A-Ko's very near and dear to my heart. It was the first anime I saw with explicit knowledge of it BEING ANIME. I'd seen some of those localized shows from the early 80s (Voltron being my favorite), but that was no different from Muppet Babies or Superfriends in my mind-- it was all goofy stuff I absorbed at an impressionable age. But THIS was the first thing I rented knowing full well that I was getting into that weird shit…
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California Crisis: Gun Salvo 1986
Just realized I never posted a link to my review of this thing over on my blog.
I will champion this strange, apparently unfinished (yet still commercially released in Japan) OVA oddity until the day I die. If anything, it works better NOW than it likely did then, because it's playing with a whole bunch of filtering of nostalgia and foreign pop cultures in ways that feel very much in the vein of more recent trends. It does for 50s…
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A Bucket of Blood 1959
I already said a lot about this a few years ago, so go check that out.
Might be my favorite Corman flick. It's a toss-up between this and The Masque of the Red Death. Guess I can split the difference and say this is my favorite black and white one and Masque is my favorite color one.
Watched the Joe Bob episode of this. It's great that Corman's still kicking around. Looks pretty good for 97. The interview was a little awkward there at times, but yeah. 97. I hope we're all just looking a little "past my bedtime" if we make it that far.
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Ride 'Em Cowboy 1942
It's cool to see the fake cowboy being a known thing even back when all that romanticized western stuff was still fairly new, and that Abbott and Costello did a whole movie centered around that. A shame that the fake cowboy cosplayers won in the end, whether you're talking about country music, fashion, or politics.
This one has a bit more energy to it than the Buck Private retreds that preceeded it. It helps that you get a good miz…
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Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2022
The kid who voiced Peter Pan and starred in a bunch of other Disney movies around that time, got dumped by the studio when he got too old, turned to drugs, and died in squalor in his early 30s. Then, 50-something years later, Disney makes a movie about how Peter Pan grows up and turns into a criminal that kidnaps Disney characters to force them into some sort of cartoon slavery.
We know Disney's evil in that existential, intangible, "too…
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Scooby-Doo! and the Curse of the 13th Ghost 2019
As far as long-running cartoon franchises that take old, apocryphal entries and loosely work them back into the "canon" go, I dug this more than Dragon Ball Super: Broly.
It's a far more herculean effort to take a character like Flim Flam and make him bearable than it is to do something similar with a character like Broly.
Also, there's some genuinely fascinating stuff going on in here with the character dynamics of Fred and Daphne, given that Fred was…