My Favorite Shows of 2021

Hey, I understand how this Wix blog editor works now, so hopefully there won't be a stock image for this post for no reason, which I can't get rid of!

2021 was a busy year at work for me. I got back into collecting toys...way too back into collecting toys. I started to get frustrated with my job, which ultimately led to...this. Also, my choices for best shows were much less crazy. Oh, did I mention I'm not including anything I'd seen before? No, I did not, but most people looking at these posts at this point already knew that. Oh well.

63. Ghost Stories (7 out of 20 episodes)—Some friends first told me about Ghost Stories. It had something of a reputation as a “funny” anime dub; a generic Japanese ghost story show (the original name wasn’t Ghost Stories, they just chose the most boring thing possible for the English title) that ADV picked up the license to in the mid-2000’s because anime was big money and anything you picked up would probably sell. The series quickly disappeared after the anime boom died and ADV shuttered, but its legend lived on, and Discotek picked it up and put it on RightStuf. I figured, hey, I love the Geneon Lupin III dub, I’d love to watch something else like that. Yeah! I’ll do Ghost Stories!

This is NOT on the level of the Lupin dub. I think I got seven episodes in. Dubbed in 2005, and you can really tell; the actors were given free rein to do whatever they wanted, and what they wanted was to say “retarded” dozens of times an episode and make tired (or, like, bizarre out of left field) jokes making fun of lesbians and Jewish people. One character was turned into a hypocrite Christian, which was mostly used to have her insult the other characters, as if the others weren’t doing the same thing. A painful show to watch, horrible.

62. All-Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku Dash—When you start watching an anime called All-Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku, you brace yourself that you’re probably about to watch some garbage. And while it certainly wasn’t high art, the first OVA and TV show of Nuku Nuku was some dumb fun gag anime, and even managed to mostly be not gross, which is astonishing for an OVA about a cute girl robot from the ‘90’s. Nuku Nuku Dash, the second OVA and final adaptation of this manga, did not manage that. Draining the already one-note characters of all personality and shoving them into a stereotypical, superhero-adjacent plot just designed to disguise the fact that it’s about a young man’s sexual awakening, this show is gross and pointless. It reminds me of the similarly-disappointing New Cutie Honey, which took an independent woman character and just made her a blank slate to play out adolescent sexual fantasies on (not that the original Cutie Honey was devoid of sexual content, mind, but…anyway, I’m not talking about that show here). Put it in the trash.

61. GinRei—One thing that disappointed me about the Discotek Giant Robo set I purchased last year was that I knew they did a series of three OVA’s about GinRei to tide fans over between episodes, and I’d wished they were included, so when this collection of that series was announced I snatched it up immediately.

Shouldn’t have done that!

As a kind of non-canon “Extra” adventure for Giant Robo, the GinRei shorts are all “comedy” stories, with a capital K. Unfortunately, too often comedy side-stories in anime mean the same tired sexual jokes and pratfall slapstick humor you’ve seen in every show since Go Nagai stepped onto the stage, and this is no exception. GinRei was one of the standout new characters of Giant Robo, and I wanted to see more adventures with her—but this ain’t it baby. By all means, watch Giant Robo, but stay away from these shorts at all costs.

60. Transformes: War for Cybertron—What can I say? It’s still self-important grimdark stuff but Dinobot was in it this time. Oh, and they completely misunderstood the character of Sky-Lynx.

59. Cat’s Eye (15 out of 76 episodes)—I’d been meaning to watch City Hunter for a while now since that’s a very important anime in the history of the medium, but Retro Crush put up Cat’s Eye, an earlier anime based on a manga by the creator of City Hunter, so I decided to watch that first. On PAPER, it has everything I would like; a bunch of comical thieves outsmarting the cops, like Lupin III! A team of foxy, smart, skilled women getting up to hijinks, like Dirty Pair! A trashy, extremely ‘80’s theme song, like pretty much any given anime between 1981 and 1995! But folks, I did NOT like it! On the one hand, the problem with being so close to Lupin III is that I just kept comparing it to Lupin III; the plans were less extravagant, the comedy less zany, the designs (while peak ‘80’s anime a-e-s-t-h-e-t-i-c) more bland. The other problem was the plot itself was a house of cards held up only by every character’s complete incompetence. The premise is this: there’s an art thief named Cat’s Eye operating in Tokyo. Toshio Utsumi is tasked with capturing Cat’s Eye. He can’t understand how Cat’s Eye always seems to know his plans ahead of time. He’s so confused that he goes to complain to his long-time girlfriend, Hitomi Kisugi, and her two sisters, Rui and Ai, who run the Cat’s Eye café. Toshio doesn’t like that his girlfriend would name her café the same thing as a criminal! However, this does not stop him from spilling the beans about his plans to her every freaking day. When another cop is like, “Hey, uh, I think your girlfriend is Cat’s Eye and you’re leaking our plans to her,” he’s like, that’s impossible.

Guess what. Guess who Cat’s Eye is. Bet you’ll never guess.

One of the reasons we’re supposed to sympathize with the Kisugi sisters is that the paintings they’re stealing were, in fact, owned by their father, and were stolen from him and sold illegally (conveniently, they were almost all sold illegally in the same city where the girls live, so they usually don’t have to travel to steal the paintings). Their father is missing, but the girls have a contact who was a friend of their father, a man named Sadatsugu Nagaishi, who is able to provide them with things like helicopters and animatronic duplicates of themselves. It’s only about around episode 10 when the girls explain how their father got his paintings: he intercepted artwork looted by Nazis to keep it out of Hitler’s hands, and now the Neo-Nazis are after him and probably involved in his mysterious disappearance.

Girls.

Girls.

I don’t think the Neo-Nazis are after your dad. I think the Mossad is after your dad, and you could solve all of this much more easily by just contacting Geneva.

Blech.

58. Sorceror Hunters—Many years ago, in cave man times, I got my anime news from IGN doing reviews of DVD releases I could not afford, but could probably find if I’d asked nicely at Suncoast video and wasn’t just there for Transformers and Lupin III. One I remember mentioned a woman named Tira Misu and her sister chocolate going on adventures, and the reviewer made it seem like a good show with just…bad formatting on its DVD menu. I wanted to watch it!

Anyway I watched it this year and it’s garbage. Ecchi stereotypical nonsense and heartless cribbing from Urusei Yatsura with some weird, half-assed bondage shit thrown in for some reason. Avoid at all costs.

57. Karate Master—The English title for this series is on-the-nose, but it doesn’t really convey the same meaning as the Japanese title, Karate Baka Ichidai, which Wikipedia translates as "A Karate-Crazy Life", but I’d probably call “Karate-Fighting Fool”. And main character Ken Asuka certainly is that. Directed by famous anime director, Osamu Dezaki (he did the Black Jack anime I really liked last year, and a bunch of Lupin TV movies I did not like very much), the series adapts a manga that itself adapted the life of famous karate master Mas Oyama—or, at least, the stories Oyama told about himself. The anime changes the character’s name to Ken Asuka (harmless) and also drops all the stuff about Oyama actually being Korean (ehhhh…), probably because the anime wants to turn Asuka into a nationalist hero, portraying him as a kamikaze pilot who didn’t have the chance to kill himself in the war and throws himself into training in karate as the ultimate martial art. After some fairly interesting episodes early on where Asuka has to try to make a living for himself in postwar Japan, the anime quickly falls into a rut, where Asuka travels abroad, hears about some foreign martial art, says “Oh this seems tough” and then beats them in a fight. I was laughing early on when the show asked me to pretend wrestling wasn’t 100% fixed by the 1950’s, but it just kept going. The show also has a baffling habit of introducing new characters and plot points and dropping them—Ken Asuka spends several episodes training FBI agents and befriending them, and then he’s just like “Eh, bored now” and the show forgets that ever happened. If you’ve seen one episode, you’ve seen them all. Don’t bother with the whole thing…like I did.

56. Flash—There were like 23 episodes of the Flash this year and I don’t really remember what happened. Ed from the show Ed came back and used really bad video editing to make it look like Joe West got run over by a train and Barry was like “Joe wasn’t run over by no train” and Iris was like “Nothing left, just a grease spot” and “Why are you making me sad right now?” and also Vincent VanGogh was there saying things like “I’m Despero and I’m here to be a good guy” and no, everyone knows Despero wasn’t a good guy. That was all literally within the five episodes that aired last month, I don’t remember anything that happened before that. I guess Cisco quit. This show won’t be around for much longer, right?

(Right.)

55. Eat-Man '98—Well, it was less baffling than the original Eat-Man miniseries, but it wasn’t really any better either. “Oh, what did he eat to solve this situation? Oh it’s a gun, wow, amazing.”

54. Walking Dead—I’m gonna be honest, 14 episodes of this show aired in 2021 and I’ve only watched six so far. The other eight are sitting on our DVR. We could have watched them, but we went with Young Justice and old episodes of Freakazoid instead. I…I think we made the right call.

53. Beast Wars II—It didn’t get better. More characters with no personality crammed in, more nonsense happening, and at the end, everyone blows up. Don’t know why this is so big in Japan.

(Amongst Japanese Transformers fans, I mean. It was fairly successful for a kids cartoon, it's not like, Gundam-popular.)

52. Great Mazinger—Don’t believe the hype, it’s not that great! Picking up where Z left off, but dropping most of the characters for less-developed doppelgangers, keeping only Boss and his gang and Shiro from Z. At first Great Mazinger promises to be a slightly edgier version of Mazinger, with a more hard-bitten hero and a complex, weird, alien villain organization with several factions vying for power—but all that’s out the window by the end of episode 2. Instead, the series focuses on Shiro as a stand-in for the young audience, acting out stereotypical morality plays for him to learn lessons; strangely, Shiro seems to be written younger and more immature than he was in Mazinger Z (not that Shiro was particularly mature in Z either, he was a little shitlord, but he had a CHARACTER, whereas here he’s a vessel to deliver moral lessons). It gets so bad that Mazinger Z, in-story the less technically-advanced robot, returns at the end of the show to save the day and steal the limelight. I imagine there was something of a fan outcry at the time that Great Mazinger didn’t live up to its predecessor’s reputation. That outcry was correct.

51. Archer—I complained last year that Archer has fallen into kind of repeating itself, and this year is no different. The death of Jessica Walters robs it of one of its best characters (the final episode is odd—I don’t know if it was rewritten after her death, or she just couldn’t complete it, but Mallory Archer just disappears halfway through and leaves a note explaining that she’s gone off into the sunset). The writers do spend some time trying to make the characters grow in new and interesting ways, but it all seems like a song I’ve heard before. Shut it down, guys.

