Post 28 and a good reason why you shouldn't lend your video game franchise to a cartoon maker in the 80s.
Pole Position is often regarded as the pioneer of the racing game, not the first racing game by any stretch but certainly the title was the one that started the ball rolling proper, but around the 80s, cartoon makers seemingly out of ideas turned to video games in order to see if their impact on computers can work as tv shows, however there was so little to go on in narrative that most of them were dreadful, and had to dredge up older already well used tropes at the time such as Scooby Doo style mysteries and 50s style in what was modern day setting, think Happy Days.
Pole Position didn't fair any better by becoming a spy show but at least in their favor it felt current to the time period as the cars borrowed elements from Knight Rider, so what's the story?
Tess and Dan Darrett have inherited the job of crime fighters from their deceased parents and must use their super machines Wheels and Roadie to stop all evil in the world, where the title comes in, Pole Position is the name of their cover as Stuntmen, so yeah no relation to the games other than the car colors matching the main cars in the games but other than that it's surprising Namco let this slide or Knight Rider for that matter as the talking computers in the cars are ripped off from that.
As far as stories go, it's a generous mix of fairly decent, cheesy, ludacrous and seen it all before, so yeah it's not exactly ground breaking but it's at least better than a good portion of the 80s Video Games cartoons everyone had to sit through, but it's still so ridiculously 80s that it hasn't aged particularly well so if your watching it now, take it with a pinch of salt. Awesome theme song though.
Post 26, and I really hope nothing goes wrong this time, powercuts are not fun, this time it's Ultimate Girls.
Ultimate Girls is the perfect homage to the ever popular Ultraman series, it begins as UFO man accidently crushes to death the main three girls Silk, Vivenne and Tsubomi during a routine monster battle. Feeling guilty for his mistake UFO man revives the three girls with his powers but in doing so makes him powerless, so the girls take over his duties turning into giant Ultraman style heroes but having to spread his power across three people means that once the transformation is triggered all the girls clothes start disintegrating during battle, it doesn't help that the monsters while paying homage to many Ultraman monsters look like phallic sex toys, yes it is one of those anime but it falls short of being a hentai and opts for a softcore ecchi show.
The story is really bad, there's absolutely no reason for the monsters to be phallic nor is there any reason for the clothing to randomly disappear, it's amazing that this anime was picked up for a license in America.
At least the episodes are short and don't outstay their welcome and a plot point about embarrassment adding more power to the girls is a surprisingly clever work around for essentially pubically stripping the female characters, but the most shocking thing I like about this series is the amazing opening theme. "White Heat" by Yozuca is one of my all time favorite opening themes and it comes from an anime that is terrible, seems to be one of those things that defies logic; the animation as well is just as good for a low budget late night anime.
No dub, would be funnier and better received if it was as it suits a gag dub very well.
Final Verdict: It's terrible, mainly because none of it is really necessary, you can have a stupidly fun anime without all the sexual innuendo but as it is all in this anime it really comes off as awkward and forced especially when it's supposed to be a spoof homage to Ultraman.
Post 25 and were closing in on the home stretch, we look at Wish Upon the Pleiades.
Wish Upon the Pleiades started as a web animation by Subaru Automobile Company, yes by Subaru, a car more famous for street racing and rallying has made a Magical Girl anime. Upon a successful run online a 12 episode series was produced which is what were reviewing today.
Subaru (Real original naming) is an average girl who upon stumbling on a Magical Observatory ends up obtaining magical powers which then leads her to the Cosplay Club who are all revealed to be Magical Girls who chase after stars to help a squishy alien repair his ship, but a dark magical boy is also after the pieces so it's a race against time to obtain all the ship pieces from the various reaches of space to repair the ship before their enemy steals them.
This space themed anime is very heavy on dialogue and has a habit of really pushing it's boundaries to try and make us understand the mysteries of the universe and how far it really goes, it's trying hard to be thought provoking but it's hard to really take seriously when you remember it's a magical girl show then it hit me like a well aimed bottle in a nightclub brawl, they're trying to be like Madoka Magica, obviously less dark than that show but Madoka Magica none the less with the main character being the obvious comparison to Madoka herself trying to work out what's right before attempting to bend the universe in her favor, it's rather jarring that they would go for this when the design of the show promised something more whimsical.
A few other things I can't get over are the broomsticks sounding like Subaru cars and Aoi's rather confusing attitude towards everything, I think she has ambigious disorder, there's something wrong but no one can work out what it is which brings me to another issue, the characters, none of them really jump out at me as being well made and none of them are really given much to work with in the backstory department which is important in establishing a magical girl team, in fact Nanako spends more time speaking for the Pleiadian than actually being herself, but I think overall the most jarring thing about this whole project is the fact that Subaru cars made this!!!
That's not to say a Japanese company can't make their animated mascots cute girls and it makes sense for a car company named after a star cluster to do a space themed anime but why not a space action series rather than a Magical Girl show, it's just very distracting and the fact that the series plays more serious cards than light hearted and funny, it's very difficult to concentrate on, especially on a subject as neverending as the universe.
