Gubaba

I went out with a girl for a while whose sister-in-law essentially created the Bratz dolls. I'd never heard of them before. My girlfriend thought they were hideous. After I saw them, I agreed. EDIT: And, to add to the discussion, I submit the Blythe Doll. Those things are f*ckin' creepy.

Watching...rewatching...trying to suck every bit of marrow out of out each episode... Especially with that long, long wait after Genesis 0:10. One of my friends finally broke down and got fansubs of the last six episodes. Which was a good thing, as it turned out, since I met an EXTREMELY cute Japanese girl who was a big Eva fan (and who I completely failed to seduce ), and she had videotaped Death and Rebirth when she showed it on cable TV on New Year's Day 1998, and she showed it to me well before ADV released Genesis 0:12 and 0:13. Unfortunately (or fortunately) she also showed it to me well before EoE came out on video in Japan, so I had three agonizing months to ponder that damn "The Eva series...it's complete!?" cliffhanger ending.

People who aren't paying attention, who go into the video to get Transformers, and put up Transmorphers by accident.

Indeed: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.d.../201010349/1023

I've heard various contradictory stories, mostly from Robotech fans who seem to be arguing strenuously for whatever version of Robotech's history they feel is the least unfortunate. (IE, don't like the "thinking caps" or the "shapings"? Apparently, that's all McKinney! Carl Macek had nothing to do with it! On the other hand, if you want to think that Carl Macek is a "visionary," I've heard that he specifically came up with the concepts of thinking caps and the shapings and wanted to put them in the show, but he was "limited by what was shown in the animation.") I also read an interview with James Luceno where he said he and Brian Daley picked Macek's brain for about two weeks before starting on the novels. Which still doesn't solve the riddle of who came up with End of the Circle... I'd *like* to believe that it was Macek, because it would be funny to think that the guy Robotech fans hail as a creative genius came up with an ending that most of them despise...but of course, I have no evidence one way or another.

I love how the Wikipedia page tries to polish this turd... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astro_Plan "As the series features transforming fighter plane mecha, it has been commonly compared to the Macross series by anime fans. The main battleship also has a slight resemblance to the Archangel of the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED series." Ah...commonly compared to Macross, just because it has transforming planes...it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they are RIPPED OFF from Frontier, would it? No, no, surely not. And yes, "slight resemblance"...of course. Only a fool would think they look almost the same, right? But the real kicker comes at the end, in the "See Also" section: "Space Gundam V - A Korean animated TV series that also used Macross-derived designs." "Macross-dirived"...that's such a nice way of putting it, isn't it?

Ooh, Palladium...now THERE'S an unimpeachable source. I'd say it's more important that the length was given as 1200 meters by Miyatake, since he designed the bloody thing in the first place. That Palladium agrees is probably nothing more than a happy accident.

For some reason, I hate getting into in-depth Eva discussions online...part of it might be due to the fact that someone will almost inevitably come in and say, "Why are you debating about such a sucky show?" and derail the whole thing. Part of it is the fact that so many people come up with such weird and nonsensical ideas (the combo-Rei/Asuka/Misato at the end of EoE being on of the dumbest I've ever heard). And part of it...well, I don't know. But if I want to talk with my friends about what it all "means," or whether the TV ending is the same or different from EoE, that's fine; but I hate getting into it in forums and the like. Even reading the stuff for any length of time makes me a little edgy...which is why while I *have* an account at Evageeks, I rarely use it. And, as I've said before, you're wrong about the two types of people. REALLY, there are only two types of people in the world: those who believe there are only two types of people in the world, and those who are smart enough to know better.

I find it MUCH less offensive to raise The Thing to the level of high art than I do to worship the original Battlestar Galactica as "a classic" that shouldn't be, um, frakked with. But then, you probably knew that already.

Bergman? Miyazaki? Tarkovsky? Kieślowski? Roeg? Possibly a handful of others, depending on ones taste, mood, and willingness to find something interesting in artistic failures.

I'll give you that. I'll still defend it as a good horror film with some meat on its bones, though. Halloween remains his avant-garde highpoint, but The Thing is certainly among his better films (not that that's saying much, of course, since he's done some real schlock). I would LOVED to be able to see what Kubrick (or Tarkovsky) would've done with The Thing...damn you for making me drool like that.

VFTF1 never "pushes" anything. He plays with ideas...he picks them up, looks at them, and sometimes picks up an opposing idea just to see how they play off each other. It's usually unsafe to look at anything VFTF1 says, and say, "Oh, that's what he thinks." It's much more accurate to look at his posts and say, "Oh, that's what he's thinking ABOUT." Regardless, the SDF-1 is still 1200 meters long.

Hmm...like a lot of John Carpenter's early films, I think you can make a strong case for The Thing being a pretty rich film. It certainly asks a lot of questions about the nature of humanity and whether it's even worth fighting for...considering that as the men get more and more desperate, they get more and more brutal and...inhuman. Seems like a subtext that would be perfect for Ron Moore, no?

What's a "veritech"?

I think I'm staying out of this one... But just in case it comes up, the SDF-1 is 1200 meters long. No ifs, ands, or buts.

The fore does...the aft looks like the Macross Quarter.

