Reply With QuoteYou do realize that all these series are waaa-aaay before my time right? (Heck, two pokemon episodes and my life was ruined. I actually entered anime-dom via Bleach)
Mhah, yeah - I think I've spent the last several years trying to forget about Tank SWAT.
Even though it's based on Conflict One, which I thought was a bit toothless compared to the original Dominion manga, I think they could have done something interesting with it. Instead we got a hideous looking PS2 cutscene that neutered all the characters to the point of apathy. It actually makes me glad that the Appleseed: Genesis series was cancelled, as apparently the same cretin was set to direct it.
You do realize that all these series are waaa-aaay before my time right? (Heck, two pokemon episodes and my life was ruined. I actually entered anime-dom via Bleach)
"Make sure the room is brightly lit and stay far away from the TV."
The gist of it is that we used to have more violence and things that blew up for no readily apparent reason. Or at least that's what it felt like, as that was generally what got translated into English.
The late 90s and early 2000s were the fucking dark ages for American anime fans. And a big reason for why I think Eva is so popular, but that's neither here nor there. But yeah. We mostly got ultra-violent profanity laden tripe. Angel Cop, motherfuckers!
Ha! Angel Cop you rat bastards!
Yeah...I came up in the '90s. It seemed that us yanks liked to see mass destruction. Go figure. I'll always have fond memories of Riding Bean & Gunsmith & Cats.
Well, not only that, but also anime was absurdly expensive and/or difficult to find. You had to work hard and pay lots to watch dog-shit. I think that's part of why a lot of people romanticize and look fondly on what I think are otherwise shit or overrted anime. No one wants to admit they just spent a stupid amount of money on something dumb.
I'll admit to it because I'm such a fiend for anime and manga. I didn't start finding good stuff until my early twenties. I think when I saw Perfect Blue, it was an eye opener to how versatile the whole genre is. I was reading Gunm at the time too.
Of course, their are some really great gems that were made around that time (maybe a bit earlier). Akira comes to mind. Recently I just saw this beautiful anime called The Little Norse Prince (or Hols: The Prince of the Sun) that was made back in '68 and released in the US. It's dated now, but the animation is incredible seeing as the dude who did it had to go old school.
The crummy ultraviolence anime thing was probably inspired by the success of Akira in the west, really, more than anything else. There were good things around too, but that was a major pusher.
I don't think the late nineties was really the dark ages, through, come on. Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus, Generator Gawl, Lain, Outlaw star... That's just 1998 alone. Just because the general populace is being miss-sold things in America doesn't mean that the genre as a whole is garbage. If anything, that time was a short second wind by the producers right before the Japanese economy really went in the drink.
This is also the same time that the XTREME GRIMDARK attitude of the western comic book industry was destroying it from the inside out, so I'm pretty sure the blame lands with the publishers more than anybody else.
That's an interesting point about the pricing. I don't remember there being any particular problems about owning up to buying something crap, but there was definitely a lot more rewatching going on.
I certainly wouldn't want to go back to ADV's genius plan of charging £13.99 (about $22) for a single half-hour oav. If you did that now, people would laugh at you.
Oh, without a doubt. The 90s and 80s had some brilliant anime. I'm just saying that a lot of what we got in the states was awful, and that a lot of it is overrated (hey, Ninja Scroll!) because of a number of factors, one of which was the fact that people were often unwilling to accept how mediocre or bad things were because they'd spent so much money on it.
I mean, it's not the best example because it's actually a not-terrible anime, but I remember what a pain in the ass it was to find all of Trigun on DVD in the early 2000s (oh, what's that? The local Suncoast doesn't have volume 2? Good luck, fucker!) and how damn expensive the DVDs were. And I wasn't too into anime myself in the 90s, but I understand that the anime-on-VHS scene in the 90s was a goddamn nightmare.
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