50. Cybersix—This one was disappointing. Cybersix is a cult hit of late-90’s animation, one of many noir-tinged cartoons following the trend started by Batman: The Animated Series, with a distinctive design style and beautiful animation by TMS. It’s unfortunate, then, that the characters are so bland! Cybersix is a genetic experiment, who is both impossibly beautiful and also can easily pass as a man in her secret identity as Adrian Seidelman. Adrian’s coworker Lucas Amato is hopelessly infatuated with Cybersix, and also is drawn to be Adrian’s friend, going out of his way to get dinner together and get to know him despite Adrian’s complete indifference (and extremely superheroic tendency to bounce without prior notice). There’s a scene in the final episode, completely silent, where Lucas and Adrian’s student Lori, who also had a crush on Adrian, learn that Cybersix and Adrian are the same person, and boy I bet they felt some confusing emotions in that moment.

One thing I felt hampered the series was that the main villain, Dr. Von Reichter, the mad scientist behind it all, was in the background the whole time, directing his son, José, to cover for his experiments and…do…crimes? For some reason? Like they’re also operating organized crime, in a way that’s never made clear how it lines up with the human experimentation think. José is completely incompetent (he is a little boy put in charge of the mafia, after all), so for most of the show I assumed the plan was for Von Reichter to become the main villain of a potential (non-existent) season 2. But no! Von Reichter is killed at the end of season 1, leaving the incompetent José as the main villain! Whose idea was that?

49. Cosmo Warrior Zero—A Captain Harlock show, told from the perspective of the man chasing Harlock. The machine empire is involved. Maetel shows up. Kind of a cheap imitation of the shows that came before, a forgettable remix of Leiji Matsumoto’s greatest hits. It’s…it’s more Harlock. That’s all I have to say.

48. All-Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku—I think I said as much as I can about this show in the review of its awful remake. The OVA and the TV show are in slightly different continuities, a fact that the TV Show acknowledges in the opening, but they have about the same sense of humor—that is to say, one cribbed largely from the earlier, better Project A-Ko. It’s a fun way to kill some time, but it’s never going to be your favorite anime.

47. Voltron Vehicle Force—Whoof, I see why this one’s less respected than the Lion Voltron. Don’t get me wrong, they tried some interesting things here. The original series they adapted this from, Dairugger XV, was one of a wave of early-80’s mecha anime that followed from Gundam and Ideon in portraying their war as fundamentally based on cultural misunderstanding and empty, which was very difficult to translate to the black-and-white world of 1980’s American children’s television, and I give them credit for getting as much through as they did, but this is kind of a mess. The censorship needs as well completely kneecap the ending, in which a good portion of the characters die, either heroically or pathetically, as the story called for it—here they easily escape to continue their war in reruns. Y’all tried, but it was just too complicated for Voltron. So they just made more lion episodes instead.

46. Future Avengers—Years ago I watched Disk Wars: Avengers, an anime about the Avengers designed to sell pogs to Japanese children. It was a tremendous waste of my time! So you can imagine why I slept on Future Avengers when it first came out, but hey, I have all this Disney Plus anyway, might as well see the one Avengers show I haven’t watched.

It’s alright. It apparently came out at the end of the big Inhumans push when Marvel was mad at Fox and so they kept trying to make “fetch” happen, but there’s a pretty good payoff where Loki bests Maximus and points out that Maximus is just Loki, but lame. Before that, though, there’s a nice storyline about some superpowered children who are raised to think they’re going to save the world from the tyranny of the Avengers, but whoops their boss is Red Skull and they’re Hydra. Unlike Disk Wars, where the Avengers were effectively Pokemon the children could summon for battles and otherwise it followed just some typical anime kids, Future Avengers does a pretty good job of building up the new “kid” superheroes alongside the original Avengers, and their attempts to atone for the evil they unknowingly committed. It’s nothing you haven’t seen in any given shonen anime before, including the bad boy who needs to be helped with pure friendship, but it’s not awful.

Deadpool just wants to have his own anime.

45. Space Warrior Baldios—This show tried, it really did. Taking a lot of popular ideas from robot anime of the time: the indestructible main robot, an alien invasion, “We’re not so different” moralizing, weird time-travel, other-dimension stuff, a hero torn between two societies, it’s all there. It’s just…not handled very well, at all. Declining ratings also forced it to end of a cliffhanger, which Wikipedia says was fixed by a sequel film, but that film isn’t on the streaming service, so instead it’s just a show where the heroes fail and Earth dies. I can see where they were going with it! They dropped hints! The alien hero recognizes the Book of Genesis (a fact that’s hilariously no-sold by his human friend with the line “Oh! So we have the same God!” YEAH I WONDER WHY THAT COULD BE), the aliens look basically the same as humans, they didn’t expect to find Earth when they went at warp to get there, Earth was drastically changed by their attacks in a way that looked familiar—IT’S A TIME LOOP! Obviously the aliens traveled back in time to the same planet they left because it was over-polluted and accidentally created the situation they were trying to escape! But we never get there. A good attempt, but overshadowed by contemporaries.

(I later watched the movie that has the real ending and it didn't add much to the show)

44. Gridman, the Hyper Agent (6 out of 39 episodes)—So back in 1994, in the early days of Power Rangers, DiC, who spent the ‘80’s fighting to be the big dog of kids shows in the US and could feel it slipping away as the decade rounded, attempted to compete with two shows: an original show called Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills, an absolutely awful Power Rangers ripoff, and Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, an adaptation of the Japanese series Gridman that I guess they could position against Power Rangers’ sister-show, the similarly computer-themed VR Troopers. I…loved Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, you guys. I went as Gridman/Servo for Halloween (Servo is more of a robot thing than an internet thing, right? Shouldn't it have been ServER?). But it only aired for one year! Disappeared, leaving me only with some really cool toys that I slowly forgot the names of.

Fortunately for me, another big fan of Gridman got a job at Trigger and did the excellent SSSS.Gridman, and another sequel this year, SSSS.Dynazenon. I didn’t have time to watch that this year (next year for sure!), but someone did put the original Japanese Gridman out on Blu-Ray, and Johnny was kind enough to get it for me for Christmas (DiC’s Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad is, sadly, probably lost to complicated licensing issues that aren’t worth the money to untangle for a modern release). One disc in and, yeah, this is about what you could expect from a Japanese superhero show. Some early computer effects are used that definitely weren’t supposed to be seen in this high definition. It’s fun though. It’s nostalgic for me.

And that Japanese theme song! That’s getting pumped music. Makes you want to punch a bear, or buy a lightly-used Mazda.

43. Beast Wars Neo—Now this one surprised me. It managed to avoid the problems of Beast Wars II by keeping the cast small, only bringing in one-shot characters for a few episodes to sell their toy, which gave the main cast space to breathe and for us to get to know them. It wasn’t as well done as the original Beast Wars, but it was enough to keep me paying attention until Unicron showed up at the end. Oh, also, UNICRON SHOWS UP, they actually reveal some information about what Angolmois Energy, the big MacGuffin of Beast Wars II, WAS, and forces beyond just the petty squabbling of Maximal vs. Predacon were put into play. A surprisingly solid Transformers show.

42. Star Fleet—The English-dubbed version of a Go Nagai puppet show. Like think the Thunderbirds, but they have a giant robot. It’s…unique! It’s unique, and it’s also extremely stereotypical. There’s a girl who’s mysteriously connected to the aliens, the hotshot team are torn between trusting their friend and fighting the aliens…it has a “we’re lost in space because of warp drive” plot that Macross and GoShogun both employed, with a bit of the “search for the friendly aliens who will solve the problem” from Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato and Captain Harlock: Endless Road SSX. The Japanese title of X-Bomber was more appropriate, as the “Star Fleet” barely factors at all; the plot follows just the few pilots of the X-Bomber ship across the galaxy as they try to find out just why the aliens are attacking them in the first place. The puppets are pretty well-made, with some interesting design choices on the enemies, but they are still limited in motion and emotion (these are not marionettes, they’re puppeted from below, so they’re usually shot from the chest up). It can’t possibly have been cheaper to build all these than to just draw a cartoon, right? A bizarre entry into a bizarre genre; pretty fun if you want more giant robots but nothing you haven’t seen before.

41. Chargeman Ken!—The ultimate So Bad It’s Good anime, or so the legend goes. Chargeman Ken was produced by the same team that made Astroganger, aired in 65 7-minute episodes in 1973 (a significant amount of that runtime is the theme song, too) and completely forgotten until someone started posting clips on 2chan for people to laugh at the absurd, over-the-top violence and nonsensical plots. The problem is, when you watch it all together, what was funny becomes repetitive. The famous episodes are few and far between, so for most of it you get pale imitations of the bizarre stuff Kenny Lauderdale told you about. Aliens have a bad plan, Chargeman Ken is oblivious, “Oh wait it’s aliens,” and then Ken slaughters them mercilessly and is praised for it. A disturbingly common plot is an alien disguising himself as a cute girl to get close to Ken, and then Ken has to murder his girlfriend. This kid’s going to be messed up as an adult.

What are Chargeman Ken’s powers? What abilities does he gain by using the charge of light? (not sunlight, any light—one episode has him able to convert to Chargeman from just the slight glow of a match shielded from the wind) Well, uh…not the ability to pilot his flying saucer, he does that as a normal person all the time. He seems to be able to jump very high? He’s…durable? Maybe? Um, gun? It is unclear. What is clear is that he can murder aliens with complete impunity and no one thinks this is weird.

Anyway in the final episode he kills the leader of the aliens and then the military is like “Cool man we blew up the rest of them too” WHAT DID WE EVEN NEED CHARGEMAN FOR IF THE MILITARY COULD BEAT THE ALIENS AGH

40. Dragon Half—This is one that had a pretty good reputation in old-school anime circles, despite only having, uh, two episodes. It’s a cute little series about a half-dragon girl who has a crush on a dragon hunter, and the sitcom plots she finds herself in as she tries to gain his attention but keeps making things worse for everyone involved. Not much to say about it, except that the closing theme will make you completely unable to listen to Beethoven again.

39. Cromartie High School—This show’s a legendary installment of the anime canon of like 15 years ago, but this kind of humor just slides off me. Certainly, I think my lack of knowledge of Big Strong Man anime doesn’t help me appreciate the jokes, though I think I know enough to get the gist, but the whole Japanese comedy routine of *something bizarre happens* “WHAAA SO BIZARRE!” just feels excessive to me. That said, the show doesn’t always go to that well, and did have enough characters and situations that it could rub them against each other in different ways for a variety of conflicts, so it never really got stale. I did appreciate the big meta joke, that these guys all present themselves as unaffected and unbeatable, but they’re really all crippled by massive social anxiousness, and the illusion of power is just them being completely misunderstood by their peers. That’s a good joke! But is it delivered well? Maybe as well as it could be. It’s just not for me.

