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.
(more…)

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…

Dipping back into the backlog, from the OP of the seventh run of Teekyu comes this one, which appears on screen for about one frame.

I’ve already covered Teekyu here before – including a later season even – but whatever. That being said, director Shin Itagaki has sure done some other shows since, and whilst people were quick to point to the CG of Berserk TV being the problem, the slideshow that was his WUG show, and the more recent Cop Craft, maybe points towards Itagaki’s production mentality at Millpensee being more of the issue there (particularly with The Magnificent Kotobuki being entirely passable).

But, hey, works for Teekyu, I guess.

From the original Patlabor OAVs (The Early Days, as it is typically dubbed, at least in the English world) is this effort, which I frankly could have sworn I’d posted about two months ago, but I apparently forgot entirely about.

I hadn’t actually watched the original Patlabor OAVs before, despite it being one of those things I’ve had sitting around on BD for a few years. It’s a particularly weird one given how many times I’ve seen the two feature films that follow-on from them – I’m one of those folks who started watching anime in the 90s, and it was only of those major VHS releases in the mid-90s that was being released back in the UK in complete isolation to the original series, and I’ve seen a whole bunch of the TV show, but somehow ended up not getting around to watching the OAVs even when they did become available to me.

But, anyway, back in September, the Barbican Centre in London was running a science-fiction anime season, and whilst the headline screening was basically the they somehow managed to swing a screening of the movie edition of Macross Plus in this space-year of 2019, I did end up sticking around to see the screening of the first Patlabor movie they had the following day, which seemed like a good excuse to finally get around to watching this thing.
(more…)

From the OP of Machikado Mazoku (or The Demon Girl Next Door, as streaming platforms have monikered it), perfect evidence that I’ve been somewhat slacking on this recent given that, in taking the above screenshot, I discovered that I’d already grabbed the exact same picture from when the opening was used as the ending in the first episode over a month ago. Whoops.

Still, aside from being busy recently (where, admittedly, part of being busy has involved playing an unhealthy amount of Fire Emblem Three Houses), it’s been a kind of depressing time in the anime industry recently and I’ve kind of not particularly felt the need or want to write about it in any particular fashion.
(more…)