When Empty Vessels Write Dull Reviews On Old Anime Nobody Remembers

I originally wrote the majority of this while I was ill and the review I criticise is a week old, but I still stand by it. Make of it what you will. The fact of the matter is that those who consider themselves at the top of the anime fandom food chain shit me to tears most of the time;

The only reason I post stuff on my blog is because I like writing. I enjoy writing about my hobbies and interests and to a lesser extent my life. I really don’t give a toss if anyone reads my posts or agrees with my reviews. However if you are a paid writer for a commercial website, you’d think you’d be able to write in a manner that was far above your bog standard 14 year old anime reviewing blogger. Well apparently that doesn’t apply to Zac Bertschy, Executive Editor of Anime News Network (ANN).

I fully admit that I am not a fan of ANN, especially since the quality of the site has slid further and further over the last few years. Certainly the “news” part of Anime News Network is mostly comprised of material that is more often than not several days old and increasingly sourced and translated from commercial Japanese anime news sites. Increasingly even more material is lazily taken from other commercial English language Japanese pop culture-centric websites such as Rocket News 24. Other material is regurgitated from press releases. Very little of it could qualify as original material. You have to remember this is an anime news site which has been running for 17 years. Even after all this time they still don’t have a permanent Japanese correspondent. Compare with Otaku USA which regularly posts article about events, shops and cafes in Japan. Even sites like Crunchyroll and Otaku Mode Tokyo provide better anime news which is neither their core businesses.

But the thing which pisses me off so much about ANN is the bile spewing bore that is Zac Bertschy. He’s the guy who turned the Answerman column into “Opinionman” and once even had the audacity to blame falling US anime company revenue on people who bought complete collection sets over single disc releases. Hilariously he claims he is a journalist. Seriously. Apparently journalism is all about stating your opinions really loudly and as fact, as well as regurgitating days old news from other news sites as well as press releases. Reporting on entertainment isn’t journalism. No one in their right mind would consider the lowlifes at TMZ as journalists, so why in hell would anyone working at some dinky anime website be a journalist?

So I think it’s time to talk about Mr Bertschy’s review which annoyed me to no end; the rerelease of “She, The Ultimate Weapon (aka Saikano or Saishuu Heiki Kanojo or My Girlfriend, The Ultimate Weapon)”. Unsurprisingly he bagged it to hell and back. This got me to thinking; was it really that awful? After watching the show over the last few days the answer is; of course not. But the reason that I find his review awful is not that I don’t think that Zac can’t have a different opinion to mine. It’s the fact that he not only wilfully misinterprets what happens in the show, but as a supposedly professional reviewer in reality he’s really no better than your average anime fan with a blog.

Starting from the very first paragraph, Bertschy claims that a term for manipulating the emotions of your audience is commonly known as “kicking the puppy”. Never heard of the term? Well I’m not surprised. I can’t find any reference to that term or the evidence for his claim that it’s a well-known and used term in screenwriting circles. Maybe he means “kicking the dog” or variations on that. But that term actually describes the cliché of an evil character just doing something evil with no real meaning other to demonstrate to the audience that he’s evil.

He then proceeds to claim that Saikano was “shoddily produced by Gonzo back in the olden days of 2002”. Really? Compared to what? Let’s have a look at other shows from that period; “Aquarian Age”, “Seven of Seven”, “Gun Frontier”, “Happy Lesson”, “Get Backers” etc. Yeah, there’s a list of high quality stuff there. Of course when he means “shoddily produced”, what he actually means is “I don’t like the art style”, made apparent with remarks about the character designs looking like “one of those Precious Moments toddler angels, just a little bump for a nose”. This is hilariously hypocritical as Bertschy publicly chastised anime fans that disliked the rotoscoping in “Flowers of Evil”. He also seems to conflate actual animation quality with video resolution, rating the animation as a “D-“ and saying this;

“All of this is made worse by the show's incredibly poor artistry. SaiKano was produced in a terrifyingly low resolution back in the early 2000s, a digipaint nightmare made to look good on CRT TVs and nowhere else. […] it was produced in such a low res that you can't even make a properly anamorphic widescreen disc for it – this show is letterboxed, which means it appears in a little box surrounded by black bars on your TV, unless you're still rocking a 32” Zenith like it's 1998. […] It's aliased to hell and back, and the cheap, clumsy digital animation looks even worse when it's swimming in jaggies. The show has a particular problem where characters are routinely drawn with accidentally enormous feet, which makes their walk cycle look completely off”.

