Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine "The Anime Thread" Thread

I saw some of Nausicaa on TV, but not all of it, but I did see all of Castle of Cagliostro (did I spell it right?).

You did spell it right.

That movie is so much fun I can't believe they didn't hand Miyazaki the Lupin 111 franchise.

I saw some of the Lupin episodes that they showed on Adult Swim.

THE HERCULOIDS (think "Johnny Weismuller Tarzan in space") was created by Alex Toth for Hanna-Barbera, just like SPACE GHOST (think "Batman in space") the year before.

THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN (think "Kamandi all grown up", heh) was created by Steve Gerber, Alex Toth, and Jack Kirby for Ruby-Spears, a studio comprised of animators who'd left Hanna-Barbera and were trying to do something better. In this case, Toth designed the 3 main characters, but Jack Kirby designed EVERYTHING ELSE. The entire show looks, feels, read and even SOUNDS like a Kirby comic (heh). It feels more to me like a Kirby comic than ANY cartoons that were ever based on Kirby comics. Maybe because he was actually working on the show.

What, no Gatchaman fans? I loved it as Battle of the Planets as a kid, even though they butchered it. (Seriously. They didn't even translated it. They chopped out the violent scenes then made up a story to go with the rest of the animation and added in the most annoying robot ever to try and explain what didn't make sense.)

I never saw that, but I did see Voltron.

So, which anime had the best "Monsters of the Day"? I think Sailor Moon. What do you guys think?

For the monsters, I prefer the tokusatsu stuff like Ultraman and Kamen Rider.

Some of the anime shows do OK, though. What I've seen from Bleach and D. Gray-Man looks impressive.

I absolutely love one of the opening themes for D. Gray-Man, but Bleach... did you know the artist for the comic is so lazy as to drawing backgrounds that he gave all the characters the ability to fly so they can fight in the sky?

Well, I chose the monsters in Sailor Moon because they're are different varieties of them. Youma, Cardians, Droids, Daimons, Lemures, and Phages.

That's kinda clever, actually.

Certainly doesn't seem to have hurt the series' popularity.

I know, still, it's the same reason I fell out of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, it repeats. The main characters have to fight people to gain the "ultimate" battle move, and then they do it again and again and again...

Oh yeah.

Nobody hits the repeat button like Japan. If the story isn't reset so the characters have to essentially start over again, you get something like the Super Sentai franchise which reboots the same basic formula every year.

It can still be fun, though, when done well.

At least with Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena they had the good sense to END it.

Sure, Sailor Moon might have been repetitive, but each season explored and fully explained the history behind her abilities, her past and her ultimate future as the strongest Sailor Senshi, and the brightest light of the universe, whereas Bleach and Pokemon just keeps adding more and more, it never stops.

In Revolutionary Girl Utena, there was only ONE power, and while at the end it didn't recreate the Earth or destroy the major villain, it did something much more important.

Although with most of Rumiko Takahashi's works, they do go on for a while, but she does keep it interesting, especially the music.

One Pound Gospel and Mermaid Saga were both shorter than most of her works... One Pound Gospel went on hiatus for at least ten years.

Maison Ikkoku, while long, was appropriate for it's length as real time actually passed.

I didn't think to mention this earlier but the site crunchyroll.com offers free, legal streaming of a bunch of anime, including Skip Beat which is my favourite manga. The stuff there isn't super popular, but it covers a lot of genres and has some old classics like Captain Harlock and Black Jack, that I'm going to get around to watching one of these days.

Meet Panty and Stocking. And Garterbelt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shHZmwq9X1Q

No, that's a kiddy version.
The one I'm thinking of is real people illustrated, sort of.
I'll think of it, someday.
The title is the main boy's name, a blonde with a white tie around his head.

Has anyone mentioned one of the original series to come from Japan, the one with the space submarine and all of the fighter pilots and the older, gray bearded captain?
It was on for quite awhile and very popular.

The thing about Pokemon is that it just doesn't repeat, he goes to a different region, with mostly different people and mostly new pokemon.
This year's have been fairly inventive, with new types of pokemon contests and some actual growth in the main characters, Brock, anyway.
Yugio grew up, too and has a very dark and involved story.

The Z story I mentioned was DragonBall Z.
Dorian loved that show.
I still have a couple of his action figures for that show, from McDonalds, I think.

Outdoor Miner - thanks for all of that wonderful info!

Hmm... a space submarine... something similar comes to mind. Nadia: The Mystery of Blue Water.

The original Yu-Gi-Oh wasn't about the card game. The style was that each episode had this incredibly cruel or mean person doing something to Yugi and his friends. The Millennium Puzzle he wore would bring out Dark Yugi in order to teach that person a lesson with a "shadow game", and usually the person would try to cheat but still lose. Example:

This beautiful but mean teacher with a habit of enforcing strict and stupid rules. Dark Yugi and herself had to play a game of putting a broken mirror back together, but they had to wear blindfolds and gloves. The teacher takes off her blindfold and puts the mirror together. Her punishment: Her beautiful face crumbles like a puzzle and reveals what she looks like on the inside, a withered old hag. From that point, she has to put on heavy amounts of make-up to look like her old self, and any time she tries to act mean or cruel, her face will crack.

I'm surprised I didn't seen this thread earlier as I'm a huge fan of various manga/anime series.

