five years of let's anime

Wow, has it really been five years since I started this blog? I guess it has. How time flies.

 note #1's cover, it's the first and last time I'd draw many of those characters.

Let's Anime started off as a print zine in 1991 - we'd just inaugurated the latest incarnation of our local anime club and it needed a fanzine because it was the 90s and fanzines were "in". I cobbled together a package of leftover fan art from previous anime newsletters and articles from anywhere I could find them, tied it all together with a completely bogus synopsis of Nadia Secret Of Blue Water, and before I knew it, there I was, back in Kinkos again. 

#3 had a great Mazinger Z article, #4 had that swell Prince Planet cover

The fanzine lasted 12 issues right through the 90s, from magazine-size to folded half-page size, from cut and paste with scissors to PageMaker and Photoshop. As the new millennium dawned, both my personal exhaustion and the advent of new digital networks of anime-news-delivery-systems combined to render Let's Anime more trouble than it was worth. I enjoyed producing it at the time, but there are many things about the fanzine days I do not miss, like selling the things from behind tables at anime cons, copy-editing submissions delivered in teeny tiny handwriting on blue-lined notebook paper, the physical production of the zines themselves made even more difficult by the lack of anything resembling a budget. I don't miss any of those things.

Let's Anime wasn't always "classic" - Tekkaman Blade was new when Steve Harrison wrote about it. Kinda new, anyway. #6 was a big Matsumoto issue!

A few years later, there it was again, that old "let's write about Japanese cartoons" itch.  Mike Toole's Anime Jump site, which had been the outlet for most of my anime writing for most of the 00s, was in hibernation. I'd retired from chairing Anime Weekend Atlanta and had a bit more free time. And of course I still had the impulse that all fans share to some degree, the desire to share this crazy cool stuff with the rest of the world. Good writing about the classic Japanese animation -you know, the stuff from the 60s to the 80s that inspired fans to start anime fandom in the first place - was thin on the ground. In fact it may very well still be thin on the ground. My writing isn't so good sometimes. But anyway, that was my angle and I'm stickin' with it. 

#7 might be my favorite cover. #8 flirts with modernity via Dragonball and Sailor Moon!

So here we are now, five years since that first, tentative blog post in July of 2007. I don't know about you guys, but for me it's been a definite learning experience.  Learning all the basic blog things like uploading photos, linking, templates, hosting sites, sidebars, and then learning it all over again every time somebody updates their software, that's a given. But the immediacy of blogging to an audience of untold thousands has been, uh, stimulating in ways I never expected. Quick on the trigger my audience is, ready with corrections if I ever get a name or a release date wrong or fudge the title of a publisher. And as annoying as it can be, the scrutiny has taught dumb ol' me to do the basic research, to double check my work, to make sure it's right before it is sent off into the wider world.  

Naturally, issue 9 featured a big Cyborg 009 article.

It might be a cliche to say "the more you learn, the more you realize how much more there is to learn", but it's true - the smarty-pants know-it-all assurance I had earlier has been replaced by the awe, if not the naked fear, of the vast universe of knowledge still lying untouched by me, even in a field as narrow and seemingly inconsequential as thirty-year old cartoons from Japan.  There is so much I don't know, so many people out there with more data and better language skills and cooler toys (and more free time). It's humbling.

#10 was our first half-size issue, with a grab-bag of articles and a weird Devilman collage on the back.

However, as unworthy or irked as I sometimes feel, I'm still constantly impressed at the reach a simple blog can get, at how much more powerful a tool this is. A single issue of the print Let's Anime never had a press run of more than a couple hundred, but thousands and thousands of people around the world have read this blog, and in the future will continue to be sent this way via search engines and links. A piece I wrote on, say, Honey Honey or Devilman will be read and enjoyed years after the fact, instead of lying in a box in the closet waiting for the inevitable rendezvous with the recycle bin.

Forward into the past with #11's look at 1960s anime and #12's focus on Space Giants and more than a year between issues. Ugh.

Writing this blog has put me in touch with a whole circle of anime fans that otherwise I'd never have met - you can see some of them in the links on the side there - and it's also put me back in touch with friends from years ago. The community we have now is bigger, stronger, and faster than anything we had back in the 90s, with the exception of two or three days there when we were all trapped in the same hotel in Dallas during a power outage.  The print days sometimes felt like isolated wilderness outposts swapping smoke signals - today's anime community is almost the opposite, a noisy neighborhood full of all kinds of characters, all expressing themselves, sometimes loudly. If I can add to the din every once in a while, that's all I ask. 

