My Favorite Shows of 2023

It is that time again, where I realize I watch too much TV and shout about it into the void. I really should use this website for something, anything else, but submitting to agents is very emotionally draining, even as I'm not that concerned about it outside of the action itself. I've written something I like, and I just want to see if anyone else will before I throw it out somewhere. I should start writing some short stories or something; maybe I'll challenge myself to that as the year rolls on. Anyway. As usual, these rankings are based on how I felt at the end of the show and are not an attempt at an objective ranking of quality. The mere choice of which shows to watch is already subjective, but I'm just saying, crappier shows could be ranked higher than better ones just because I liked them more. I'll try to edit these before I post; I found plenty of dropped thoughts and repetition in my Facebook posts, but they're very long so I make no promises for thoroughness. Alright, let's get started with some absolute dreck: 68.      Secret Invasion: Loosely (LOOSELY, super-loosely) based on the Marvel storyline of the same name (or maybe the…other Marvel storyline of the same name), Secret Invasion tells the story of a small group of terrorists living in Eastern Europe who feel dispossessed and abandoned by their government in the time after the blip, and are willing to kill a lot of people to get the land to live as they want because they feel they’re morally justified.

Wait.

Hold up.

Didn’t we do this already?  Isn’t that the same thing as the villains from Falcon and Winter Soldier?  What?

In short: yes, it is, and yes, this series suffers from all the same problems as Falcon and Winter Soldier, just…more.  Secret Invasion is everything wrong with Disney-Marvel, wrapped up with a little bow in six hours of excruciatingly uninteresting “television.”  It’s a series about secrets that refuses to withhold any information from its audience.  It’s a series about politics that refuses to take a political stance.  More than that, the series is severely hindered by its inability to keep up with political developments—at one point in the final episode, a character warns that the US needs to make a first-strike attack on Russia because “Russian tanks are headed toward the border with Finland and Ukraine.”  Well, as for Ukraine, YES, they ARE, aren’t they?  And as for Finland, uh, you mean that NATO member?  Why bother making a first strike when the Russians can implicate themselves and have the full force of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization wipe out their entire military?

Like, Marvel is a big company, and they put out a lot of titles a month; it’s been that way since the 70’s (they were very small and only put out a few titles in the 60’s—there were people who would read EVERY MARVEL COMIC A MONTH back then, which I consider a big factor in the development of continuity pedants that plague Marvel to this day; hell, sometimes I’m one of them).  I can’t say that every comic Marvel publishes is a gem, or even worth the paper it’s printed on.  But damn, they do still put out some thrilling, emotional, beautiful, artful stuff, even today (buy anything with Al Ewing’s name on it, you’re welcome).  And sure, James Gunn still hit it out of the park with Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 this year, I will say that.  But where did this energy go?  Was it sucked up in the machine, the need to churn out movies and TV shows by a date instead of taking the time to make sure they’re good?  Or did the producers lose track of what story they wanted to tell, and they’re just picking names out of a hat, hoping we’ll stay excited?  What happened to the film division that it can’t keep up with the quality of something maybe 100,000 people read a month?

As I said at the top, Secret Invasion is ostensibly an adaptation of the 2008 mega-storyline by Brian Michael Bendis that he’d been teasing through pretty much every comic he’d written for Marvel up until that point, especially his New Avengers series.  But it’s not.  That Secret Invasion drew upon 47 years of Skrull stories, dating back to Fantastic Four # 2.  It built upon the famous Kree-Skrull War storyline by Roy Thomas, Neil Adams, and John Buscema; it used the history of that war and the sacred place of Earth within Kree and Skrull ideology that Steve Englehart and Don Heck established in the 1970s, it used further developments in that war and multiple characters made by dozens of authors of varying degrees of talent in the decades since.  Comics Secret Invasion was a massive event, rewriting decades of comics by the revelation that someone had been replaced by a Skrull.  Why did Hawkeye bring back Hellcat from Hell in 1997, when he went looking for his wife, Mockingbird?  Why, because Mockingbird wasn’t really dead, that was a Skrull who died fifteen years ago, here’s the real Mockingbird, she’s fine!  Why has Hank Pym been building a Negative Zone prison, hiding in the background pushing Mr. Fantastic to use his intelligence for immoral ends?  Because he’s a Skrull impostor, and he’s been manipulating the Avengers and the Fantastic Four for their infiltration plans for the past five years!  It all culminated in a shocking murder of the Skrull queen by Norman Osborn, which he used to elevate himself and attack the other superheroes, setting up another few years’ worth of coimcs, some good, some bad.  But it did something, it was a pivotal moment in these characters’ stories, it led to some interesting series and miniseries over the next few years.

The television series that shares its name does none of that.  Aside from a short cameo in a Spider-Man movie, the Kree and Skrulls have only featured in one film: Captain Marvel, a mediocre origin story in a franchise full of them.  (Okay, technically the Kree were also in Agents of SHIELD, but don’t make me remember that; Marvel certainly doesn’t)  Captain Marvel presented a simplified version of the Kree-Skrull War, with the Kree as the vicious, vindictive aggressors, and the poor Skrulls just pitiable victims looking for some safety.  It was a disappointing simplification of their comics interactions, where both sides can claim the other started the war (but it was the Kree, they did it, right after they genocided the Cotati, but don’t get me started), but was sufficient for that film, which already had a lot going on.  Secret Invasion tries to introduce some of the moral grey from the comics at the start, and completely botches it.  The Skrulls have been living on Earth since 1995, basically doing black-ops for Nick Fury.  They’re a little pissed that they’re still living in disguise, but Nick Fury is afraid they will be seen as horrible invaders if they reveal themselves to humans, so he tells them to wait, because he's a cynic.  Talos, the only Skrull character we might have any attachment to, also tells them to wait, because he’s a bright-eyed optimist who believes that there’s good in people and they could come to accept the Skrulls.  Also, Talos has summoned a million Skrulls to Earth that he never told Fury about and installed them as replacements for powerful humans around the globe.  And, having placed these Skrulls into positions of power in media operations, never thinks to use them to spread pro-alien feelings amongst the populace, or that having most shapeshifting aliens in covert murder missions might prejudice people against them should they ever be found out.  Talos is a fucking moron.

What follows is a parade of people we don’t know getting murdered with no consequences.  So glad we cast Cobie Smulders as Actually Important Marvel Character Maria Hill, only so she could show up in three films, do nothing, and die.  The idea is the Skrulls have united behind Gravik because he wants to kill all the humans and just take the planet for themselves, which seems kind of like a plausible threat if you didn’t see the Eternals, and of course Gravik has a secret base in a forest in Russia and a machine that gives him superpowers.  However, unlike Karli Morgenthau in Falcon and Winter Soldier, Secret Invasion never gives a reason why someone would follow Gravik.  He’s not particularly charismatic and tends to devolve into screaming and attacking people the moment someone asks a reasonable question about his plans.  He kills more of his own people than Nick Fury or Talos do and he’s not even particularly good at killing people; when he discovers Emelia Clarke’s character is a traitor, he shoots her and leaves her for dead…without checking the body; she is in fact fine and gets up and walks away to continue working against Gravik.  At one point, Gravik has a meeting with other Skrulls, who are all powerful businesspeople, NATO generals, television hosts, and the goddamn Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.  The NATO general expresses astonishment that this dude with a cult in Russia thinks he can push them around, and Gravik just…implies a threat, and that’s that, the dude gives up.  Why didn’t he use NATO against Gravik once Gravik wasn’t in the room?  Hell, right after this, another woman we haven’t seen before tells Gravik in no uncertain terms that she will continue working against him, and she is allowed to walk out of the room unharmed, and then, RIGHT OUTSIDE THE SAME BUILDING, calls Talos and tells him what Gravik is doing so he can stop it.  (Comically, the show ends with a scene where that woman defends herself from anti-Skrull terrorists, as if we could possibly be worried about the safety of this person who showed up in one scene and disappeared for the rest of the show)  There’s a lot of people telling the bad guy they don’t like him and will work against him and getting away with it.  Talos meets Gravik in a museum, where Gravik has replaced EVERY PATRON in a room with Skrulls.  They all transform, just to show Talos they’re there.  Talos then STABS GRAVIK and just…walks away.  What’s the point of bringing bodyguards if they’re just going to watch you get stabbed?  In episode 5, Fury knows Jim Rhodes (War Machine) has been replaced by a Skrull, and was trying to help Gravik kill the President of the United States.  He has a gun to Skrull-Rhodey’s head and doesn’t shoot, right in front of a bunch of people who he could show the president’s top military advisor was a Skrull.  Why didn’t he shoot?  Especially since Rhodey then goes and tries to convince the president to fall into Gravik’s plan?  Especially since Olivia Coleman’s character then goes and shoots a Skrull in MI-6 and fixes a bunch of problems on the British side?  It makes no sense, especially since they do it AGAIN in episode 6!  And the president is right there!  Fury is like, “Mr. President, Rhodes is a Skrull!  Look into your heart, you know it to be true!”  like homie let’s look into his guts, that will answer the question pretty definitively.  It’s an idiot plot, trying to wrench drama out of situations completely devoid of it.

Let’s talk about Samuel L. Jackson, because bless his heart he’s trying.  The man never gives less than 110% to even the dumbest role, and that’s why he’s a legend.  I have seen him elevate absolute dreck into must-watch guilty pleasures, but he doesn’t have enough leeway to do that here—except for one scene.  In episode 4, Fury sits down with his wife, Varra, a Skrull who is working for Gravik and has been sent to kill him.  They have a tense, emotional conversation about their relationship, whether it was real, whether Fury would have loved her as a Skrull if she hadn’t taken a human face, how she was commanded to make him fall in love with her…spy stuff.  Things that make the characters question themselves.  I mocked Varra asking Fury if he would have loved her true face when it happened, but Jackson’s long, anguished pause, ending in, “We’ll never know,” was real acting.  It would have been so much more powerful had we not just met Varra two episodes ago and gotten an infodump of their whole relationship either one episode before, or in the very episode where they had a tense standoff, or both, I can’t be bothered to look it up.  Maybe sprinkle some of the scenes of the Furys’ romance throughout all the episodes, have us asking, “Who is this woman?”  before the big reveal?  That could have been something, added some mystery to it.  Instead, both Furys fire their guns…at the wall, deciding they can’t kill each other.  Aw.  How cute.  Instead of killing each other, you killed all the tension you’d worked so hard to establish.  Fuck these writers, I swear.

Like, what else can I say?  It’s a strangely American-focused view of world politics for a show that never sets foot in the United States.  Are we supposed to believe that Russia can deploy military ordinance on British soil?  Like, it was a false flag operation, but does anyone believe that would happen if it wasn’t a false flag operation?  President Ritson, played by one of the D~~~~ M~~~~~ dudes, is a complete invalid bossed around by one dude (even ignoring other military advisors and letting faux-Rhodey belittle them), and then he goes on TV and advocates genocide?  “I have asked Congress to declare all extraterrestrials enemy combatants” dude with a divided Congress, that’s never going to pass.  “We will kill them all” nah brah, enemy combatants have an option of surrender, do you even the Geneva Convention?  Does that directive apply to Asgardians, too?  Like, when I was in Middle School, I wanted to write an “adult” Transformers story.  To my Middle School mind, that meant plagiarizing the first episodes of the TV show but making Ironhide say “shit” a lot.  That’s the level of “mature” entertainment Secret Invasion is going for, an empty shell with no moral core, no message, just bleakness and the shape of something they once saw on television.  It’s nothing.  Meaningless.  Worthless. 67. City Hunter (anime) (through City Hunter 3 episode 5): I say “anime” because there is apparently a South Korean TV show, in addition to a Japanese live-action film, two Hong Kong movies (one with Jackie Chan!), and a French Film. City Hunter is a big deal. Does it deserve to be?

No!

A few years back, I watched a show called Cat’s Eye, I reviewed it for that year’s list, but I made note that I’d become bored and frustrated with it and dropped it after a few episodes because a DVD set I’d preordered arrived and I needed to open up at least one episode’s space on my viewing schedule. I always intended to come back and finish Cat’s Eye sometime, just to say I’d done it and move on, not expecting to like it. However, I knew that Cat’s Eye was based on a manga by Tsukasa Hojo, who also made the manga for City Hunter, another anime I’d heard a lot about and wanted to watch. Like Cat’s Eye, it looked similar to other shows I liked, such as Lupin III and the Dirty Pair; City Hunter was also much more popular than Cat’s Eye. I figured, surely as he became a more established author, perhaps the problems with his early work went away, or maybe having a male main character would help with the problems I had with the male lead in Cat’s Eye, or…there must be SOME reason City Hunter was so popular, right? I promised myself I wouldn’t give up this time. This time, it’ll probably be good.

I will finish this. Probably. But I see no reason to consume any more media by Mr. Hojo ever again. I will not finish Cat’s Eye. I will not read Angel Heart. I’m done.

I was having trouble putting into words what I find so objectionable about City Hunter that I don’t see as a problem in, say, Lupin III or Urusei Yatsura. On paper, they seem to employ the same action stereotypes, the same kind of jokes, similarly immoral or flawed characters. One day, I remembered an anecdote from comics history. In 1985, Marvel launched a series called Dakota North Investigations, featuring a striking image of a woman in high-fashion 80’s clothes holding a gun, and the single word, “STYLE.” Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty, who had been writing their own comic about a female private eye, Ms. Tree, for some years, took issue with Marvel cutting into his business, and made another ad, with a simple image of their title character, and the word “SUBSTANCE.” City Hunter is all style. The designs are gorgeous; Tsukasa Hojo makes designing beautiful people look easy, and while his beautiful women all fall within a specific type, they all have their own face, unlike, say, the women of Leiji Matsumoto; but their personalities all blend together, they’re all just devices for standard hack plots. The scenery of Tokyo, as translated by the wonderful teams of Sunrise Productions at its prime, is gorgeous to look at, which is good, because the heroes never go anywhere else; heck, dignitaries from other countries come to THEM for some reason. The villains all blend together, a collection of cocky, preening gangsters and corrupt politicians who bully their way through a series of petty crimes, or try to intimidate people into giving up incriminating evidence. Invariably, the victims, almost always beautiful women, turn to Ryo Saeba, the City Hunter, a gun for hire who lives in the city with tacit police approval, a crack shot and serial sex offender.

The “skilled guy who is also a weird little pervert” is a stock character in anime, for good or ill. Lupin III has elements of it, Ataru Moroboshi lives that life, Master Roshi had it as his major character flaw. Ryo Saeba surpasses each one of them for complete creep status. Early in the show, it’s established that he arrives early for meetings with clients so he can harass them before they get down to business. He regularly steals underwear from random women on the street, flips skirts—the dude gets distracted by pretty ladies when there’s a gun in his face. Oh, but of course, he has standards; if a woman deviates from his definition of beauty in the slightest, Ryo will insult her and, if given the chance, bully her into changing her style to suit his taste. The show thinks this domineering attitude is good, admirable behavior, even as it pays minor lip service to Ryo’s other actions being detestable, if only in a “boys will be boys” kind of way. Oh, and Ryo also isn’t interested in underaged girls—except when he IS, which is ALL THE TIME. When you make a GAG out of a character suggesting Ryo, who doesn’t want to take a job protecting a 14-year-old because she isn’t sexy enough, just try grooming her so she’ll date him once she’s an adult, AND HE THINKS THIS IS A GREAT IDEA, you need to stop. Yes that happens. Yes it killed my soul to watch it. Even at his original-manga worst, Lupin III never did that. Ataru Moroboshi doesn’t hit on Middle Schoolers, and he’s only in High School. Plus, neither Ataru nor Lupin hit on women ALL THE TIME, there are plenty of episodes where they just do other things. Ryo harasses strangers and friends at least 2-3 times an episode, with maybe a handful of exceptions. I am fine with morally compromised characters, as long as I understand them, or they give me something, anything to latch onto. Ryo Saeba’s redeeming characteristic is that he knows how to shoot a gun, and is ostensibly a good bodyguard. I say “ostensibly” because he’s a terrible bodyguard, but he’s good enough to create allegedly exciting TV; his charges are often kidnapped after he leaves them alone or takes them out on the street for no real reason, which gives the show an excuse to have a chase and a shootout with an array of unremarkable, interchangeable bad guys. Like, maybe if the fights were interesting, the show might be fun in spite of its horrible sense of humor, but everything’s the same. Ryo harasses a woman, he’s hit by a Looney Tunes hammer, shoots the gun out of some mobsters’ hands, they run away like scared babies, repeat. For ONE HUNDRED FORTY EPISODES AND EIGHT MOVIES. Why? WHY?

