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

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:45:41 — 48.5MB)

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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.