Anime - Do you Understannnnnnndu?

[majestic]

1 minute ago, Bartimaeus said:

I guess technically I don't really understand what Miyu is doing to them when she "seals"  them away - to my eyes, it doesn't really seem any different then e.g. killing an extraplanar in D&D, which "kills" their form here but really sends them back to their home plane in some fashion. So the implication to me was that she did, for all practical purposes, kill them, .

I guess that's as good an analogy as any without knowing too much about Japanese shinma mythology. Assuming the idea of banishing them has any basis in myth, of course. Miyu doesn't get what she wants, and Himiko directly comments on it, but Kei and... creepy unnamed Japanese doll demon (Ranka was it?) probably did. Kind of. Who knows.

Brings me back to the point of giving this a couple of extra minutes.

If you want to roll your eyes at something, try this:

 

[Bartimaeus]

I saw her avatar here and was like "with an avatar like that, she's a hundro percent a turbo-tumblr-er, I probably don't have to but let's make sure".

Yup. And then she started animating her own little character graphics because I guess using words isn't her strong point...

Suffice to say, think I'll stick to Lindsay Ellis. ...Now if only Lindsay Ellis did video essays on Sailor Moon and Utena, .

@Sarex Thanks for the recommendations. I actually checked out Hellsing once upon a time ago, wasn't really to my taste for a variety of reasons, but I just took a quick look at Monster and that looks a bit more up my alley.

Edited August 7, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

11 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Suffice to say, think I'll stick to Lindsay Ellis. ...Now if only Lindsay Ellis did video essays on Sailor Moon and Utena, .

It's probably best that she doesn't. I mean, I don't think I would care if she tore Utena a new one, but somehow I doubt I could live with her talking about Sailor Moon Super S. Because that's just a recipe for disaster.

Speaking of disasters, here's this video that someone else made who way way back when auditioned for the same Nostalgia Chick spot that Lindsay Ellis got:

Yeah.

0/10 go to hell, and all that.

[Bartimaeus]

I made it 25 seconds in before I had to close it. Does it only get worse from there?

Also, I'm not familiar at all with Lindsay Ellis' former Nostalgia Chick persona except that I know that she says it was terrible and bad and please don't go back and watch those videos - was it really like this?

[majestic]

8 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

I made it 25 seconds in before I had to close it. Does it only get worse from there?

I don't know, but according to the comments, she liberally complains about everything. I turned it off once she said that she's offended that a dumb blonde stereotype is supposed to be a role model for girls. So yes, it only gets worse. Much worse.

10 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Also, I'm not familiar at all with Lindsay Ellis' former Nostalgia Chick persona except that I know that she says it was terrible and bad and please don't go back and watch those videos - was it really like this?

I don't know, to be honest, I hate Channel "Awesome" with a passion and whoever that Nostalgia Critic dude really is, he can go die in a fire. I never watched anything Nostalgia Chick related, at least not without knowing about it. Might be I caught a scene here or there.

I mean look at this sh... stuff, I was going to say stuff.

Or better, don't. Because, ugh.

I get it, partially, your original dub really sucked (or was funny beause of that), but eh. Ugh.

[Sarex]

36 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Thanks for the recommendations. I actually checked out Hellsing once upon a time ago, wasn't really to my taste for a variety of reasons, but I just took a quick look at Monster and that looks a bit more up my alley.

Did you watch the first version of Hellsing that had it's own story or the second that followed the manga, because there is a big difference.

[Bartimaeus]

12 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Did you watch the first version of Hellsing that had it's own story or the second that followed the manga, because there is a big difference.

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it was Hellsing Ultimate, which I believe is the later one.

@majestic I skipped past all of the absolutely embarrassing intro stuff and landed in him talking about the intro...and then heard Usagi voicing Darth Vader at like the 4 minute mark. I thought that was funny. Him himself, not so much.

[majestic]

1 minute ago, Bartimaeus said:

@majestic I skipped past all of the absolutely embarrassing intro stuff and landed in him talking about the intro...and then heard Usagi voicing Darth Vader at like the 4 minute mark. I thought that was funny. Him himself, not so much.

You missed the part where he talks to his **** as a 14 year old because his **** wants to watch Sailor Moon and he doesn't, but **** of course wins out. That's when I turned that off. Yep I turned something off without finishing it.

[majestic]

Done with the Vampire Princess Miyu OVA.