No dub but it wouldn't work as one anyway.
Final Verdict: It's nice looking but it feels far too heavy on dialogue and plot to be a magical girl show and can easily put off audiences expecting something else entirely.
Post 24 returns to my roots as we look at Mask of Zeguy.
You have to understand that back in the 90s it was customary to get anime that was either a little crap or really crap on VHS, further exemplified when you consider that what I used to watch in the early days is exactly the same as pretty much 90% of Youtube Reviewer Bennett the Sage's portfolio, if you don't know who he is then to sum up quickly he's part of a group of reviewers on Channel Awesome consisiting of Nostalgia Critic and Angry Video Game Nerd among others. In short, I'm old and this is what we had to put up with in the early 90s.
Mask of Zeguy is an OVA about time travelling/universe jumping historical figures who try and stop a powerful mask falling into the hands of the deity Himiko who wants to open these mystical gates to control the world but also needs a preistess to complete the ceremony, by chance a regular school girl named Miki is transported to the alternate world in the clouds by accident, Miki's friend gets kidnapped by monsters and is mistaken for the legendary preistess. Miki lost in this alternative world stumbles across a flying machine piloted by our two heroes.
Our warriors on the good side are Hiraga Gennai and Hijikata Toshizo along with a mystic cat and on the evil side working for Himiko but argubly in it for themselves are Zhuge Liang (Named Koumei as that's his Japanese name) and Leonardo Da Vinci who looks closer to an oversized dwarf.
The heroes must stop Himiko from opening the gates while preventing Miki from getting captured.
Okay the premise shows a lot of promise and you could argue that elements of this OVA helped the likes of Read or Die and Inuyasha that have many of it's plot elements however the story in this is confusing at best and at worst downright tedious and incredibly rushed. There is a lot of dialogue and fair play to Tristan Goddard's performance as Gennai in the dub who really took such a mess of a story and made it somewhat understandable but it doesn't stop it from being confusing nor does it really give a clear motivation for the side villains who never really do much once their scenes are over, Himiko is a pretty stupid villain who doesn't catch on the first time that the girl she kidnapped is not the priestess she needs, Toshizo is on the stupid man hero scale who thinks women shouldn't be on the battlefield, a statement that is both redundant and sexist while main character Miki spends the entire anime whining and asking a million questions while saying she's useful which basically confirms what Toshizo has been saying about not getting her involved.
Sigh...Gennai is the only one who actually has a good part otherwise the anime is just really bad, for an early dub it's not bad but doesn't really save it.
Final Verdict: Mask of Zeguy fails to take advantage of a premise that has enough going for it to be creative; it leaves some character motivations unforfilled, a climax that is rushed, a bitchy main character, a bland male hero type and a stupid villain. I'd skip this one.
Post 23 looks at Tom & Jerry the Movie.
Tom & Jerry shouldn't need a plot but this movie has one sadly; during a series of unfortunate events Tom & Jerry are left homeless when their owners move away and the house gets demolished. After coming across a sort of orphan named Robyn, they decide to help her find her missing father, however she's under lock and key at the hands of her Aunt Figg and her lawyer who wants to claim the inheritence off her father who is declared missing in action.
When it's discovered that Robyn's father is alive Robyn finally succeeds in escaping along with Tom & Jerry who escaped from the pound after being put there by Figg.
After escaping again from a washed up entertainer, Robyn finally makes it back to her original home only to escape a fire that engulfs the home but is saved by her father at the end.
So perils and escapes abound in this film along with far too many musical numbers and Tom & Jerry having full vocals. This is not what I expected from a Tom & Jerry Movie, in fact for a film called Tom & Jerry the Movie it has very little Tom & Jerry in it and that brings up an issue plaguing the franchise since the end of Chuck Jones Era.
From the end of that era Tom & Jerry have suffered from the pain of too much dialogue and acting as the secondary characters to an episode character, even before the old era my least favorite episodes were always ones with too much dialogue either from Spike, the duckling, Tuffy or a human owner. What made Tom & Jerry so brilliant was that the actions and expressions were doing all the talking, even episodes that don't focus on Tom & Jerry's fight but simply looks at slice of life like Mouse in Manhattan which focussed on Jerry touring Manhattan yet his expressions told us more about the story than dialogue ever could. It's not that the cast are devoid of dialogue, it's cleverly mentioned by Jerry that the only reason he didn't speak before was "There wasn't anything I wanted to say that I thought you'd understand" which fair play to the writers actually works in context.
As for the movie characters they all suck, I feel I'm learning a little too much about them especially in some of the weirder songs such as Aunt Figg's villian song or Captain Kiddie's song about his past. Also I don't think Robyn is a strong enough character to really hold a movie together about Tom & Jerry, granted they've been with other speaking characters before but Robyn is very much the typical orphan character with no more than one dimension and it makes even less sense for Tom & Jerry to talk to her when it's clear that no other humans can hear them.
So overall it's not the best experience to have the Tom & Jerry label on it; if it were a different franchise it would have some credit to it but as it does have the Tom & Jerry label it's nothing special just very awkward.