I’ve already wasted too much time on this, but I want to make one more point about who’s hitting him with that hammer. After a few episodes where Ryo takes orders from a mysterious contact named Makimura, the show introduces Makimura’s sister Kaori and kills Makimura off. Kaori takes her brother’s place as Ryo’s handler, and immediately assumes a kind of protective control for Ryo’s affections—which, of course, he never gives to Kaori, constantly insulting her style and calling her too mannish. The characters have no chemistry, and aren’t in any kind of relationship, but the show asks us to assume they’re just too stubborn to tell their real feelings and are destined for one another. I repeat: Ryo belittles Kaori, he insults her, compares her unfavorably to other women, yet STILL often sexually harasses her too, and expects her to take care of his business affairs for him, often leaving her to do the work while he chases other women. This would already be an abusive relationship without me even mentioning that Makimura told Ryo Kaori was adopted when he died, and asked Ryo to pass that information along, and Ryo just…didn’t do it. He’s lying to her constantly. When Kaori’s real sister (apparently when Makimura’s father adopted her after her criminal father died in a shootout, he didn’t bother to check if Kaori had any living relatives, like, you know, HER MOTHER) arrives to see Kaori, Ryo encourages her to lie too because…well, I say it’s because he doesn’t want his lie to be found out, but the show wants us to think it’s because he loves her so he…doesn’t want her to leave him alone to have a fulfilling relationship with her sister, which is actually worse than what I said. Granted, Kaori’s sister has her own hangups about Kaori not being feminine enough, too, but that’s just a trick to get us to side against getting Kaori out of that house. It’s not healthy. She’s begging for emotional scraps from an abuser. No wonder she can only lash out with a temper and cartoon violence. It’s all he’s left her. And the show asks us to believe women flock to this guy. I guess like James Bond is Ian Fleming telling himself his 50-year-old ass would still be attractive to women, Ryo Saeba is all the horrible otaku guys stand-in. But God damn it, at least James Bond movies have some VARIETY in their formula. YES, MORE VARIETY THAN CITY HUNTER, I PROMISE.

That’s it, that’s all I have to say. No use saying any more; no amount of cool 80’s pop songs can save this one. Stay away, folks. There’s nothing of value here. 66. Ewoks: Everybody’s out here like, “Watch Asohka,” “Watch Andor,” NO, damn it, if I’m going to watch a Star War in this, the year of our lord 2023, I’m going to be CONTRARIAN. I decided to watch the 1980’s Star Wars cartoons instead. Because I’m a MORON.

Ewoks, produced from 1985-1986 by Canadian animation company Nelvana at the height of their post-Care Bears power, Ewoks continues the trend started a year earlier by the television films by taking the mischievous little developing-society shit-kickers from Return of the Jedi and turning them into the cute teddy bears their detractors always say they were. Ewoks follows Wicket and his friends and family as they battle a strangely wide array of sentient species all over Endor, with focus on the bumbling, Grinch-like Duloks and an old witch of indeterminate species called Morag, who has some sort of ancient beef with the Ewoks. The Ewoks all speak English so we can understand them, instead of the nasal grunts of the films, and appear to exist in a fully-developed, modern society built around the nuclear family so the kids can learn simple lessons about how to do the right thing, often, as was the trend at the time, simplified so much that an adult who’s actually paying attention would find the Ewoks very insincere (me, I did). The forest moon of Endor becomes strangely domesticated as a result, with many roving bands of friendly bards and various other villages of different sentient species within walking distance of the Ewok village; instead of the Force there’s actual magic, with mystic artifacts and ancient wizards as the focus of several episodes; the “forest moon” is revealed to have several large areas of plains and mountains and rivers not evident in the films so the Ewoks can go on little adventures to different locations; all the Ewoks have their own slightly-different outfits and designs and broad character traits and…

It's the Smurfs, basically. I’m saying they just made the Smurfs again, but it’s supposed to be Star Wars.

I’m generally interested in 1980’s cartoons; I like the aesthetic, I like the dumb fun, I like the interplay of writers suddenly given freedom from the shackles of 1970’s children’s show regulations butting up against the fact that they only have that freedom because a toy company paid them to sell products because that’s the only way they can afford to be syndicated. But there’s a difference between the 80’s cartoons nerds talk about and still buy toys from, and what kids actually watched at the time. You’d be forgiven for thinking He-Man and Transformers were the big dogs with the most episodes and longest runs of 1980’s cartoons, and you’d be wrong. That was the Smurfs. I didn’t watch the Smurfs very often; it ended shortly after I was born, I don’t remember anywhere around here running it in syndication, my dad says he hated it…we did ride Smurf Mountain a few times, but that closed a LONG time ago. When it comes to reading bandes dessinées, I prefer Hergé to Peyo, you know? Anyway, it makes sense that they’d want to follow the big dog; after all, everyone ripped off Scooby-Doo in the 70’s, too. And I don’t want to fault a children’s show for, you know, being for kids.

But Ewoks is bad. Even setting aside that it’s supposed to tie-in to Star Wars (and in case you thought they forgot, one of the final episodes features a mad scientist coming to Endor to steal their magic sunstone that he secretly plans to use to overthrow the emperor…and then I guess the Empire decided to come back to Endor again later? Really, if Wicket hadn’t messed up that guy’s shot, the movies would have gone a lot differently.) Ewoks is a mess of a series, with low-stakes adventures, bumbling moron enemies, heavy-handed, boring moralizing, and stereotypical characters. It only gets worse in the second season, when the show was slightly revamped to have shorter 10-minute segments instead of being all full 30-minute episodes, and got a new theme song that was even worse than the original. The First season’s theme was by blues guitarist Taj Mahal, and for an incongruous as that musical style was from the content of the show, and for how much he and his wife half-assed the lyrics (“We are strong/We will fight/And we’ll stand up for our rights” yeah this show is not dealing with anything as deep as a protest movement) they still were outdone for blandness by the second season’s theme, a song so devoid of imagination it defaults to including the phrase “Friends forever.” The animation gets worse (aside from a few random shots of extremely fluid gesticulating), the extended cast of family members from the first season are mostly forgotten except for a few appearances, and the four “main” Ewoks, Wicket, Latara, Teebo, and Kneesa, are all posterized into broad stereotypes so that each episode plays out on a formula: Wicket wants to get a memento for his warrior belt, Latara is vain and pushes things too far, Teebo is completely head over heels for Latara and lets her push him around, and Kneesa doesn’t have much of a personality, sometimes she has low self-esteem, I guess. And consider that this show had PAUL FRIKKIN DINI on the production and writing team. Imagine how much worse it would have been if he wasn’t doing his usual thing and throwing in a bunch of episodes with magic women in them. You can see a few hints of the writer he would become in his episodes; a line of dialogue here or there, maybe, but it’s buried under standards and practices and simplistic storytelling, and the other writers don’t have much to bring to the table themselves. Even if you’re curious about what Star Wars used to be, just stick to the Ewoks movies, at least. They aren’t good either, but you’ll get a few confused laughs. This show’s just boring. 65. Witcher: Blood Origin: I was so unimpressed by the Witcher TV show that I forgot to review the episodes I watched a month before making my reviews last year…is what I’d like to say, but I also forgot Peacemaker came out in 2022, and I thoroughly enjoyed that series, so maybe what I do and don’t remember has little to do with quality. Anyway, nobody liked this four-episode miniseries about the origins of the Witchers, but I had a few days of lunch breaks to fill before some DVD’s I’d ordered came in, so I figured, hey, why not. The reviews didn’t miss the mark, the series is dull, overwritten, and crowded with too many characters for such a short runtime. The party of heroes doesn’t fully come together until the third episode, and by then it’s time to start killing them. The writers attempted to make up the difference for their short run time by introducing a narrator, a shapeshifting creature who tells the story to Geralt’s friend Jaskier because…he was nice to elves that one time? Also, when was this battle it saved Jaskier from? Anyway, the narrator never says anything terribly important, mostly jumping in to give insight to the characters’ inner thoughts—insight that could just as easily been conveyed through dialogue or body language, and usually was, making the narrator completely irrelevant.

Going back to Jaskier being nice to elves, I suppose the main purpose of the narrator’s…narrative was to give hope to the elves, oppressed under the current human political structure. Jaskier is enticed by the promise that the original Witcher was “a badass elf,” which led me to assume Michelle Yeoh’s character was the first Witcher, but no, it’s the completely unremarkable jacked dude with no personality. Recounting the characters is a waste of time, as only a few had any traits to make them remarkable (the elfin bard with like one good song and even that you’ll get tired of by the end of the four episodes, and the gay dwarf who makes like Triple H with a sledgehammer), the rest fading into the background until they have to do some magic. I’m more concerned with the motivations for the bad guys, which broadly…don’t make sense. The series starts with the king of one elf realm trying to make peace with others, only for a coalition of his high wizard and his sister to kill him and all his friends with a monster, and take over other kingdoms. The wizard is the only one who knows how to summon monsters from other dimensions, so he’s in control, but the sister, now empress, wants to exercise her power herself. Early on the show wants us to sympathize with the empress, because she’s just used as a political pawn by her brother, and she wants to go out and see her subjects as they live and improve their lives—though the heroes still want her dead because she is complicit in the deaths of their loved ones, which, you know, can’t get past that. But, two episodes in, once she gets power, the empress is suddenly all about how the wizard wanted revenge as a member of the lower castes, and she has to make sure the upper-class stays in control, and she’s hiding that they’ve used up all the people’s grain for magic summoning and stuff. So, does she want to be a monarch for the people or not? The one time we see her go out amongst the people, she immediately abandons that plan in favor of blackmailing the wizard’s right hand to turn to her side. Did she just lie…to herself? Her late-show fascination with “civilizing” other worlds seems to suggest she still had a lot of prejudices that wouldn’t help her poor subjects anyway, and I’m all for complex characters whose motivations aren’t readily apparent, where you have to take in the whole show to conceive of their character, but the great villain hardly seems like a threat when she would have died without the intervention of the heroes at all.

In fact…yeah. If the heroes hadn’t attacked her, the wizard would have done his plan to betray her, killed her with his magic from the other dimension where he killed his girlfriend in a Thanos infinity stone-type pact, and then…the convergence of world would never have happened. Monsters wouldn’t have been inflicted on the world, and humans wouldn’t have been brought from the Earth dimension (oh yeah, this says all Witcher humans are like…mid-1500s humans whose boat fell through a portal). Maybe the wizard badguy would have lost control of his magic, and monsters would have been bad, but the human’s oppression of the elves in the present-day Witcher timeline is the direct fault of the heroes Jaskier is supposed to sing about to make elves feel better about their heritage. How is this inspiring, again? 64. Sonic Underground: Leave it to me to watch a show I know is bad just to say I did it.

Sonic Underground was Sega’s attempt to tie into the release of Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast back in 1999 with a new cartoon made by DiC, who had such success with Sonic the Hedgehog (or SatAM) and Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog earlier in the decade (yes, two different shows). They even brought back Jaleel White as Sonic, although it had only been four years since SatAM went off the air, so maybe it was just the simplest choice; they recast voice actors a lot less frequently back then. However, DiC was in a lot rougher state in 1999 than they were earlier in the decade; after spending the eighties doing their best to become king of kids cartoons by flooding syndication with as many high-profile franchises as they could get their hands on, DiC was unprepared for the arrival of cartoon-focused cable channels and kids blocks owned by studios that would fill them with their own cartoons. Suddenly Warner Bros., Disney, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network were churning out high-quality shows that DiC couldn’t compete with, and Saban was translating Japanese cartoons at lower cost and higher views than DiC could make original works. So, with all of this, how did DiC and Sega decide to make their new Sonic cartoon? Did they continue from the cliffhanger ending of SatAM, still fresh in the fandom’s mind? Or use some of the elements from that cartoon that made their way into the Archie comic series, at the peak of its popularity? Well, Sonic Adventure had a very clear plot with a well-defined cast of six playable heroes and two major villains, which formed the basis for every Sonic game since and was much closer to the vision of the original creators than the comics or shows, did they just match, you know, the game they were selling?

No on all counts! Sure, they kept the idea of Sonic being a “freedom fighter” against a dictatorial Robotnik from SatAM and the comics, and even brought in Sonic’s uncle Chuck from the same (even though, as I will explain below, it didn’t make sense for Sonic and Uncle Chuck to be related and no explanation is given for why they look alike) and Knuckles’s grandfather Althair from the comics. However, everything else is different, and I mean EVERYTHING. For whatever reason, they decided that Sonic the Hedgehog should be the abandoned true heir to the Kingdom of Mobius, the eldest of triplet children of Queen Aleena, who fled as Robotnik consolidated power and the approval of the landed gentry to overthrow the monarchy and establish himself as dictator, with forced cybernetic implants (“Roboticization,” in Sonic lingo) and mind control the punishment for disobedience. Yes, I said Sonic was one of triplets: he’s given a sister, Sonia, and a brother, Manic, both ALSO voiced by Jaleel White for some reason. After being adopted by separate families as children, they all meet up in contrived circumstances, realize they all have magic amulets, and so decide to fight Robotnik by forming a rock band.

Yes. They’re a band and they sing a song every episode. A really, really bad song. Every time. With horrible late-90’s video editing effects.

I hate it.

(Oh, and Jaleel White doesn’t do the singing voices either, they have three other actors do that. Which means the reggae song is by white people. YES I SAID THE REGGAE SONG, they sing it to convince Knuckles to help them.)

 I mentioned Knuckles—he’s only in four episodes, mostly involving Chaos Emeralds, which the showrunners don’t distinguish from the Master Emerald (honestly, good call). No other characters from the games show up—just Knuckles, Sonic, and Robotnik. No Tails! No Princess Sally because, well, now Sonic is royalty himself. Which really undermines the lesson the show is trying to tell kids by having the greedy gentry sell out the peasants for short-term financial gain. How can you ask us to decry the greed of the upper classes when you’re also arguing in favor of monarchy? This show’s moral core is mostly accidental, its scattershot lessons on how to become better freedom fighters based on pithy moral platitudes the writers may have heard once instead of any reasoned code of ethics, but that’s a pretty big contradiction, you know?

Instead of having a large cast of characters and an ongoing plot like the other Sonic media at the time, each episode starts with a narration from Queen Aleena about what lesson her children were about to learn, followed by a bog-standard plot from the big bin of cartoon settings. There’s a Hatfield and McCoys episode, a mirror universe episode, a Brigadoon episode, an ancient mummy episode, an episode where they go back to Roman times, an episode where the villains convince someone the good guys are the bad guys, a sham trial episode, an island paradise episode…some of those are written by people I’ve seen do great shows, like Bob Forward. I guess they were just slumming it for a paycheck. So, for some reason (a “prophecy,” the laziest of lazy storytelling cliches) Queen Aleena can’t actually, you know, TALK to her children directly, instead relying on intermediaries, rumors, and letters to get them to do what she wants. Seem inconvenient, like it would create misunderstandings that could be avoided with direct communication? Oh yeah—in one episode, the kids hear a rumor about the royal jewels being for sale. They find them in a stereotypical Arabian market, and decide to steal them for the common good—only, the unscrupulous merchant sees them, and looks conflicted. Then the heroes are attacked by Sleet and Dingo, Robotnik’s answer to Bebop and Rocksteady in this show. Dingo had shape-shifted into a carpet, because for some reason Sleet has a remote control that makes Dingo shape-shift, and he catches Sonic and team, but of course they escape. Sonic gets the gems back and takes them to a secret royal chamber. Only—whoops! This was all a trap! Queen Aleena created fake gems and a fake secret royal chamber and the moment Robotnik stepped inside he would have been killed by a death trap. Sonic can outrun it, but Robotnik couldn’t! Sure, Sleet and Dingo got greedy and would have tripped it before the big man got there, but that’s still two main villains down (ones who are constantly inches from death before the heroes save them, a stupid conceit in tons of kids cartoons—just don’t leave your villains in a position where the heroes need to save them! This is a life and death situation! It's self-defense if the heroes leave them to die! It’s fine!). In the end, it’s revealed that—Queen Aleena was disguised as the merchant! She was right there, watching her children make choices she knew would lead to their horrible deaths! She let it happen and just hoped things would work out! They blew her whole plan because she wouldn’t help! LADY YOU ALMOST GOT YOUR KIDS KILLED, AND…well, not democracy, you’re a monarch NOT LIVING UNDER THREAT OF BEING TURNED INTO A BRAINWASHED ROBOT WOULD HAVE DIED WITH THEM! WHAT THE FUCK!

