neon genesis evangelion

This and Lain

Oh wow - I never checked out Lain and up til this second had totally forgotten it existed but suddenly I remember a LOT of buzz

It's seriously amazing work, even watching it as an adult (and post-90's; the VR stuff is of course dated but a lot of the mobile devices, social networking, etc is...not prescient, but damn good guesswork and as such not embarrassing in hindsight). There's a new blu-ray coming out in the US next month, with everything restored to HD from the original elements- I've seen clips from the Japanese release of the remaster on Youtube and it's a revelation after years of seeing it on muddy first-gen DVDs with blown-out color.

Ah, here we go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9CXmEUwvgM

Oh waiiiiiiiiiiit. I might have watched the first episode of that in the control room of our high school's video lab. Damn.

re: Eva, I can't say it's really satisfying but there is something miraculously batshit about the End of Evangelion ending, where the evil white Evas circle around and the two-hundred-foot Naked Rei does something with a spear to dissolve all of humanity into flying green crosses and Asuka and Shinji wake up on a beach, presumably to become the next Adam and Eve. All soundtracked by the world's corniest piano suicide ballad which gradually morphs, apparently without anybody involved noticing that this is an odd thing to do, into an "All You Need Is Love" type singalong complete with "A Day In The Life" strings. This from a show that begins with giant robot fights and wacky hijinks revolving around a warm-water penguin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNelByTqFnA

good god this is even more fucked than i remember

pretty sure i've only ever really seen this as a pirated Video CD of an unsubtitled camcorder-in-the-theater bootleg, with art reading "THE END OF EVANAGELION"

This just reminded me that my friend sent me the Blu-Ray of 1.11 and I haven't watched it yet. I sort of wanted to wait until they were all released but that'll be forever. I loved this series as a teenager.

All soundtracked by the world's corniest piano suicide ballad which gradually morphs, apparently without anybody involved noticing that this is an odd thing to do, into an "All You Need Is Love" type singalong complete with "A Day In The Life" strings. This from a show that begins with giant robot fights and wacky hijinks revolving around a warm-water penguin.

― Doctor Casino, Saturday, October 20, 2012 1:34 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

iirc its called Komm Susser Todd and is a blatant Hey Jude rip as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCLoNOYcVQU

only the song audio, with all the freakiest visual bits, and yeah, the "Hey Jude" rip is pretty apparent, don't know why I didn't think of that

I've gotten more into anime in the last year and would love to watch NGE, but it seems to be going for pretty astonishing prices everywhere I look. I do plan on seeing more Lain, seeing it's often cited as one of the first shows in the mold of Kino's Journey, Mushishi and Haibane Renmei, all of which I really liked.

Half.com has what appears to be complete box sets for $30, FWIW.

kind of staggering considering as a teenager i'm sure i bought these for like, $15-20 per two-episode VHS tape

it was pretty easy to find on a semi-enclosed body of water used by marauders

I believe you mean "Dirac's Ocean."

I do plan on seeing more Lain, seeing it's often cited as one of the first shows in the mold of Kino's Journey, Mushishi and Haibane Renmei, all of which I really liked.

You really can't go wrong; it's very much like those shows, especially the darker or more elliptical episodes of Kino's Journey (ie the less pastoral or Invisible Cities-esque ones). You mention Haibane Renmei, but it's also worth checking out the other two shows lead artist/character designer Yoshitoshi ABe worked on if you get a chance- NieA_7, which starts as a slice-of-life magical realist (or whatever the sf equivalent of that is) thing with lots of forced wackiness but ends on a much more subdued, Haibane Renmei-like note, and Texhnolyze, which is overlong, a bit too action-y and full of irritatingly affected nihilism but still absolutely marvelous to look at.

A few years back, ABe and Ryutaro Nakamura (the director of Lain, Kino's Journey and Texhnolyze) were working on something called Despera that summaries and production art presented as a kind of diesel-punk 1940's Lain, but it seems like it's been sidelined, maybe permanently, by Nakamura's ongoing health problems.

Okay, removing nerd hat...NOW.

Yeah, I've heard about Texhnolyze and will probably seek it out sometime in the future. I've been getting two box sets roughly once every two or three months, and usually order something lighter and humorous along with a more "serious" anime each time. Thanks for the tip, Doctor Casino, though I'm always weary about ordering stuff from the States.

I should rewatch this. I remember that it seemed super profound and symbolic, though I could never have explained how.