38. Mazinger Z—I was surprised how much this improved in the second half of the series. Strangely, one way it improved was giving a lot more time to the comedic characters, which is usually a bad sign in this show, but Boss and his junkyard robot, Boss Borot, added a lot of heart to the show, and also, plot-wise, putting another, weaker robot into the show was a way to build some tensions in the battles since there was never really any chance of Mazinger losing. The introduction of new enemies shook things up as well, with the introduction of Archduke Gorgon, a kind of lion centaur, but with the man torso coming out of the tail instead of the head, introducing some nice tension amongst the villains, since Gorgon worked for a separate power and didn’t take orders from Dr. Hell, the established villain. It gave me a greater appreciation for the series, which up until the second half was looking extremely dated even next to shows from a few years later; the second half was where Mazinger had to step up to the plate against real competition, and it did a good job of bettering itself. There are still better anime out there, even ones about this robot, but the second half is where you really see why this is a classic.

37. Transformers Rescue Bots Academy—It’s over! Rescue Bots Academy continued on with its typical charming little lessons for kids, with some interesting complications involving introducing new Dinobots and a new version of Perceptor for the characters to play off of. It surprised me by introducing a Decepticon to the story, Laserbeak, for a story about redemption and accepting others, as one of the Rescue Bots tries to befriend Laserbeak despite the others’ prejudice against the Decepticon for crimes of the past. I regret that I missed the show had started back up again—my DVR was set but they didn’t mark these episodes as new—so I did see them out of order, but it’s a fun addition to the Transformers lore. Still better than the Netflix show!

36. Detective Conan—What’s up with Conan this year? Well, not much. They hit episode 1,000, but it wasn’t all that interesting, and the plot didn’t really progress at all this year. Just another reminder that anyone, anywhere in Japan could flip out and kill someone at any time, for any reason.

(Their 1,000th episode was a remake of a story from the first year. I thought it seemed familiar at the time, but didn't remember until I went back and watched some old episodes I'd seen before.)

35. Iria: Zeiram the Animation—This one’s wild. A prequel to an Alien-like Japanese sci-fi movie called Zeiram, it chronicles the first fight between human bounty hunter Iria and the great monster, Zeiram, an “immortal space monster” that just kind of has free reign to go around the universe terrorizing people because ain’t nothin’ no one can do about it. The show has a distinctive futuristic-feudal Japanese style that reminds me a lot of Outlaw Star, with very inventive mech designs (I love the little puffer tank things) and a solid, if stereotypical, plot where Iria is looking for revenge for the death of her brother, but then the alien starts manifesting aspects of her brother. Some of the twists you see coming miles away, and the defeat of the monster is a little unbelievable, but they did the work to show the heroine being clever and biding her time to use her limited tools right against an otherwise unstoppable enemy (also it’s the kind of sci-fi where they established enough crazy weaponry over the course of it that they can pull SOMEthing out of thin air if they need to). It’s a fun 6-episode OVA, which manages not to fall into the ‘90’s OVA trap of being too gross and actually finds the time to develop its characters a little bit. Not bad.

34. Combattler V—After I loved Voltes V, I wanted to see the earlier show from the same director, part of the same “Romance Robot” trilogy of cartoons produced by Toei and Sunrise in the late 1970’s. And it started out great! The characters of Combattler V are much more developed than the ones in Voltes V, and have a lot more of that Fantastic Four-style conflict that’s really good at driving episodic stories like this. The alien enemies in this one were suitably weird, with like, a bird man dude, and people who seemed to be stuck in walls and could only teleport between certain windows around the bad guys HQ; that’s freaking weird! They all answered to a giant statue they called mother! The bad guy found out he was a robot clone and had a mental breakdown! It was awesome! I was excited!

Then all those bad guys died and new ones showed up who were less interesting. The heroes got comedy kid sidekicks. All the drama dissipated. W-h-yyyy did this happen to often in 1970’s anime? I suppose the stereotypes helped to sell toys, but come ON fhgwgads! I wanted to see the robot bird man be sad! A disappointing end for the show, but I’m glad Voltes V wasn’t forced into a similar situation and got to play out its’ more interesting plot points to the end. I got the last of the trilogy, Daimos, for Christmas, I’ll see if that one is more of a Voltes V or Combattler V next year.

33. Astroganger—Two months before Mazinger Z premiered, another, forgotten mecha anime appeared on television. Immediately overshadowed by its more prestigious competitor, this anime was almost completely forgotten to time, a footnote in the history of the Super Robot genre. But now, that anime is available in the United States. And boy, is it not good—but it is GREAT.

Astroganger tells the story of Kantaro, a half-alien boy who is the only one who can interface with the living metal being, Astroganger, who started as just a lump of alien metal but has become a giant robot. For reasons the show never gets around to explaining, only by having this small child become one with him can Astroganger, who seems to be powerful and is capable of independent thought himself, use his superpowers. They fight against the alien Blasters, who all kind of look the same, but there is one who is the boss. This show is made by the same team that made the later, more infamous Chargeman Ken, so you can imagine how it goes: the heroes are completely unstoppable and absolutely bloodthirsty. In the early episodes especially, they sometimes destroy two alien menaces per show; or the alien monsters will mutate into different forms because, I don’t know, we saw that one already, we’re bored. It’s a show that doesn’t know what it wants to be, and I appreciate that. Being a full 30-minute show, though, allowed them a lot more room to move than the 5-minute Chargeman Ken episodes; as it went along Astroganger managed, despite itself, to develop an actual plot, and present semi-coherent stories. This was both pleasant, and unfortunate, as the anarchic chaos was one of the most appealing things about the show, to me. It’s a fun anime to just put on and let wash over you, like waves from the ocean, except a robot is blowing stuff up.

32. Digimon Ghost Game—Do you know how long it’s been since a Digimon show followed directly on the heels of another Digimon show? That hasn’t happened since Digimon Frontier followed Digimon Tamers on April 7, 2002—that’s almost 20 years! I guess it shows that the Adventure remake was popular, although I kind of thought they might continue by remaking Adventure 2 or something. This is an interesting take, though it’s already kind of undermining its premise: Digimon as urban legend horror story. The kids find some new urban legend about a ghost, go investigate, oh it’s a Digimon who’s just confused about human life. It had a good mix of typical Digimon kids stuff and horror in the early episodes (the flashback to the main character going to look for his father at his home work station and finding a smoking crater where the computer chair should be was a nice twist) but it’s becoming more straight-up monster hero, which is a little disappointing, but I don’t know how long they could get away with plots like “the funny clock man ages kids to death” or “Mummymon is confused about injuries so he tries to mummify everyone and hide them in the basement” either. I do like the secondary lead, who is a Japanese kid who moved to America, was a prodigy who graduated college as a teenager, but became such a huge anime weeb that he moved back to Japan and went to a boarding school because it seemed cool in a manga he read. We’ll see how this goes.

30 & 31. Astro Boy (1963 & 1980)—I watched two TV shows based on Astro Boy (Or Tetsuwan Atom, if you’re Japanese), the 1963 version and the 1980 version, the most classic of classic anime by the “God of Manga”, Osamu Tezuka, and I’ve decided to review them together because they were largely the same. Oh sure, the original preserves a lot more of Tezuka’s signature sense of humor, his visual gags and weird little recurring jokes, but the 80’s version had improved animation and a more consistent plot. For the most part, Astro Boy is a straightforward superhero story, where Astro is completely trusted by those around him to save the say against various forces invested in doing wrong against the people of Earth. Tezuka was slightly ahead of his time, however, in dealing with themes of prejudice in Astro Boy—since the hero is a robot, not human, a good portion of society sees him as below their notice, or are suspicious of him just because of the way he was created. When robots go wild, often Astro Boy is blamed and imprisoned just for being in the area or trying to fight them; shades of Spider-Man, right? Except Astro Boy predates Spidey by ten years! Tezuka also employs some more episodic tricks out of Will Eisner’s Spirit playbook; some episodes Astro Boy won’t show up until halfway through, as a deus ex machina to help a one-shot hero introduced at the start of the episode, or to recontextualize the action so far so the viewers will understand what’s been going on with the characters introduced in the episode. This was a favorite ploy of Tezuka’s, a way to work out his feelings about issues of the day on the page. It’s unfortunate that the rights holders seem to insist on only putting the English versions up to stream—several cuts and skipped episodes remove content that I’d really like to see in the original context. Still, it’s a fun old watch, whichever version.

29. Digimon Adventure:--Picking up where we left off last year…where did we leave off last year? Ah, yes, the Digimon were still causing trouble in the real world, and the kids were fighting to control it in the Digital World. The series did a better job of having one cohesive story than the original, breaking the kids apart and bringing them back together as needed to create a variety of adventures and introduce a large array of characters and locations that kept the series fresh as it went along; although, like the original the series reached its climax and everyone went “Oh we have how many episodes left? Uh, here’s this other quest you need to do, actually.” I was disappointed that there was no moment like the fight with Vamdemon/Miyotismon in the original series, where the kids went home and revealed the truth to their parents in the real world. That was the height of tension and really changed the game in the original series, but here the whole thing played out in the Digital World. It’s a little disappointing, and I think keeps it from surpassing the original Digimon, when in all other respects this was probably the superior show. Could have used just a bit of a break from the usual, you know?

28. Doctor Who: Flux—This season of Doctor Who was presented as one continuous story over six episodes—something that had been tried before, but never really in the new series and not with this same amount of interconnected content. It…kind of worked. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of Chris Chibnall overall, but he’s done pretty good work in the last two seasons (but that first season, whoof). This one’s plot was one of those big, weird ones that loves confusing you right out the gate, which is fine by me, but the payoff was another big, world-shaking revelation that can just leave me cold. It reminded me of Grant Morrison’s critique of Scott Snyder’s take on the DC Universe, during Morrison’s run on Green Lantern: Superman says the Justice League is “Wrapped up in interminable battles with ever MORE gargantuan, MORE primordial, and above all, more reliably ANTHROPOMORPHIC cosmic supernonentities.” I won’t tell you what happens in the final episode of the season that made me think of this, but you can probably guess.

