Anime Landscape: Now And Then

Another editorial for you this time, I was in a severe rumination mood after I drank heavily from the last review, so I decided to do a somewhat EVOTIC style piece on one of my favorite things to watch, anime. What really kickstarted this for me is I was watching a reviewer unpack literal memories of different memorabilia and items of interest, and it did nothing but spark memories of a very specific niche genre. My utter love and fascination with anime stemmed from a very early age, I can't have been older than 4 or 5 when I started watching anime on this thing called Toonami on Cartoon Network, still my favorite channel ever. I watched that channel religiously every single day, and my cousins who were like 16 or 17 used to come down to my grandparents house and watch Dragonball Z with me. They explained basic plot because when I got into that we were into the Cell saga, but they also told me that these cartoons were not from America but from a place called Japan. And to a 4 year old the concept of a place bigger than my hometown was beyond my comprehension, but I never took the animation style or voice acting differently than I would with shows like Powerpuff Girls or Scooby-Doo. I used to run as fast as I could to my bedroom, tell my Nan and Papa hi, throw my backpack down and turn on this giant television set incased in wood to watch Toonami after school everyday. If I was really lucky I could see the intro which I thought was the coolest intro to anything ever, and Tom was the coolest host ever. And boooooy did that start something for my life. As I grew up I found likeminded friends who also watched anime in the early 2000s, a true golden age for such content. Staying up as late as I could to see Adult Swim, having sleepovers and watching all our favorite series was the highlight of the day. Watching Ghost In The Shell, Case Closed, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, The Big O, Trigun, and easily the one me and my friends were most involved with, Inuyasha. It was the show for us and when I found out there were feature length films of the show like Pokemon I lost my mind. Cause you have to fully grasp, anime has come lightyears since my youth. The internet was still in it's infancy, if you wanted to delve deep into anime culture or see more examples of the genre, whether it be films, or shows, or games (hell I didn't even know about manga until high school) you either had to know places that selled episodes and merchandise, or know people who knew people where you could get different anime stuff. Nowadays I can walk into a Walmart and pick up shows as current as My Hero Academia or as old as Cowboy Bebop with ease. I knew two places that sold anime DVD's, a local video store and Fry's Electronics. And that shit was expensive. I can pick up the first season of a show or an entire show for about twenty dollars now, but if you wanted the first whole season of say Chobits you better be ready to cough up 50 or 60 bucks. Or you had to do it like me and spend roughly twenty dollars for 4 episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist and do that for volume after volume to get the whole show. No joke that was the first anime show I not only owned but saw all the way through, cause the only way you could watch it is if it was on TV or you spent a pretty penny for it on video. And merchandise was nonexistent. Regardless of what it was, posters, statues, plushies, action figures, cosplay items, you had to either have the good grace and knowledge of having a website where you could buy stuff which was an absurd notion to me back then, or you pick up an anime magazine with a little luck from the gods at your local supermarket and they would have extensive lists, pages upon pages, of different items to order through the mail. I cut up a magazine like mad to keep the pictures inside or to give them to friends who saw it and thought it was cool during school. The landscape of being a fan of this genre has changed to the point of being unrecognizable now, I had bookmarks on the family computer of places that sold anime merchandise in middle school, and now I can get an entire show and cosplay apparel and find 20 websites where I can marathon Bleach without even getting off the couch. It has changed for the better but you really had to have been alive and interested in that stuff at that moment in time to fully get what I'm saying. Unless it was Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, there was no way in hell you were getting anything in stores, and televison blocks were the only way to watch your favorites. All the premium movie channels like Encore and Starz were godsends to pre-teen Dude, to be able to watch Howl's Moving Castle and the second Inuyasha movie. Hell when Cartoon Network held a special month of Miyazaki's films that was a big deal back then, I think they possibly even showed it both subbed and dubbed. You had to dig in the right place, but if you fell asleep late at night before your show came on, totally me by the by, you were screwed. I had to rely on friends to fill me in on what happened last time on Dragonball Z (literally), or some other slew of shows at sleepovers, and had to wait sometimes a day sometimes until next week for the next episode. In a way it's all sort of lost it's sense of adventure, you had to bust your ass to find anyway to watch and enjoy this very niche market in America before it grew into an industry that is just as prolific and strong as any movie studio, but those experiences would last forever if only in memory. Funimation man, Funimation damn near single-handedly presented so many shows to me on a silver platter, captivating my imagination and made me always wanting more. I truly couldn't have been born at a better time for that culture, that fanbase, it crafted many good memories and I truly would not trade or change one bit of it. The fact that watching Toonami lasted well into my teens, that I would still be at my grandparent's house in my room and that I could turn my TV on Saturday night and digest show after show and wrap up by the time the sun slowly starts to rise, is incredible beyond words. How fitting is it, that you spend an entire night watching animation from Japan to wrap up by the time of the rising sun. Britain might have a strong place in my heart, but never forget who stole your heart first.

