Well, here we are with the final entry of this blog for 2022. "What to expect in 2023?", you may or may not (but more than likely the latter) ask? Well, I think I should finally focus on ideas that I have had in mind for literally years, but simply always held off on for other stuff, usually simply because I can be a bizarrely lazy person, in some ways. The death of an iconic SF mangaka that was only announced earlier this month has made me decide to finally move forward with one of those writing ideas, and I have another 8-9 of those kinds of ideas (where I literally have had some images ready to go for years!) to continue on with, so I feel it's time to force myself to move forward with them. I also have other ideas in mind that are just concepts on Windows Notepad, so some of those might also get done. However, that's for next year, so what are the other six "posts" that I am most proud of from these past two years?
Hong Kong '97 vs. Hong Kong 97 (April 1, 2022)
On November 26 of this year, Albert Pyun passed away at the age of 69, after having dealt with both multiple sclerosis & later dementia. Even though he literally was able to work as an intern to Takao Saito, a director of photography who was most known for his repeated partnerships with the legendary Akira Kurosawa, Pyun would go to on be considered a modern-day equivalent to Ed Wood, due to his notoriety for directing B-movies, oftentimes very cheesy ones. However, upon news of his death, what came about was more a sense of gratitude towards a director who knew the kinds of films he wanted to make, and the joy many had in watching those films, among which includes the likes of 1989's Cyborg with Jean-Claude van Damme, the 1990 Captain America film, or 1997's Mean Guns with Ice-T & Christopher Lambert, the latter of which would praise Pyun for his passion about filmmaking in a French interview for the film. Coincidentally enough, just seven months prior to his death, I happened to make an April Fools' Day piece where I pitted his 1994 film Hong Kong '97 against the infamous unlicensed Super Famicom game of almost-nearly the same exact title, Hong Kong 97 (the apostrophe is paramount!), and while I'm absolutely sure he never actually came across this piece in those last months of his life, I would imagine he would have found it amusing.
But, yeah, this was an idea I had in mind to do for a good while, pretty much ever since James Rolfe brought up the movie in his old AVGN episode about the video game. After all, both products were about something happening that involved the transfer of ownership of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China, came out just one year apart, and outside of a single punctuation mark (& the game's cover using the whole year number) had literally the same exact title. So I finally decided to bite the bullet & buy the LD for the movie, as I try to be all about the having the best video quality possible for stuff like this (even if it's mainly just for an overly long gag), & compared the movie to the game. Unsurprisingly, the movie was better than the game (that's not really hard to do, as the game was intended to be terrible), but what did astound me was that the film itself actually wasn't half bad, in its own right. Compared to Pyun's usual fare, Hong Kong '97 was more of a slow-paced character drama, detailing the transformation of a killer-for-hire from someone who thought that he didn't really care for others to one who realized that he truly did care for those closest to him after getting a hit put out on him & dealing with the idea that he may actually die. Sure, it's wasn't high art or anything, but it is surprisingly enjoyable as a film, and I think the whole Vs. Battle itself honestly gave me a bit more of an appreciation for Albert Pyun than I originally had. If you are curious about watching the film, I did capture the LD & I uploaded it over to the Internet Archive.
RIP Albert Pyun
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| This really is the entire idea behind attempts to make Saint Seiya a hit in "North of Mexico". |
Theory Musing: Why Does Saint Seiya Consistently Fail in "North of Mexico"? (November 7, 2022)
If there's one thing about anime & manga that remains the same around the world, it's that many of the biggest, most successful works tend to be seen as such in almost any continent. In most areas of the world, titles like Dragon Ball Z, Attack on Titan, One Piece, Naruto, etc. are more or less universally agreed to be the most popular & successful titles out there (this is not about quality, so no trying to argue that "Well, I don't think one or more of them is all that good"), and that makes sense. However, there are some works that are successful in some regions but are just never all that successful in others, if those other regions even get any of it. A perfect example of that is Masami Kurumada's Saint Seiya, which in Japan, parts of Asia, most of Latin America (i.e from Mexico down), & certain regions of continental Europe is a massive megahit of a franchise, and has been ever since the late 80s or early 90s. However, the same cannot be said for Saint Seiya when it comes to the United States & Canada, a.k.a "North of Mexico" (because Mexico is part of "North America", so I can't use that), which didn't start officially getting the franchise until mid-2003 via DiC's Knights of the Zodiac.
