Year: 2015

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Anime World Order Show # 135 – SeHa Girls WITH NEW ELVES and Heidi Kemps

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:26:23 — 39.6MB)

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Freelance videogame journalist Heidi Kemps of Gaming.moe joins the battle to discuss the recently-concluded short comedy series Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls.

Introduction (0:00 – 28:12)
The year isn’t exactly off to an auspicious start, as we’ve lost two friends: Psychommu Gaijin and Anime Hell contributor Mike Horne (there’s a GoFundMe for the funeral costs), as well as Bill Thomas of the Philadelphia Animation Society, previously featured in group interviews with the “Old Farts of Anime” that we did back in 2008 and 2009. Only MD Geist and/or Laser Fantastic can turn this around. Also, since it’s been a while since the topic was approached, Daryl weighs in on Battle Angel Alita: Last Order by Yukito Kishiro, which has recently concluded. Compare it to what he wrote in his review back in 2008 for Otaku USA. That website, incidentally, is also incidentally why there’s no need to ask for a review of the ninth Crayon Shin-chan movie, The Adult Empire Strikes Back, since that review was done four years ago.

Also, here’s video of Heidi’s bad videogames/kusoge panel at MAGfest:

Review: Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls (28:12 – 1:26:23)
Heidi, Daryl, Clarissa: put down those exciting Sega products! Gerald reviews the recently-concluded simulcast (and recently announced for DVD) of perhaps the greatest of the “inanimate objects anthropomorphized as cute girls” anime: the one where you combine gdgd Fairies with Sega hardware consoles–wait, what? Oh, right. You see, kids, Sega used to have hardware consoles and…eh, forget it. Though the series primarily only focuses on three of the “Sega Hard[ware] Girls” there are quite a few more (there are some larger screenshots here). The system Daryl was forgetting the name of was Robo Pitcher, and as noted in the series it could switch between baseball and tennis.

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Anime World Order Show # 134 – Ardith Carlton, Who Aims to Win Wonderful Tomorrow

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:34:56 — 43.5MB)

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In this episode, we’ve finally managed to get hold of Ardith Carlton! Ardith’s contributions to the early days of American anime fandom are significant, but “The Legend of Success Ardith” is one of hard work and guts in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. These days Ardith lives in Japan, so if that’s your dream then listen on to find out what it takes!

01:45 – Ardith discovers Japanese animation and discusses what it was like for her being into cartoons and Marvel comics circa the 1970s
18:30 – How Ardith first went to Japan while in high school, what her first encounters with unaltered manga and anime were of, and how it all came about
32:55 – Be Forever Yamato and why much of the the July 1980 issue of Animage is burned into Ardith’s brain
47:30 – What anime was running (and re-running) on Japanese television in the summer of 1980
50:55 – Ardith returns to the United States, enters college and eventually discovers other anime fans exist
59:50 – Ardith’s involvement with Space Fanzine Yamato, the first American fanzine created that was devoted to one single anime title. You can reference Steve Harrison’s account over at Let’s Anime. An archive scan of the fanzine itself is presumably somewhere on Cosmo DNA, but I can’t find it. That Spring 1980 issue of Fanfare was also scanned somewhere, and now I can’t find THAT either.
1:01:35 – Coming up with THE SECRET LYRICS~! to Galaxy Cyclone Braiger! In 2015, context for the Ugly Robot Anthem is just one click away.
1:05:35 – Ardith’s work on Robotech Art I and how that experience plus THE ROBOTECH PEOPLE sapped her of all the boundless enthusiasm you’ve heard in her voice up until this point such that she vanished from anime entirely for eleven years
1:15:00 – On what it ultimately took to pull up roots and return to Japan to attend the Winter Comiket after all that time away
1:25:00 – Everything comes full circle as Ardith ends up at her current job working at HobbyLink Japan as a result of that which has transpired before (note: HLJ dot com is a site we dare not directly link to because once you’re looking at it, you’re liable to start wanting all the shiny things)
1:30:30 – Ardith starts to talk about anime song events as documented on her awesomely out-of-date website Anison Central, which would’ve tied into the other big thing she’s involved with nowadays until A TERRORIST ATTACK disrupted the podcast and severed the connection to Japan

If you’re feeling the sting of that shocking finale and need to hear more Ardith Carlton RIGHT NOW, Ardith Carlton: An Awesome Life is a four-part interview with Ardith conducted by Tim Eldred at Anime Weekend Atlanta 2014. Sound off in the comments if you’d like us to have her on again!