My Favorite Shows of 2022

At last, the culmination of the shows watched by me, a random person no one's ever heard of. Posting this led to several people telling me to put all these on a website, and I thought, "Hey, I did buy one of those earlier." So, here's the way too many things I watched while eating when I wasn't writing my novel.

Oh, and the show I forgot to put on the list this year was the Witcher, which is pretty damning since I watched that a month before I made this list.

84. RahXephon: There’s a huge chunk of anime time in the 00’s that I am mostly missing any context for. Was all the anime in there bad? No, I hear about a ton of shows that were great. But there became a trend, especially in the shows that made it onto TV, so what I had available to me at the time, of shows like…this. Brooding, introspective shows with nothing to say and all the time in the world to say them. Sad boy protagonists surrounded by beautiful women who put up with him for some reason. Bible references because the author watched Evangelion. You know, I bet that’s why the women put up with the sad boy protagonists too.

Set in 2023, RahXephon follows a young man from Tokyo who believes that it’s 2015 and the rest of the world was destroyed in 2009. This is false! In fact, creatures from another world are infecting people from Tokyo and only he can pilot the robot and blah blah blah isn’t it so sad. There’s also an immortal guy and a bunch of clones and the bad guy robots are psychically linked to people in Tokyo so when you kill one it brutalizes a little girl or something. And why? Why all of this? So the hero can recreate the world in his own image.

He just puts it all back like none of this ever happened. Well, except he turns another one of the angel pilot women into his daughter, because that’s not messed up or anything. Yeah. Anime sucks sometimes.

83. The Flash, Season 8, part 2: I don’t remember a single thing that happened on this show this year, and I don’t care to look it up. No, wait! I think they followed up on a Legends plot about Eobard Thawne reforming, that was…a dumb fakeout, honestly. Something something evil speedster, these nerds like D&D, I’m ready for this to be over.

(This is not meant as a dig against D&D or the nerds who play it--they are me. There are just two characters where that's one of their only character traits.)

82. The New Adventures of He-Man: This year was a year for catching up on He-Man. Since She-Ra ended, Netflix and Mattel have kept on the MotU train, releasing two new He-Man series that…well, we’ll get to them. They’re not as good as She-Ra. But they’re better than…this.

Airing in 1990, the New Adventures of He-Man was Mattel’s attempt to revive their golden boy after the collapse of Filmation and the terrible reception to their live action movie left the original Masters of the Universe to slowly fade out and die. They relaunched with a redesigned line, smaller figures designed to be more like the Kenner Batman toys of the time, and this new cartoon, picking up vaguely sometime after the original show, with only a few characters (He-Man, Skeletor, the Sorceress, and, for one episode only, King Randor and Queen Marlena, and Teela; and only the Sorceress looked anything like her classic design) sticking around as He-Man and Skeletor travel to the future to help out in a new war between “humanity” (whatever that means in this context, as it includes a centaur and a tank man) and the “Mutants,” who are basically just people with odd-colored skin. The humans are all white, by the way. The plan was to reinvent He-Man for the 1990’s, Ninja Turtles-dominated TV and toy markets, getting away from the weird 1980’s sensibilities and pushing forward to the techno-future with a fresh start.

It didn’t work. Subsumed under a flood of identical toy cash-ins by other companies (usually DiC, who attempted to dominate the market by flooding it with identical shows produced on the cheap), the motifs that made He-Man so unusual and interesting seven years before had become stale through overuse. TV stations had their pick of syndicated kidvid shows about muscular blond men in space, and they weren’t limited to picking up new shows; I have fond memories of watching cartoons from five, ten years earlier, because the channels didn’t care if the toys were still for sale or not. It certainly didn’t help that the New Adventures of He-Man sucked ass, either. He-Man, at least, is voiced by the wonderful Garry Chalk (the fact that they didn’t have him reprise his role as Optimus Primal in the upcoming Transformers movie is a CRIME) and there are several other recognizable actors in the cast (including Scott McNeil, the dark horse candidate for the modern Mel Blanc) but they’re only half-assing it because the material is garbage. The plots tend to follow the same formula: Skeletor has an idea, he convinces Flogg to do it through flattery (for some reason, Skeletor is technically a subordinate in this series, manipulating the future-bad guys through trickery), the people fall for it because they’re morons, He-Man saves the day. The dullness of the formula was only matched by my anger at a trend of episodes expressing extreme fear and skepticism for diplomatic solutions; the Council of Primus’s frequent capitulations to the most hypocritical and brazen appeals for peace by the Mutants, explicitly the aggressors, really struck me since this show came out during the fall of the Soviet Union. It’s hard to read some episodes as anything other than a screed against the collapse of the Soviet Union as some sort of trap, that they were waiting for our guard to be down after peace talks to wipe out the rest of the world—certainly some cynicism is justified in retrospect considering, you know, Putin, but at the time the situation in Russia as it is now was less than an idea, and presenting it as a ploy and any diplomats arguing against a hardline stance as dupes and collaborators is just dangerously militaristic. I don’t want to stress this too much since it was only like five episodes out of 65, but one was called "Glastnost Schmaznost" (sic!!) so, uh, yeah.

The show is just dripping with signs that no one cared. At one point a guy calls a Gibson Flying V a Fender Stratocaster, and I don’t know anything about instruments so if I’m catching the mistake you know you fucked up. It’s bad. It’s BAD!

81. Transformers: BotBots: BotBots are a toyline of small Transformers, usually coming in packs of four, who turn into, like, food items, or tools, or something. They’re cute, but I don’t collect them because hey, I have enough useless tchotchkes, I don’t need the hamburger man cluttering up my shelves. I wasn’t surprised when they announced a TV show. I figured I’d watch it like every other Transformers show.

Set in a shopping mall that was doused in energon radiation, BotBots follows the new Transformers birthed by this accident as they engage in stereotypical TV-high school drama about cliques and the “popular kids,” recycling tired jokes from better shows and resurrecting cultural references just out of date enough to make you raise an eyebrow (who wants to see a hamburger-themed Hamilton parody, exactly?). The main character, Burgertron, is a vain, self-absorbed schmoozer who is somehow universally beloved, until he screws up one time, alerts the dimwitted human guard to their presence, and is demoted to outcast along with the Transformers born in the lost and found who weren’t around to become part of the cliques. Burgertron then bullies the other “Lost Bots” into trying to be cool and join the cliques, not through any kind of empathy, but because his image of himself is based entirely on his social standing, with no interior life aside from being better than everyone else, even though he also has no skills to make that happen. It’s a strangely cynical show, even as it is a capitalistic cash-grab; the team behind it also worked on the generally delightful Rescue Bots series for smaller children, but their attempt to age-up the humor falls flat. Burgertron reads more like a villain than a hero (though, of course, there are other villains working against him, but since they’re more arch they’re also a bit more likable?) and the episodes that focus on other characters like Bonz-Eye and Kikmee are far superior to the main plot (Clogstopper the plunger, however, is a cheap imitation of Shorty from Tangled, who could already get on my nerves sometimes). Some people seem to like it. I just don’t understand why.

80. GoDannar: If you’d asked me what the horniest show I’d watched this year would be at the start of the year, I would have thought the Cutie Honey show would have been it. But no. Marriage of God and Soul GoDannar!! Is a show I watched because I only wanted to keep HiDive for a year and hey this one has robots in it. I would eventually realize, after starting the show, that I had seen clips of this online. Not because of the robots. Because of the tits.

This show’s got tits for days. It’s all about it. Technically there’s a plot about weird monsters infecting people and some sexist shit where when men get too angry and horny they hulk out and become monsters and they need love to keep them under control or something (Oh but don’t worry ladies, you aren’t destined to be used to control violent men or anything! Butch lesbians are like men so they get infected too YEAH NO THE SHOW IS FUCKED UP) but mostly it’s just an ecchi anime. The mostest ecchiest. I guess we’re supposed to be rooting for the main couple, but as usual I don’t see any reason they should stay together, the dude treats the woman like dirt and she has mad self-esteem issues because of it. Oh and they work together and their robots have to combine to get the superpowers or something. I guess I’m glad I’ve seen it to be able to say I’ve seen it, but that’s like…the only reason. The show is ethically broken.

The mechanic couple was cute, I’ll give them that. Almost excuses the…well, basically the Lannister siblings. Show’s gross.

79. Kimagure Orange Road: I love the eighties anime aesthetic, but because my early anime days were limited by what was available online, I haven’t seen much of the big, influential works of the time. Still, I’m a big fan of those two towering examples of the high school screwball comedy from that era, Urusei Yatsura and Project A-Ko. They just leave me rolling in the aisles. I’d heard of Kimagure Orange Road, and from its aesthetic, style, and era, it looked right up my alley. High school hijinks! A dude with telekinetic powers navigating through a funny love triangle! Wonderfully-directed, extremely a-e-s-t-h-e-t-i-c opening themes! I was hyped!

So, the problem I have with the show is all the characters suck and don’t deserve happiness. This is true of Urusei Yatsura as well, but Rumiko Takahashi knew that, and that’s why it’s funny. This show, instead, takes one more step towards the birth of harem anime, and assumes we see ourself in its protagonist, and the problem is I fucking hate him because he’s a terrible boyfriend. Kyosuke Kasuga is in love with Madoka. Madoka knows he’s in love with her, and likes him back. But, she’s very standoffish, so instead her outgoing, energetic friend Hikaru Hiyama asks him out first, and is really into him, and Kasuga is something of a damp rag so he just goes along with it, earning Madoka’s ire—or, at least an expression of it, because she doesn’t seem to have a problem with meeting her best friend’s boyfriend behind her back in private romantic settings and setting up compromising situations, oh geez who could have seen this coming? At the very least I was hoping for some more payoff on the fact that the other guys are afraid to ask Madoka and Hikaru out because they’re school delinquents, presented in the first episode as total badasses who can just wreck dudes twice their size, with rap sheets a mile long. We are told that even the school horndogs look down on them as tainted goods. However, the show tends to forget that, portraying them as just regular high school girls who go hang out at popular spots with the gang as usual, with their supposedly unforgivable pasts only brought up now and again when we need Kasuga to save them from a revenge plot. It’s all so…boring. The female characters are offered up for the male gaze, and that’s all; prizes to be won or discarded by the male lead through no real effort of his own other than being there and…yeah, just being there. Also, the school horndogs are really into Kasuga’s little sisters, and the narrative seems to want to force them together as two couples against the sisters’ wills. Kasuga doesn’t even seem to like those guys and they’re his best friends. Why? WHY???

The one saving grace for me (other than Ushiko and Umao, the lovesick couple who show up in new, humorous situations in every episode, yes even the time travel ones) (yeah...I’m not getting into the staircase that cases Kasuga to time travel if he falls down it) is the finale movie, “I Want To Return To That Day.” Technically I think they made another movie in the 90’s, and technically the OVA’s came after the movie, but they take place before it, so I still say it’s the finale because Kasuga finally breaks up with Hikaru for Madoka, after stringing her along the whole show. Hikaru…doesn’t take it well. She reveals that she’s not a moron, that she knew the whole time he was into Madoka, but she held out hope since he never made a move. Right when she thought he’d come around, he dumps her. It’s horrible. It’s uncomfortable. The friendship at the core of the series collapses and the two “heroes” are left alone with each other at college. It was the only way it could have ended, and I appreciate the writer’s courage to go there, with no tricks, no psychic powers making things funny or frivolous. It’s just not enough to make me watch this show ever again.

78. Gridman: I don’t know what I can say about this show that I didn’t last year; it was fun seeing something I watched as a child (or as close as I can legally get, as I don’t know that anyone is willing to pay the money to license from two companies to get Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad back into circulation), and I love the design sense of this show (the scenes inside the computer, with the green wireframe buildings, are a killer design choice that immediately take me back to 1994, and I love when they pop up in the recent sequels) but Japanese superhero shows tend to follow a strict formula, and this one sure does too. Perhaps the only thing that sticks out to me about this show is the budget clearly ran out around episode 26, with the scenery “inside the computer” looking much shoddier, and the plots becoming a little loose. I think they switched cinematographers too; even the shots in the “real world” looked different than before, and the continuity of recurring characters was much looser. Also there were a few jokes about a dude in drag hitting on the bad guy, who is a grade schooler, and wow yikes I wish you hadn’t.

Oh, and the official subs were wild. Just…lots of cursing by Jesus, and weird insults.

77. Detective Conan: Zero’s Tea Time: Zero is a popular character from Detective Conan, so they gave him his own little series of shorts. He’s a cop, who’s undercover as a gangster, who’s undercover as a barista, so he can spy on the heroes of the show. (his undercover name is Amuro, so he’s voiced by the same guy who plays Amuro Rey from Gundam) Only running six fifteen-minute episodes, there isn’t much to say about this show; the plot is basically nonexistent, following just a “day in the life” of its star as he somehow stays active as a police officer, helping his contact within the force take down criminals while somehow also maintaining two separate covers (and viewers of the main show know Conan has broken this guy’s cover, but lets him stay in place because Conan has his own cover to maintain). It’s a fun little addition to Conan, but it’s not essential. It’s barely a narrative.

76. Spawn: Back when I was a kid, Spawn was forbidden. A lot of violent things were forbidden, and that’s reasonable, as I was a scared little child and didn’t need to see a serial killer impaled on popsicle sticks, which is something that happened early in Spawn comics. It’s just that, being banned, it meant my parents KNEW about Spawn, and KNEW it was violent and gross, which shows how BIG Spawn was in the 90’s, how much of a force in popular culture Todd McFarlane’s little hell boy had become in a relatively short amount of time. And good for Todd! Spawn and the rest of the Image founders did great work in breaking the Big Two’s hold on American comics, and Image remains a bastion of creator freedom in the industry, even in ways the founders weren’t. But this is no time to delve into Todd’s fights with Neil Gaiman. The point is, Spawn was big enough to lure Eric Radomski away from Batman the Animated Series and to HBO, where they could do a real, dark cartoon that really got Spawn and accurately translated his adventures to a suitably adult audience.

They completely failed. Radomsky’s more restrained, down-to-earth art style that worked so well in the art deco world of Batman ironically sapped the cartoonish exaggerations of McFarlane’s art style. Spawn in motion is rigid, restrained; the budget not allowing him to move except in small starts, the storyboarding keeping him to the shadows, and most egregious of all, the writing keeping him from acting until the very last moment. I haven’t read any Spawn comics except the Batman crossovers, but the Spawn of the TV show is a lazy, disinterested “hero” who tends to promise protection to the underprivileged and then goes and does something else while demons and madmen murder them with relative impunity. Even when Spawn sees injustice, he will sometimes wait until a murder has already happened, then angrily act with such swift and overpowering violence—chains descending from trees, hooks ripping murderers into the air, guns blazing through flesh—to make clear that, yeah, he COULD have prevented that murder, I guess he just didn’t FEEL like it.

Making matters worse, the voice director was clearly not suited for the job in front of him. You see it a lot with “serious” “adult” cartoons, where they hire big-name actors used to working in theater or TV, get them in a sound studio, and—they don’t have anything to react against. Keith David (playing Spawn, of course; a role he’d reprise years later in Mortal Kombat 11, of all things) and the infrequent guest appearances of Kath Soucie are the only ones who sound like they know what they’re doing; the rest of the characters read their lines about horrific murders and the war between Heaven and Hell as if profoundly bored, often delivering sentences with the inflection all wrong, as if the actors don’t understand the plot.

And the vaunted violence that so scared my parents way back in 1997? Hidden, missing, toned down; disguised by cuts between identical shots, interspersed with flashes of white and panning zooms around the picture, a directorial choice I’ve seen so often in cartoons and live action TV from this time that it must have seemed edgy and cool at the time, while now it just looks cheap. Further undercutting the mood, every episode starts off with a short summary of the themes by Todd McFarlane himself, a clean-cut Crypt Keeper reciting big-idea platitudes that barely relate to the content of the episodes. Little wonder that it got cancelled after three years and only 18 episodes; the plot moved at a snail’s pace anyway, meaning Spawn makes the decision to actually actively fight evil just in time for the show to end. I don’t know if I’ll ever like Spawn, but there must be better ways to find out.

75. New Tetsujin-28 (previously available in English as New Gigantor): The third adaptation of the original giant robot manga (after a very brief live-action show and one of the first TV anime, released in the US under the name Gigantor), this anime from 1980 tries to update the classic original a bit, redesigning the titular robot to be a bit sleeker, and incorporating television into its remote control. The plot also focuses on environmental issues like solar power, which it assumes will be widespread by the late-90’s (sorry guys). Now, it’s been a while since I watched Gigantor—since high school, in fact—and the series isn’t available in the US right now, but I remember it, like a lot of its contemporaries, being a fairly violent show, designed to appeal to adults as well as children, where Tetsujin would wrestle with opposing robots while the cops and robbers shot at each other on the ground below. This show has very little of that, and seems to focus much more on child viewers, taking time to give the hero very toyetic vehicles and laser guns (set to stun, of course). The animation is fluid and the designs crisp, but something of the thrill is gone, replaced with rote battles between Tetsujin and an array of indistinguishable opponents, usually mad scientists of the world-conquering bent. There are a few recurring villains, most notably the would-be king of Earth, Branch, and his terrorist group, who show up to menace our heroes from time to time to provide a real threat, but the one-shot villains aren’t that much different than him, they just only lose to a child once instead of all the time. Yes, the robot pilot is a child, which is understandable only because this is kids entertainment; Interpol inducts the kid into their organization even though anyone could just take the remote controls and pilot the robot themselves (Giant Robo, the second robot show by Tetsujin-28 creator Mitsuteru Yokoyama, would solve this problem by making the robot voice controlled, so only the kid could use it). I find myself spacing out during its robot battles a lot, which is relatable as someone trying to write compelling robot battles right now, but annoying as a viewer. I’ll keep watching, because robot, but I’m sure the other Tetsujin-28 shows are better.

74. Cutie Honey Universe: Cutie Honey is a series I got interested in at a point in my life where I would forgive an anime a lot more than I would today. My thought process was, “Ah, sexy! Sexy=funny,” and did not progress much beyond that. Fortunately, the original anime has a lot to recommend it, and I just have to deal with having the 90’s anime on my shelf, hidden behind some Doctor Who DVD’s (New Cutie Honey should be avoided at all costs). The main problem is the “sexy jokes” tend to come at the expense of its main character, who I otherwise find a very compelling hero, if not particularly deep, and an unusually independent woman who stands out among her early anime compatriots (which, again, New Cutie Honey from the 90’s completely fucked up by making her more submissive to the male lead, a bland cypher for the horny intended audience). Still, my curiosity drives me, and when I had access to a new show, I decided to give it a try.

Universe treads over the same plot points as most Cutie Honey shows, adapting the story that ran for most of the manga and half the original show: Honey Kisaragi is a robot girl created by a super-scientist who was killed by a terrorist organization after the alchemical device he created and implanted in Honey. That device lets her rearrange the atoms of her clothes and hair into elaborate disguises, but also gives her amazing superpowers to fight evil. Eventually the bad guys catch on to her identity and attack the all-girls Catholic boarding school Honey lives in. The amount of horrible deaths this leads to varies between versions, this show trends towards the manga’s amount, which is to say, a lot.

Universe is an admirable effort to bring the series forward to the present, but it still fails. Some of this is due to just odd choices—Honey has a time limit on her powers, represented by her natural (“natural”) blonde hair growing out of her superhero persona’s short red hair…and, of course, by her superhero costume disintegrating. Her newspaper photographer boyfriend now works for a secret police squad, as does Honey; she also fights the villains by creating extra-dimensional liminal spaces for them to battle without harming civilians, a power which is never explained and barely even acknowledged. Some of Go Nagai’s horny jokes from the manga are retained, which is always confusing because they don’t hold up well and clash with the otherwise serious, dour nature of this adaptation.

And that’s what really galls me—for all it’s (many) faults, Cutie Honey is at least supposed to be FUNNY, and this show is just…bland. It goes through the motions of the original plots, or even interesting new plots like Tarantula Panther having second thoughts about her place in the Panther Claw criminal organization, with a detached view, as if nothing really hits home. This sucks when the plot is about how Cutie Honey is suffering post-traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt from the death of her friends at her enemies’ hands. It REALLY sucks when one of them shows up alive at the end of the show—along with a horde of other women who I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be the other dead girls come back to fight, but I thought they were…until Honey’s best friend Natsuko was still dead. Why do some get to come back, but not others? It seemed unfair, cheap. The show isn’t bad, it just didn’t know what it wanted to be, and only had 12 episodes to do it, and spent them doing something that had already been done at least four times before. Maybe next time they’ll switch things up a bit, you know?

At the very least, someone could finally get the rights to officially release Re: Cutie Honey in the USA, that one’s by Gainax and actually looks good.

Oh and this was the first one not to use the classic theme song, which is blasphemy.

73. Galaxy Railways: A Letter From The Abandoned Planet: Yeah, baby, just throwing myself into a short sequel for a show I did not watch. Fortunately, it was also a crossover for a show I did watch. Unfortunately, that was no help at all. It was fun seeing the gang from Galaxy Express 999 again, but this was just a simple plot, could have been any random stop along their trip from that show, to a time-displaced planet that has something to do with one of the Galaxy Railways main characters and a strange energy they investigated. I think it had something to do with the origin of one of the characters I didn’t know? Maybe I should have watched this in order with Galaxy Railways, I didn’t retain a lot of it.

72. Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go!: Ciro Nieli, who had worked on Teen Titans, was headhunted away by Disney and given the chance to launch his own show as part of the rebrand of Toon Disney with the Jetix block to compete with Toonami. The result was a show I was aware of at the time, but did not watch for two reasons: 1. It was acting like anime, but wasn’t. 2. The anime it acted like was retro, which made me think the production team was just rehashing old stereotypes instead of doing something new. These were dumb reasons, especially since I assumed the stilted animation was on purpose to look like old cartoons, when really the animation studio, Answer, who also worked on Transformers Animated (as did the composer, Sebastian Evans II) just drew things like that. I decided to give it another try, because I’m running out of interesting things on Disney Plus and hey, giant robot.

It's okay.

The main problem I had with the series was the focus on one character, when there’s a whole team around him. Jiro, the one human on the Super Robot Monkey Force Hyper Team, is always the focus, especially at the start—the adventures revolve around him, and the monkeys exist to respond to his emotional journey. Except for a few plots near the end of the series, the monkeys just serve as one-note sounding boards for Jiro’s emotions and hero’s journey to be the savior of planet/city Shuggazoom. (Near the end, a romance between monkeys Sparx and Nova is introduced, but never goes anywhere other than an unspoken feeling on Sparx’s part that’s unclear if it’s even reciprocated) I did like the romance between Jiro and the sleeper-cell robot Jinmay, who believed herself to be a real girl (not a spoiler, that’s episode one baby), but Jinmay is only a recurring character, so it rarely comes up; even as she becomes more integrated into the team, she’s left behind when they go on a space mission, or taken captive, or whatever. The show is unusual, being an American-made series with an affinity for classic anime its target audience would never see, but if you have access to the classic anime that inspired it, you could just watch those instead. Hm, I hope that’s not prophetic for what I’m attempting to write…

71. Acrobunch: Another robot anime from low-budget anime producer Kokusai Eigasha, also behind the J9 Trilogy and Space Warrior Baldios, which I watched in 2020, Acrobunch is like those in that it could just as well not have a robot in it and still be basically the same show. It’s different from those in that they somehow actually had a budget to produce good animation, which is astounding as the premise and writing in Acrobunch is not up to the standards of either of those series, and it aired alongside J9 which is, in my opinion, clearly superior (Acrobunch’s blu-ray went out of print at the same time as J9’s, but I didn’t pick it up because I’d just watched it earlier that year and knew I didn’t want it). Acrobunch follows a family of archaeologists in the far future, where human society is recovering from an ecological disaster—the first episode led me to believe Earth had been flooded by melting polar ice caps, but the rest of the show just portrays Earth basically as it existed in the present, so they kind of dropped that theme. The family is searching for a hidden civilization spoken of in rumor and myth in many ancient civilizations: the lost Quaschika, some sort of unknown ancient civilization or power. Working against them is the Goblin Organization, a group of actual goblins forced underground by humanity in ancient times who want Quaschika’s power to regain their place on Earth. This means most episodes follow a standard formula: the family stumbles upon an archaeological wonder, miraculously preserved as if it was abandoned just yesterday, even if underwater, completely whole and not damaged at all; they do this quite easily, almost as if anyone could have done it in the past 5,000 years and makes you wonder why no one did. The Goblins show up to claim it, and during a battle, the find is destroyed. Oh, well; that wasn’t Quaschika, and since it wasn’t what they were looking for, they don’t care.

