Anime World Order Show # 51 - Timeliness Is Not Exactly Our Strongest Suit

Daryl's gain is turned up entirely too high for the entire episode, which is even LONGER than usual. In addition to our Megacon 2007 report, Clarissa reviews Animation Runner Kuromi, Gerald revisits The Venus Wars, and Daryl finally gets around to reviewing To Terra Volume 1.

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There's going to be quite a few links this week in the full show notes for once. Eventually.

Introduction (0:00 - 18:24)
Remember, we still have a contest going where the winner will get a 100% silver keychain of our show logo. Perfect for destroying lycanthropes.

We spend a lot of time pontificating about the whole "o" versus "ou" deal when it comes to romanization. Plus, Scott from GeekNights has a VERY IMPORTANT question that requires all of our powers combined to answer. Actually, no it doesn't.

Convention Report: Megacon 2007 (18:24 - 35:29)
Megacon 2007 took place from February 16-18. Our convention report is about six weeks after the fact, and for that we apologize. Admittedly, Megacon is a multimedia event, and so anime-related activities are but a small subset of everything going on there. We apologize for failing to mention that William "Spooky Electric" Bradford won third place in the Barbarian Battles, but perhaps we are just highly bitter that despite Daryl's endorsing him to be chosen as Planet Smoothie's Cupman, he failed to emerge victorious. We will be editing this post to include links to several pictures taken at the convention, but for now, here is the horrifying pizza picture we warned you about:

There was no need for Daryl's archnemesis/would-be doppleganger to spend months constructing an enormous Shinigami out of PVC pipe (aka Death Plastic), thus keeping her rooted to one location for the day. All that was needed to kill one's victims was that pizza, which was given to her by a total stranger. PS: when she enters that Death Note lookalike contest, vote for her so we can take credit for her victory!

You know what else we don't need? To use a flash or perform contrast/color correction on photos taken of Virgil for the entertainment of the Death Valley Driver forums. Next on the list: getting footage of The Iron Shiek raping B. Brian Blair "to make him humble." Bryan Alvarez was ROBBED in that Sweeney match, and mark our words: the ICW ICWA Texarcana Television Championship WILL be rechristened the Frank A. Gotch Collar-and-Elbow Memorial Championship. After all, Larry Sweeney and William "Spooky Electric" Bradford are the same man.

• This is pretty much what the entirety of Megacon looks like
• Even though it's mainly a SF/comic con, there were familiar sights
• This schedule for the panels was posted in one place in the lobby, but neither it nor a map was in the con guide
• The Deviant Art meetup is exactly what we envisioned
• Clarissa said that the pizza picture is by far and away the most unflattering picture of Daryl's archnemesis ever taken. That is incorrect, because that is what this picture is

Let's News! (35:29 - 1:12:22)
There was no news last week, and now this week, the news is two news segments strung together such that this segment alone is the recommended length of an entire podcast. We covered a lot of ground and, man, I hope next time our news segment isn't as horribly long, but, well that's the nature of the beast.

Anyway, Media Blasters has decided to essentially shut down most of their non-yaoi manga line. Of course, this means that Daryl's favorite porn ever, Apocalypse Zero, [Daryl: it's not porn if you don't draw the dick, and seinen is TOO CLASSY for that. Even though without his dick, there's no way even Eikichi could hope to defeat Kakugo] is now no longer being published. This leads to a discussion on whether there's much of a "fandom" for seinen at all and what this could mean for getting more manga here that's meant for an older audience. QUICK, GO OUT AND BUY GOLGO 13!

On the subject of manga, many big deal manga artists have sued a site for distributing their manga. Coming from a country where manga is super cheap, this is pretty bad. There's also an interesting interview with Mamoru Oshii online, however, because it takes too damned long for our episodes to come out, it now requires a free registration to read (Bugmenot might help). Also, Anime Classic did a great job on restoring the crazy MTV-like 80's anime To-Y, so go watch it and try to make sense of it (hopefully the tracker will be up since it seems to be down as I write this)! CPM's also in big trouble over releasing yaoi manga that the Japanese company claims CPM is distributing without authorization. Clarissa is happy that the titles might be moved to someone who doesn't charge more to watch dudes be rude when she can get her equivalent DBR quotient for less money from other publishers, while Gerald isn't cool with the whole "changing of a license overseas and the US publisher has to pay for it again." We, of course, know nothing and maybe things will become clearer in the coming weeks.

Also, Bandai Visual, in a "planned failure" move, is releasing Freedom and Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise (one of Gerald's favorite movies ever) undubbed for horribly inflated prices. FUCK YOU JAPAN AND YOUR PRICING!

Want to see just how clueless Bandai Visual really is? Read their explanation for why they priced the DVDs the way they did. Didn't everyone learn after ADV's Kaleido Star debacle that the forum posters on Anime on DVD should all be completely ignored? At least, that's the only place on the Internet where we could envision someone being STUPID enough to agree with this line of thought.

Promo: The Big Bald Broadcast (1:12:22 - 1:13:29)
Kyle Hebert is not only an anime voice actor, he's a podcaster who's been doing his show for longer than we've been around. We've just never played his promo because well, I don't think he actually HAD one. This one is actually fan-submitted, and so we'll forgive it for not actually mentioning Kyle's involvement or stating the website. That's what these show notes are for!