We're off for a little vacation for the next couple of weeks, but Let's Anime will return! Stay tuned!

youth culture killed my dog(s)

  

Shrieking and honking its way out of the cough-syrup nightmares of a nation of feverish preadolescents, HELLHOUND LINER 0011 TRANSFORM! (Maken Liner-0011 Henshin Seyo!) is, barring my ignorance of an entire genre of movies about evil space amoeba-squids sending monster robot bugs to smash an Earth defended by children in giant space helmets and rocket-firing submachine guns aided by talking cybernetic pet dogs who occasionally transform into spaceship-combining super dog robots, a unique film experience.

                             

Americans of a certain age will remember our 70s cartoons; suffocated by emasculated parent-approved blandness, full of funny dogs and singing teenagers solving mysteries, interrupted with public service announcements by has-been actors eager to work off their drunk driving charges. This was a reaction to the acid rock psychedelic-biker-Manson Family grindhouse insanity that was creeping into our culture courtesy The Hippies, to be fought at every turn by the Silent Majority and their henchmen at Action for Children's Television. Japan had their own anti-cartoon crusaders, legions of kendo moms and PTAs agitating against Go Nagai's Shameless School and other national disgraces. 

But while American producers knuckled under and wimped out, Japan doubled down on the wild, filling their 1970s kidvid with outlandish action-adventure quivering with barely repressed raw power. That's where HELLHOUND LINER 0011 comes in, and keep in mind this isn't some kind of weird desperate failure produced by some forgettable fly-by-night outfit. It's from Toei, the Walt Disney of the Orient, the industry leader in fantastical fantasy films for children, hosts of their popular Manga Matsuri summertime children's film festival, which in July of ’72 gave Japan's kids this story of friendly transforming robot dogs and their orphaned master seeking vengeance upon an entire race of deformed space devils. 

HELLHOUND LINER 0011 TRANSFORM!, or as Toei would like you to know it, “Go Get Them 0011”, has a solid anime pedigree with direction by Takeshi (Captain Harlock, Great Mazinger, Grendizer) Tamiya and a script by Tsuji Masaki and Toei legend Yugo "Little Prince And The 8-Headed Dragon" Serikawa. However, it's Hiroshi Sasagawa whose imagination powers HELLHOUND LINER - the film is based on his 1963 Shonen King serial "Hellhound Goro", and Sasagawa would go on to a long and fruitful career at Tatsunoko, where he'd give TIME BOKAN its sexy Doronjo-sama and let CASSHAN's transforming robot-dog-jetplane Frenda out of the robot-dog-jetplane kennel.

               

Sasagawa's original Maken Goro manga

The theater lights dim, the Manga Matsuri kids dial the popcorn-throwing back a notch. HELLHOUND LINER 0011 starts, and immediately you're assaulted by the soundtrack, deeply painful atonal free-form jazz, like Miles Davis, an irritable Miles who won't quit stepping on the goose that somehow got into his studio. There's all sorts of tinkly percussion, echoey beatnik scat vocals, reverb'd keyboards and a beefy sax that is simply drilling a hole into your skull. As the background for a children's cartoon, this is nothing less than a sneak attack. One imagines parents enduring twenty or thirty seconds of this before simply walking out of the theater and abandoning little Saburo to the mercy of whatever creepy deviant is stalking children in Tokyo this week.    

Parents, this is pretty much your cue to get out. Just get out.

As the credits roll we're treated to amazingly detailed cutaway diagrams of the inner workings of the various horrifying monsters that will soon be smashing civilization as we know it. "Civilization" for this picture is represented by Mid-Century Modern dome-parabola architecture, shining white concrete, enormous roads full of pointy space cars, and moving sidewalks to get our Citizens Of The Future from school to home and back again. Our hero Tsutomu Hayashi is a normal latchkey kid whose dad is a scientist with a little moustache and whose mom isn't around and may never have existed. Neighborhood kids make fun of Tsutomu because his dad predicts Earth is threatened by space aliens. And I don't blame them, that's pretty crazy. But it's OK because Tsutomu doesn't need human friends, his pals are four stray dogs. Don't you wish you had dogs this great? Three dogs like the puppies Ace, Jack, and Joker, and their mother Queen, who would stand by you no matter what? Sure you do.