Evolutionary Viewing Of The Internet Critic Part IV

I couldn't get a film to review this week so let's just have a chat. If you've read my other EVOTIC ramblings it mostly focuses on how I was introduced to the concept of writing and making videos on various bits of media, specifically film and video games easily my two biggest passions. But this is more or less going to be a microcosm of how well, my tastes and viewing of cinema changed over the course of the past 20 years or so. I just turned 25 a while back, and yet my love for movies has been there just about as long as Japan has been on my radar. I was a movie kid back in the day. You want to shut me up for a bit? Put on a movie. You want to hear me quote every line of dialogue in a movie because I was 5 years old and didn't have anything better to do with my time? Buckle up. Longer movies never were an issue for me, but to everyone else it was. So what if a movie is 3 hours? The majority of movies I watched when I was little little were like 2+ hours, so what's another 30 odd minutes. I was watching The Ten Commandments when I was like 5 or 6, and that movie is about 4 hours long. And I loved it! I was given freedom with the movies I could see, as long as it wasn't R rated, and I honest to God could not take the majority of my movies to bring to kindergarten because it needed to be PG or G, and it never dawned on me that I was watching more mature stuff because it was just entertainment. Granted there were instances where I couldn't handle small segments of a movie but I held my ground with a lot of stuff. Even though I was a scaredy cat until I was maybe 9 or 10, then I started watching the Universal Monster movies which was my introduction to horror, and gradually I upgraded to slasher movie in my early teen years, and now I'm kind of a sucker for the genre. I used to only have one criteria between a good movie and a bad movie: If it was boring, it was a bad movie. So even a movie as universally panned as Batman & Robin was cinema gold to my young eyes because that movie is anything but boring. Now....different story. I refuse to be called a cinema snob, I'm well versed in cinema, I know what I like, but I keep quite an open mind which is something I kept from my younger years. But bad movies are bad movies dear ones, and I can tell pretty quick if I'm in for a bad trip. Another thing that has obviously stuck around is my movie collection, even when I was young I had tons of movies to watch whenever I wanted whether they be mine or my grandparents, I had an entertainment system filled to the brim with movies of all kinds, a closet full of VHS tapes, and honestly not much has changed. True I still went out and played a lot as a kid but it's undeniable that certain movies got me fired up to go out and run rampant. Can you guess what movie made me swing around a red baseball bat as a sword? Speaking of which, I blame Star Wars for this but I have not changed my mind on the subject, I always wanted the villain to win. Whether it be The Empire, any pick of the litter in the Disney villain department, I always felt that heroes were nothing but boring goody two-shoes and were absolutely no fun. And I had this revelation at the age of 3 by the by, and yeah I still feel that way. Dress me in black, imbue me with the powers of eeeeevillll, I'm here for it. But obviously some things have changed during the course of my lifetime and it has affected the way I look at films, I follow a good cabal of internet critics, I don't take their word as gospel but I respect their views enough to listen, but I'm more of a cynical grumpy old man now so if a movie fails in my eyes it needs to be wiped off the face of the planet. Whereas if I was younger I wouldn't care too much and just not watch it again. I always wanted to do something in the movie business, whether act, or write, or scout locations, and while I've taken on the outsider looking in perspective it still has something to do with movies. Movies have made me appreciate culture, improved my vocabulary at a young age, absolutely arrested my imagination, and has taken up more time of my life than anything else. And I wouldn't have it any other way, good experiences and bad. It's awful nice to put your thoughts to writing, and no doubt many people have a lot of experiences and memories to share so I hope you tell them. It should be a fun experience to discuss things you love, and I'm happy you could join me on this odyssey through movies and television shows galore. So until next time, happy watching and I'll see you soon.

Evolutionary Viewing Of The Internet Critic Part III

And here we are again, thinking of days and friends long gone.

The first thing I have to say before we head into more somber territory is how much YouTube has changed. May be for better, may be for worse but I was there...almost in the beginning. As I have said YouTube did not hit my radar until about 2007 or 2008. I don't think I got an account until 2009 (still no videos to this day), but I really loved it. It just seemed like a fun neat little place to just share ideas and fun things. I remember a time when YouTube was made for either fun videos or media from past decades. I listened to a ton of 80s music and viewed music videos regularly, and loved it to death. But what I more fondly remember are just fun silly videos. Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid, The friggin' Dramatic Chipmunk, videos of legend now but while popular back then were viewed as fun. I think of YouTube as that place where you could literally make a video of you talking or doing stuff with your friends like in your neighborhood and you could get views. Whether you were doing some idea you cooked up or were just chilling out and talking. One of my best friends in middle school had a channel, and it was literally her and her cousin I think, jumping on a trampoline and talking the most random nonsense you ever heard in her room. I thought it was the coolest thing, I've always wanted to do YouTube videos! Just that small scale, fun, and intimate way that people made videos. I remember one of the channels I watched, it was just various let's plays of various games and I grew a strong relationship with the creator of that channel, we could talk about anything and have a blast, I loved her work to the moon and back. And even more large scale people like Miss Hannah Minx still had that small scale video environment. I especially loved her older videos because it seeped into her regular life when she was in Tokyo. I'm not sure you can find all of them now, but some of them were just nice fun videos. Not to say the YouTube of today is not fun but it lost a lot of it's basic, yet fun loving charm. There were no corporations or big budget YouTube personalities. It was just people putting love and passion into their work and uploaded it for all the world to see. Watch The Legend Of Zelda A Pain In My Ass, that sums it up perfectly, pet project, lot of creativity, very funny, for no other reason than just to do it. And most of these people are gone and I miss them very dearly because they were such great people, which leads to one of the saddest days of my life. On this day, one of my reviewers passed away. I was barely a fan of him for....maybe a month. I just decided on a whim to watch, Jewwario. Watched his reviews of japanese video games and instantly loved him. Without a shadow of a doubt he was one of the most kind, loving, caring, and wonderful human beings ever. And I weeped when I heard the news. I crumbled and broke down. I barely knew his work for even a month and I broke and cried over his passing. That should give you some indication of how truly wonderful he was. He is one of my heroes until the end of time itself. I miss him with all of my being and I wish him and many others were still with us today. To all of my Youtube friends, old and new, to all of my few fans, I want to say I love you all, I wish for nothing but the absolute best for you in life, and I hope to keep seeing you somewhere in time and space. I love, and admire, and above all so thankful to have you with me. Thank you for reading, goodnight.