They’re really bad archaeologists, is what I’m getting at. Even considering that pop fiction archaeologists always seem to know what they’re digging for before they find it somehow, these guys are, directly or indirectly, responsible for the loss of vast amounts of human knowledge in their search for one thing that may not exist. Anyway, at the end they go full woo, pulling off a “twist” ending about expanded consciousness and the next universe that other shows (including some on this list) have done earlier, better, or both. I don’t hate it, but Acrobunch is just nothing special.

70. Magic Kaito 1412: It feels weird to call this a spinoff of Detective Conan since Magic Kaito predates it, but Conan got popular and Kaito didn’t, so it ate the previous character and now he’s mostly supporting cast for the later show. I didn’t even know this anime had come out almost a decade ago; it adapts all the solo stories of Kaito Kid, the Phantom Thief who styles himself after Arsène Lupin and bedevils the detective with the mind of an adult and the body of a child. Since there are fewer chapters of Kaito Kid’s manga, the series gets through pretty much all of them in 24 episodes, skipping only one that’s an out-of-continuity crossover with a samurai manga by the same author, and one that came out after the anime ended. It also has a few appearances by Detective Conan himself, including one set before Detective Conan when he was still just Shinichi Kudo, which has a convoluted answer to why it doesn’t break Conan continuity which says the two only met AFTER he got shrunk. That said, there’s not much here to excite someone who doesn’t already like Conan; I maintain that if you want to watch some Lupin anime, there’s this dude with a red/green/pink/blue jacket you might have heard of whose adventures are a little more exciting (or a lot more, depending on which one you choose). It was interesting that this series features actual, real magic—Katio’s classmate is a witch, complete with hunchback butler and a portal to hell in her living room—since Detective Conan tends to assume a rational, realistic world, just one where people commit murder for stupid reasons (it is, after all, a detective show). Still, it’s nice to, uh, actually know what this guy’s deal is. Now just tell me why he looks just like Kudo and we’re set.

69. Detective Conan: Not much happened in Conan this year, either; no surprise, as the plot always moves at a snail’s pace, kept on TV by episodic murder mysteries. You know, for kids! I especially liked the one at the soft-serve factory, where Ran serves herself vanilla ice cream but it has a streak of blood in it because there’s a corpse shoved in the machine, that was hardcore.

There were also 3 episode of “Police Academy Wild Arc,” which continued from one last year and adapt a spinoff manga about several police officer characters, including Amuro and the siblings of a number of other recurring police officers, back when they were at school. The main plot involved solving the murder of one of the officer’s father—turns out, a man’s child had died, and he went mad and convinced himself she had just been kidnapped, so he killed her “kidnappers”, and years later the cops figure this out and manage to stop him from murder-suiciding a girl who looked like his daughter. In the meantime, they have little fun adventures, oh how swell.

But I also re-watched the 49 episodes that aired on Cartoon Network when I was in high school, as well as the other 84 episodes that were dubbed by Funimation and never aired on TV, and BOY, it sure was nice, not just to see how much faster the plot moved back then (I guess they had more manga chapters queued up to adapt at the start, instead of having to wait for storylines to be over like they do now), but also how much more, uh, messed up it was. Man, they didn’t CARE what kind of violence kids saw in 90’s anime, huh? I wish they’d bring back some of those visceral thrills, but I doubt we’ll ever see it. Too much money in this one these days.

68. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021): Mattel should have reinvented He-Man in the 1990’s. If not then, they should have done it in 2002, when the 80’s reinventing boom first reared its ugly head. That’s what Transformers did, with Beast Wars, and then Armada; it changed to fit the times, and thrived for it. Transformers seems a little scared of doing that now, so I guess Mattel thought they should give it a try.

Ehhhh…

First of all, that theme song is awful, which I guess means kids love it. I thought the same thing about the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes theme and the comics then included a love letter to it, so what do I know. Second, this show follows the modern trend of having kids shows be about kids, never adults, which I guess is just what you have to do to get your kids show made, so whatever. This changes He-Man’s transformation into a more explicitly Shazam-derived formula, where Adam isn’t just beefing up, but aging up, into a much, much more cartoonishly large form. Another change is spreading the power among the other heroes; instead of just transforming Cringer into Battlecat, Teela, Man-at-Arms, and Ram Ma’am (instead of Ram Man, you see) also can call upon the power of Greyskull to transform into more powerful forms. But, the bad guys figure this out too, calling upon the power of Havoc, which is how Uncle Keldor gets to turn into Skeletor (I’m honestly surprised they followed up on the Uncle Keldor plot from the toy pack-in comics; the evil uncle stock character is hackneyed and played out, but at least it was established).

The show’s main problem is it has to follow the excellent She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which it couldn’t possibly be better than. The worst problem is, it tries to do the same plots. Oh no, Adam is at odds with his father, the kind—just like Glimmer was with her mother, the queen! Why, Ram Ma’am feels like Adam is pushing her away for his new friends and powers—just like Catra felt about Adora! Wonder if she’ll turn evil too? The writers also have more difficulty integrating the humor with the drama, often undercutting the moment or drawing upon tired jokes you’ve heard a million times if you’ve ever been on the internet. It ends with a cliffhanger teasing Hordak, which is just what’s done, but I doubt we’ll ever see that paid off…but I never thought we’d pay off the season 2 cliffhanger, so who knows. Hordak was voiced by Kevin Conroy, though, so he won’t be back. Still sad.

Also, they put a shirt on He-Man. You cowards!

67. Moon Knight: My biggest disappointment with the current crop of Marvel movies and shows is they’re finally branching out to the weird corners of the universe, the darker corners, the trippy ones, and their solution is to smush those back in the mold of the rest of the films, even if they don’t fit. That’s how we end up with Moon Knight, a real-deal crazy person being used as a puppet by a mad god, being played…for laughs. Well, not entirely; there’s plenty of murders and dark secrets, and a big twist at the end, and of course they jump straight to the big monster god fight instead of building with some street-level stuff first (nothing BUILDS anymore, they just jump straight to world-ending stakes, where do you GO from there?), but making Steven Grant into a bumbling coward in over his head just so we have an audience viewpoint character is so…so…Marvel movie. The formula is set, the formula is sacred, and we’re going to tell you how weird and out-there the movie is to prepare people when something mildly unusual happens, when back in the 1970’s Marvel would just make up weird shit just to do it. I know Disney has no interest in making a show where the hero just kills chuds with impunity, but then why make a show about Moon Knight, other than he’s a fairly big Marvel hero and was next on the list?

I also feel bad for May Calamawy—not too bad because she got a big paycheck, I guess, but because I’m told she’s a fantastic actor and all she gets in the show is to be the nagging ex who won’t leave Marc/Steven alone. For a good portion of the show her dialogue is all questions directed to the hero, anger about something we don’t know about, and the worst stilted exposition I’ve heard in a while (not that Khonshu’s “Summon the Suit!” command didn’t make me groan either, I’m sure it sounded cool in their heads). Of course, her character Layla El-Faouly gets to be a superhero at the end, too, as compensation. She swoops down in her super-suit as music builds to a crescendo and a little girl asks, “Are you an Egyptian superhero?” to which Layla answers, “Yes!” I understand there are people out there who will critique any new superhero who isn’t a white man, and I hope the nicer things I have to say about other superhero series on this list shows that’s not where I’m coming from, but that felt so forced and artificial, like we’re supposed to applaud because Disney thought to throw a minority a bone. They struck it rich with Black Panther and are just throwing things out there to see what sticks, without making sure they have a good story for it first. Certainly didn’t help that she was a supporting character in a white man’s story, you know? Black Panther and Ms. Marvel succeeded by making sure the characters were great as characters first, and they didn’t bother with Layla.

I don’t know…Oscar Isaac wants to come back, and Moon Knight has managed to stick around in Marvel proper for 40 years, so the character has fans. The little mummy wrapping costume is a nice variant on the classic one, it looks cool. I’m just so tired of settling for mediocre. There’s enough superhero media now we don’t have to, and it makes the flaws in shows like this, which I would have loved 10 years ago, even more apparent.

66. Resident Alien: My parents suggested this one to me, commenting that the main appeal was Alan Tudyk making funny faces and off-the-cuff comments (the comment on the content and the suggestion that I watch did not necessarily happen at the same time). I caught up on it after the season season finished, and I was not quite as impressed.

It's been a long time since I watched a show on Syfy (I was halfway through typing “The Sci-Fi Channel” before I realized my mistake…sigh…) and while RA definitely is superior to Flash Gordon, it suffers from some of the same problems as all lower-budget TV science fiction like the CW shows: they only have so much special effects money, and they have an hour to kill, so a lot of time is taken up by supporting characters who lack the depth to carry the time. Some, like Sheriff Mike and Deputy Liv, are at least funny and delightful to spend time with (I swear, Mike’s actor has to ad-lib half his lines, they get preposterous real fast). Others, like spineless Mayor Ben and his wife Kate who is repressing how much she doesn’t want to live in a small town, grate my nerves really bad. This would not be as much of a problem if, like I’d assumed, it was a medical murder procedural—I’d imagined something like iZombie, where each episode had a little murder that would, over the season, add up to a big mystery. This would provide a weekly impetus for Tudyk to switch up the comedy routine while also giving a little drip of information to drive the plot forward. Instead, they went the Dexter route, with season-long storylines. Heck, the storylines don’t even pay off over the course of the season! We only find out who killed the dead guy in season one at the end of the season; the characters don’t figure it out until season 2! And some of them need to get mindwiped because they know too much. It IS an interesting reveal, I’ll give them that. And by the end of season 2, the showrunners seem to finally know where they want to take the plot, and are moving in a direction that grabs me. It just takes a while to get there.

In the meantime, we’re left with standard plots of “Oh, the town can’t figure out this guy’s an alien.” The result is, instead, you have to ask “Oh, why do people put up with this guy?” An easy answer is “He’s a doctor and their doctor was murdered,” that’s how the show gets started, but the amount of “friends” the alien picks up is baffling. Hot mess Darcy makes sense because they quickly establish she’ll fuck anyone, but then they also establish that she’s a former Olympic skier who gave up after a career-ending injury and volunteers as a mountain helicopter rescue…person who also runs the local bar and is the badass friend of everyone in town. I think they accidentally made one of the supporting cast TOO interesting, so much that she eclipsed main cast member Asta, who’s just an anxiety-ridden nurse who’s still getting over an abusive relationship and didn’t ask to be the first person to find out her new boss is an alien. So of course they eventually let Darcy in on the secret. It takes until the end of the second season for the writers to actually come up with a reason Harry the Alien needs to stay alive (to save us from other, worse aliens, naturally); before that…well, before that he just lies a lot. His alien race is devoid of empathy, and he frequently brags that they don’t feel things like love or togetherness. Of course, he slowly learns those are good qualities and maybe humans aren’t so bad, yadda yadda. Instead, I’m left asking, how did these creatures form an advanced society if they don’t care if the others live or die? How did they band together for common goals if murder is their go-to way of solving an inconvenient social problem? This seems evolutionarily disadvantageous when spread to a galactic scale.

It's not…bad. The show is definitely carried by Tudyk’s star power. But I have too much trouble seeing the lines where ideas were pasted together in real time as the showrunners were still trying to figure out what kind of show they were making. Plus, like, not to drag the supporting cast too much, but seriously so many of their plots just get dropped after a few episodes, they’re clearly just there to fill time while alien stuff isn’t happening. Hopefully the future seasons will have more alien stuff, after the second season finale moved the main plot along by a lot, and found a way to loop in the townspeople too. Right now it’s not quite there.

65. Archer Season 13: I hate to admit, they managed to pull something off here, but I still feel this is a show long past its prime. Perhaps Disney doesn’t care; presumably it still makes enough money to justify its existence, even if it’s just to fill time on FXX. This season finally takes the time to say, yes, maybe Archer needs therapy, and yes, maybe his alcoholism isn’t just a funny character trait—although that can lead down a rocky path, I do kind of miss fun drunk Marvel Hercules since they decided to sober him up. The tired nature of the old jokes, which sometimes even backtrack over character development from previous seasons (a trend since Archer came out of the coma) is at least covered up by some nice new twists, like the aforementioned therapy for Archer (which goes horribly wrong when his therapist tries to date him, but don’t worry, he already needed to get her out of the country to avoid assassins, he just didn’t go with her), Pam romancing a Swiss spy working at an opposing organization (apparently the Swiss are great at spying, that’s a recurring joke this season), and at the very end, a nice double-cross (and triple-cross!) just to keep the plot interesting. Oh, and they solved the whole Lana divorce plot that had worn out its welcome over the previous two seasons. I’m not happy the show’s still running, and it does seem to keep looping back to where it started, but I guess they found something new to do this year.

64. Zorro: I’m sure I watched a couple of episodes of this as a child, but that’s all I remember. I definitely saw the first Antonio Banderas movie, and I tried to watch the second but by the time we went to the theater it wasn’t playing anymore and we watched Harry Potter instead. But Zorro’s just become a character who’s in the back of my mind, so every few years I see a Zorro thing and think, “Oh! Zorro! I forgot I like that guy!”

I was disappointed when Disney+ launched without their classic Zorro show, just a bad transfer of a movie made of several episodes, but they finally added it this year, with a crisp remastered transfer (which my internet hates, and struggled with a bit—still, it looks really good!). Not that I expected much from the show—Disney in the…well, until the eighties basically, they had a formula for action which was family-focused. Something for the adults, but nothing the kids couldn’t watch. Anyway, I’d seen the old George Reeves Superman, I’d seen a couple of other shows from the 50’s, I figured I knew what to expect.

Well, I did and I didn’t. Unexpectedly, the first season of Zorro is a long 39-episode serial, chopped up into 13-episode arcs. I never would have thought that would happen back in the 1950’s, but it helped Zorro stand out. Each episode presents a whole adventure where Zorro defeats the enemies of the people, but they also build on each other, with recurring characters between each. The first arc is my favorite, where Zorro fights against the corrupt Captain Monasterio, who is, of course, abusing his power to enrich himself, and he builds false cases against those who speak out against him, so Zorro spends most of the first plotline keeping a man named Ignatio Torres alive so he can testify against Monasterio. The actor playing Monasterio is a perfect frustrated bad guy, but just debonair enough to feel like an equal to Zorro; these early episodes are really good. The second plotline introduces a new corrupt official, this time working for an unseen master called the Eagle, and also transitions the character of the bumbling Sergeant Garcia from an enemy of Zorro/Don Diego de la Vega, to a friend, which I thought benefitted the script, since Garcia was already kind of the heart of the show. However, once Garcia got his own comic relief sidekick, the dull Corporal Reyes, and transitioned into a kind of Abbott and Costello act, the comedy started to overtake the story, and the action became lower-stakes, more targeted towards the child viewers. This is common with heroic action stories like this, and I honestly wasn’t surprised when, at the end of the season, Zorro defeats the cunning Eagle by…revealing he has agoraphobia, and will turn into a screaming mess if he doesn’t have someone in the room. Not that the Eagle’s plan wouldn’t have been put down by the Spanish Army anyway; I don’t know why he’d start a rebellion by taking a small town like Los Angeles (well, as it was back then—if someone started a rebellion by taking Los Angeles NOW, I would consider them a threat, but…). And this first season also has a lot of faults that come from being from the 50’s, the same kind of things enforced by bodies like the Hays Code and the Comics Code; Zorro laments that Los Angeles has so many corrupt politicians put in charge of it, yet he always feels he can appeal to the king for justice, despite the king being the ultimate source of the corrupt governors. The show is allegedly set in 1820, right before Mexican independence, but there’s no sign of unrest, and the heroes frequently make appeals for calm and trust in the status quo—considering that the hero is a landed gentleman and he often says this to workers, Zorro’s heroism sometimes feels like he’s protecting himself instead of the citizens. Heck, with the Eagle plot, Zorro basically fights FOR monarchy, in territory that is today part of the United States! I doubt Disney considered the hypocrisy of this at the time.

The problems increase in the second season. The long, complex plots are completely gone, their only remnant the 13-episode storyline set in Monterey instead of Los Angeles, and one multi-episode plot where Zorro’s cad of an uncle, Cesar Romero, tries to marry a woman for her money. There’s also an ironic storyline where Jonathan Harris (Who would later co-star with Zorro’s actor, Guy Williams, in Lost in Space) plays a Spanish nationalist who tries to kill an American who illegally entered California, as a deterrent against immigration (in his defense, said American is easily the most annoying character in the show). And, in a minor quibble, this is where the show’s timeline breaks down; despite clearly saying it’s set in 1820 at the start, the characters all accept that America is “on the other side of the mountain,” meaning the writers appear to believe Nevada was American territory at the time…despite Spanish/Mexican territory stretching through Texas for another few decades. In the story immediately after, ANOTHER corrupt official arrives to collect money for “The war…with England, France, and the Netherlands!” which would place the story, not in 1820 at all, but sometime around approximately NEVER (the writers appear to have conflated two separate stages of the Coalition Wars against Napoleon that happened years apart, and in any case were over by 1820). I still have seven episodes left, but it’s a mess now. There are apparently a few special episodes from the Wonderful World of Disney they haven’t put up yet, but just watch the first season, trust me.

63. Phantom Quest Corps: This short four-episode anime is something Hank picked up because it looked funny. It is pretty funny! Following a drunken sorcerer who runs a business with a precocious little boy as her accountant and business manager (never explained), she coordinates a ragtag group of psychics and clerics to clean up ghosts in Tokyo, for money! They don’t make any money. I understand it’s a bit of a ripoff of Ghost Sweeper Mikami, but I will judge that for myself…next year!

More than the gags or the plots, what really grabbed me about this show is how much its aesthetic, from the designs to the way people moved to even the mood of the writing and music, struck me as baseline stereotypical anime, but that’s just because I started watching in the late-90’s. You don’t see stuff like this anymore! The style has completely changed! The future is a foreign country and I don’t understand it with all your moe girls and your round faces with tiny noses. I long for a time when I could just watch a show where a grown-ass woman who LOOKS like an adult could just pull out a lightsaber and fuck up Tokyo Tower while wearing a formal dress. Just a little bit of fun from days long gone.

62. YashaHime: Inuyasha. Probably America’s favorite Rumiko Takahashi series, though certainly not mine—but more on that later. Still, it came out at the time I would watch whatever Japanese cartoon was on television, and so I watched every episode of the damn thing, every filler, every random new character designed to draw the plot out, every time Kikyo should have freaking died and didn’t because we can’t have the romantic leads actually confess their feelings until the end. Why, this is a Japanese series! A couple working together is unheard of!

So yeah this is a cartoon about Inuyasha’s daughter. Well, really, it’s about Sesshomaru’s daughters with Rin, which, like, dude I know Kagome is in high school and Inuyasha was already old when his ex pinned him to a tree for fifty years, but don’t you think Rin’s, like, a little young for you? Oh well, too late now. The show is pretty clever in how it slowly doles out Inuyasha callbacks, separating the girls through their TRAGIC ORIGIN! and slowly reintroducing them into the world. The pacing is a little better than Inuyasha since the writers were able to create their own storyline, free from having to wait for another manga chapter to drop before they could actually move the plot along, and to their credit they introduced a main villain and found a way to kill him and keep the plot going, while one of my main complaints about Inuyasha was that Naraku was so one-note (love Kikyo gimme dat jewel) that I would have liked the heroes to kill him and move on to a new threat, Dragon Ball-style, whereas Takahashi clearly conceived the story to revolve around the defeat of Naraku so he had to be there. They take their time bringing back Inuyasha and Kagome so that, once they do return, we already have an established interest in Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha, and know only they can defeat the main enemy, so the show isn’t taken over by the established characters who are just hanging around.

Oh, what’s the plot? Well, when Sesshomaru’s daughters, Towa and Setsuna, were born, a few years after the birth of Inuyasha and Kagome’s daughter Moroha, a demon named Kirinmaru traveled to Japan to kill them due to a prophecy of his own demise. Instead, Sesshomaru pretended to betray his relatives, sealing Kagome and Inuyasha in a magical pearl (though Moroha escaped), and even staging the death of his own daughters—all while trying to keep his dying wife Rin alive through the energies of a mystic tree. However, unknown to him, his daughter Towa was sent into the present by leftover mystical energies from Kagome’s magic well, and was raised by Kagome’s brother. Now she has returned to her own time and reunited with her relatives, and must find several macguffins, restore her sister’s memory, and hopefully not screw up the timeline too much. Oh, and romance a homunculus. It’s…it’s fine. Like I said, the pacing is better so it runs through things at a good clip, they didn’t let the villain grow stale, and the romance actually progresses. They teased a plot in China for a season 3, so that’s another way to not let the older characters take over the narrative. I don’t see any reason someone who likes Inuyasha wouldn’t like this.

61. Stranger Things Season 4: God damn it Duffer Brothers, you said four seasons, why isn’t this over yet? Netflix’s big cash cow keeps chugging along, bringing back classic 80’s songs for a new generation to obsess over (never thought I’d hear Kate Bush on 102.3 in this day and age, but here we are), and the big twist is—there was a single person behind everything! The alternate universe, the monsters—it was all created by a psychic shock in a battle between Eleven and a psycho murderer who killed his family and framed his father. It’s been a revenge plot all along!

On the one hand, from a narrative standpoint, this creates a personal tension between the threat and the heroes, and that’s good, that’s exciting on a primal level, I believe I talk about that elsewhere in this list. On the other hand, Stranger Things had accomplished that before, WITHOUT a sentient enemy—the monsters took my son, the monsters are in my son, uh…season three added some Russians so there was a ticking clock, I guess. Making the upside-down just a byproduct of something that happened in Hawkins makes the universe feel smaller, and I think that’s a real loss to the series.

Putting Max in a coma was also a real loss to the series, but that will probably resolve next season. I do appreciate their replacing the Cold War era Russian-throwback storyline (well, not completely—Hopper still had to get out of Russia, resulting in perhaps the most improbably storyline, where three people who illegally passed into Russia actually manage to rescue their friend from a gulag; y’all know the Soviets would shoot down civilian airliners if they accidentally went off course over Russian territory, right? How’s this dude running peanut butter across the Bering Strait, doesn’t make any damn sense) for a Satanic Panic storyline. Not that I think treating Russia as an implacable foe is necessarily a bad idea; certainly, I think this year showed that its government is still a threat to individual liberty, maybe more than ever, but Stranger Things is at its best when the threat is coming from inside the town, from the normal blind spots and prejudices of America, amplified through fear and ignorance. That was rampant during the eighties, and we shouldn’t forget it. I also appreciate that they tied that fear into anti-drug campaigns; the villainous Jason turns to vigilantism because he can’t believe his girlfriend would turn to drugs to treat her depression because he sees drug use as a moral failing, believes the propaganda at the time that stigmatized the addicted and hindered real treatment. That’s the kind of idea good horror investigates, and it’s the sharpest part of the script.

