Funimation are the guys who do the Dragon Ball dubs after Saban lost the license. But did you know that Harmony Gold, the guys usually attached to Robotech, made dubs for the pre-Z Dragon Ball episodes and movies? Well here’s your chance to check those out.
Scheduled to post on the right time, but the wrong day. Fixed now.
Yesterday I took a look at the live-action remake of Ghost In The Shell, the anime based on a manga. I wanted to judge the movie on its own merits. Now it’s time to look at the original movie, the 1995 animated version. The original manga has a sequel and a prequel set between the first and second manga. We’re looking at the movie as I have read none of the manga and treating it as the source material.
This is one of the early anime to hit the US at the height of the 90s anime boom and might be one of the videos responsible for it, showing that animation wasn’t just for kids and more adult stories could be told through animation. It’s still considered a must-see anime that holds up enough to inspire numerous other movie makers even in the US. I’ve only recently had the chance to see it as Tubi and VuDu both have it available free with ads to watch. I went with the Tubi version because for some reason the free shows don’t run on VuDu on my computer, just the ads. Yet I think I can watch the stuff in my library without any problem. Meanwhile Tubi’s full screen option goes wonky on the latest Vista-friendly version of Chrome but works fine on Firefox, so take that into account as well. Also, this one is not for the kiddies at all. These are the uncensored versions, with nudity, swearing, and dudes turning into cyber-enhanced meat chunks, so that into account as well.
RELEASE DATE: 1995
RELEASED BY: Kôdansha and Production I.G.–I’m using the Manga Entertainment English dub
RUNTIME: 1 hours, 23 minutes
STARRING: Mimi Woods and Richard Epcar,
DIRECTOR: Mamoru Oshii
WRITERS: Kazunori Itô, based on the manga by Shirow Masamune
(“comic”, “manga”–STILL THE SAME THING, PEOPLE!)
GROSS INCOME: JPY54,753,615.22 from an estimated budget of JPY600,000,000
(gross income may be the current value based on exchange rates, IMDB only lists the yen for budget and the gross in dollars)
“You have huge nasal hair.”
Robotech II: The Sentinels book 3 #13
Academy Comics, Ltd (January, 1995)
“Scheme A Little Scheme”
WRITER/ARTIST: John Waltrip
LETTERING: Alphabet Soup
Matt Reeves just posted some pictures of the new Batmobile from his upcoming theatrical take on Batman and holy automobiles it’s an actual car and not a jet-powered tank! This is what I’ve wanted to see for a while in a Batmobile. It doesn’t draw a lot of attention beyond “hey, neat custom car”, but still feels like a car Batman would drive. It’s something we haven’t seen in live-action Batmobiles since Tim Burton’s racing tank and leagues above the “Tumbler” tank of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy and whatever that was Zac Snyder and Joel Schumacher gave us in their movies. This is a step in the right direction.
For comparison here’s a video that features all the live-action Batmobiles over the years.
It may seem strange to some of you out there that I watched the live-action American movie rather than the original anime movie when I have access to it but I have a rare opportunity here, to see the live-action remake as intended–to an audience who hadn’t seen the anime or even read the manga the movies are base on–and judge it accordingly. Well, rare for me at least. Americans have a strained relationship with animation, writing the whole format off as “kiddie cartoons” or “subversive animation”. In Japan animation is just another way to tell stories to audiences of any age group. There are still people who don’t watch animated works like there are here. We get so much Japanese animation and so few live-action works that aren’t science fiction (except for game shows and soap opera type dramas I think that’s all we get) that we have a skewed view of anime but it doesn’t have the same stigma it does over here in the US.
Of course Hollywood buys into that because “regular” actors have a hissy fit when an animated movie gets a nomination for a big movie award, hence the “best animated movie” category. To be fair Japan makes live-action versions of their anime and manga as well, but there’s more care to the source material from what little I’ve seen when compared to how US studios adapt comics, video games, and cartoons. That’s a topic for another time but today I want to focus on how well this movie works for those ignorant of the series…or try to. I have seen both seasons of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex and very much enjoyed it so I’m not completely in the dark about this franchise. I just feel I can judge it more fairly if I watch this before the anime, which I plan to do tomorrow, with a look at the “2.0” version of the anime on Friday. With that, the obligatory trailer.
RELEASE DATE: 2017
RELEASED BY: Paramount Pictures, Dreamworks, and dear God how many companies and associated companies were involved with this?
RUNTIME: 1 hours, 47 minutes (2 hours for the SyFy TV edit I watched)
STARRING: Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk , “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, and Michael Pitt
DIRECTOR: Rupert Sanders
WRITERS: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, and Ehren Kruger; based on the comic by Shirow Masamune
(yes, they wrote “comic” and not “manga”–SAME THING, PEOPLE!)
GROSS INCOME: $169,801,921 from an estimated budget of $110,000,000
“I’m Jean-Luc Picard…and I can breathe in space.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation #24
DC Comics (October, 1991)
“Homecoming”
WRITER: Michael Jan Friedman
PENCILER: Peter Krause
INKER: Pablo Marcos
COLORIST: Julianna Ferriter
LETTERER: Bob Pinaha
EDITOR: Robert Greenberger
Catch more Super Café at the How It Should Have Ended YouTube channel.
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