As we near a solid 20 years since that first attempt on Cartoon Network, we have seen numerous attempts at releasing Saint Seiya in English from a variety of companies (Toei, DiC, Viz, ADV, TMS, Crunchyroll, Cinedigm, Discotek, Seven Seas, Netflix... and this is just counting the various manga & anime!), and from all indications every single one of them has failed, if not straight-up just bombing. Considering how successful it is in so many other regions, with some areas loving it just as much as DBZ (if not more so), there is the occasional query of "Why hasn't Saint Seiya caught on in the US & Canada?", and so for my last Theory Musing article as a consistently yearly thing, I decided to take a look at this question & give my feelings on it. I covered the botched first impression from DiC, the fact that the franchise was already considered nostalgic in Japan by the time it finally arrived in "North of Mexico", how that second factor meant that other titles inspired by it that arrived in English first wound up making Seiya feel old hat, the simple fact that it's now just so big that it's kind of overwhelming for newcomers, how Kurumada's visual style won't be for everyone (or, as I said, "The Looks of a Shojo Manga, but with the Heart of a Violent Gekiga"), and just the general unknown factor of it all that rounds things out. I even pointed out how, while TokyoPop's release of the B't X manga in the 00s was an even bigger bomb, Anime Midstream's release of the B't X anime in 2018 & 2019 went on to not just be well received (especially its stellar English dub), but from all accounts actually wound up doing better than expected.
In the end, my final question in regards to all of this was "Is it Masami Kurumada, in general... or is it just Saint Seiya?", but unfortunately it's a question that I don't think we'll ever be able to actually answer, since no one's going to be brave enough to take a chance on anything other than Saint Seiya, and that applies to both Japan & abroad. Recently it was announced that Akira Toriyama's one-volume manga Sand Land will be receiving some sort of CG anime adaptation... and from all indications Toei Animation has nothing to do with it. It really makes me wish something like this could happen with Masami Kurumada, as while Toei is busy producing its all-CG reboot series for Seiya that's now streaming on Crunchyroll, I would love to see another studio take a shot at maybe redoing Fuma no Kojirou via anime, or maybe adapting Otoko Zaka into anime for the first time ever, as both would make for fitting promotion for their respective manga having new content being made, as the former is getting a new side-story focused on Musashi Asuka for the manga's 40th Anniversary, while the latter has started its final story arc.
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| While it'll only ever appear in that first entry, this is the official logo. |
Oh Me, Oh My, OVA! α: The Forefathers of the Short-Form OVA (May 31, 2021)
Tying back to "concepts I've been wanting to actually write about for years", we have the debut entry in a new segment that I do plan to do more often, especially as I start running out of stuff to write about for both Demo Disc & Retrospect in Retrograde. The idea was to explore the deep well of the "short form OVA", i.e. anime released straight-to-home-video that only lasted no more than two episodes, as unlike watching anime that don't have complete English translations to them or re-reviewing anime that I originally reviewed here going (mostly) off of memory this is a concept that can theoretically last forever; me using the Greek alphabet is restrictive, but I can always move on to something like Cyrillic script. While there have been plenty of OVAs of this type that have seen official English release, there are still way more that never had, and many of those don't even have an English fansub. While it isn't literally a never-ending well to pull from, it might as well be just that, for all intents & purposes.
And so came the debut of Oh Me, Oh My, OVA! in May of last year, where I cover four different OVAs for each entry, though in following Demo Disc's format I cover them in chronological order, because I just like things to be organized in some way. As of this look back I have done three entries of OM, OM, OVA! (because the best acronyms sound like baby gibberish, right?), but there was really no other choice for this list than the first entry, where I looked at what I could find were the first four short-form OVAs ever created. Coming out in between the releases of late 1983's Dallos (the first OVA ever made) & early 1985's Megazone 23 (the first OVA that was a smash hit), all of the OVAs covered here were one-&-dones that never received any follow ups & were a perfect mix of what I brought up earlier: Received an official English release, received an English fansub, & has never been translated before. Radio City Fantasy: Machikado no Märchen is a visual treat with some fun music, though it's definitely best described as "experimental". Birth (a.k.a. The World of the Talisman or Planet Busters) is arguably even more of a visual tour-de-force with even less of a plot, but damn if it isn't a wild ride to watch. Meanwhile, Greed is the opposite by having tons of plot in a shorter run time, but with its own wild ending makes it just about as much a ride to watch. Finally, Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko remains the enjoyable watch that had made it the cult-classic it remains to this very day, which only makes me wish it would finally get a license rescue in English; seriously, all we've ever gotten is a VHS release by Right Stuf back in the late 90s.
