CalAggie

 
 
I shot an unboxing video yesterday when RIN ~Daughters of Mnemosyne~ & Case Closed season 2 arrived from RightStuf. I always feel a little silly after doing one of these but at least I did an okay job handling the digital camera and keeping a good flow to the commentary.
    
I intend to post a review of RIN on my own site and hopefully use the CC set to flesh out episode entries here on Anime Vice. (I also want to write something about all six currently released Conan movies in a collective post.)

Last night (January 18th), 1 vs. 100 Extended Play had a Fanboy Night so there were themed rounds about comics, video games, and anime. I recorded the anime round for people who missed it and though the quality isn't as great as I wanted, the questions are readable and that's what really important. (Click "HD" if you feel like it.)
 
PART ONE 
  

  
PART TWO 
    

    
PART THREE   

PART FOUR 
  

  

The discussion topic of the past week has been the sales of Big Windup being not satisfactory enough for Funimation to pursue bringing over the second season, which debuts in Japan this spring. I wonder if this would be as widely reported if it hadn't come from a news website's podcast and even written up as a story on that same website. Perhaps it still would because the show seemed to well-received by online critics.
 
What initially irked me as a genuine lover of real sport is the extrapolation that sports anime in general isn't popular in America. That may be partly because of the stereotypical anime fan or geek being disinterested in sports (because it's "boring", they had bad experiences with high school social circles or whatever) but I know a few bloggers who watch soccer & American football so it's not an absolute. Still feels like a minority of the overall fandom, though. I suppose I can be fine with that - it allows me to act like I'm rebelling against the old view of geeks/nerds - but I wish it weren't so. 
 
I personally have only watched the first few episodes of Windup so I don't have a good opinion about it - I thought it was okay so far. (The chatter has caused me to put the series at the top of my rental queue - if I like it afterward, then I'll buy it.) I've mostly given up on significant blind purchases of anime because I view it as more of a collector thing... and because I didn't have an actual paying job until last month. Manga is thankfully different because I can give a series a chance with its first volume for $8-13 and continue with whatever clicks with me.
 
(Right Stuf is currently having a Funimation sale until the 18th so if *you* want to buy Big Windup and show some support for it, each $59.98 box set would be discounted 40% to $36.)
 
Back to sports anime in America: on a previous ANNCast, once-Geneon employee Chad Kime said Hajime no Ippo (a.k.a. Fighting Spirit) bombed. They took the risk because "the core anime market was really impacted". Chad came to the conclusion that "anime fans are too passive to get into sports shows". Justin & Zac chimed in that sports ficition in general doesn't too well in the US and that's fairly true - there aren't very many sports movies not entrenched in an inspirational story arc. (Reminder to self: why have you started Friday Night Lights yet?)
 
My base of experience in sports anime & manga is limited - 2 episodes of Big Windup, 8 episodes into Cross Game, three into One Outs (haven't gone back), slowly acquiring Princess Nine on DVD, Naked Wolves (sumo), and a few episodes of Prince of Tennis. (Note how many of these are baseball-centric...) I want to start reading sports manga such as Crimson Hero (volleyball), Diamond Girl (baseball) when it comes out from CMX in April, Whistle! (soccer), and Eyeshield 21 (football) - although I'll probably watch Eyeshield on CR first. I guess Slam Dunk (basketball) is on CR as well.
 
Finally, I've seen a few comments on various stories asking if Bamboo Blade counted as sports anime. I would lean toward "yes" because it involves physical activity and competition but it also has a lot of character-focused comedy and doesn't have the same feel as a team-focused series. Yawara is more definitely a "yes" since judo is an Olympic category and though Kaleido Star has gymnastic displays, it's more about creating a circus spectacle so I'm guessing "no". 

Over the past few days, Bruce McFarling posted a recap of the animesfree.com situation from a few weeks ago while pointing out that a bunch of their backup embeds are hosted on Myspace and followed it up with an inquiry into Hours of Action this Friday, wherein participants would mass-download FLV's of uploaded fansubs of anime Crunchyroll is currently simulcasting such as Letter Bee, Fairy Tail, and 11eyes so that 20th Century Fox (the registered owner of the specific video hosting domain myspacecdn.com) would take notice - and OF COURSE, delete the downloaded content afterward because all the participants will be morally upright people!
 
Though this is a noble attempt to alert Fox about intellectual property infringement, I think another potential group effort that may work better would be to gather links to those same illegal uploads to MySpace Video as well as MegaVideo and Veoh, which other mass streaming embed sites also mainly use, and send them to the Japanese copyright owners for them to use in DMCA notices to those video hosting websites. 
 