>Has anyone mentioned one of the original series to come from Japan, the one with the space submarine and all of the fighter pilots and the older, gray bearded captain?
It was on for quite awhile and very popular.

Candle your probably thinking of Star Blazers, which was based on the series Space Battleship Yamato, one of Leiji Matsumoto's most famous works.

As for the repetitiveness of various manga and anime it's hardly as if american comics and animation (as well as other countries) aren't guilty of that quite often themselves. We as LOSH fans should especially be keenly aware of that fact.

The 2nd Japanese cartoon I ever saw, I ran across the SAME day as my first... ASTRO BOY. Once again, I tuned in in mid-episode, but it caught my attention and grabbed me and wouldn't let go. For years, I used to watch it over and over. Unlike 8TH MAN, I did manage to see the very 1st episode once... only once. (Until about 3 years ago, when I tuned it in about a 1/3rd of the way in, and couldn't believe someone was running it, it hadn't been seen in Philly since 1970 at the latest.)

A scientist's young son is killed in a car crash. In a fit of madness, he gets all his colleagues to help him on a new project... building the most advanced ROBOT ever created, and making it in the IMAGE of his DEAD son. At first he's overjoyed, it's like his son is alive again! But the man's INSANITY tragically shows thru when he becomes annoyed-- then enraged-- by the fact that his "son" is NOT GROWING. He's created this WONDERFUL being-- a robot who actually thinks and HAS FEELINGS like a real person-- but because he's "not real"-- he eventually can't stand the sight of him, and (GASP!) sells him to a CIRCUS. I dunno about you, but this strikes me somehow as even more tragic than the origin of 8TH MAN. (I'm actually getting EMOTIONAL just typing this.)

Well, ASTRO BOY is saved from a life of slavery by the kindly Professor Elephant (he's got a big schnozz, you see...), who manages to get the boy away from his "owner" and ADOPTS him and treats him as if he were his own son... but in a much more healthy way than the boy's creator ever did.

And, because this "boy" has all these "super-powers" (he can fly, he's super-strong, etc.), well, naturally, becoming a super-hero just comes natural.


I LOVED this show when I was a kid... but strangely, when I started to grow up, it began to make me feel uncomfortable, something 8TH MAN never did. Looking back, I think there were 2 reasons for this. First, it was about a BOY, and teenagers don't want a young boy as their hero. Second, there was so much real, genuine HUMAN EMOTION in so many episodes of this show, and in my own life, things became increasingly restricted, more and more, and the show began to represent what I DIDN'T have. (A healthy home life.)


Decades later, watching the few episodes I was able to on Cartoon Network (Saturday nights, 1:57 AM-- that's right, they started it EARLY every week, the idiots), I was able to appreciate the show all over again. The mix of adventure, human emotions and outright SLAPSTICK COMEDY was a joy to behold.


I've seen an episode or two of a later version of this show... sadly, it wasn't 1/10th as good or as inspired as the original.


1966 was a real banner year for me...

Naruto, perhaps?

YES!


Now, what was the name of the spacesubmarine show?
SUPER famous classic!

In the old days (the 60's & 70's), new shows tended to arrive, even on the local stations that ran syndicated reruns, twice a year-- September, and January (more or less). September '66 was an absolute EXPLOSION of wonderful shows from all fronts, and that included the local stations running imports.

Philly's Channel 48 got ahold of 3 shows, presumably all with a small number of episodes, that they decided to run in rotation during the SAME time slot-- 6 PM. It went like this:

Monday -- GIGANTOR
Tuesday -- KIMBA, THE WHITE LION
Wednesday -- STINGRAY
Thursday -- KIMBA, THE WHITE LION
Friday -- GIGANTOR

Strange but true!

GIGANTOR, I learned many years later, was the very 1st "giant robot" ever from Japan. It had a fun theme song, nasty but cartoony villains, and, apparently, LOADS of "violence"-- so much that GIGANTOR soon became one of the chief targets of anti-violence censor groups who, having already managed to tone down Prime Time, now set their sights on "children's television".

I don't recall if I ever saw the 1st episode of GIGANTOR. I know it was about an inventor who builds a giant robot, a young boy, Jim Sparks, who CONTROLS it with a small, hand-held remote unit, and a uniformed police character slightly less idiotic than the one on 8TH MAN. If memory serves, the villains tended to have two recurring goals-- conquering the world, and trying to get their hands on GIGANTOR, so they could use HIM to conquer the world. This formula would later be repeated on the live-action show, JOHNNY SOKKO AND HIS FLYING ROBOT.

GIGANTOR never stuck in my head as much as the earlier B&W cartoons, although it did inspire me to give my own comic-book character-- a young boy-- HIS own giant robot. I guess at age 7, I must have thought, didn't every kid hero have one? (Hanna-Barbera's FRANKENSTEIN JR. debuted on CBS the SAME week GIGANTOR turned up on Channel 48. What a month that was.)

Many years later, I managed to rent a tape of the show, and sat down with my best friend to watch it for the first time in decades. I can't really say if it aged well or not... suffice to say, it wasn't that well-written, but that may explain why the episodes didn't stick in my mind the way 8TH MAN or ASTRO BOY had.

I think Actor Lad got it when he mentioned Star Blazers.

Speaking of which, there's a live action version set to be released in Japan in December.