Anime World Order Show # 29 - Better Late Than Never

Better late than never, I guess. Daryl reviews the horror anime Requiem From the Darkness, Clarissa reminisces on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya now that it's ended, and Gerald talks about his favorite anime of all time, Gall Force.

Click Here to Download


Introduction (0:00 - 25:10)
Gerald starts things off by making a joke about how "Ichi" is pronounced the same as "itchy" that's so subtle he didn't even know he was doing it. In the emails department, Patrick M. writes in to tell us all about the other Osamu Tezuka that was mentioned back in the Shadow Skill segment of Show # 26, the Popcorn Samurai likens Gerald to Eagle from The Muppets, Area 88 mega-fan Cloudy-Sky likens Gerald to Butthead and Stephen Hawking while expressing approval over Daryl's review of Area 88 back in Show # 4 (by the way, it's out on DVD now!), and we explain the reason why we haven't reviewed too many television series to date. Plus Keith over at Teleport City reveals an even grimmer secret about MD Geist that we neglected to reveal in our recent review. Since there's really no news this week, we close things off by mentioning that Intersound Inc, where the Harmony Gold/Streamline Pictures releases were dubbed, is going out of business and is selling off all their equipment. This leads into a brief discussion on anime dubs.

• So, who does Gerald sound like this week?
• Dr Bunsen Honeydew
• Sam the Eagle
• Butthead
• Stephen Hawking
• ANN's page on Kentaro Haneda

Promo: Fast Karate for the Gentleman (25:10 - 26:14)
Dave and Joel's gaming and anime podcast is one of Daryl's favorites, and it's not just because they frequently talk about how awesome Daryl is. It's because they provide him with jokes to steal. If you're going to Otakon, stop by the Artist's Alley and check them out!

Overlooked: Requiem From the Darkness (26:14 - 46:40)
In an attempt to be more contemporary, Daryl talks about this 13-episode horror-themed anime series released by Geneon about a year or two ago which absolutely nobody cared about except for about three of us over in ADTRW. He was planning to show a clip of it at Anime Festival Orlando, but ran out of panel time. Laugh to yourselves as a guy who knows nothing about art or visual aesthetics tries feebly to describe a show whose primary characteristic is the fact that it looks like nothing you've ever seen before! Sample screenshots are posted below.

• Obligatory Anime News Network link
• Overview of Japanese literary awards - the Naoki Prize is roughly equivalent to the Pulitzer for fiction
• Wikipedia's entry on yokai - of course, you already read this during the Karas review, right?!
• Screenshots of the series:
• Mataichi the Trickster - Generally shown in shadow, Possibly the Ultimate Eye
• Ogin the Puppeteer - BOOBIES, MORE BOOBIES
• Nagamimi the Bird-caller - His normal form, Standing next to Mataichi
• How ordinary townspeople are often drawn
• How the police are depicted - Daryl referred to these characters as "Shinsengumi" based on their uniforms, but if this series takes place during the Meiji era, then the Shinsengumi would no longer exist as all you Rurouni Kenshin fans recall
• Another shot of the police - notice how the background looks
• How the buildings look, Another building

Screenshots don't adequately reflect the effect that the CG and camerawork has on the show, but there's quite a bit of that too. After this segment had finished recording, Gerald mentioned how he thought the style of this show was just too confusing to follow what was happening. He should have mentioned it while the recorder was on!

Review: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (46:40 - 1:05:11)
Clarissa trumps all of us in attempting to review something recent for a change by tackling what was the most popular anime series in Japan last season. We weren't sure whether to bother with it since everywhere you go there's people who won't shut up about this series, but apparently people want to hear our thoughts. This one was pretty tough to review, since roughly 15 minutes were excised from this segment for the sake of removing spoilers.

• ANN entry for Haruhi
• Wikipedia entry for the anime (has tons of info on characters, organizations and more)
• Haruhi novel translation wiki

Promo: Popcorn Samurai (1:05:11 - 1:06:39)
Here's a brand-new podcast that just started up which is all about samurai movies! In the first episode, he talks about Seven Samurai and starts off the first part of what will be an extensive piece dedicated to the Zatoichi films. Hmm, now that we've got a podcast all about chambara, I wonder if there's anything out there dedicated entirely to 70s Shaw Brothers kung fu pictures? Could this be a job for Jules Carrozza aka "Kojiro Abe"?! Note to self: get the Celestial remastered version of Heroes of the East.

Review: Gall Force (1:06:39 - 1:25:25)
Gerald reviews what is his favorite anime ever, the OAV series Gall Force. Despite being OAVs, Gall Force is not his favorite OAV series--Gunbuster is--and by his own admission, Gall Force is not the best anime ever made. This also ended up being a really long segment: for time constraints, all instances of screaming about how awesome laser beams that fire out in one direction then change direction are have been removed. That alone probably took up ten minutes.

• Gerald's personal and never updated page on Gall Force (It'll happen one day)

Closing (1:25:25 - 1:30:05)
It's 1:30 AM as I write this, and the gist of the matter is that we were all occupied with getting ready for our panels at Anime Festival Orlando this weekend. I had 24 hours to compile, capture, then author a DVD containing two hours of assorted video clips. Did I mention I didn't actually know how to not suck at authoring DVDs? It took me 3 days to put together a DVD that ended up being about 30 minutes. It's not the DVD layouts and menus that'll kill you, it's encoding/converting everything over to MPEG-2. Gerald and Clarissa had similar obligations, and on top of that both of them are experiencing grievous computer hardware troubles.

So basically, that's why Show # 29 was late. Actually, this is all a lie; all of the segments were complete days ago with the exception of the Gall Force review and the closing. Anyway, next time on AWO, it's one of two things. Either we're fast-tracking our Anime Festival Orlando coverage--probably no TRUTH report this time around since Daryl ended up becoming part of it--or we're reviewing the things we mentioned in the show. Daryl's going to be talking about another Geneon series which nobody bought, New Getter Robo. People clearly mistakenly thought it was about robots when it is really about KARATE. Another fine offering from Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa. In stark contrast to that, Clarissa's going to review the manga Antique Bakery, and Gerald's going to review the limited edition box set of Patlabor the Movie 2, which is one of our favorite films.

Tweet