An "Old Skool" moment

Way, way back at the beginning of this blog, I wrote a short (*ahem*) post that tried to justify my spiral into obsessiveness, and tracked my overall history of watching Japanese cartoons.

One of the shows that softened me up for any influence the medium eventually had on me was "RoboTech", that edited/dubbed juggernaut derived from a couple of different original Japanese "Macross" series. The first couple of episodes of this have shown up on The Anime Network's On-Demand channel (which I've pretty much not bothered with because all the shows I sampled on there have been either boring or annoying). Anyway, revisiting the whole Rick-Lisa-Minme soap opera, and finding that I still remember the theme music after about 18 years has been quite a trip. I'm not entirely sure I'm going to continue re-watching it much more than for the nostalgia value, but I'll probably enjoy it on that level at least.

The big event that show softened me up for, of course, was that crappy 4th generation videotape of "Akira". Projected on an auditorium wall with a lousy, distorted mono speaker. And that completely floored me. Last night, many years later, I watched the "DTS Edition", which I picked up in the last DDD sale.

Daaaammmmmmmmnnnnn!

Outstanding picture quality, and even better, the soundtrack was phenomenal! And just watching all the various details and how the characters were designed and animated, in comparison to everything I've been watching lately, was really enjoyable. I'd say a lot of the modern stuff has a lot more technical sophistication, but Akira was packed with "life". And that's not to say that for the time it wasn't sophisticated, it sure was, but thanks to that movie, a lot of techniques it used are taken for granted. That's not a bad thing. But imagine them being used to the level that Akira did then...

Oh, wait, you don't have to imagine it for much longer...

F* yeah!