Yeah, I tink so (I've also heard that a lot of the animators never got paid for their work on the last bunch of episodes...you'd think Gainax could've paid them back with interest later... ), but at least it was allowed to finish its run. Of course, it was always intended to be 26 episodes, whereas both Yamato (cancelled at episode 26) and Gundam (cancelled at episode 39 and given a four-episode extension) were meant to be 52 episodes long. I'm not talking about the American market, which was really flourishing (at least in direct-to-video releases) in the mid-'90s...I'm talking about the Japanese market. Very few anime aimed at teenagers or adults was on air on TV in Japan in the early-to-mid '90s. The '80s boom was over, and kid's stuff was on TV, with the more "mature" material being released as OVAs. Eva helped change that, even if the effects were only felt on cable channels for a while.

I think it's important to note that Misato nattering on about "Service! Service!" DOESN'T mean "fanservice" in the sense of nudity or sexy shots...more generally, anything given free or as a bonus is considered "service" in Japanese (compare Sheryl's "I don't do this kind of service very often" or the bartender at a pub I went to in Tokyo who put down a bowl of nuts and said, in slow English, "This is service"). So, in Eva, it pretty much just means, "We'll give you more than your money's worth next time, too!" And it's interesting that of those three, Eva was the only one that was popular right off the bat, as both Yamato and Gundam were cancelled on their initial run. My thoughts about it: A lot of fuss is made about the fact that Gainax is the ultra-otaku studio. As such, they made the show that THEY wanted to see, which directly led to it being a show that otaku would like. If you're into giant robots, the first half of Eva has SOMETHING you're going to like, and probably a lot of it. At the same time, they don't fall into the trap that a lot of geek-productions do, which is ignoring the characters in favor of rock-'em sock-'em action or insanely detailed technical talk. The characters (while often painted with broad strokes) are recognizably human in a way that Gundam or Yamato's characters often aren't. A lot of time is spent with just the characters talking to each other (and, towards the end, themselves) about their thoughts and wishes; this is unexpected in a robot show, and allows people who AREN'T into giant robots to get hooked on it as well. Combine that with the times in which it came out, when TV anime was in kind of a doldrums of kiddie series with low production values, and Eva REALLY stood apart from the rest and seemed even MORE special. Then of course there's the fact that the story is full of mysteries and riddles, and it always seems like the answers are right around the corner. It feels like a puzzle that can be figured out if you you just get that one...missing...piece of information. Yes, it can seem like the show is stringing people along, especially when a lot of the mysteries end up unresolved, but I for one never got the feeling that there WEREN'T answers, or that the staff was making it up as they went along. It was well-crafted (even, arguably, at the end(s) of the story), often VERY well animated, with characters that can be accepted as moderately real people. And it raised the bar for anime, especially TV anime. A lot of series (*cough*Eightron*cough*) post-Eva figured that the way to compete with it was to have depressed heroes and bizarre plotlines, but the best of what came after (Cowboy Bebop being foremost, I believe) took the RIGHT lesson: make your fictional world unique, and make the plot serve the characters.

Hmm...for me, it was...1996? 1997? I think '97...when by chance I ran into one of my old friends, who was probably the most hardcore anime fan I knew in the '80s (he managed to track down EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of Zeta Gundam on VHS in the mid-'80s. It took him a lot of searching, wheeling, and dealing, but he did it). Anyway, after catching up about real life stuff, he asked if I'd seen Evangelion. I said no. He said, "Oh, you've GOT to. It's the robot show for thinking people." So I rented the first volume, and got into it. REALLY into it. Once I caught up to volume eight (episodes 15 and 16), though, then I had to start waiting...which was a pain. Anyway, the point is that I had no internet connection, so my only connection to the anime world at large was the staff at the comic/video store near me, my friends, and occasionally Animerica magazine. And pretty much all of us loved the series, so I didn't learn about the backlash until later. I was quite puzzled by it at the time, but I'm less so now. The reasons I love the show (its experimentation, the fact that they take pains to show what clinical depression can really be like, the mystical/religious window dressing), is guaranteed to make the people who just want a nice giant robot show angry. That, and the show's more strenuous fans can be more than a little annoying at times (I know, I'm one of 'em). These days, I figure Eva, being one of the most well-known and influential anime series ever, doesn't really need me to come to its defense...I can just sit back and let it defend itself way better than I ever could. And I kind of like the fact that a lot of people don't "get it." It means that, like a lot of great art, it's not obvious. To me, the mystery is not why so many people hate the show, the mystery is how a show so blatantly avant garde ever became so popular in the first place.

That same trailer has been linked to twice already...

Tobey's got a lot on his plate... http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1629519/story.jhtml

So...despite the fact that NONE of us knows how the directing duties were split up, we can attribute anything we liked the Ishiguro and anything we didn't like to Kawamori. *whew* That's a relief. I'd hate to give Kawamori credit for anything besides Valkyrie design.

I don't get the connection...that's a personal anecdote about how to direct when one of the directors is an actor, too. Anyway, it's a pretty open secret that (as Renato said) Ishiguro was basically there to convince the producers that a strong hand was at the wheel, but that he pretty much stepped aside and let Kawamori, Mikimoto, Itano, and the others do their thing. Why do you think it would be different for the movie?

You DIDN'T EVEN WATCH THE WHOLE THING...? *sigh*