It probably wasn’t the best story to introduce new companion Dan into, especially after losing Ryan and Graham, two great companions, in the New Year’s special, but they found a way to make it work okay; Dan’s aggressive Liverpudlianism distinguishes him as a character immediately, and his love/hate relationship with one of the aliens is a good source of comedy. The companions all get their own little story away from the Doctor, which was good, because it gave them a chance to develop without her, while she was off unveiling deeply-hidden secrets by herself. One thing that bothered me is the whole “secret history of the Doctor” angle just seems like a retread of the Matt Smith-era “What’s the Doctor’s real name?” plot, to which the answer was a resounding “Who cares?” both within the fiction and from me. At this point we’re just compounding lies the Time Lords have told, and while they are manipulative little bastards and always have been, at some point you need to pivot to something else, you know? I also felt the villain of the piece, the Grand Serpent, was a little under-baked. Well, one of the villains. The ones who wanted to destroy everything for religious reasons were alright. But the Grand Serpent was introduced as a great dictator of a future human civilization; I assumed he was just flavor for a side-character’s story, but then he started doing time travel stuff and fighting the Doctor directly, as well as looping in established characters from previous seasons into the plot. It was fun…but was it too much? Ah, well, maybe we’ll get more from him later. Plus, Davies is back…in two years. Fun…

27. Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy Season 1—I’d mentioned last year that I loved the final season of McCoy’s Doctor Who, but I was wary of season 1. I knew a new team had come onto the show in McCoy’s second season to run it until the end, but a lot of the same people who worked on the execrable Trial of a Time Lord worked on this season (indeed, a character from Trial returns for the final story of this season). The first four-episode story, Time and the Rani, was good enough, featuring the rogue Time Lady attempting to conquer a planet and use the Doctor’s intelligence to operate a super-weapon through the use of, uh, exploding spinning tops, poison bees, and one sequence where she takes advantage of the Doctor’s post-regeneration confusion by just dressing up as companion Mel and acting like she’s the companion (brilliant, A+ writing, great idea). The standout story for me was the second of four serials, the four-part Paradise Towers, which I think has only gotten more relevant with age. The Doctor and Mel arrive in what they were assured was the pleasure-spot of the universe, a major luxury hotel, only to find it in disarray with gangs of women playing a strange game of tag across the halls, spraying their tags all over the place. Older residents live alone and have largely resorted to cannibalism (As one lady lures Mel into her apartment, the other cleans a plate of human femurs off the table-HAH!) to survive. The ostensible authorities, an explicitly Nazi-coded group answering to a little dictator with Hitler’s stache and an incongruous nasally accent representing, not the dictator as mastermind as he prefers to present himself, but the banal reality that leaders of cults of personality have no idea what they’re doing or even how completely ill-suited they are to their own job. The “Chief Caretaker” employs cynical propaganda and outright lies to hide deaths caused by his own incompetence in his religious crusade of gentrification; he’s what Basil Fawlty would be if he ever got his way. Behind it all is the Great Architect, the ancient designer of Paradise Towers, who was so proud of his crowning achievement in Architecture, he refused to let it be ruined by a little thing like people actually living in it. And that’s before we even get to Pecs (Who Sets The World of Paradise Towers To Right!), a self-proclaimed superhero who will bust through a door at the slightest provocation. The whole thing’s a riot!

The other two stories of the season suffered from being only three episodes. Delta and the Bannermen had some interesting ideas about genocidal wars, a romance across species, and aliens going to a bed and breakfast in 1950’s Wales, but it was just too much in too short a space to really keep track of. Dragonfire was pretty fun, but didn’t offer much aside from an obvious villain (Mr. Freeze in space, basically) and a better companion. I will say, the introduction of Ace surprised me; having seen later episodes, I knew she was a British girl from the 1980’s, so having her just be a waitress on a space station in the future caught me off guard. She explains, though, that she set up an explosive and this caused a time storm that sent her to the future. Oh, of course! Happens to the best of us.

26. Creamy Mami, the Magical Angel—Sometimes you just watch an anime because someone on Youtube talked about it. And you know, it paid off! Creamy Mami is, well, it’s an unfortunate name for an English-speaker to have the say out loud, that’s for sure; but it also tells the story of Yuu Morisawa, a little girl who is still young and innocent enough to see a ship from the dimension of Feather Star, the world all human spirits inhabit before they’re born. As a reward, the imp Pino Pino gives her the magic power to transform into, uh, a slightly older girl who has your typical range of Japanese magical girl powers: disguise, special effects, devastating laser blasts, mild telepathy, you know the deal. Along with her two familiars, cat-like creatures called Posi and Nega (guess their personalities), Yuu has to navigate going on her magical adventures while avoiding tipping off anyone to her dual personality, or else she’ll lose it, for some reason.

So it doesn’t help when she’s immediately scouted off the street by a record producer, given a contract (under the assumed name of “Creamy Mami,” which she just comes up with on the spot), and suddenly has to go on tours and do recording sessions, all working around her school schedule, without her parents finding out.

Created in the early ‘80’s as kind of a cash-in on the popularity of competing program Minky Momo, Creamy Mami is something of a predecessor to the surprisingly good 1985-87 American toy advertisement cartoon, Jem and the Holograms, which featured a similar premise of a woman with a secret identity as a glamorous pop star. It mostly succeeds on the likability of its cute premise, although, as usual for anime of this or any time, the central romance plot is half-baked, with boyfriend Toshio being kind of a douchebag (as Hank put it, “he is a unit of boy”) that Yuu continues to pursue despite his disinterest and the availability of better options because ??? profit. As usual, the episodes I appreciated most were the ones where things went off the rails: I tend to cite an early episode where they reveal, out of nowhere, that there are a certain amount of people born on Earth that are chosen (by God, one assumes?) to be special helpers, and Yuu discovers that a demon is trying to kill one in her neighborhood. That’s right! “Demons are attempting to murder God’s chosen on Earth” is the plot of a one-off episode! Or my absolute favorite episode, “Mami, Through The Looking Glass,” a twisted (but still kid-friendly! Mostly kid-friendly) mashup of the Infinity Train episode “The Chrome Car” and Perfect Blue (if you know, you know). That episode followed up on some themes that would reoccur throughout the series: that, basically, Yuu didn’t ask for this. Her magic powers are something of a burden to her, she never wanted to be a pop star, this is all done for someone else, to make others feel better. It’s a theme I wish the show had done more with, but kind of…undermines the entire premise. We don’t want to feel bad about our pop star hero! We want her to do one last amazing concert, for the FANS! (Well, okay, I want to feel bad for her, but I’m Sickos at the window) (I did really like the scene in the sequel movie where she transformed involuntarily and it’s like a horror movie, that was slick) What’s left is a cute, fluffy anime with the possibility of a real weird episode at any given time. That’s a win in my book.

(I can post these pictures because I took the screencaps myself and they are essential:)

25. Super Dimension Century Orguss (9 out of 35 episodes)—WHERE ARE YOU GOING? WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME? *jamming*

Got this one for Christmas, so I’m just starting. Studio Nue’s follow-up to their biggest hit, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, this one benefitted from a larger budget and the confidence of having one of the biggest TV shows in Japan. I got REAL into Macross Freshman year of college, and its reputation as one of the great mecha anime is well-deserved, so I’d wanted to watch Orguss for a while, but a recent re-watch of Macross left me a little cold; I’d aged out of its story of a shy guy who messes up his relationship with women, but the women keep coming back to him. I was like, why do these strong women keep putting up with this schmuck? Orguss doesn’t quite have this problem, but it’s not completely immune—Kei Katsuragi is a hotshot pilot in a world war, who has girlfriends all over the world. However, when one battle, with the objective to take over the one orbital elevator that the two main blocs of the Earth, goes South, and his transport leaves him behind, Kei disobeys orders and detonates a dimensional bomb. The reason the bomb wasn’t detonated, however, was because they did not have the time to calibrate it to work properly, so Kei is enveloped in light as the whole world goes wonky. He awakens in an unfamiliar landscape, surrounded by strange people involved in their own conflict—the nomadic Emaan, at war with the conquering Chirams who bully and control all the other nations of the planet. The Emaan explain that this is Earth in the future, that each force on the planet used to be the human species of their own alternate universe, until some catastrophe flung all the versions of Earth together into a constantly-shifting mishmash of worlds, and they had to figure out how to coexist.

Kei is like, “Huh weird wonder how that happened.” I WONDER.

Kei is pretty clearly designed to be the opposite of Macross’s protagonist, Hikaru Ichijo. Where Hikaru was shy and reluctant, Kei outgoing and bold. Maybe too bold; he has a tendency to kiss women when they don’t want him too. Despite his big talk about having multiple girlfriends, he seems to have settled on the Emaan mechanic Mimsy as his girlfriend, no matter what her fiancé thinks (in Kei’s defense, Mimsy isn’t too thrilled about her fiancé either). I’m not happy with that relationship dynamic, but we’ll see how it goes. Good so far.

24. Falcon & Winter Soldier—If you’re going to make a TV show about the state of black culture in the modern Unites States of America, maybe make sure you actually have something to say about it.

John Walker, yeah, you love to hate him, Bucky had the Oreo cake, villains, Sharon, Zemo, yeah there’s a lot of nice stuff around the issue at hand. But of all the Marvel shows, this one felt the most…hollow? That’s not how you want your new Captain America to feel. Sam got a bad deal when he was Cap in the comics. Don’t do it to him again, Disney.

(Hah, I was already complaining about my chosen order for Falcon & Winter Soldier when I posted these. Don't worry, Captain America: Symbol of Truth launched in 2022 and is amazing, Sam finally got a good Captain America story. And Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty, the one about Steve Rogers, is also awesome! Good time to read Captain America.)

23. Devilman Crybaby—You know the feeling of oncoming nausea? Slight dizziness, inability to control your diaphragm, a lump at the back of your throat that won’t go away? Only the slightest pain, but you still feel on the verge of death?

Have you ever thought, “What if this feeling was a TV show?”

I THOUGHT I WAS READY FOR DEVILMAN CRYBABY. I’d read the manga; I’d wanted to read the manga for like 20 years, I knew the ending before I ever read it: Devilman loses, Satan wins, humanity is wiped out, and God sends his army of angels to kill Satan and start again. It’s a downer! The love interest is torn apart by a mob who carries her head on a pike! So, yes, I read no-spoiler reviews that complained about how much they liked it before the ending and thought, “Heheh, you fools, I was prepared.”

I WAS NOT PREPARED.

What I didn’t count on was how much personality director Masaaki Yuasa and writer Ichiro Okouchi would imbue in new characters. Akira, Ryo, Miki; I knew them and their roles in the story. Silene and Kaim, too. The show’s innovation, however, was adding other Devilmen; “Miko”, the girl whose jealousy of Miki sends her down a dark path before she finally sees the light in the end, and her boyfriend whose name I forget and looking it up isn’t helping, who decides to betray humanity for his own selfish ends, and it still doesn’t save him. And who can forget the new scene, not in the original manga, where Miki’s father finds her brother, who wanted to be a devilman but couldn’t control the demon inside him, eating his own mother, having succumbed to his uncontrollable hunger, only really becoming aware of what he did as his father attempts to kill him, but can’t. And then the cops mow them all down indiscriminately. The Devilman “condition”, in this version, is heavily linked with puberty and sexual awakening: after a fitful sleep, Akira awakes to find his bed full of hair and semen splattered on the ceiling; the other Devilmen seek sexual encounters all over, but find no satisfaction in them. TV personalities unfairly demonize the, uh, demons, instigating political repercussions, widespread suppression, and open mob violence—all a false flag attack from Satan himself, a mad grab for political power that works way too easily. That part, at least, was in the manga. Not so much has changed since 1973, it would seem.