But they could have just fucking ended it here. Come on, you guys. These kids ain’t young anymore.

60. Kimba the White Lion: Doing some more catching up on the classic anime of Osamu Tezuka, Kimba (or Jungle Emperor) is infamous for its similarities to The Lion King. Though Kimba itself only deals with the adventures of its title character, with a later series that wasn’t available to me following his adventures as an adult, I can say that, yeah, a lot of episodes seem to have elements of the Lion King, and it’s not subtle. However, while the Lion King focuses on Simba’s quest for revenge for his father, Kimba only briefly touches on that (though he does get revenge on his father’s killer, Tezuka stock villain Ham Egg) and instead focuses on Kimba’s attempts to corral the animals into a functioning society based on the human world, with restaurants and infrastructure. A recurring plot is Kimba having to fight other animals to convince them to no longer be carnivores—he also briefly eats bugs like Timon and Pumbaa, but eventually finds a vegetarian solution and the animals free their captured grasshoppers in a large swarm. The series is largely episodic, and gets a little old after a while, but what really concerned me was how often it comes back to colonialist ideas of the nature of Africa. Tezuka’s goal was clearly to provide moral lessons for small children about how to properly function as a member of a modern community, but a side effect of that is the animal’s natural state—and that of Africa—is frequently highlighted as wild, uncivilized, and uneducated, repeating all the stereotypes used to justify colonialist expansion. The series was certainly not alone in this, and I don’t know how much of that is amplified by the old dub, which frequently harps on Africa being the “dark continent,” but it did impede my enjoyment. And interesting historical piece and a big part of an illustrious career, but maybe not worth watching without a critical eye.

59. Walking Dead: Shh, I’m not done yet! I’m about ready to give up on this show, which has fallen into a pattern of, “Raise hopes, squash them, everything is awful forever, repeat,” but it’s finally grabbed my interest again. I wasn’t looking forward to the Commonwealth, a pristine, fascist civilization that tries to consume the communities our heroes built, since they felt like more of the same: a clearly bad leader, corrupt underlings, disregard for freedom, and immortal to the core. However, about ½ way through this final season, once the writers were up against a wall and HAD to move the plot forward, it started booking. The Commonwealth’s pointless assault on an apartment complex of weird but harmless people, just minding their own business, for a crime they didn’t commit? And the heroes uniting against it, even though it was in their best interest to play along? That’s what I want to see. Darryl leaving his ex alive after her stupid boss almost gets everyone killed, and her coming back for short-sighted revenge? Good twist, teaming up two enemies who otherwise would hate each other, just because they have another enemy they both hate for different reasons. I’m actually excited to see how things end up, despite myself, because at least things are HAPPENING. Haven’t been able to say that for a while.

58. The Looney Tunes Show: “What if Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza?” That’s the elevator pitch for this one, and you can see why I skipped it when it came out—other than the fact that very few modern takes on Looney Tunes have been what one might call “good.” However, I kept seeing clips from this version, and figured I’d give it a try because HBO Max is determined to make sure there’s very little else I’d want to watch on their service.

It got a few laughs out of me, but I could have just stuck to the clips. There’s enough here for a few fun recurring jokes and some interesting situations, but a lot of time is wasted on sitcom setups or subtle jokes, when Looney Tunes excelled at making Mel Brooks yell into a microphone (or suicide jokes, which you can’t do on kids TV and wouldn’t play well if you did). Additionally, there are two recurring short segments that usually play in the middle or end of an episode: “Merrie Melodies,” which are silly songs, and computer-animated Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts. If you’re watching an episode that has one, pray for Road Runner. The CGI is less emotive and stiffer than the classics, but at least it’s a good joke; Merrie Melodies will take a subpar concept and stretch it out for two minutes or more of bad singing. I tend to just block them out.

The biggest surprise of the series, and the source of the best jokes, is strangely Lola Bunny, who even more strangely is voiced by Kristen Wiig, in what I feel stupidly confident calling her best role. While Lola was introduced in Space Jam with no more personality than “Sexy Lady Play Basketball” (my attempts to compare her to Jessica Rabbit only came off as insulting toward the far superior character of Jessica Rabbit), the writers of this show decided to take the fact she only exists to be Bugs Bunny’s girlfriend and make that the joke. “Clingy girlfriend” is a played-out trope, it’s true, and I get the feeling they only wanted her for one episode, as she’s basically the B-plot of the golf course episode, but it worked so well they brought her back and eventually had Bugs just…start dating his crazy stalker, because he couldn’t win. Her overconfident bluster, complete misread of social cues, and rampant paranoia lead to some of the most chaotic sequences of the entire show, which is good, because this is LOONEY TUNES. She outdoes Daffy Duck for chaos, and that takes work. I just wish the show had more scenes like hers.

57. Princess Knight: Continuing my trek through old Osamu Tezuka shows comes his classic shojou fantasy, Princess Knight, and at first I thought I would grow bored with this quickly like I had with Kimba, but it grew on me. Mostly that’s because Princess Knight had an ongoing plot, so it was able to build toward a satisfying conclusion in a way Kimba didn’t—the titular princess Knight (or Sapphire; I only had the dub available and had to deal with the name changes they made, although I think I did find a lot of the episodes subtitled on YouTube later) contends with a massive invading force and beats them back, and her recurring enemies all turn on one another and are destroyed in a culmination of all the subplots from earlier in the show. Princess Knight is one of a number of works by Osamu Tezuka where the author seems to work out his feelings on a subject on the page, making up his mind as he goes; in this case, the subject is gender politics. Sapphire is born as a woman but raised…well, not AS a man, she is aware she has a woman’s body, but she is trained to act “like a man” and to hide her feminine side because the kingdom she was born into, located somewhere in central Europe but within walking distance of Hell, follows only male primogeniture, and the king doesn’t want to let the evil Duke Duralumin or his idiot son, Plastic, take the throne. Now, I know a thing or two about rules of succession in medieval Europe, and none of this makes any sense: Duralumin (and his henchman, Count Nylon) always wants to put his son on the throne and never makes a claim that he should be king, despite clearly preceding his son in line—unless you say Plastic was royal on his mother’s side, but societies that excluded women from succession wouldn’t count any of their children as part of the succession either, it wouldn’t pass through them at all (the French used this explanation to keep English kings off their throne a number of times—didn’t stop the English from waging wars to change their minds, but…), and anyway, kings had absolute powers, at any point the king could change the law of succession and people would just have to put up with it…until he died, then they could do anything they wanted (there are more cases of this on the continent than in England, but Jane Grey comes to mind, doesn’t she?), and anyway they never explain why the king couldn’t just have another kid. Really it’s just an excuse for the Princess to avoid Duke Duralumin’s constant attempts to prove she isn’t a boy. Except…the princess has a little helper, Choppy/Tink, who is an actual angel who mixed up the process when the angels gave little babies their hearts; Princess Knight has both a boy and girl spirit, so really s/he’s…non-binary? Gender studies was a nascent concept when Tezuka came up with the series and already he was asking questions so advanced they wouldn’t have terminology for it for decades. So. That’s fun.

56. Masters of the Universe: Revelations: I wasn’t expecting much from this show. Because. Well. It’s Kevin Smith was behind it. Kevin Smith has a great reputation from his 1990’s slice-of-life comedies like Clerk’s and Mallrats, but his recent output has been…less-than-stellar, and his serious comic book works are uh…bad. Real bad. Look, some people really like his Daredevil, but 10 issues of “Hmm…SHOULD I kill this baby?” ain’t doing it for me, and that’s supposed to be the GOOD one. So, when he announced he’d be making a “sequel to the original He-Man”…

Look, I still say She-Ra’s better. Honestly, I think the 2002 series is better. But Masters of the Universe: Revelations is better than it had any right to be. There’s some real dumb, Geoff Johnsian stuff in here—apparently “Orko” is a child’s corruption of “Oracle,” because he never COULD get it right, oh boy aren’t you sad for the comic relief character yet, blech—but Revelations takes things in an interesting direction by starting with the final battle between He-Man and Skeletor, and then picking up the pieces later, when the heroes have splintered and the kingdom of Eternia is in disarray from the loss of its heir. Teela couldn’t forgive Adam and her father for keeping the secret of He-Man from her, and has left the royal guard to find her own way in life. Man-At-Arms was kicked out of the guard for lying to his king. In Skeletor’s absence, Evil-Lyn searches for him, while Tri-Clops and Trap Jaw have founded a new religion that worships technology and is forcibly converting people into cyborgs to serve them. It’s an edgy take on a kid’s show and that got worn out back when Alan Moore was still doing it, but at least it does something interesting and unique.

Of course, the heroes are all drawn back together, and of course He-Man and Skeletor come back from the dead, but that’s beside the point. The point is, healing the mistakes they made during their lives. Finishing the plotlines that were hinted at but never resolved, involving Evil-Lyn’s quest for power, and Teela’s secret origin as the daughter of the Sorceress. Even little touches like Adam choosing to be himself in the afterlife for protectors of Greyskull, instead of being He-Man, unlike the rest of the champions—that’s a good testament to his character, a “Clark Kent is the real personality” twist. This one ends on a cliffhanger too, and I also don’t think we’ll ever see the resolution of it; the difference is, I might actually like to see where it goes this time.

55. Space Adventure Cobra & Cobra: The Animation: A classic anime I’ve heard whispers of since I first got into anime back in like 1999, Cobra is the epitome of classic men’s action storytelling with a sci-fi bent. Existing somewhere on the spectrum between James Bond and Lupin III, with an origin 100% plagiarized from Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” Cobra follows the adventures of the eponymous space pirate as he travels across the universe with his faithful assistant Lady Armaroid, a living Hajime Sorayama painting. Together they meet weirdo aliens and romance an array of nearly-identical women who, despite allying with the most skilled fighter in the universe who has a deadly weapon installed in his left arm, all seem to end up dead, one way or another. That, more than anything, is the sticking point with me: no matter how weird the alien designs, how bizarre the plots Cobra finds himself in, the writing always goes back to killing a woman to add a little drama, and it gets tiring after a while. Even ones who survive one adventure, like Galactic Patrol policewoman Dominique, a major player in the first and longest arc of the show, the search for the treasure of Captain Nelson and fight against the diabolical Crystal Bowie, gets killed eventually. Heck, she gets to have a fake death, be revealed to be alive, and then die in…well, I’m not sure if there was an episode not available to me or if it’s from a manga chapter that wasn’t adapted into the anime, but sometime between the original 1982 cartoon and the 2009 one that adapted additional chapters of the manga, Dominique dies, which I know because an identical woman named Secret shows up and Cobra’s like “You look just like my dead girlfriend.”

Despite that, the show is pretty fun. Cobra vacillates between playing the fool and being the charming, debonair hard-ass hero as the situation warrants is action movie 101, but he pulls it off. Certainly the original series was helped by great animation from TMS during the two-decade period where it just churned out amazing animation like it was no big deal; being directed by the late great Osamu Dezaki didn’t hurt either (though I always have to say, hated most of Dezaki’s Lupin III movies, but he did alright here). The later Cobra: The Animation suffers some from a lower budget and coming out while anime was still working through the growing pains of the switch to digital art, and it also goes way more over the top with skimpy outfits for the ladies in a way that’s more distracting than actually appealing. It’s a fun enough series, and all the original episodes are up on YouTube (I watched the movie, which is an alternate take on the first arc of the anime, which I assume is also the first arc of the manga, on RetroCrush, and Cobra: The Animation is exclusive to HiDive now) so you can check a few out at your leisure. Most of the episodes are done-in-one adventures after the first 10-episode arc so it's easy to pick one up when you’re bored, but I wasn’t blown away or anything. Just needs a little more variety.

54. Guardians of Justice: A bizarre show that could only come about because Netflix will throw money at anything, as long as they don’t have to do it for multiple seasons in a row. An obvious Justice League pastiche that reverts to what I would have otherwise considered long played-out, sub-Watchmen, “What if superheroes, but bad?” stereotypes, Guardians of Justice manages to still keep my interest by just being so fucking weird. Created by Adi Shankar (Castlevania, Dredd) and starring three-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion Diamond Dallas Page as Knight Hawk, a grim, violent, murderous, fascist Batman (Hey doesn’t Marvel have a Batman pastiche called Nighthawk? Look don’t ask questions.), the story follows the slow dissolution of the Guardians of Justice after the apparent suicide of Marvelous Man, the Superman analogue. The story heavily implies that Marvelous Man has done more harm than good to humanity; arriving after World War II when a Hitler robot threatened to start war all over again, Marvelous Man prevented any further conflict anywhere on Earth ever since, but otherwise left the world to itself, which had the unintended consequence of allowing the Cold War powers to become maniacally violent and antagonistic toward each other, safe in the knowledge that even if they acted on their threats, they’d never have to deal with any consequences. With Marvelous Man dead, America and the Soviets are this close to nuclear annihilation, and the Guardians want to find out why. As I said, not a terribly original plot, though there are a few twists and turns that caught me off-guard (one that I’ve only seen done once before, one that was telegraphed only by knowing which DC hero one of the Guardians was based on). The real reason to watch this show is the bizarre changes between aesthetics and mediums; produced on an extremely low budget, the show cuts from live-action with minimal special effects, to flash animation, Claymation, even sprite animations for battles and flashbacks. Super-violent battles play out with Adam West sound effects overlaid, montages show us the deadly side effects of the “heroes” manipulations; strange throwaway scenes come back episodes later to play into the dark finale. I don’t know if I can recommend it, but I won’t tell you not to watch it. At the very least, you won’t see anything else quite like it, and sometimes that’s enough.

53. Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 3 & 4: I’ve been a little hard on Discovery before, and in my defense, it did everything in its power to deserve that treatment. I was in no rush to get back to it, but once I had access to more Star Trek, I wanted to get the two seasons of Discovery out of the way first (mostly because they came out before the seasons of Picard and Strange New Worlds, but also…I guess I started this show first, huh?). When we last left our allegedly-intrepid crew, they’d fought off an AI from the future, figured out Michael’s mom was a time travelling angel Spock had seen, and went into the future themselves, unable to return. All their friends decided to never talk about them again and act like they never existed.

For years now, Paramount has wanted to do a darker Star Trek about the Federation falling apart and everyone hitting hard times, barely keeping it together on starships that are falling apart. I remember reading about a webtoon pitch on exactly that subject back in my freshman year of college, and all three of the Kelvin-timeline movies were about the potential fall of the Federation from people it had wronged coming back for revenge. Heck, Picard season 1 dealt with an isolationist federation, afraid of fulfilling its primary mission of protecting human rights. Season 3 of Discovery finally fully commits to that idea…for a little bit. Michael Burnham emerges from her time warp to find the Federation shattered by the simultaneous detonation of all dilithium (and, presumably, trilithium, a compound material created from dilithium) in the Alpha Quadrant. Unable to communicate between its various worlds, it has shattered into disconnected provinces, with the main threat the Emerald Chain, a slave-driving, corrupt organized crime group headed by the scuzzy Orion Syndicate and the Andorians, a Federation founder planet whose people are nonetheless a little distrusting (they establish that the only one of the four founding members of the Federation to NOT back out were the Tellarites, who were previously characterized as…greedy little traders! They did always have a rivalry with the Andorians, but what an odd choice). On the one hand, I was happy to see Star Trek finally move beyond the two eras it had already explored in great detail, though of course there are four (!!) other shows airing right now that are still back in those times. On the other hand, every character arrives 900 years in their future, absolutely aghast that the Federation could have possibly shattered and desperately tries to restore their status quo. Like, 900 years is a long time, you guys! Civilizations fall all the time! I’d be a little surprised if the Federation was still completely intact even without “The Burn” (the source of the destruction of all the dilithium was a silly Star Trek idea that isn’t worth discussing here; needless to say, the problem was solved in a way that put main characters in danger but actually wasn’t that big a deal in the long run, and would have resolved itself in a few days anyway, albeit in a way that would have killed an innocent).

So, okay, some lip service is paid to the Federation falling short of its ideals before its final collapse through unrelated means, but they don’t really explain what that means except as a reason for Ni’var (aka Vulcan) to be reluctant to rejoin the Federation. Really, the destruction of the Federation is just an excuse for them to do typical Star Trek plots on famous Star Trek planets—go to a place, piss of the locals, but at the end everyone works together and reaches a compromise that could lead to better relations in the future. That, at least, was fun; as was seeing these pre-Kirk officers learning about things the audience already knew from the 90’s (“So apparently it’s common knowledge now that the Trill have symbionts living inside them.” “Oh um okay bet.”). I also liked the little twist of a Trill Symbiont being implanted in a human (an act of desperation, since they couldn’t contact Trill and find another suitable host in time, nor return the symbiont to the pools) (obviously everyone knows what I’m talking about, right?) and not working right, but they didn’t really take that in the direction I’d anticipated except to say the Trill might want to try that again. Not to get too caught up in that plotline, but Adira’s lucky their unusual situation, and the unusual resolution of their boyfriend Gray’s plotline, will probably spare them from having to put Gray in one of her friend’s bodies when she has to do the zhian'tara ritual.

But while the third season was a welcome return to Star Trek tropes, it felt rushed and ended rather abruptly, with season villain Osyrra suddenly deciding that actually she would like to negotiate with the Federation, as long as said negotiation didn’t involve any consequences for her, personally. It also featured a puzzling two-episode arc focusing on Michelle Yeoh’s Mirror-Philippa Georgiou that moved her character arc in an interesting direction, addressing her regrets that kept her close to Michael Burnham and finally getting her to admit that compassion is a worthwhile endeavor, and then immediately wrote her out of the show. Oh, and then there’s Unification Part III, when parts I and II were TNG episodes from the 90’s, that was just too cute (This is what Spock was up to before he died. How did he die? Well, have you ever heard of “Red Matter”…?).

The fourth season felt much more confident, focused, while also dealing with the most classic of Star Trek premises: These aliens are killing us. How do we ask them nicely to stop? It kicks off with the tragic death of two characters we met in season 3 (even in the best season of the show, we don’t escape modern Trek’s fascination with killing characters right after having a big character moment for them), as a mysterious distortion in space-time flies through the galaxy blowing up planets. The fragile Federation does good guy stuff to help out the displaced and save lives, but when scientists discover the distortion is a technological creation of an advanced race, the Federation is split between those who want to destroy it and those who would like to open diplomatic channels and explain the dilemma to the aliens who made the “DMA.” If the moral argument in favor of fair and open communications over unilateral escalation wasn’t strong enough for the viewer, don’t worry, they’re going to add on a bunch of additional threats after the fact to really hit home that shooting a big thing no one understands is a bad idea that will definitely get people killed.

The crux of the season is based around a conflict between now-Captain Michael Burnham (I was pissed when I saw she was captain instead of the infinitely more-qualified Saru, but they explain Saru is also a captain who had stepped away to return to his home planet for a while and came back in a temporary advisory capacity to help his friend through a tough time, which I appreciated) and her boyfriend, animal activist Cleveland “Book” Booker (an alien who took a human name, and also basically looks human except his forehead can light up sometimes). Burham is on the negotiating side, Booker, having lost his family to the machine, is in favor of military action to destroy it. This actually is good for Burham’s character, which up to this point has mainly been built by other people saying good things about her while she pursues shortsighted, suicidal, or even treasonous courses of action; here, she has a chance to show she’s grown from the person she was even last season into a person of firm moral character worthy of leading her crew, which was nice. I liked Sonequa Martin-Green as Sasha Williams on the Walking Dead, a character she turned from a background nobody into a well-rounded member of the supporting cast, and I knew she could do better work on Star Trek if she was just allowed to show us why we should care instead of just being told the character was special over and over again, and I think they’re finally starting to do that. Book doesn’t come out quite as well, since his arc has him committed to the wrong cause for the wrong reasons, but he gets his little redemption “Oh I fucked up” storyline at the end. At the very least, Book was not the only one duped by the season’s true enemy, Ruon Tarka. A very topical villain, Tarka is…well, in season 1, there was a very cringey line where Elon Musk was listed as a great inventor, and now we have this very Elon Musk character as a selfish villain, willing to kill everyone else to get what he wants. Tarka plays on people’s fears and uses his larger-than-life personality to distract and confuse people into thinking he has their best interests at heart, while keeping his real motivations close to the chest and hiding information that might change people’s minds so HE gets what HE wants. He cons Admiral Vance (so far, the most ethical Starfleet admiral I have yet to encounter who wasn’t part of the main cast of a show before being promoted, and some of them don’t count either) into giving him unlimited resources, convinces Book to turn against his friends because “It’ll be fine, everyone wins if I get what I want;” then when that doesn’t work he keeps moving the goalposts, bringing more people in, convincing them that if they just keep taking the easy way out, everything will be better. Once you know his real motivations, the audience can tell Tarka doesn’t care about anyone, not even his “”””FRIEND”””” he wants to meet in another universe. Who cares how many corpses you leave behind, if your goal is to escape to another universe where they’ll either be alive or never born anyway? Tarka’s a tech-bro nightmare, a charismatic inventor with a moral vacuum where his heart should be, who knows just how to con someone into doing what he wants. Plus, he’s Risian, which is just hilarious.

51 & 52. Science Ninja Team Gatchaman II & Gatchaman Fighter: The beginning of the 1970’s redefined the Japanese superhero genre with a number of new TV shows and manga, but two were the most important: Shotaro Ishinomori’s Kamen Rider, and Tatsunoko Production’s Gatchaman. They both introduced the helmeted superhero design that became standard in later superhero and giant robot shows, and Gatchaman introduced the themed, color-coded five-hero team that became the standard for the rest of the decade and still influences Power Rangers today. But, while Kamen Rider ran for two years and had several sequels immediately following its ending, then popped up every few years until petering out in the 80’s before reemerging in 2000, Gatchaman ran two years and just ended, followed by several similar shows by the same team, like Casshern, Hurricane Polymar, and Tekkaman. It took almost five years—and a release of a movie clip show summarizing the original—for Tatsunoko to return to their golden boy for two more series that ran back-to-back and continue the plots from the original series, flowing one into the other almost seamlessly. The result is…well, more of what worked before, with a few changes. II and Fighters both give the heroes new vehicles, presumably to sell toys to the kids—the iconic God Phoenix craft was destroyed at the end of the original series, so at the start of II the team is given a new God Phoenix, aptly named…the New God Phoenix. They also each have their own personal craft that can launch from the main ship, but those aren’t important. A bigger hole to plug was the death of one of the main cast, the enigmatic and gruff Joe the Condor, at the end of the original series. The show briefly replaces him with a man named Hawk Getz, who turns out to be a traitor who is killed early on (although they later reveal that Hawk Getz was actually a good guy, who was killed and replaced before meeting the team—so glad we figured that out!). Joe is, of course, not dead, but was revived as a cyborg, which becomes the most interesting thing about the show, as he believes himself invincible with his newfound strength and as a result keeps taking on more and more dangerous missions in an effort to FEEL something, until his friends confront him about it. The rest of it is just more of what worked before—bad guys have big weapon, good guys have big bird ship with missiles (the aptly named…Bird Missiles). The bad guys are even basically the same—though Berg Katse, the previous catspaw of alien energy-being Leader X, died last time, it didn’t prevent X from capturing a child and mutating him (I could have sworn that child was supposed to be a girl, but what do I know) into an androgynous being known as Gel Sadra and convincing said being he (they?) will rule the Earth as leader of the Galactor terrorist organization, right up to the point where they die when not useful. The twist this time, Gatchaman knows Gel Sadra’s mom, and she starts to catch on to what happened! Well, at least it was something.