                   

As it happens Tsutomu will have the last laugh on the skeptics. Earth is, in fact, invaded by space aliens from the Planet Devil. They have a complicated multi-faceted approach to maximizing their Earth-invasion effectiveness while thinking outside the box in synergizing their impactful expectation-managing, involving creepy tentacle monsters, giant electro-mechanical insect demons, and legions of what appear to be cat-faced amoeba bugs, all led by bulb-headed freak Golgoth. 

The first step in any Earth invasion? Kill all the scientists, as shown in a pre-title sequence where hapless weathermen are tentacle-violated. Professor Hayashi, noted anti-alien speaker, is the next target. The aliens "plant" a bomb disguised as a cactus (in a tasteful modernist crystal plant pot) inside the Hayashi home, in the hope that home decor accouterments will go unnoticed in a woman-free household. However, our intrepid dog-mom Queen somehow knows the difference between an alien bomb and real plants, and, along with her three puppies, snatches the cactus grenade in her jaws and escapes to the woods just in time to be vaporized in a giant explosion. A heartbroken Tsutomu has lost his only friends. Or has he? 

Soon it's Tsutomu's birthday and Junior is shocked. Queen and progeny are safe and sound! Absent Dad explains via videophone; even though their bodies were destroyed in the explosion, he was able to save their canine brains and implant them successfully into some dog-robot bodies, each with its own super dog-robot-body super power. Tsutomu gets a giant space helmet able to translate barks into human speech. Happy birthday!  

It's during this magical videophone birthday present moment that the aliens attack Dad in his research center, and Tsutomu and his dog friends must embody the film's title and transform into Hellhound Liner 0011!

                      

sure, why not

As hideous monsters emerge to destroy humanity, HELLHOUND LINER 0011 shifts into high gear. Tsutomu helmets up and his canine cyborg commandos transform into a super jet to invade the secret Devil sanctuary inside an erupting Mt. Fuji and destroy Stage One of the Devil plan. Earth's cities are engulfed in a horrifying nightmare as giant praying mantis monster Mandaras destroys bullet trains with his Super Sonic Knife and jet planes are sliced in half with his Rainbow Ray. And if that wasn't bad enough, Mandaras' swollen forearms burst open and birth thousands of disgusting metal-destroying ticks, which devour the Tokyo Tower.

                

hideous monsters and their hollow hideous monster planet

Golgoroth helpfully informs Earth of their declaration of war via an experimental psychedelic short film containing one word, the kanji for "death", dripping with blood (subtle!). As the Devil Planet rains neutron bombs down on Earth, they prepare their ultimate plan - to use their Moon Bomb to shatter Luna and smash its remnants into our planet, killing everybody and ruining Earth for centuries. How will this benefit the Devil Planet? Who knows? They're devils! And as our world faces a desperate crisis Prof. Hayashi succumbs to his injuries, leaving Tsutomu alone with only cyborg dogs for company.

                 

Though the Earth is set to launch their space fleet in a massive military assault, Tsutomu and Liner attack first and invade Planet Devil itself, unleashing an orgy of robot-dog ray-gun destruction on the space monsters. Ace uses his eye beam, Jack his fire breath, and Joker transforms into whatever comedy relief is necessary, while Tsutomu uses his father's final gift, an automatic ray gun that also fires rockets. They're opposed by legions of Devilians and the monsters Mandaras and Escargon, a giant acid-spitting snail with way more mouths than is necessary or tasteful. But together Tsutomu and the dog-cyborgs overcome all the monsters and stop Golgoth's Moon Bomb with less than one second to spare.

                  

HELLHOUND LINER 0011 comes out of a thriving field of science-fictional juvenile adventure - it shares a lot of thematic DNA with Toei's 1970 Manga Matsuri flick 30,000 MILES UNDER THE SEA, which also features a young boy and his fairly implausible pet fighting giant monsters. 0011, however, raises the stakes at every opportunity. You’ll see a super mechanical fighting beetle shoot its head off and destroy a highway overpass, a talking dog with the voice of CYBORG 009's 007 (Machiko Soga!!) turn into a sexy centaur and wink at a 10 year old boy, the same boy who later dons a space suit to shoot rockets at a giant slug whose abdomen is lined with fanged jaws and whose eye-stalks shoot dripping acid, all accompanied by the piercing soundtrack by Takeo Yamashita, who wrote the score for the game show “I Crush The Perfect Crime Detective.”