A bad show. 63. Exosquad: I’m coming to the end of the list of mecha shows I have access to without having to pay extra; going through series by series in vaguely the release date order, unless I feel like switching it up/get confused about when things released. In doing so, I ended up at this weird relic; an early attempt at an American-produced (animated in South Korea, recorded in Canada; that’s how these things rolled back then) giant robot show that tied into a toyline from Playmates: EXOSQUAD! A valiant attempt to ape things anime was doing around the same time, dealing with complex war stories and morally-grey characters—and don’t tell me they didn’t know about those shows, because I’ve seen quotes from production members comparing Exoquad to Gundam, and there’s a lot here that seems to ape motifs from Legend of the Galactic Heroes—but within the confines of a syndicated toy tie-in cartoon in 1993. That’s a difficult trick to pull off, even with writers I respect like Len Wein and Bob Forward on the team—but most writing was done by Executive Producer Will Meugniot and head writer Mark Edens, based on an idea by (checks notes) GoBots head writer Jeff Segal.

What could possibly go wrong!

Understandably, given the cultural trends of 1993, Exosquad owes just as much of its design, mood, and action to superhero comics as it does mecha anime, if not more. It especially cribs from the X-Men cartoon, which WAS one of the big ones at the time (Universal Studios Animation couldn’t afford to crib from Batman: The Animated Series, so this was never going to be Gargoyles-level, although lead hero JT Marsh does have a halfhearted attempt at a Bruce Timm jawline); but more than aesthetically, it tries to follow X-Men in focusing on issues of racism and prejudice, and that’s the first place Exosquad drops the ball. Set in the future, where mankind is colonizing the solar system, Exosquad starts off with a major war having already occurred 50 years prior—not that I’m one to complain about establishing wars have already occurred. You see, in moving to the stars, humanity…well, they used first forced labor, and then slave labor. When the series begins, the main conflict is between Earth and the Space Pirates; only in the second season do we learn the Space Pirates are the descendants of criminals taken into outer space for hard labor terraforming planets, who were abandoned to their own devices when a cheaper solution was created: the NeoSapiens. NeoSapiens are genetically engineered super-beings; long-lived, durable, able to see things man can’t; they have two thumbs (one on either side of the hand) for some reason—but they’re sterile, they can only reproduce by building more in a lab (also, we are frequently told that NeoSapiens lack creativity or the ability to imagine, but that just doesn’t fit with the events of the show, as I will demonstrate). Fifty years ago, the NeoSapiens rebelled (See? How can they IMAGINE FREEDOM if they don’t have creativity? They wouldn’t be able to think to rebel!) and almost won, until robot suits called Exoframes were invented, and the humans beat them back, ALLOWING them to retain cities on Mars, but heavily regulating their weapons and society. We meet the heroes, the titular Exosquad, in the middle of running an unauthorized mission to run down to Mars, piss off a few NeoSapien troops, and laugh when they can’t fight back—you know, commit a little treaty violation/declaration of war, for funsies.

X-Men follows a band of oppressed as they work for equality, making a tough moral stand between two different flavors of racial oppression. Exosquad presents a racially divided world and asks us to side with the oppressor. Why? Well, NeoSapien leader Phaeton has a lot of Magneto in him—heck, the show repeatedly draws direct parallels between its sci-fi adventure bullshit and the actual events of World War II, and Phaeton is repeatedly directly compared to Hitler. He’s a charismatic dictator who suppresses the press, kills anyone he gets angry at, and slowly devolves into madness as a disease eats away at his body and mind. He deserves to be defeated, yes. But the Exofleet never establishes a moral justification for their actions, beyond “Hey, WE live on Earth, that’s OURS.” Even when the final storyline (or what ended up being the final storyline—they seeded at least two more plotlines for a season that never happened) begins, JT Marsh muses that they’re going to “get back what was taken from us” (no I’m not rewatching it to make sure I got that line just right). What was taken from YOU? You built these guys to work for you, and when they asked for equal rights, you gave them a pittance. The Space Pirates were left to die, they can only live by stealing, and your government was full of screaming, irrational delegates calling for their blood—and YOU, JT Marsh, were going to give it to them, without question. The only reason you’re friends with the piratesat all is because the bad guys picked a stupid fight/plot convenience. The show spends a lot of time telling us why the bad guys are bad. It spends no time telling us why the good guys are good.

(I will say—the writers realized their problem in season 2. A lot of characters start paying lip service to Earthgov having “problems in the past” and about how “It’s not about oppressing NeoSapiens, it’s about Phaeton’s lust for power;” even Sean Napier, who, in the first season, came off as a dyed-in-the-wool racist who refused the shake Phaeton’s hand after Napier saved Phaeton’s life [this was before the war; after the war Napier would have been justified in letting Phaeton die]. In one particularly odious scene, Phaeton sends a clone to infiltrate Exofleet, and she talks like a NeoSapien assumes a human would, yelling about how she wants to “kill some Sapes” or something. Nara Burns [whose family was killed by the NeoSapien army but is also in love with Exofleet-allied NeoSapien Marsalla] approaches the clone, saying, I swear to God, “We don’t use that word here.” WE DON’T USE THAT WORD HERE! She then says “Calling them Neos is okay when you’re short on time” YOU DON’T GET TO DECIDE THAT FOR THEM, BLONDE WOMAN! Anyway, my point is, this would all sit a lot better if the first season hadn’t ended with the Exosquad blowing up a laboratory full of NeoSapien babies because “If they make that many Neos, they won’t need to keep any humans alive.” Don’t tell me this isn’t about genocide when you blow up a nursery, all I’m saying.)

I had to make a lot of asides to that aside, but I do appreciate that they at least tried to do something complex, but even that failed, for two reasons. One is the animation; I hate to fault a show for bad animation, and I have loved several shows that suffered from low budgets and poor oversight (Getter Robo Arc, the J9 trilogy, hell even and especially the original Transformers), but Studio Akom, despite having improved drastically since their almost-unintelligible Transformers episodes, were barely up to the challenge of animating X-Men’s straightforward superhero battles, they were not the company to animate complicated fleet movements and guerilla campaigns. The writing IS considerably better than some of its contemporaries', and as I think you could tell, they had a lot of interrelated characters, recurring themes, and complicated motivations playing in the background—but they never really came to the foreground either, except in the rare case that someone might die (I do appreciate the very 90’s way of getting around censors; my favorite moment is early in the series, when the heroes jump two NeoSapien guards, change shot to the guards recoil in terror, change shot to Alec DeLeon opening fire toward the camera, and the subsequent shots are framed so we just don’t look over in the direction those guards were standing anymore, and they don’t do anything to stop the heroes—but we don’t SEE that they’re dead, any conclusion we might reach is just an assumption, and therefore not imitable violence that might affect the kiddies’ mental development). Interpersonal relationships, romances, personal tensions (aside from the one pirate that was selling everyone out, he got a few people killed before he overplayed his hand and blew up), they were pushed to the background while episodes dealt with an increasingly monstrous array of faceless creatures for Phaeton to throw at our heroes. The Neo Megas (or should it be NeOmegas?) were the first, a breed of NeoSapiens with powers the original breed didn’t have (And how did the uncreative NeoSapiens engineer this new species? Shhhhh…); they faded into the background soon enough, after only a few episodes of being a big threat because…they could communicate long distances at dog whistle volume, and therefore pass information without being detected. Also they had big alien heads, not that the NeoSapiens didn’t look like aliens already. Then came the Neo Lords, NeoSapiens crossed with animals, a horrific army of chimeric creatures running across the Outback (this arc was in Australia, you see); velociraptor men who tracked our injured heroes through the desert, bat men who would drop weapons from the sky, crab people, crab people, taste like crab, look like people (And who imagined these, amongst the imagination-less NeoSapiens? Shut up!). Finally, there were the Neo Lords, who were just…big bruisers with bug wings, I don’t know. I’ll give the NeoSapiens this, not much thought went into the Neo Lords. And look, I get it; part of me longs for the 1980’s and the soap opera-tinged superhero comics I would pick out of back issue bins in my youth, when I know that really I was drawing upon maybe two pages of interpersonal drama and most of the issue was about punching the Shocker or whatever; having a couple of lines to the effect of “JT loves Colleen” was normal, and I shouldn’t compare it to the deep philosophical discussions Legend of the Galactic Heroes would engage in, sometimes for a whole episode. But it feels like Exosquad ignored its strengths to engage in comfortable pulp nonsense, and in doing so just served to make, I remind you, a rebellion of former slaves, look like, well, monsters. Something to be eradicated. Just another reason to make their half-hearted appeals to equality seem as hollow as they were.

Look, I’ve spent too much time on this already, but I have one last thought. The show makes clear that it draws a lot of its plot from World War II, and there are plenty of parallels (Phaeton manipulating the fleet into combat with the pirates and then blowing past Earth’s defenses evokes Hitler going around the Maginot line, for example). Heck, the show sometimes draws other parallels; there’s a reference to crossing the Rubicon that doesn’t make any sense, there’s a Red Baron character (I admit, the moment I saw a NeoSapien in a red robot, I thought of Char Aznable first, and I can’t rule out a double-reference either), and uh, Admiral Winfield starts off Exofleet’s mission to retaking Earth by directly comparing himself to Francisco Franco (REALLY not a good look! I know you were giving the kids context for what a Fifth Column is but y’all really had your leader of the good guys compare them with the Spanish Fascist Party!), but I do want to recount the single worst comparison they made to the events of World War II.

You see, early in the show, the heroes need to get to Venus. The reason isn’t important. Anyway, they decide to pose as civilian prisoners being transported off-world to get there. The human civilians are all loaded onto a space transport of an odd design; the NeoSapien pilots sit in a module up front, and the humans are loaded into big box cars attached behind (how they survived the g-forces of escape velocity while standing idly around a big empty room is not explored). When they reach Venus, the NeoSapiens laugh evilly, and disconnect the box cars, sending them hurtling into the sun. Leaving aside that this is a very inefficient way to kill prisoners, what could have inspired this sequence? What, in World War II, could have inspired a scene where humans are crammed into box cars and burned alive? What could it be?

Don’t watch Exosquad. 62. Flame of Recca: It’s been a while since I watched a straight shonen anime; longer since I watched one that wasn’t a sequel to something I’d already seen. So, after I went through most of the shows I wanted to watch on the Retro Crush streaming platform, I decided to give Flame of Recca a try (and then they added another show I wanted to watch more—oh well, always next year). Unfortunately, I found very quickly that I was already pretty familiar with Flame of Recca, as it follows basically the same arc as YuYu Hakusho, without the charm. In fact, I’ve accurately described Recca as the perfect midpoint between YuYu Hakusho and Naruto: it released at about the midpoint between the end of one and the beginning of the other; follows a group of high school delinquents who get superpowers like YuYu Hakusho, but they’re all ninjas like Naruto; the anime is by Studio Pierrot, who made both the YuYu Hakusho and Naruto animes; and it’s directed by Noriyuki Abe, who also directed YuYu Hakusho and…Bleach. So close. (Oh, the original manga was by Nobuyuki Anzai, who wasn’t involved in either property; his other big hit was MÄR, which I recognized once I saw the manga cover, but never read or watched)

Unfortunately, comparing Flame of Recca to YuYu Hakusho and Naruto, while completely fair given the shared genre conventions and plotlines, means Recca will always come up short. You might blame some of that on Recca’s anime not lasting until the end of the manga; it stops at the end of the tournament arc (an overly-long tournament arc that takes up too much of the runtime and exists only to delay the showdown with a popular villain—again, clearly YuYu Hakusho) while the manga continued for many years. I, however, diagnose one big problem: Recca, the title character, is boring. His design is boring, for one; he rolls around in the standard buttoned-up schoolboy uniform of a delinquent protagonist like Yusuke Urameshi, sure, but compare him to supporting character Kaoru Koganei and tell me which one looks like a late-90’s shonen protagonist, you know? But more to the point, Recca lacks a shonen protagonist character hook. We’re introduced to him meeting a girl, Yanagi, who becomes the female lead and primary MacGuffin of the series due to her healing powers. After she heals him/saves him from a construction accident (“FIRED!” I screamed as the crane operating with no spotter close to the safety fence dropped a bunch of I-beams onto a pedestrian walkway; “MANDATORY DRUG TEST!”), he swears to be her servant for life, on his honor as a ninja, which he for some reason claims to be even though he’s the son of a fireworks manufacturer. It’s later established that he’d sworn to serve anyone who could defeat him in battle, but we don’t see that happen until after he’s already chosen to serve this woman for a different reason, and exists only so two characters who tended to fight him could be angry/confused. So, Recca’s big character hook is he wants to protect this girl. Okay, fine…but that’s it. That’s all he’s got. Goku stands out as a protagonist because he’s a country bumpkin, just an easygoing, stupid guy who loves sparring for the fun of it, but doesn’t want anyone to get really hurt and will stop anyone who tries to do wrong (and also the early stories derived a lot of comedy from big, tough guys underestimating him). Yusuke Urameshi plays the tough guy, and is, but is a big softie at heart, and struggles to express himself due to a rough childhood from his absent father and alcoholic mother. Naruto is an orphan, shunned by society, so he acts out to get noticed and longs for acceptance, and we follow his journey to achieve that. Recca just beats people up and likes a cute girl. That’s it.

Oh and he’s the chosen successor to an ancient ninja clan that controlled mystic weapons and they were all destroyed by the army of Nobunaga but Recca’s mother sent him through a TIME VORTEX using NINJA MAGIC and now she’s immortal but Recca’s evil half-brother followed him and he’s in the present too and working for a criminal organization has all the mystic weapons and Recca and his friends have to retrieve them and also the leader of the criminals wants to experiment on Yanagi to use her healing powers on himself and live forever. They drop all that REAL early, unlike the stupid retcon of Yusuke being descended from a demon that came late in YYH. Feels like a lot of work to make the boring protagonist seem important, huh?

But it’s insufficient to say Recca is overshadowed by other, better shonen anime protagonists, because he is also overshadowed by the other, more interesting protagonists in the show itself. I’m particularly partial to Fuuko, the cool delinquent girl who gets wind powers that almost kill Recca early in the series when she creates a freaking tornado in the schoolyard (it almost kills her too, but hey, it was her first time and also she was being mind-controlled a little) (I’m just kidding, the weapon drove her insane). She’s smarter than the guys, demonstrated very early on when she outsmarts a puppet master enemy, and puts more work into improving herself and understanding her weapon than the boys; she finds ways to manipulate her wind powers into different forms, overcomes heavily-armored enemies, and has to push her predetermined love interest she has no chemistry with, Domon, to work to improve himself the way she does on her own. So, of course, the narrative has to find ways to handicap her so Recca looks better; when she is on the verge of singlehandedly defeating Gashakura, the massive, armored warrior, she gets hit by a laser forcefield that electrocutes her (she still won, but Gashakura also injured himself to make things even again); she’s put up against a horrible sexual harasser who manipulates her by calling her pretty when he’s losing and ugly when he’s winning even though at no other time does Fuuko seem worried about her looks, and she gets poisoned because she shows compassion (she loses that fight, but still outsmarts and kills the bad guy later). I’m used to anime in general being rough on female characters (well, media in general) but this feels like handicapping someone to make the protagonist look good.

And speaking of, for a show that falls right in line with a lot of other anime targeted at teens for family viewing, there’s a lot of nudity in Flame of Recca. Fuuko gets her clothes whipped off by a tornado, a flame dragon woman strips for no reason, there’s a preposterously egregious shot of Yanagi being electrocuted while naked…that’s not even all of them. I know there was basically no content regulation in anime for a few decades, but what the hell, guys? There’s no other adult content in this show, why did you do that? It’s not even titillating, it’s just demeaning.

So, yeah, highly derivative, uninteresting, sexist…I’m not kidding about the tournament arc ripping off YuYu Hakusho, either; it’s a team-based tournament with heavily-defined rules that are thrown out the window the moment the narrative doesn’t care about them anymore, and it’s narrated by a rotating cast of women in skimpy animal-themed costumes to imitate the half-animal demon ladies from YYH, it’s very on the nose. There were a bunch of other characters but I don’t care about them. Flame of Recca is a bog-standard shonen anime that does nothing to put it ahead of other, more famous series in the genre, except maybe that it has gorgeous animation because it’s Studio Pierrot instead of Toei. Just watch YuYu Hakusho instead; it doesn’t have as many cool fighting women as Flame of Recca, but it treats them better (and Kuwabara is cooler than anyone in Flame of Recca, and especially cooler than Domon, who is clearly intended to be the Kuwabara analogue).