Gatchaman Fighter tried to flip the script a little bit, but only a little bit. Here, Leader X dies, but a small portion of its consciousness is able to cling to circuitry of the Galactor headquarters. Leader Z doesn’t have the energy to make its own minion anymore, but luckily enough a young European lord named Count Egobossler (great bad guy name) already has a terrorist organization, so they just rebrand it. The show never really explains what Egobossler’s motivation is--some of his employees mention they consider him a viable alternative to inequality under the existing system, which of course is never explored because we have to believe Status Quo Is Good or else what are the good guys fighting for? We ARE told Egobossler is not the real Count, but a bastard of the previous Count and his maid, and he’s locked his legitimate brother away to watch as he controls the family to his own ends, which is a good origin, but it also makes Egobossler seem justified in his actions since his dad was just awful, and while the “real” count seemed like a nice guy, must have also been naïve to ignore the injustice perpetrated to further his position in the world. There’s a short plot where Egobossler fears his people will turn on him if they find out the truth, which felt wrong to me since so many of his employees allegedly followed him for moral or aspirational reasons that had nothing to do with his social standing; indeed, the “real” count only briefly regains control of the family (and is shown to dislike what his brother did with it) before he dies and the other one’s back in charge, so what was the point of all that?

Also, Fighters starts to show the franchise’s age, as it had to compete against flashier shows with robots and special attacks, and chose to adapt by giving the team the GatchaSpartan machine, a larger place made up by combining five other machines into one. In addition, team leader Ken the Eagle (who the show sometimes just calls Gatchaman as well—make up your mind, writers) is given a lightsaber called the Gatcha Fencer, which he uses by launching his smaller jet out of the larger jet, opening the cockpit, and slicing giant robots in half himself. This is an utterly preposterous replacement for the iconic Bird Missiles and Firebird Attack of the earlier series, making the rest of the team kind of redundant and severely overpowering one tiny sword. The show writers eventually caught on and the show ends by explaining the Gatcha Fencer’s radiation is KILLING KEN, but he’s too stubborn and just keeps doing it.

So, uh, yeah. It’s more Gatchaman, and if you like the original, well, here’s some more.

This was also removed from HiDive over the summer.

50. Digimon Ghost Game: Oh my god DO SOMETHING. Continuing from last year (and with a brief pause when Toei got hacked), Digimon Ghost Game still tells episodic horror stories based around Japanese urban legends, usually with a surprise ending where a misunderstanding is explained and the Digimon’s victims all get better, but sometimes not. But, like, the difference between Digimon and Pokémon, at least on television, was always that Digimon had a PLOT, a driving impetus for the kids to get out, go places, and defeat a villain. This show HAS that, or at least has dropped enough hints, but it’s content to just keep doing the same thing over and over. Does Bandai plan to just run this until the ratings tank to sell toys? If it’s working, I guess they might, but that’s a bit of a change from what they’ve done before. There have been some absolutely nutso plots in this show so far; in one episode they did Uzumaki, that’s just wild. I just. It should be over by now. Please, let the plot progress. PLEASE.

49. Lone Wolf & Cub (1973): THE samurai manga, full stop. A legendary work by some of the greats of manga, often imitated but never equaled, Lone Wolf and Cub is such an icon it’s a shame I’ve read so little of it. Instead, I decided to watch this TV adaptation, since I had access to it on HiDive. It’s…pretty good. I do wonder why there was never an anime adaptation; it’s possible the market of the 1970’s was still too focused on children they didn’t think that was a viable option, but something is lost by not being able to exactly match Goseki Kojima’s art. The guy playing Ogami looks…a little pudgy, not gonna lie. Set sometime in the first half of the 1850’s (it’s unclear when, and the story doesn’t get too specific about the political situation beyond “it’s the Tokugawa Shogunate”), Itto Ogami was once the advisor in charge of hara-kiri (that’s the translation they used, not seppuku) for the Shogun, but the rival Yagyu clan had wanted that job as part of its plan to control all divisions of the Shogun’s government, and framed Ogami for treason in…well, a very obvious frame-up that involved killing his wife, but the thing about being a military dictator is, you don’t have to care if someone is guilty, you just kill everyone accused of treachery and figure that will get everyone who deserves it. Instead, Ogami fled with his son Daigoro, who had been hidden to save his life, and travels Japan taking assassination jobs to save money as part of a mysterious revenge plot.

In some ways, the show can get pretty dull and repetitive. Ogami’s employers are always betraying him, some woman gets close to Daigoro because she doesn’t have a child of her own, someone dies tragically, and people keep thinking it’s a good idea to kill this guy who’s killed everyone who ever drew a sword on him. However, the writers do a lot to spice things up from episode to episode, either by separating the heroes, sending them into harsh terrain, poisoning them, or having the Yagyu lure them into traps. The ongoing plot does come up at unexpected times, as the Yagyu’s leader Retsudo sends his children against Itto—in one disturbing plot, we meet Retsudo’s illegitimate children, and the series heavily implies Retsudo seriously considered raping and impregnating his own daughter to replace his other dead children (he, uh, doesn’t do that). While that is the most disturbing plot, it’s hardly alone; Ogami and Daigoro meet many an abused prostitute, mistreated maid—basically, feudal Japan was pretty hard on women, and most of them in the show end up dead. This is disturbingly common for manly-man stories of this era, as is the trend back toward WWII era nationalism in the fetishization of the swordsman’s life that is simultaneously really cool and worrying. Basically, Ogami wins so much and so decisively, it becomes kind of boring sometimes, or even more, confusing when he DOESN’T kill his enemy. The final season has a long plot where Ogami, Daigoro, and Retsudo all have to team up against the Shogun’s conniving poisons master, who somehow manages to NOT DIE for most of the season, despite being drowned, shot up, poisoned, all his catspaws killed, left out in the wild—like, everyone else dies so easily, but THIS GUY holds on? Ogami kills so many samurai the show actually implies that he was accidentally responsible for the fall of the Shogunate and reestablishment of absolute monarchy in the 1860’s, just by killing all the Shogun’s best men, leaving him with the dregs and a fractured government (also there’s an episode where a dude preaches the virtues of the emperor and Ogami kills the guy but his cult lives on, so that’s another thing setting up the fall of the shogunate).

But the real mistake was, Retsudo gets stabbed in his right eye at the end of season 1, and in seasons 2 and 3 he wears an eyepatch over his left eye. THEY THOUGHT I WOULDN’T NOTICE JUST BECAUSE THEY RECAST THE MAIN VILLAIN BETWEEN EVERY SEASON.

This show was removed from HiDive in December.

48. Centaurworld: A wild mix of movie-quality fantasy animation and late-00’s internet video humor, this show caught my attention with its bizarre trailer but apparently not too many other people were interested because it only lasted two seasons and got cancelled before I had time to watch it. I probably wouldn’t have watched it if I’d known how many freaking songs it had (look I don’t want to seem down on musicals, but TV show budgets and schedules aren’t conductive to the songwriting process in the same way as a long-gestating film or play, let’s say). Following a horse from a dark, young adult fantasy world who finds a MacGuffin that accidentally sends her to a Charlie the Unicorn fantasy world, Centaurworld at first positions itself as a fish out of water story as the serious and dour Horse (people aren’t very inventive in her universe) struggles to find her way home when surrounded by the silly, frivolous Centaurs. The first season mostly focuses on Horse’s emotional journey towards accepting her new friends and finding her own sense of fun and belonging apart from her emotional codependency with her rider (who she knows only as Rider…actually I don’t think we get another name for her), while dropping hints of a deeper conspiracy and introducing a frightening villain at the end. I guess they got the notice that there wasn’t enough viewership for more than a second season, because that really kicks things into high gear, rushing through very deep and interesting plots about self-acceptance, internalized racism, traumatic childhoods, toxic fandom, and repressed desire. The bad guy in this show is messed up, let me tell you. A lot of the conflict is the character’s internal battles literalized onto the world at large. The animation is gorgeous. The jokes…?

I was serious about the late-00’s YouTube sense of humor. In a way it was kind of nostalgic, but also a little stale. I did like the weird song about dealing with social anxiety where the kleptomaniac with a bag of holding in her stomach affected an Elizabeth Holmes impersonation, that was wild. It’s just another animated show that had a lot of things to say about a lot of deep ideas, without the room to express them properly. It’s worth a watch, just to say you’ve seen it. I don’t know any other show quite like it.

47. Super Dimension Century Orguss: Back when ya boy was just a wee lad, out on his own as a freshman in college with little to no social skills and no desire to make friends by anything other than complete coincidence and happenstance, I got really into Robotech, the 1985 anime dub that combined the series Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA into one semi-coherent narrative. At the time, as a shy kid, I sympathized with Rick Hunter/Hikaru Ichijo’s indecisiveness around women and was drawn to the soap opera aspects of Macross in the love triangle around Rick/Lisa/Minmay, feeling confident that Rick made the right choice to confess his feelings for Lisa and leave the flighty Minmay. Now, I don’t know that I’m any less introverted or any better with women these days, but as an adult rewatching Macross I’m astounded that Lisa, a powerful woman with a career of her own and oh yeah HIS COMMANDING OFFICER IN THE MILITARY, put up with Rick’s indecisive, two-timing ass long enough for him to realize that he’s being a douche (likely due to the awful advice of a clearly suicidally-depressed Claudia Grant; it is definitely NOT noble and IS super depressing that all her friends allowed themselves to die but saved Lisa because she was the only one getting laid at the end) and I feel a lot more for Minmay as someone who had a lot of responsibility thrust onto them at a young age in a difficult situation who was also being emotionally manipulated and physically abused by her asshole stalker cousin. BUT I DIGRESS.

So, taking this weirdo soap opera stuff into consideration, I was curious to see what the follow-up to Macross by the same team, Orguss, did with its hero, Kei Katsuragi, who is immediately established as a hotheaded playboy who slept around with a bunch of women. I was hoping they would be a little better about sexual freedom, especially since the show quickly put him into a matriarchy, on a ship captained by a woman and mostly staffed by women as well.

Buddy, NOPE.

The gender politics of this show are bullshit. Early on, Kei is astonished to see that the captain of the ship doesn’t care if he sees her naked; I took this as a good sign, this clearly Romani-inspired society doesn’t consider the nude body shameful and Kei needs to get over it. Oh, ho, ho, NO, ERIC, THIS IS AN ANIME; in fact the captain is not, in her society, considered a woman because SHE NEVER HAD A KID. Also, their women go STERILE at age 18 (18!!!!) which is a disturbing, PAINFUL experience characterized by intense fevers and prolonged periods of semi-consciousness. So you either have a kid or go through this and now you’re considered basically a man. (How would this even evolve, anyway? Seems very disadvantageous to procreation) So, if it’s so common, that’s just a thing that happens to this species and people accept it, right? No, the women are all TERRIFIED of being considered genderless and the captain lives every day with bittersweet regrets that she let the man she loved marry her sister instead. Oh, and of course Kei falls in love with the headstrong Mimsy, who is very close to her 18th birthday, so we’re on a ticking clock as she fights her feelings and he fights her boyfriend. (who gets to die twice! For DRAMA) And that’s before we mention the mysterious woman who definitely isn’t Kei’s bastard daughter who was conceived the night he was thrown into the future/other dimensions.

Because the show does have an interesting hook! The world they’re on is a conglomeration of several alternate-reality Earths, each fighting for dominance while the dimensional energies tear it apart! Only Kei can set it right! It’s a cool hook, the mech designs are great! Just, dear God, you didn’t have to make it so freaking UNCOMFORTABLE!

46. Birdgirl Season 2: Sure was more Birdgirl. I find myself struggling to separate what happened in season one from season 2; season 2 upped the ante on the chaotic situations and jokes that had something to say about the real world, but it also dropped some of the wilder aspects of sight gags and surreal occurrences from the first season. Many more plots dealt with Judy coming to terms with her repressed, fucked up childhood caused by her raging egotist father, but also how those around Judy are also really messed up. Apparently Charley is some sort of immortal being whose skin can come to life and eat people? I don’t know, it didn’t stick with me as much but it was still fun to watch.

45. Little Demon: A little outside my normal wheelhouse here, but one of the episode directors used to write a webcomic I read, so I figured I’d give this one a shot. A humorous take on the Omen, this show chronicles the misadventures of Chrissy Feinberg (Lucy DeVito), a young girl raised by her weird, reclusive, jacked single mother Laura (Aubrey Plaza). When Chrissy has her first period, the sky turns red and splits asunder and her mother reveals that her “spilling blood” starts the prophecy of the end times, as Chrissy is the prophesized daughter of Satan (Danny DeVito—hey, how’s that for casting?). This is gross-out humor to the extreme, like, Michael Shannon gets his dick off and won’t stop talking about it, characters travel to and from hell with horrific rituals that look like vivisections, Mel Brooks gets murdered, and one particularly tough episode about body image problems ends with the best friend character expanding like the end of Akira. It’s gross, it’s dark, and I want to say it’s touching but it’s more like it will eventually get to be touching, but can’t right now: the closest it gets is the episode where Satan and Laura have to go say goodbye to the soul of the dog they once owned together as it moves on past where Satan can reach it. Instead, the show’s first season just sets up complicated character traits to pay off later. Satan and Laura are both two extremely maladjusted people who are probably the only ones who can stand each other and have a lot in common, but Satan’s schemes to become ruler of Earth and Hell keep messing things up. Satan is driven by a bruised ego and childish desires, and wants to pass his hangups on to his daughter as if they were strengths; it almost works, but she can’t trust him either, and so spirals into denial. Chrissy is far too young to handle everything that’s been thrust upon her, and her mistakes with her powers don’t register with her as moral lessons so much as extreme emotional and physical trauma on top of an already-unsettled adolescence. I did really appreciate the moment near the end of the season when the two best-friend characters realize their whole lives have been taken over by the stars of the show and just walk out and have a good time on their own, that was a nice bit of genre-savvy writing. Like, it’s a good show. I’m honestly interested in seeing where it goes, and talented people I respect got to do their dream work on it. I’m just warning you, it can be rougher than you expect.

But there’s also an episode where Shangela hosts the Running Man, and Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a demon who looks like Danny DeVito, so, like, you have to watch THAT one.

44. Aggretsuko Season 4: I mentioned when I talked about season three that I wasn’t sure if the show ended then. Turns out it’s ending next year with season five, which might be for the best. Not that this season was bad; not at all, I think the shift of attention to Haida’s emotional problems was a big step. Sure, he managed to ask Retsuko out last season, but this one sees him come under the control of a new board member at their company, a pushy up-and-comer with no respect for experience or the established pecking order of the business who is thrust into command when the president has a heart attack. The board member pushes out older employees who push back against his new initiatives, and ingratiates Haida to him by appealing to his ego and promoting the hyena to higher offices. Consequently, Haida becomes more invested in the work—too invested, doubling down on work and sacrificing his identity apart from the business. Once the Board Member starts asking him to break rules, he’s too deep in, and his fear and ego drive him further toward his boss and cause him to push away his friends, including Retsuko, who he fought so hard to earn a relationship with.

As someone who’s put too much time and energy into unfulfilling work before myself—as we all have—I liked how this season portrayed the excuses we give ourselves for putting too much time in at work, and how slick corporate marketing can cause us to prioritize the company’s needs over our own. I did not appreciate how Retsuko took a backseat in her own show, basically watching as her boyfriend disappeared into a corporate stooge until she and the gang led an intervention at the end. I suppose it was inevitable; the third season left Retsuko an out from her corporate job, even as she left her idol group she was still popular enough, and this season saw her establish her own YouTube how-to channel that was quite successful. She has enough contacts with other industries and businessmen that she could leave her thankless job anytime she wanted to, but the show needs her to stay or it loses its supporting cast, its reason for being. Maybe she’ll finally pull that plug in the final season; I hope she does. The show’s still good, but when the main character outgrows the premise, it’s time to let her do so—offscreen.

43. The Ghost and Molly McGee: This was cute. Which is one of the two reasons I watched it, that it looked cute. The other reason was it starred Ashly Burch and Dana Snyder, two actors whose work I’ve enjoyed before—and I got a bonus Lara Jill Miller using the same voice she did as Kari in Digimon, as the best character, Libby. The premise of this cartoon is the McGee family moves to a new town, Brighton, which is…not really a good neighborhood. Its industries have all closed, its mayor is phoning it in, most of the population is aging into retirement, and local ghost Scratch has been failing upward by using the already dismal mood of the town to convince the other ghosts that he’s great at making humans miserable. Enter an irrepressible little girl who decides he’s going to be her best friend, and whoops he cursed himself to be tethered to her, a premise the show sometimes forgets when it’s convenient to the narrative. Cue a series of low-stakes, stereotypical kids sitcom plots that can include a song montage somewhere (most of these aren’t great, but the snow one where Molly slowly goes insane was pretty good, and I like the point in the montage where the retirees are helping rebuild an outdoor stage where a dude dies and Scratch has to push his spirit back into his body to keep working, that’s fucked up). The show’s comedy has just enough of an edge to keep me interested without slipping into outright cynicism like BotBots, like a recurring joke where the failing infrastructure of the town kills an animal and you see its spirit run off away from the corpse, or Molly’s severe insecurity bordering on paranoia, or the cluelessness of school popular girl/bully/Instagram influencer/actually an okay person, Andrea. And the animation is actually really good; even a cheap, Flash-style computer-animated show can show off great fluidity and exaggeration like you used to only get from hand-drawn these days (one of the main animators also made some wonderful Phoenix Wright animations on YouTube, so she knows what she’s doing). It’s not my favorite, and I may forget to check back in when new episodes air, but you know, it’s okay, and that’s better than I feared.

42. Transformers: Earthspark: It’s an Alan Tudyk year, as he’s Optimus Prime now. Just saying.

Earthspark is a triumphant return to real shows with a budget for Transformers, after years of non-union actors sleepwalking their way through lines and cheap CGI barely piecing things together (Cyberverse was pretty good though). The plus side is, it picks up on the comic’s plotline from the John Barber/James Roberts era, where the war had ended and Optimus and Megatron have made peace, but moves the action to Earth, with the Transformers stranded there, cut off from Cybertron after a major battle in the early 1990’s. Decepticons are a minor threat, mostly imprisoned, with only a few still running amok in uncoordinated attacks of desperation or anger. The ten episodes dropped so far hint that Megatron is reconsidering coming around to Optimus’s point of view, as he watches his people condemned to a life in a cage by uncaring humans, with no end game in sight except, maybe, Cybertronian enslavement or eradication, and Optimus either unwilling to let himself see it, or resigned to the least-worst fate. Optimus, at least, is hiding some things from the humans, so he too has regrets about his decisions. These concerns were left to linger for future episodes, however, with the climax instead focusing on a big battle with a human accumulating Cybertronian technology for his own goals.

But what is Optimus hiding? Oh, that more Transformers have started to be born on Earth, like series stars Twitch and Thrash, who are bonded to two human children, Robby and Mo Malto, whose mother fought alongside the Transformers during the years the Transformers war on Earth ran hot. Most of the episodes so far are low-stakes affairs, as the kids and “Terran” Transformers learn life lessons from Bumblebee (and their mistakes). It’s the kind of “we’re all family here!” feel-good stuff that’s popular in kids cartoons these days, but was completely missing from the toy tie-in advertisements of MY childhood, and therefore feels wrong, even as I understand the narrative necessity. These types of stories rarely last once the shows plots ramp up though, so I doubt we’ll have much more time for them next year.

41. Ms. Marvel: Kamala Khan is a new character I don’t know much about, except what I’ve heard from others and what I’ve seen in team books. I also don’t go much for teen-centered superhero comics, just because I’m an adult who grew up reading comics about adults for children, so reading about teenagers expressing their feelings and not just repressing them like Spider-Man in the 1960’s is confusing and alien to me. But.

Ms. Marvel was a really good show, a great adaptation of what I know about the character for the very different world of Marvel movies. This necessitated some changes that don’t really hold up to scrutiny for the continuity—Patrick pointed out that most people wouldn’t know who Captain Marvel was, and would have just seen her in the final battle against Thanos, so it’s a little weird that they had a whole costume contest for her, but you know…maybe the Avengers had a website with information about her. I do think it’s weird that a convention had no guests and was all booths in a shady warehouse but hey it’s New York. Ms. Marvel is also another superhero film that dumped the concept of a secret identity as soon as possible, but I do understand why: Kamala coming to terms with her status as a child of immigrants, fusing her modern American girl image of herself with her parent’s conceptions based on their history and fears was the emotional crux of the series, and having her keep a side of herself hidden from her parents would have undermined that, kept them…not villains, per se, but antagonists, so having her open up to them was a good call for the narrative. The characters are broad enough to be memorable in the short runtime, but deep enough that they can surprise each other in funny, interesting ways. They’re obviously setting up bringing in more from the comics, and I’m here for it, build a big story that’s not just five chapters long, do it.

I does suck that Kamala’s origin has to be tied to something else, though. In the comics she just has stretchy powers, and that’s a big part of her aesthetic, with catchphrases like “embiggen” based around her stretchiness; she got these powers from the Inhuman’s Terrigen mist which blah blah blah don’t worry about it. After the Inhuman’s show bombed because it was one of the worst TV shows I’ve ever seen, they decided to make Kamala…one of the Clan Destine instead, an even more obscure Marvel group created by Alan Davis. Which. Fine. But they messed with her powers too? Just another little weirdness made by the MCU fixing what isn’t broken, I guess. Oh and maybe she’s a mutant, who cares.

40. Doctor Who: Tom Baker Season 6: This was the season where Douglas Adams was the script editor. So. You know.

EXCEPT

I’d already seen the two Douglas Adams-scripted (or co-written) serials of the season, “City of Death” (which he finished after the original writer had to drop out due to personal reasons) and the infamously-unfinished “Shada” (which has now, through animation, been finished, and may be the greatest Doctor Who episode of all time). So, those episodes can’t count for this review, leaving us with just “Destiny of the Daleks”, “Creature From the Pit,” “Nightmare of Eden,” and “The Horns of Nimon.”

“Destiny” is a rather limp effort from Dalek creator Terry Nation, a sequel to his excellent “Genesis of the Daleks” from Baker’s first season (another contender for the best episode ever) that sees the Dalek’s revive their (in-universe) creator, Davros, in the hopes that he will be able to solve their stalemate with the mechanical Movellians. The Doctor and Romana are caught between them and have to blow them all up while saving their slaves. This one feels like a retread of better Dalek stories from before, like maybe they didn’t show up as often because Nation was running out of ideas. “Creature” is more interesting, following the Doctor and Romana to a jungle planet where metal—any metal—is a precious resource, and is ruled by a queen whose wealth is based on control of the only mine on the planet, and is suspicious of the Doctor and Romana and wants their metal tools to increase her wealth, or else they’ll be fed to the eponymous Creature in the Pit. In a nice twist, the Creature turns out to be an ambassador from another planet, trying to negotiate a trade treaty where his planet can offload excess metals for the jungle planets excess plants, and the planet’s queen threw the Creature into the Pit so he wouldn’t disrupt her monopoly, and therefore control—a very Star Trek concept, where the dictator has become so used to power she works against her best interests out of fear of being on a level playing field with those she’s oppressed. Kind of reminds me of anti-feminist tracts from the Victorian era. “Nightmare of Eden” is kind of a lame drug running mystery, where the villain is cartoonishly obvious and the solution is hampered only by bureaucracy run amok (with maybe a side of fascism). “The Horns of Nimon” is another plot about the gullibility of the fascist, where a military power fallen into poverty blindly accepts a deal that promises to put them back in charge of the system without considering what their benefactors hope to gain, and so doom themselves to death through ignorance while also damning several others to slavery and death in a blind panic to retain what power they have. As a parable of a crumbling empire, it must have struck home to the British of the late-70’s; certainly a self-interested charlatan duping people into believing they can revive their nation through cruel exploitation of other countries doesn’t have any political implications for the modern world, does it?