                   

Remember these are ordinary dog brains. This is what dogs think about, apparently

Of course they can’t spend a lot of time on subtle nuance in a fifty minute film designed for a theater full of short-attention-span kids out on summer break and stuffed with candy. Like Toei's later Manga Matsuri shorts starring Mazinger Z, Devilman, Getta Robo, Grandizer, Great Mazinger, and various combinations thereof, the film throws us into the deep end and lets us drown in the sea of Macrodons and Mandarases. However, unlike a movie starring Mazinger Z or Kamen Rider, we have no idea who Hellhound Liner 0011 is, and we'll never see those characters again. 0011 is a one-off, a instantly dated snapshot of what Toei thought would entertain children for fifty minutes in between shorts starring Barom-1 and Chappy The Witch. No consideration was given to marketing, no focus group testing, no corporate long-term plans hampered the journey of this film from the subconscious to the movie screen.

                                  

original Manga Matsuri posters for '72

As such, perhaps it gives us a unique look inside the surging, turbulent, media-assaulted psyche of the Japanese youth of 1972. Frightened of giant monsters and aliens and absent parents, wishing for friends and pets and birthdays, fascinated by rockets and space travel, desperately wanting a rocket-firing ray-gun of their very own. Which begs the question, do we want these things because we see them in these sorts of movies, or are things like this put in movies because they know what kids want to see? Maybe a little of both is at play here. I only know one thing for sure; one of those rocket-guns would. be. SWEET. 

Special thanks and a tip of the Let’s Anime hat to Bluefixer for making this available!

-Dave Merrill

Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Org world, please consider joining our Patreon!

fake bacon and electronic music hotline 2012

Remember when you were a kid and all you wanted was some Star Wars toys, and then Christmas came around and what Santa brought wasn't official Star Wars stuff, but some kind of off-brand something that vaguely resembled Star Wars only not closely enough for legal action? Or when you wanted that Beatles record and what you got was "The Beetle Beat" by studio musicians pretending to be Merseyside club rockers? 

The disappointment of youth becomes the fascination of adulthood as we look back on these knockoffs with amusement and fondness. The West wasn't the only arbitrary geographic region to have its merchandising afflicted with items vaguely similar to other, more popular properties. Japan itself had a wonderful time selling almost-Kamen Riders and quasi-Ultramen and not-quite-Mazinger Zs to kids who didn't know any better and adults that didn't care one way or another, here's your thing, now shut up for five minutes. Let's take a look at two of 'em! 

I bought this children's rice bowl at a Japanese grocery store, entranced by its perfection of shape, its lustrous sheen, and its fake Transformers robot characters. It's seen lots of use mixing watercolors, acrylics, and ink washes in my enthusiastic if not quite professional artistic career; if it had been used as originally intended it would undoubtedly have been accidentally smashed on a kitchen floor long before now. 

The best part - well, apart from the legend "Batul V"-  is this illustration of the human characters, which seems to be a snapshot taken when Random Anime Hero met a girl cosplaying as Amu Fanneria from HEAVY METAL L.GAIM. On the other hand that guy may very well be a badly drawn, not-legally-actionable Daba Myroad. Sure, why not. 

As a huge hit prominently featuring a public-domain historical object, SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO inspired a wide variety of really blatant knockoffs, many of which are highlighted at the Starblazers.com website. Our subject here was purchased under the mistaken impression that it was official Yamato merchandise, a misapprehension no doubt shared by countless Japanese parents, to the chagrin of their kit-building, obsessive- compulsive-disorder suffering progeny. 

Part of the "Space Animation Series No. 1" collection from Tokyo Marui, the box art for this model kit promises to take you on a hundred-thousand light year journey to battle evil from beyond the stars, along with your vaguely Matsumoto-esque heroes. Other kits in the series include the Cosmo Shark, the Battle Tiger, and the Tiger Zero. 

Upon opening the box you're greeted with thirty-year old rubber bands and an ancient tube of model glue, protected by the visage of the no doubt evil Emperor Debiru, or as we like to call him, "Little Debiru". 