Putting aside the bizarre comment about the poorly drawn feet (I have no idea what in god’s name he’s referring to) and the fact my copy of the show (region 2 Japanese DVDs from 2003) has surprisingly very few aliasing problems even when zooming in to fill the entire screen, video resolution has sweet F.A. to do with animation quality. It doesn’t matter if the show was shot on 8mm film stock, 480i video resolution or for ultra-high definition or if you’re watching it on VHS or 4K streaming video. None of that stuff has got anything to do with animation quality. As far as I could see, apart from some low grade CG shots in the first and final episodes, the animation looked as good, if not better than most TV anime released in that year. And the digital colouring and composition looked far from “cheap” and “clumsy (again, compare to “Gun Frontier”, “Get Backers” etc.) and looked quite natural compared to harsher looking digital painted shows like “s-CRY-ed”. Certainly a couple of the animation cuts in episode 9 and 10 looked off model and of course a show from 2002 isn’t going to have the same level of animation detail as one from 2015, but obviously Bertschy doesn’t care about such comparisons.

Then we get on to Bertschy’s bizarre interpretation of the relationships in Saikano. He claims that most of the female characters “including Akemi, Shuji and Chise's mutual friend, and Fuyumi, his first love, goes through some manner of sexual and emotional humiliation at the hands of Shuji, who they all claim to love”. Um, what? Fuyumi was 14 year old Shuji’s teacher (Shuji is 17 in the present) when she had an illicit relationship with him. Now it’s quite obvious in the show that Fuyumi is a very needy and somewhat unbalanced woman (you’d have to be to have a sexual relationship with a 14 year old). She’s forcing herself on to him and you could easily suggest that he’s was the victim of sexual assault as a 14 year old, and that an adult woman having sex with a 17 year old schoolboy isn’t a great idea. It doesn’t seem to occur to Bertschy that Shuji’s relationship and feelings towards Fuyumi are more than a little complex and not as black and white as he makes them out to be, especially now that he has a girlfriend he wants to protect with her own set of “unique” problems. As for Akemi, she’s just confessing her love on her deathbed. I agree that particular scene is emotionally manipulative and not all that subtle, but to claim that its “sexual and emotional humiliation at the hands of Shuji” is patently absurd. Even stranger is Bertschy’s bizarre claim that Shuji’s relationships with these two women turn Saikano into “a crappy harem fantasy sneakily bolted on [to the story]”. Um, what the heck? In what alternate universe could this show even be remotely considered to be in the harem genre?

Later Bertschy clumsily berates “Saikano” for what he considers to be poor attempts as drama threaten to derail the show “like a dangerously overfilled clown car” (yes, he actually gets paid to write this tosh) and suggests that the “apocalyptic sci-fi premise is just window dressing for the emotional fireworks on display. You get people with the sci-fi hook and then nail them to the wall with your nuanced and relatable character writing (see: District 9, Children of Men, Cowboy Bebop, et al)”. Which is all well and good, but in the three sci-fi shows he has mentioned, all are sci-fi first and foremost. The sci-fi element plays a very large part in all three, whereas in “Saikano” it’s not really a big deal.  Shuji and Chise’s relationship is at the core to the show. I get that he’s trying to say that the show’s drama is poorly done, but you can’t really make the comparison between those movies and “Saikano”.

In the forums Bertschy gets a little upset with people comparing “Puella Magi Madoka Magica” to “torture porn”; “[…the] accusation for Madoka seems to be a hyperbolic, purposefully barbed response to the show's popularity rather than a sincere or genuine reaction to the show itself”. Well why don’t we compare both shows? Both Kyoko Sakura and Sayaka Miki have back stories just as sad and tragic as anyone in “Saikano”. And let’s not forget Mami Tomoe suddenly shooting the other girls in episode 10. How is that any less shocking or emotionally manipulative than anything in “Saikano”? Then there are the obvious parallels between Madoka Kaname and Chise; both receive powers that they don’t want but feel compelled to use, and both ultimately end up sacrificing themselves in order to save people they love. And let’s face it; you could easily make an argument that the writing in “Madoka Magica” is really no better than what is found in “Saikano”. Let’s see how well “Madoka Magica” holds up in a decade or so.