So yeah, still a pretty good season, but without those two serials I’d already seen it drops in quality a bit.

39. Young Justice: Phantoms: Greg Weisman is once again the victim of his own love of serialized storytelling. He can’t just end a story, he has to start five more. Phantoms continues the adventures of “the Team,” now older and hopefully wiser, and follows several different classic members of the Young Justice cast in separate adventures that all come together at the end of the season. Picking up after Superboy’s “death” in the first half of the season from 2021, the second half of Phantoms deals with grief, as Beast Boy falls into a deep depression, pushing away his friends and teammates, and the other Team members remember Superboy and deal with their grief in their own way. Concurrent to this, Rocket struggles as a single mom of an autistic boy, but refuses to admit her son has a learning disability and needs specialized care, and avoids her problem by going on a mission to New Genesis, where she befriends Orion, whose struggles with the part of himself that comes from Darkseid help Rocket come to terms with her own doubts about herself as a mother. Oh, and Superboy is, of course, not dead, but in the Phantom Zone, where he struggles to remember himself while being taunted by illusions of Lex Luthor and a dead Superman. This all goes wrong when he’s found by Zod, who knows a thing or two about manipulating someone in a vulnerable emotional state. Oh, and of course there’s time travel stuff going on too, with Legion of Super-Heroes members jaunting about, trying to restore the timeline after Zod and his crew escaped the Zone in THEIR time, and now Zod’s son is trying to make sure his father wins against his enemies.

It's a lot, and it all comes together fairly nicely with a big set-piece fight and a good finale for Conno\er and M’gann, but, just like last time Young Justice got cancelled, there’s a lot of Darkseid stuff left on the table, and I don’t know why they didn’t just, you know, FINISH IT, instead of doing more building and setting up more heel turns for future episodes that wouldn’t come. It’s pretty clear that the budget wasn’t there this season; a few times they flash back to seasons 1 and 2 when they had that Cartoon Network money and the animation is much more fluid in those compared to the stiff, minimal motions of this season—some flashbacks are told entirely in still frames. I’m very sorry to see it go, but it’s not like I couldn’t have told them this would happen…

38. Blue Gale Xabungle: In addition to being the year for catching up on He-Man, this was the year for catching up on non-Gundam shows by Yoshiyuki Tomino, and Xabungle is probably the weirdest one he ever did. It starts off similar to some of his later works, following a group of travelling merchants on a desert planet that is ruled by a separate class of gentry who live in bubbles and have technology beyond that available to the average person on the surface, which they dole out at their own whims. The planet is governed by one code: you have three days to get revenge if someone wrongs you, and you just don’t go beyond that. The main character, Jiron Amos, disobeys this law by seeking revenge for the death of his parents a week before the show started, and is treated like a madman. So of course the rule is broken all over the place by the end.

However, as the show progressed it developed a sense of humor about itself. The designs were already goofier than a lot of contemporary robot shows, so maybe being sillier was always the plan, but they started pushing toward fourth wall-breaking very quickly. GoShogun had success with similar levity the year before, so I can understand why comedy might have seemed appealing, but unlike the superhero/supervillain world-conquest fight in GoShogun, Xabungle deals with deeper concepts of revenge, peasant revolts, mind control, and nuclear escalation. Four episodes in, a character who had been a major player up to that point just falls out a window and dies. We watch a man slowly die from an infection his immune system can’t handle, all the ruling class (the “Innocent”) can’t handle the surface of the planet. Tomino loves jarring deaths and sudden switches in tone during wartime, but Xabungle is more jarring than most, and it often took me out of the narrative.

I was also disappointed in the treatment of Elchi Cargo; she was my favorite character, an independent woman, a wealthy merchant’s daughter who thought her purpose in life was to bring culture to the masses, and would fucking shiv anyone who tried to stop her. She is forced by the death of her father to take over his business, and then by circumstances and attacks to fight to retain that business, and to keep her employees and the other main characters safe. So of course near the end of the series she gets captured and brainwashed, turned into an emotionless killing machine working against her friends. She does recover near the end, so things turn out alright for the character, but I think a lot of media, and especially anime, default to mistreating powerful women for drama, and I was disappointed to see this here.

Also, Xabungle was another show dropped from HiDive so who knows how you can watch it.

37. Spy × Family: It’s been a long, long time since I watched the Big Anime For the Year when it aired, but SxF caught my attention when the first volume of the manga released because of its crisp, deceptively simple art style and intriguing plot: in the middle of a cold war between the countries Westalis and Ostania, a Westalis spy known only as Twilight must infiltrate the opposing country and pose as a family man to get close to his target, a prominent nationalist politician trying to instigate a new war between the two countries. To do this, he must, on the fly, gain a child and a wife, which he miraculously manages, under the pseudonym Loid Forger. Unknown to him, his new wife, Yor Briar, is Ostania’s top assassin who was looking for cover herself; both parents are unaware of the others’ real job and just think they’ve found a very nice, accommodating person willing to pretend to be their spouse for purely economic reasons; it’s not like they l-like each other or anything, baka. However, the little girl they’ve adopted, Anya, knows everything, because she was psychic powers, but is also only like six so she’s still very naïve and makes Rugrats-type misunderstandings of what her parents tell her. Komedy!

I definitely liked the first half of the season more than the second, for the very simple reason that it falls into the shonen anime trap, which I will explain more in a later review I wrote before this one; but, in summary: to stretch out the series, new characters are introduced who also distract from the main plot. Twilight, Yor, and Anya have all been used as tools of a thoroughly corrupt state, no matter which side of the cold war they come from; Twilight and Yor especially have been so indoctrinated that they justify the horrible crimes the state has them commit as the only path toward peace, when in fact they’re merely prolonging the conflict. Their masters send them out on assassination and infiltration missions for subjects as minor as someone trying to reveal a politician wears a toupee; ANYTHING could send these countries into a violent war, and as thrilling as Operation: STRIX, the infiltration of the politician’s inner circle through his son’s prestigious school, is, I hope we’ll eventually see the Forger family and the friends turn against their political masters and try to establish a better regime that will lead to real world peace. Instead, the second season becomes bogged down by additional characters, like Yor’s brother Yuri from the secret police who has the Anime Disease of being…well, being in love with his sister. The slightest consolation is the show looks down on this instead of portraying it as normal, which a disturbing number of anime do. Then, just to be fair, Twilight gets a coworker who is also in love with him, but would be mean to Anya, so we have to do a few episodes with her. I worry these kinds of additions, while they help the author and publisher keep a popular series going, detract from the tight pacing and thematic elements that drew me to the series in the first place, and don’t want to see them take over the show. (The crush Damian Desmond, the son of the target of Twilight’s mission, refuses to admit he has on Anya is, however, fine, as is the romantic tension between the “parents”—those are part of the appeal. Also, Anya’s friend Becky’s childhood crush on Loid hasn’t gotten weird yet, but I’m sure it will…) It’s an intriguing show, but I’m more interested in where it’s going than where it’s been right now.

36. Fighting General Daimos: The odd one out of the Robot Romance Trilogy by director Tadao Nagahama, Daimos follows a single robot pilot who controls a transforming tractor trailer and is assisted by two other pilots who have a separate plane they fight in, instead of a robot composed of five vehicles like Combattler V and Voltes V. It also distinguishes itself from the rest of the trilogy by actually being BASED AROUND A ROMANCE, a star-crossed lovers situation between the human robot pilot and the sister of the alien general. Not complicated enough for you? How about the fact that the alien woman, Erika, killed the father of the robot pilot, Kazuya? But she only did it because she thought Kazuya’s father had killed her father? But of course that was a false flag assault by her uncle, who has seized power in the alien state and sent his nephew to lead the assault against Earth as a plot to get rid of him and Erika messed that up through her pacifism, but also she had amnesia so she didn’t know she was an alien when she met Kazuya? I hope that’s star-crossed enough for you, I don’t want to have to get into the second half of the series when she fakes her death to lead an underground pacifist organization composed of members of both factions hiding out in the wilderness of New Zerland (sic).

Whereas most romances in anime feel forced or even emotionally toxic, Daimos benefits from its strong focus on Kazuya and Erika’s relationship because it adds real stakes and character to a genre that, up until then, was mostly based around episodic combat, where the personalities were broad and designed to revert to status quo. The previous installments of the Robot Romance Trilogy had worked against this a little with Stan Lee-like interpersonal combat, but Daimos stands out for the ongoing plot it managed to achieve, with threads continuing from episode to episode in a way that even my beloved Voltes V didn’t quite manage. Of course, the trend toward status quo also hurt it; the need to keep the lovers apart meant quite a few episodes revolve around Erika breaking out of confinement, only to end up right back there at the end, which got extremely frustrating after awhile. Also, its story of political maneuvering by the villainous uncle was a bit of a repeat from Voltes V, without the more political angle of the peasant rebellion against the nobility that really made the earlier show stand out, although Daimos did have a shocking storyline that ended with the pie-in-the-sky dream of the United Nations voting to disband the permanent seats on the security council, sapping the “Big Five” of their control of that body and giving power to the smaller states. I thought that was extremely politically topical for a show designed to sell toys to kids.

After this series, the director moved on to some other shows, directing a few episodes of Rose of Versailles and Ulysses 31, both very popular. Unfortunately, director Nagahama contracted hepatitis while on vacation shortly after, and died. I think his work definitely influenced Gundam, VOTOMS, Macross—heck, Voltron’s plot is extremely similar to Voltes V, and not just from the color-coded combining robots. I count his work as the earliest robot shows I can recommend without reservation, and that’s quite an accomplishment.

35. Doctor Who: Jodie Whittaker Specials: It feels weird to do a review of three episodes, right? Even though I guess I’m doing that with other shows, that’s just an artifact of how my viewing divided up; this one was designed to be three episodes. I guess that wasn’t the intent, just an artifact of how things worked out. Still, what an oddly unsatisfying year for Doctor Who. It feels like Jodie Whittaker just started, and now we’re losing her; these three episodes play out like a would-have-been of season-long plots if they’d only had more time. “Eve of the Daleks” was a fun time-loop story with the Biggest Bad of the series, a bottle episode set entirely in a storage warehouse, with a humorous unseen character who hordes things in storage containers, an odd couple stuck working on New Year’s who get roped into Doctor shenanigans, and, oh yeah, payoff of the slow build that Yaz is in love with the Doctor, and her and the Doctor having to deal with the ramifications of that after Dan figures it out before either of them. I surprised myself by enjoying the organic way that relationship built, as opposed to the Dream Girl plot Rose was saddled with way back in Series 1, and looked forward to what might happen, even though I knew there was no time for anything. So, being no time, no movement was made: Legend of the Sea Devils was a fun but mostly-forgettable pirate-themed romp with a classic villain that ends with the Doctor reciprocating Yaz’s feelings, and then onto the big finale!

“The Power of the Doctor,” whoof. A good episode, but it didn’t look that way at the start; overstuffed with an unrelated cold open, three villains, returning companions from Whittaker’s seasons and even before that, cameos from previous Doctors, and that twist ending—it’s a lot! When Jess and I were chatting about it on Discord, she said the Daleks felt extraneous, like it could have just been the Master teaming up with the Cybermen (again) and I agree, it could have shaved off a lot of extra work to fit them into the plot (and we already had a Dalek story this season), but aside from the rush to set everything up at the start, the pieces of the story’s puzzle all fell together nicely, and even the returning companions, Ace and Tegan, got a lot of development to hanging plot threads left over from how they were written out in the eighties (or, in Ace’s case, how the show ended when her character was still travelling with the Doctor, so we never got to see what happened between them that she wasn’t there in the TV movie). It did a lot of heavy lifting to resolve the Doctor’s doubts over the new information she has about her origin and put all the companions in a good place—but as a result, just like in the previous two episodes, her relationship with Yaz that I was excited about was relegated to one scene where they ate ice cream before she regenerated. Ah, well. As endings to disappointing runs go, this was less disappointing than most; if only the rest of Chibnall’s Who had been like this.

34. SSSS.Dynazenon: SSSS.Gridman was a surprising delight a few years ago, a shock revitalization of a show I loved as a kid into a compelling exploration of the meaning of reality, toxic fandom, depression, and big superheroes combining with robots to punch monsters. And Transformers references. If SSSS. Dynazenon had been just more of that, I would have been satisfied.

Well, that’s exactly what it was.

Following up an indeterminate amount of time after the end of SSSS.Gridman (which itself took place an indeterminate amount of time after the original Gridman), in a reality of indeterminate relation to the one(s) experienced in the Gridman shows, Dynazenon follows the mysterious shonen anime protagonist Gauma, who has somehow been thrown into a moody teen drama between the shy Yomogi and the depressed Yume, who acts out by ghosting everybody in school and gets away with it because she’s hot. They, Yomogi’s friend Koyomi, and sometimes Koyomi’s younger cousin Chise, are all convinced by Gauma to pilot a combining robot, Dynazenon, who is clearly based on the Dyna Dragon (aka Draco) from the original Gridman, who was the only hero unit from that show not adapted for SSSS. Gridman (and a personal favorite). Gauma holds information close to his chest, but he’s fighting against the Kaiju Eugenicists, a group of people who control giant monsters and are working toward their own ends and have a history with Gauma.

The series, as before, perfectly blends the giant monster battles with interpersonal drama, not just will-they-or-won’t-they between the main love interests, but smaller conflicts like the villains doubting their paths, or Chise feeling left out since she doesn’t have a robot to pilot herself (wonder if they fix that during the show, WINK). The episode where the heroes and villains all go to the pool at the same time and the lifeguard keeps yelling at them is a favorite. SSSS.Gridman just felt sharper, you know? Certainly, the “main characters” of Gauma and Yomogi felt a little overshadowed by the supporting cast in a way that wasn’t true of Yuta, Rikka, and Sho of SSSS.Gridman. Maybe it’s because the stakes were higher, maybe it’s because I’ve experienced a narrative like this before, or maybe it’s because we, the audience who watched SSSS.Gridman know more about the character’s world than even they do, so I was always waiting for another shoe to drop when they find out what I knew (which…kind of happens halfway through—couldn’t get through this without some familiar faces, you know?). Or, maybe it’s because they knew they would get a movie to tie the two shows together. Looking forward to THAT next March…

33. Legends of Tomorrow, Season 7, part 2: Alas, the final season; although they were clearly running out of ideas and just repeating/one-upping previous seasons, it’s still a shame to see this one leave on a cliffhanger while the Flash got 13 episodes to finish up, but maybe they’ll follow up that cliffhanger on the Flash next year. You can’t just cast Donald Faison as Booster Gold and then cancel the show that episode! Bullshit!

Still, the show did manage to make some good points about superhero fiction and the possibility of change and redemption, in its usual meta-fictional, cartoonish way. The Legends ended up fighting 90’s Extreme versions of themselves, roided to the max and killing people for great justice. This provided a nice contrast of the character development and growth the Legends had been allowed to experience on their show, against the trends towards fabricated conflict and, uh, summary imprisonment without trial on shows like the Flash; an argument in favor of feelings and compassionate reform against the fascist trend in dark, angsty superhero media. Even as it slid back into the formula of time travel adventures, away from the retro-gangster storyline of the 2021 half of the final season, having two different versions of the characters fighting themselves and trying to argue for their own existence was a nice twist on a concept otherwise growing stale. Still not as stale as its peers, but a little stale.

I do understand that there are situations outside of the showrunner’s control with the cancellation here; WB is selling their stake in the CW, and since they made most of the network’s money through streaming and that revenue stream doesn’t help the new owners, all the old superhero shows have to go. Just, why did this one have to go first?

32. Doom Patrol (Season four): The Patrol’s back and as dumb as ever. Only five episodes into what looks like the final season (but who knows), the Patrol has finally started working as a superhero team, but is still avoiding dealing with their problems. Larry feels like he can heal through communing with his newborn negative energy spirit, Keeg, but he struggles to understand Keeg after a peek into the future spooks the kid. Cliff, on the other hand, is excited to finally be able to feel something due to technological advances, and wants to use this power to spend more time with his family, finally able to touch his grandson instead of just miming the act of holding him without the sensation of it, but instead his violent life prevents him from attaining this simple pleasure, replaced only with the horrible feeling of cold death “for the greater good.” Rite and Rouge still have a lot of baggage that they’re not dealing with. Jane is struggling to understand herself as an individual, other than an aspect of Kay Challis. Cyborg tries to resume the life he left to be a superhero. It’s an intriguing culmination of the themes the show’s pursued through the rest of the run, and they’re bringing in more classic concepts from Drake and Premiani’s original DP, along with a bit of Rachel Pollack and even Gerard Way’s characters, but not enough has happened for me to get a definitive picture of how I feel about it yet. The budgets do feel smaller, since very few of the supporting cast have shown up; Cliff probably could have gone and spent time with his grandson by now, but maybe they can’t get the actors for his family back yet, you know? The Rita-focused episode was fun, and the cut away to Danny the Street, Nora-Lee Corrupt, and Dorothy Spinner were fun, and I hope for more like that this season. This show hasn’t let me down yet, it just picked a bad time to pick up again.

And bring back Flex Mentallo, damn it!

31. Kid Cosmic: This one almost snuck by me. The only show Netflix actually let Craig McCracken make during his exclusivity contract with them, Kid Cosmic is a 1970’s rural kid rebellion story about a nerdy, hyperactive orphan who discovers a crashed alien spaceship and uses the artifacts within to give himself superpowers (“FINALLY!” he exclaims upon finding a crashed flying saucer in the desert). Kid loves living out his superhero fantasies, but struggles to control his powers, which just get worse as some of the other artifacts pass to other townspeople who can use them better. Early on, the show has low stakes as the characters learn to use their powers and have mostly-offscreen battles with weirdo aliens looking to take the superpowers for themselves, but as it progresses the team finds themselves in increasingly perilous and weirdo out-there adventures; each season has a different setting and theme, and each of the main cast of characters has a complete arc that runs through the series. I’d really like there to have been more, but by the time I got around to watching it, the show was already cancelled and McCracken moved onto a supposedly-upcoming Powerpuff Girls reboot because no one wanted the new shows he was pitching (no, not that CW pilot, with the sale of the network I think that’s officially dead). It’s a shame, too; McCracken clearly still has whatever “it” factor drove the Powerpuff Girls back in the day, effortlessly threading the needle for true “family” entertainment that doesn’t talk down to kids and provides enough action and drama for adults (though maybe I’m not an objective judge of that). Trite storylines about damaged orphans play out with emotional realism, villainous caricatures of toxic fandom play out as if from experience (though I am a little tired of the nerd who lives with his mom stereotype, at least Mom gets some revenge here), and a wonderful retro-comic aesthetic complimented by a weirdo-punk soundtrack. Give it a try if you have the time, and a Netflix account.

30. Aura Battler Dunbine: “Fortunate are those who remember the tale of Byston Well. Though we’ve been born on this Earth with those memories imprinted upon us, it is in our nature such that we cannot remember them.”

Another Tomino mecha anime, Dunbine follows the adventures of Show Zama, a disaffected motorcyclist who is shunted from our Earth to a fantasy world called Byston Well and drafted into a war of conquest by nobleman Drake Luft, who wishes to rule the world himself. Show breaks free from him and joins the rebellion, led by Neil Given, whose land was taken by Drake and loves Drake’s daughter, Elmelie, who rebels against her father; although, perhaps Show’s real reason for leaving is his feelings for the beautiful robot pilot from Texas who also sided with Neil, who has the completely plausible name of Marvel Frozen.

Dunbine is a fascinating example of the ways the giant robot anime genre was forced to evolve as it became more and more crowded in the early-80s, mixing fantasy and the real robot combat in a way that few shows have done since (Escaflowne comes to mind). I’ve heard it referred to as the first isekai, although I think John Carter of Mars disproves that assertion. As usual with shows Tomino oversaw, it’s a fascinating watch, with great characters and a complex plot that effortlessly juggles multiple moving pieces—well, almost. Like Xabungle and Daimos, it mistreats one of its female leads, in this case Elmelie, whose escape attempts from her father’s control almost always fail and exist only to add tension to the episodes; even when she does escape, she spends a few episodes under suspicion from her allies and is then recaptured. She also had a completely pointless death, but completely pointless deaths ARE kind of the point in Tomino’s anti-war war stories, so that’s more a feature than a bug, but I had hoped this one would trend towards a happier ending, or at least a bittersweet one like Turn-A Gundam. At the very least, the fantasy setting allowed Tomino to explore ideas he was clearly interested in but didn’t really fit with his other series; I’d always begrudgingly accepted the “psychic” elements of the “Newtypes” in Gundam, but here the “aura power” created from humans travelling through the “Aura Road” to Byston Well, which gave them the ability to power giant robot “Aura Machines” and limited precognitive abilities they used in battle, like Goku sensing someone’s power levels, make sense in a fantasy setting in a way Amuro’s powers didn’t in Gundam’s hard-scifi universe.

Also, the show’s pacing could use some work. They introduce some really interesting ideas that are never followed up on. My favorite idea they introduced involved the Ferrario, a fairy race that are divided between the classic mythological Fae-like Ae Ferrario and the cute, tiny fairies, the Mi Ferrario. A recurring joke that Mi Ferrario are generally considered untrustworthy pays off when Silky Mau, the Ae Ferrario, is brought before her queen, Jacoba Aon, for punishment for bringing Earthmen to Byston Well, Jacoba transforms Silky into a Mi Ferrario as punishment, explaining that all Mi Ferrario were transformed from Ae Ferrario who broke the law. Main character Cham Huau, a Mi Ferrario, becomes terrified, as SHE DIDN’T KNOW THAT’S HOW SHE CAME TO BE, AND DOESN’T REMEMBER WHAT SHE DID. Never comes up again. I also wish the show hadn’t chosen to end its plot on main Earth and had just contented itself to a short plotline where Show and one of Drake’s troops are stranded there mid-series, but I’m not sure if that would have solved any problems, it’s just that the show really dragged after that, like each episode was just killing time until the scheduled end, repeating the same battle over and over with no change as the heroes failed to make a dent in the enemy forces and pissed off the Earth troops. If it was even two episodes shorter, the ending would have been tighter and I’d like it a lot more.

29. Lupin III Part 6: After last year’s very interesting mix of a Sherlock send-up and special episodes by guest writers from prominent classic anime, I was really looking forward to the second half of this show following up on the first’s promise of a boy-genius Moriarty tangling with Lupin, or maybe learning more about the complicated secret plans of Albert D’Andressy, the villain from Part V who seems to also be a descendant of Arsène Lupin. Imagine my surprise when I got none of that! Instead, the story switched to a mystery about Lupin’s past, when a mysterious group of female assassins arrives on the scene, claiming to be employees of Lupin’s dead mother! Well, not his real mother, that was just a cliffhanger to shock you into coming back, but a woman who raised him. What follows is a story about questioning everything we ever knew about Lupin, about his origins, his purpose, and his relationship to this mysterious woman and boy am I sick of stories like this. It reminded me of that plot in Matt Smith’s time on Doctor Who where they made a big deal out of the Doctor’s “real name,” and I just rolled my eyes because, what kind of payoff can you do with that? He’s not going to turn out to be someone we know from history, he’s not God or anything (not that they haven’t done that as allegory), all that could happen was it turns out the whole time we’ve been wondering he was just Doctor Bob. Doctor Bob, all along!

