Or at least Japan’s animators seem to love Gerry Anderson. I mean, that surely is Thunderbird 2 that Imo-chan is riding upon there. Not that this is the only blatant Thunderbirds reference in anime, of course, rather it’s just the one which is sitting most recently in my mind. Here’s Thunderbird 2 in Otaku no Video, for another example.

See it up there on the bookcase? Good.

Then there was Technovoyager, the show which was so much like Thunderbirds that they localised it as Thunderbirds 2086. What I’m actually intending to write about here, though, is what happened back at the beginning of the 80′s, when a Japanese production group (including Go Negai, of all people) decided that it’s sure be a neat idea to do their own their own marionette show. which resulted in X-Bomber.

Which promptly, by all accounts, kind of bombed in Japan. It’s probably safe to assume it did regardless of any accounts, though – it’s not like Japanese animation history is exactly saturated with puppet shows. It did, however, end up getting versioned for UK TV under the title Star Fleet, where it ended up gaining a lot of fans – most bizarrely Queen guitarist Brian May, who somehow managed to convince Eddie Van Halen to play on a cover version of the shows ending theme.
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and by “some things”, I mean lesbians, random panty shots and reverse traps.

So, for the first time in about 11 years, I watched Project A-ko yesterday. A-ko, released back in 1986, is certainly an odd movie. It was originally going to be a soft-porn OAV produced by a bunch of ex-Urusei Yatsura staff looking to blow-off steam by doing something completely nuts, only for it to loose the “porn” and “OAV” parts along the way. What it didn’t loose, however, was the “nuts”.
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I’m currently in the middle of an operation which consists largely of moving all my stuff from one room in the house to another. My room isn’t actually all that large, but its kind of deceptive – I have a hell of a lot of crap. The good thing about this is that I’m finding a few things of neatness lying around – like that copy of Phoenix Wright I thought I’d lost (thankfully I’d already finished it by that point), and the subject of this post.

For those who are too young to remember these things, this is a VHS cassette. Its kind of like a DVD, except they take up loads of space, the video looks fugly, you don’t have language selection and the extra features are kind of non-existent. Also, you have to WAIT for it to rewind if you want to watch something again.

VHS tapes aren’t really that rare – we had videos for years before we moved onto the shiny disks, and it was pretty much the only way to watch things other than broadcast TV. This one, however, is a genuine old UK anime release – and I mean old. Any UK citizens may have noticed the lack of BBFC certificates on here. This is because this particular tape pre-dates all UK video releases having to go through the BBFC! Oldtabulous!
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For all the positive hype fansubs are claimed to generate (and please don’t take this as an opportunity to discuss!), they also have a habit of generate a fair amount of negative hype, and often unjustly at that. Satelight get more then their fare share of negative hype, and certainly most of it is unjust – Heat Guy J, probably the most ‘normal’ title they’ve produced, was panned by many as having mediocre animation and no plot right up until the DVD release (at which point people realised it was actually a superior example of the genre), but the likes of Aquarion has been slated repeatedly for being, well, spaztastic.

The most negatively received Satelight series is undoubtedly Earth Maiden Arjuna. Given I wasn’t hearing anything remotely positive back when it was first hitting R1 I was pretty much ready to skip on it until Bluwackys obsessive fanboyism persuaded me it might actually be worth a look.
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At some point in the future, aliens become entirely normal. Its not like they are randomly walking around the streets or anything (at least, not as far as normal people are aware), but nobody thinks twice about the fact that spacecraft seem to crash land on elementary school premises (and only elementary school premises) on a weekly basis, nor the fact that the schools keep the aliens caught on their grounds on their grounds. Even less seems to be thought about the fact that its down to the students to catch them.
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