that I probably can’t replace it breaks my heart. It has the second story about the gluttonous pilot and his high school sweetheart in it! Plus the assassin and the croquet team! I’m with Gerald: I just like having my copy of things.

    In closing, Daryl, you should be ashamed for trying to force patriarchal shounen frames on unabashedly shoujo storytelling. You may think you’re having fun as the oppressor, but you’re actually oppressing yourself, man! Gerald, you should feel ashamed for not liking Gintama. Do you have a tumor on your soul or something? I just don’t know about you. Clarissa and Erin, you have nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’m not playing favorites or anything. QED

    1. Daryl, did that comment about the wrong guy indicate shipping preferences, or are you just concerned about having the optimal dance partner?

      Both? As I noted on Twitter four months ago to the day, it’s a little known fact that the various “Pick-Up Artist” methodologies were developed after reading a whole bunch of shojo manga and writing down everything the male romantic leads did. Think about it. “Leonhardt von Christ.” “Erik von Markovik.” Those von’s can’t be trusted. Just look at Victor von Doom.

      Daryl, you should be ashamed for trying to force patriarchal shounen frames on unabashedly shoujo storytelling. You may think you’re having fun as the oppressor, but you’re actually oppressing yourself, man!

      I am but a vessel for delivering THE TRUTH, madam. Just as everyone call tell that Sailor Moon and the Power Rangers are running off the same engine under the hood, all the Big Dogs of manga–as identified by their predilection towards wearing Big Dogs apparel–know that the 49ers (be they San Francisco or Magnificent) revolutionized the world not with an upside-down castle, but by using another’s playbook. Those are seinen layouts!

      Seems like this Swan discussion…

      *puts on shades*

      …just got ducked.

  17. Tomo’s piece on Spirited Away was actually published in Animerica, leading to a dramatic teary-eyed call first thing in the morning to Viz from Andrew Osmond, who was shocked, outraged, and upset that someone had an interpretation of the film different from his own.

    1. I’m sure plenty of people took away something from that film. I thought more about what it was to have a “grandma” myself since I lost some during my lifetime.

    2. Tomo wasn’t simply trying to épater the bourgeois (although he was doing that, I believe, when he free-associated Miyazaki first with Lewis Carroll, then with Tsutomu Miyazaki). In the article, Tomo cited as support for the interpretation a discussion of the film’s underlying themes with Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki that ran in the Japanese edition of PREMIERE (apparently the June 21, 2001 issue).

  18. By the way, Flight of Dragons is currently under WB’s belt these days (along with much of Rankin-Bass’ post-mid 70’s material including the Tolkien TV films, some holiday specials and shows like Thundercats (but excluding The Last Unicorn). They got a burn-on-DVD out for those of us Americans to get if we must (though apparently not ‘remastered’ as some of their other titles are, but it looks pretty good to me).
    http://www.wbshop.com/Flight-of-the-Dragons-The/1000179884,default,pd.html?cgid=WAANIMATION

  19. I can’t believe all the people who know Robot Carnival didn’t make this correction: Tetsuo appeared in the background of Starlight Angel, not the Opening.

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