That was pretty good. The third part was a little disjointed again, the fourth mostly a flashback into Miyu's tragic backstory. Himiko would probably have been happier if she had not chased Miyu around.

I'm expecting good things of the TV show now.

edit:

In terms of tone and feelings evoked this made me want to rewatch Outer Limits, the 1995 version. As an anthology show, it does have its ups and downs of course, but man, some of these episodes were pure gold.

Edited August 7, 2021 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

I've watched a handful of episodes of the 1963 The Outer Limits. Remember it being mostly kind of awkward and weird, . Anyways, glad you enjoyed Miyu, and I do think the TV show will probably feel a little better put together, .

Edited August 8, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

5 hours ago, Sarex said:

Did you watch the first version of Hellsing that had it's own story or the second that followed the manga, because there is a big difference.

I watched Ultimate, which I think is closer to the manga and has the Major. @majestic might like it, if only because the Major's crew is a bunch of knock-off Von Stroheims. 

[majestic]

7 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I've watched a handful of episodes of the 1963 The Outer Limits. Remember it being mostly kind of awkward and weird, . Anyways, glad you enjoyed Miyu, and I do think the TV show will probably feel a little better put together, .

26 episodes seems like a good deal more time to get things across or maybe explore characters a bit more. I'm expecting something good here.

The '95 Outer Limits, while mostly sci-fi and less fantasy or horror, has a certain melancholic and sometimes downright dark tone. There are so many episodes that explore human nature (even positive ones), and it often ends in tragedy. What feels like a long time ago, when the TV Tropes Wiki was still a place that was more fun than serious and tropes still had meme-ish names, which, incidentially, was what brought me to read much of it, the current "Cruel Twist Ending" page was still called "Outer Limits Twist" (and Creator's Pet was called "The Wesley").

First season has an episode called Quality of Mercy which not only is a bottle episode featuring only two actors and a guy in a costume, but one of the finest moments of the show (if not actually the best episode it has). It's, uh, also relatively indicative of the budget the show had, which apparently was a couple of shoestrings and some chewing gum, and most of it probably went to the actors. So don't expect great production values, but it did feature a lot of fun "guest" stars and young actors one recognizes today. I mean, as much as an anthology show with always changing cast can have guest stars. There's an episode with Mark Hamill, and one with Leonard Nimoy, and a bunch of others.

Spoiler

The T-1000 is captured by an alien race that attacked Earth, and locked up together with Joan Leaven, before she became Joan Leaven. I mean, Robert Patrick and Nicole de Boer, respectively, of course. T-1000 is a hard, overly masculine soldier stereotype and is immediately annoyed that Leaven is a whiny, really young cadet who, if not for the war, wouldn't have been recruited anyway. She's apparently being tortured and experimented upon by the enemy.

Anyway, they spend a lot of time together in their cell, obviously, where Robert Patrick's character eventually develops a bond with Nicole de Boer's. They try to escape, but it ends in failure and punishment, not on him, but on her, of course. In the end, it turns out that the T-1000 is not nearly as hard assed as he seems to be, and tries to comfort the increasingly tortured and despairing cadet by telling her of a secretly prepared imminent counter-attack on the invader's forces.

Cue Outer Limits twist ending, she was a spy all along, and good old Bob just messed it up by showing the very qualities that make us human. If only he had stuck to being the toxic masculine stereotype he appeared to be when the episode started, huh?

Just a tangent. It has nothing to do with Miyu, just the general feel of the OVA. Some of the episodes are misses, but that's to be expected, it did run for seven seasons. Some are remakes from older Outer Limits or Twilight Zone episodes, but usually with a darker twist to them.

The only problem is availibility. There's nothing better than a DVD set scanned from a censored Canadian TV source (not much of value was lost, anyway, to be honest, unless you're really into Alyssa Milano's breats... *shrug*), but the image quality isn't great. Actually... yeah, isn't great is perhaps the wrong way to put it. It's not VHS-transfer level bad, but it really does show that it was made from a Never The Same Colours TV source.

At least for now. We did have a season one boxed DVD set region 2 release that was pretty good in quality, but the sales were so poor that they never followed up with the other seasons. However, I just checked, and the remaining seasons will actually be released starting October 1st, 2021. Nice. Maybe. Because that is a completely new release, not a follow up to the first boxed set from 2008.

