Anime World Order Show # 43 – Hey Sanrio, Release Ringing Bell on DVD Already

Daryl reviews the obscure and INCREDIBLY DEPRESSING 1970s film Ringing Bell (from the people who brought you Hello Kitty!), Gerald is quite let down by Kishin Corps, and Clarissa saves the day with Part 2 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. This is perhaps the last episode of 2006, what with Christmas and New Year’s coming.

Introduction (0:00 – 39:34)
We spend all this time talking about two things. First, Daryl lists off all the website changes and mentions that Podcast Pickle is resetting all the favorites counts to 0 again on December 29th, so you’ll have to add us again. We’ve been #2 for several months, so perhaps we can be #1 eventually! Also, we’re now listed on Digg Podcasts, which has a pretty good chance of eclipsing all the other podcast directories aside from maybe iTunes since its voting system is a lot more helpful. If you don’t know what Digg is, GeekNights will explain it for you. If you do know and you use it, go there and like, vote for us. More importantly, vote for the episodes of AWO you liked most of all and if you want, leave some comments there since we have no forums.

Second, Walter Amos left us a voicemail, and since it was ten minutes long, we opted to respond to it in pieces since all of it was interesting. Walter even does our legwork for us, being gracious enough to provide us with the following links:

Let’s News! (39:34 – 1:06:19)
ADV’s licensed Season 2 of Ah My Goddess! Wonder how well that’ll do for them? Guess we’ll never know since the reason they don’t publicize their sales figures is because…hey, look over there! Plus, that new Studio Ghibli movie that apparently isn’t all that good, Gedo Senki, is getting released in the UK (and possibly Japan) before it hits the US. And Masako Nozawa, the voice of Goku but NOT the voice of Doraemon as we stated (that’s Nobuyo Oyama, and she’s the Arkanoid friggin’ MASTER), thinks modern seiyuu are the pits.

Review: Ringing Bell (1:06:19 – 1:29:14)
This is the part where Daryl tries to impersonate Justin Sevakis, but comes up oh so short. This was a movie from the 1970s released by Sanrio–best known for Hello Kitty–under the name Chirin no Suzu. It was dubbed and released here in 1983, completely intact and with nothing done to hide that it was a Japanese cartoon. However, it’s been out of print for decades and there’s no DVD. Daryl’s invoking the statute of limitations on spoilers for this one, but suffice it to say that this might just be the most depressing children’s story ever. Click here to download a 700MB torrent of a VHS capture of this. This has been out of print for decades, so hopefully Sanrio’s lawyers will not have us thrown in jail for the crime of wanting people to see this.

Daryl has some nerve to say that he isn’t sure of where the story originated from considering it says so right in the opening credits.
Here’s Chirin at the start of the tale. Aww, he’s so cute that people the world over would spend millions of dollars on Chirin brand air conditioning units.
Until the Wolf King swoops in and fucks up his Christmas. Daryl wishes he could talk like the Wolf King, or at least find the mixer settings that would enable such a thing.
Chirin is quite distraught that JESUS FUCKING CHRIST GOD DAMN IT WHAT THE CRAP IS ELMER FUDD DOING HERE OUT OF NOWHERE
And that’s when things officially start to take a turn for the nightmarish…

Review: Alien Defender Geo-Armor aka Kishin Corps (1:29:14 – 1:48:30)
Gerald picked this one up at Otakon since he hadn’t seen it and it was something that’s been out in the US since the laserdisc days. People always compared it to Giant Robo. How bad could it possibly be? Well…

Review (manga): Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 2 (1:48:30 – 2:03:40)
We strongly recommend you listen to Clarissa’s review of Part 1 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure before proceeding. Otherwise, this probably won’t make sense. But who are we kidding? Jojo’s probably wouldn’t make sense anyway. But who cares when there’s FIGHTING and GORE GORE GORE? And of course poison “wedding rings” with special antidotes.

