The best version of the sprawling epic that is Fist of the North Star is the original 27-volume 1983 comic from by writer Buronson and artist Tetsuo Hara. The Toei Animation TV series brings the kitsch, but cuts much of the visceral visuals of the comic and replaces it with horrible filler. The newer Oriental Animation Videos and gaiden series’ have their hearts in the right place, but it’s not the original. The full power of what Buronson and Hara wanted to convey to Japan’s male youth (and later, Western Europe’s and a few dozen dead enders in America) can only be appreciated in the comic they slaved over for five years. And I put a beret on as I say that. Every time.

Toei’s 1986 movie adaptation is the odd one out. Take the term “adaptation” lightly, the film is more accurately a re-imagination with brain-skull explosions and internal rib cage eruptions left intact, but several significant rewrites scrawled onto plot, back story and themes, an anime movie practice made infamous later with the Escaflowne film and by now pretty much de rigueur for Japantoon films (stay tuned for our forthcoming review of Psalms of Planets Eureka seveN: good night, sleep tight, young lovers: Pocket Full of Rainbows). It works well enough, but it’s not the original.

You guys remember 2004’s Samurai Champloo, right? T’was the first major production by the Japanese animation studio Manglobe—an incredibly flashy, hip-hop-inspired story of a couple of vagabonds and a teenage girl whose chastity is continually endangered wandering across Japan in search of the generally ambiguous “samurai who smells of sunflowers.” Champloo was a strong first outing for the studio—brightly colored, goofy, violent and episodic, plus it did pretty well overseas. Manglobe’ve been pretty quiet since then. I guess they did another show, Ergo Proxy, around 2006 or so, but frankly it looks incredibly boring. It’s got that nasty “grimdark” palette of grays and dull splashes of color characteristic of the most tedious of modern low-budget digital productions.

Their latest production, Michiko e Hatchin, just wrapped up a couple of months ago. You might not have realized that—so far, the show seems to have been largely ignored in Western Japtoon fan circles, and that’s a shame.

Once in a while I get saddled with the task of reviewing some pornographic anime or anime-related pornography. Sometimes someone else will do it, but it’s usually me. There are a few constants with these reviews: the videos themselves are always terrible, the posts get more hits than any other post on this site and I always open with a joke about how much our readers like porn.

That’s probably a fallacy, as most of the page views on these reviews no doubt come from random perverts who find us via search engines or Wikipedia. A guy searching that intently for information about Lolita Anime or a live-action tentacle video probably isn’t the kind of guy who’s going to hang around and read about obscure 80s cartoons.

In any case, this time I’ll be talking an unlicensed live-action porno video based on Macross Frontier. Giddyup.

A lot of people like to tell me that moe didn’t exist in the 80s, but if you believe that you also have to believe that nerds weren’t desperately lonely and willing to fall in an empty, merchandise-driven mockery of love with one-dimensional fictional characters in the 80s. Unfortunately, I have evidence to the contrary: Cosmos Pink Shock.

We all know that Yoshiyuki Tomino, Sunrise’s most famous director, will always be remembered for his seminal classic, Wings of Rean. Now, however, we will discuss a little-known entry in his creative career called Gundam. You may have heard of it.

In the 1999 series Turn A Gundam we see a Sunrise in the throes of transition: cel animation giving way to computers, the sprawling slow-paced shows of 80s Sunrise replaced with the frenetic into-the-deep-end shows of 00s Sunrise, Universal Century ceding popular dominance to the slew of alternate universe shows, Tomino signing off on the Gundam franchise as a whole. The last television installment in the franchise to involve Tomino’s hand happens to also be the last television installment in the franchise to not be an offensive, repulsive mess.

(The following article will contain spoilers for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. We’re just saving you some time.)

Now haters gonna hate, ladies and gentlemen, but the fact remains that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has been one of the most popular and influential Japan-cartoons of the decade. One of many results is that the show is an effective representation of everything terrible about the medium. Colony Drop Inc. has been remiss in failing to address the many ways in which this role model for the anime industry is proudly insipid, unbearably self-satisfied trash, and we are sorry. We will now resume our duty as haters.

It’s hard to talk about Armor Hunter Mellowlink, because you’d be talking about a plot already summarized by the series itself. In the first episode you see a fellow named Mellowlink on a quest for revenge, which eventually involves him fighting a mecha while he is on foot, and our hero wins in an incredible yet somewhat plausible manner.

By God, if that’s something you want to keep seeing then there’s 11 more episodes for you to watch where a dude named Mellowlink is going to kick some giant robot ass while on foot. Stop reading after this paragraph if that sounds good to you; you don’t need the rest of the review here, where I talk about stuff that’s only of interest to people who log into IRC channels to match anime trivia knowledge against other long-winded “intellectuals” with no dates, ever, and therefore a lot of time on their hands. Find the series somewhere and watch it, it’s totally cool, I promise.

Without an interesting hook, it’s very hard for me to enjoy such anime simply for the mechanical eye candy, which is perhaps the main reason why I find it so hard to praise Char’s Counterattack. Brace yourself, because this is going to get brutal.

My contribution to Area ‘88 was originally going to be a post on Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack, a movie which I only vaguely remembered from its Cartoon Network airing some years ago. I went into the film as charitably as I could, but I just couldn’t find much to enjoy in CCA, not even in the ironic realm from which I approach almost every anime that I watch. Not wanting to be the wet blanket to the celebratory garage-kit bonfire that is Area ‘88, I decided to tackle My Neighbor Totoro instead, a film almost guaranteed to be enjoyed by any conscious human being with a soul. Well aware of the hype that even now surrounds Totoro, I was nonetheless pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie – not in the cynical capacity of how bad everything else is, but as a guy honestly impressed by how good this movie really is. This is not to say that I didn’t do my damnedest to find fault with Totoro, but between the film’s infectious charm and its airtight structure, there’s really no good angle of attack to be found. Still, I was glad to find my critical offense so thwarted, for it was a nice change of pace to review something so authentically lovable.

But if you’re a real dude, you can’t accept this. You can’t be an Official Colony Drop Man of Destiny, one worthy of walking the hard road of otaku, if you don’t do pointless, difficult things just because you can. Some time ago, during one of my packrat Book-Off hunts for media I don’t need, I bought a Japanese VHS copy of the first episode of obscure 80’s anime OVA Hi-Speed Jecy. Only recently have I bothered digging up a VCR to watch a cartoon I will not at all understand. Instead of just doing this all alone and telling you about it, I figured I could try live-blogging it as I watch, and we can all share in… whatever happens. Your entertainment is not guaranteed. Neither is mine.

This will take place tomorrow night at 9 PM, US Eastern time, at this page, in the fancy window below. Before you start reading the liveblog, do yourself a favor and get a Nicovideo account so you can watch along! We’ll be allowing some time for people to get their Nico going, and then we’ll be off. I’ll be in front of my TV with a laptop, and I’ll tell you all how the show is going. I know nothing about this show past its title and the likely involvement of Haruhiko Mikimoto, and I will not seek out such knowledge until after I watch it. If you know something about Hi-Speed Jecy, please hold off telling me until the liveblog actually begins.