Because Bertschy cannot connect with the characters in the show (with all the conflicts raging across the world in the last decade, he can’t put himself in the shoes of young lovers who find themselves unwilling caught up in the conflict?), he questions the sci-fi aspects of the regarding Chise’s mechanisation. No sense of imagination this bloke. I mean seriously, does every little thing have to be spoon fed to the audience? Baffled at military tactics, Bertschy asks; “If they have this ultimate weapon that can literally erase a town in the blink of an eye, why are they bothering with ground troops?”. One could stupidly ask the same thing in regard to the Cold War. I mean why have armies when nuclear weapons could obliterate the planet several times over? He also asks; “Why do they have to hunt her down later? Wouldn't they install some kind of tracking system?”. One would think that seeing she is an “ultimate weapon” and is shown to have external control over military satellites and the like, that yes, it’s not too much of a stretch to believe she could hide her presence from the military. See what I mean about this guy having not an ounce of imagination?

Finally in the last paragraph of the review he brings out his oddest comparison of the show yet; “Really, this is dysfunctional, poorly-made tragedy porn. Like pornography, it services only one emotion and nothing else, and like pornography, it's profoundly uncomfortable to watch in a room with other people, so the idea of getting together with your buddies to laugh at all the dark-hearted angsty gnashing of teeth is unpleasant at best”. Putting aside what is probably the most utterly lazy and overused way to describe something which is one dimensionally gratuitous (i.e. the addition of the word “porn”), there’s the comparison between pornography and this show. Seriously, how would watching this show in a room full of people be comparable to being in the same room watching pornography? Only in the hyperbolic bizarro world of Zac Bertschy, that’s where.

When this guy is the editor of arguably the biggest anime website in the world, you have to question fandom as a whole. Comments in the ANN forums on the review had the usual bleating of sheep with practically no dissenters. Click bait nonsense like this review for a 13 year old show that only a few people will buy irks me to no end. Other than to create controversy and cause a few page hits, what was the actual point of the review? For a hilarious comparison, read his thoughts on the show back in 2002. From "genius" to "awful". But this is Bertschy’s shtick; be sarcastic, be negative, act like some hipster anime critic, all tip and no iceberg (to paraphrase Paul Keating).

Bertschy does write as if his opinion is that the be all and end all of everything and the way he belittles anyone with dissenting opinions, which only further entrenches this perception of him. Seeing as he criticises the majority of anime and to a large degree its fans, one can only wonder why he still works for ANN. If he hates anime so much, why in hell would you torture yourself by writing about it every day? Add in the fact none of his views are particularly enlightening. When you consider that there is an infinite number of anime bloggers and Tumblr pages spitting out content just as infuriating and shoddy for free, so why would you read the deep as a puddle thoughts of some doofus that thinks his opinions are vitally important to the world?

This Fucking Black Dog...

Well, it happened. In the last week of March, the wheels fell off. It was a week from hell where my anxiety just went through the roof and I just wasn't sleeping. Work was killing me. By Wednesday I was going nuts trying to contact my old psychologist. However I could only get in to see her in mid April. I thought, fuck it, and on the Monday went to the medical centre to get whatever to calm me down and the week leading up to Easter Friday off from work. Unfortunately it wasn't my regular doctor and I was prescribed some pills which weren't that great.

While it settled me down somewhat, the side effects were awful. Like a lot of SSRI anti-depressants, it really messes with the sexual side of thing. I had (actually, still have) a raging libido, yet the pills have made sure I can't do anything about it. It's driving me nuts (no pun intended). It may seem like a joke, but it's really distracting to have these side effects for nearly a month now. So after consultation with my psychologist and regular doctor, I'm getting off pills. But with these terrible pills, you can't go cold turkey, even if you've only been on them for as little as a month. I've gone half dose for the last week, and the following week is half that again.