Devilman Crybaby is a violently beautiful, thoughtful, and timely work that also manages to be a respectful adaptation of a classic. It’s a wonderful TV show. It’s just that no one should ever watch it.

22. Young Justice: Phantoms—The writing team promised more of the original “Team” this season, and while they’ve delivered, I think they may have bitten off more than they can chew with the plot. So far this season has followed three plots, arranged in chunks of episodes each devoted to a different set of characters: Superboy, Miss Martian, and Beast Boy travel to Mars for Conner and M’gann’s wedding, Tigress and Cheshire deal with their messed up childhood while trying to decide if two defectors from the League of Assassins can be trusted, and Zatanna leads a trio of young magicians in a series of battles between two Lords of Chaos who are trying to kill one another, while Vandal Savage narrates his life story. It’s all very good, as Young Justice tends to be, but I think it’s lost some forward momentum by breaking up its story into little chunks; the fight between Klarion & Tikal and Child & Flaw especially seems a little dragged out to fit the episode length. Personally, I’d like an answer on that cliffhanger from the first storyline, please! Maybe wait until this is all up and binge it, I’m fairly certain we’ll have some nice payoff at the end, but let’s get a move on, Mr. Wiseman!

21. Castlevania: Whoops, I forgot to do this one last year. Well, this was the final season of Netflix’s Castlevania, and whereas season 3 was a little plodding with no real drive towards the end, and suffered from splitting its characters, season 4 was back on track with exactly what the people want to see: some complete morons with the extremely bad idea to revive Dracula. That’s what Castlevania is all about, after all! This season did good work with the seedier elements of this version of ‘Vania’s world, with the predictable-but-entertaining reveal of the secret Court following a dead king and queen, protecting the Nobles while the peasants were left to fight monsters alone—and contrasted with Alucard taking normal peasants into his castle to save them. Bill Nighy’s Saint Germain returned from season 3, a considerably more twisted man than before, in keeping with the season’s theme of slow corruption of anyone in touch with the demons and monsters of the world. A pleasant change was the resolution of the Hector/Isaac/Carmilla plot, which saw Isaac and Hector rejecting their motives for revenge and growing beyond the people Dracula made them into (though they still killed Carmilla, fuck her). And of course, Malcolm McDowell killed it as Varney, the forgotten predecessor to Dracula who, in Castlevania, frequently presents himself as someone worthy of respect, although no one ever recognizes him. A nice close to the series, though they are promising more, perhaps jumping ahead to another Belmont (Christopher? Simon? Surely not all the way to Richter) so we’ll see how it goes.

(Yes, all the way to Richter.)

20. Space Runaway Ideon (14 out of 39 episodes)—“Can you hear it? I’m sure you can. That distant roar…”

Legendary anime director Yoshiyuki Tomino had basically invented the “real robot” genre with Mobile Suit Gundam the year before, and that show did not meet the expectations of late-1970’s Japan’s mecha-watching audience and was cancelled before the end of its contract, with the writers barely able to convince the sponsors to give them time to make a satisfying ending. Tomino did not know yet that the mecha-watching audience’s tastes were about to change, that he was just two or three years ahead of the curb and had created one of the most influential TV shows of all time; all he knew was that if people wanted a super robot, he’d give them one.

Space Runaway Ideon feels more Tomino than even the original Gundam, dealing with ideas he’d come back to even in later Gundam series: accidental conflict, compounded by repeated distrust and misunderstanding between foreign cultures, weapons from an advanced ancient civilization deployed to disastrous effect by people who don’t fully understand them, aliens switching sides to better understand foreign cultures and as a result being accepted by neither. Perhaps this is why it’s not grabbing me as it should; I’ve seen Turn A Gundam, I’ve seen Reconguista in G, these themes feel familiar from more mature works. It’s interesting to me how he works in the super robot angles; it’s very rare in Gundam to do the Megazord thing where multiple pieces come together to make the robot, with different pilots for different parts. The pilots are also not united in their thoughts; Cosmo is rather laid back and putting too much pressure on himself to succeed, Bes (the closest thing this show has to Bright Noah) is clearly in love with the alien Karala and trying to act like he’s impartial in supporting her, and Kasha just wants to wipe her enemies out. I think I heard how this one ends, and it’s not pretty. Yeah, it’s one of THOSE Tomino anime. Looking forward to it.

19. GoShogun—I mentioned Baldios was overshadowed by contemporaries—here’s one! I swear, one episode has something like “GoShogun is Better than Baldios” as ipsum lorem on a TV screen, I busted out laughing. GoShogun tells the story of three hotshot pilots brought together by a mysterious benefactor to pilot a robot built by a dead scientist, with the purpose of preventing an Illuminati organization, Dokuga, from obtaining the Good Thunder, the first teleportation-capable Earth Ship, and discovering the secret of the outer-space energy source, Beamler. Beamler is a kind of hippy-drippy, next-evolution-of-man thing, that interfaces with the scientist’s son Kenta, and slowly evolves him beyond the boundaries of man, until he leaves Earth with his robot friends (including the GoShogun itself) to start the next stage of human thought.

But who cares about that! The real draw of GoShogun is its pilots and villains, each with their own extreme personality and sense of humor. They play off one another well, and can switch from high melodrama to high camp on a dime, like the best Spider-Man stories. The vain enemy general Bundle is a particular delight, scheming complicated organized crime plots while still making sure his hair is on point, and taking time to hit on Remy, the female lead. The GoShogun team gets all the good stock plots a robot show should have, like helping out a town in trouble, teaming up with a reporter to get the truth out, and ultimately galvanizing the people into action to overthrow the dastardly villains, always with a smile and a quip—a more American way of looking at heroes than the typical stern leads of Japanese shows, I think. Despite it all, though, the series ends with a “where are they now”-style recap of what happened to each of them after the show—where the villains all continue to prosper in the new, post-Dokuga society, and the heroes fall into debt and obscurity. It’s a funny little twist!

Oh, and don’t sleep on the sequel movie, Time Étranger, which picks up fifty years later, where no one has aged for some reason, and Remy is hospitalized in a car crash…or are they all trapped in a town where death lurks around every corner, and Remy’s death has been predicted for three days from now? And when I say “they all”, I mean the heroes and villains, together, acting like old friends, and in the status quo established by the “where are they now” segments. It’s dramatically different from the show (no robot! Kenta took it to space, remember?) but absolutely essential.

18. Legends of Tomorrow—Ahh, the last show worth watching on the CW (Riverdale who?)—and even then, Legends did seem to be in a bit of a rut this year, lampshading how its seasons have become formulaic, writing out one member of the team only to introduce a new member and go through the same introductory spiel each time and bringing everyone together for a song and a lesson at the end. We got two seasons this year, though, and the second one had the opportunity to bring in some new, interesting twists. The first one re-did some of the same old plots about fatherhood and identity, but also had an interesting twist on the villains with the amoral technofascist Bishop working to incorporate Sarah’s genetics into his grand scheme to enrich himself, and throwing the rest of the Legends out to dry. It did good work playing on Ava’s poor self-image by putting her face-to-face with the singleminded clone slaves she was supposed to be, and brought in an out-of-left-field change to Gary, the comedy relief character. But the most unusual change they made was playing on John Constantine’s penchant for self-destructive behavior in a way that was a drastic departure from the show’s usually upbeat motif, but still felt true to the character.

Season 7, which will resume next month, switched things up by stranding our heroes in the 1920’s West, pursued by J. Edgar Hoover, who believes them to be bandits and possibly communist agents. Things go pear-shaped when the team accidentally kills Hoover…only to then find themselves pursued by a J. Edgar Hoover Terminator! Characters and Concepts from the previous season are cycled in that I don’t want to spoil, but it’s an interesting twist to throw out the one thing the show is known for and keep the heroes in just one period piece (of course, they do eventually find a way to time travel, but not with the regularity to which we are accustomed, and only to other period pieces). Legends somehow still manages to keep me interested, which is unusual because, I remind you, it’s on the CW.

17. Loki—Loki was a wonderful exploration of one of the most fully-realized characters in the Marvel Universe, stripped of everything he took for granted, all his power, fully aware of the consequences of his horrible mistakes over the series. I did think the whole Sophie angle was a little…unnecessarily weird? Underdeveloped? They did not satisfactorily explain why she needed to be wiped out, to me. I had assumed that just being born a woman was enough, but there were plenty of other Lokis wiped out. And of course, the great reveal that the Time Keepers were just puppets on a string was undermined by introducing another new character—one of my favorite Marvel villains, yes, but not one from within the narrative up until that point, once again setting up something later at the expense of the current narrative. Still, it’s a good way to move ahead with one of their most popular characters in a new way.

16. WandaVision—It is possible! You can do something unique and inventive in the Marvel Cinematic Universe! Push those boundaries! Defy genre conventions! Be your own thing!

You just have to end it with a big boring fight that introduces another Marvel character and undermines everything that came before, it’s the law.

15. Hawkeye—This is the one I was most worried about. The movie Hawkeye is almost completely unrecognizable from the wisecracking, low self-esteem-hiding hero I’ve known since I was ten years old, and Kate Bishop, the new Hawkeye, is such a completely-realized character in the comics it would be so easy for them to mess her up. Hailey Steinfeld I knew from the Bumblebee movie, and I knew she could pull off Kate’s attitude, but would the writers give her the script for it?

Yes! Mostly!

Kate’s awful family is a common plot point in her stories, so they retained it here, but very…changed. Setting up Clint Barton as a surrogate for Kate’s dead father is…it’s not weird. I want to say it’s weird, but it’s bland, and undermines their equal relationship in the comics. It’s a very different Clint.

Aside from that, this really captured the feel of the Matt Fraction/David Aja classic run (can I call it that? It’s less than ten years old) without actually ADAPTING any of it, aside from the car chase scene. It’s probably the most overall successful of the Marvel shows…until, of course, they cram in another Marvel thing at the end. I’m not going to say I wasn’t happy to see him, but it was a lesser installment in that character’s storied career. I guess that’s just what we have to live with from Marvel now; you’re not here for what you’re actually watching, we just need you excited for the next one. Sigh…

14. Birdgirl—Birdgirl I was on the fence about, but I remember liking Harvey Birdman in college and it seemed like a good way to get more Della Duck-adjacent content after the end of DuckTales, so I decided, hey, why not? Birdgirl straddles that odd line between being a sequel to Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, and also being something completely different: Phil Ken Sebben is the only classic Hannah-Barbara character to show up at all, and he dies offscreen at the start of the show. The rest of the characters are completely new, and at most Birdman-adjacent (Birdgirl’s best friend/confidant is a Mind-Taker, like Mentok) so it’s a little jarring if you’re expecting a straight sequel. The show does have the usual kind of cynical sense of humor as Harvey Birdman, but the longer runtime allows it to have a lot more heart, too. The standout episode of this first season, in my opinion, was episode 4, “We Have The Internet”, in which Judy/Birdgirl finally upgrades her father’s company with a basic internet connection, and then the whole thing goes horribly wrong (standout line: “You know, fear is a useful survival response Judy. Like…right now. Can you feel it?”) (also line: “You need to get out now! The building is ALIVE! I’m a nun and I know these things!”) and things get…too zany and a woman gets decapitated and her head’s just bouncing down the street, and look I was in stitches. I put it on so I could remember that line and I’m still laughing.