Basically the Comet Empire's Zordar with a copyright-defying beard, Emperor Devil here comes with his own little stand so you can prop him up like a paper doll in front of your completed Cosmo Warp kit. Tokyo Marui is now a world-reknowned manufacturer of airsoft guns, so you can now have the pleasure of shooting one Tokyo Marui product with another Tokyo Marui product. And so, the great circle of knockoff merchandising life continues.

it's may so it must be time for

Hey, why no Let's Anime posts lately? Well, it's not because I don't have goofy stuff to write about. Nope, I've been working on getting things ready for the upcoming Anime North, which is this weekend. If you're in town you should come on by! It's a great show full of events, guests, dealers, costumes, dances - check the website for full details - and I'm doing some panels and things. Three-day passes have already sold out but you can still get one-day tickets for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 

So what am I up to at AN this year? Friday at 7pm Shain and I will be holding down the Mr Kitty table at the NOMINOICHI, Anime North's garage sale swap meet event. It takes place in the Convention Center, hall F. We're giving our closets one final cleaning and that means YOU get to take home our old anime VHS, anime posters, books, manga, and anything else we can get rid of. 

Of course Friday at 10pm in the Plaza Ballroom in the Doubletree is Anime Hell.  This two-hour freeform clip show event has been a mild amusement to Canadian audiences for more than six years, and this year's show promises to be just as confusing and laff-packed as previous installments. Followed at midnight by our feature film presentation, 2010's SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO.

  

 This screening features special custom subtitles unavailable anywhere else! 

Saturday at 1pm join Helen McCarthy and I as we take a look at the animation of the god of comics, Osamu Tezuka's animation legacy. It's happening in International B in the Doubletree and will be packed with clips from the thirty-plus years Tezuka created animation to go along with his voluminous manga output.

  

And yeah, some of it gets kind of peculiar. 

At 3pm on Saturday in the same room Mister Kitty brings you Stupid Comics - LIVE! Shain and I are bringing our popular web feature to real life as we highlight some of the lowlights of our investigation into the world of bad comics. It's guaranteed to shock and amuse, especially when we get to the bad wanna-be manga.

And on Sunday at 1pm, again in International B I'll be taking a look at Spooky Classic Anime, the kind of cartoons your parents wouldn't let you watch in the 60s and 70s, except if you had been able to watch these cartoons in the 60s and 70s you'd be Japanese and it would be OK.

Don't be afraid! See you at the show!

Advice From The Beast

Back when Let’s Anime was a print fanzine read by dozens, we’d print darn near anything. One popular feature was an advice column written by an abusive, possibly psychotic individual known only as “The Beast”. Throughout the mid 1990s this so-called “expert” dispensed wisdom to every single fake question that the editors wrote for him. No one knows where he came from or what happened to him afterwards, but let’s remember him the way he’d want to be remembered – hurling insults at strangers.

THE BEAST 

By: The Beast (Let’s Anime #3, Spring 1993) 

Well here I am again to dispense my pearls of wisdom to you, my breathless audience. So shut up and pay attention. First off, here are some letters.

 Dear Beast: The other people in the anime club I attend all say that Ranma ½ is unrealistic and repetitive. What should I do? 
Yours, 
Chris Jorgensen 

Dear Chris;

 Show up at the next meeting in a dress, and beat the crap out of all the Ranma detractors. Repeat 115 times, changing genders as necessary.

Dear Beast; 
My pal Amuro says that Mobile Suit Gundam is just too complicated and has too many characters and mobile suits to keep track of. Is there any way I can explain Gundam simply to him?

Yours truly, 
Char 

Dear Char; 

Well, if your friend would only realize the inherent political ramifications in the Axis’ alliance with Neo-Jion, he would understand that the Titans meant to force a confrontation with Side 13 against the AEUG, which means that the Crossbone Vanguard would need to utilize the Zabi clan’s intentions to see the Abowaku/Luna 2 defense pact with Shangri-La dissolved in favor of a renewed hard-line policy of dropping space colonies and big rocks on Earth. There, that was easy, wasn’t it.

  

Dear Beast: 
I’m very unpopular with some people that I would like to impress a lot. I try harder and harder each time, but I always end up annoying them even more. What can I do to make these people like me? 

Sincerely, 
Carl Macek 

Dear Carl, 

You know, there are some people in this world that simply will never be satisfied, that will complain and complain no matter what you give them. It’s best to ignore these “nattering nabobs of negativity”, as Spiro Agnew described them, and go on about your business with calm self-assurance.

  

Dear Beast; 

You suck. You don’t know anything about music or advice. All the anime you like stinks. You’ve never had a girlfriend and you drive a badly-made automobile. Please die soon. 

Yours, 
I.M. Pseudonym 

EDITORS NOTE: Please remember to include your full name and address when writing The Beast. Thank you.