It's just been an utterly frustrating 16 or so months. Everything has just piled on top of each other and caused this. As a result, I'm gonna have to take a break from blogging which is annoying as I've been trying to get back into it. Hopefully I'll see you around in a week or two.

Video Backlog: “Sailor Moon”

Publisher: Viz Media (USA)
Format: Region A Blu-ray, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English dub and English Subtitles. Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English dub and English Subtitles.
Length: 46 episodes x 24 minutes
Production Date: 1992 - 1993
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes

I was a bit hesitant about doing a synopsis for this show, but I guess a lot of new fans might be unfamiliar with it, so here goes. Usagi Tsukino is an ordinary 14 year old Japanese schoolgirl living in the Tokyo suburb of Azabu Juuban. Usagi is a complete klutz, cries a lot, gets low grades and is always late for school. Another ordinary school day seems to be starting as Usagi rushes to school, but she spots two primary school kids tormenting a black cat. She saves the cat from the kids and removes a pair of band-aids on the cat's forehead. Underneath is a golden crescent moon. The cat stares her down and moves towards Usagi which scares her a bit, but she notices she's late for school and runs off.

After a horrible day at school, and coming home to an angry mother who found out about her low score for a maths test, Usagi goes to her room. She notices the window is open and hears a voice calling her name. It's the black cat that she saved earlier that morning. The cat's name is Luna. She believes Usagi is Sailor Moon and gives her a brooch which can transform her into the legendary heroine. Luna's main mission is to find the Moon Princess, but in the meantime a monster has replaced the mother of Usagi's friend, Naru. Luna and the transformed Sailor Moon head to the Jewellery store where Naru and her mother work and live. There they discover that the monster has taken over a group of customers and turned them into zombie-like creatures. Sailor Moon is quite daunted at the task of defeating the monster, but is helped by a mysterious and handsome masked man named Tuxedo Mask (who oddly resembles Mamoru Chiba, the guy whom Usagi has a love/hate relationship with. Do you think maybe they're the same person? Nah, can't be...). Soon Sailor Moon manages to defeat the monster, restore the customers back to themselves and free Naru, though she doesn't know Usagi is Sailor Moon.

Over the next few months while looking for the Moon Princess, Luna and Sailor Moon battle a number of monsters disguised as humans, seemingly wanting to take human energy for some purpose. Along the way Luna recruits three more Sailor Guardians; a brainy girl in Usagi's school, Ami Mizuno (Sailor Mercury), a fiery Shinto priestess with limited precognitive powers, Rei Hino (Sailor Mars) and a brawny, yet very feminine tomboy, Makoto Kino (Sailor Jupiter). Luna eventually reveals to the Sailor Guardians that they are fighting the Dark Kingdom, enemy of the Moon Kingdom where Luna is from. Headed by Queen Beryl, the Dark Kingdom is trying to acquire human energy to revive an evil being named Queen Metallia. Beryl has several handsome male lieutenants who serve her; Jadeite, Nephrite, Zoisite and Kunzite, most of whom are defeated by the Sailor Guardians. But soon their focus switches to obtaining the Silver Crystal, also wanted by the mysterious Tuxedo Mask. The Crystal was broken into seven "Rainbow Crystals", each now in the bodies of seven humans. After a long battle, the Sailor Guardians finally come into possession of the crystals and obtain the Silver Crystal. They also recruit the final Sailor Guardian, Minako Aino (Sailor Venus) and her partner Artemis, a second cat from the Moon Kingdom. Both had been acting independently from the others, with Sailor Venus in disguise as the mysterious masked crime fighter Sailor V. The Guardians now set about defeating the Dark Kingdom in order to save Earth.