There’s room for improvement, and future seasons with more room to develop the characters and their…bizarre, bizarre relationships with each other. I’m looking forward to it!

That bit about the foreskin was too weird though.

13. Doom Patrol Season 3—Well that was interesting! After finally finishing up what was SUPPOSED to be the season 2 finale, Doom Patrol was able to divest itself of a lot of the Niles Caulder baggage it had built up over two seasons (although in doing so it lost Timothy Dalton, darn) to spend some time actually ruminating on who its actual main characters are, and making real progress in their mental issues. Larry comes to terms with his horrible parenting, and is given a chance to be better—and so is Robotman, although he finds every way possible to mess that up, as he also struggles with a whole bunch of addictions and impulsive habits. Cyborg realizes he doesn’t have to be the man his father wants him to be. Jane realizes that the only person keeping her from healing from the trauma of her abusive childhood home life…is every single other person in her head working to protect their psyche, instead of Kay Farris. And Rita…Rita finds love. She finds acceptance. And it’s all torn away by Madame fucking Rouge.

Brilliant casting of Michelle Gomez as Madame Rouge, by the by. She was wonderful as Missy in Doctor Who and she kills it by putting her all into lines like “I’ve found out who I am! I’m a BIRD! I think!” Throw in classic DP villains like Garguax (freaking Garguax!) and the ones we’ve all been waiting for, you know ‘em, you love ‘em, THE BRAIN AND MONSIEUR MALLAH, and you’ve got a winner of a season on your hands.

12. Barry—This one’s my parents’ favorite, and it’s positioning itself as a good replacement for Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, but it hasn’t grabbed me quite as much as those shows, despite excellent performances from a star-studded cast. It’s one of those “Hollywood Writing About Hollywood” series, but here the implication is that Hollywood is kind of awful, and I respect that. One difference between this show and the works of Vince Gilligan is in its main character, Barry Berkman (alias Block, played by Bill Hader in an unusually serious role that still has major comedic elements); whereas Walter White and Jimmy McGill are thoroughly flawed men who have the ability to know what they’re doing is wrong but continue down a dark path through hubris and an inflated sense of their own importance, Barry is an extremely broken man, someone who was found at a low point and manipulated by someone he trusted (Monroe Fuches, played by the always-wonderful Stephen Root). The audience can see Fuches is an amoral piece of shit, but he has just enough of a knowledge of the human condition to see when people are in a position to be manipulated, and uses that to twist Barry’s morality around until Barry finds himself in too deep with committing crimes, completely lacking any self-actualization, only operating on the orders of someone else, someone who doesn’t have his best interests in mind. He definitely doesn’t find someone with his best interests in mind when he meets Sally Reed (played by Sarah Goldberg, who I haven’t seen in anything before and this seems to be her breakout role, who really doesn’t have much to do in the first season but has a very deep and meaningful arc in season 2 with a wonderfully tragic ending that sets up a possibly-heartbreaking ascent into Hollywood stardom in season 3, we’ll see how that goes) and Gene Cousineau (the, again, always-wonderful Henry Winkler) a Hollywood nobody who runs an acting class for the purpose of inflating his own ego. This presents a wonderful mix of talented actors playing complicated characters that produce many small comedic moments that can really catch you by surprise, and get real belly laughs out of nowhere. And that’s not even mentioning that one weird episode in season 2, directed by Bill Hader himself, where Barry botches a job and he and Fuches are pursued around town by a feral karate child; really bizarre one there.

But the main thrust of the series is, “Does Barry deserve redemption?” And at the start, you think, yeah. He didn’t ask for this. But season 1’s final episode puts that into new perspective: It’s not merely that Barry thinks he deserves better, but that he doesn’t think there should be consequences for his actions. That what he did before, that was…that was someone else. And sure, it was; he wasn’t acting on his own feelings, his own desires. But every time Barry is given the chance to make things right, to take ownership of his misdeeds, he avoids responsibility. He thinks he’s entitled to everything good, and none of the bad.

At some point, Barry’s going to fail, and fail hard. The same thing happened to Walter White, and I have every confidence it will happen to Jimmy McGill. But I don’t know if I’ll feel the same release, the same catharsis as I did when those men died.

Or maybe it will be worse. Maybe Barry will succeed. I think that might be the most depressing outcome of all.

Oh and I didn’t even mention NoHo Hank! NoHo Hank is great.

11. Legend of the Galactic Heroes—I appreciate a sci-fi show that starts off and I immediately don’t understand what’s going on with it. Some spaceships are shooting lasers for reasons I don’t understand, people are throwing out names for things I’ve never heard of, we see a guy die and look at a picture of his fiancé and then some other characters are like “Hey I knew that guy, he was pretty cool” and they go hang out with his fiancé and then she tells the Minister of Defense to fuck off and he sends a paramilitary organization to terrorize her to continue the war and then on the other side of the war their commander reminisces about how his sister was summoned away from their house when he was 10 because the kaiser wanted her to be his chief mistress and the monarchy is in decline and everyone’s being manipulated by a non-aligned world and I am fifteen episodes into this out of one hundred ten (one hundred sixty-two if you count LotGH: Gaiden) and I feel like I’ve watched enough happen for several seasons of a lesser show.

The first adaptation of a Japanese novel series (they’ve made a new version recently that’s much shorter), this show was released direct-to-video from 1989 through the ‘90’s, so I’m only just getting started. Unlike most shows, this series doesn’t take a “Side” in it’s war between the Alliance of Free Planets and the Galactic Empire: the Alliance styles itself as a return to the society that existed before the conquest of Kaiser Rudolph 400-some years ago, whereas the Empire sees itself as the legitimate government for all of human-occupied space and the Alliance is just a breakaway province. The show makes clear, however, that no war can continue for 150 years without corruption across the board; I’ve mentioned the use of paramilitary organizations to quash any talk of searching for peace on the side of the Republican alliance government, and the Empire is so caught up in their own jockeying for power, the major nobles don’t ever go near the front to remember the war is going on, anyway. As someone who was just 13 when we went to Afghanistan, the frequent cuts between the major battles along the front of the war in which millions of people can be wiped out by astounding future weaponry, and the home front scenes where people exist in either modern cityscapes and suburban environments or lavish, Prussian-themed castles, acting out heavily-formalized romances seemed very familiar to me; the war is completely forgotten at home, just a fact of life that continues on somewhere else, someone else’s problem.

“Someone else” in this case is Reinhart von Loengramm of the Empire, and Yang Wen-Li of the Alliance (they both have already been promoted various times as of episode 16, so it’s pointless to tell you their titles, they’re going to change). Both men from outside the higher nobility and typical military hierarchy, they’re looked down upon by their peers at the start of the series, but through quick-thinking and masterful tactical decisions gain respect and rise through the ranks—although, this comes with its own problems, as political forces attempt to use the two men for their own goals. Yang is kind of our personal-interest character, a laid-back dude who just wants to get out of this war alive, trying to angle for the best strategic position to open peace talks and maybe end the war in such a way that it won’t start back up again until he’s dead (for after all, there has always been war; he’d just prefer to keep one away for as long as possible). The real star of the show, of course, is Reinhart, the pretty-boy rogue of the Empire, who seeks personal power to get revenge on the kaiser, who he blames for, basically, kidnapping Reinhart’s sister into being his girlfriend. Reinhart also wants to end the war, yes—but he’d like to win it, and in doing so, place himself on the throne. Both men have great respect for one another, but completely different ways of looking at the world, and I look forward to seeing how that will play out over the next, uh, five to six months. Woof.

10. Thus Spoke Rohan Kishibe: Rohan Kishibe is often described as the self-insert character for Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure creator Hirohiko Araki, which I feel is an odd thing to say about Araki since Rohan is such a flaming asshole. Still, all the Jojo chapters have their own fun feel, and the laid-back setting of Part 4’s town of Morioh is fun to go back to, not the least because it was the only setting that was left with the same status quo at the end, just with the bad guys dead or reformed (So many Jojo plots involve a great quest, you know? Easier to go back to the weird town than to follow Jotaro on the plane back to Egypt and see him graduate high school and get his marine biology degree.) This series adapts four of the smattering of Rohan-centric stories Araki has done since the end of Diamond is Unbreakable, and it’s pretty fun. Rohan gets in over his head with weird supernatural threats with nary an enemy Stand user in sight, in a way that is completely in line with the plots of Part 4 but also harkens back to the vampire-fighting early days of the series. If you like Jojo, it’s more Jojo; and I do like Jojo.

9. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 6--Stone Ocean: Okay, I’m twelve episodes in and already our hero has been wrongly imprisoned, killed her court-appointed lawyer in revenge, been targeted by a corrupt priest who secretly runs the prison, been shrunk, been forced to wear a costume made from the skin of a dead rat, got superpowers, befriended sentient plankton, done an entire “it was all a dream” episode, met a little baseball kid, traveled back in time, fought in zero-g, been shot, almost poisoned by poison dart frogs, and had to watch her estranged father’s soul get stolen. Several main characters are named stuff like Foo Fighters, Weather Report, and Whitesnake. God I love Jojo.

Oh and the main character is named Jolyne, so one bad guy taunts her by singing Dolly Parton, this is all I needed.

8. DuckTales (2017)—DuckTales was, I think, up against much stiffer competition last year and, much like I said about She-Ra last year, I think might be ranked higher if I was taking the whole show into account instead of just the four episodes that aired in 2021. Don’t think for a second that I don’t consider this one of the most sharply-written, well-acted, and touching TV cartoons of my lifetime. Bringing in TailSpin and finally making a new version of Poe DeSpell from the original DuckTales was fun, and the moment when Manny the Headless Man-Horse finally spoke in the extra-long final episode had me cracking UP. But there was one bit at the end, the driving force of the final episode, that pulled a trope that never sits well with me, that I just did not like, and I want to take this moment and unpack that.

And to do so, I’ll need to drop some season-3 spoilers for both this show and Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure, which I was desperately avoiding last year. I think anyone who would read this and watch the show has either gotten to this point or given up. Turns out, maybe I want something different from a Disney Princess TV show than people who watch Disney Princess stuff on the reg. Can you imagine?