So of course, it turned out his “real name is the DOCTOR!” and in much the same fashion, Lupin’s going to do Lupin and his past doesn’t matter, no matter what the post-hypnotic suggestion implanted in his subconscious when he was a little boy tells him. Oh, I’m so glad we spent 12 episodes on that (even though this season also had a lot of fun “done-in-one” episodes in addition to the main plot, they were all tied together retroactively at the end of the season when Lupin’s “mother” revealed she’d manipulated the women who appeared in those episodes, somehow). Not that it was bad, by any stretch, and it did set up yet ANOTHER antagonist lurking out there somewhere, looking to interfere in Lupin’s plots in a potential future sequel, but the second half of Part VI just wasn’t up to the standards of the first half, or indeed Parts IV and V before it. At the very least, I would have liked a cameo from Part V’s main character Ami Enan in the same way Part IV’s Rebecca Rosselini showed up at the end of Part V, but it was not to be. Ah, well. Better luck next time.

28. Star Trek: Picard Season 2: I’m going to need to talk about plot elements in this one, so don’t read if you don’t want to know.

I was easier on season one of Picard than a lot of other reviewers, and I completely understand why. One of the problems with having your main actor be one of the producers of a television series is, he’s going to make sure his character arc is something HE finds interesting, or else he just won’t do it. Sometimes this gets you bizarre scenes like the one in Nemesis, where Picard drives around the desert in a dune buggy because Patrick Stewart liked off-roading in his free time and could convince Paramount to fund it. So, in every season, Picard must delve deep into his psyche, and overcome some doubt that has haunted him forever, or deal with a personal trauma buried deep within his past. This season, he does both, through the hackneyed plotline of Mommy Issues. At the very least, Stewart does a good job of it, and it does fit as an explanation of Picard’s…reserve, shall we say, in romantic issues. Thank God that at least the hints early on that Picard’s father was abusive toward his mother were misdirection, though the reveal of the truth is still rather hackneyed (what, they didn’t have treatments for bipolar disorder in the 2310’s?).

Another disappointment? This season was sold as the final showdown between Picard and his arch-nemesis, Q, played with aplomb as usual by John de Lancie—when he shows up. Oh, sure, Q is there, and is the main threat behind everything that happens in the season, but he does most of that offscreen! He hardly shows up at all, only appearing in a handful of scenes to give cryptic hints and be like “Oh hey yeah by the way it’s me, I messed with time, sorry not sorry.” Even when he is on screen, it’s a harsher, more villainous Q of the kind that showed up in “Encounter at Farpoint” and “All Good Things…” which makes him more of a threat but completely misreads the appeal of the character. If I’m reading Superman and Mr. Mxyzptlk shows up, I don’t expect “Whatever Happened to The Man of Tomorrow?”, I want him to go looking for his buddy McGurk!

Instead, in Q’s absence, the vamping and hijinks are transferred to…the Borg Queen? Yes, she’s back, and she’s sassy this time. I guess there was always a bit of that, but I still think of the early, emotionless Borg, instead of the post-First Contact “we have a leader” version, and this time she’s very confrontational about it, manipulating Picard’s friend Agnes Jurati into not only turning on her friends, but pushing her to be more outgoing and impulsive, culminating in…well, culminating in several murders and draining lithium out of batteries to become more cybernetic, but also one time she sings Pat Benatar and that may have been too much.

Despite all that…I actually kind of liked it? Maybe part of that is because the show didn’t go with the worst possible plot; early on in episodes 2 and 3 when it looked like the cast would be stuck in YET ANOTHER alternate fascist world the season looked interminable, but instead it became a time travel story, not dissimilar to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, but now with identifiable threats with knowable motivations, so I felt more connected to the villains than the big…space…cigar with a volleyball from IV; the threat was more immediate, the motivations understandable, and therefore more real to me as a viewer. Even without Q, I found myself laughing along on some of these adventures, even if only at the absurdity. None of the plots came out of left field, and anyone could have seen Captain Rios’s “last-minute” decision coming from miles away, but the actors gave it weight, and it moved at a brisk enough pace to keep me engaged (see what I did there?).

The series also did a great job of mixing in Star Trek history without overburdening the plot—well, except for one plot point (damn, but someone in the history of the Soong family had REAL dominant genes, I’ll tell you that). Bringing back concepts from Assignment: Earth was funny, but applied well to the plot (and tying in a second classic Star Trek concept to the Assignment: Earth plot was freaking hilarious). I also really appreciate what this series has done with Seven of Nine; Voyager was the last Trek series I watched before these new ones started, and while I understand it has its fans, I was not one of them. Seven struck me as Data, again, but with tits this time, and I understand Jeri Ryan has expressed similar misgivings, so the way they’ve been able to build her up, take her away from Rick Berman’s sexist oversight, and give her real character growth is interesting (but that kiss still had only the slightest build to it, I got a hint they might be going that way but they really jumped ahead there). So, overall, I still walked away pleased with the series, despite my misgivings. I just wish I wasn’t misled about Q. And also the history of the Picard vineyard is convoluted and I don’t understand how they hold onto the land for so long without someone else inhabiting it.

Also, shout out to the return of beloved character “Punk On Bus,” that was fun.

27. Urusei Yatsura (2022): I feel pretty confident saying Urusei Yatsura was the biggest anime of the 1980’s. Bigger than Dragon Ball, bigger than Fist of the North Star. I don’t think you can argue against it; Mamoru Oshii (and others) adapted Rumiko Takahashi’s breakout manga into a countrywide smash, changing the look and feel of anime forever and creating a wave of silly high school copycats that eventually morphed into several other, more perverted genres. How do you remake that?

David Production’s answer seems to be: hem closer to the source material. The original series, especially under Oshii, made several changes to Takahashi’s source material, the most obvious being keeping Lum’s Stormtroopers around until the end, but I’ll loop back to that later. This new series makes very few changes, or rather the changes it makes are caused by skipping chapters of the manga, not changing the narrative flow of the chapters themselves. While the original series also rearranged chapters to get to the popular stuff first, it could only do so much because the manga was still running, while this new one has jumped anywhere up to halfway through the series for the stories its adapted so far. Changes from the source are minimal, though the few I’ve noticed are usually improvements: in Oyuki’s first appearance she acquiesces to Ataru’s advances, which clashes with her later appearances showing her as aloof and calm; here she is purposely manipulating him to try to trick him into shoveling her driveway. They skip chapter 3, so instead of Ataru being indebted to Lum and having to let her move in with him, she just does it and there’s no argument. They rearranged stories to push off the first appearance of Lum’s cousin Ten (understandable—Ten was very popular in the 80’s, presumably because he’s adowable baby, but since most stories take place around the high school he’s not as essential as the characters who are Lum and Ataru’s age), so some appearances by Ten have to be removed—in the most dramatic change, the final episode of the year adapts the New Year’s story at the Mendo estate, where Ten is replaced by Oyuki, Benten, and Sakura, and new jokes are written for the three of them—and Ryoko is there because it’s after her first appearance now—and they stole the ending from the Christmas chapter of the manga because it's a better punchline. No, the real treat for this series is how David Production’s staff have learned from aping Hirohiko Araki’s style for Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and adapted his use of strange colors and inset panels to UY’s 1980’s aesthetic for rich, poppy pastel designs that feel more 80’s than the actual 80’s, or by aping the covers of the manga collections with Ben Day dots and oscillating colors when the aliens use their powers.

I do, however, have to lament the loss of Lum’s Stormtroopers, the short-lived manga characters who instead were turned into mainstays of the anime. By skipping chapter 3 of the manga, they lose their first appearance, relegated only to a few chapters where Megane and Chibi show up in the background. The one chapter where all four of the Stormtroopers appeared that was adapted to the new anime, Oyuki’s origin, replaces Kakugari with Mendo. The Stormtroopers aren’t really necessary for the comedy—the show’s still riotously funny, even though the jokes are 40 years old—but Oshii’s interpretation of these four weird nerds, pushed around by their obsessive, maniacal leader who doesn’t understand interpersonal interactions any better than the rest of them, but through pushiness and bullying can corral these lonely men into doing his will with the false promise of success in dating, oh and also he’s obsessed with the Nazis for some reason NBD…that’s a very topical type of comedy that’s it’s a shame to miss out on. Well, I guess it’s okay since the original is being rereleased next year too, but…

Took too many screencaps of this one so you just get my favorite.

26. (Wonderful World of) Mickey Mouse: A 1993 survey said that, by that year, Sonic the Hedgehog was more well known with children than Mickey Mouse. I can believe it. Unlike Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, which in my day (imagine me beating someone with a cane like Cranky Kong) still ran in syndication or on basic cable, Disney was paywalled behind premium cable, only going basic cable after I’d already become a fan of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. This left Mickey in a strange position; I knew of him, I saw him at Disney World, I knew there were tons of old cartoons out there, but I’d never SEEN them. Heck, in the 90’s, they were barely making new cartoons; Prince and the Pauper, Runaway Brain…a few were available on VHS, I remember seeing Fun and Fancy Free and Mickey’s Christmas Carol at my grandparents’. Even once they started up new cartoons when I was in high school, it was like Disney liked to keep Mickey at a reserve; austere, separated from his chaotic friends, Donald and Goofy.

When I heard they were trying some new cartoons to revive Mickey like he was in the original shorts from the 20’s and 30’s, a hard-luck hero getting into unintentional antics, I was intrigued, but watching them involved just letting the Disney Channel roll and hoping to catch the shorts during commercial breaks, which wasn’t going to happen. So I waited…until now. Overseen by Paul Rudish, who worked on classic Cartoon Network shows 2 Stupid Dogs, Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, and others; ironically, Mickey Mouse, who stood apart from the antics of 90’s cartoons, is now the vessel for the continuation of that sense of humor. Each short escalates the preposterous antics of the previous ones, exaggerating the reactions of Mickey, Minnie, and the gang to legitimately funny ends (one shot of an overwrought reaction by Mickey has gained traction as a reaction image; I was present at GalaxyCon when Goofy actor Bill Farmer was asked a question about the Potato Land episode, in which Mickey and Donald build a potato-themed park to fulfill Goofy’s childhood dream and are almost killed by a flood of rotten tubers—oh, and the one where Goofy was a rotting zombie—“They didn’t used to let us do stuff like this!”). Rudish also knows when to not press the joke; he never takes it to Ren & Stimpy—or even Runaway Brain—levels of grossout humor, keeping the jokes absurd but not disturbing (except the zombie one). They’re enjoyable on their own, completely separate from the Mickey Mouse license.

I put the title in quotes because technically there are two shows: the original shorts that aired during commercial breaks on the Disney Channel, and the longer ones that were Disney Plus exclusives, but they’re the same thing really. They also had a series of four 30-minute specials this year, themed on the seasons, but the early ones (with long, musical openings and corny voiceovers linking themed vignettes) were better than the later ones (which told one long story, cutting between A and B plots for the different characters).

25. She-Hulk: A near-perfect translation of the comics to screen, in a way I didn’t trust Marvel to pull off. So much of the post-Disney Marvel media, sometimes even the comics themselves, has been obsessed with homogenizing and simplifying the weirder aspects of the source material, covering up the enthusiastic-but-corny early stuff with a snide comment to let us know they were in on the “joke” that this is all very silly while still providing a mere surface-level plot, very little subtext, and an ending that foregoes a satisfying conclusion in favor of an advertisement for the next film. Sometimes this still results in entertaining films, and we’ve seen a little pushback in films like Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, but not nearly enough for my tastes (also, love how everyone took the concept of the multiverse and ran it into the ground this year; I remember when alternate universes were still new and exciting, a SOMETIMES plot). She-Hulk immediately got on my side by keeping the most enduring trait from John Byrne’s standout series—talking directly to the viewer/writer. They update this from Byrne’s self-referential humor (“TOAD MEN, Byrne?!?”) to an Office-style confession, where She-Hulk turns to the audience to deliver some comment or extra information for the scene in progress (only sometimes noticed by the other characters). Sure, that’s kind of Deadpool’s thing now too, but Shulkie did it first and she deserves to keep it.

Putting women in charge of the writing and direction was also the correct move, even if circumstances in Hollywood (and good old greedy corporate PR cynicism) made it possibly the only choice Disney would make for a female-led series. Even with all the good Byrne and his contemporaries did back in the late-80’s and early-90’s getting She-Hulk a cult hit, critical darling comic book, that was still THE most boys-club time for comics, and they weren’t immune from “Ha-ha! The joke is she’s NAKED!” storytelling cliches (I’ve seen worse, though—at least it wasn’t Scott Lobdell). The jokes about toxic men pushing their way into women’s lives have gone around enough that I recognized stereotypes, but some other people I’ve talked to about this show…well, they didn’t interpret it quite right, so I think we can still get some play out of those plots. At the very least, the scenes about dressing nice and looking sexy were played like they empowered the women instead of just being there for the male viewers, which is a step forward from even ten years ago.

My one complaint is the ending. Not Daredevil’s walk of shame, Matt Murdock is a ho and he definitely has before and will again, fanboy haters need to calm down. When She-Hulk busts through the Disney+ menu and goes to confront Kevin Feige. I worry that Feige is becoming too entrenched in Marvel’s productions, that he has too much control, and he’s using the work of others to build his own legacy. I suppose that’s not dissimilar to what Stan Lee did, and how he lost guys like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko who believed, rightly, that they were underappreciated. Just, seeing Kevin Feige-approved sequences where people cower in fear of Kevin Feige leaves me a little uncomfortable. Plus, the whole point of that scene was She-Hulk finding a way to resolve the conflict peacefully, through constructive dialogue and compromise, like a lawyer would, instead of the typical Marvel fight scene—but we don’t get to see her do that! Instead, we jump to the end, where KEVIN solved everything, uh, itself (it’s not really Feige, see, it’s…oh, just watch the show) and we’re just told what happened afterward. The ending could have used some work, is all. But that’s it, that’s my complaint.

Oh wait, no, why’d they have to do my man Mr. Immortal like that? He’s a much nicer guy in the comics! A great boyfriend!

24. Barry season 3: Hollywood is broken. You know it, I know it. Lately it seems like everyone knows something’s wrong there, even the crazies are talking about it, but we’re so programmed to being drawn to it that unscrupulous people can still use it to their own ends. They can hide behind popularity and seemingly get away with anything.

Well, unless they get caught on tape berating a subordinate. That’ll fuck your career right up.

Barry’s third season doesn’t bother with the primary concern of the first two, whether its protagonist is redeemable: he isn’t. He knows he isn’t. There was a time he could have just stopped killing and moved on, if his “friends” had let him. Now that they’re willing to let him, it's too late. He’s done too much, the lies are too deep. Gene, who has finally found a backbone, finally actually doing something to make amends, can’t escape Barry’s decisions. His attempts to make amends for the horrible things he did (years too late, but at least he’s actually trying, unlike Barry’s complete misunderstanding of human nature) are all tainted, because they come from Barry’s generosity—leaving aside the fact that Gene isn’t even sure if he means it. Until, maybe, the end. That final shot, just, chef’s kiss. Beautiful framing.

And Sally? Oh, boy, that storyline. All she ever wanted was the lie of Hollywood, the place where dreams come true. And to be so close, so CLOSE, and have it taken away by the reality of Hollywood. That people make decisions for irrational reasons, that businesses are cruel and fickle, that they make decisions that have nothing to do with art or people. It’s frustrating! It’s especially frustrating considering the behind-the-scenes story of HBO Max, the platform Barry airs on, after the season finished, where shows were cancelled and even delisted en masse. Who wouldn’t be mad? But Sally has never handled anger well. She invents storylines where she’s the victim and makes everyone believe them. That only works when she’s in charge though. I hope she finds some freedom in going back home. She won’t.

Oh and NoHo Hank dates a married man and a lot of people die because of it, that was wild huh?

23. Gundam: The Witch from Mercury: So this show’s about ¼ of the way done and it’s already swerved me like three times. The preview episode that aired a few months before the rest of the show prepared me for a dark, daaark show, and after all it is Gundam so I’m not saying the stakes aren’t high and the political situation isn’t dire, but I was expecting full-on, Iron-Blooded Orphans-style killings in the street and kids murdering people. Instead, the first episode proper followed a socially anxious girl from the sticks, Suletta Mercury, on her first day at a prestigious private school after being homeschooled her whole life, who accidentally gets engaged to another woman, the wealthy, haughty Miorine Rembran, on her first day. This is the plot of an ecchi romcom!

Miorine’s dad killed Suletta’s dad. I don’t think they know that yet. That’s not a spoiler, you’re supposed to know that first.

The show so effortlessly blends the complicated backroom politics and undercurrent of bubbling unrest caused by a patently unfair yet completely entrenched political structure where the elite are cut off from the concerns of the average person (you know, Gundam stuff) with the light, fluffy schoolyard crush storyline that I ended up assuming the whole year was going to be a slow burn leading up to a twist at the half-year point that I was caught off guard when everything ramped up at the end of the year, ending on a…well, a wonderful discussion of both main characters’ feelings but also a great cliffhanger that brings every plot thread of the previous…my God, there’s only been twelve episodes and the main characters have already founded their own startup, broken the law, insulted the bad dad in front of his employees twice, stolen the show at a ball, cheated on each other, and accidentally killed a guy. Gundam—real Gundam, not this Build Fighter Pokemon stuff—is back; let’s hope it stays a while.

22. Bee & Puppycat: Lazy in Space: Bee & Puppycat was always a series I wanted to watch, but originally it was a little difficult to accomplish: the pilot was followed by a long break as they prepared the “series,” which was a bunch of shorts released haphazardly online and then they made a whole regular season that got memoryholed when the service it was created for cratered. Well, here comes Netflix to save the day, putting the whole missing season up on its service along with remade versions of the original shorts, which as a result I still have not watched!

Created by Natasha Allegri, part of the generation of Frederator employees who brought us Adventure Time and Steven Universe, B&P falls squarely in that same visual and emotional aesthetic. But, like. Weirder. The music and writing feel strangely detached from the action, which made me feel like the show was washing over me like the sound of waves on the beach. This is not a complaint, and perfectly fits the setting of a small island just off the coast of who cares. Bee is a mysterious orphan living on the island who seems to know everyone, but especially her lifelong friends the Wizard family, who are her neighbors. She seems especially close to Deckard, a talented chef who wants to go pro, and apparently used to date Deckard’s brother Crispin, but she is not close to Howell, who fired her for sleeping on the job. Distraught and alone, she wishes for a pet, and receives one from a magical portal: a hateful little dog-cat-man thing who gets her a job with a temp agency that exists outside reality. Thus begins a series of surreal adventures on small planets as mysterious forces conspire against our…heroes? While also their neighbors get up to shenanigans, knock up beautiful wrestlers, and oh yeah also Bee’s landlady is in a coma and all affairs of the apartment complex are handled by her son Cardamon and his maniacal pet dog Sticky.

I understand some viewers had trouble with this show, as individual episodes can sometimes feel like a disconnected series of nonsensical events leading to an anticlimax, and in those people’s defense, that is an accurate read on any one episode of Bee & Puppycat. Things just…happen, and people accept them. Bee stores all her food in the toilet for some reason and all we get is Cas Wizard saying that’s weird (Cas does have a breakdown because she’s the only one who realizes how weird things are…she’s a little repressed, quit wrestling to work as a coder, pretending she doesn’t regret it). If you have patience, however, all questions are answered pretty clearly and decisively by the end of the season. In the meantime, you’re treated to an aesthetic feast of cute, imaginative designs, played out on otherworldly vistas and terrorized by inhuman threats, all doused in an oscillating color palette of deep blacks, wild prismatic effects, and beautiful pastels. Netflix better pick this up for a second season so I see how Puppycat gets his revenge on those wizards, let me tell you.

Steve Blum is in it.

21. Pop Team Epic Season 2: I considered just doing a joke-review of Pop Team Epic. Kind of comes with the territory, right? The sketch comedy show that isn’t funny, but is also extremely funny, back again for more jokes about videogames. As the season went on, though, I considered that would be a disservice to one of the most artistically interesting series since Adventure Time went off the air. Each sketch on Pop Team Epic credits the production company that made it, wearing the differences in animation style and tone on its sleeve—or letting you know exactly who to blame. Animators even get on-screen in sketches like the mid-season dating sim episode, which they put a lot of effort into completely changing between the female-voiced original and the male-voiced rerun immediately afterwards that is a hallmark of the show—and they also have a post-episode roundup with the different actors each time, which…apparently had a short script, judging from how many of the actors say about the same thing, but ad-libbing seems to have been suggested judging from how many people go way off script. It’s not that the show really made me laugh out loud, though it did, but even the anti-humor or jokes that aren’t classically “Funny” stuck with me for a long time afterwards, especially studio AC-bu’s fantastic follow-up to their Hellshake Yano kamishibai-style sketch from season one. It might just be the shittiest anime based on the shittiest manga, but you have to watch it.

Oh, and they finished the Shouta Aoi story from season one, don’t worry.

17-20. Armored Trooper VOTOMS and its short sequels: Science fiction has a real problem with…let’s call it, mission creep. You start off with a story about a future war, a government conspiracy, the guys on the ground in over their heads, getting by with just their wits and grit. But that isn’t enough. Your hero can’t just be really good and really lucky, he has to be the BEST. The best pilot. The best fighter. Heck, maybe he heals really quickly too. And his girlfriend is a scientific experiment. No, she’s advanced beyond humanity. Wait, then what does she need the hero for? Well, he’s also advanced beyond humanity, he just doesn’t know it. Because he was chosen. By God. To become God.

This is the problem with Armored Trooper VOTOMS. Chirico Cuvie is a gruff, blank slate soldier hero who is defined by the people around him; his friends Gotho, Vanilla, and Coconna, who are allowed little foibles like bickering and greed while Chirico comes up with plans to keep them all alive against impossible odds. I found this plot very engaging, with interesting fights, well-designed mechs, and an intriguing government conspiracy plot. However, they had to keep pushing it. After the end of the latest outbreak of a centuries-long war between the two interplanetary coalitions in the Astragius Galaxy, Gilgamesh and Balarant, a secret splinter group within the Gilgamesh-aligned Melkian army steals the “Perfect Soldier” who had been genetically engineered by the military and frames Chirico for the theft. After escaping prison, he travels across planet Melkia, looking for clues and trying to find the mysterious woman he saw in space—the “PS” herself. While I found the psychic connection between Chirico and the woman he’d name Fyana a little silly, the first half of the show had some really compelling war (and postwar) plots, changing from a corrupt, polluted town to a Vietnam-inspired guerilla war plot, where the heroes struggle to keep their morals and their lives, and frequently found themselves on the wrong side of a conflict. The second half of the show, where Chirico turns out to be a chosen one of a space god, lost me. The writing was still good enough, and the early episodes earned enough goodwill to keep me going, but it lost some human element by going big; the vast, villainous conspiracy was reduced to preening pawns of an unknowable entity who discards them once the hero shows up, and one mysterious figure reveals a secret alliance with the space god that makes no sense with his previous actions. Even as Chirico turns against his “benefactor” at the end, I wish the story had stayed grounded, and not tried to put everything about its backstory on the back of its hero.

I considered reviewing each VOTOMS series separately, but I decided against it since each of the OVA’s that followed just continue the same story, by the same writers (with two exceptions, but we can skip them because they are short and suck). Three direct to video movies were released following the end of VOTOMS; one was just a standalone story about the show’s heroes, but the other two provide backstory on Chirico’s time in the Melkian army as one of the Red Shoulder Battalion, under the mysterious Yoran Pailsen, who of course knows more than he lets on about Chirico’s true nature. These, and the mid-2000’s Pailsen Files series, give more detail about how Pailsen discovered that Chirico was a kind of chosen one, but also have to backtrack and establish Chirico’s mind would protect him from knowing he was a chosen one because it was…too traumatic, or something. Basically, if he’d retained knowledge from the prequels, he would have known where the plot was going in the main series, so he had to forget. It’s a common prequel problem, and it’s bad writing.