It's a bit more tedious and still relies on the hope that figures in authority will take heed that something is happening that is detrimentally affecting their products but it could bring more attention about this issue to the Japanese studios and if anyone needs to know about this, it's them. Also, any US licensors like FUNimation could also be included in this effort, though I have a feeling that its legal department may already be aware of this particular problem, given the service of a DMCA notice to animesfree.com that started this thread of discussion.
 
This crowdsourcing effort is just something that came to mind after I read Bruce explain the Teaspoon Model in his first posting and said this near the end of it: 

There'd have to be at least one person at the company actually sending out the letters to the sites streaming the bootlegs - but they would be far more effective if backed up by ten or twenty people contributing a couple of hours a week tracking down where the material is located. Indeed, the "white hats" could drop in info on where to get the material legally while at the bootleg bloodsucker streaming sites, including the proliferating opportunities for legal free streams.

I needed to get these thoughts out of my head but didn't really want to use my proper anime blog to do it so that's why I typed one out here.

Gawker Media blog io9 recently posted a list of "The Top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy Shows" and its validity was criticized fairly quickly by some of the people I follow on Twitter including ALF ranking ahead of GitS: SAC and Get Smart being listed at all (at #67) since it doesn't seem like it fits in the category. (I guess the site thinks tech counts as sci-fi, which I'm so-so about, or spying part of fantasy, to which I'd say "no".) Though I'm not a big fan of the increasing practice of "listbaiting", I'm also often curious to see what made certain lists so I suppose they've got me in their traps.
 
(Each section, for your convenience: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 61-70, 71-80, 81-90, 91-100)
  
Here are the animated entries that made their list: 

#14 - Futurama
#15 - The Tick (animated series)
#23 - Cowboy Bebop

This gritty, fun anime series about bounty hunters in the 22nd century probably helped inspire Firefly, and it definitely gave us one of the most memorable characters in science fiction — the super-fighter with a dark past, Spike Spiegel.   

#28 - Venture Bros.
#29 - Batman Beyond
#35 - Robotech

The show that helped introduced space opera to a whole new generation (along with Starblazers), Robotech gave us humans struggling against not one, but three alien invasions, using bootstrapped alien technology. And more importantly — super robot armor.

#46 - Invader Zim
#60 - Starblazers

A plucky crew of humans takes to space in the sunken battleship Yamato, repurposed as a spacecraft, in this melodramatic, thrilling animated space opera. The crew of the Yamato are never anything less than awesome, and the show really gives a feeling of space travel being slow and dangerous — but the show's real standouts are the villains, especially the sly Desslok and the chilling Comet Empire.     

#61 - The Jetsons
#89 - Transformers
#91 - Static Shock (I'd honestly forgotten about this show!) 

The Big Bang, an industrial accident in the city of Dakota, turns many of the city's residents into powerful metahumans. Though many "Bang Babies" use their newfound powers for evil, quick-witted teenager Virgil Hawkins uses his electromagnetic powers to fight crime, aided by the gadgets built by his genius best friend, Richie. But it's trickier hiding his identity as Static Shock from his widowed father Robert and strong-willed sister Sharon. Even amidst a glut of superhero cartoons, this is one of the most memorable.

#93 - He-Man and the Masters of the Universe 

#94 - Serial Experiments Lain 

Shy junior-high school girl Lain is living a quiet life — until she gets an email from her dead classmate Chisa Yomoda, who claims she's not dead, but has just transcended the flesh world and moved to cyberspace. Lain gets drawn into a journey of cyber-discovery, hallucination and weirdness, as she's encouraged to ditch her flesh body and help bring down the walls between our world and the cyber-world. Trippy and bizarre, Serial Experiments may be the best cyberspace-as-drugs show ever.

#96 - Aeon Flux 

Aeon Flux originally debuted on MTV's Liquid Television as a series of shorts about Aeon Flux, the bondage-clad agent of an anarchist nation battling the forces of the restrictive Bregna government, only to be repeatedly thwarted by her own death. But Aeon eventually got her own half-hour show, where she locked horns (and occasionally naughty bits) with her nemesis Trevor Goodchild in a surreal, disturbing, and yet sexy dystopian future.    

#97 - Thundercats 

#99 - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 

Cybernetic police officer Motoko Kusanagi keeps New Port City safe from cybercriminals, maniacs and terrorists, using an array of surveillance toys that includes optical camouflage and mini-tanks called tachikomas, while she tries to get to the bottom of the mysterious "Laughing Man" incident. It's been praised as one of the most fully realized cyberpunk futures, and for having the best depiction of cyberspace environments, ever created. Plus, cyborgs with tanks versus mysterious cybercriminals FTW!