The Old School Otaku Lounge

recently rewatched some comfort-food type anime (well my version of comfort at least) like Genocyber, Devilman, and Angel Cop but want to give Nier a try tonight. Wonder Egg, as mentioned above, is also one I plan on giving a shot when I get time.

I’m just now getting into Vampire Princess Miyu, Video Girl Ai, To Heart, and Macross 7 thanks to some VHS tapes that I’ve been able to acquire. It’s rough though because I don’t have a lot of time and I recently got into JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure too and that’s a lot of episodes. I also plan on watching the 2 sets of OVAs that came out for JoJo’s before the 2012 anime.

I've been getting into a recently newer anime called Hi-Score Girl, which caught my interest since it invovles characters that are into the arcade/video game scene of Japan in the early to mid 1990's. It's a pretty cute/fun show to watch with a coming-of-age feel watching the main characters growing up and love triangles being formed while they play arcade fighters. There's a bit of technical talk in terms of fighting game techniques the characters use that I found interesting. I was watching an episode last night and the main charactor turned on his Sega Saturn, and I looked over at my system just going "oh look, I have the same system sitting on my table." There's several game companies invovled in the series so its interesting to see characters/games from SNK/Capcom/Square Enix/Etc all on the same show, I can't imagine the copyright negotiations to make all that happen. I would recommend to people who are into classic game collecting or grew up on fighting games.

Of all the "original" Netflix anime shows I've seen, Hi-Score Girl has been my favorite so far. (I'm still slowly making my way through Great Pretender) It probably is a show more catered for a specific generation of gamers though (which I was a part of).

Interestingly, Hi-Score Girl is actually CG animated but aside from a few odd head cd-esque bobbles here and there, I usually don't notice.

Oh its definetly CGI, but I have no issue in how it looks tbh. I'm part of that generation of gamers as well and grew up as a 90's kid, so these were games that were always around me/I played with friends in grade school/middle school.

After watching Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch From Mercury, I was instantly interested in going back and seeing all the Gundam I missed previously, considering I didn't know much at all about the franchise previously. So I'm starting with G Gundam. And... oh wow, it is not what I was expecting. Granted, I'm not sure I had clear expectations in mind, and G Gundam doesn't so much surpass them as it just goes in a completely different direction. Must say, I do definitely appreciate how deliberate the camp is (at least when it's not being offensive about that, which it does sometimes) and there are parts that clearly show strong ambitions.

Silly as it may be, I like being able to look back now and see where it has echoes in the more modern GWitch. Like, a world where the real conflicts and pain on Earth are just used as props and settings for the ruling class to hold their Glorified Mech Duels to the amazement of the masses is not THAT far off, right?

For me, the latest is Dirty Pair: Affair at Nolandia.

This really seems like an anime that would do well with a re-make, as the original is bad, but bad in a way that could have retro-appeal if it wasn't so incoherent.

Like the gratuitous tentacle scenes, which later on sort of suggest they are PTSD memories of the esper from being experimented on?

Or the comedy in how there's a barf-marathon "I *gasp gasp* can catch him!" that doesn't really play up how absurd it is. Like the bad guy escapes *sinister music* on a city bus! So the solution is to steal someone's bicycle and chase after them the whole way, rather than just following until the bus to stop and getting on. Add some scenes of high-stakes tension when the bus is stopped and the bicycle is stopped while random people get on and off the bus and you have some great potential.

Also, the old-school Dirty Pair character designs have passed through the barrier -- in 2004 when a DVD release of Nolandia got an ANN review, they were bad and dated, but I think by now, they have reached the "intriguingly retro" stage of the life-cycle.

If Devilman could get Devilman Crybaby, why not a new Dirty Pair that rehabilitates those old toons?

Affair *of* Nolandia, excuse me- (There is also a prolonged scene where they decide after being trapped in a repeating nightmare, that the best way to draw the target out of the jungle is with handmade stuffed animals.) Not sure if this is about outside circumstances back when OVAs were new, or the impact of one director over another, but the script-writer for Nolandia later went on to write the script for Ghost in the Shell.

I'm rewatching Humanoid Monster BEM from 1968 as I'm using it in my Monster Culture class I teach at uni. All the eps are on YouTube and it's such good stuff. I wrote a synopsis of every ep for a zine I edit (see issue 6.1) https://tnfff.org/mangaverse/