Happy New Year from SMC

Yes, we have been watching this, too

Haha, the last time I posted was last July, so fast-forward to January 2012 and Happy New Year!  Will update soon with what DS and I have been watching - right now he's going through a Speed Racer redux, and it's been fun to go through the episodes we have on DVD.  Not so crazy about Scooby-Doo anymore, which is sad in one sense but I think there'll always be a soft spot in his heart for those meddlin' kids and their dog.  His advancing age (he's almost 10) makes me think he's ready to handle Gatchaman so thinking about changing back to the 1-DVD-at-a-time plan with Netflix and go through the ouvre again - I think I'm ready to go back and tackle these, as well, now that I have a bit more Japanese subtext under my belt.

Sick Day

Darling son is home sick this morning and, for some reason, last night he decided to drag out our Speed Racer DVD's and re-watch the eps we have.  When he was little, his very first observation about Speed was that, "he looks like a girl."  But, you have to admit, he does some pretty kick-ass stuff, and his dad knows Judo.

Here's a link to the first post about Speed Racer from 2006(!), and here's one that has a youtube of the Japanese version of the theme song.

Kuragehime (Jellyfish Princess) and Belated Update

So, let's see...the last time I posted to SMC I was remarking on the death of Walter Cronkite, the voice of Benjamin Franklin on DIC's "Liberty's Kids" - I have actually been talking about this show in one of my graduate seminars this semester.  Yes, my professor thinks I'm a complete doof, now, because so far I've expressed my love of "1776, the Musical," my preference for Hall of Presidents at Disney World over real presidential history, and now my comment that one of the themes of Liberty's Kids is about the obstacles of slaves and freed black people (my seminar with this professor is looking at Antebellum slave narratives).  I think if he knew about this blog he would be rather dismayed that he had provided me with a letter of recommendation for graduate school.

Anyway, so I'm finishing my second year of grad school and then...?  The economy is so bad I'm not really sure what my next move is; I just know that I'm not continuing in the PhD program because I cannot continue teaching freshman English for $7.80 an hour.  Well, actually, I could keep doing that, but not teaching AND writing a dissertation for eleventy years. 

My son is still watching Scooby-Doo; he doesn't like the newest addition to the canon, however; It's something that Cartoon Network came out with recently (he watches cable at the G-rents').   Not having seen it, his resistance to it tells me that it either has too much real supernatural stuff going on, or it's somehow grittier than the other incarnations.  Wait, let me look for it...It's called Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (this link will take you to the CN page for the show) - it looks pretty standard issue, so I'll have to watch an ep and see if I can figure out this SD anomaly with my boy.  He's watching a lot of CN's other offerings for kids (and the Total Drama series, even though it's for a somewhat older crowd); Scooby-Doo has become a sort of mental comfort food for him, like the old Popeye and Looney Tunes cartoons were for me. 

I started this blog when my son was still little, as a way to write about my experience with reacquainting myself with the old cartoons I watched as a child, especially now that I was introducing these works to my son.  Now he's moved on to the stuff he likes but he still has an appreciation for the old Fleischer stuff and that makes me happy. 

So, I'll sit with him and watch the stuff he likes, and for the most part it's stuff I can reasonably tolerate, like Johnny Test; while it's not stuff I would go out of my way to watch on my own, I'm still appreciative that I get a chance to sample what the hip youngs are watching these days.

Anyway, so that's as much of an update I can reasonably give without getting completely boring, so I'll just move onto the next subject, which is also somewhat of an update. While my son has been blazing his own path of cartoon experience, I'm continuing down this rabbit hole of anime (and now manga) that I started up when introducing my son to some of the old anime that I watched (when it was still called Japanimation).  After I went through all of the old stuff I watched, I started looking at stuff I had never really watched but was from the same time period (and had not entered the U.S. market in any translatable way), then I moved onto new stuff.  I think the first recent anime I started watching was Bleach, and it's been all downhill from there. 

