neon genesis evangelion

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 :-/

how was anyone seeing this in the 90s?

there was an anime review section in the back of this import video game magazine i read that led to me asking for (and getting) a bunch of the vhs tapes for my birthday in like '96 or '97 and i remember most my parents like complete puzzlement about any of this stuff but they also bought me a pretty sweet record of lodoss war box for the same bday

i do remember how expensive/difficult to acquire this stuff was in the 90s so i was sort of saddened to see that the entire series is (was?) available to stream on youtube three or four summers ago when i rewatched it

hey, it's a great thing that it's 100x easier to watch anime compared to when we young

i too remember the pain of buying those $30 VHS tapes. i was so happy when my local comic shop or video store picked up some rentable anime

My high school also had an anime club, where seniors could introduce sophomores (previously versed only in Akira and Sailor Moon) to the wonders of the first two episodes of any number of random shows. At at a certain point, the sophomores learned enough to no longer settle for whatever was being offered, and the club split into rival factions, which required inventing a dubious new title, the Eastern Film Appreciation Society in order to convince the school officials that this needed to be its own club. The EFAS leadership (including yours truly) also cast an open invitation to anybody who wanted to appear in an extra yearbook photo, so it (apparently) possessed close to a hundred members, versus the rump anime club's near-dozen.

Usenet was also key in getting up to speed on the shows that were out there, learning how to get fansubs, etc.

there was always something potent and fulfilling about how obscure and rare anime felt to me in the 90s. i dont wish anime was still hard to find and expensive to acquire but that was def part of the appeal of it to me as a kid, the idea that i was watching something secret and different from the stuff my friends and classmates and people at tennis camp were into, something they hadnt even heard of. its still slightly surprising to me when i talk to people who were into it at the same time i was so strongly do i associate this stuff (less eva than some of the other series i was fanatical about) with a kind of private obsession

TOTALLY, no question. It was so great to have this hobby with a world of undiscovered treasure - which also made it really satisfying to commiserate with the small number of other people who would get the jokes, be stoked about the same release news, whatever. My first couple of anime conventions, though exhausting, had a similar "wow, I'm among my people!" kinda feel that faded by the time I went to my third in 2000 or so. This is obviously independent of the quality of the shows but I do think it's significant that my interest waned as more and more shows were becoming available. Part of this was the sheer tidal wave of product though - it got really hard to tell shows apart, for me, though it's kinda obvious I probably woulda dug the big 'college hits' of the early 2000s (Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, etc.) if I'd given them the time. But I also was in college vs. high school, I wasn't in touch with any anime people there and there was other stuff going on, political clubs to join, rock bands to go see, girls to meet, etc.

the difficulty in tracking this stuff down also it also made it kinda mind blowing when you'd start seeing roujin-z or w/e on regular old tv

i do remember how expensive/difficult to acquire this stuff was in the 90s so i was sort of saddened to see that the entire series is (was?) available to stream on youtube three or four summers ago when i rewatched it

felt the same way when I typed "macross do you remember love" into youtube a while ago and there it was, the whole movie. last time I'd watched it (quite a while ago), it was on this nth generation dub of a dub. I'd found someone through a newsgroup, sent them blank tapes, endured an excruciating wait for my stuff to arrive. later on I'd get burned by the same person in another trade and that part sucked hard... but everything else about these weird fan systems made watching this stuff super exciting back then.