Review: Animation Runner Kuromi (1:13:29 - 1:28:07)
Who needs to cosplay for ego validation when we've got voicemails that do it for us? Clarissa tells us all about this 99% totally accurate and not at all exaggerated tale of working in the anime industry, as directed by Akitaro Daichi. Gerald cites this as one of the few anime to contain ska music, but Daryl cannot for the life of him remember any other music being used throughout this other than the BGM played at the start of the segment.

• Here's CPM's official Animation Runner Kuromi website. There's a couple of excerpts from the interviews on the disc, as well as character run downs and wallpapers.
• The DVD for this will only cost you $5.99 from DeepDiscountDVD (shipping is free). The sequel is more expensive, at $10.87. It's good, and it won't rape your wallet. What more can you ask for?

Promo: Dave and Joel's Fast Karate for the Gentleman (1:28:07 - 1:28:38)
Dave and Joel have also been podcasting long before we were on the scene, but Daryl likes to run around saying he put them on the map anyway. This is also a fan-made promo, as whoever made it and sent it to them forgot to remove the 2 minutes of BGM from the beginning. Personally, we were hoping that the bluetooth headset audio clip was going to be about beating up people while telling them to remove said headset, thus bringing everything full circle as their original promo was about beating someone up while telling them to remove their stupid hat.

Review: Venus Wars (1:28:38 -1:50:15)
For the record, we were not THAT late to play that voicemail about Transformers: The Movie being released on DVD. It had been out for a little while by the time he called in. Many people who remember Anime Week/Saturday Anime on the Sci-Fi Channel wrote in to us asking about this one, and so the task falls to Gerald, as he'd already reviewed Crusher Joe back in Show # 24. This is the final film directed by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, and upon rewatching it and removing the haze of nostalgia, perhaps we'll find out why that might have been the case. Incidentally, he also directed the anime adaptation of The Song of Wind and Trees, one of the more well-known of Keiko Takemiya's works. You can get Venus Wars for about $10 on Amazon.

Promo: Chibi Tokyo (1:50:15 - 1:50:51)
Chibi Tokyo is like, the West Coast equivalent of Fast Karate for the Gentleman. Except in addition to Fist of the North Star, they also like Captain Tsubasa a lot. More people should listen to this podcast. In the time since this promo was made, they've actually added a third cohost, so perhaps they need an updated promo more than us! Be sure to listen to the two-year anniversary of Anime Genesis to hear their special commemorative song they composed and performed.

Review: To Terra Volume 1 (1:50:51 - 2:26:15)
The reason we don't use ProTools is because we lack the competence to actually USE it properly. At least, Daryl does. Exhausted from having worked on crunch time schedule for the past two weeks, Daryl rambles and rambles AND RAMBLES his way through this latest offering by Vertical Inc such that this segment alone is the length of what a typical Internet podcast is. Fortunately, he's got it together just enough to convey all the relevant information, albeit in a highly decompressed, roundabout manner. This is a sci-fi manga by Keiko Takemiya, but don't make the mistake we made a few weeks back: despite being part of the Showa 24 Group, To Terra is technically a shonen work, which is what makes it so important. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

• Contribute to the AWO slush fund by purchasing To Terra...Volume 1 via clicking that link
• The brouhaha over Vertical's mislabeling over To Terra (advertising it as shojo when it is not) is ancient news as far as Internet age goes. Here's the Livejournal post from early January--over three months ago--that started it all and showed us that we were wrong in our assumptions that this was shojo because Vertical's early marketing was off the mark.
• It's not like we were the only ones taken in by this. Tangerine Dreams--a "shoujo" anime/manga resource--did it too, and upon discovering the mistake, wasn't thrilled about it either. To use "shojo" or "shoujo," that is the question, but it goes to show that even hardcore fans were mistaken on this. How could that be?
• The answer is that shojo, plain and simple, is not a genre unto itself. It's effectively a marketing classification, so when the marketing isn't quite on the mark, confusion results. Who benefits from that? Companies like Tokyopop, whose entire marketing machine is built around twisting definitions of things like "manga" to their own purposes, with the ultimate goal being to sell you "shojo manga" written by "DJ Milky" aka Stu Levy.
• Anne Ishii's response to the matter is hilariously awesome - but she acknowledges the error regardless, and as a result no current marketing of To Terra states that it is shojo. Yes, New York Comic-Con took place a little over a month after this post and To Terra was still being marketed as a shojo title there, but we'll cut them some slack since they probably had to print up all that stuff quite some time in advance.
• Mike Toole's review of the long out-of-print Towards the Terra theatrical anime
• ANN's page on the new Toward the Terra TV series that starts airing in Japan very soon and will probably be fansubbed by nobody since it's a show we want to see - on the one hand, Norio Wakamoto as the narrator. On the other hand, Takehito Koyasu as Keith Anyan. Character designs by Nobuteru Yuuki; say, we met him and interviewed him!
• Slan: A Novel - by A.E. van Vogt, this was a notable inspiration for To Terra

Closing (2:26:15 - 2:30:59)
Next time, the theme is either robots or shows that seemed like they were going to be one type of thing going into it, but ended up being something else. Take your pick. Daryl's reviewing Ergo Proxy, Gerald's reviewing Megazone 23 Part 2 (DOGGY STYLE), and Clarissa will cover Hades Project Zeorymer.

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