61. The Witcher Season 3: The season that made Henry Cavill say “Fuck it I quit.” Well, that’s probably an exaggeration, but it is his last. It was a better season than season 2, which is to say, this season didn’t repel my attention as much so I kind of remember what was going on/I remembered to talk about it. It did take me until episode 6 or 8 to realize I’d been confusing the two old white guys with beards, that did clear some things up. Season 3’s solution to the mess Yennefer made of everything last season was to just…act like…she didn’t. Some lip service is paid to her releasing that prisoner and betraying Geralt and Ciri (almost), but then everyone is smiles and acceptance and she’s everybody’s friend (well, all the people she’s supposed to be friends with, anyway). Convenient! Less convenient is how Ciri keeps acting out, screwing things up, and running away from one or both of the people who are supposed to protect her, but at this point Ciri is so magically plot-armored I never felt she was in any danger, even when riding from a big black cloud that I’m not 100% sure was actually there. I’d like to say there were enough betrayals and secret plots to make your head spin, but considering there’s a whole episode where they show you the same few sequences four times, just with a bit more added in each time, while a band plays a song that involves repeating “Things Are Not As They Seem” over and over, I think maybe the problem was less that they had some shocking twists planned and more that I didn’t bother paying attention half the time. Looking for engrossing fantasy on Netflix? Watch Castlevania. It’s smarter, prettier, and it has that dude from Smash Bros. in it.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to say this: all the elves in this show are naïve morons who get played way too easily.

So glad everyone respects the walls in the HEDGE maze even when they’re being chased by a monster armadillo.

60. The Flash (final season): Did 2014 feel like a good time to be a fan of superhero comics? I can’t remember anymore. I remember that Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye and Unbeatable Squirrel Girl were both still running, and there were plenty of comics I felt excited to read each week—not to dump on the comics I read now, which are all good, but I risk getting off onto a more interesting topic. No, my topic today is the Flash TV show. A stupid, conflicted show that tried to straddle the line between CW’s patented “beautiful 20-somethings who can’t emote so let’s put piano music over this scene” and the Flash’s “This is how science works, right? Eh, fuck it" goofiness. When it was new, it FELT like it worked, but I wonder if that’s just beggars not being choosers—what other options did I have to recreate the feeling of a classic Flash comic, other than the Flash comics? So let them work in their half-hearted, “Dark Matter” explanations of the Flash’s powers, their love triangles, their idea that Barry is driven by the murder of his mother that’s REALLY caught on in the past ten years since Geoff Johns made it up in…2009? 2011? Who knows. It also helped that ComicsAlliance was still around back then, and I got to read along to their episode reviews, which continued even as the website around them crumbled, up until the moment it all shut down. They showed a flashback to an early episode this season, and I popped for “Joe West’s Business Beanie,” which the CA reviewers treated like its own character, and oh I just remembered they would repeatedly corrupt “Bazinga” until it became a recurring joke to finish any Barry Allen line parody with “brazingles.” Good times.

This season of the Flash had thirteen episodes to do three things: 1. Wrap up the cliffhangers from last year, 2. Wrap up the Arrowverse as a whole, 3. Wrap up its own goddamn self. It did…most of those things. It did NOT finish the cliffhanger from Legends of Tomorrow, instead focusing on a story about Batwoman becoming the evil Batman-Flash from Death Metal, which I guess resolved a cliffhanger from the Batwoman show but it was so boring I didn’t care. There was an episode where Stephen Amell showed up as Oliver Queen one last time, back from the dead to help the Flash against a major enemy from a previous season who had been defeated but was still alive and with powers, so it helped provide some closure. Those episodes were fine, typical Flash stuff, and as much as I hated Arrow the show, Amell is a good enough actor (good ENOUGH—this is still just the CW, after all) (I did like his wrestling feuds with Cody Rhodes, too), it was fun to see him back. The really weird part was how the Flash wrapped up the cliffhanger from the previous season, where Caitlin Snow was trying to bring her…let’s say twin, Frost, back to life. Instead, she kills herself, and somehow comes back as a THIRD personality, Khione, who goes through an accelerated “I’m just discovering myself” plot, survives attempts by Frost’s boyfriend to basically kill her, discovers she has weird powers, and declares herself a god and shunts herself from their reality, all in the span of thirteen episodes. And at the end of it…she brings Caitlin back, with twenty minutes left in the episode. I guess the actress wanted something different this season, because she definitely got it, but the whole plot just fell flat for me.

So, how’d they finish it off? Well…Cobalt Blue. If that means something to you, then you know Mark Waid’s Flash. In the comics, Cobalt Blue was an ancestor of Eobard Thawne, and he used magical energy to attack the Flashes across time for revenge since he was actually Barry Allen’s twin brother, switched at birth. In Waid’s conception, Cobalt Blue was supposed to be a legacy villain with incarnations all along the timeline as part of the original’s master plan, but that would have been too much to pull off here—but they had established an ancestor of Thawne’s in this show. Wayyy back in season one, Eddie Thawne was a main character who killed himself to stop the Reverse Flash from ever being born…which…kind of worked, mostly didn’t. The writers brought that character back in, well, in a weird way, creating an alternate identity (Malcolm Gilmore—because in the comics, Cobalt Blue was Malcolm Thawne) and following “Malcolm” as he discovered the mystery of the dead “Eddie” who looked just like him. Which was all a waste of time! Just killing time while they were sending the Flash on a time travel plot so you’d remember stuff from earlier in the show and maybe add some gravitas to the situation, hopefully. It turns out the “Negative Speed Force” (a stupid concept, just going to say—this proliferation of “forces” drove me away from the Flash comics, too) brought Eddie back to life so he could…kill the Flash! The Cobalt gem that Cobalt Blue uses to get his powers from? Never really explained, just manifested by the Force to get him to do its bidding or something. They just want to have some excuse for the name; he leaves behind radiation from a cobalt isotope too for no real reason. It all culminates in a neat but perfunctory fight where a bunch of villains from previous seasons all team up and get their asses kicked in like ten minutes, and then Eddie Thawne rejects the Negative Speed Force and gets to live. Hooray! He doesn’t get invited to Iris’s baby shower though. He and the Flash shake hands, decide to be friends, and then they don’t talk for the rest of the final episode. Hooray?

Okay, now this bit that I wrote before the rest of that:

This season may contain the stupidest single episode of The Flash ever made, which is an accomplishment. The sixth episode, titled “The Good, the Bad, and the Lucky”, follows two of the supporting characters, Cecille and Allegra, as they work as defense attorneys for a woman with luck powers. Her luck powers got her engaged to a handsome man, but then her luck turned, ending in her being framed for her fiancé’s attempted murder. This, alone, is ridiculous: the cops arrive so quickly after she discovers the crime scene they must have seen her struggling with the door, and they took the time to establish she’d JUST picked up her wedding dress, so there must have been witnesses that could place her elsewhere at the time of the crime, but no, we are assured the cops see no other suspects, especially once they find the murder weapon was…a high-heeled shoe with the heel broken off (???). (Attempted murder? They said he was in a coma, but they treat the fiancé like he’s dead.) Cecille is kind of a jerk the whole time, since she’s in danger of missing her daughter’s birthday party due to the case. Why could she not take one day off from a public defender case for a crime that just happened yesterday? Because somehow being a defense attorney means she has to investigate the whole crime like she’s Phoenix Wright, except she ALSO gets her client out of jail to come walk around the crime scenes with her, which just seems like an invitation for the culprit to tamper with or dispose of evidence. Which was stupid, because the REAL culprit hires goons to kidnap her! Because the real culprit was her fiancé’s brother! Who has massive gambling debts! But can still afford to pay goons! And also to sneak a luck-reversing device into her engagement ring so her luck turns bad, and then his goons force her at gunpoint to get a job at a casino so he can beat the house because her luck is bad! Why doesn’t the house just send someone else when she starts losing? Wouldn’t the house realize the other dudes preventing people from joining the table/preventing the hostess from leaving the table by openly brandishing a firearm are probably fixing the game for the sole other player who’s racking up chips? Why is this poker game happening on a balcony in what appears to be an otherwise family-friendly restaurant? (Okay, earlier in the episode they establish the pub has a poker night, but there’s one table and everyone else is having food so huh?) Did the goons sit in on her job interview to make sure she didn’t tell the owner of the casino “Hey these guys are forcing me to fix this poker game?” These are questions the show isn’t concerned with asking itself. Perhaps that luck-reversing device just worked really well. 59. New Tetsujin-28 (episodes 18 onward): Apparently unsatisfied with just continuing their episodic adventures with earthbound foes, the 1980’s Tetsujin-28 instead introduced a space-based enemy halfway through the series. First working with established enemy Branch (and yes, there are a few recurring villains here; my favorite was the woman who posed as a tennis instructor so she could clone the robot), the “Space Demon King” wanted to invade Earth for nebulous reasons, one of which was to give it to his son, as a gift. Prince Gula was first introduced as an amnesiac friend to the main characters, but once his origin was revealed, he became an enemy, of course. Maybe modern shows have spoiled me, but I kind of thought there would be a tense fight and possibly a reconciliation where Gula became an anti-hero before the end. Instead, the show forgets all about him for a large swath of episodes, including a month-long (going by the original broadcast dates) program of horror-themed episodes…in July and August. Instead, Gula just goes full evil, and is KILLED by the protagonists before the final episodes! It kind of robs the finale of any emotional resonance, as even the Space Demon King doesn’t seem too mad about his son dying, as much as being challenged at all. Lots of pretty early-80’s animation, but kind of hollow as a series. 58. Doctor Who: Colin Baker Season 1: Colin Baker really got the short end of the stick, didn’t he? Of all the previous Doctors, he’s always seemed the happiest to have been in the role, the most enthusiastic about the continuation of the show, and the most vocal of its proponents (see his full-chested defense of Jodie Whittaker’s casting, for one). Unfortunately, due to circumstances outside his control, his episodes all suck real bad.

I’d previously purchased Baker’s (and yes, there are two Doctor actors named Baker, but Tom’s not going to come up here) second season, the infamous 14-episode “Trial of a Time Lord,” and seen Colin Baker’s first serial, The Twin Dilemma, on Netflix—his regeneration was actually before the finale of the previous season, so his first adventure as the Doctor isn’t included in the “Season 1” set—so this set contained the last episodes of Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor before the BBC fired him and replaced him with Sylvester McCoy…and also replaced the script editor, so the quality of McCoy’s episodes improved dramatically.

This season jumps back and forth between black humor and dark violence, and never seems to know which scene should be played which way. I knew going in that fans were divided over the violence in the series; I was excited to watch the first two-part story (all serials of this season were hour-long two-parters, except one which had three parts) “Attack of the Cybermen” because I knew it had a complicated time travel story and an infamous scene where the Doctor blows up a Cyberman with a laser pistol. Unfortunately, the action was so bland I barely remember it…which may also have something to do with it being the one I watched longest ago, but still. The main plot, that the Cybermen traveled to 1985 to redirect Halley’s Comet (timely!) to blow up the Earth and prevent the Doctor from destroying their planet in the ORIGINAL Cyberman story, The Tenth Planet, which was set in 1986, and required Earth to still exist, is a punchy, tight story that makes good use of Doctor Who continuity. However, the writer confused the plot with extraneous elements, like a slave revolt on the Cyberman’s headquarters on planet Telos (also an established Cyberman base going back to their third appearance, Tomb of the Cybermen), or the Doctor befriending the leader of the original inhabitants of Telos, just add too many elements and subplots, padding for time and overburdening the narrative with too many ideas.

The second serial, Vengeance on Varos, made more of an impression (one of its villains, Sil the space monopolist, was popular enough to return the next season) but suffers from no clear message. Extras on the set tell me it was meant to be a reaction against violence on television (referred to with the delightfully corny Britishism, “video nasties”) but somewhere along the way that got lost, and the episode ended up delighting in violence itself, most notably with an oddly incongruous semi-comic scene where the Doctor dumps two grunts in acid, makes a Schwarzenegger quip, and leaves them to die (to be fair, they were going to dump him). The serial posits a former prison colony that earned its independence and set up a semi-democratic government, in which the people elect a dictator but then also all have an individual vote on all laws, and the dictator must strap himself into an electric chair and get zapped if he loses the vote. The current dictator has lost a bunch of votes but managed to survive the voltage (okay actually it was cell-destroying rays, but you get it) so far, but he can’t take much more. The citizens are disaffected from the democratic process, voting for the pleasure of seeing a man die than FOR anything, as the system, as set up, doesn’t require the opposition to put forward a position, they don’t even know what will happen once the current dictator dies. Oh, also the planet is very poor, because Sil has convinced them no one wants their resources and has been buying expensive metal on the cheap because he talked a previous dictator into a raw deal, and several unelected members of government are living high off bribes and consolidated power. This all seems like an argument for a more effective democratic system, term limits, representational government, and better educational programs, but all the Doctor seems concerned about is getting the planet’s resources to repair the TARDIS…which he does eventually get, for free. How, you ask? Why, once the people vote to oust the dictator, he and the Doctor team up to overthrow the corrupt government and…reinstate the dictator! Against the explicit wishes of the electorate! There even was another rebel leader who could have been in charge and HAD BEEN working to protect the rights of the people, but no, we just put the old guy back in charge and he gets rid of the part where people can kill him! Oh, but it’s fine, because the government sale of the resources will now bring in more money, and of course money flowing into a government monopoly always brings freedom to the people; that old saw about capitalistic success bringing democracy after it. After all, it worked so well in China, right? (sarcasm, dripping, DRIPPING with sarcasm) Any message the serial could have had beyond “violence is bad” is muddled and contradictory, and even that message is lost beneath, well, all the violence!

What else? “Mark of the Rani” used the Luddites and real history in an amusing way, but the title villain was undermined by also using the Master, which was meant to highlight the differences between the two villains, but instead showed they were basically the same. “The Two Doctors” (the three-episode story) was a disappointing misuse of two of the greatest characters in the history of the show, Patrick Troughton’s Doctor and Frazier Hines’s Jamie McCrimmon, as it jumped between the two protagonists, sometimes in different timelines. The plot has some of the uncomfortable racist elements that fantasy still struggles with, as Second Doctor chides a scientist for attempting to evolve a “lower” lifeform to human-level intelligence, and the narrative assumes that aspects of that species culture (specifically cannibalism) are inherent in their genetic structure. Also, the Time Lords don’t like this specific person attaining time travel, even though the freaking Daleks managed to get the technology. Also the Sontarans are involved for flimsy reasons? And everyone travels to 1980’s Spain for no other reason than we had clearance to film in this old mansion and we wanted a comic relief English lepidopterist and his hot Spanish girlfriend, and those two also own a restaurant. As if that wasn’t too much already, all the plots converge in a strange anticlimax, where most of the final episode is spent following the Second Doctor and a cannibalistic chef as they wander through town, dine and dash at the lepidopterist’s restaurant, and then stab the man to death in a scene so incongruous I thought they were going to joke it away and reveal the dude was fine, but no, the comic relief got shivved and bled out on the floor and it’s still…sort of played for comedy, but not enough to be funny. Also two different people booby-trap the time machine in two different ways so the Sontarans and the evolved creature both die to it, in one case while the Doctor is on the whole-ass other side of town.

Geez, there’s still two left. “Timelash” sees the Doctor get caught in someone else’s time experiments (See! The Time Lords didn’t care about the Borad—that’s his name—experimenting in time, why were they mad at the guy from Two Doctors?), in this case a mutated dictator who had conquered a planet the Doctor had visited in an unseen adventure back when he was Jon Pertwee (in case you wondered when this happened, they make sure to show a mural of the Third Doctor and a picture of Jo Grant, even though no such episode ever aired). It takes a lot of its gravitas from the Big Brother-derivative nature of its antagonist, hiding his true self behind an image of a kind old man…except they’d already done that in the much superior Second Doctor story, The Macra Terror, including the plot point of all the people being convinced of the dictator’s moral superiority and acting on corrupt orders without question. Anyway, the Borad was disposing of dissidents by throwing them into a time portal, and one of them ends up at HG Wells’s house and then HG Wells just dicks around screwing things up for two episodes, like someone on the writing team really hated HG Wells I guess?

So I guess I give the best story to “Resurrection of the Daleks”, but like…I don’t want to. It’s still very bad. The Doctor and an assassin named Orcini get caught in a power struggle on the planet Necros, whose main industry is Tranquil Repose, a funeral company that also stores cryogenically frozen bodies until cures can be found for their diseases. There’s a bit of lip service paid to this being a corrupt arrangement already, as the employees are all too focused on presentation of the frozen/dead and little attention is paid to actually reviving them, with all information delivered by an obnoxious rockabilly DJ (who still gets a raw line—“It’s ROCK AND ROLL!” -blows up a Dalek- “It KILLS!”) who makes it obvious the frozen people’s families are taking money supposed to be used for cures and just leaving their family members in limbo forever; I thought that was a neat hook, as was the tension between the millionairess who generously sells a superfood at low prices to the poor who wants to kill the mysterious “great healer” who runs Tranquil Repose. Of course, once the zombies show up (and are promptly forgotten) and the daughter of a missing Tranquil Repose employee finds her mutated father in a Dalek shell, it turns out Davros is just using the frozen people to make new Daleks loyal to him, and also using the other lady to sell any useless bodies as food, disguising it so it passes as plant food. She wants him dead to pocket all the profits herself, Davros wants what he always wants, and it all spins out of control and pretty much everyone dies. Davros lives, but is taken captive by Daleks who aren’t loyal to him. Also there’s this weird bait-and-switch where Davros seems to be just a head, they blow up that head, and then Davros rolls up in his normal Dalek wheelchair like “hah you fell for my head thing did you” like dude it was an episode-and-a-half of you just talking to people through an animatronic? What? Man I haven’t even mentioned the weird plot about the nurse who was infatuated with her boss and they both die, or the inexplicable scene where a giant floating Dalek reflects some lasers back at people, pixelates, and explodes (there IS an extended version, maybe that explains it, but why would I watch that?).