The few sequels were much better. I was surprised to find myself enjoying the pompously-titled Brilliantly Shining Heresy, in which Chirico fights against a church that worships violence and has patterned itself on military organization. Chirico and Fyana find themselves pawns in a fight over the election of the new head of the Martial Church, as the two candidates fight over who can kill the most enemies of the church to be chosen as the new pope. I thought it was a rather insightful exploration of how religion can be abused to justify any action, no matter how horrible, even if the miniseries did end with some stupid retcons to justify writing characters out of the series. That miniseries did have a follow-up, first a movie and then another miniseries, but they were released out of order, so the one that follows directly after BSH was released after the events that immediately follow it; those stories were fun because they brought back the supporting cast (Coconna always deserved more than the series gave her, I felt) for a reunion tour across major locations from the show, culminating in, well, more space god stuff. Mostly I was astonished at how VOTOMS continued to feel fun, even as it looped back on itself and focused on increasingly convoluted mystical BS. If you need some good robot stuff, you could do a lot worse than VOTOMS.

16. Lupin Zero: If they had just made a Young Lupin show out of the blue, if I didn’t know the manga, I would have been so pissed. But. BUT! Monkey Punch did four chapters of Young Lupin back in the manga, WAYYY WAY BACK before they even started making anime, showing Lupin interacting with his grandfather and even his DAD, Lupin II! Lupin II shows up like five times across the manga and anime, and that’s a high estimate! So to adapt that, even a short adaptation? I was stoked. Then, I hear the music in the trailers—new covers of the Part 1 music, originally by Charlie Kosei (sadly, the new versions aren’t him—probably too expensive these days)? They’re pushing all the right buttons here.

So, it’s only six episodes, and I’ve only watched three—there’s been a new one, but my HiDive subscription ran out right in the middle of the run, and I’ve decided to wait a few months so I can watch the other three and the rest of the first half of Urusei Yatsura all at once. But man, those six episodes. I’m a little bothered by the show making Jigen a childhood friend of Lupin’s—that wasn’t from the manga, and contradicts…well, the five other completely contradictory origins of the Lupin gang (manga shows them all meeting one by one over several chapters, Psychokinetic Strategy is another origin, then Episode 0: First Contact, A Woman Called Fujiko Mine ties back into Part 1, and the 2014 live action movie has another really bad origin), which I dislike only because I love the idea of Jigen as a gun for hire who finally ends up with the one guy he can trust, and moving that earlier feels off, like he goes away from Lupin and comes back. But who cares? The rest is golden, as the boys unite over protecting a lounge singer they befriend while going to a club they’re definitely too young to be in, or messing around with the underworld while they’re too young to know better, sneaking beers and cigarettes on the school grounds.

I especially liked episode 3, an adaptation of one of the Young Lupin manga chapters, and the first time in like 40 years that they adapted some of the manga (well, to my knowledge, there’s plenty of Lupin manga that haven’t been translated to English). Monkey Punch’s original Chapter 37 was a fun look into Lupin’s childhood—a HORRIBLE childhood, where Arsène Lupin barely resembles the character as written by Maurice Leblanc—and a fight to the death with a twist ending. All that is preserved, but expanded into a thrilling race against time, with death traps, a mismatched showdown, and a bunch of weird opponents for Lupin to match wits against, including one very familiar from recent TV shows. It’s exactly what a Lupin manga-to-anime adaptation should be, and I applaud them.

Also, can I just say how happy I am that we’re acknowledging Lupin III is literally the grandson of Arsène Lupin again? I know TMS was scared of the Leblanc estate suing again so they played coy about how he was “allegedly” the grandson of the master thief, and Japan does seem to have a different understanding of the generations concept than ours (instead of him just being named Arsène Lupin III, like his father and grandfather before him, Lupin has to fight others for the RIGHT to be known as III (sansei), as if it’s a title—this also came up with Sherlock Holmes in Part 6), but Monkey Punch always envisioned him as a direct descendant and I’m happy to see someone admit it. Plus, copyright on Arsène Lupin is long expired. It’s a free-for-all! TAKE IT.

13-15. The J9 Trilogy (Galactic Cyclone Braiger, Galactic Gale Baxinger, Galactic Whirlwind Sasuraiger): Evil laughter echoes in the shadows of the brilliant stars in the night sky. The entire galaxy is burdened with the tears of people from planet to planet. Galaxy Cyclone Braiger! Call them and they will arrive at light speed!

I’m counting these three together because they were written by the same guy, scored by the same guy, take place in the same universe, and star the same people as different characters. They’re basically the same show, played out over three years, with three different robots. And, uh, plots.

The J9 series is one of the type I encounter a lot when watching robot shows from the early 80’s: they didn’t want to make a show with a robot, but toy sales pay the bills, you know? Especially in the first one, Braiger, the robot appearances are perfunctory at best, often showing up for about two minutes to destroy some spaceships just to hit a quota. The real meat of the story comes from the time the heroes spend outside the robot: infiltrating criminal organizations, undercovering political schemes and assassinations, or coming up with a scheme of their own.

The first series, Braiger, sets the tone. Allegedly based on samurai dramas but looking for all the world like the A-Team in space, it follows Isaac “The Razor” Gudonov, an eccentric genius who has left Earth to live on asteroid J9, the most isolated home in the skeeziest neighborhood in the Belt. Interplanetary travel has opened up the solar system for colonization, but that’s just led to an increase in crime as mafia syndicates (known as “Connections,” presumably after the French Connection) all jockey for control of shipping and battle each other for territory. From his remote location, Isaac recruits ace marksman Jotaro “Blaster Kid” Kido, racecar driver Steven “Speedy” Bowie, and Machiko “Angel Omachi” Valencia, a demolitions expert who just happened to have broken into Isaac’s house when the others arrived there. Together they form the Cosmo Rangers, heroes for hire helping the helpless fight back against crime. For the first half of the show, it’s a fun, episodic adventure series, as the gang goofs their way to new missions (always arranged by their underworld contact, notable swindler Pancho Poncho) and shows the Connections what-for, but it all comes together at the midway point when the “Nubia Connection” is taken over by the mysterious Khamen Khamen, pharaoh of crime. Then, what once appeared to be standalone episodes all coalesce into a coherent narrative, paying off stories from back at the start of the show and bringing everyone together and effectively building the tension.

Not to give anything away, but the next show picks up 600 years later, where the solar system has developed, more worlds are inhabited, and it’s all governed from Earth by a shogunate: technically the new colonies are ruled by a monarch based off one of the new worlds, but really the Earth military is in command. As this structure fractures under the strain of hundreds of years of control, it’s threatened by outside interference as several alien civilizations make contact with the trading post on Pluto (civilizations like…Engles, Rance, and Merica. Wonder where they got those names from?) A new organization, the Galactic Gale, brands themselves the successor to J9 and rides across the system, attempting to calm the political situation at “home” in the hope that the shogunate can defend the solar system against these new, “Outer” powers instead of just being taken over. Based on plot alone, Baxinger might be the best of the series, with its complicated political wranglings, repeated betrayals and backstabbings, and its too-late, bittersweet introduction of democracy as an alternative to the dictatorships and monarchies the solar system seems destined to during its narrative. However, Baxinger also has the worst animation, and the worst preservation of the series; the small-time production company just couldn’t provide the resources to live up to the quality of the writing this time.

Fortunately, someone wised up by the time of the final installment in the series, and Sasuraiger has much better animation and preservation, although they did mess up and play one episode preview twice, which means it aired before the episode it described and after the episode it described. Starting 200 years after Baxinger, in a time of opulence and freedom after the strife of the previous millennium, it’s plot is a bit of a throwback to Braiger, dealing with criminal organizations and a small group who combats them, but it’s a much more confident show, building on the experience of the previous two years to make a more consistent show that better integrates its giant robot elements and builds on the history of the other shows better. Set in a time where the previous J9 groups have become so mythologized a theme park is built around their adventures, Sasuraiger follows Bruce Bernstein, aka I.C. Blues, a cardshark wanted for murder who makes the mistake of making a bet against Bloody God, the kingpin of the newest, deadliest crime syndicate in the solar system (and yes, Bloody God seems to be his legal name; several characters address him as either Bloody or Mr. God). Aided by some other likeminded individuals who happened to be at J9 Park that day, Blues escapes with the J9-III, a transforming, space-travelling steam engine robot, and sets out to make good on his pledge to visit each inhabited world in the solar system in a year. This setup allows for a variety of missions, as each episode (or two-parter) gets a different “planet,” but they also made sure each character had their own hook so they would have different people to focus on when they went to different planets: Bruce is a suspect in a murder and theft, so the cops are after him, Rock is out for revenge on the thieves and assassins who crippled his father and killed their friends, Birdy Shaw is a shoplifter who is estranged from her famous parents, Jimmy and Suzie are on the run from parents who want to break them up, and uh…well, Beat didn’t have much to do. These choices meant the show was much easier to follow than the often-overcomplicated Baxinger, but also had more variety and character development than Braiger, and is kind of the perfect mix of everything good about J9.

So, what’s bad? Well, they all have wonderful theme songs in the style of classic 50’s-70’s rock and roll, but the music in the episodes themselves can sometimes be described as 80’s butt rock, especially in the first two (find a chord and just keep hitting it; though Baxinger did have that one track where a dude just went NUTS on a shamisen that comes back to me all the time, and Khamen Khamen’s theme FUCKS). The animation sucks, there’s no way around that; even Sasuraiger, while an improvement, is still lower-middle tier for Japanese TV animation at the time. I barely got to see them because the Blu-rays went out of print and people rushed to get them before they were gone. I mentioned the robots seem perfunctory, but I want to stress that I think their designs may have been done by a different team than the show; Sasuraiger toys seem to have been sold under the name Battrain, as if disconnected from the show (and were available in America as part of the Converters line under the name Fast Track, but that’s different), and the fact that they needed an excuse to have the robots turn into cars and motorcycles means the shows take place in a universe where motorcycles are viable means of space travel. It’s a little silly when someone shoots a laser at a motorcycle gang and they just rise up off the ground and start shooting back.

But most of all, the shows are great about building conflict and getting you to care about the characters, but they seem to struggle with finding a satisfying culmination; each one ends on an anticlimax, and I’m left with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, they do subvert audience expectations, which I appreciate and can be very interesting. On the other hand, maybe I just want to see the robot blow up the bad guy, you know?

Still, though. Three hidden gems, and ones I’d wanted to experience since college. Recommended, if you can find it.

12. Armor Hunter Mellowlink: The one (serialized) VOTOMS spinoff that can stand on its own, Mellowlink was a 12-episode miniseries about an infantryman in the Gilgamesh-Balarant war; a foot soldier specially-trained to fight against the Armored Trooper robots that feature prominently in most of the series. Framed for a crime he didn’t commit, Mellowlink escaped from his unjust tribunal and travels across Melkia seeking revenge on those who wronged him and killed his fellow soldiers, armed only with a special rifle with a bayonet that launches with an explosive charge to pierce AT armor. The lower episode count and smaller cast means Mellowlink is more focused and tighter than the plot of VOTOMS itself, with a contained story that still manages to fit a few twists in along the way, mostly involving Mellow’s two friends, Carradine and Lulucy. The first half of the series is largely episodic revenge stories, where Mellow wanders into a different town on Melkia, usually around the same time Carradine and Lulucy arrive for their own reasons, searches out his target, and kills them. Right around when this gets boring, the plot ramps up and the fights get more intense; since Mellow doesn’t use the robots like everyone else does, his opponents take risks he can’t, so he has to be shrewd about how he fights them, and things get out of hand fast. Probably the only thing wrong with the series is that they felt they had to tie it into the plot of VOTOMS at the end, with a twist ending that makes no sense if you haven’t seen VOTOMS, while the rest of the series stands on its own—although, Mellowlink is set concurrently with VOTOMS, so some scenes are much cooler if you know which events in VOTOMS are taking place at the same time. It’s a great variant on the robot genre I haven’t seen much else like (with the exception of the early episodes of Attack on Titan, before Eren found his superpowers). I just wish it was easier to watch.

11. Future Boy Conan: So, in 1978, a young Hayao Miyazaki was given his first solo directing job, away from his partnership with Isao Takahata who he had worked under as an animation director (or, in the case of Lupin III, a co-director, which largely amounted to the same thing). This was a 26-episode (so, half a year) TV adaptation of The Incredible Tide, a novel by Alexander Key, author of Escape to Witch Mountain.

Okay, you all want to watch this show now, I’m done.

…okay, but what I found most interesting about this show was the little bits of worldbuilding. The overarching plot followed pretty standard ethical divides of the evil, polluting, technological society against the (generally) peaceful, egalitarian, agrarian one, but it shined in the depiction of how these societies functioned. Most of civilization had collapsed in a major world war decades before, with a few people living in small towns of varying stability on small outcroppings of land left from the destruction of the continents by massive magnetic weapons that caused huge tectonic distortions. Industria, the main power built from the remains of a major city of the old world, powers itself through fossil fuels reconstituted from plastic waste, buried under the ground from great upheavals and mined through slave labor from smaller communities they’ve dominated by use of wartime superweapons. Industria’s society is a failed state of philosopher-kings; the old scientists have sequestered themselves away from the people in a quest to recover lost knowledge of solar energy, so focused on the pursuit of lost knowledge for the betterment of man that they don’t see the rampant militarism rising from the administrators who carry out authoritarian rule in their name. Dissidents are branded on their foreheads so they will be anathema for life; the leader ruthlessly searches out other societies who are not actively warring against them just because he can’t stand that somewhere exists that isn’t under his boot. His ultimate goal is to reignite a war no one cares about anymore, just so he can win it. Honestly, that seems terrifyingly realistic on its own, even though the show has him taken down by one oddly strong boy and a lecherous sea captain. In many ways this is still just stock Miyazaki: characters run in-step with each other, there’s a powerful girl who still gets damseled, cool retro ship and plane designs; nothing here is going to surprise fans of the man’s work, but as a look into the early days of one of the great directors it’s fascinating.

10. OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes: The best way I can describe OK KO! Is that it’s a show by people who watched Cartoon Network, for people who watched Cartoon Network. There’s a Dexter’s Lab-inspired episode. There’s an episode where the title character teams up with Ben 10, Garnet, and Raven, with a joke about the Teen Titans being cancelled and coming back. There’s a Captain Planet crossover. There’s a freaking Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School episode. Secret Mountain Fort Awesome apparently takes place in the same universe. Sonic the Hedgehog even shows up! They even have an All That reference and that’s Nickelodeon, what the heck! THERE IS A NU-METAL EPISODE.

But there’s more to it than just “hey I recognize that.” Set in a world heavily influenced by JRPG’s and superhero media, KO follows a young boy who wants to be a hero, training by working part-time at a convenience store in a shopping mall run by Mr. Gar, formerly the superhero El Bow, who has a secret history with KO’s mom Carol, aka Silver Spark, which involves a tragic explosion and a sub sandwich. KO himself sometimes gets lost in all the plots involving other characters, but that’s okay—in true shonen anime fashion, he is the glue that keeps the group together, the irrepressible impetus for the other characters to reconsider their preconceived notions of their purpose in the world and push themselves forward, to be better, to reconnect with old friends, to blow up Kurt Angle.

And that is the only downside—I think the writers wanted to do more with KO. They definitely had a long-term plan for his growth and development that got rushed in the final season, and probably would have involved more detours to supporting cast members (“Oh,” says series villain Lord Boxman, voiced by the great Jim Cummings, when his co-villain Professor Venomous gives away his whole plot, “are we doing this all now? I thought we were going to drag it out a bit more…”). OK KO came during the tail end of Cartoon Network’s big push for new artists to launch interesting shows, and it kind of got the axe around the same time as the longer-running Adventure Time and Steven Universe, without the chance to grow organically like those series. The final episode of the show acts as a what-if, showing hints of adventures we never got to experience, letting us imagine the emotions of seeing these characters play out their journey like we should have. It’s nice. I enjoyed it a lot.

Plus, back in my day, I sure did watch a lot of Cartoon Network.

This show was removed from HBO Max because David Zaslav hates fun, but I’m told it’s still on Hulu.

9. Getter Robo Arc: I’d always wanted to get into Getter Robo, the first series about a combining robot, but it’s been difficult since the first and third cartoon were never translated into English, the second one had a dub produced for syndication in the early 80’s, but only 2/3rd of it and it was only released on video in Europe in the late eighties, and none of the cartoons directly adapted the manga, which also isn’t available in English. I did watch New Getter Robo two years ago, and thought it was alright, but that was a straight-up reboot, as if there had been no other Getter Robo series but with a new robot design. When I saw there was a new Getter Robo show, I wasn’t in any hurry to go see it.

Getter Robo Arc is the first show to directly adapt the manga by cartoonist Ken Ishikawa, who was working as an assistant to Getter Robo creator Go Nagai in the 1970’s when he was asked to do the manga to tie-in to the TV show Nagai created for Toei animation. This was common at the time; Nagai’s mentor Shotaro Ishinomori also worked this way on shows like Kamen Rider, so you had this odd situation where hundred-episode shows would be “based on” a three-volume manga where 2/3rds of it was just more detailed versions of the first couple of episodes of the show, and then everything rushes to a crazy conclusion that was slightly different from the show. Getter Robo (and its sequel, Getter Robo G) played out the same way, with Ishikawa doing the manga while Toei’s writers worked on the show, and if it had ended there it would have been just a normal arrangement from the 70’s. Instead, Toei made a new Getter Robo show, Go, in 1991 (part of a trend of retro revivals around the time), and as was usual by then, hired someone to do a cheap, short manga to advertise the show and toys in kids’ magazines; but, for some reason, Ken Ishikawa also convinced them to let him do a new manga. Ishikawa’s Getter Robo Go diverged from the show immediately by bringing back Jin Hayato from the original series, and then swerved completely away from the show’s plot, first sending the pilots to Alaska to join an international band of giant robots and then introducing a mysterious, “Ultimate” Getter Robo that possessed a strange sentience of its own, and implied that Getter was manipulating humanity for its own ends. Ishikawa followed this up with a prequel expanding on the mysterious Getter, now identified as Shin Getter Robo (though apparently a different meaning of the Japanese word “Shin” than “New;” I understand the word has a few different meanings in Japanese depending on spelling/context), and then a follow-up to all of them, Getter Robo Arc, which unfortunately ended early when the magazine it ran in was cancelled (which I knew about; the same magazine had a Transformers comic that only ran four chapters). Unfortunately, Ishikawa died of a heart attack two years later, so to my knowledge no manga has directly followed his plotlines, although elements of his stories made their way into some of the more recent anime and manga by other writers. Arc is the first attempt to translate his manga accurately into an anime, and it starts with the final storyline of the manga.

How do I know all this? Well, I loved the Getter Robo Arc show so much, I read the manga. Didn’t I say the manga was never translated into English or made available in the US? Hey shut up.

19 years after the Shin Getter destroyed the Machine Empire fleet that had been commandeered by the Empress of the defeated Dinosaur Empire, after which Shin Getter fled to planet Mars, taking its pilots, original getter pilot Ryoma Nagare, Getter Robo Go pilot Go Ichimonji, and living Buddha Tahir, with it. The world has mostly moved on, with Hayato continuing his research at the Saotome Getter Energy Research Institute, although damage from the battles between Getter Robo and its enemies still litters some areas of Japan, which lie in disrepair. Suddenly, Ryoma’s son Takuma and Tahir’s brother Baku arrive, their irrepressible drive marking them out as suitable pilots for the experimental new Getter, Arc, along with the only other test pilot who had been able to control it: Sho Kamui, a half-human, half-reptile created as part of a Dinosaur Empire experiment at the end of the original Getter Robo, a last-ditch effort to make dinosaur people who would be immune to the Getter Rays, which are poisonous to reptiles but apparently beneficial to humans in small doses. Kamui is, in fact, the illegitimate son of emperor Gore II and a human woman kept in captivity in the remains of the Dinosaur Empire’s home, Machine World, which has negotiated a peace with the humans in the time between Go and Arc, but of course Kamui’s half-brother Gore III is secretly looking for his moment to strike back. Into this steps the mysterious Andromeda Stellaration, an insect army that had secretly been behind the Machine Empire and the Oni Army, forces Getter had combatted in the past—and whose members include remnants of the Oni Army who killed Takuma’s mother.

The first thing I noticed about Getter Robo Arc was the rich history behind its narrative. As an old-school Marvel and DC fan, I’m a sucker for the feeling that there’s a larger narrative I’m just getting a piece of, and Arc did a great job of parceling out just enough information to leave me hungry for more. In fact, the anime actually expanded on the manga, taking advantage of its defined length to plug holes and throw in more easter eggs than the original manga had time for. Arc also did a great job expanding on its characters; Takuma is in many ways the typical Go Nagai headstrong, tough guy hero, just like his father, but Ishikawa gave him a good hook with his desire for revenge—at a key moment when it becomes clear their mission might be ethically wrong, Takuma decides to pursue revenge first, then consider morality after.

The anime also adds new plotlines to close plotholes from the manga, either because Ishikawa didn’t consider it or because he ran out of time. This includes a long sequence where Shin Getter returns from Mars changed, having merged with its pilots, and Go emerges to have one last conversation with his friend and copilot, Sho, who has become a general for the UN. Also important, it provides closure for Hayato’s plotline, which had to be dropped for space when the manga was cancelled, so we never see what happened to him.

As for the ethical questions I mentioned…I’ll have to get into spoiler territory a bit. The manga, as mentioned, ends abruptly with a showdown between several major characters, but other characters like Hayato are left behind, and it leaves dangling the major ethical question the narrative posed.

Alright, spoilers ahead, but: Getter Energy is a sentient cosmic force, that has chosen humanity to become the most advanced race in the galaxy, and has guided our evolution to this end. When our heroes are sent into the future, they find Musashi, who died in the original Getter Robo, leading an army of humans who all control Getter technology in a war against other races, answering only to the mothership known as Getter Emperor. Takuma, Kamui, and Benkei watch as Musashi blows up an entire planet, just to kill everyone on it, and realizes Getter has turned humanity into a roving galactic genocide army. Everyone on the ship is prejudiced against Kamui and some Dinosaur Empire soldiers with them, and Kamui realizes that all his people have already been wiped out in this future. Takuma and Benkei raise some concerns, but to no avail—Musashi dies again from an Andromeda attack, but the Getter Emperor mothership already has another copy of him ready, programmed to fulfill its mission, with just enough of his original personality left to present as a person. The manga didn’t have the space to follow this up, ending with an impending battle between Takuma and Kamui while the Getter Dragon from Getter Robo G awakens as a prototype of what would become the Getter Emperor centuries later. This, too, is where the Arc show ends, but they added a postscript where Takuma and Baku break Kamui out of jail on Mars and begin to work to prevent the horrible future of the Getter Emperor from coming about. I appreciated that; even if they fail, it’s at least uplifting to know our heroes turned out to be men of character at the end, able to resist the control of Getter energy and stand up for equality.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: JAM Project not only made a new theme for this show, but did new covers of the three themes they’d done for other Getter Robo shows, playing as the closing themes in reverse order of the shows: New, then Shin vs. Neo, then the second Armageddon theme. They also played an instrumental of the first Armageddon theme over Kamui’s jailbreak. Nerd shit, I love it.