Before I get into my criticisms of the show, I’m going to point out that this show really did turn the magical girl genre on its head. "Sailor Moon" has the usual magical girl elements; the mascot, the transformation, the wand and other magical items, but creator Naoko Takeuchi adds other elements to the mix to create something highly original. Borrowing from Toei's super sentai series, she has taken the core formula of the genre; a transforming team of heroes who fight monsters who originate from an evil empire. Just like sentai team members, all of the girls have distinct personalities and even a colour which represents them. Even the way they fight a monster every week is similar to the formula sentai shows have. The other stroke of genius was putting all the girls in the classic Japanese sailor school uniform. And let's face it, this was the key element which made it a cross over hit. It's quite obvious that the boys who watched it tuned in to see shapely girls with obscenely long legs in short skirts. I also note that some of the Sailor Guardians footwear when transformed borders slightly on the fetish side, with lace up boots and stiletto heels. I mean come on, you can't tell me that this wasn't a conscious decision by the character designer. I also note that fan favourites Sailor Mars and Mercury do have some rather infrequent fan service moments, but these pretty mild and tame when compared to today's anime.

Aside from the design elements and the overall Dark Kingdom storyline, another great element is the relationships between the five girls who make up the Sailor Guardians. The characterisations are pretty good and there's plenty of comedic and romantic sub plots as well as character development to keep fans happy. There should by a girl with a personality here that anybody could relate to. The character designs by Ikuko Ito and Kazuko Tadano are such classics too. They're instantly recognisable to any anime fan, as well as those who aren't into anime. Even though this series is mostly comedy based, the drama is an area where this series truly shines. There's some truly heart wrenching subplots. In particular the final three episodes are quite sad and full of tension. The final two episodes are probably two of the best half hours of TV anime in the 1990’s (baring "Evangelion").

Director Junichi Satoh is a certified genius of magical girl anime. With titles like "Ojamajo Doremi", "Kaleido Star", "Princess Tutu", "Pretear" and "Maho Tsukai Tai (Magic Users Club)" he has become king of the genre. Like the majority of the titles he has directed or created, "Sailor Moon" is filled to the brim with cute and extremely likable characters, overflows with shoujo drama and has plenty of humour. Another important part of the series is the cast. In particular the woman who plays Usagi, Kotono Mitsuishi, who has also played Excel in "Excel Saga" and Misato in "Evangelion". Her energetic and happy-go-lucky performance suits the character very well. I can't imagine anybody playing Usagi but her. Interestingly Kae Araki played Usagi during the final couple of episodes due to Mitsuishi being hospitalised due to her appendix being removed. Luckily these last few episodes are very serious in tone, so her absence is not noticed that much, but this also due to the great performance that Araki gives, who sounds very close indeed to Mitsuishi.

Yes, there are tons of transformations repeated during the episodes. Yes, the wands and other items Luna gives the Sailor Guardians are designed specifically as marketable toys for young girls. Yes, there generally is a monster who pops up every week and yes, the Sailor Guardians end up defeating it each week. But geez, this a great little show. However I didn’t enjoy the series as much as I had in the past. Maybe it was an overfamiliarly with the show. Maybe it’s because the animation hasn’t aged all that well. Maybe it’s because magical girl shows released after this one ("Cardcaptor Sakura", "Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha", "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" etc.) have topped it. Maybe it’s the fact that the “monster of the week” plot is used over and over again for 40 something episodes and does get a bit tiring after a while. Whatever it was, it didn’t do it for me so much this time around.

The other major problem with this set is Viz have pretty much fucked up the video. Make no mistake, the BDs are far, far superior to ADV Film’s old DVD set from 2003. The audio is much more clearer and the video is a far cry from the old worn out composite master used on ADV’s set. However the show should look a hell of a lot better than what it does on Viz’s BDs. There’s a lot of weird ghosting, mosquito noise and aliasing. Add in some very occasional pixilation and what seems to be oversaturation in parts. The question is why does it look so bad? Viz just seems to have completely cocked up the authoring. And judging by a recent ANNCast, they don’t give a fuck. I suppose it’s selling truckloads and they just do not seem to care. It’s utterly disappointing, but at least the video is watchable and better than the old ADV DVD set. The preludes are still after the opening animation and I think the variants of the first opening animation (disguising the identities of the Sailor Guardians until they appear in the show) aren’t there, which is the same as the ADV set and quite disappointing. The extras on the discs include the first clean opening and closing only plus a whole lot of useless extras created by Viz. Most are videos compiled from footage from conventions where Viz relentlessly promoted the fact they’d acquired the series. Do people really want to see half an hour of over excited American fans blabbing on about how they adore the series? There’s also video of a panel where the Viz rep briefly introduces the cast of the original 1990’s DiC dub, but aren’t releasing that version (still loved by a large section of fans, some in anime fandom, a lot who aren't). Why in hell would they do that? To fans it must have given the impression there were releasing that version of the show as well. On the positive side the box which houses the two halves of the series is really well done, as is the booklet, which is a lot better than the crappy “Ranma ½” booklets which only have episode synopsises in them.

