Mikan Watch #126: Tesagure! Bukatsumono

Posted by DiGiKerot in Mikan Watch at December 7, 2019 on 9:47 pm


From episode 5 of Tesagure! Bakatsumono, which I somehow missed when I originally watched it despite it being in plain sight, so thanks Elliot of, err, three years ago?

Anyway, Tesagure (which is probably best known for it’s OP that has lyrics that describe the stereotypical OP cuts it uses as they appear on screen) is one of those semi-improv shows that were all the rage (well, slightly the rage) a few years back, no doubt thanks to the emergence of cheap animation tools like MikuMikuDance, where the characters just end chatting nonsense about a bunch of random topics. In this particular episode, they discuss uniforms that somehow cup huge boobs, and cycling comics. I kind of feel that the demand for this kind of thing has probably been somewhat subsumed into the whole vtuber thing, though to be fair, it’s not like the entire medium of anime hadn’t peaked with gdgdFairies already anyway.

(Though Tesagure is one of the better examples of such a thing if you are in the mood for it, weird third series possibly aside)


Mikan Watch #125: From Up on Poppy Hill

Posted by DiGiKerot in Mikan Watch at December 6, 2019 on 5:51 pm


At this point in the backlog, I’m running into the ones I don’t readily have screenshots or easy access to videos of, so in the the spirit of being lazy, here’s a photograph I took some six years ago in a branch of HMV that no longer exists of the Mikan Box in the Spanish Quarter in the Ghibli movie From Up On Poppy Hill. Plus it’s probably funnier for me just to half-arse it like this anyway.

For what it’s worth, I have actually seen the movie – I caught a festival screening pretty early on – and I like it well enough and all, but it’s not something I have ever particularly felt the need to watch again, so it’s sure not something I have a disk copy of lying around or anything.

I’m generally a lot cooler on Ghibli’s output than I used to be anyway. I mean, Porco Rosso and Whisper of the Heart being functionally perfect movies aside, I suppose as one grows older, one comes to appreciate Takahata’s eccentricities over the Miyazaki that tends to come more quickly to mind.

Although I say this, I’d probably enjoy the heck out of, I dunno, Laputa if actually sat down at watched it again, but I can’t particularly say I have much compelling me to do so these days.

(Also the vacuum left by Miyazaki’s latest attempt to retire just ends up leading to usually interesting directors like Keiichi Hara making uncharacteristically bland movies like Birthday Wonderland in an attempt to plug some kind of perceived void, but ho-hum)


Mikan Watch #124: Ninja Hattori

Posted by DiGiKerot in Mikan Watch at December 5, 2019 on 10:21 pm


From episode 9 of Ninja Hattori. If you are wondering how I even spotted that there’s a Mikan Box in this one, well…

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Mikan Watch #123: Manabi Straight!

Posted by DiGiKerot in Mikan Watch at December 4, 2019 on 8:53 pm


From the second episode of Manabi Straight, as show that I finally got around to starting to watch earlier in the year and… errr, kind of still need to get around to watching the last few episodes of. Stuff happens, I guess.
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Mikan Watch #122: Gintama

Posted by DiGiKerot in Mikan Watch at December 3, 2019 on 9:35 pm


I’ve done Gintama before, but this cardboard sleeping bag (or arguably more of a coffin, given the context) is from the shows third run, rather than any of the others I’ve talked about previously.

I end up spending a lot of time working on stuff on the ‘puter at home in my freetime in December, so it’s usually the time of year when I start looking for low-effort things I can half-watch whilst working on other things. Thanks to talk of Hulu having posted a dub of a chunk of the first season of Gintama (which I gather is the third time at least some portion of the show has been dubbed at this point, with completely different casts, and has had some mixed reactions), I ended up going back to some episodes from the last time Gintama was dubbed – the third season episodes that Crunchyroll did.

Gintama is one of those shows that I theoretically like, but I never actually get around to watching any of. It’s also one of those shows where I’m always kind of shocked at exactly how many episodes of it there are. Good show, though I think I’ve maybe only seen forty or so episodes of it at this point, which is something of a drop in the ocean compared to the entire series run. Will I get around to watching more once I run out of easily available dubbed episodes? Probably not, though I probably should, but the nature of the show means you actually need to pay attention if you are relying on the subtitles…