8. Space Runaway Ideon: There he is! There’s our Tomino. After the relatively normal early episodes from last year, featuring an alien princess getting mixed up with scared humans who had happened upon a planet the alien empire claimed and a long pursuit by the aliens of the humans who had uncovered mysterious technology, Ideon really started to pick up about halfway through the show, in an episode where the crew finally meets up with other humans. The military commander of the base they land on doesn’t believe their story, but takes a shine to the robot pilot, Cosmo, who she recognizes is suffering from post-traumatic stress, and takes under her wing because he reminds her of her son back on Earth. When the aliens attack, she and Cosmo are riding in a truck together, which flips in an explosion that shatters the protective dome of their space colony, trapping her underneath. Cosmo, still rattled from the blast and suffering from a panic attack, tries to pry her loose; the show doesn’t portray what happens to her, just Cosmo pulling on her arm, a scream, and then a look of terror from Cosmo. I assume he tore her space suit while trying to save her.

Oh yeah, it’s that kind of show.

Even before watching the show, just from synopses and what other fans had told me about Ideon, I understood it as a reaction to the reception to Gundam; the “realistic” war drama of Gundam didn’t appeal to kids, who wanted superpowered robots who crushed their enemies almost effortlessly. So, here you go kids: the Ideon robot is an unstoppable force, a sentient cosmic entity with powers and desires beyond human understanding, manipulating the heroes into secretly carrying out a cosmic judgement on all sentient life. What is the meaning behind the mysterious comets raining on Earth and the alien homeworld alike? Ideon. What cause the destruction of the ancient society found on the colony planet? Ideon. What force governs the will of men, drawing them further into conflict, even as it leads them to their own doom?

Well, that’s us. We failed the test.

The series is a rather bleak examination of human will, of human hubris; at the end, when faced with certain annihilation, the alien leaders push forward, for their own ideals won’t allow them another course of action. Free will is a lie, the ending was set before the series began. The story comes from watching how the characters deal with that, how they break or are reforged in the knowledge of their smallness in the face of all things. It’s fascinating to watch. Unfortunately, it also didn’t play too well to the kiddies tuning in to watch robots punch things, so the show was cancelled rather abruptly; the final episode, #39, sets up a big conflict and then jumps straight to “everything exploded and they all died, the end.” Fortunately, after the success of the Gundam “compilation movies” the previous year—basically a clip show presented as a feature film, very popular in Japan before the advent of home video and even after—they were allowed to do some for Ideon. The first film is an accurate summary of the first half of the show, with some new sequences to simplify plots that unfolded over multiple episodes into more closely-connected events, but the second film starts with an abbreviated recap of one character’s story so we’d know who she was and then just launches into the final episode itself, continuing with the true ending to the story, explaining some odd imagery from the show’s ending and diving into the spiritual element of the story, as Tomino loves to do late in his shows. A hidden landmark work, with themes Tomino returned to again and again.

So of course HiDive delisted it halfway through the year, sorry!

7. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: I think I can be forgiven for being anxious about Star Trek prequels. The three times it’s happened before have been some form of awful: Enterprise was a misstep from go, with unlikeable characters and bland, even jingoistic plotlines that never went anywhere, relying on “Hey! I get that reference!” in lieu of real worldbuilding; the JJ Abrams movies doubled down on those mistakes, getting my hopes up for a new story going forward and then instead dragging out the corpse of stories I loved to parade their greatest hits in front of me, devoid of context or emotion, because they couldn’t think of anything new and instead gave in to the fans’ worst impulses in the hopes they would be dazzled enough not to notice they had nothing to say; and Discovery’s first two seasons brought forth a parade of characters we already knew about to tell us its main character was special so they wouldn’t actually have to demonstrate that in any capacity. The announcement that they would do a whole series about Captain Pike, the one who predated Jim Kirk on the Enterprise and famously was scarred horribly and went off to a fantasy planet where he could enjoy the sensations of living, scared me. Star Trek’s been going backwards for twenty years, and this looked like another excuse to keep going the wrong direction.

I don’t know how they did it. I don’t know what magic chemistry they had behind the scenes. But this is the best Star Trek since they started making TV shows again.

A certain amount of that can be chalked up to them just…DOING Star Trek, no apologies, no concessions to streaming. Finishing a cold open and having someone say “Space, the Final Frontier…these are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise” for the first time since 1994 hits in a way I didn’t expect until I heard it. More than that, the show does done-in-one adventures, instead of a season-long plot, which not only allows it to cover more ground thematically, but gives it more time to devote plotlines to the supporting cast so we feel attached to them, understand their motivations and fears. I still struggle to remember character names on Discovery and Picard, but I know Pike, Chapel, M’Benga, Una, Spock, Ortega, Uhura, Hemmer, Kirk, La’an, and T’Pring better than any of “Picard’s friends.” Sure, you might recognize some names there; I definitely knew a few of them before. But even those from the original series are fleshed out more. M’Benga, who showed up in maybe two episodes of the original show, is given a tragic plotline that plays out over the season. Uhura and Nurse Chapel both have major character arcs that delve into their doubts and fears; Uhura’s is resolved and leaves her set to become the character we know, Chapel’s is not. And, uh, that’s not the Kirk you’re thinking of. Even when it does delve into dredging up old Star Trek lore, it’s for important character reasons. Spock and T’Pring’s relationship was one episode of the original show, a secret he kept for reasons his own. Here, we see it play out, and start to fall apart; exemplified with a wonderful nightmare sequence in episode five that should seem familiar to…well, anyone, even people who haven’t watched Star Trek. And that’s not the only Spock-centric reference that comes up for good reason, not just to get the fans excited (though the one I’m thinking of did do that). And that season finale? Building upon an odd choice from Discovery, the season finale is a fascinating what-if for two different episodes of Star Trek, and beyond…but I won’t spoil anything.

Complaints? I didn’t like episode 9, a by-the-numbers Alien pastiche that continues the annoying trend of modern Trek of killing off good characters for cheap drama. Like many prequels, it’s stuck between doing things exactly as they said in the source material, or pushing the boundaries with information we learned later, and while it’s threading that needle pretty well so far I can see where it could go wrong really quickly. But for now, I’m astonished they did something this good. Give this team whatever they need. More, please.

6. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean: Damn, I got a little choked up at the end of this. I first heard about Jojo back in college as the longest-running manga to have no TV adaptation, just a few OVA’s back in the 90’s (and that movie that Araki memoryholed because he hated it); a friend who I then pissed off recommended it, but I was on a high-horse about only reading official releases at the time (see also: why I haven’t watched all of the original Urusei Yatsura show) and decided to wait until the whole thing was translated, not just the third arc, which is the most popular. About five years later I was at Barnes & Noble and noticed they were officially translating the whole thing. I picked up the first volume, and immediately loved its madcap mix of Victorian literature and Shonen anime conventions (Brontë meets Buronson, I might say), and kept up with it through the various storylines and constant subtle shifts in genre, loving how writer Hirohiko Araki appeals to various literary modes while also subverting anime genre conventions. Stone Ocean, which had its first 12 episodes released last year, adapts the final storyline of the “original” Jojo story; the first six storylines follow on from each other, while its modern continuations are a reboot or reimagining of characters we’d met before. I’d managed to avoid spoilers (aside from someone telling me they go to Disney World, and, spoiler, that storyline had to be toned down a lot for copyright reasons, although this part of the manga hadn’t been collected in English yet so I can’t directly compare), so I found the ending kind of bittersweet, a real loss I wasn’t anticipating.

I won’t touch on the story except to say it’s as crazy as you’d expect, (“Do you believe in gravity?”) and that it strikes me that this storyline is a thematic inversion of her father, the closest thing Jojo has to a main protagonist, Jotaro’s part 3 story; Jolyne is trying to save her father just like Jotaro did his mother, but she is trapped while Jotaro had freedom to travel across the world. Jolyne’s little prison gang feels a lot more like family than even Jotaro’s crew did back then, or Giorno’s gang; they all band together for the common goal of saving Jotaro because they know Pucci is up to something. I did like that DIO’s final plan of revenge makes a sort of sense; first of all, the connection of the villainous Father Pucci’s three henchmen DIO (aka Dio Brando, the closest thing Jojo has to a main ANTagonist, who died in part 3) planted in Florida to help with the plan kind of answers a question the previous storyline posed but left hanging (no I’m not going to explain that further right now), and second, the Made In Heaven power is so drastic that I understand why DIO wouldn’t use it himself, instead keep it in his back pocket in case he needed revenge on the Joestar bloodline—oh hey look he did! Pucci’s reason for fulfilling DIO’s insane plan fits well with his (insanely tragic, fucked up) origin, while also undercutting his grandiose posturing and showing the priest for the small, petty man he really is, obsessing over mistakes he made. His entire motivation is an assumption that everyone else already feels the same pain he’s saddled himself with, the pain DIO took advantage of in a moment of weakness. Almost makes you feel sorry for the guy.

The only problem I had with the end was Jolyne’s absence for it. This was the first—I think maybe still only—saga with a female protagonist, and Jojo doesn’t have a great history of treating its female protagonists well. Jolyne is instrumental in defeating Pucci, yes, but she doesn’t get to take the final shot. Sure, I guess Josuke didn’t get to kill his villain, Kira, either, since he was run over by an ambulance, but at least Josuke was THERE. Even before the final battle, Jotaro sort of steals the show once he shows up. Also, all the main villains after Kars have time manipulation powers, you notice that? Getting in a bit of a rut, Araki.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see an adaptation of the other two storylines (well, three, but I have a feeling JOJOLAND, which starts next year, is going to run for a long time). I don’t think david productions knows. I do think it’s fitting that, after I finished, instead of closing it out as a completed show, Netflix tried to send me back to episode 1, to start over. It’s like the end of the show brought us back to the start, looping like…oh, what do you call it…those…car, things, like a four way stop but a circle…ah, it’ll come to me.

5. The Owl House: I’ve said for a few years that, if Disney ever found out what their TV animation department was doing, they’d shut it down, since it was the most inventive and entertaining part of the business. Well…I may have jinxed it. Cancelled, with only two episodes left to air next year, the Owl House had a lot of ground to cover in very little time, starting with following up on last year’s heart-wrenching cliffhanger where Luz’s mom discovered the truth and begged for her daughter to return to the human realm. The show does manage to have some fun with its impending cancellation; near the end of the season, Eda, scared by how Luz is barreling toward her final confrontation with series villain Emperor Belos, suggests they take a vacation to the beach, and Luz responds, “I’d love to go to the beach, if we had TIME for twenty more adventures, but we DON’T!” That said, the team does an admirable job with cramming a lot of emotion, exposition, and plot into very little space, possibly the best I’ve seen, and I’ve read a lot of suddenly-cancelled comic books in my time. In 45 minutes, “Thanks To Them,” the “Season 3 premier” (if we can call three episodes a season—but I mean, hey, I do that for the original Transformers so why not?) covers the ground of what could have been a whole season satisfyingly, with major emotional moments between all the main cast covered and time for jokes and popular supporting characters to cut in, too. Seriously, I was watching the clock near the end of that episode thinking there was no way they could possibly fit in everything they had to, and not only did they, there was a beautifully-animated fight sequence to boot. But, just being satisfied by what we got doesn’t mean I don’t want more. Even in the second half of the second season proper, I wish we’d had a moment to calm down and sit with the characters, as Hunter was slowly deprogrammed from what Belos taught him, or that we got to see more of Willow and Gus’s growth…maybe a bit less of Luz sitting with her guilt over unintended consequences, she and Amity had the same conversation about not keeping secrets like three times. If this show can be this good in a time crunch, what would it have been if they’d given it the time it deserved? Screw you, Disney, but thank goodness for everything we got.

4. Primal Season 2: Tartakovsky, you’ve done it again. I would have been content merely for more of the first season, which had ten wonderful, Conan-style adventures across a prehistoric land. Tartakovsky had said in interviews he wasn’t interested in repeating himself this season, but I wondered what that meant; certainly, Spear and Fang would have to go save their friend Mira, but what else could happen? One advanced civilization in a still-primitive world. Once that was done, they’d return to the done-in-one adventures, right?

I am now left with QUESTIONS. Questions about how this universe works, the setting of the show. Season 2 changes so much about the series, revealing a more complex setting than the one I expected from season 1. Magic and wild animals continue to cause problems for our heroes, but more than the one, horrible society I expected, they find many settlements that don’t make sense together. Instead of one-shot adventures, the heroes are pursued by foes across multiple episodes, with actual story arcs and recurring villains. All the while, there’s still no dialogue—or, none we can understand. The images and sounds carry the whole story, each one immaculately storyboarded, animated, colored—wonderfully done.

Except episode 5. The midway point of the season. I can’t help but think it must contain some hint to the questions I’ve raised about the setting, that the world of Primal is not what it first appears. I kept thinking some major revelation was just around the corner, but none materialized. Still, episode 5…I won’t say anything, but what a shocker that was. Just wild.

Complaints? Well…the end of the season was a little weird. I get it, but Mira, that’s a messed up thing to do to a guy…in that situation. It all worked out and MAN what a cliffhanger but it was just a little uncomfortable. That’s it. If this keeps going it’s going to be my number one eventually, it’s just had major competition. And it had BETTER keep going.

3. Mob Psycho 100 III: Writer/artist ONE accomplished something with his manga Mob Psycho 100, adapted in three beautifully animated, wonderfully scored, and brilliantly acted parts by Studio Bones, that I don’t think any of the more popular shonen manga can pull off: it’s concise, focused, never strays from the message, doesn’t become bogged down with extra characters, gets straight to the point, and doesn’t go longer than it needs to. Certainly, his big breakout work, One-Punch Man, which ONE worked on simultaneously with Mob Psycho, has suffered from all of those problems during the Garo/Monster Association plotline: several volumes barely feature the title character, instead spending time on side battles with supporting characters that don’t move the plot along at all. I consider this a consequence of success; if you’re selling well, the editors and publishers want more content, more content means you have to come up with reasons for the story to continue, which means more characters, more threats, more plotlines. Mob Psycho was a smaller publication, allowing the cartoonist to work at his own pace; also, One-Punch Man was born from a one-shot joke, while Mob Psycho was planned as a serial from the start, so its hook is much more tied with the plot, while OPM had to build its world after the fact. Still, there was so little information about the series available online before the show, I was surprised when it even got picked up for an anime, but One-Punch Man’s initial arc was so popular it made sense people would want to adapt the other work by the same writer. I’m so glad they did.

The third season is much more chill than the first two, since the exterior threats have all been handily defeated in the seasons before—well, except one, I suppose, but he ties into the point I’m trying to make: the focus of Mob Psycho was always on the enemy within, one’s own doubts and blind spots, instead of some big world-ending threat. Heck, those world-ending threats only came about because they couldn’t come to terms with their own problems. The resolution of the Psycho Helmet storyline, which had played out in the background the whole show and was a major point of contention between Mob and his friends Dimple and Mezato was the animation tour-de-force of the season, a devil’s temptation that resolved with the most honest, natural “friendship speech” I’ve ever seen. (The friendship speech is such a shonen anime stereotype that Yu-Gi-Oh! Abridged made a recurring joke of it, but it’s usually framed as a polemic on the benefits of friendship—here, it’s a frank discussion between two friends, where one doesn’t want to admit he’s a friend at all) Tome and the Telepathy Club finally make moves to research telepathy and aliens, and get more than they bargained for (and an absolutely wild, trippy postscript I did not see coming). And Tsubomi…

Look, making the big, earth-shaking (literally) finale just be “Mob finally tells his crush how he feels” is a little on the nose, but damn if it didn’t mean more than that, really. If you watch the show, you know what I mean; so much of Mob’s personality is built around repression and sublimation of his desires, finally having to act on them IS a big moment. I’m sure I’ve spoken before, at least to some of you, about how I sympathized with a lot of anime heroes in my high school and college years because they were shy and reserved around women, and now I hate them because they were also liars and creeps and I don’t know why the strong, powerful female characters put up with them. That’s not Mob. Not just because, in those few times he does interact with his crush, Tsubomi, he’s kind and honest, but because several times characters do ask him, you know, “Why do you like this girl?” And, like many guys in high school (it couldn’t just have been me), he doesn’t have an answer. His classmates like her because, well, she’s the hottest girl in school, but that’s not Mob’s reason. They did have a crush on each other back in Elementary School and for a lot of anime that’s enough to decide two people are destined to be together, but that’s not the whole story with these two. A fancomic writer I found a few years ago apparently wrote a big essay about Tsubomi that I haven’t read so now I’m nervous about accidentally touching on the same themes without knowing it, but we do get a few looks into her perspective that are intriguing and I only wish we could get more, but I don’t know how ONE could write that story without undermining the conflict in it. We know Tsubomi remembers Mob from when they were kids, and presumably she didn’t block out the memory of his powers like others kids seem to. She watched him with Mezato and Emi and approved of his emotional development, and tested Reigen to see if he was trustworthy (he failed her test, but we know he's a good guy after all). We even get a little scene with her and her friends where they look more human than the idealized versions Mob saw when admiring Tsubomi from afar, dealing with a…very human problem not usually associated with the idealized woman on a pedestal, and to his credit Mob handles it like a gentleman. I was expecting some big test, some final reveal of what Tsubomi wanted from Mob, but…well, maybe we did get it. I’ve gone on too long, and don’t want to give too much away, after all.

One of the best anime ever made.

2. Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Never have I encountered a series so perfectly attuned to what I was feeling about current events from the moment I watched it. The writers of this series (and the novels it was based on) in the eighties and nineties so perfectly predicted what it was like living in post-9/11 America, so perfectly grasped ideas I also want to communicate through story, like what it feels like to see democracy eroding itself, while also being under assault from bad actors, what I feel about Russia attacking Ukraine, the importance of civilian oversight of the military, the dangers of believing your own hype, or mortal certitude, of monarchy itself. Legends of the Galactic Heroes wonderfully wraps all that baggage into an entertaining package of robust characters, who seem to live full lives on and off the camera; of deep lore we only get a hint of from history tapes and classified documents. The bittersweet victory of sticking by one’s principles, even when no one else will; and the triumphant glee of watching some piece of shit get a laser through his fucking chest when he thought he was untouchable. I hope I can communicate half so well the feelings I saw reflected in this show.

Due to, you know, preferring democracy myself, I tended to see the show from the perspective of Yang Wen-Li, the great general of the democratic Free Planets Alliance. I wish I could find his really good speeches on YouTube; they have clips from some of his more broadly applicable ones, but his private conversations with Julian and Frederica are the best ones. My favorite scene involved Yang going on at length about how his government was deadlocked in discussions on how to proceed, arguing for and against plans that Yang supported, or moral issues, or construction projects, while the Empire could just move forward with whatever the emperor felt was best, and at the speed he deemed necessary. Frederica bowed her head and conceded that perhaps authoritarianism was the better form of government; Yang reacted by violently declaring that wasn’t his claim at all, since there was no check that the emperor was making the right choice, or considering the feelings of his subjects. Democracy is the only system where people can remove a leader who acts against their interests; the moral certainty of an emperor can’t be guaranteed. The idea seems to simple, yet over the course of the series Yang has to contend with military officers working against their own Commanders in Chief, elected officials using deceit and political ploys to manipulate the populace into keeping them in office, or, when that fails, supporting violent gangs to assault dissidents. Those same politicians are themselves open to manipulation by religious fanatics, or from brazen corporate overlords who control cash flow to both sides of the war and manipulate the media to throw it whichever way they want. And that’s assuming those forces are actually different forces at all! There’s so much depth and complexity, and I’m only talking about half the show so far!

On the other side, Reinhart von Lohengramm (nee Musel) must contend with his own issues, which come from similar human foibles of corruption and moral vacuums, but take a different form. The Empire is composed like an old Enlightenment society, where the remains of feudalism govern human interactions, and the landed gentry truly control the power, with the throne subject to their whims. Reinhart’s struggles are similar to Yang’s, in that he is a low-born noble, and so openly disrespected by the entrenched power structures of his civilization, but he is also the most qualified for the job, so even though he wins battles the nobles mistrust him because he’s a threat to their power, which they have done nothing to earn. Whereas Yang is willing to bow to the decisions of his elected officials (and, by proxy, the people), Reinhart must manipulate the masses into acclaiming him executive power—in a way, using democratic principles towards distinctly undemocratic ends. Reinhart is obviously the true “hero” of the series, a romantic pretty boy who actually upholds the moral certitude so many other characters in the series pretend to, but whose desire to answer to no one puts him at inescapable odds with the only men he respects—those who stand against him openly. His story is a test of the concept Yang inadvertently sold Frederica on: can he change a society in one man’s lifetime? Can he sell people morality by force of will? And, does he even recognize morality when he sees it? We are told several times that the empire sees no problem with using torture to procure a confession, and several otherwise-likeable characters use it. Advisors convince Reinhart, against his better judgement, to use secret police, and false flag tactics, so long as they preserve his public appearance as a principled warrior-general who fights alongside his men. Perhaps even the great emperor must compromise, and take what he will get, eh?

This is a vast oversimplification of a very complex narrative. I have left so many characters, plot points, and themes on the floor; indeed, the show did too, as it started about a third of the way through the books, and then looped back to what they’d skipped at the end (which was largely romantic court drama stuff that I felt sometimes took away from the themes presented later in the work: for instance, I assumed Reinhart’s father lost his money in just trying to act like a higher noble for his own advancement, which would justify Reinhart’s hatred, but some of the prequel episodes implied he repented, or in one case that von Musel was ruined by another nobleman for daring to sue when the noble’s drunk driving killed his wife, though that was from one particular movie that drew from the manga adaptation instead of the novels themselves), but I only have so much space to gush. One of the greatest anime of all time, no doubt. Heck, fans bullied HiDive into bringing it back to their platform after they dropped it over the summer (the other anime they dropped, not so much). Find a way to watch it. No regrets.

1. Better Call Saul Final Season: Oh, man. I don’t know how they pulled it off. I don’t even know what I could say that others haven’t said better; how does one make a better review than Videogame Dunkey’s? You can’t.

As Badfinger was so quick to remind us during the final credits, Breaking Bad was the story of a man who got what he deserved. El Camino, on the other hand, was a chance for someone who got screwed over by the first guy to live his life without fear—someone who didn’t deserve any more punishment, much less the punishment he received. Where does that leave our friend, Saul? Somewhere in the middle? Sure, you could say that. Saul Goodman is a junkie, a damaged man who went looking for something else to get him by and found something that worked once, so why not try it again? He just keeps pushing the limits, expecting everything to go well because it worked once, until that’s the only option he has. It’s not that he never experienced consequences, he simply, stubbornly, refused to learn his lesson. Dealing with consequences was too much, when he could simply avoid them. If he avoided them, he would never get hurt.

Kim Wexler is such an important character to this arc, and I’m so glad they took the time to loop back to her in the end. She’s ultimately the hero of the story and was always the source of integrity in Saul’s partnership. The show makes this very clear: the moment she’s gone, Jimmy doubles down on crime, just to show her he’s not hurt, he’s not scared. When she finally steps up, when she claims her mistakes and works to make amends even if it hurts her…well.

There IS a chance for redemption. So many shows focus on that; hell, Barry is all about it. But you have to confess. You have to admit what you did. And there has to be consequences. I spent so much time imagining horrible ways this show could end; that he gets away with it, that he dies in a hail of bullets. Jimmy McGill decided to trust the law. It’s something.

Like, what else can I say? The filmmaking on this show was always phenomenal, and that one shot in the flashback, of the commercial reflected in his glasses? My God. I love love LOVE that he was done in by a little old lady, just the kind of person he thought he could always snow, and Carrol Burnett slayed as Marion, the person who finally saw through the façade. I didn’t even mention Gus and Lalo, which was fascinating as always. There’s just so much. Wonderful television.