Anime World Order Show # 225 – 2×2 Ninja Consultant Nonsense Trivia, 2023 Edition

After vanishing–NINJA vanishing–for nearly a decade to start raising a family in NYC, we’re reunited with Erin and Noah of the long-defunct Ninja Consultant podcast (and Livejournal!) for the annual pre-Thanksgiving tradition that is THE TRIVIA EPISODE~!. Lots of new gimmicks this time around, be it game types or the fact that our Patreon supporters at the $5 and up tiers were able to watch this carnage unfold live on video courtesy of our Discord! Just take a gander at what you missed out on.

Introduction (0:00 – 9:51)
Just who are Erin and Noah, anyway? How do we know who they are? What made them fans? These answers would be known to those daring enough to have listened to the earliest episodes, but for the benefit of those of you with lives we ask them to recap matters as best as frazzled parents of two can. Why, they didn’t even mention how they got married on the Vomit Comet by Lord British! AND THANK GOD FOR THAT. Claims that certain cosplay incidents never happened are to be taken semi-spuriously.

Trivia: The Um…Trivianing (9:51 – 25:43)
The initial warm-up round is the usual AWO Trivia episode shenanigans and hijinks. You know the drill: there’s categories that very accurately describe the content of the questions to be answered, and then everybody gets asked stuff and objects the entire time.

Name That Tune: This Time, Actually Working Edition (25:43 – 1:25:00)
Last year, Gerald attempted this without testing everything correctly, but not to worry! THIS year, he’s got all the sound clips up and running. The catch is that unlike most Anime Name That Tune offerings you’d see at a convention, these are all instrumental tracks! Thrill and marvel as the gang doesn’t know the melody to the extremely popular for decades global hits you adore!

Anime Family Feud: Team AWO vs Team Ninja Consultant (1:25:00 – 2:31:34)
BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! 150 wackadoos were surveyed for a variety of thrilling anime-related responses, and it’s a race to see which of us can correctly guess what the heck you maniacs said…which was at times ridiculously off the mark and at other times ridiculously on POINT. While everybody else is of the Steve Harvey persuasion, Daryl grew up more of a Ray Combs guy, with a bit of Richard Dawson sprinkled in. The buzzer sound effect has been adjusted to suit. The survey SAYS…?

Anime World Order Show # 224 – The Crime Is Drinking Budweiser After Showering, The Sentence is Death

Mike Toole returns to the show for this MONSTER CHILLER HORROR edition of AWO released on Halloween, in which Gerald reviews the polar opposite of The Poe Clan: Go Nagai’s Shuten Doji! Now that we’ve done this, the YouTubers can follow in our wake and make this one a meme darling.

Introduction (0:00 – 38:58)
We check in with Mike and what he’s been up to, Discotek Media and otherwise. It’s been a few years since Mike was last on, and we didn’t even get to see him this year at all since none of us went to Otakon this year. Plus, we finally play and respond to a listener voicemail after months of having it downloaded and sitting on the desktop waiting to be played. Look, eventually those shortcuts just blend into the background. This then makes us talk about the usual for 39 minutes: things currently airing this season, stuff that just came out on on Netflix which we haven’t had a chance to binge through prior to recording, the state of physical media anime publishing, memeing on Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Rintaro, and so on.

Review: Shuten Doji (38:58 – 1:45:41)
As part of his revenge against the world, Gerald unearths another generally forgotten (at the time of this recording) OAV that embodies everything the words “Go Nagai” emblazoned on the VHS box cover entails. Shuten Doji is exactly the sort of thing that gave “anime” its negative stigma in the US which never fully went away even after Pokémon came out. It’s violent, sexually crass, ill-paced in narrative, prone to extreme bouts of logic-stretching convenience, and it has got one terrible English dub. In the altered words of the late Menahem Golan, now zeees eeeez a AD VISION! In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing we crave–well, except for Clarissa because she has sense–the way people nowadays crave being reincarnated in a world governed by generic RPG rules. Never before has there been an anime with a more cogent moral lesson to teach its viewers, which is “don’t adopt children.” Any similarities to the classic creature of Japanese myth are um, tenuous at best.

The plot to Superman? The future plot to GaoGaiGar? I suppose he did become the light…
A rare moment in which the leading lady Miyuki is clothed. That is remedied moments later.
As the closing theme to Gattiger the Super Car famously asked, why is there the shadow of my mother over my despicable enemy!
AD Vision made merchandise for Shuten Doji, such as this T-shirt. If you have an original one of these, people will buy them off you for hundreds of dollars because they have trust funds.