One of my most hated tropes in literature is the idea of a genetic destiny, or predetermination. It’s usually employed in the context of someone finding out they have a Bad Parent, even one who wasn’t involved in their parenting at all—think Luke Skywalker being pulled towards the Dark Side because Darth Vader’s blood runs through his veins, even though he didn’t meet Vader until he was already a (young) adult. You see this a lot in TV shows for cheap drama; I vaguely remember, before I stopped watching, Arrow doing a plot where Green Arrow’s sister finds out John Barrowman is her dad and she immediately starts hanging out with this murderer and trying to learn from him and seeming evil. It’s not necessarily a “bad parent” thing—in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, when Bashir is revealed to have undergone genetic modifications as a child, that’s…well, it was a sin committed by his parents and he had to deal with a lot of personal issues, yes, but it wasn’t something inherently “evil”, but it did undermine the character’s accomplishments up until that point; his curing alien diseases and miraculous discoveries were now somehow unearned, in a way that similar accomplishments on other Star Trek shows by Doctors McCoy, Crusher, and uh, The Doctor.

Which is why I was initially pissed off at Tangled last year with Cassandra’s heel turn and the revelation that Gothel was her biological mother, which she had blotted out of her young memory. It reeked of predestination, and I wasn’t happy AT ALL. But, what I appreciated about that show was they had an entire season to explore that; and they did a good job of portraying it as a maladaptive response to fears and pressures that the character had been carrying with her for years, feelings she’d repressed or told herself she was lesser for having that she was acting out on now, that she needed to express, but was doing in a self-destructive manner—it wasn’t that she was predestined to evil because her mother was, but that Cassandra’s mother had damaged her and Rapunzel in the same way, and Cassandra didn’t have the same support structure Rapunzel did, so Rapunzel had to grow as a person first to then help her friend. It wasn’t perfect, and there were certainly better, or more consistently, written shows I watched last year (and yes, at least two episodes had the writers default to “Ehh I’m mad my mom” but the ones around those added important context so I’m discounting that) and that’s why that show really appealed to me.

Okay so I just spent two paragraphs talking about Star Trek, Star Wars, Arrow, and Tangled, what does this have to do with DuckTales? Well, in the final episode of the series, two other identical twins of Webby show up and kidnap her, and it’s revealed that Webby was actually a clone-daughter of Scrooge McDuck that Beakley had rescued from FOWL some years before and concocted a false identity for. FOWL needed another Scrooge because McDuck himself had no children and they needed her to get a big MacGuffin that was important for world domination and set up a big crowd-pleasing fight, it was quite a bit of fun. But, there’s that genetic predestiny again. In this case, it’s more of a Dr. Bashir situation: Webby had, since episode one, been portrayed as the ultimate Scrooge McDuck fangirl, who had trained her mind and body to be a great adventurer, who did this all on her own initiative—and isn’t that the lesson of Scrooge McDuck, after all? He pulled himself up by his bootstraps! He’s sharper than the sharpies and tougher than the toughies, and so was Webby! It was a vast improvement over the original Webby, who was just kind of a stereotypical “uncool girl” who liked dolls and didn’t play sports. The new Webby earned her place in the Duck family through her deeds, not her genetics, and this new revelation cheapened that for me. You can say, “well, that’s inconsequential, that’s something they did for the plot, she still earned all that through training,” and that’s true—but there were the other clones, May and June, who were also similarly skilled. Though FOWL’s training? Perhaps; they were much more diabolical than Webby, less excitable, less…REAL. And certainly, by opening up new story options, the writers COULD have changed my mind, they COULD have addressed any of my complaints…but the show’s cancelled. They’ll never have the chance to. And no, none of this was mentioned at all in the “This Duckburg Life” shorts they put on YouTube either, though those were hilarious (“…and Drake” cracked me up). It just…everything else about this show was so perfect, but I just really don’t like that one little thing.

7. Star vs Forces of Evil—You gotta love a show that starts out as “Invader Zim, but happy” and ends up being about challenging the nature of institutionalized racism. Star Butterfly is heir to the throne of the dimension of Mewni, a magical realm where the queen is basically Sailor Moon—but she’s a hyperactive, independent teenager who can’t control her powers and is sent to Earth to learn her lesson, basically. She’s pursued there by Ludo, a monster lord voiced by Alan Tudyk. So far, pretty fun. Where things start to get complicated is when Star’s human (people from Mewni are called mewmans) friend Marco starts to question her conviction that monsters are inherently evil; Star’s reassurance that her country’s founding myth of driving the monsters from their land and taking it for themselves was totally justified does nothing to assuage Marco’s fears. One of my favorite aspects of the show was Star slowly losing her prejudices, making friends with monsters, helping those in trouble, and pushing back against the prejudices of her society. Seeing the character who, at the start of the series, did not want to be queen and felt trapped by her genetic destiny for the throne start to WILLINGLY shoulder immense burdens and handle them better than any of the monarchs that preceded her was extremely compelling to me, especially as the forces of the status quo martialed against her, and she had to work against people she once saw as heroes. “Mom’s Image Has Been Co-opted By Racists” was not a plot I expected on the Disney Channel!

Which is why it was a little disappointing the show didn’t have enough time to let that breathe. Because, alongside the plot I described above, there was also the Magic Plot—where Star discovered terribly secrets about her family’s legacy, her mother’s choices, and the true story behind Queen Eclipsa, her anathematized ancestor—and the romance plot—Will Star leave Tom for Marco? Do Marco and Kelly really have a chance? Why would anyone date Pony Head?—also took a lot of time, along with the more lighthearted comedy stuff that the show originally focused on, so a lot of really cool ideas just didn’t have room to breathe. Oh, we made Buff Frog head of monster issues at the castle! That’s really cool! Anyway he moved to another dimension like two episodes later. Oh, Marco and Kelly are doing a casual thing! Good thing that’ll play out in the background of three episodes before they break up offscreen. And heaven forbid we go a season without an episode about Spider With a Tophat! I don’t know how much time would have been enough time, and I can’t guarantee that they wouldn’t have just crammed more things in there, but these plots were all pretty cool and I just wish they’d had more room to breathe. Otherwise, great show.

Oh yeah, and I did say Pony Head—Princess Pony Head is a magical decapitated unicorn voiced by Jenny Slate, who played Mona Lisa Saperstein from Parks & Rec. Great show.

6. The Owl House—Do you ever think, “Hey, I need an alternative to Harry Potter?” Is that like, something you would want right now? For whatever reason you might want that? Cool, cool.

Watch this show.

It IS Disney, there is that, but I’ve said before, I don’t think Disney remembers they have a TV animation department and the longer we can keep it that way the better. Owl House follows Luz Noceda as she accidentally finds herself in a magical alternate dimension as the apprentice to the witch Eda, who is actually Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo. They use the Wizard School setting to explore themes of growth and personal acceptance, the same as Potter, but with a greater emphasis on the dangers of oppression, repression, and self-hatred. The very first episode sees Luz free the prisoners of the “Conformatorium,” a reeducation camp set up by the Emperor of the magical land. The show repeatedly contrasts the freedom of unbridled magic with the state propaganda of control and potential danger of individual action or thought in a way that is obvious but juuust subtle enough that it’s not overbearing. Plus, they, uh, get away with some stuff Disney doesn’t usually let people get away with, just sayin’. Created by one of the storyboarders for Gravity Falls and with a good chunk of the team back together from that show, this is one to watch, folks.

5. Over the Garden Wall—I MEANT to watch this one when it first aired, but I just kept missing the dates, so I certainly wanted to watch it once I had access. I know several other people have already seen it, so I’m not even going to go into much detail except that we all know this is great, one of the major artistic accomplishments of a particularly fertile period of artistry in Cartoon Network history. A perfect little 10-episode series, a good adolescent coming-of-age story, that draws you into its weird fairy tale world and its lovable doofus characters, and then slowly seeds the twist at the end. Wirt, Greg, and Beatrice (but mostly Wirt) grow and get over their own fears and anxieties in beautiful, unique fantasy environments, and also Christopher Lloyd fights a demon. Do yourself a favor next fall, sit down one night when the leaves turn red, sip a nice warm drink, and watch this one in one sitting.

4. Lupin III, Part 6—How. How do they do it? How do they keep making new best episodes of a franchise that’s been running for fifty years? A franchise where HAYAO MIYAZAKI has done episodes and movies?

Well, finally giving Mamoru Oshii the chance to do an episode (TWO EPISODES!) after they kicked him off the movie he pitched in ’84 helps, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s been a long time since Sherlock Holmes was on the case. He’s had to take odd jobs, working local private eye stuff, just to earn a living to put Lily Watson through school and keep food on the table. Ten years ago, Lily was orphaned—an event so traumatic, she blocked it out. But, as she’s grown, as she’s lived with Holmes and become interested in his work, she’s started to remember…and one day, one traumatic event causes her memory of the night to return.

Watson calls out…tells her to stay away. Shots are fired! Lily runs to her father, only to find him dead. Over the body stands a man, weapon drawn…the man known as LUPIN III!

Now Lupin is back in London, pursuing the treasure of the Ravens, the secret cabal that controls the British government, and so is his rival, Albert d’Andressy from Part 5. But, Sherlock Holmes is also on the case, after the Ravens kill one of their members in police custody—and Holmes is out for revenge on Lupin! Or, is there still something else to the mystery of what happened to John Watson? When I wrote this I didn’t know, but now I’m all caught up but screw telling you, just watch it. I don’t care that it’s only on a subscription service, just wait until it’s all there and blow through a free trial.

Like the last few shows, there is a main plot that’s punctuated with classic Lupin-style episodic adventures, but this time the done-in-ones are all by famous anime writers from the past, as kind of a 50th anniversary treat. These episodes, and the main plot, keep up the quality they’ve returned to since Part IV in 2014, after almost 30 years of mediocrity after Part II (Part III is okay and there are some TV movies I love, but there was certainly no level of SUSTAINED quality of the level of Part I and Part II until then), in animation, writing, acting…all of it. Real laughs, good drama, and just wacky, zany nonsense. They also seem to be keeping an eye to the future now; I thought they might continue the cliffhanger of Albert’s plans from Part V, but I didn’t think it would come up in the first episode.

Doing a take on Sherlock is a good move, too. Some of the most memorable parts of Part II were when they just had Lupin go up against obvious pastiches of popular movies of the time—Lawrence of Arabia (okay that was a real person but come on), Superman (twice!), Pink Panther, Fantomas, Emmanuelle—and doing a version of Cumberbatch’s Sherlock for a classic Lupin vs. Holmes matchup in the present day could be a mess, but it’s been great so far. Holmes is portrayed as a real threat to our thieves—his baritsu* is a match for Goemon’s mix of martial styles in episode 2, as he’s able to use his cane to keep Goemon from drawing Zantetsuken, his unbeatable sword, ending the battle before it starts. The show’s still going, and I’m interested in seeing how Lupin outsmarts his worthy adversary…and learning what really happened the night Watson died.

