I started along the path of an odd thought process the other day. It started when someone brought up Trava – Fist Planet in the context of being a same universe relative of the spectacular looking new movie REDLINE. This, obviously, got me thinking somewhat about Trava – Fist Planet.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing anything about Trava for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s kind of old at this point. Well, old in anime terms, which in reality means it was made in 2003, which was before much of the internet was particularly interested in looking for anything quite as offbeat as the Madhouse production was. More than the age, though, the way it was distributed no doubt hampered its following. Trava was originally serialised as part of Grasshoppa!, a DVD magazine almost like an audio-visual Faust, featuring live action and animated shorts both serialised and one-off. The best known content that debuted on Grasshoppa! is probably Studio 4°C’s Sweat Punch shorts, including End of the World and Comedy, that were later released under the name Deep Imagination.

The sad thing is that, when I finally decided that I’d kind of like to see the Grasshoppa! disks, they were extremely out-of-print, doubly so the DVD which collected the Trava episodes which had been spread throughout into one convenient package. Ultimately, of the four volumes of the series released, I ended up with only the third, and let me tell you, for something as thoroughly peculiar as Trava, the third instalment really isn’t a good place to start. It was kind of impenetrable, infact.

This is, of course, all a massive digression, as Trava, from REDLINE staffers Takeshi Koike and Katsuhito Ishii, has nothing to do with Hideaki Anno. Further along the path this line of thought had taken me, however, was the remembrance that the third instalment of Grasshoppa! also included things which weren’t related to Fists or Planets. Things like Ryusei Kacho, by a certain guest director recognisable to many a fan merely from his favoured choice of typeface.
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It’s not really a show from which I’d have expected it, but given it’s been a while I’m not going to complain when what’s probably my favourite show at the moment throws a bone in my direction. It’s kind of like the cherry on the top of a delicious tsundere pudding, or some equally as stupid and nonsensical metaphor.

(On a largely unrelated note, the English dub of Pretty Cure started airing on some obscure UK satellite channel today. Errr, yeah…. can’t say I’m likely to discover whether or not the mikan box still appears in that version, if you catch my drift, if only because the English OP is kind of excruciating. I’m sure the lyrics are about as terrible as they were in Japanese, but when you don’t have to struggle to understand them, it’s really painful to listen to ^^;)

For those who failed to notice, Bamco posted the second iM@S2 promo video on Youtube yesterday. I have to stress that there’s nothing particularly new to this – it’s not only still the same song as the first promo (and given how often Go My Way was used in the lead-up to the 360 games release, you’d better get used to it), but I’m actually pretty sure that this is just the video that they played on the second day of last months iDOLM@STER event. Certainly, I’d seen off-screen camera shots of what appears to be the content of this video on a couple of Japanese gaming news sites a month ago.

Still, it does show off the games five-member units. I notice that, should you discount the extra couple of people, there’s still a few differences in the dance that the three remaining girls would be performing when compared to the first promo. Based upon that, it looks like the dances may scale to the member count better than they did in the first game, and given there looks to be contact and more dancing around each-other this time around, that can only be a good thing.

Courtesy of Author, taken from, errr, Mitsudomoe, right? I assume the fifth episode, given he just posted about it.

I’ve not seen the show, at least not as of yet, so I don’t have anything further to add on the matter. I suppose whilst I’m on the subject of Mikan Boxes, I have to admit I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t one amongst the many, many boxes of stuff being shifted between houses in the third episode of Asobi ni Ikuyo. Poor form, guys, poor form!

Hey, it’s certainly been a big news weekend this week, and no news has been bigger than the announcements from the big show.

By which, of course, I mean iDOLM@STER 2. This is, of course, not surprising to anyone, given that they essentially announced last year that they’d be announcing details of it this year, but it’s still kind of cool to see. Less cool is that my NTSC-J 360 is still somewhat on the broken side. Guess I’ll have to get that replaced at some point.
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