Just a bad season, all around. No wonder the show almost got cancelled. 57. Zorro (final seven episodes): Not much else to say about this one, except that my understandable apprehension about the episode titled “Senor China Boy” was lessened when it turned out the title character was James Hong. Dodged a bullet there.

56. Challenge of the GoBots (episode 36 onward): What a mess this show is! Again, thanks to my mother for buying me this series, I’m very grateful and it’s just what I wanted, but that’s because I’m a crazy person. GoBots is a bad show in every way, incompetently written, poorly animated; I guess the voice direction is alright, it is Andrea Romano after all, but she’d do better work elsewhere. The third and final DVD set of the series (the distribution rights to the film, Battle of the Rock Lords, seem to be in limbo, but I watched that on TV ten years ago so I’m good) collects the last 30 episodes by airdate order, but airdate order is all OUT of order. Episodes 41-45 are an origin story that was clearly supposed to kick off the season, introducing concepts and powers that appear earlier with no explanation. It does help fill in some gaps, that’s for sure. I can’t really blame GoBots for that, Transformers and GI Joe had the same problems; in syndication it was impossible to make sure things aired in the intended order, especially with the hectic production schedules that would mean even production order didn’t make sense.

I can blame GoBots for when its internal logic doesn’t make any sense. Sure, Transformers had the whole Constructicons kerfuffle (Megatron says they were built on Earth, but later we flash-back to them as Autobots who were brainwashed by Megatron on Cybertron, and later still we flash-back to Megatron being built by what appears to be…the Constructicons) and what the heck is a Primitive Transformer, but for all its troubles the episodes themselves tended to make a certain amount of logical sense. If Optimus Prime said he had a plan, then a plan would unfold, including twists—like the famous scene where he lets Ravage escape to feed Megatron false information. In the episode Mission: Gobotron, Leader-1 says he has a dangerous plan to stop the Renegades from disrupting construction on Gobotron, as they have been the whole episode. After he says this, he proceeds to…ship a large amount of construction materials to Gobotron, which the Renegades attack and largely destroy, sending huge metal plates raining down from orbit onto civilians. It looks like civilians die! Gobotron didn’t put up its force fields, however, because they were controlled by someone in Leader-1’s convoy, who was injured in the Renegade attack, so another Guardian has to struggle through smoke to activate the defenses for the civilians. Leader-1 then declares victory because technically more people could have died. What??? Oh, and I neglected to mention: there was political pressure on the Guardians because they lose, like, a lot, and Leader-1 needed a win to stay in power. So the episode looks like Leader-1 purposely created a situation where people would get hurt, and then activated the force field later so he could claim he “saved” them from a situation he created. This is our hero??

That episode is not the only time the Guardians, the supposedly-good GoBots, come off as weird fascists, whose only claim to “good guy” status is they’re the nice status-quo, whereas the Renegades are punks who destroy public property. And brainwash people, I guess. The Renegades ARE bad, yes, but the Guardians are…also bad, is what I’m saying. The episode “Et Tu, Cy-Kill”, is an even more potent example of the problems with GoBots, as it demonstrates not only the disturbing fascist tendencies of the show, but its most glaring of many continuity problems. The episode begins with Scooter telling one of the new Guardians, Tri-Trak, that Leader-1 and Cy-Kill used to be friends (looking a lot more like modern portrayals of the friendship between Optimus Prime and Megatron than the classic Transformers episode War Dawn ever did). The plot of the episode follows Leader-1 and Cy-Kill as they fight against Renegade terrorist attacks, with Leader-1 becoming more popular than Cy-Kill, who seethes with jealousy. Right off the bat, Cy-Kill proposes a two-person dictatorship with Leader-1 (a…diumverate?), who refuses; as the episode goes on, the GoBots repeatedly try to proclaim Leader-1 dictator, and he just gives limp refusals that “No one man should rule Gobotron,” without any real defense of democratic ideals (Gobotron is repeatedly said to be ruled by a Gobot Council, whose members, aside from the wise elder Zeemon, change from episode to episode—you can fanon that there were elections, but just remember the real reason is no one was paying attention). Cy-Kill builds a small group of Guardians who prefer that HE be dictator, and so they free imprisoned Renegades on the condition they swear undying loyalty to Cy-Kill (thus explaining why Cop-Tur and Crasher are Cy-Kill’s right hands in the show) and when their assassination attempt on Leader-1 fails, they run off to become Renegades and take over Gobotron that way. The combination of repeated attempts by the Guardians to install Leader-1 as a dictator, and the understanding from Mission: Gobotron that Leader-1 is basically only in power because of the Renegade threat and he would lose his position if military action wasn’t needed, leaves a real bad taste in my mouth.

Oh, the continuity error? Remember I said Scooter recounted this tale to Tri-Trak? Well, in the flashback section, Tri-Trak IS THERE. He’s RIGHT NEXT TO ZEEMON. He’s FIGHTING AT THE SAME TIME AS LEADER-1 AND CY-KILL. Did he forget? They did introduce a mind-wiping machine in one episode, but Tri-Trak wasn’t shown to have been hit by it (not like Dart, who is a whole other continuity mess). Also, why did they JUST show Tri-Trak graduating from Guardian Academy, if he was also a Guardian literally HUNDREDS of years ago? Show makes no sense.

55. Ultraman (2019): Ultraman is a series I think is really cool while I also don’t know of a single installment to justify that belief. I’ve seen the original (although TECHNICALLY Ultra Q is the first one in the series, not Ultraman, but I haven’t seen Ultra Q), Shin Ultraman (which was pretty good, but very disjointed; Shin Godzilla and Shin Kamen Rider are much better), Ultraman: Toward the Future (the Australian one, which my friends will often mock for the narration that recurred in every episode: “Because of pollution in Earth’s atmosphere, Ultraman can only retain his gigantic form for three minutes. Time…is running out.”), and the short-lived 4Kids dub of Ultraman Tiga. I had heard a lot about the manga by Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi but never read it, and since I was running out of things to watch on Netflix, decided to give their adaptation a try. It uh. Hmm.

I do like the setup to the series, I think it’s rather unique; 30 years after the original Ultraman show, Shin Hayata, the man whose life Ultraman saved by fusing with him in the original series—basically, Shin would switch between himself and Ultraman as the situation merited, until at the end of the series Shin was healed and Ultraman went back home to space—is haunted by half-memories of being Ultraman, and troubled by fantastic powers he’s suddenly manifesting. The anti-alien organization, Science Special Search Party, has been reduced to a museum of Ultraman’s adventures due to a decrease in alien encounters, and Shin’s old comrade Ide runs the place…and reveals that’s all a lie, they’re still active just acting in the background, and they work together to make an Ultraman-shaped Iron Man armor for Shin to become an old man superhero. This is an interesting and unique concept! So of course it’s thrown out the window immediately so Shin’s son Shinjiro, who inherited Ultraman powers from his father, can become the real Ultraman after his dad is injured (his dad later gets a new outfit based on Ultraman’s boss, Zoffy). In theory this allows for a Spider-Man type setup, where the young kid gets to learn big important lessons about trying hard and standing by your morals, even when things go wrong or you screw up. I’m not sure that is the greatest way to run a government organization, but I’ll loop back to that later. The entire premise is immediately undermined when they introduce the character of Dan Moroboshi, a baseline human who ALSO gets his own Ultraman suit (based on Ultraseven, who is from a show that didn’t happen in this universe—are we to believe there’s another Ultraseven out there in space and it’s just a coincidence this suit looks like him, or does Ultraseven not exist in this universe? I’ll never know). And then there’s an unaligned dude named Jack who also gets an Ultraman suit (based, of course, on Ultraman Jack). And then there’s ANOTHER dude named Seiji Hokuto who’s very sketchy and also gets his own Ultraman suit (based on Ultraman Ace). So basically anyone could just…have an Ultraman suit, with equivalent powers. So why are they just letting Shinjiro, an emotional, repressed teenager with basically no training, run wild doing superhero stuff on the public dime? Also, a big part of the first arc is that the SSSP is changing tack, moving from operating in secret to reasserting its might as, presumably, a government-sanctioned organization, and revealing that they have human-sized Ultramen to the world…but they never really explain anything about how Ultraman works, or that there are people in those suits. They get everyone believing that Ultraman, the alien, is back, and just looks different and…let them believe that. Which causes problems later.

The main problem with this show is it assumes we care about Shinjiro and his troubles when they’re almost all self-inflicted by his own immaturity and emotional overreaction. This would be forgivable if Shinjiro ever expressed any sort of moral compass or ideology, but instead he just sort of wanders around in a daze, unsure of what to do, until someone makes him mad and he freaks out and breaks things. Often his girlfriend Rena has to coerce him into doing the right thing because she believes in him or something, and when given the chance she can’t articulate a moral argument in favor of Ultraman’s superheroics either. Hell, even Dan Moroboshi, the supposedly highly-trained soldier, ignores a civilian (Taro, who later gets his own Ultraman suit, of course, but not before becoming the Human Torch for practically no reason) providing him evidence that would help solve a mass kidnapping that also captured an Ultraman—and Moroboshi ignoring this leads directly to the death of Taro’s girlfriend, a fact the show forgets about immediately and Taro never expresses any anger toward Moroboshi for; the most we get is him thinking about how he didn’t listen to Taro and going “Oh hey yeah that guy I ignored.” And that happens in the second storyline, which is the one I LIKED; at only six episodes, it’s fast, it's concise, it has a simple superheroic premise where the good guys are good, the bad guys are bad (except for the pretty alien who’s being manipulated by the true villain, of course) and the win feels good. I’m skipping over the first season because it’s a lot of setup without much payoff (except that everyone spends a lot of time fighting Bemular who turns out to not even be a bad guy), but the third season…

Look. Having an asshole pundit come after the superheroes on irrational, trumped-up charges and turning the populace against the hero by repeating lies loudly and often enough is a tradition dating back to, well, Spider-Man. I have no problem with that. I would like the opposition to at least be coherent, instead of this dude who just bashes Ultraman for property damage (wouldn’t the alien monsters damage more property?) and at one point tells a fable where he compares the attacking aliens to wolves who need to attack Earth to reduce humanity’s population (compared to deer) so we don’t kill ourselves through overuse of resources (as intelligent creatures, couldn’t we find another way to manage resources to live? Leaving aside the complaint that the aliens would just kill, you know, all of us, it’s not as if all of them were after humans as a food source). No one ever takes him to task for effectively advocating for murderers. This is presented as a good argument. It’s also part of a conspiracy of anti-Ultraman aliens who are trying to kill the Ultramen on Earth…but just the ones who have specian beam powers like the original Ultraman, so actually most of the cast would be fine. They also use shapeshifters and doctored footage to frame the Ultramen for attacks and murders, and this is where the whole thing falls apart for me. I mentioned the SSSP never explains to the populace who the Ultramen are. They could have just announced on TV that they arrested Shinjiro and were conducting an internal investigation, made clear that there were suits and they can switch out who’s in them. Made this about one rogue agent instead of an institution working for shadowy interests. But they didn’t. They didn’t tell anyone shit. The SSSP was operating with no oversight and no accountability to the people. This is the organization I’m supposed to be rooting for? It sounds extremely corrupt and shady! Especially since it turns out the aliens were being helped by Mr. Edo, an alien working within the SSSP! Now, his reasoning is also horrible; he created Ultramen on Earth with specian beam powers like the original Ultraman because he didn’t like Ultraman and didn’t like that humans liked Ultraman so he needed to make new Ultramen so he could disgrace them so humanity wouldn’t like Ultraman anymore and he could kill the Ultramen, and only then, once he was done murdering innocents, could Earth be allowed into an interplanetary consortium. Because, you see, Ultramen make judgements based on biased reasoning, and so he must make new Ultramen to show humanity that their reasoning is biased, so he can kill them all for—this is nonsense, it’s a complete hypocritical contradiction, and it’s presented like a big moral gotcha. They don’t even refute it, the people who have turned against Ultraman just turn back to his side once he starts winning against the big bad. It’s all tryhard edgelord superheroics without any depth, just acting out the moral questions of better fiction without anything to say. I’m very fascinated by the Ultraman series and its complicated, nonsense timeline, but I would have been better off watching one of the formulaic kids shows that make up its core than this mess.

54. Star Wars Droids: Of the two Star Wars cartoons that premiered in 1985, Droids is the more palatable to a modern viewer. Droids is typically described as taking place before the first movie, when C-3PO and R2-D2 hadn’t been purchased by the royal family of Alderaan yet. If your reaction to that was, “Wait, didn’t Bail Organa buy them at the end of Revenge of the Sith?” I remind you that movie hadn’t come out yet, so no one knew to be in-continuity with it. Really, though, Droids exists in that kind of un-time typical of movie tie-in cartoons: it has all the trappings of being set around the same time as the movie, without making any sense with the plot of the film. And that’s okay!

Droids follows 3PO and R2 as they bounce from “master” to “master,” helping small groups of friends out in a series of connected adventures that run 4 to 5 episodes, and then moving on to another group and another adventure. This kind of continuing plot was unusual for a cartoon of this era, especially a 13-episode Saturday morning cartoon; some shows would have 5-episode miniseries, usually operating as a “pilot” in syndication in hope that a network or enough local channels would order a series (GI Joe and GoBots had success with this model, Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos…did not), but those miniseries aired daily, Monday-Friday, and Droids was a Saturday morning cartoon. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Droids had less success than the Ewoks cartoon—maybe, but I doubt it. The episodes didn’t tend to end on cliffhangers or anything, so a kid could easily watch one episode of Droids, get a complete story, and not be lost if they tuned in later even if they missed a few weeks; the arcs are just defined by supporting cast and villains. I wonder if one of the problems was the action. Though Droids has a lot more going on than Ewoks, it still relies on cartoonish antics and simplistic solutions to actions sequences, with violence never elevating above a character being shoved over or falling with a comical thud. Compare this to Transformers and GI Joe, which regularly featured major gun battles that never managed to hit any people, but frequently blew tons of stuff up. Droids does feel rather tame next to that, or even He-Man, which had a lower level of violence but would still give you He-Man punching the camera followed by a reverse-shot of Skeletor falling down.

So, what does Droids have going for it over Ewoks, aside from “everything?” Well, the design sense is top-notch, clearly copying from Jean Giraud/Mœbius, giving the series a style that set it apart from its cookie-cutter contemporaries (hey, if you’re going to crib, crib from the best)—although, the character designer appears to have gotten confused and put C-3PO’s pistons on the wrong side of his elbows somehow. The characters in each storyline tend to blend into one another, although the first and last storylines do stand out as the closest to a fun exploration of the Star Wars universe. The first one sees the droids fall in with a ragtag group of racing enthusiasts who also have pissed off a criminal organization; the aging patriarch of the organization is looking to leave it to his tech-bro son, with disastrous results. Boba Fett even shows up by the end! That’s probably the best one, although the final storyline, where the Droids accompany a man with the unlikely name of Mungo Baobab (they consistently use the bay-o-bab pronunciation, too, which just makes it funnier) on a quest for treasure while they’re pursued by an incompetent crime lord and an Imperial officer with a grudge against Baobab. That storyline was popular enough to get a TV movie prequel, detailing the first meeting between the Droids and Mungo and the origin of the soldier’s rivalry with him. It also features a giant robot named Heep who feeds off of astromech droids, which just seems impractical. Also, it pulls the old “meet every need of the sacrifice so they don’t expect they’re sacrifices” schtick; let me tell you, “Fetch an R2 unit from the harem” is not a phrase I thought I’d ever hear. The second and longest storyline was more disjointed; whereas the other storylines tell complete adventures each episode that build into an ongoing story as you watch, the second storyline was much more episodic, just featuring the same cast. It also revolved around the droids helping restore the “rightful king” (groan) to his throne…only for the writers to forget this and then establish that said king hadn’t accomplished some task all the monarchs have to do, so really anyone could have been the rightful king. (Although, personally, I don’t think anyone can claim to be RIGHTFUL ruler without a democratic mandate, but I digress…) What followed was a series of events so hackneyed and juvenile I’ve already blocked most of them from my memory, except that IG-88 shows up for some reason, and there’s a character named Kybo Ren, with a B (also, I think that was a compound first name and he had another last name, but I’m not looking it up).