As for what else the future holds for Oh Me, Oh My, OVA!, I guess we'll just have to wait & see.
Cybernetic Empire (September 20, 2022)
Today, Bandai Namco's Tales Series is one of the biggest names in JRPGs, and while it obviously isn't quite on the scale of success & notoriety as something like Final Fantasy & Dragon Quest, it's definitely a strong second-tier RPG franchise from Japan. The origins of Tales come from a development studio named Wolf Team, which back in the early 90s was best known as the most notable studio that belonged to game publisher Telenet Japan, and while Wolf Team's games weren't always the best in terms of quality, they were just so full of personality & style, and some of them were legit really good. Once Wolf Team partnered with Namco to release Tales of Phantasia for the Super Famicom in 1995, though, the studio would almost only ever go on to develop more Tales games, & after it got fully purchased by Namco in 2003 the studio even got renamed to Namco Tales Studio, reinforcing that focus. Meanwhile, Telenet Japan would spend the rest of the 90s publishing almost nothing more than pachinko, pachislot, & mahjong video games, before making an attempt at other video games in the 00s before going bankrupt in 2007. However, I did use the word "almost" when it came to Wolf Team & Telenet Japan after Tales of Phantasia's release, because in 1999 the two companies united one last time to release a video game... and, despite its absolute obscurity, it truly is a proper farewell to the Wolf Team (& Telenet) of old.
Cybernetic Empire is the only console game Wolf Team ever developed using 3D polygons, and details the battles between UN agents & a mysterious terrorist group run by a man known only as "Black Mask", with control of an object called "The Cube" (& later the world, of course) at stake. A fully-3D action-adventure game where you primarily make your way through different environments & take out foes along the way, the game has definitely aged to some extent, as it's a late PS1-era game of this style. However, a mixture of impressive graphics that I feel push the PS1 to an extent, a variety of enemies that really does encourage using your entire arsenal at different points, normal foes that require a little more than simply "shoot until dead", a tiny bit of some blatantly obvious Metal Gear Solid influence, an end game plot that goes absolutely bonkers, & a magnetic tether mechanic that's really damn cool (& I wish was utilized just a little bit more) creates a game that I am seriously sad to see never talked about online. Aside from it being the last non-Tales games Wolf Team ever developed, it's just a game that really aimed pretty high for the console it was released on, and while it does stumble here & there I'd argue that it actually managed to succeed in most of what it aimed for. The fact that Eat-Man's Akihito Yoshitomi did the character designs (which was admittedly the entire reason why I even bought this game a few years ago) is just icing on the cake for me, personally.
Without a doubt, if you still enjoy playing PS1 games & want to try something out that's off the beaten path, then definitely give Cybernetic Empire a go. While it is all in Japanese, it's not impossible to play & get into, by any means.
Kinnikuman II-Sei 20th Anniversary Retrospective Tetralogy (August 29, September 29, October 29, & November 29, 2022)
We started Part 1 of this two-year list with an Anniversary retrospective, so we'll end Part 2 with a pair of retrospectives. Up first is yet another thing I've had in mind doing, but held off on actually starting simply because of the sheer scale of it. Back in mid-2011, during the first year of the blog's existence, I reviewed Viz's release of the Ultimate Muscle manga, which was the English adaptation of Yudetamago's Kinnikuman II-Sei, the next-gen sequel to the iconic slapstick wrestling action manga that ran mainly throughout the 80s in Shonen Jump. Like most, I got into the series via 4Kids' English dub of the 2002 TV anime adaptation, which is where the UM name came from, and while I did once watch the first 26 episodes years upon years ago via bootleg DVDs I bought from New York City's Chinatown, I had wanted to watch all of the anime in its original Japanese for a long time. So, with 2022 being the 20th Anniversary of the TV anime, I felt that this year was the perfect time to finally do it, and I went all out with it. I covered the two theatrically released anime movies that never saw official English release, followed by all 51 episodes of the TV anime (across two parts, because I no longer feel like covering an entire year worth of an anime all at once anymore, at least via traditional review), & then I finished off with the Japanese dub of the bonus 26 episodes that 4Kids commissioned Toei Animation to produce because of how popular the anime was abroad.