So in short, “Sailor Moon” is a bit of disappointment in terms of content and presentation. With no alternate UK (or Australian) blu-ray release on the horizon, I think I will continue to buy the Viz sets despite their gross incompetence in authoring the BDs. I still think the show is worthwhile and amazingly they’re a vast improvement on what was previously released on DVD. 7 out of 10.

Remaining Backlog: One series, one movie, also waiting for second parts of a number of shows to be released before viewing them.

Video Backlog: “Raijin-Oh”

Publisher: Anime Midstream (USA)
Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English dub (episodes 1 to 25 only) and English Subtitles.
Length: 51 episodes x 24 minutes
Production Date: 1991 - 1992
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes

The Jaku Empire arrives in Earth orbit from the fifth dimension, ready to invade the planet below. However an alien entity named Eldoran appears and confronts the attackers in the robot Raijin-Oh. Eldoran attempts to stop a missile full of Akudama seeds which will eventually hatch and turn into monsters being sent to Earth. However the commander of the invasion, Belzeb, forces the missile to prematurely detonate in order to thwart Eldoran. Raijin-Oh is caught in the explosion and is flung into Earth’s atmosphere with the Akudama seeds. Raijin-Oh crashes onto a primary school in the town of Hinobori. It lands right on top of a fourth grade class, room 5, class 3, and smashes right through the roof. The class naturally panic but are confused to find the rubble floating in mid-air. The room goes black and Raijin-Oh’s cockpit opens. The glowing alien entity known as Eldoran tells the children that they are to protect the Earth from the Jaku Empire and gives them each a medallion. As quickly as Eldoran arrived, he disappears and the class room appears to be undamaged. The call and their teacher, Mr Shinoda, are confused. Was it all a dream? However no one can doubt that each member of the class has the medallion that Eldoran gave them.

The following day Belzeb and his subordinate, Taida, arrive in Hinobori and let loose an Akudama seed which transforms into a mechanical exhaust monster which starts to cause havoc. The children gather at the school realising that the arrival of the monster is part of the Jaku Empire invasion Eldoran was talking about. In their classroom they discover that most desks have an area where their medallions can be placed into. Once they do that, the class room starts transforming into a command centre. Three of the boys, Jin, Asuka  and Kouji, discover bracelets which pop out of their desks. They place their medallions inside the bracelets and find themselves being transported inside three giant robots; Ken-Oh, a humanoid robot piloted by Jin, Hou-Oh, a bird like mecha operated by Asuka and Juu-Oh, a lion robot manned by Kouji. Having been thrown into battle against the Jaku Empire’s robot without any training, to boys struggle to bring it down. They must cooperate with their classmates in the command centre to defeat the mechanical exhaust monster robot.

OK, so this show is quite formulaic. Most episodes have the Akudama seed being born into some kind of small monster after being activated by hearing a human saying out loud that something annoys them or a nuisance (for example a crying baby, which will cause the dormant Akudama seed to transform into a comical baby monster that cries all the time). Taida will arrive, check out progress and watch as it gets bigger and bigger by consuming something. The children, who call themselves the Earth Defence Class, send out Ken-Oh, Hou-Oh and Juu-Oh to fight the monster. Belzeb arrives (after Taida screws things up and the monster looks like it might be defeated), who then ups the size of the monster by unleashing a blast of dark Jaku power via a fairy like creature called Falzeb who lives inside his chest (yes that’s right, literally inside Belzeb’s chest). Ken-Oh, Hou-Oh and Juu-Oh form to transform into Raijin-Oh and defeat the monster. Add in some sort of problem that one of the 18 kids has which may or may not be related to defeating the monster which gets solved by the end of the episode. Repeat by about 50 episodes.