Dear Beast; 

My dad told me to ask you if that was your face, or were you just wearing a mask with the features of an abnormally stupid and ugly person who dunked his head into a vat of highly potent sulphuric acid and then tried to make up for it with enrollment in the Hair Club For Men? Huh? 

Your Pal, 
Crusher Ed 

1600 Whitebase Way 

Side Three 

Dear Crusher Ed; 

Thanks for including your full name and address. Hope you enjoy your new life in the orphanage.  

THE RETURN OF THE BEAST 

(Let’s Anime #4, Fall 1993) 

Well, howdy, and welcome back to my font of perpetual knowledge concerning personality problems and bands. I sure hope that those of you who have serious difficulties managing the anime-fan lifestyle will write in and ask for my help. And if you don’t get help here, get help somewhere… and now for our first letter.

   

Dear Beast; 

My pal says that ODIN is a science-fiction film, while I maintain that it is a space-fantasy. Which one of us is correct? 

Yours truly, 
Matt Black 

Dear Matt; 

You both are wrong. ODIN is neither a SF film nor a space fantasy. It is a sleeping aid. Use only as directed.  

Dear Beast, 

Why don’t they make a movie where the Knight Sabers from Bubblegum Crisis and Space Cobra team up with ‘Thundersub’ and Hurricane Polymar to defeat Marvel Comics’ Dr. Doom? 

Sincerely, 
Jim Shortz 

Dear Jim,
Because that would be stupid.

   

Dear Beast; 

If Carl Macek and Sandy Frank had a fight on live TV with sledgehammers and other blunt instruments, who would win? 

Ben Dover 

Dear Ben, 

I don’t know, but it’s nice to think about, isn’t it?

  

Dear Mr. Beast; 

I am currently working on my graduate thesis, which consists of an in-depth analysis of incidences of cultural significance in modern Japanese television animation. I would appreciate your opinion on the following: in your experience, do you feel that the zeitgeist of the common Japanese proletariat’s existence has been enriched by a common Jungian exposure to iconic symbolism through popular cultural media, or, conversely, is there to be seen a resurgence in classical autonomic materialization of total neo-judgmental theory? 

Yours truly, 

Billy (age 5) 

Dear Billy, 

Yes. 

ONCE AGAIN TERROR STALKS THE EARTH… THE BEAST LIVES 

Advice For The Hopeless By: The Beast 

(Let’s Anime #5, Spring 1994) 

Yes, it’s me again. They let me out of the institution just to painfully cobble this column together with crayon and brown paper (no sharp objects allowed) so I’m gonna try and make it a good one. First from my mailbag…  

Dear Beast: 

Why does all Japanese animation look like "Speed Racer"? 

Confusedly, 
Al Coholic 

Dear Al, 

Because you suck.

  

Dear Mr. Beast, 

Why do most of the characters featured in the majority of Japanese cartoons fail to resemble actual Japanese citizens in the least? 

Yours, 

Phil Irrup 

Dear Phil, 

Because your mother wears combat boots.

  

Dear Beast: 

Why does Ultraman always wait until the last possible minute before using his Spacium Beam and destroying the monster? Why doesn’t he use it at the beginning of the fight and kill the monster right off, saving countless lives and untold millions in property damage? 

Yours, 

Eiji Tsubaraya 

Dear Eiji; 

If the big silver guy used his big gun right at the beginning of the fight, it’d be over in a second! Where’s the fun in that, smart guy? Plus, it’s a little known fact that he owns controlling interests in several large Tokyo construction companies.  

Dear Beast, 

Whenever I use cheap, no-name brand videotape in my VCR, the copies always come out lousy and the shedding tape ruins my video heads, causing expensive repairs. 

Yours, 

Al Jalikakik 

 

Dear Al, 

Good.

  

UNTERKALTEN MIT DER AUFGEKOMMEN POKERT!! 

DAS BEAST 

(Let’s Anime #7, Fall 1994) 

Welcome back to the column that tells it like it is, when it was, and how it will be. Got a problem? The Beast has the answer! Let’s dip right into that mailbag and see what we come up with.  

Dear Beast: 

I’m confused. I could swear that the term for video-only animated releases is “original video animation”, or OVA. However, my pal Freddy claims that the real title is “original animation video”, or OAV. Our silly feud has escalated to the point where I am afraid to go outdoors or use power tools. Please end our dispute once and for all. 

