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Zenryaku,
Now that the fall anime season is gearing up in Japan, it's time once again for Anime Apolyton. This one won't be too big, but there's some domestic news that I wanted to get up.
So, we'll start with that. Neon Genesis Evangelion is now showing on Cartoon Network. New episodes start every Thursday, with repeats on Friday and Sunday. The first episode appeared last week, so I probably should have posted earlier, but you can still catch the rerun.
It looks like they aren't going to be airing the director's cut versions of the later episodes. This isn't really surprising, since they cut shows for more commercial time as it is, and the DC versions are longer.
My word of warning here would be the dub. I find it to be really bad. Not as bad as, say, One Piece, but nowhere near as good as Cowboy Bebop. A lot of people seem to have no problem with it, though.
This is one of the big name titles. It was really the first big series to be licensed for US release. It's had a huge impact on the mecha genre, and characters from the show are still showing up on favorites polls.
The main thing to keep in mind is that the show is not primarily a mecha-action series. It has all the trappings, and you can watch most of it that way, but if you think of it as just an action series you're going to hate the ending. The director, Hideaki Anno, even got quite a bit of hate mail from it, including death threats (which he later used in a montage sequence in the movie End of Evangelion).
Basic story is an alternate world setting. About fourteen years before the start of the show, there was a huge explosion in the (IIRC) artic, large enough to tilt the Earth on its axis, which completely messed up all sorts of things (as you can imagine). Supposedly caused by a meteor strike, it was called "the Second Impact", and became kind of advance warning (thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls... long story) that the Earth was about to be under assault. To fight off the attackers, which came to be called Angels, the company Nerv was formed and headquartered under Tokyo-3. They developed the Evangelion units (the mecha), about the only thing able to fight with the Angels, which are immune to conventional weaponry and even highly resistant to nuclear weapons. The show centers around the Evangelion piolts and the Nerv staff, all of whom are seriously messed up in some way or other (which is part of what really makes the series). Great characters and some good action sequences, and one of the fights in the movies is simply incredible.
Sticking with dubs for a bit, I've watched a bit of One Piece and Naruto on CN. THe difference between the dub treatments is huge. Naruto is actually a decent dub; the actors can actually act and the dialogue is pretty (as little as I remember) unchanged. Some minor strangeness, like using "A Thousand Years of Death" instead of "A Thousand Years of Pain" for an attack name, but nothing really bad.
The One Piece dub is a completely different animal. I, probably unfortunately, happened to catch the dubbed version of a couple of my favorite episodes. Namely the one where Zoro looks for two new katana and the one where he takes on Baroque Works. My first complaint is with the supposed acting, which seems to be pretty much absent. Most of the characters don't seem to have any clue of what they're supposed to be. Which I guess is only natural, given how much of the show has been cut for no clear reason. Half of the fight sequences with Baroque Works seem to have just disappeared for no reason, for instance. Worse is what they did to Tashigi's character, which seems to have been turned into almost the complete opposite of the original. And why won't they even give Zoro's swords their full names? Anyway, the dialogue changes are the other big problem. What made it to the dub has almost nothing to do with the original script. They've replaced some rather good lines with a collection of lame attempts at jokes, and since much of the appeal of the series is the character, this just doesn't work.
I just can't understand why they licensed this series. Between the complete rewrite, all the video editing, and the licensing costs, it would probably have been cheaper for them to just make their own new series.
On the Japan side of things, there are several continuing series (including Naruto, One Piece and Bleach). There's some second seasons of shows that were at least decent, such as Rozen Maiden and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. There's a very loosely related Mai Hime "sequel" called Mai Otome, although so far I haven't seen any basis for similarity. The main thing I've been waiting for is Aria, an anime based on the manga of the same name (which I mentioned last time).
Hmm. Not as much to say as I thought there might be. I'll probably expand on this as I see some of the other new series.
Wraith
"Yay! My heart fills with hideous despair! Ooo! And behavior controlling drugs!"