Not sure if that means that the quality is going to be better, but I'm pretty sure I'll buy that just to have it. Still only DVD, but I doubt that there'll be anything better than a DVD release, and ideally the new DVDs were made from a decent source - or at least the PAL version of the original source, where we could end up with an Italian Sailor Moon style quality difference to the current Canadian boxed set.

Whee, what a long assed post.

The nature of the show makes it of course possible to just check out Quality of Mercy. There's no storyline, except for some end-of-season arc welding clip show episodes that I found highly entertaining.

Edited August 8, 2021 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, majestic said:

The only problem is availibility. There's nothing better than a DVD set scanned from a censored Canadian TV source

Spoiler

How does this Amazon rip (albeit still 480p) compare to the DVD?

(note to moderator: I'll remove this once majestic has downloaded it, )

 

Edited August 8, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[Bartimaeus]

More Eriko. Eriko gets a gig as a radio host, and while her first day on the job goes fine...

Spoiler

...her second day has a fourteen year old girl (that looks suspiciously like Hotaru Tomoe) call in to tell Eriko that she's going to kill herself, and that she's been planning to do it for a while, but calling in to Eriko's show to tell someone what she's going to do has finally given her the courage to go through with it...click. Eriko spends the rest of her program's time trying to call out to this girl, begging her to call in again and talk to her, explain her reasons, anything. ...But the good news is that her career has recovered enough for her to get a radio job and she's started singing professionally again, .

 

 

[majestic]

54 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

That'll be done in 4 minutes from now (guessing the host is speed limited).

I'll check after lunch.

But unless it's made from the Canadian source the DVD set is based on, it should be a good deal better regardless.

[majestic]

Canadian DVD source:

Amazon Video:

I'm not entirely certain why the Canadian DVD source has such a noticably reduced resolution*, but it is much brighter. There's some noticable jagginess around the edges of the props in the Amazon source, which is really weird. So yeah, the Prime Video image looks like it has the proper resolution and is otherwise not as washed out, but something's gone wrong in the encoding. The text for the credits also has noticable encoding artifacts. Good job, Amazon. Geez.

I even tried looking for my PAL DVD boxed set, however I think that one's in the basement with my other DVDs. Stupid limited physical space.

*

Spoiler

Probably to reduce file sizes for a 154 episode release in like 200x, but I'm not entirely certain. I'm blaming this one on the uploader, but there were a LOT of complaints about the image quality of the DVDs on Amazon, so the washed out look of the picture does not come from bad encoding.

 

Edited August 8, 2021 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

I was wondering about that, because this episode is hella dark. Here's the Hulu version that I just grabbed to compare even more:

...Seems like the Hulu version is maaaybe the best one? Honestly, the more I look at it, the more it seems like the DVD has the most amount of detail even though it's the lowest resolution...

Anyways, I watched it - for being a bottle episode, it was pretty decent. Though it's still not really my cup of tea and I'm not a live action sci-fi guy, and...wait, why did we get to the subject of this show again?

Edited August 8, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

4 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

I was wondering about that, because this episode is hella dark. Here's the Hulu version that I just grabbed to compare even more:

...Seems like the Hulu version is maaaybe the best one? Honestly, the more I look at it, the more it seems like the DVD has the most amount of detail even though it's the lowest resolution...

That looks pretty similar to the DVD source though, with a slightly better resolution. If the DVD really has that oddball resolution and that image is just upscaled for Hulu, then that might explain a thing or two about why it looks like it has the most detaily. Ah, mid 90ies TV, you had so many great things to offer, alas, keeping decent film sources was not one of them.

6 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Anyways, I watched it - for being a bottle episode, it was pretty decent. Though it's still not really my cup of tea and I'm not a live action sci-fi guy, and...wait, why did we get to the subject of this show again?

I said the tone of the Vampire Princesse Miyu OVA reminded me of The Outer Limits remake, a connection I made purely on feelings, not on anything objective.

Preeeeetty off topic.

So how about that Revolutionary Girl Utena rewatch that supposedly makes the entire anime so much better, you up for that?

 

[majestic]

Look at how the very first episode of the Vampire Princess Miyu TV show beings with SERA KAHO jupitering as teacher. Is there any 90ies shoujo anime she hasn't been in?

edit:

Aaaaaaand the otaku boy is Kensuke from NGE, who was also Madoka's father in Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

edit 2:

And Larva speaks too, and he does so using the voice of Mr. Undercover Nudist Beach operative from Kill la Kill. Or rather, the other way around, this was first.

