Month: January 2006

Daryl talks about the Often Overlooked theatrical anime classic Hols (Horus?), Prince of the Sun. Gerald reviews the City Hunter sequel Angel Heart, and Clarissa picks up from part of the discussion in the last episode to talk about fansubs, scanlations, and their relevance in anime fandom today.

Faced with insurmountable obstacles such as Gerald being out of the country, Daryl declaring himself Mayor and assaulting his constituents with pies on the coldest night of the year (click here for pictures), and Clarissa being a girl, our second episode experienced many untimely delays in getting everyone together to record. But we’re back and better than ev…er, marginally improved!

Introduction (0:00 – 11:10)

We read excerpts from some of the listener feedback and respond. Be sure to send us email at animeworldorder@gmail.com with your name, where you’re from, and what you think of the show and we’ll take your advice under consideration! This week we’ve all decided to get headsets, record the show at 44100 Hz, and ensure that the left and right audio channels are the same volume for the whole show! Please let us know if you encounter any issues with the sound quality. Next time around, we’ll try recording everyone’s voices on separate tracks the way we should have been doing from the get-go.

Let’s News! (11:10 – 20:58)

We follow-up on last week’s new items by mentioning Bandai Visual USA’s homepage is now up, then after proclaiming the superiority of the Emotion logo with the vector Easter Island heads note that this webpage which Gerald misreads the URL for during the broadcast and nobody catches him on it contains side by side comparisons of the audio from the Japanese Macross, Robotech, and ADV’s English dub. We’ll go easy and not zero in on the “pudknocker” line. As for this week’s [outdated] news, the author of Slam Dunk has been accused of plagiarism, and we ponder anime’s future with this whole Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD thing since this was recorded around CES time.

• Mainichi Daily News article regarding Slam Dunk plagiarism allegations
• Site comparing NBA photos to Slam Dunk drawings side-by-side
• Official Blu-Ray website
• Official HD-DVD website
• Engadget’s comparison between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD

Anime Hell Promo (20:58 – 2:31)

AnimeHell.org sent us the first in what will be a series of promos, but since everyone was off at Ohayocon doing Anime Hell there, the promo was actually just a trailer to Zardoz. Uh oh, better not tell Steve Harrison’s mom! You can get plenty of other silly movie trailers and much, much more by visiting the site! Anime Hell: it’s coming to a convention near you! If you’ve got promos, email us with them and we’ll intersperse a few of them throughout the show to break things up a bit.

Often Overlooked (22:31 – 35:45)

Daryl tells us all about Hols, Prince of the Sun, only he forgets to look at the notes he took while watching the film that would help assure him that what he was saying would have some basis in fact. For example, contrary to what is stated, Studio Ghibli does in fact consist of MORE than just two people!

• Anime News Network’s Hols, Prince of the Sun page
• Helen McCarthy’s book on Hayao Miyazaki

Rotating Segment – Fandom Stuff (35:45 – 48:42)

Clarissa leads off in a discussion about fansubs, scanlations (man, I hate that word), and their relevance/necessity in anime fandom. Eventually everyone chimes in and the conversation progresses like…well, the same way it always does.

• ICv2 interview regarding The Anime Network

Review (48:42 – 1:02:21)

Gerald handles the review this week, which is for the first six episodes of Angel Heart, the new sequel to City Hunter. Note that this contains spoilers for those episodes and probably also City Hunter. Gerald wishes it to be known in this space that Tsukasa Hojo is the author of City Hunter, a fact he forgot to mention in the review. Actually, he kept saying the author was Tetsuo Hara. Clearly Daryl’s influence is spreading like a virus.