Naturally, with 77 episodes (& two movies) in tow, I felt that I needed to take my time with this. So I decided to pace myself relatively well by having one review for each part of the 20th Anniversary retrospective come out on the 29th day of each successive month (a.k.a. "Niku/Meat Day", because 2 & 9 are "ni" & "kyu" in Japanese), giving me an entire month to watch each third of the 77 episodes I'll be covering; at 36 years old, I've long stopped trying to watch more than 2 or 3 episodes of an anime at a time. Thankfully, that pacing worked just fine, and it allowed me to also time each review to come out on a day that the Kinnikuman franchise itself is sometimes celebrated with (every 29th that happens on a Friday is "Kinniku/Muscle Day", as Friday is "Kinyoubi" in Japanese); ironically enough, I missed out on a Kinniku Day, as the last one was this past July. Regardless, watching all of this Kinnikuman II-Sei, while overall a bit overwhelming in some ways, was still a lot of fun, and with me giving the manga a complete re-read during this same time reminded me of just how good this series is. It certainly has its faults, especially in just how important Mantaro Kinniku/Kid Muscle himself winds up being (yes, he's the main character, but arguably to the expense of his entire supporting cast), but it's still a very solid & enjoyable action/comedy series, with a wrestling seasoning to it.
Luckily, while I was in the middle of this retrospective, Discotek Media announced that it would be releasing 4Kids' Ultimate Muscle dub in its entirety on SD-BD early next year. As I was covering the Japanese version, which hasn't been confirmed for a release yet (it's currently on "If the dub release does well" status), this announcement didn't really "mess" with my timing (though I definitely had a feeling that this announcement would happen during this time), but at least this anime is getting a re-release in English, in some way.
I mean... was there any doubt what the last pick for these past two years would be?
I have made no attempts as masking just how much I love Masami Kurumada's first hit manga, 1977's Ring ni Kakero. After giving Kurumada a chance early on as a fan of anime with the anime adaptation of B't X, I then moved on to checking out the Ring ni Kakero 1 anime, as I wasn't quite ready to try getting into something as massively long as Hajime no Ippo (which my friends had shown off to me here & there not too long earlier). It was after enjoying what would wind up being "Season 1" of RnK1 (Season 2 would debut a few months later, which I first watched "raw") that I finally decided to give Saint Seiya a try, though that was via the manga, and it was shortly after that point that Kurumada would eventually become my favorite mangaka out there. His style of action, with its mixture of over-the-top force & heavy dramatics, just really struck a chord with me, & unlike many of his contemporaries his love for this form of storytelling is very obviously pure & loving. Personally, I feel that this is most true with Ring ni Kakero, which was made at a time where his touch would go on to influence the entire genre as a whole to this very day, hence why Shueisha would call it the "Hot-Blooded Fighting Manga Bible" when it got released digitally in 2014. Simply put, RnK is straightforward (though arguably to a fault, at points) shonen action manga in its purest form, just with a boxing exterior, due to Kurumada's love for Ashita no Joe, which the early part of the manga (which the anime would mostly skip over, minus some flashbacks) was a direct homage to; also, the concept of general "action manga" had still not been fully formed yet.
Really, everything I'm saying can be found in the multitude of pieces I have already written on this blog for RnK, so what made last year's trio of posts so special?