Timidly yours, 

Matt Finisch 

Dear Matt, 

Obviously you’re the kind of guy who likes to spend hours arguing over incredibly stupid trivia that nobody else on the entire planet cares about. So here’s your answer: the real term used everywhere is “cartoon.” Deal with it.

 Dear Beast: 

I recently heard that, instead of renting anime at Blockbuster Video or buying it at the local comic book store, some fans are actually getting anime by trading videotapes with pen pals through the mail! What’s more, apparently they are getting anime that hasn’t even been released in America! Yours, 

Moe Ron 

Dear Moe; 

No shit.  

Dear Beast; 

The Lion King is a completely original film and is in no way a total ripoff of Tezuka’s JUNGLE EMPEROR. Really! 

Yours, 

Michael Eisner  

Dear Mike: 

Yeah, right. And Garuman/Gamilon space submarines might hyperwarp out of my butt. Heh heh. 

HE KNOWS EVERYTHING THE BEAST: ADVICE FOR MORONS 

(Let’s Anime #8, summer 1995) 

Greetings, puny mortals. It is I, The Beast, back to dispense my indispensable jewels of knowledge to the undeserving, ungrateful masses that teem around me, like a teeming mass of teeming things. Or something. Well, on to our first letter.  

Dear Beast; 

I really wanted to catch the next solar eclipse, but all my friends say I’ll go blind if I stare at it. I say they’re full of you-know-what. But what if they’re right and the blazing photosphere of the sun burns my retina like a surgical laser at full power? What then? 

Yours, 

Anita Drink  

Dear Anita; 

What then? Then you’ll be blind, stupid.

  

Dear Beast, 

My cousin Eddie says that Robotech was originally five American TV shows that the Japanese took and edited into three. Is he wrong, or am I correct in saying that Robotech was animated in Japan from a script written in Sri Lanka by Tamil rebels and then translated by UNESCO as part of an abortive peacekeeping effort in the Middle East? 

Sincerely, 

Ivan A. Beer 

Dear Ivan; 

You’re both wrong. Robotech was originally conceived in the tenth circle of Hell as punishment for the earthly misdeeds of certain members of Studio Nue. As it turned out, we all wound up suffering, but so the heck what.

Dear Beast; 

I’m hosting a little get-together for some close friends during which we will screen some examples of animation from the nation of Japan. I’m wondering if it’s permissible to serve wine, cheese, and other minor comestibles during the screening proper, or should one wait for an appropriate “halt in the action,” as it were? 

Snidely yours, 

Asfrum Holein Ground 

Dear Asfrum; 

When to hand out the munchies is a serious question facing those of us who entertain with Japanese cartoons. Thoughtfully, most animation producers have provided us with an “eyecatch”, a short intermission in the middle of the original animated video that is perfectly suited to a small interruption, and this includes the serving of refreshments. Of course, if the evening’s entertainment is a feature-length film, no such “eyecatch” will be present, in which case I suggest you use the goddamn pause button.

  

Dear Comrade Beast; 

Is it not true that the vigorous continuation of the class struggle results in the unequalization of People’s Justice as it applies to roundly condemning those who seek to undermine the revolution of the masses? Or what?
Yours,
No Wei

  

Dear No; 

A vigorous examination of the principles involved shows that normalization, though approaching at an increased rate, is still not within the realms of a classless society. I suggest you rededicate yourself to the eradication of anti-collectivism. Either that, or go fishing.

Dear Beast: 

You are so full of shit! I saw you at the con trying to impress the chicks with your so-called “knowledge” of Gundam and SPT Layzner. However, I happen to know that Amuro Ray’s father’s ambitions did not include political office or animal husbandry as those back issues of C/FO Magazine would have us believe! And Eiji’s fits of rage are certainly not irritability caused by caffeine withdrawal, as you slyly intimated in between shots of cheap bourbon – any idiot would realize that his enraged behavior stems from his home environment, and not from any questionable chemical factors! And what’s more, maybe next time you can take criticism in a slightly more mature fashion, instead of beating me savagely across the head and shoulders with a length of hard plastic pipe! Painfully yours, 

I Mista Buss 

Dear Mista: 

What the hell are you talking about?

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Sadly, The Beast’s advice column never appeared again. The whereabouts of this helpful if abusive sage are unknown, and even though Let’s Anime enjoys a new life on the internets, he has not stepped forward to claim his place in its renaissance. And that’s probably OK.
 

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