"shinji's japanese voice actor is really good, when he screams its legit terrifying"
i'm not sure but i think it's a lady? like bart simpson.

just watched end of evangelion, complete lol

I've gotten more into anime in the last year and would love to watch NGE, but it seems to be going for pretty astonishing prices everywhere I look. I do plan on seeing more Lain, seeing it's often cited as one of the first shows in the mold of Kino's Journey, Mushishi and Haibane Renmei, all of which I really liked.

haha, are you me? Kino's Journey, Mushishi and Haibane Renmei are all shows that i adore.
I recently watched the Evangelion TV series for the first time, I can see why it was so important at the time etc. but ... it really wasn't that enjoyable to watch, thought it was kinda terrible tbh. are the film versions any better?

tbh that's how I felt about the velvet underground's first three albums

don't bother with the film versions then, i'm gonna be frank...

that said, the rebuild movies were shockingly good at capturing what was good about the original series. i guess that's not a surprise since they simply redrew many of the iconic scenes and removed a lot of cruft, but i'm used to TV > film retellings being pretty crappy. it and made me want to rewatch the series again, since at the same time it made me miss those super long, slow shots wallowing in depression. doc casino, you get what i'm saying

so are they gonna rerelease the TV series on blu-ray?

the new film is being cross promoted with ... a horse race. yup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQX__T2W8ag

http://spongethesquid.tumblr.com/post/51611088597

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XSV2DAUnfk&feature=youtu.be&t=9m56s

i chuckled. what WAS that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGFSwwibn94

Made my day!

wow

i am watching this now for the first time, holy shit so good

this is my favorite show

still haven't watched the third rebuild movie bc everything i've read about it suggests it is insane garbage

Yeah I refuse to watch any of the ones that 'clean up' the ending

I haven't seen 3.0 yet, but from what I understand it's even MORE of a mess, which makes me want to see it all the more!

3.0 is cool, carries in the eva tradition of trolling fanboys

who would you cast in live action american remake? has michael cera aged out?

eva-01 going nuts and ripping apart eva-03/13th angel is some freaky shit; surprised they were able to air it!

i think around the same time ppl in the us were freaking out about power rangers and x-men being violent.

yep. I believe the show did get moved to a later time slot at some point during its initial run tho.

that scene was serious

^_^

o_o

O_O

>>>>room falls into a hushed silence<<<

for teenage me

how was anyone seeing this in the 90s? i remember some kids at school talking abt "neo eva" prob around 99-2000 but i can't imagine there was some cable channel airing these (in the us anyway)

long established tape trading networks, anime clubs and binaries on Usenet by late 90s etc. guess you would have needed to be a huge nerd to know about any of this stuff tho!

Of course with shows like Evangelion there were official VHS releases, going by Amazon they were coming out by 1998

huge nerd so I did tape trades too but I mostly bought bootleg vhs tapes from nyc places that had things like kung fu, hk action, and kaiju movies <3

and yeah, there were official release, but they were soooo expensive! like $35 for two subbed eps or something iirc!

yeh it's crazy how the high price of anime during the economic bubble has been retained in Japan, while prices in the West have come right down (although occasionally Japanese companies still try the old methods e.g. the recent Yamato 2199 with 4 episodes on a Bluray for $45)

for example, take recent hit Attack On Titan
on US Amazon you can get a Bluray box set of the first 12 episodes with all the extras, dubbed & subbed for $25
On JP Amazon you buy single Blurays containing 2 episodes each for ¥4795, roughly $48
the economics of the business are absolutely borked, hence the preponderance of creepy young girl T&A in modern anime grumble grumble

service! service! service!

Honestly, I mean, what is it about that. I'm not even into the anime, I just want to play the JRPGs video games but god do I feel weird playing JRPGs now. Were Japanese people always this sexually retarded or was it just the 16-bit era that prevented me from realizing that Japanese men have the sexuality of 9-year-old aspergers.

For me it was a mix of official VHS (which was crazily expensive - $20 for two episodes on VHS was my experience) and really shitty low-quality VHS dupes. I definitely had at least half of Eva in those sweet-looking ADV VHS tapes, lined up on my shelf, next to the one great indulgence of that era for me, the complete Escaflowne ($100 at the time, now available on Amazon for $18, or $45 for the DVDs). Most of the anime I saw was fan-subbed, ranging wildly in quality from tapes packed out in EP with nth generation, washed-out dupes (but: sixteen episodes on one tape!) to really gorgeous labors of love (can still remember one fansubber by name: VKLL, who did immaculate work on key chunks of Sailor Moon continuity when they were not available in the US).

There were certain things I would buy official releases of and certain things where that was just not ever going to be realistic... DVD changed all this just as I was getting out of the hobby. Back in the 90s there were all these huge, huge shows that you just couldn't believe would ever get finished being released, and couldn't imagine anybody actually buying each and every tape of - so why even bother buying tape #1 out of 100? It's a shame because there were these shockingly dedicated, and probably insane, small American operations that were slowly, steadily putting out these expensive but wonderful tapes. AnimEigo did Urusei Yatsura with all these annotations and stuff explaining the puns and mythological references, everything. That show has 195 episodes! The watershed here was probably Dragonball Z, which had daily television building its audience, and was coming out on tape for a while but I believe switched over to DVD just before it would have gotten totally crazy.

soyokaze fansubs is the one I remember to this day. their tapes were blue!

and yeah, those animeigo inserts were special. and particularly fascinating to me for something like otaku no video, which had all these layers of references and in-jokes I couldn't possibly get otherwise.

still have regrets about not signing up for that macross box they did but I just didn't have the money then :-/