Simply put, 2021 was the 40th Anniversary of Ring ni Kakero's final chapter, "Sayonara Ringu/Good-Bye, Ring" (originally "Ring yo, Eien ni!/Ring, Forever!"), which was originally published in Issue 44 of Weekly Shonen Jump in 1981 with both "lead color" & "full color", i.e. it was the first thing shown in that issue of Jump, had full-color opening pages, and the remaining pages were all done in the red-tinted colorization that was tradition for the magazine at the time. This was the first time any final chapter in Jump would be given that kind of special treatment (Yamazaki Ginjiro's finale earlier in 1981 simply got the cover, & nothing more), with only Dragon Ball & Slam Dunk being given the same exact treatment in 1995 & 1996, respectively (Slam Dunk's finale also got the cover), while only Naruto & Kochikame have since been given anything remotely similar when it comes to starting their final issues & featuring color of some sort. I wanted to celebrate that moment in some way, so I did three things. First, I actually bought all 25 volumes of the original RnK manga so that I could finally directly compare it to the RnK1 re-release from 2001/2002 that I already owned (& reviewed the manga from back in 2013), and see just how much was changed for the latter. In the end it was a mix of some reworked scripting & some art changes (most notably the removal of all swastikas, meaning that Team Germany are no longer Nazis!), but the biggest of all was the removal of numerous sections (including entire chapters) of the early part of the manga, due to how Ryuji Takane wasn't always the primary focus. Second, I finally did a Retrospect in Retrograde re-review for all four seasons of the RnK1 anime, with the end result being easily the longest review I have ever written, at over 8,500 words (What am I, Bad Game Hall of Fame?!), no matter how much I tried to shorten it; the end result, though, is one of my favorite reviews of all time.
Finally, I also bought the entire run of Ring ni Kakero 2 so that I could read all of it & give it the review that I had long wanted to do; aside from Saint Seiya, it was the only "long" Kurumada manga left for me to review. I had previously read the first 8 volumes of RnK2 long ago and enjoyed it, but it was definitely something to finally start over from the beginning & read all 26 volumes, because while I do feel that B't X was Kurumada directly addressing & even sometimes deconstructing his own style up to that point, RnK2 was aimed at something else entirely. Instead of addressing his own catalog, though there was some of that at points, Kurumada's sequel to his first big hit addressed the idea of nostalgia & being obsessed with what had been done in the past, instead of allowing a new generation to be defined for who they themselves are. In the review I directly compared RnK2 to 2017's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a film that very much looked to do the same with the iconic cast & themes of the original trilogy, only to be hit with both derision by some of the franchise's most hardcore fans for various petty reasons (but most notably for not treating the returning cast with absolute veneration, instead showing them all as flawed) & a lot of what it aimed to say being negated with sequel The Rise of Skywalker. In comparison, the story of Rindo Kenzaki & the people he meets, befriends, & becomes rivals with directly addressed the idea that everything the cast of RnK1 did was something to look up to. RnK2 showed all of the returning cast as flawed, beaten down and weakened by their past fights, & to some extent still stuck in their old ways, with a number of them even dying as the sequel went on... that is, if they weren't already dead before the sequel even started; imagine if the Star Wars sequel trilogy began with Luke, Leia, & Han already dead, & you have Ring ni Kakero 2.
In the end, while I felt that RnK2 didn't quite manage to rise above the "holy trinity" of Ring ni Kakero 1, Saint Seiya, & B't X, it was still definitely right behind them as Masami Kurumada's #4 manga, telling a story that still gave fans of the original the occasional reference & homage that would please them, but also warned them that the fights those original characters went through wounded them in ways that they would never truly recover from, both physically & mentally. At the same time, while the actual main cast of this sequel would go through some similar plots & battles as their predecessors, it quickly became obvious that those who truly would succeed were those who either aimed to surpass those who came before them, or decided to go down their own path & be their own person... and Masami Kurumada did all of this long before Rian Johnson looked to do so. While I absolutely enjoy Kinnikuman II-Sei both in its manga & anime forms, a major aspect of its storytelling (at least, in what we got officially in English, as there was a "Part 2") was about the new cast having to live up to the "Legends" that came before them, and that was something that Kurumada wanted to directly address with Ring ni Kakero 2, something that I feel he definitively succeeded at doing. Though it is technically a sequel, one can absolutely go into Ring ni Kakero 2 without being familiar with the original manga & still experience the overall theme & message Masami Kurumada was telling with it, as it is a universal one, in that regard, & I wish it had an English release. Since this review a fan group has started an English translation effort for RnK2, but it's from the same group that only got halfway through Fuma no Kojirou before stopping, so I honestly don't hold out much hope for it going far.
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And with that it's time for me to call it quits for 2022. I'll see you next year for more writings on the obscure, forgotten, & the like. Happy New Year, and may your 2023 be a good one.
Happy New Year, thanks for all the interesting posts (especially the Kinnikuman II-Sei retrospective), and I look forward to what you have to say in 2023.
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