And I have to mention, the show starts with an “Episode 0”, the final appearance of Kobayashi Kiyoshi as Jigen, a role he’s played since the unaired pilot film in 1969. He’s 88 years old, and even in that episode he clearly sounds worse than he did even two years ago in Lupin III: The First. Still, I’m sad to see him go; he had such a unique timber in his voice that the new actor (the Japanese actor for Solid Snake!) can’t quite reproduce. I still expect the old voice whenever Jigen opens his mouth. Ah, well…

*Yes I know Conan Doyle meant barTitsu and misspelled it, but they say “baritsu” in the anime, don’t blame me.

(Kobayashi Kiyoshi died the summer after this show aired, he could have finished it out and they still would have replaced him...oh well, he got to live his last months without working.)

3. Steven Universe/Future—Well this took me long enough, right? I slept on this show when it first aired, and immediately regretted it. And, I admit, it took a while to grow on me. The first season or so spends a lot of time setting up the world, setting up the characters, in a way that felt fun but not quite as good as some shows I watched at the same time that aired after it; I felt perhaps I was seeing the building blocks for later successors, but I hoped I was seeing the building blocks for something bigger to come. Hoo boy, was that right.

Now, I’d seen some spoilers for this show before starting—how could I not?—but there was enough of a lack of context that once I actually saw the show, I knew that how I ASSUMED the spoilers would go down was different than how they ACTUALLY went down, so I didn’t know to what level I’d misinterpreted, so I could still be a little surprised. I complained about Star vs. the Forces of Evil not having enough room to do everything it wanted to, and Steven Universe didn’t have that problem: 200 episodes and you can have episodes about lazing around the town AND about getting into a fight with your friends AND about a meet cute AND about alien invasions AND about bringing a pet home after it follows you from the store AND about your friends working through their issues with each other after one has mistreated the other for centuries AND about living up to your mother’s legacy AND about French fries AND about learning to love yourself and express yourself AND about overcoming your trauma AND about how living up to your mother’s legacy is bullshit actually AND about meepmorp AND AND AND

Steven Universe is a lot. It has a lot to say, and it says it all, I think. All of the main cast is extremely well-realized, with their own motivations that slowly become clear over the course of the series. The central thesis of the show is that the choices, the pain of the previous generation is on the new generation to heal; and maybe it only can be done by someone who didn’t feel the pain from the past in the first place. Steven is a precocious kid, yes, but he has a lot of love in his heart; he fits into the same saintly neighborhood helper as, say, Arnold, from Hey Arnold! The little kid who’s everyone’s friend, and always has time for everyone.

But it wouldn’t be in my top 10 without SOME sort of twist right? That’s why Steven Universe Future, the true Final Season, after Steven Universe The Movie, is lumped in here. The central premise of “Steven’s been helping other people, now it’s time to help Steven” is so strong, and so affecting. He gets a little moment with everyone, even characters who showed up kind of late and he didn’t have much time with in the main show. It’s a wonderful encapsulation of a feeling that a lot of adults can forget easily, mostly because we want to forget: being a teenager means being angry all the time for no reason and it sucks, actually. Steven learns the lesson that you can’t just power through your problems, you have to move on and grow…and he learns it only after he sees everyone moving on and growing without him.

When this first aired, I didn’t watch it because I was really only into Adventure Time on Cartoon Network at the time, and I didn’t think there was any way it could be as good as Adventure Time. And, perhaps, from a standpoint of sheer artistry and inventiveness, it isn’t. But Steven Universe has, I think, a more concise mission statement than Adventure Time, and it delivers. If you haven’t tried it, or the fandom scared you away, give it a chance. At least get to the one where Lapis Lazuli shows up, that’s when the fun really starts.

2. Watchmen—No one should ever make a sequel to Watchmen. Not just because Alan Moore doesn’t want one; sure, Moore got screwed by business practices that he probably should have seen coming and he has every reason to feel jaded and hurt by the way DC has paraded his magnum opus around and mined it for content without any input from the actual creator, but Dave Gibbons worked on Watchmen too and he seems fine with sequels. No, no one should make a sequel to Watchmen for much the same reason Netflix shouldn’t have remade Cowboy Bebop: you just can’t recapture the magic of a defining moment of time like that. The now-seemingly-endless deluge of empty, soulless follow-ups to Watchmen they’ve created in the years since, from Zack Snyder’s visually faithful but emotionally empty adaptation, to the unnecessary and contradictory Before Watchmen prequels, to the meaningless and already-forgotten Doomsday Clock, only proves that you can’t improve on perfection—or, if we’re not saying Watchmen is perfect, then at least that you can’t fall in love for the first time twice. The fact that Marvel seems determined to try their hand at Doomsday Clock by involving Marvelman in their main universe bodes ill for the future.

And then HBO made this sequel to Watchmen, which out of nowhere is some of the best TV I’ve ever seen.

First of all, they made the correct decision to follow the original book instead of the movie; making Ozymandias’s plan into framing Dr. Manhattan for destruction of multiple cities all over the world instead of having a big alien teleport into Manhattan was more structurally sound from a scriptwriting standpoint because it pushed the plot forward without introducing new elements, but the point was made (and I can’t remember by which reviewer, now) that if Dr. Manhattan attacked Moscow, why would the Russians believe this man, who had up until this point been an American agent, have also attacked the US? They’d launch the missiles! No, it’s good that they kept the squid for the show, because it kept Dr. Manhattan on the table as someone people on Earth would still respect, and not immediately attack (also the scenes of raining squids are funny). The dark comedy of Ozymandias’s fate after the end of the series is also one of the standout decisions of the show; those scenes are so bizarre, so disorienting, and they’re only explained at the very end. All you’re left with is this shell of a man, deluding himself through his own ego, who is so very thrilled with his mass-murders that murder is the only solution he can see to any problem that presents itself, until he’s literally spelling “HELP” on the beach by stacking dead bodies.

Because the main thrust of the series is: you can’t fix a problem with one grand motion. Sure, Ozymandias stopped global nuclear annihilation; hell, the series follows up on a throwaway joke like at the end of Watchmen and has Robert Redford elected president (A newspaper headline at the end of the book says “RR to run for President”—you are meant to think of Ronald Reagan, until the head of a right-wing tabloid complains about Redford running, saying, “Whoever heard of an actor president?”). What we see is a future that has the SHAPE of a Star Trek, liberal paradise, with slavery reparations, open discussion of the horrible history of race relations in America, and sexual and economic freedom, but it’s all just a mask over the same problems as before, just with a new coat of paint. The racists still exist, they just hide it better. Police brutality persists, it’s just directed towards someone else. And corruption was always going to exist, no matter what party is in power. Watchmen the miniseries does just what Watchmen the graphic novel did: it presents a bunch of problems, and no easy answer. The political side we want to win won’t even solve the problem; the problem is much deeper, and continuing the lie won’t fix anything. It’s always a fight, and a fight against everyone. I’m still not sure exactly what it wanted me to think about some of the issues it raises, and that’s okay. It’s okay, because I’m still thinking about them.

And that’s Watchmen.

(Oh yeah, those rumors that Marvelman/Miracleman would show up in 616...hasn't happened yet.)

1. Infinity Train—I am a firm believer that one should go into Infinity Train cold, knowing as little as possible. However, there’s no way I can talk about this show without ruining that, so consider this your spoiler tag. Go watch Infinity Train right now, you can probably get it done in a week.

Infinity Train is an anthology show, with each season following a different person as they work through their personal problems on the Infinity Train, a massive, ever-expanding train in another dimension. The first season operates much like Over the Garden Wall, with a girl named Tulip going on adventures and trying to get over her anger over her parents’ divorce while also making friends with a funny robot and a cute corgi and solving puzzles while fighting against the train’s conductor, who is even more broken than Tulip. The standout episode of the season is “The Chrome Car,” which I mentioned but did not explain in my Creamy Mami review, in which Tulip’s empathy is put to the test, as she has to help someone at her own expense. For a ten-minute episode, it really makes you fall in love with a one-shot character.

Which is why I was so thrilled when that previously one-shot character was the main character of season 2, arguably the best season of the show. Season 2 takes everything you learned in season 1 and turns it on its head (and you know how much I love when shows do that), taking what was a fun, kid-friendly adventure about self-acceptance and really digging into the implications of the world the writers built. If the denizens of the train are only there to help the “real” people grow, are they even people at all? They seem to have emotions, inner thoughts, FEELINGS; they aren’t tied to their setting by anything other than that being their home, they LOOK like people…but the Train doesn’t TREAT them that way. By following “MT” (she has another name, I’m not telling), the show deals with problems of identity. The lovable robot from season one now seems uncaring, or even hostile; “You’re helping here, why would you want to leave?” “MT”’s arc is to prove that she has INHERENT worth, that she has a meaning of her own, beyond her FUNCTION in SOCIETY. That’s powerful. That’s important.

Season 2 also introduces some absolutely despicable villains who don’t believe “MT” has worth, or a function; who see her as sub-human. And they’re the main characters of Season 3. Season 3 was a more challenging season, but one that still had me on the edge of my seat. Our lead now is a master manipulator, who created a cult of personality around herself through lies and half-truths, keeping her real feelings so hidden she refuses to acknowledge them even to herself, being content to see herself as above everyone else. They way she mobilizes her thralls against the “Nulls” on the train frighteningly recalls how those in power manipulate the populace to stay in power—Grace manipulates her people into hating the denizens of the train to make them think they are equal to Grace, all to distract from how she manipulates them for her own benefit. The trick of season 3 is making you feel for her as she starts to come to terms with the horrors she’s committed, as the cult she created gets out of hand and she finally, despite herself, learns empathy. There is a sad song scene. She doesn’t get what she wants. It’s beautifully done.

Which is why I am disappointed to say the show ends on its weakest season, 4. Season 4 was clearly setting up something else for season 5, and seems to be designed as a kind of breather after the really heavy stuff from the previous two seasons. Sometimes you need that! But, since the planned later seasons got shot down, it just feels like a step backwards. It’s fun, but it’s not a finale. It’s also a prequel, which I didn’t think was necessary. Honestly, I cared more about the people than the world.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like for everyone once they got off the train. I want them to meet in an airport somewhere; maybe Tulip would make a video game about it. I think she and “MT” might stay Twitter friends or something. I think they’d have a lot to say about their different experiences of the same thing.

I think about it a lot.

(I'm a firm believer...in this thing I just said because I did it. Can you tell I was a little rushed this year? Oh, and the show I forgot to list was What If, the mediocre revival of one of Marvel's oddest coimcs as an anthology show. Didn't have any new episodes of that in 2022, though I had expected some...)