-- Fillerbunny
Now that the fall anime season is gearing up in Japan, it's time once again for Anime Apolyton. This one won't be too big, but there's some domestic news that I wanted to get up.
So, we'll start with that. Neon Genesis Evangelion is now showing on Cartoon Network. New episodes start every Thursday, with repeats on Friday and Sunday. The first episode appeared last week, so I probably should have posted earlier, but you can still catch the rerun.
It looks like they aren't going to be airing the director's cut versions of the later episodes. This isn't really surprising, since they cut shows for more commercial time as it is, and the DC versions are longer.
My word of warning here would be the dub. I find it to be really bad. Not as bad as, say, One Piece, but nowhere near as good as Cowboy Bebop. A lot of people seem to have no problem with it, though.
This is one of the big name titles. It was really the first big series to be licensed for US release. It's had a huge impact on the mecha genre, and characters from the show are still showing up on favorites polls.
The main thing to keep in mind is that the show is not primarily a mecha-action series. It has all the trappings, and you can watch most of it that way, but if you think of it as just an action series you're going to hate the ending. The director, Hideaki Anno, even got quite a bit of hate mail from it, including death threats (which he later used in a montage sequence in the movie End of Evangelion).
Basic story is an alternate world setting. About fourteen years before the start of the show, there was a huge explosion in the (IIRC) artic, large enough to tilt the Earth on its axis, which completely messed up all sorts of things (as you can imagine). Supposedly caused by a meteor strike, it was called "the Second Impact", and became kind of advance warning (thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls... long story) that the Earth was about to be under assault. To fight off the attackers, which came to be called Angels, the company Nerv was formed and headquartered under Tokyo-3. They developed the Evangelion units (the mecha), about the only thing able to fight with the Angels, which are immune to conventional weaponry and even highly resistant to nuclear weapons. The show centers around the Evangelion piolts and the Nerv staff, all of whom are seriously messed up in some way or other (which is part of what really makes the series). Great characters and some good action sequences, and one of the fights in the movies is simply incredible.
Sticking with dubs for a bit, I've watched a bit of One Piece and Naruto on CN. THe difference between the dub treatments is huge. Naruto is actually a decent dub; the actors can actually act and the dialogue is pretty (as little as I remember) unchanged. Some minor strangeness, like using "A Thousand Years of Death" instead of "A Thousand Years of Pain" for an attack name, but nothing really bad.
The One Piece dub is a completely different animal. I, probably unfortunately, happened to catch the dubbed version of a couple of my favorite episodes. Namely the one where Zoro looks for two new katana and the one where he takes on Baroque Works. My first complaint is with the supposed acting, which seems to be pretty much absent. Most of the characters don't seem to have any clue of what they're supposed to be. Which I guess is only natural, given how much of the show has been cut for no clear reason. Half of the fight sequences with Baroque Works seem to have just disappeared for no reason, for instance. Worse is what they did to Tashigi's character, which seems to have been turned into almost the complete opposite of the original. And why won't they even give Zoro's swords their full names? Anyway, the dialogue changes are the other big problem. What made it to the dub has almost nothing to do with the original script. They've replaced some rather good lines with a collection of lame attempts at jokes, and since much of the appeal of the series is the character, this just doesn't work.
I just can't understand why they licensed this series. Between the complete rewrite, all the video editing, and the licensing costs, it would probably have been cheaper for them to just make their own new series.
On the Japan side of things, there are several continuing series (including Naruto, One Piece and Bleach). There's some second seasons of shows that were at least decent, such as Rozen Maiden and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. There's a very loosely related Mai Hime "sequel" called Mai Otome, although so far I haven't seen any basis for similarity. The main thing I've been waiting for is Aria, an anime based on the manga of the same name (which I mentioned last time).
Hmm. Not as much to say as I thought there might be. I'll probably expand on this as I see some of the other new series.
Wraith
"Yay! My heart fills with hideous despair! Ooo! And behavior controlling drugs!"
-- Fillerbunny
Yay!
:vomit:
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