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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High School Hero 1946
Hey, one of the sisters actually gets to do stuff in this one. She joins the football team and whups everyone while pretending to be the glasses dork dude. Those football bits are nowhere near as cool as, say, what you got in Horse Feathers or the stuff the Three Stooges did, but it goes a long ways towards making this The Teen Agers joint watchable. And the dance number at the beginning where the guys and gals do some sort of dance-football routine is the best number in these movies so far.
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Men 2022
Maybe "The Goddess" isn't so much the manifestation of the feminine ability to create life so much as it's the construct of the masculine desire to control that which it can never have. Worship, praise, and religion in all forms are just the vestiges of the eternal desire to both simp for and dominate over the half of the species that allows it to perpetuate. We dudes just dick around, figuratively and literally, and had to create a sort of…
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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…
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Cipher 1989
Well that's one way to "promote" a manga in OVA form.
That IS pretty much the purpose of most of these OVAs: to act as a sort of commercial for the comic while also being a little bit of fan service for those who already dig it. They usually animate some portion of the original manga-- often times the first few chapters/volumes in an abbreviated form. If that did well enough, or if they figured there was enough interest to…