Does my obsession with Japanese animation make me otaku?  Haha, no - I've actually tried to engage otaku in online forums and was immediately tossed out, so either my online social skills are really, really bad or I just haven't gotten "it" (whatever "it" is).  I realized recently, however, that I've watched so much anime in the past couple of years that I'm getting a little jaded and can now start looking at the different offerings with a more critical eye.  So, I won't automatically obsessively watch a series if I don't like it or find it too ecchi or fan-servicey.  I guess that's a good thing?

One show I've started watching that deserves some mention is Kuragehime, and I'll continue with those thoughts in another post - I've already eaten through way too much time on this one meandering post.

Swiped the picture from Star Crossed Anime Blog

Battle of the Planets or Gatchaman?

Most definitely, Gatchaman totally rocks and rolls over Battle of the Planets, the watered-down, weird U.S. transposition of this totally cool anime from the early 70's. You know, leave it to the Yankees to screw up a totally good imported cartoon. I am reminded, of course, of the New Line Warriors of the Wind fiasco, where Roger Corman bought the U.S. distribution rights to Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and edited it so badly that it made absolutely no sense. It would be another 10 years before Miyazaki would trust us with another of his movies.
I grew up watching Battle of the Planets and so watching the original source anime, Gatchaman, is like watching a whole different story. I recognize the characters and the music, but the stories are completely different. For one thing, the stories in Battle of the Planets all take place in space, while Gatchaman's stories seem to occur more often under water.

The nice thing about finding all the original Gatchaman episodes on DVD is that I get to introduce DJ to this important cartoon from my childhood in its original, unadulterated form.

Check out the very cool Gatchaman fansite by Veronika Henkels which has a link to Tatsunoko's website (not for easily culture-shocked Gaijin). It was totally not a surprise to me that this was the same studio that put together Speed Racer, and in fact just before I left for work the old man and I had a discussion about the music from Gatchaman. He said it sounded a lot like the music from Johnny Quest and therefore was a total rip-off because Gatchaman came out 8 years after JQ; I said the music sounded just like Speed Racer. Back and forth until I said, "well, honey, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree," to which the old man said, "yeah, to agree that I'm right and you're wrong!" We have such intellectual discourses in our house. In your face, old man!

Mach Go! Go! Go! (Speed Racer)

I was sadly mistaken when I thought the English intro to Speed Racer was especially rockin' and visually appealing!

Speed Racer Redux

Last week was one of those weeks where you take your child to the library and take out, say, 16 videos of various formats. Yes, it was one of those lost weeks where the TV becomes the babysitter, and mom goes into a holiday frenzy. One of the videos I got for my son, unbeknownst to him, was the Speed Racer Collector's Edition which has the first 11 episodes. This was not a DVD to just put your kid in front of -- I was dying to revisit the exciting tales of Speed Racer that I remember from my childhood. If you grew up in the 70's the afternoon broadcast TV landscape for kids was a wonderful east-west fusion of badly animated, badly dubbed, Japanese cartoons. I would have to say, in my part of the world growing up, there was a mighty triumvirate of Japanimation (the uncool term for the now-cool word, "anime") consisting of Speed Racer, Astro Boy, and Gigantor. My husband, on the other hand, remembers Speed Racer, Gigantor, and Kimba, the White Lion (those Floridians, you know...).
Watching the old episodes again was a great treat -- I know from reading in other places that Speed Racer enjoyed a renaissance of sorts in the 90's and the release of the DVDs in the aughts has reinvigorated the franchise. It is sad, in a way, that so much of the early Japanese animation brought to the U.S. was as taken for granted, if not more so, than their English cousins because it was part of a cheap package to put on in the afternoons to sell toys to after-schoolers.
My son was completely enchanted with the heroic, if rambling, struggle of Speed and his friends and family, and kept asking about "the Masked Racer." He just couldn't wrap his brain around the fact that Racer X was actually Speed's older brother Rex, and in retrospect I guess I had the same confusion when I was his age, as well.