This is Joseph Joestar, and he’s a dork. I don’t know why he’s wearing what appears to be three hats stacked on top of each other. I guess one hat just wasn’t enough for the Joestar majesty. Well, at least it’s not merged with his hair. (If you’re not familiar with the hair hat, then you haven’t read Part 3. Don’t worry, we’ll review that one too.)
Joseph tends to use his Hamon for overly elaborate ways of throwing things at people, like coke bottle lids, or tripping them. Of course it’s hard to keep thinking of him as a badass when he does this sort of thing.
This is Joseph with Caesar, his best friend and ally. They’re also both dorks, as evidenced by the fact that they do stupid things like have fights with pasta (and somehow also pigeons and girls) and have dumb moments like this.
This is LisaLisa, and she will totally mess you up. She’s also very mature and level headed, which is good when you’re working with a couple of tards like Joseph and Caesar.
Behold the ultimate asskicking life forms, Wham, AC/DC and Cars. Santana’s not there, but I assure you he was even more naked. Araki sort of rectified the lack of homoeroticism from Part 1 in one fell swoop with these guys.
This is something I think makes Jojo’s fights far more awesome than most shonen fighting show battles. CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS, BITCHES.
Of course, chariot races with vampire horses help too. What, did you think we were joking about that?
Come on, you know you want to be there for this.

Closing (2:03:40 – 2:05:22)
Next time, whenever that is, we’re going to do another “we answer emails” episode. We promise that we’ll actually manage to answer more emails than we got through when we had Dave Merrill on the show back in Show # 33, an episode which is one of our personal favorites.

61 Replies to “Anime World Order Show # 43 – Hey Sanrio, Release Ringing Bell on DVD Already”

  1. Please read this line in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger:

    “You son of a bitch!”

    Daryl, you just cost me $39.03 plus shipping as I’m ordering the R2 of Mind Game. I’m only seeing Yamamoto Seiichi credited for music, not necessarily all of Boredoms (or Vooredoms [with an ‘infinity’ instead of two ‘o’s] or whatever they’re calling themselves today), but that’s quite okay. Yamamoto’s been with Boredoms for a long while, but he’s also been in Omoide Hatoba (best Boredoms side-project band for my money) and ROVO. The guy’s all over the map, musically, and I’d definitely consider myself a fan.

    I remember seeing some stuff about this movie a while back, but I didn’t hear about Yamamoto’s work on this until the podcast today. Sweet!

  2. Just scrolled thru the comments because I was wondering if there was something wrong with my browser, not showing any new posts since show 43. Ah, porn spam. As I am fond of saying, this kind of shit is one of the many problems that is a direct result of my not being Emperor. (Because, were I Emperor, people screwing up blogs I want to read with porn spam would find themselves in the gulag right pronto!)

    I mainly came round because I just wanted to throw in some links to things that I came across this evening that made my head be exploded. Not only is Bell of Chirin itself on youtube, but people are making MUSIC VIDEOS TO IT!!! And oddly, other people are using Chirin’s music to make videos of other things!

    Also to respond to Chris from a while back re: LoGH videos. I have had a video in my head for LoGH based on a song from CHESS for many years and I swear to God one of these days I’ll get around to making it. In the meantime, I have made only one short LoGH video like yours – I stuck the “Gathering the Fleet” music from Space Battleship Yamato (the song I always called “The Gamilon March” before I knew the actual title), and dubbed it over the fortress Iserlohn docking sequence from the first movie. It syncs almost perfectly, time-wise and thematically! And considering Noboru Ishiguro directed both shows, and the voice actors for Kodai and Admiral Okita are also in LoGH (Yang, Merkatz respectively), this adds just one more bit of happy synchronicity!

  3. amos: Have you posted this video anywhere? I’d like to watch it. I’ll also probably link it in the thread on the SomethingAwful.com forums.

  4. Sorry to hear about troubles. Blogger should get off their asses and unlock your account.

    Chirin’s story was interesting. I think all tv should be shown to kids only with parental supervision. If an adult feels their brain turning to mush, they shouldn’t be showing it to a kid either. If serious issues are raised, they can be discussed.