• Official Angel Heart webpage (Japanese)
• Official Tsukasa Hojo webpage (Japanese)

Closing (1:02:21 – 1:04:20)

We wrap things up by doing the obligatory begging people to rate and review us on sites like iTunes, Podcast Pickle, and so on and so forth before moving on to the next episode preview. Next time (which will be much sooner than the last delay between episodes), we’re spitting in the face of common sense and dedicating the entire show to mecha, which just might be the least popular genre of anime in this day and age. Look forward to Daryl’s review of Gundam SEED Destiny: Final Plus, Gerald’s creator spotlight on Shoji Kawamori, and Clarissa’s choice for Often Overlooked is King of Braves: GaoGaiGar! See? The Often Overlooked segment doesn’t HAVE to be about old stuff after all!

For Show # 5 we talk about why “voting with your dollars” doesn’t really work, discuss the Often Overlooked classic anime They Were Eleven, and conclude with Part 1 of our interview with Patrick Macias, author of “Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo” and the Most Dangerous Man Alive.

The Patrick Macias interview was as good as we’d imagined, and since Patrick is more machine than man, he was able to stay with us as we recorded for about five hours. I haven’t got the heart to pare it down, so based on listener feedback we’ve decided to try going with longer segments while simultaneously dropping the quality settings down to make the file smaller. This one’s encoded at 64 Kbps 22.050 KHz as opposed to our typical 96 kbps 44.100 KHz, so let us know if the sound quality is too awful to bear and I’ll upload a higher quality encode.

Introduction (0:00 – 9:25)

Since the segments are longer this time around, instead of having three 15 minute segments we’ll have pretty much one that takes up most of the time. We respond to your emails and deny allegations of being nice to one another.

Let’s News! (9:25 – 20:59)

Tokyopop lays people off, prompting Daryl to complain about so-called “OEL manga.” The prices for the Patlabor 1 rerelease have been set, prompting Daryl to complain about stuff costing too damn much and how the tactic of “voting with your dollars” just doesn’t work. Daryl feels like complaining about something, prompting Daryl to complain about the terrible subtitle inaccuracies on the Zeta Gundam box set, which in turn leads to Daryl complaining about how the 2-disc rereleases of Zeta Gundam have fixed subtitles and Bandai told nobody and offered no exchange program. Do you notice a pattern developing here?

Promo: Anime HELL (20:59 – 22:16)

Sixty thousand volts of black power will course through your veins as you hear this classic gem of badfilm.

Often Overlooked: They Were Eleven (22:16 – 44:52)

Clarissa talks all about the overlooked sci-fi shoujo classic They Were Eleven, which all of you should watch considering it costs $10 on DVD, people!

• Obligatory ANN link
• A They Were Eleven fansite with screenshots
• Information on Hagio Moto
• A page about Ikeda Ryoko…by the way, Clarissa writes these names last name first, Japanese style
• Takemiya Keiko
• Yamagashi Ryouko
• Yumiko Oshima

Interview — Patrick Macias, the Most Dangerous Man Alive, Part 1 (44:52 – 58:47)

Our very first guest on the show! Patrick Macias is an expert on Japanese pop culture who is smarter and cooler than all of us. He is the author of Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion as well as Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo, both of which should be available at bookstores near you. If not, there’s always Amazon! He’s often referred to as “the Hunter S. Thompson of anime fandom that natively speaks English” by those who read his almighty blog, and by the time this interview is over, you’ll know why.

This interview ran for about five hours in all, and I just don’t have the heart to edit it down the way I would my own segments. So what I’ll do is this: I’ll release the remaining parts of the interview in roughly one hour segments, each segment of which will loosely center around one particular topic. For instance, one segment would pretty much be all about Kazuo Koike, even though we’ll go off on wild and crazy tangents.

Closing (58:47 – 60:14)

So the episode doesn’t just abruptly end, I recorded some sort of closing here. It was 1:30 AM when I did that. It is 3:30 AM now. I have work in four hours. Something tells me my vote will be for the one hour interview segments to be posted in lieu of actual episodes instead of in addition to. But while I’m here, it seems we have another iTunes issue. The show descriptions in iTunes always appear as one giant block of text with no line breaks in them. Anyone know how to fix that? Ideally I’d want the iTunes show description to just be the Comments in our ID3v2 tag, but for now I’ve edited every post to start with a short summary of the episode.