What else is there to say? Stewart Copeland composed the opening theme song, which definitely isn’t up to the standards of, say, that other guy in the Police, but it grew on me. I can’t for the life of me figure out why it failed; toy sales may have had something to do with it, but considering they could sell toys of the background characters in the cantina in the main Star Wars line, I don’t know why figures of the villains and heroes from Droids wouldn’t fit right in with the rest of someone’s Star Wars collection. Maybe kids were just over Star Wars in 1985. Boy, there’s a weird thought…

53. Six God Combination Godmars: This one was another big robot show of its time, coming right on the heels of New Tetsujin-28 from the same company (like, literally the next week in the same time slot). It even has one of the same characters; the police chief from Tetsujin is transplanted, design, actor, and all, as the leader of the special task force, Cosmo Crusher, that the main character of Godmars works for. Based on the manga Mars, one of the minor works by Tetsujin-28 creator Mitsuteru Yokoyama, the manga’s plot and designs were radically changed for the show to more closely ape popular robot toy designs of the time; supplementing the manga’s one robot, Gaia, with five more that combine into the titular Godmars. The plot? Ace space pilot Takeru finds out he was adopted after being sent to Earth as a young boy—to conquer it. If he failed, his robot Gaia would self-destruct and take out the whole planet. He was sent by his “father,” Xul, ruler of planet Gishin; although, in what I believe is a change from the manga (I had difficulty finding information about the manga in English, and only skimmed the one summary I did find just in case I want to read it some day), the anime reveals Xul kidnapped the young Takeru, called Mars on his home planet, from his TRUE parents, since Xul is an energy being unable of having children himself. Mars/Takeru’s brother, Marg, works behind the scenes to help him while feigning mental illness, and here we see why this show was so popular: two hot brothers divided by tragedy. Apparently, women went nuts for Marg. He’s on the movie poster, and he got a special direct to video episode all about him that came out FOUR YEARS AFTER THE SHOW ENDED. The showrunners must have been kicking themselves after they killed him off.

Godmars kind of buckles under the weight of its unexpected popularity. Well, even before that, it had a problem that there was really no reason for the robot to be a combiner—to the extent there ever is. Most shows had three or five combining robots as a way to create a large supporting cast and give them something to do during the fighting, but Godmars just has Takeru control all the robots with his psychic powers, so the other members of Cosmo Crusher are just…there, backing him up. A few of them get romance plots pretty late. But they clearly expected the show to only run for half a year, since the fight against Xul and Gishin resolves 25 episodes in, and there’s another 39 episodes after that. They fill the time by just doing the same plot they just did…again. They reveal Xul has been mentally controlling a general from another planet and driving him to seize power by instigating racial pogroms, only to find his daughter is part of the minority, so he has to kill her but she just gets banished…it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy thing, and all I could think was it’s the same plot as the backstory to Voltes V. Well, I find myself thinking, “This is like they’re trying to do Voltes V again and messing it up” a lot in these early-80s robot anime. Godmars has the Voltron curse; it’s just good enough that it was popular at the time, but not so good that it hasn’t been surpassed before or since. Taken together with all the anime available, it’s just incredibly mid. Great animation though.

52. Ya Boy Kongming!: I think maybe modern anime isn’t made to appeal to me anymore.

Let me say, first: that’s not a bad thing. I’m 35 years old and weird; I’ve never been drawn to more popular media, my tastes take like a decade to catch up to anyone else, and I’m just drawn to being the only guy to see weird stuff no one’s ever heard of. By all means, younger generation, enjoy what you want. But there’s also been a shift in the way anime is presented in America, which doesn’t jibe with my outdated conception of the medium. You see, back in the 1990’s, if you wanted to watch anime in America, you had to get it on videotape. That meant the series that would come to America were pre-selected to favor series that would sell to people who would buy (or rent) multiple videotapes of the same show—sci-fi/fantasy nerds. You know they put every episode of Star Trek on video? I saw them circling around the ceiling at Dave’s Comics when it went out of business. So, obviously, if a nerd could do that, they’d buy every episode of, say, Ranma ½. As a consequence, anime was, in the popular consciousness, associated with science fiction and fantasy narratives, because that’s what was available. Even once it started getting on TV, the shows tended toward this genre, as they either used what was already licensed for video or were designed to sell toys to kids, which in the boys’ toy market meant adventure series with fantastical elements. This is no longer the case today. The ease and prevalence of streaming means everything can be readily available, for cheap or for free, legally, and in high definition. Instead of searching for hidden gem six-episode shows from five or ten years prior, everything is available in America the instant it released in Japan. As a result, there’s a much wider variety of genres of anime available in America than before, as streaming companies want to draw in as many viewers as possible and don’t have to limit themselves to just what tapes will sell; everyone pays the same subscription amount and you watch whichever show in whatever genre you want. In general, this is good. As specifically applies to me, this means I’ll scroll through the list of every show on the new anime season and find maybe one that looks kind of interesting. Even considering I had a biased view of the genre breakdown, even considering my particular tastes (and desire to avoid the preponderance of weird, horny otaku fetish bait), it can FEEL like something shifted and left me behind.

I also want to talk about genre, because of course genre isn’t the be-all, end-all of what we choose to watch. I will watch all sorts of things, read all sorts of things, and certainly I should expand my horizons more than I have. I’d love to see more arthouse films, read more high literature, but I keep being drawn back to my own little niche, the things I usually read…it’s easier, I suppose, but also I get different things out of it. I think about the old stereotype of the woman wanting to watch romance and the man wanting to watch action, and each one being bored by the other’s choices. It’s reductive and I can think of a ton of exceptions (even within my reactions to things I’ve watched), but I think it illustrates the general point: when you watch a lot of things that are similar, have similar plot structures, follow typical elements, you begin to piece together what you like about the genre and can better tell different examples apart. The action fan is excited because he can see how that stunt was really cool, how that comeback was extra stupid, how much the muscleman star has improved on his acting since the last one; the romance fan is shocked when they invert her expectation for the meet cute, amused by the banter with the best friend character, torn apart by the unspoken emotions you’ll only notice if you’re really paying attention to the plot or the actor’s delivery. You show the action fan the romance movie or vice-versa, and without the context of other movies in the genre, they just see the same movie as the other examples of the genre. It’s how I can sit here and be like, “Oh, Voltes V is a much better show than Voltron, because XYZ,” but reviewing a show outside my comfort zone leaves me wondering, “Is this REALLY good, or did it just exceed my expectations?” I worry about my ability to accurately assess the quality of a series of a type I don’t usually watch because I don’t know what’s been done, what’s hackneyed, or what’s truly valuable to fans of the genre. I can only speak to my own experience, which is by necessity limited by my own preferences. This exercise was all about my own preferences anyway, so in a way that doesn’t matter, but I want to make clear I’m not implying my favorite genres are in any way superior to any other.

Ya Boy Kongming! (Paripi Komei in Japanese—the English translation goes with the Chinese pronunciation, not the Japanese pronunciation) came highly recommended. Two separate friends told me, on multiple occasions, to watch it, and it was on every top-ten anime of 2022 list I saw (which was only like two or three, but that’s still a fair chunk of the major websites that cover that sort of thing). Now, judging multiple series in multiple genres against each other is difficult, for the previously-stated reasons, but I do wonder if that says more about its competition than Kongming! itself. In the show, actual real-life person Zhuge Liang Kongming, the master Chinese strategist, finds himself reborn in modern-day Japan on Halloween and decides to become the manager of a young musician. What follows is a lighthearted, fluffy take on the “A Star Is Born” archetype, where the older man, past his prime, spends the remainder of his life working to show everyone what he sees in a bright young star (Eiko, who was inspired to be a singer after seeing a performance that literally “saved her life,” as the stereotype goes) that had been previously overlooked (“lighthearted and fluffy” meaning “without the substance abuse and suicide part”…or the part where they get married). And it’s fine! It’s fine. I can’t find any fault with the show. But that’s all there is to it, you know? And here’s where my ignorance of the genre comes in. I can only think of a few shows or movies I’ve watched that are similar to this one: Carole and Tuesday, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, Magical Princess Creamy Mami, actually Super Dimension Fortress Macross (but only the Minmay bits), and maybe season 3 of Aggretsuko. (The Doors biopic and Flight of the Conchords aren’t quite the same) Elvis is kind of a mirror to Kongming!, as it presents a crooked manager who doesn’t have the best intentions for his star, perhaps more similar to Kongming’s antagonists (?), Azalea, a high school band who tried to make it big but, in a moment of weakness, signed with a cynical Frank Farian-type who turned them into a soulless pop group. I have to admit, I appreciated how the show avoided glamorizing the pop idol scene in Japan, which is skeevy as hell to me; instead it focused on busking and rap battles, finding your voice outside the corporate structures. It tried to say something about overcoming depression and your own self-doubt through the Kabetaijin and Azalea storylines, but it’s all just too pat, in that shonen anime way where everything gets better after the culmination of the storyline, you know? Kongming magically solves everyone’s problems, and then they all smile and fall in line with his plan to save the world through pop music (that’s why I thought of Minmay, you see). Everything is predictable, nothing surprises. Even the big, emotional moments, like when Eiko decides on a title for the first song she wrote, play out exactly how you’d expect; we are meant to thrill when she renames the working title “Roppongi Udon Shop” to…“DREAMER.”

Now look, “Roppongi Udon Shop” was never going to go to # 1, I know that. But “DREAMER?” The most hackneyed, overused song title ever? I count eighteen songs and eight albums listed on Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for “Dreamer” alone. That’s your big emotional moment?

Like, it’s a fine show. I didn’t hate it. But I can’t say I looked forward to watching it either. Compared to the other films it reminded me of, Kongming! didn’t have the political message of Carole and Tuesday, the bizarre action of Creamy Mami, the tragic story of Elvis, the romance of Macross, or the mild psychological horror elements of the stalker plotline in Aggretsuko. Comparing it to other anime from 2022 I watched, it wasn’t as funny as Pop Team Epic or Urusei Yatsura (and it’s songs weren’t as catchy as UY’s either, though I’m sure those probably WERE produced in the hated idol system), it wasn’t as emotional a coming of age story as Lupin Zero, Mob Psycho 100 III, or Witch from Mercury, it wasn’t as cute as Spy x Family, and it didn’t have as pointed a critique of capitalism as Made in Abyss. It’s fine, and if you like fun stories about singers believing in themselves, this is one. Go for it. But it didn’t have much to offer me.

51. Psycho Armor Govarian: Watching through all the robot shows I have (legal) access to means I just keep coming back to Go Nagai, huh? Legend says that, in the early 80’s, Go Nagai tried to revive his original hit robot show, Mazinger Z, with a new installment. However, Toei Animation still held exclusive rights to make a Mazinger Z show, and Nagai and Toei were still arguing over his royalties for creating other robot heroes like Gaiking, and they wouldn’t work that out for another ten years. Instead, Nagai teamed up with Knack Productions (Astroganger, Chargeman Ken) and created Psycho Armor Govarian, named after the titular robot, who looks…basically just like Mazinger Z, but more eighties-ish. Govarian also technically transforms, but it’s one of those transformations where he just turns into a robot laying down, and also they never do it on the show.

Nagai is famous for his “hot-blooded” heroes, kind of dumb punks who get by through sheer guts and determination (to paraphrase Optimus Prime). Back in the 70’s and 80’s, though, Nagai’s stories tended to get toned down for TV; the hard-hitting punk storylines of the manga were just too violent for family television, although from an American perspective anime was still extremely violent, especially considering how regulated and tame American children’s cartoons were around the same time. Consequently, while Nagai’s manga are still vibrant and affecting today, the (early) shows based on those manga can get kind of repetitive and dull, and Govarian is no exception. The show does have an interesting premise; getting past the typical “aliens invade, but one good alien gathers children together to save the day” story, the premise is the children gathered together all have psychic powers, and the robots are just a way of channeling their powers, having no inherent abilities itself. This is a nice reversal of the Mazinger formula, and prefigures shows like G Gundam by over ten years. However, the concept breaks apart a bit once they establish the children also CREATE the robots through their psychic powers, inconsistently portrayed as them pulling metal from walls and fashioning it into the proper shapes, or just creating them out of thin air. Along with Govarian, there are two other robots, Raid and Garom, who form kind of a Gundam/Guncannon/Guntank triad for the show; and because that’s not enough, Govarian and Raid temporarily get powered-up forms when they travel to the alien’s dimension. The show never explains why they need the robots instead of just channeling their powers together, except that the bad guys are doing it too. And when I say “they”, I mean it—not only does the show repeatedly establish that the heroes need to pool their psychic powers to beat the aliens, including pulling from heroes left back at the base (Govarian pilot Isamu appears to be especially attached to the cute Pacific Islander (?) twins, Puke and Pike (uh, not pronounced like the English words they look like)), it just KEEPS ADDING NEW CHARACTERS. The show starts off with seven human heroes and two aliens, adds two more humans within two episodes, kills one dude (which was fine, because he looked just like two of the other dudes and I couldn’t keep them straight) and adds another as a replacement, and then brings in three more people before the end just because. I may be forgetting some! The show definitely did, barely anyone got any characterization, and people established early on get completely forgotten halfway through; there’s a stereotypical little Chinese boy who has a big origin where his mother is killed in front of him, and by the end of the show he’d pop up like “Oh right, you’re here.”

Which is not to say there’s nothing of value in the series. The initial villain, Meria, is particularly interesting. The only female commander in the alien armed forces, her failures are used as pretext by her commanding officers to have her removed from duty in disgrace, despite the other commanders not winning either. At first, this drives her mad, and she steals a robot for herself and goes on a maniacal crusade to kill the heroes, sometimes causing havoc just to lure Govarian out so at least one of them will die. Meria is responsible for the single most shocking bit of violence in the show, when a little boy is running for safety into his mother’s arms, and Meria smashes him underfoot (hey, even toned down, this is still from the makers of Devilman and Chargeman Ken, there’s still some wild violence on NPC’s for no reason). However, Meria has the only complete arc in the show; after several defeats, she ends up living in the woods, and saves her former commander, Christo, the man who had her demoted. They are separated and Christo goes back into service, but Meria wanders the Earth, connecting with its people, and ultimately regrets her part in the invasion, and ends up dying in battle with Christo in the next-to-last episode. She’s the real star of the show.

What do I mean, no one else had a complete arc? Main pilot Isamu doesn’t change as a character; he’s fighting to avenge his dead mother and sister, he reconciles with his estranged father, he’s in love with the mysterious Risa who creates flowers with her mind, and he’s friends with Pike and Puke, but none of that PROGRESSES. There’s no CONFLICT with his dad; turns out they’re both fighting the aliens anyway, and they just get close by working together. Isamu doesn’t change. Atlas and Layla have a more romantic plotline, with the shy, big guy Atlas being embarrassed about his feelings for the traditionally beautiful, bold Layla, but there’s a cute episode where they go visit Atlas’s mom, then Atlas is injured and Layla sits by his side, and later Atlas is by Layla’s side when she almost drowns saving Pike and Puke, and…that’s it, that’s their whole arc. Kurt Buster was an Air Force pilot who tries to convince the Earth Forces to work with them, he dies in battle, but his sacrifice convinces the military to work with the heroes with no conflict for the rest of the show. Hans is an asshole, but he has a meet-cute with an alien animal rescue worker while in their dimension (this is Go Nagai, so walking in on someone while she’s in the shower counts as a meet-cute) and she helps them get home and is never mentioned again. You could say the alien ally Zeku has an arc, since he was the last of the resistance fighters against the fascist dictator of the alien dimension, and he gets to suicide-attack the main bad guy in the final episode, but that’s no an arc, most of the time Zeku is just the guy who gives orders, and anyway GoShogun did that better. Oh, and how about the main bad guy, Garadain? There’s some neat bits where he’s completely detached from the job of ruling the planet, even spending no time with his wife, just sitting alone with a fairy (???) named Milly Lee, who’s like…half his mistress, half drug, as she has some sort of magical hold over Garadain. This is never explained.