    Finding “safe” shows to babysit kids with is an abdication of parental responsibility.

    [Bob]

  5. w. amos said…

    Just scrolled thru the comments because I was wondering if there was something wrong with my browser, not showing any new posts since show 43. Ah, porn spam. As I am fond of saying, this kind of shit is one of the many problems that is a direct result of my not being Emperor. (Because, were I Emperor, people screwing up blogs I want to read with porn spam would find themselves in the gulag right pronto!)

    I don’t know either. Had to get the latest show from my PSP’s RSS catcher.

    I mainly came round because I just wanted to throw in some links to things that I came across this evening that made my head be exploded. Not only is Bell of Chirin itself on youtube, but people are making MUSIC VIDEOS TO IT!!! And oddly, other people are using Chirin’s music to make videos of other things!

    Too bad that wasn’t a great film the song was stuck to, but I guess it works to some people (I often think of the music and reminding me awfully of the kind of stuff I would aquate to Japan too easily anyway.

    Have to go grabe the DVD that has “Chirin no Suzu” on from CD Japan and get a A++ copy out there to the masses!

    Also to respond to Chris from a while back re: LoGH videos. I have had a video in my head for LoGH based on a song from CHESS for many years and I swear to God one of these days I’ll get around to making it. In the meantime, I have made only one short LoGH video like yours – I stuck the “Gathering the Fleet” music from Space Battleship Yamato (the song I always called “The Gamilon March” before I knew the actual title), and dubbed it over the fortress Iserlohn docking sequence from the first movie. It syncs almost perfectly, time-wise and thematically! And considering Noboru Ishiguro directed both shows, and the voice actors for Kodai and Admiral Okita are also in LoGH (Yang, Merkatz respectively), this adds just one more bit of happy synchronicity!

    That’s cool. The way I was going by it, I was making a joke over what much different a show could e if it had a different theme song, and in this case, a Japanese anime using an American theme or vice-versa.

    I think it has more to do with my childhood in having this interest in watching a show based on how it was presented in it’s OP sequences (of which we’ve lost touch with in domestic productions as of recent years due to the usual timing constrants that limit such need). Worst I had for an idea was to synch Tenchi Muyo! with the Family Guy theme a few years back but didn’t get around to (also don’t really want to get too technical with things like making the anime characters move their lips to the song either).

    I made a couple more but haven’t gotten around to YouTubin’ anything just yet (somehow I attempted to overdub the crappy GoBots opening with the insrumental OP to Grendizer and it nearly failes due to the shorter time lengtt of said opening, but it sill looked cute to me, and Shunsuke Kikuchi kicks ass anyway).

    And yeah, AMV Hell’s OK, but I don’t see myself watching it over and over since the novelty only works once in a while.

  6. Hey guys, I just spent ten minutes looking through Blogger and Google websites for an email address or a form I could use to tell the support folks that this was a real blog, and that I would like them to reauthorize your account. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a single one.

    Do you know of an email address or anything we can use to support you in this?

  7. I have told my friends the plot of one Crying Freeman story (the one with cologne and BUGNUG) and one Golgo 13 story (the wiseguy one), and they think I’m making the shit up.

  8. amos: Have you posted this video anywhere? I’d like to watch it. I’ll also probably link it in the thread on the SomethingAwful.com forums.

    halojonesfan: No, the only time I put this together was on a VHS tape to fill out a tape to a friend with some LoGH fansubs on it. I don’t think the tape could be easily located anymore, but as I think about it, it would be fairly easy to replicate in iMovie, so maybe I’ll give that a shot. If I do I’ll definitely post it on youtube and link it here.

  9. I’ve been going through the older shows between releases, since I don’t have anything better to do most of the time (even at work!) and well shit, I think I saw WaterShip Down when I was a kid. I’ve been trying to remember the name for a long time. All I remembered about it was that it had rabbits, it was pretty gorey and thinking this is on F**up cartoon (makes wonder how young I was when I saw it).

    Thanks for the great show.

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