I don’t know shit about anime.
Never watched it much. Didn’t grow up on it. Never cared about it. I watched Voltron every now and then when I was in third grade, but that doesn’t count. Everybody watched Voltron back then. And besides there are no fetish-y schoolgirls in it.
Back in the video store days, I rented the early chapters of a few series here and there (can’t remember any of the titles) and the occasional feature, but nothing ever stuck with me. I remember I even found them confusing to watch. I never followed any series to the end. I never stayed the anime path. I was never a weeb, just your regular ol’ dweeb.
It has come to my attention though, as I sail the internet high seas and even talk to the occasional stinky real life person once every few months, that there are people out there who are OBSESSED with this junk. It’s all they watch. I run across these anime freaks all of the time. I trip over them every Saturday night on my way to the barn dance. I see this so often that I’m beginning to wonder if I’m missing out. Maybe this stuff is cool. Maybe I’d be into it if I put a little more time into it. Maybe I’ve been living my life all WRONG.
So, here’s the start of a series in which I feel my way around this topic. I have no idea what I’m doing and there are so many people on the internet spouting opinions about anime that, for now, I’m just going ignore all of it. It’s too much. I’m not going to go through somebody’s list of the “classics”. I’d rather fumble around. It’s what I do best. No matter what, you can always count on me to flounder about like a clumsy tool. (Though if you have suggestions for me, feel free to share. Just please don’t pile fifty-eight of ’em on me all at once. Keep it manageable.)
Also, for the time being, I will do NO research on anything that I write about here. This series is NOT done in the internet know-it-all spirit. I’m not gonna skim Wikipedia articles and then pretend to be an authority.
No, I’m just (figuratively) a guy in a video store, plucking stuff off the shelves because it looks cool. I watch ’em. I talk about ’em. For the purpose of this series, I never even heard of Wikipedia. We don’t get the internet on my side of town. The nuclear power plant fucks up the signal.
I’m excited… I think.
So, without further ado, LET’S ANIME!
(True fans use the word “anime” as a verb, right? I know I would!)
So, I choose to begin with Bubblegum Crisis for a few reasons:
a) It’s one of those venerable names that you can’t help but see around if you’ve ever wasted decades of your life in the various worlds of comic books and cult movies and cartoons, so I was curious.
b) It’s streaming right there on Night Flight Plus, the greatest cheap, sleeper streaming service out there. It’s packed with cool shit, but no one’s talking about it, maybe because no one under 35 knows what Night Flight is. This has been teasing me for a while. I figured I’d give it a shot. (Let’s also note that the version on Night Flight is in Japanese and is English-subtitled, which is best, I think)
c) It’s from 1987, which is Grandpa Jason’s comfort zone. I danced the jitterbug with the best of ’em back then, lemme tell ya.
And I’m happy to say that Bubblegum Crisis is 80s as shit! I’m talking synthesizer music galore, goofball pop songs that only nostalgic mental cases like me would enjoy, plenty of that Blade Runner thing happening in its vision of Tokyo as an urban war zone in the year 2032 and sequences that steal some of the best stuff from Streets of Fire.
Its premise is great and ridiculous.
You’ve got this girl band called Priss and The Replicants (blatant Blade Runner reference) who don leather and ripped jeans and outrageous arm bands and wigs and rock it regularly on stage, dropping hot licks and songs about tortured love, at the Hot Legs Club deep in the graffiti-strewn inner city.
Meanwhile, nobody knows that they’re also a privately run task force called The Knight Sabers. They disguise themselves in weaponized Tony Stark armored suits and fight the menace of The Boomers.
Those are huge, hulking killer robots that randomly show up on the streets and start killing motherfuckers and destroying things left and right. The police try to stop them, but they usually get mowed down like all the rest.
Enter The Knight Sabers to save the day. After they’re done playing their show, at least.
The plot of this 45-minute first episode deals with our ladies in armor being hired by the government to find two missing people. They run into a whole mess of Boomers along the way, of course.
Much destruction follows while The Boomers reveal themselves to be more complex than anyone previously thought. Meanwhile, the leader of our heroes, Priss, fends off the advances of a police detective, a fan of her band, who really wants to season her sushi.
I liked it a lot. It’s a real 80s dreamscape. The fumes gave me a terrific high. I kinda want to see it on VHS.
I don’t know how long this will last, but right now my anime interest is running nice and warm. More to come.
Jason – just started reading these! I haven’t watched Bubblegum Crisis since the early 90s but I remember liking it.
Anime can be anything and everything. Pick a subject, any subject – there’s a 90% chance there’s an anime about it. Might not be a good one but it will exist.
One I don’t feel ashamed at all in suggesting is PSYCHO-PASS, a cyberpunk police procedural about a society that achieves peace through absolute emotional control by the state. It’s fuckin’ nuts. There’s, I believe, three seasons or more but I’d watch the first and leave it at that.
*Adds PSYCHO-PASS to The List*. Also, thanks for the comment.
Oh, I, too am hooked on Night Flight Plus. The punk docs alone made it worth the subscription.
It’s the best. I use “Night Flight” more than any other streaming service.