Classics – Page 2 – Anime World Order Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:40:38 — 46.9MB)

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It’s our 250th episode, except it’s actually closer to 332! No better time for Gerald to review 1983’s Prime Rose: A Time Slip of 10,000 Years by Osamu Tezuka, now officially released in English. Nudity! Eye gouging! Beheading! Slavery, and not even the B.S. “ethical” kind you see on a curiously elevated basis within contemporary isekai! All this and so much more in a movie meant for the entire family!

Introduction (0:00 – 43:40)
We certainly weren’t expecting to show me the way to you this year, but out of nowhere Sentai Filmworks has announced they will be releasing 1984’s Heavy Metal L-Gaim on Blu-Ray in one complete collection. It’s $65 to preorder it, and while there’s certainly a possibility that it could go on sale later in the year, you are rolling the dice on that since when it comes to these classic anime releases it’s just as likely to quickly go out of print. For now, Panzer World Galient and Queen Millennia remain readily available (and have gone on sale), but all of the previous 1980s Yoshiyuki Tomino mecha titles Sentai Filmworks released–Space Runaway Ideon, Blue Gale Xabungle, Aura Battler Dunbine–are now out of print. After going over some fan feedback to our previous episode, we talk about what current anime we’re watching and manga we’re currently reading. This segues us into discussions regarding the contemporary reticence for anime adaptations to deviate from their source material, and since everything we say is never QUITE up to date, in the time since this recording was made you can once again purchase the Discotek releases of Urusei Yatsura and soon Lady Oscar: The Rose of Versailles courtesy of MediaOCD’s Discotek Deep Dive section.

Because Apple hates everybody and their draconian rules dictate what everybody else must do, it seems that later this year Patreon will be forcing us to a monthly billing rather than a per-creation one. We therefore are throwing down the gauntlet. For if we get to 350 subscribers, we will review Scarlet by Mamoru Hosoda! Will it make us even more angry than Gundam Narrative? ONLY YOU CAN MAKE US ANSWER.

Review – Prime Rose: A Time Slip of 10,000 Years (43:40 – 1:40:38)
SkySet Entertainment is a newly-formed localization studio, and their first release comes courtesy of Tezuka Productions, whose unofficial slogan ever since the gold rush days of licensing Tezuka’s manga may as well have been “we’ll license out stuff to anybody!” 1983’s Prime Rose: A Time Slip of 10,000 Years is one of several made-for-TV movies created for Nippon Television Network’s annual 24-hour “Love Saves the Earth” charity fundraiser. Originally released in a print-on-demand Blu-Ray authored by SkySet themselves, a better version is now available courtesy of AnimEigo/MediaOCD. You can also stream Prime Rose on Retrocrush in Japanese as well as English dubbed. For those with Amazon Prime subscriptions, Prime Rose is also available on Prime Video.

Some might find the narrative of this film to be most illogical. (This episode incidentally is posted on the 11 year anniversary of Leonard Nimoy’s death.)

The sword is good. The protocol droid for Human-Cyborg Relations is evil, like the penis.

Prime Rose’s hair is in fact purple, not red as Daryl said. She may not have been a commonly used member of Tezuka’s Star System, but she still made it into that Astro Boy GBA game.

Beware, future charioteers riding horse-bulls: the fire breathed from the butthole dragon causes instant petrification!

Most of Tezuka’s traditional “stars” do not appear in Prime Rose outside of brief background appearances. This coliseum crowd shot is the only appearance of all these guys. Can YOU name them all?

Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:29:09 — 68.7MB)

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0In this episode, by popular request Daryl reviews the 1998 sci-fi Western Outlaw Star, which we all remember so little about it’s almost like we’re seeing it for the first time. The original Toonami Generation is now middle-aged, after all.

Introduction (0:00 – 1:03.22)
Anime Boston is just two weeks away; we’d better start working on all those panels we’re doing, huh? For now, it’s another new anime season, and another batch of titles to check out. We talk about what we’re watching, since there’s a fair bit of good stuff airing right now. But also, Gerald saw a movie that displeased him mightily. We spend about 45 minutes discussing this.

But then we also talk about the incredibly short print runs of both manga and anime these days, which means we have no choice but to bring up the fact that the recent policy decisions being undertaken by the government are now having tangible effects on our existences of watching cartoons, playing videogames, and going to fan conventions. This is less than 15 minutes worth of discussion, but we know this is all anyone will pretend we talked about. So look: we’d love to stick to just talking about anime and avoid politics anything, but politics thinks otherwise. If want to argue about this, we will just delete/hide your comments without responding or showing them to anyone.

Rough news all around, and while it’s affecting merchandise right now (model kits, toys, apparel), printed materials are supposed to be exempt from all this tariff junk as are goods from Canada and Mexico that are compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). That should theoretically include most authored anime Blu-Rays and UHDs…except since we recorded this they’re talking about levying tariffs on foreign-produced media. Can that actually happen? Realistically not, but we’ve been saying that about a lot of things lately that are happening in the dumbest possible way. As The Comics Journal succinctly put it, “they might fuck us up at any moment.”

This is a unique time in history, and not in a good way.

Never in our lives have we been unable to preorder otaku goods because of who’s running the government. These are not things that can (or should) ever be shifted to domestic production.

There was no plan of action or implementation period because nobody making these decisions thought them through first.

One day, someone is going to pretend all of this was no big deal and that it was all blown out of proportion. So we’ll take the screenshots now, because who knows if there’ll even still be an Internet Archive of web snapshots in the future.

Review: Outlaw Star (1:03:22 – 2:29:08)
Daryl reviews a series that has been highly requested over the years, presumably because Outlaw Star aired during what people now nostalgically refer to as the “golden age” of Toonami/Adult Swim: that time during their early inceptions where they were first showing anime nationwide, effectively creating a brand new wave of anime fandom that spanned wider than fansubs or retail store rentals/releases had ever done before. Outlaw Star’s hybrid of Eastern mysticism with science fiction and the tropes of the American Western made it reasonably accessible to audiences who did not have prior knowledge of Japan, but the fact that it aired concurrently with two other space Westerns, one of which was Cowboy Bebop (the TV series of which wasn’t technically made by Bones like we said on account of the studio not existing until a few months after Cowboy Bebop TV was made, such that Bebop TV is also by Sunrise albeit by a different team, but the founders of Bones were the same people who made Bebop), means it is forever destined to be thought of as lesser by comparison even 27 years later. Nevertheless, we’ll try to evaluate it separately from that, seeing as how it’s been 27 years and all.