Anyway, uh, Knack Productions improved drastically since Chargeman Ken, but they’re still not great. There’s some wonderful animation, especially early on, but I imagine they were working on a tight deadline for some of these episodes, which is how you get the amazing animation mistake Kenny Lauderdale caught on his channel, [I will not link that here as I am not affiliated with Kenny Lauderdale; basically, the animator accidentally photographed his hand holding one of the frames in place and it made it to broadcast]. (Remember kids, don’t fault the budget; sometimes you see the mistake, but you have an hour to get the tape to the TV studio and you need to get paid)

50. Detective Conan: Whoops I was wrong, there was one part of Wild Police Story left, in which the heroes graduate the police academy and then it explains how they all died except Zero. And then Crunchyroll delisted that episode for some reason?

Oh boy, the plot actually moved this year! Right near the start in March/April, a three-episode arc saw Conan team up with his friends in the FBI and have a tense chase across Tokyo because all his FBI friends are stupid. Just the worst. Like, they get found out because they use a very simple cypher for their messages about the Black Organization, which, fine, Detective Conan is still kind of for kids and they love explaining their tricks so the kids at home can feel like they learned something, but they were using escape room-level trickery to code messages about an international criminal organization and they act surprised when agents start dying. They try to set a trap and just end up getting more people killed because the bad guys bother to check if it’s a trap, and oh yeah, one of the guys they sent to set the trap faked his death earlier and if the bad guys see that it’ll blow the cover of someone sent to infiltrate their organization—which, by the way, means two people are infiltrating this criminal organization for two different police services and they aren’t coordinating and haven’t taken it down yet. Then, dudebro who is trying to avoid the bad guys escapes to an island in Tokyo Bay, and…makes a fire on the coast! So they know someone’s on that island! Dumbass. Well, at least he figured out who Rum was, finishing off a multi-year mystery with three possible candidates. It was the guy who’s also always around one of the deep-cover agents in the Organization. Does he suspect? Is he just keeping tabs on a subordinate? Who knows, but I’m sure they’ll drag out any payoff for a while.

I don’t have much else to say about this year; there was a Kaito Kid episode where he fought Amuro, Heiji made his annual appearance, they solve a mystery related to Haibara’s dead sister, and the final episode of the season had a dude kill his friend over Yu-Gi-Oh cards with a particularly unbelievable trick to get an alibi for the murder; dude tied a string from a heavy shelf full of trading cards and attached it to his belt, so the shelf would fall as he walked away from the table. He walked right past two other people! Even assuming the thread was as invisible as they said (which, no), those people could have walked into it! And seen his belt move! And that still would have taken more exertion than normal walking! Stupid.

Eh, it’s Conan; I’ll be back.

49. Detective Conan: The Culprit Hanzawa: When I watched Thundercats Roar, the parody of 1985’s hit action cartoon Thundercats, I asked, “Who is this for?” Why would someone make a parody of a show that hasn’t been on TV, even in reruns, since 2001…in 2020?

I didn’t have to ask that question about Detective Conan: The Culprit Hanzawa. Detective Conan is one of the most popular shows in Japan, and it’s been running non-stop since 1996. This show was for everyone.

A common shorthand in Detective Conan is to show the murder, but have the culprit just be a silhouette, to represent that the hero has figured out how the crime occurred, but not who did it. Culprit follows Hanzawa, one such silhouetted man, who has journeyed to Beika, Conan’s neighborhood in Tokyo, to kill someone (heavily implied to be Shinichi Kudo, which, uh, not to spoil the first two episodes of Detective Conan, but you ain’t gonna find him, dude). When he arrives, he finds the whole area of Beika Town living in a kind of traumatic stupor, in constant fear of murder lurking around every corner. Apartments are cheap, because they’ve all had a horrible murder in them. Child detectives stalk the streets. A random high school student has Goku-level powers. And whatever you do, do NOT take a job with Professor Agasa, no matter how much he haggles your salary higher.

Basically, it’s every joke you ever heard about Murder She Wrote, turned up to 11, and damn it I wanted to make a joke about Beika being the murder capital of Japan sometime, come on show.

Anyway, it’s pretty funny, but I think it only works if you know Detective Conan. The episodes are short, at only 10 minutes each (with theme songs), and the final episode is a highlight, as it follows Conan’s friend Sonoko who has founded an…interesting cult.

Conan actually busted out the bento box fax machine in this one, he doesn’t use that one much anymore. Of course, he just beaned a guy with it, didn’t send a fax, so…

48. Galaxy High School: What a collection of talent for such a forgettable mid-eighties show. I suppose “forgettable” is a little hard on it; a lot of the humor in Galaxy High prefigures late-eighties shows like Tiny Toon Adventures or even the humor and aesthetics of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which premiered the following year, but it never reaches those heights. Perhaps my opinion was soured by Wikipedia’s comparison to Urusei Yatsura, which I only keep bringing up because it’s so good. No mid-80’s American cartoon could compete with that level of zaniness, that motif gained popularity in the 90’s. Certainly, though, there were episodes where main character Doyle Cleverlobe was a bit more like Ataru Moroboshi than others…but I was saying, the talent. Developed by Chris Columbus (one year before he directed Adventures in Babysitting, which he followed up with the first two Home Alone Movies) from a pitch by Syd Iwalter and…um, John Kricfalusi, later creator of Ren & Stimpy but also a confessed child predator who used his cartoons to lure teen girls to his studio, just want to be clear I don’t like him. Anyway. Episodes were written by Larry DiTillio (He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983 AND 2002) and Beast Wars), and featured actors like Sue Blue (Arcee in Transformers), Hal Rayle (Snarl, Pipes, and Shrapnel in Transformers, Deep Six in GI Joe, Commander Steele in SWAT Kats, and a fill-in for Raphael in TMNT when Rob Paulsen couldn’t make it to the studio), Howard Morris (Ernest T. Bass in Andy Griffith, the title character in Atom Ant), Jennifer Darling (Irma in TMNT, Ayeka in Tenchi Muyo), Pat Carroll (Ursula in Little Mermaid), Pat Fraley (Krang in TMNT), David Lander (Squiggy in Laverne & Shirley), Neil Ross (Prowl in Transformers, Shipwreck in GI Joe, Keith in Voltron), John Stephenson (Thundercracker in Transformers, Mr. Slate in Flintstones), and Nancy Cartwright (Bart motherfucking Simpson)…plus, music by Don Felder of all people!

So, okay, people whose names Eric recognizes are involved. How’s the show? Well…TMS produced and animated it, and I’ve spoken before about how they were doing top-notch animation at the time, and they don’t disappoint here either, turning in what I feel confident saying was the best animation on television in the 80’s, in any country. Must have been that US network money from CBS, I don’t know, but there’s barely any errors and it’s all very smooth, even when doing extremely complicated movements. The writing, on the other hand, falls back too often into sitcom clichés, even if the sitcom the cliché comes from is Gilligan’s Island. They pull the old “Oh I’m their king, oh wait no I’m the sacrifice” plot! With cannibalism, even! From a modern perspective, some of the writing choices feel off—though there is some sense of episode-to-episode continuity, with new characters (like the wealthy, annoying Reginald Unicycle) being introduced and actually sticking around for future episodes, character motivations do seem to shift in unusual ways. Wendy Garbo, the wealthy popular girl, is either part of the gang or a mild antagonist, depending on the episode; and while our human main characters, Aimee and Doyle, are introduced as hating each other, Aimee tends to default to being the voice of reason for Doyle, and is even convinced he has a crush on her at one point and seems into it. That’s the beach episode, by the way, which is one of the better ones, which, considering it’s the one where the whole cast almost dies…

The show never bothers to explain WHY Aimee and Doyle are both going to school in outer space. The theme song just says, “Two kids will be chosen from Earth to go to school at Galaxy High,” after explaining that Doyle is a jock and Aimee is a nerd. In the first episode, they’re enrolled, and showing up for the first day of class, where the teachers all publicly mock Doyle for being a bad student and force him to get a job at a pizza parlor to pay his tuition. Why he wouldn’t just go home is never explained. Aimee, on the other hand, is immediately taken in by the cool girls and gets a retro-futurist costume she wears for the rest of the show. The early episodes are very Doyle-focused, and suffer for it; they tend to revolve around Doyle getting into hijinks as he’s tormented by the xenophobic Beef Bunch, led by Beef Bonk, an alien who hates Earthlings, as exemplified by his oh-so-clever catchphrase, “Earth stinks.” They love the catchphrases on this show; did we really need one character to always say “I love it!” and another to say “I can’t stand it!”? The show starts to improve once it enlarges its focus to the rest of the cast, beginning with the episode “Those Eyes, Those Lips,” which refers to the physical characteristics of rock star Mick Maggers (gee, I wonder if he’s based on anyone in real life) who supporting cast member Booey Bubblehead wants to see in concert because his music touches her soul or something. It’s a pretty standard plot, including a bit where Mick Maggers reveals he’s just a normal guy by dressing up in a disguise to befriend Booey organically that seems gross in retrospect, but they make some interesting design choices as Booey talks about listening to music alone that really make it stand out. None of that was enough to keep the show around for more than 13 episodes, though, and so it never had much of a chance to grow beyond sitcom stereotypes, and anyway within a few years other shows like Bobby’s World or Doug would take up that sitcom niche for kids, and Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Duck Tales would surpass it for comedy, adventure, and…well, maybe not surpass the animation quality, but raise the bar a bit more. An interesting experiment, though.

Oh, and I almost forgot: The Creep, the winged alien who chained himself to Aimee and always croons songs about either her or the action? I hate him.

47. Digimon: Ghost Game: Oh! That escalated to a finale rather quickly. There’s not a lot to say about it; they had a bunch more done-in-one episodes, and then a few started leading toward a finale, explaining that the Digimon were sent to Earth to escape corruption in the Digital World, so the kids started thinking about going there. Then everything went wrong on Earth, they went, and within three episodes all the questions were answered and everything was resolved, humans found out about Digimon and they worked together for a new future, the end. I enjoyed it fine, but there’s not a lot to say about it.

Well, except this—they never paid off Kiyoshiro’s arm being wrapped in bandages! Sure, sometimes he took them off and was a badass, but I guess he was just pretending the whole time because he saw it in an anime.

46. Ghost Sweeper Mikami: Last year I spoke fondly of the show Phantom Quest Corps, but also mentioned that I’d seen several people say it was a ripoff of Ghost Sweeper Mikami, which I knew had been posted on YouTube by the rights holder. So, this year I watched Ghost Sweeper Mikami, to see how similar they are. And, uh. Well, Phantom Quest Corp is about a beautiful, stylish redhead who is running a failing business where she fights ghosts with a lightsaber, and Ghost Sweeper Mikami is about a beautiful, stylish redhead who is running a successful business where she fights ghosts with a lightsaber. So I see where they were coming from.

Mikami falls into the same trap a lot of anime from the late 80s and early 90s did, however; one that Phantom Quest Corp avoided: the gross serial sexual predator we’re all supposed to think is funny and loveable. Admittedly, there are a few of those I do find funny and loveable; you all know I’m a big Lupin III fan, and Master Roshi is a great character—heck, I even like Danbei from Cutie Honey, and I’ll give some props to Ataru from Urusei Yatsura, if only because he’s not the worst guy in that show. The difference between those characters and, say, Carrot from Sorcerer Hunters, is they all have other redeeming characteristics, and being way too horny is their comedy character flaw, like Scrooge McDuck’s greed except instead of gold they want the pussy. Especially when discussing Lupin and Roshi, it’s a sometimes thing. In the 90s, however, the popularity of characters who caused, uh, let’s say sexual hijinks was apparently so high that several writers thought they could just…make a character who was nothing but that. Just a 100%, always on, horndog machine with no respect for boundaries. There’s a whole big disgusting pile of them, and one such character is Yokoshima, the uh, audience viewpoint character for Ghost Sweeper Mikami.

I hate him.

The first few episodes of Mikami are practically interminable, just minute after minute of Yokoshima being inexcusable, getting beaten up for it (and rightfully so!) and repeat. A lot of time is spent explaining why Yokoshima keeps at his job (he gets paid like shit and is treated like shit but his boss is hot so he sticks around), but no one ever explains why Mikami keeps him around, especially after she hires the kind, helpful ghost Okinu in the first episode. Okinu is the spirit of a woman who was a human sacrifice, intended to become a new mountain god for a small town hundreds of years ago, but it didn’t take. After centuries of trying to make herself into a god, she just convinced Mikami to have another dead dude take the job instead and went to work for Mikami. Her innocence and joy at discovering modern conveniences and travelling the country—and the world—for the first time are charming and the show benefits from spending more time with her later, even as it outright says that she has a crush on Yokoshima for reasons that, again, are not explained. She is definitely often exasperated with Yokoshima’s womanizing right along with Mikami.

Indeed, the show really shines when it expands its cast, not infinitely, but to a small group of recurring characters who have a lot more personality and…well, not depth, but they’re a lot more lovable than Yokoshima and Mikami. At the very least, I can describe their characters, all I can say about Reiko Mikami is that she’s played by the late, great Hiromi Tsuru (Bulma in Dragon Ball, among others Americans might not know). I guess Mikami is also very greedy, sure. But what about Meiko, the childish woman who considers herself Mikami’s best friend; heir to a family of monster tamers, she often loses control of her monsters when frightened, sending them to attack at random? Or Mikami’s rival, Emi, who’s even more greedy and controlling than Mikami, but also willing to take dirty jobs from the cops, like cursing gangsters…and she has a crush on Pietro, the half-vampire protégé of Mikami’s former teacher, Father Karasu. Or even Dr. Chaos (voiced by the very recognizable Shigeru Chiba, famous for Megane from Urusei Yatsura, Shigeo from Patlabor, Pilaf from Dragon Ball, and Kuwabara from Yuyu Hakusho), a thousand-year-old alchemist who was the scourge of medieval Europe, but now has lived so long he’s gone senile, can’t remember his magic, and barely ekes out a living with his android servant Maria? THOSE guys are funny, and when the show switches from a focus on Yokoshima to fun, lighthearted stories about Mikami’s group as three friends getting into trouble with a rotating cast of other friends, it really soars and provides an amusing diversion for 24 minutes a day. So, in the end they did manage to pull off something entertaining, and give me a bit more of what I enjoyed about Phantom Quest Corps in its measly four episodes, only Mikami ran for 45. Overall, I enjoyed it.

Just, can we please kill Yokoshima?

45. Loki (Season 2): The first season of Loki dropped during that first burst of Marvel Disney Plus shows, sandwiched between the dull Falcon and Winter Soldier and the forgettable What If…? (I say that because I did forget about it when I wrote my reviews that year, but be honest, so did you). Loki, along with WandaVision and Hawkeye, was more successful, telling an unusual story with a unique and memorable setting and some real emotional and physical stakes. We followed the anti-hero as he struggled to reconcile his “evil” predisposition to his need for family and companionship, backed against the wall and forced to make difficult choices.

It's two years later. What’s changed? Well, Marvel’s formula is running dry; or rather, they’ve given up on making you care about a character first, and begun taking for granted that people will show up. They pile in as many references to other series as possible, promising the next one will be good without making sure the current one is. We’ve churned through a season each of six more shows and nine more movies, with a tenth following the next day. Oh, and two holiday specials, don’t forget. And here comes Loki, picking up right where it left off. Does it work?

Not as well as the first season. Loki feels like three different seasons of a TV show crammed into six episodes, all with a reduced budget. Nothing happens on the level of the big tornado monster in the first season, you don’t get cool guest stars like the room full of other Lokis here, just a lot of Jonathan Majors, who…well, he hasn’t been convicted of anything at the time of writing, but it doesn’t look good [Obviously, he HAS now been convicted of abuse.]. Loki really wants to tell…no, that isn’t true. Loki flirts with telling a story about a group of people faced with realizing they’ve been misled, that the mission they followed religiously their entire lives—long, long lives—was a lie, they’ve been enslaved by an uncaring master and forced to do horrible things to innocent people, just to fulfill one man’s vanity, his confidence in the need for his own existence and assurance that only he knows the path forward. A cult, waking up to its prophecy unfulfilled. Some characters take this well; B-15’s switch from a hard-ass, by-the-book cop to a compassionate, caring friend is rather abrupt, but welcome. Others don’t; one of the higher-ups in the TVA breaks with the group, forming a splinter organization that continues the mission set out by He Who Remains because it’s all they’ve ever known how to do, killing people and timelines on their own initiative, without oversight. And there you go! That’s your season plot, you have your villain, your heroes, complex motivations—hm?

What’s that?

This happens mostly offscreen and is resolved by the start of the third episode?

Oh.