They do change things up mid-way; Belzeb gets a robot of his own, the Jaku Satan, which combines with the monster of the day. And of course the Earth Defence Class gets their own super weapon, Bakuryu-Oh, a dragon like robot that can transform into a humanoid and eventually combine with Raijin-Oh.  There are also a number of comic relief characters, the previously mentioned Mr Shinoda who has a thing for the school nurse, Ms Himeki, the oddball principal and the school’s goat, Carol. But the show is squarely aimed at young kids and is a bit repetitive and bit dull at times I’m afraid. Not helping is the rather flat and dull animation. Other than the stock footage of the robots, there are no shadows or any real detail in the character animation. It just looks so cheap, but this is early 1990’s TV animation. What can you expect? However I did enjoy the second half much more than the first. There were a lot of crazy monsters, quite a lot of inventive ideas in the stories and number of laugh out moments. And you have to admit the transforming school is really quite clever, especially for show aimed at young boys.

I initially thought this show was part of the “Brave” robot series (or “Yuusha” series, which includes “GaoGaiGar”) as it’s also produced by Sunrise, but it’s actually part of the “Eldran”(or "Eldoran") robot series, three early 1990’s TV series and an aborted fourth which appeared as a one shot OVA in 2001. I generally don’t follow this genre too closely so the differences between the Yuusha and Eldaran series are neither here nor there to me. However I bet most people would pick “GaoGaiGar” or even the unlicensed gem “Gear Fighter Dendoh” over “Raijin-Oh” any day.

The show is adapted by a new company with the unfortunate name of Anime Midstream. Look, I know they’re just a bunch of anime fans releasing their first show, but I’m still going to have to point out a few flaws. The first volume came out in early 2010 and their plan was to not only dub it into English (yes, a 20 year old robot show not many people had heard of) but to release it in single volumes with five episodes at a time. This was in a market which was regularly releasing half series box sets, and almost anything over 10 years old (or even younger) as sub only. Over four years later, they finally gave in and released the second half of the series as a cheap digipak (which looks a lot like the dreaded Hong Kong bootleg DVD sets from the early 2000’s), subtitled only. But unfortunately a couple of the single disc releases have some significant problems. Volume 1 for some reason the Japanese dialogue only is present in the left channel. Switch over to the English dub and the music and sound effects with some dialogue comes out the right channel with occasional dialogue coming out the right. I tried it on two different DVD players and my BD player. Same result every time. This is a massive cock up. In every review I have read no one has seemed to have noticed, which baffles me.

Volume 2’s video is actually stretched in 16:9 format, not the correct 4:3. Even the back of the DVD slick reads 16:9, which means the company knew about this stuff up and shipped the discs without correcting it. That’s pretty poor form. Minor annoyances include bizarrely placed chapter stops which means you need to fast-forward quite a bit if you don't want sit though the opening animation every time. Chapter stops after the opening animation, after the first eye catch, before the end animation and before the next episode preview is standard on most discs since DVD came out. Why they didn't do this is beyond me. The video quality isn’t all that good either, with some worn out old composite video masters as the source. There’s also some very sloppy translation. They credit the original creator as Kei Yatate, when it’s actually Hajime Yatate, which is the collective pseudonym for the studio Sunrise. They also list the opening theme song as “Silk” when it’s actually “Dream Shift” by the group Silk (they do list Kinuko Oomori as the singer which technically correct, but the song was released under the name of Silk). On the positive side, there are quite a few extras on the discs. These include clean opening and closing animation and a couple of music videos, one of which is Silk’s actual music video for “Dream Shift” which features Kinuko Oomori’s big 1980’s hair.

Despite all of the problems with the discs, I really have to hand it to Anime Midstream for getting the show out. It’s obviously been a labour of love, but perhaps a series too large for a new video company to take on. I wish them the best for the future and I really do hope they release more titles. As for the show itself, look, it’s not the best example of the genre. It does get better in the second half and there is a lot of absurd humour which I like. But I think this release will only appeal to a small set of fans. I can’t imagine how Anime Midstream made any money off this show. I was going to give it .5 less, but I think overall the show deserves a 6 out of 10.

Remaining Backlog: One series, one movie, also waiting for second parts of a number of shows to be released before viewing them.