Anyway...

Spoiler

So far this seems like a bait-and-switch setup where Miyu isn't at all at fault for the killings. Might have been more of a mystery without having seen the OVA already.

 

Edited August 8, 2021 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

That's a whole lot of recognized voice actors, . By the way, did you ever check out the English dub of either this or especially the original OVA? The TV show is bad, but the original OVA is terrible. I could make a clip for you if you didn't have the opportunity.

While the first episode was like that, subsequent ones are not and don't really lean on Miyu being like a "secret protagonist" or anything like that.

Edited August 8, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Well it looks like part 6 of JoJo is going to Netflix this December. Guess cartoon network got cut out, which in all honesty is probably a good thing.

[majestic]

37 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

That's a whole lot of recognized voice actors, .

Indeed. I was just told by the wiki that Miyu was also in NGE, as Ritsuko's assisstant. So I guess I'm at 3 of 4 potentially recognizable characters. Not bad when you consider that back in November when I started watching Sailor Moon with subs I couldn't even keep the voices of the five girls apart when they were talking over each other during that ridiculous Sailor Moon S preview episode.

My source has both the English and Japanese audio, yes. I'm not sure I want to check it out based on what you just told me. Heh.

37 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

While the first episode was like that, subsequent ones are not and don't really lean on Miyu being like a "secret protagonist" or anything like that.

Even so, just from the OVA and the first episode, Miyu is one of the more interesting anti-heroes I've seen. Or probably the best. That depends a bit on how the TV show's going to work out .

15 minutes ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

Well it looks like part 6 of JoJo is going to Netflix this December. Guess cartoon network got cut out, which in all honesty is probably a good thing.

Meanwhile, here, Netflix only has Phantom Blood, Battle Tendency and Stardust Crusaders.

 

I have also watched the first three episodes of Invicible today. The first one I watched back when this premiered on Amazon Prime at the behest of a friend who insisted that I watch it to the end. That episode was 95% forgettable and 5% OH MY GOD, HORY SHIIIIII, WHAT IS HAPPENING?!

To be honest if I weren't me and would finish it anyway, I'd only keep watching this because @Bartimaeus (look at the forum software doing that @ thingie well... haha @Bartimaeus look there it works!) said it gets much better. Dear Lord, between the insipid teenage coming-of-age superhero drama*, the Martian Flaxian invasion and that painfully terrible "love triangle" setup between Amber, Mark and Eve, the Demon!Columbo detective and the show lampshading how terrible its one-liners are, I have no idea why anyone would even want to continue watching this. Except to keep listening to the voice cast, which at this point seems to be where all the budget went. Instead of, say, writing an engaging storyline or interesting characters, or ideally both.

*Fully realize that this is weird coming from me of all people, but there's something really off-putting about this.

Edited August 8, 2021 by majestic

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

7 minutes ago, majestic said:

Meanwhile, here, Netflix only has Phantom Blood, Battle Tendency and Stardust Crusaders.

Here we've got that and Diamond is Unbreakable on Netflix. Right now if you want Golden Wind you have to go to crunchy roll (where it's free I think) or CN's dub with real ****ty accessibility. Hopefully it all gets sorted out so you don't have to be naughty and get a scolding from Bruno for not adequately supporting your corporate masters.

Edited August 8, 2021 by KP the meanie zucchini

[majestic]

9 minutes ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

Here we've got that and Diamond is Unbreakable on Netflix. Right now if you want Golden Wind you have to go to crunchy roll (where it's free I think) or CN's dub with real ****ty accessibility. Hopefully it all gets sorted out so you don't have to be naughty and get a scolding from Bruno for not adequately supporting your corporate masters.

Yeah, Golden Wind is available on Crunchy Roll without premium access, I've just checked. I'm not sure how well my account there will function, because that verification email never got through, and now I've tried two different email accounts and it still doesn't work. Dunno what's going on. *shrug*

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

3 minutes ago, majestic said:

Yeah, Golden Wind is available on Crunchy Roll without premium access, I've just checked. I'm not sure how well my account there will function, because that verification email never got through, and now I've tried two different email accounts and it still doesn't work. Dunno what's going on. *shrug*

I was able to watch it for free without an account. I'll check on it to see if that's still the case.