The problem with Loki is the problem with all Marvel movies right now: they can’t just stand alone. They have to tie in. Marvel Comics can suffer from this as well; all too often, if a series gets popular, its plot starts to creep into other ones, and its finale can grow out of proportion into a multi-series crossover that dilutes the big emotional moments (this sort of editorial interference became more common from the late-80’s). I tend to compare the movies to the comics from a best-case-scenario standpoint of the comics; a lot of those are bad, too. Loki, at least, tries, and sometimes succeeds, to tell a compelling story, but it’s missing that human touch. At one point, when the heroes discover the rogue TVA agents have been “pruning” splinter timelines, B-15 looks at a display of the timelines disappearing, tears in her eyes, and silently says, “Those were people.” And I guess they were; in the abstract, she’s watching trillions of lives wiped out in an instant. But this is fiction, you have to MAKE me care. They’re all fake to me! If I don’t see them, if I don’t KNOW them, I don’t care about them. The stakes are high for the characters. For me? All the people I know about weren’t even near the danger. Why should I care?

The next few episodes waste time explaining how the universe is going to blow up and following Ravonna and Miss Minutes as they gallivant about time trying to put some plan in motion that doesn’t pan out; it’s all pleasantly arch, including a few good character moments for the villains, but completely inconsequential. At one point the woman who was willing to kill trillions because her dead god said so grows a conscience out of nowhere and is promptly squished to death, but we don’t even get to see her mangled corpse (there are a couple of moments this season of something visually interesting happening off-screen; I guess they blew all their money on the spaghetti simulator) (there are a lot of strings this season, is what I’m saying). The show finally, FINALLY finds its emotional core by making Loki really look deep and figure out what he actually wants from life: his friends, people who love him unconditionally, the family Odin was never able to give him and he wouldn’t allow Thor to be. Loki finds a morality in community, and every action he’d taken up until that point was just his pigheaded way of making that community without having to admit to himself that’s what he was doing. Unfortunately it takes until episode 5 for him to figure that out. It’s a good episode! It’s a satisfying finale, actually, with Loki using his god-powers to great effect, making a home for his friends even if he’s not there, finally finding something he’s willing to sacrifice for instead of sacrificing everyone else for himself. It’s a wonderful theme, with room for some real deep psychological delving. So, of course, they pushed it off to the end in favor of setting up another movie. Bleh.

44. Barry (final season): Huh.

Hm.

Well?

I’ve had a lot to say about the previous seasons of Barry, about how Hollywood is an empty hole, telling stories about how it is a source of imagination but ultimately just coming back to the same old things. “I hope that when people see Mega Girls, they’ll think, ‘The person who made that, made Coda’” is such a devastating line that perfectly encapsulates the current state of film companies (and yes, my own complicity in making them this way) that I wish the show had time to actually explore it.

It feels like we needed two seasons to get all the ideas Bill Hader wanted to put out there, but it also feels like there wasn’t enough for two seasons, you know? I think the time skip was probably a mistake. I get it, they wanted to show the consequences of these people’s actions, how it all blows back on them, how Sally just runs toward depression and how, for all his rhetoric, Barry just wants to be in control. And how sad is it that Fuches is the only one who attains any kind of mental clarity from this situation? How fucked up is that, that HE gets his little moment of redemption, but Sally is left looking over her shoulder, feeling like anything she gets is unearned, for the rest of her life? That’s messed up, and honestly is the thing I appreciated the most about the final episode. I don’t want to talk about Hollywood’s take on the events of the show. Less said about that, the better. At the very least, John should have questions about why the showdown with Fuches and NoHo Hank that he was PRESENT FOR is completely absent from the film.

But my main problem with the time jump was that it deadened the emotions that were so present and vivid in the first half of the season. Sally’s fear and guilt combining into a haze of out-of-body experiences, both with her nagging mother and infantilizing father and when she tries, almost unconsciously, to get back into Hollywood only to find herself in the same old trap she thought she’d escaped by making Joplin. Running back to a bad man and a hollow relationship just to do SOMEthing. Hank’s betrayal of Cristobal was so gutting, too. He’s so afraid of losing everything that he doesn’t even try to stand up for what he believes in. NoHo Hank was always about the presentation, and even once he found something deep and real that he would fight for, he refuses to keep fighting the moment something catches him off guard. Fuches confronting him about that was interesting, but wouldn’t it have been more interesting to follow up on that while the emotions were still raw?

Well, now that I think about it, don’t we leave Hank where we found Fuches? I mean, not dead, but before that; Fuches was a man lying to himself about the effects of his choices and his place in people’s lives. Hank put himself in the same situation, and Fuches had moved beyond it. In that way, the showdown is very fitting and poetic. I just wonder what else we missed out on by going that route.

Barry is a piece of shit and completely unredeemable, he would have found a way to fuck up going to the cops for Cousineau too. Cousineau is dumb as hell, yes, but that’s no surprise. Of course his redemption was only skin deep. He ran to “find himself” instead of staying to help his family, again. But Barry? Awful. That scene where they all sit around talking about how they like Abraham Lincoln so then Barry spends time on YouTube looking for any little flaw in Lincoln’s character just so he could make himself look better by comparison? Diabolical. Manipulative. And the little knife twist of him dunking on Saint Augustine right after, just because he found something out…masterful writing. But yeah. I’m glad he died, sucks that he accidentally framed Gene in the process, but you know…tidy little bow.

I don’t know. I don’t know! How do I feel about it? I’m glad they went darker, but it was a little relentless. They have interesting ideas, but they had to drop some other interesting ideas to get there. I have to wonder if I’m disappointed because it wasn’t what I expected, or because I expected more from it. Am I sad that there was no redemption? That would be a bullshit reason. I just feel kind of numb about it. 43. The Walking Dead (final 9 episodes): It’s…over. Well, no, it isn’t; they’re leading into spinoff movies about Rick and Michonne, and a miniseries about Negan and Maggie, oh and supposedly a Daryl show. But for us, it’s over.

The final season worked through some of the problems the show had over the previous seasons, mostly because it had limited time to work through its plot so things had to move quickly—so quickly, in fact, that some things got lost by the wayside. Important bits like the heroes of Alexandria and the Kingdom integrating into the Commonwealth’s society, especially Ezekiel becoming an important political figure, are mostly taken as read, with only a few scenes showing how it came about. However, that’s balanced by the sheer joy of watching Pamela’s stupid dictatorship crumble. Watching a grassroots organization take down a petty, self-absorbed dictator who gained her power through providing people the trappings of what they valued about society, without the substance (which is to say, a dictator) is always enjoyable, but it's more fun with the added benefit of her piece of shit son being eaten alive, right on screen.

That said, surprisingly few of the main characters die in the struggle, so few that they had to bring a couple of characters back from previous stories just to die so you’d feel something. This is not necessarily a complaint, deaths just for cheap heel heat are pointless and it’s sometimes better writing to give your characters something to do. The only death that really meant something from the finale was Rosita, a popular character who’d been around for a while, and so got a way too drawn-out finale. Like, it was nice of the zombie virus to wait for her to spend a week with her family, saying goodbye to her boyfriend and best friend in quiet, private moments while soulful music played, usually it can sneak up on you at the worst moments.

I guess the best moment from the finale would have to go to Gabriel, who finally gets to atone for his major sin committed before the series started. They try to make Negan atone as well, but it’s the most hackneyed, “I learned what it means to be a parent and now I feel remorse” plot that everything is doing these days, and I’m just so tired of it (I’m sure that’s going to come up several times on this list, just know I wrote this one first). It was just nice to be EXCITED about Walking Dead, one last time.

42. Sherlock Hound: AKA Great Detective Holmes, but let’s go with the punny dub name, even though I watched it in Japanese and will just call the character Sherlock Holmes, shall we? Sherlock Hound is a TMS anime whose every fiber screams, “Part of an attempt to break into the American/European animation markets.” The only reason I watched it was because Miyazaki was showrunner for the first six episodes and directed five himself, only for the Conan Doyle estate to throw a fit about nothing (as they do), but TMS was already scared because of the LeBlanc estate suing them for Lupin III a few years prior, so they put the show on hold and Miyazaki left to go make Nausicaa instead. I can’t say you’ll notice TOO much difference after Miyazaki left, especially if you watch the episodes in airdate order, since the first two episodes in airdate order, which show Holmes and Watson’s first meeting and first battle with Moriarty, were made by the second team (the service I watched them on put the episodes in production order, which places the intended first two episodes in the middle of the show, with episode 2 before episode 1…). I did detect a decline in background details and less experimentation with the storyboarding, less artful shot construction, after Miyazaki’s team left, but this is still mid-eighties TMS, the animation is uniformly gorgeous, with some real standout episodes from both teams, the soundtrack is fun, and the designs are great. Most of all, there is no change in the quality of writing between the Miyazaki episodes and the later ones. This is not really a compliment.

Look, this show is for kids, even more than anything else Miyazaki did. There’s no extra moral or deeper meaning for an adult to grab onto, there’s barely ever a mystery. 25 out of 26 episodes, Moriarty did it, and the only reason it isn’t 26/26 is because they introduce him in episode 2. Looking more like Arsène Lupin than any Moriarty I’ve ever seen (oh, but he’s a purple wolf; did I not mention everyone was dogs? Everyone is a dog), he’s less the Napoleon of Crime and more a reject from Team Rocket. Moriarty will think up some harebrained scheme, force his put-upon henchmen Todd and Smiley to work on it, and watch as Sherlock Holmes casually dismantles it, time and time again. Half the time Sherlock isn’t even hired to investigate it, he just happens to be present when Moriarty pulls off his plot. Beyond Lestrade and the London Police being reduced to Keystone Cops, the show doesn’t have much to say about…anything. One of the Miyazaki episodes (I think the one he didn’t direct) makes a point in favor of taxing the rich, as Sherlock investigates a Scrooge McDuck-type miser (but without Scrooge’s good points) who had a few gold coins stolen from his massive penny bank, only to discover they were stolen by the man’s son to help the orphanage in his father’s destitute company town, that’s the furthest this series goes to make any real moral. Two episodes take astoundingly pro-British Empire stances, like the one where Holmes has to return the Rosetta Stone to the British Museum, which implicitly mocks the stance that Egypt deserves to hold onto the relics discovered within its boundaries (the villain is, thankfully, French; although they use Napoleonic imagery for the Frenchman, so personally I was much more interested in the untold story of what this Bonapartist planned to use the capture of the Rosetta Stone for during the Third Republic, but perhaps that’s too unique a plot for the kiddies).

Oh, and their take on Mrs. Hudson is a nineteen-year-old (!!) woman, widowed when her young husband’s plane crashed (there are airplanes in Sherlock Hound; its setting is a vaguely-Edwardian period where cars and planes are common but not ubiquitous, and Moriarty seems to have technology slightly more advanced than everyone else, veering into steampunk). Seeing Watson and Holmes fight over Hudson’s attention is…bizarre, to say the least, and it would stick out to me regardless, but after seeing the young Mrs. Hudson in Lupin III, I wonder if something about the Japanese translation gave everyone a different impression of her over there. Also, they never explain why she opened a boarding house instead of just remarrying one of the other pilots who were infatuated with her, or went back to piloting herself, since at least two episodes have Hudson get behind the wheel of a car or plane and do action movie stunts. An odd choice to make a minor character so secretly interesting and do nothing with it, but hey, that’s anime sometimes…

41. Ninja Warrior Tobikage/Ninja Robots: Back when I was bored in college and looking up all the information I could about robot anime instead of going outside, I stumbled across information that confused me: a show called Ninja Robots that supposedly aired on Cartoon Network in the 1990’s that I’d never heard of before. Eventually, I got enough information to figure out that I hadn’t seen it because it aired on Cartoon Network in Australia and New Zealand, and never aired in the US. So, I was fairly excited when Discotek Media got the rights to it, and went to great lengths to recover the English dub to put on their blu-ray release…but not $45 sight-unseen excited. Fortunately, cheap, unreliable Retro Crush got the streaming rights, although they messed up and are missing the dub for some early episodes. I did watch this one dubbed and subbed because I figured there might be some funny differences, and there were—the dub starts off fairly accurate except for some name changes and devolves as the series goes along. The localizers add the required corny jokes, yes, but they also get confused, sometimes making lines the opposite of what they were supposed to be, using the original Japanese names for names they changed (the theme song especially uses the original Japanese names for the princess and the bad guys, which were both changed for the show), or sometimes translating dialogue to say the opposite of the intended meaning, even sometimes changing one character’s line but not another’s follow-up line, so its as if someone is responding to something other than what was said. With all that in mind, I’m going to refer to any characters whose names were changed by their Japanese names with the English names in parenthesis, mostly because some of the English names are very funny.

Set in a future where Earth has colonized Mars, but left Mars to be run as a military colony where you’re either a soldier or a construction worker, Joe Maya and his friends Mike and Rennie (Jenny) are a bunch of punk kids who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when aliens arrive and start a big battle just outside the inhabited area. Joe ends up piloting one of the robots, and enters into an uneasy alliance with Princess Romina (Rowina) and her subordinates, Shaf (Jade), Gameran, and Irbora (Icelander) of planet Radorio (Andromeda). Meanwhile, the governor of Mars, Hazard Pascha (usually referred to as Hazard in both translations, but there’s at least one episode of the dub where he says his name is Duke Hazard, which is pretty funny), who wants to conquer Earth because he’s a slimy punk, allies with the aliens from planet Zaboom (Crokan, although I haven’t found anywhere that lists the exact spelling) and its ruler, King Annex.

What follows is pretty standard 80’s giant robot stuff, with the gang overwhelmed by the enemy forces but able to eke out victories because of the secret power of their robots. There are some interesting twists, like the title robot not being controlled by the main character until near the end of the series; Tobikage (Cybertron) appears from nowhere, secretly slipping out of a hidden room on their spaceship the El Shank (Xenos 5), apparently acting on its own, and fusing with the other robots to make more powerful ones. The aliens can’t pilot their own robots themselves; they came to Earth to fulfill a prophecy that only ninjas can pilot the robots, which just seems like poor planning to me. Also, the main characters all say they aren’t ninjas and don’t even know what a ninja is, but they end up piloting the robots anyway during times of need, with no explanation ever offered. The plot also offers some neat little twists; because Hazard is governor of Mars, he is able to create propaganda against the heroes, spreading lies over media and using this to pressure the governments of Earth and the moon to back him and the invaders, although this gets pretty tedious by the end of the series. It takes Earth way too long to figure out he’s lying, and then all the writers have left is making the politicians be assholes to the heroes by constantly putting them right in front of the cannons. I found the interplay between the humans and the aliens on the El Shank a little more interesting; since the humans are the only ones who can pilot the robots, this causes tension between them and Irbora and Gameran, who see it as a threat to their cherished position as the princess’s main advisors. It’s an interesting portrait of how, even in wartime (maybe especially in wartime), people will let their petty jealousies guide them to make decisions that undermine the overall effort just so they can keep looking better. Irbora keeps making decisions that would get everyone killed, but he doesn’t care so long as Joe Maya looks bad. Frankly, Joe Maya is an impulsive teenage asshole who will fly off the handle for no reason, he didn’t need help looking bad, but at least he has a moral core. Irbora doesn’t seem to believe in the cause he’s fighting for, and indeed switches sides for mysterious reasons he never gets around to explaining.

Notice how I keep saying nothing is explained? The show was obviously cancelled a little bit earlier than they expected. Tobikage is one of the few robot shows made by Studio Pierrot, who were at the top of their game in the mid-80’s. The animation is gorgeous, and it’s amazing how many episodes have extremely fluid, complex fight scenes for how complicated the designs are; they capture that mid-80’s mecha aesthetic perfectly, with beautiful still frames and shading. Episode 41, which is effectively the final episode, is a nigh-perfectly animated tour-de-force of mecha action. However, it doesn’t actually END. All the bad guys die, sure, but the heroes then say they’re going to go off to Radorio and defeat the armies controlling it, fulfilling a prophecy about combining the energies of two powerful robots with the El Shank. The El Shank turns into a bird of light and…the end! Next two episodes are clip shows implausibly narrated by Hazard, who we just saw engulfed in a massive column of flame and disintegrated. This wasn’t unusual for 80s robot shows that had big ideas and not enough viewers, but they tended to get a movie or an OVA to finish them off; the clip shows feel like something that would have been made for the home video market, a “best-of” compilation to keep fans excited for a finale that never came. It’s a little hard to feel too let down by the ending, though; the bickering between the main characters had grown stale through overuse, the mystery of the robots had been forgotten by the writers for over a dozen episodes, and the government of Earth didn’t do anything to earn the viewer’s sympathy other than live on the planet where we live. Ninja Warrior Tobikage is pretty, it’s breezy fun, and at least the guy dubbing Joe Maya into English was having fun (also, some of the supporting cast got pretty goofy with their voices, probably to disguise that they were playing a bunch of other characters—no one knows who the actors are, as the credited actors from the English credits aren’t the ones who were used, so we don’t even know how many characters were played by the same person). It’s a fun enough post-Macross robot show, but you could just watch Macross.

40. The Ghost and Molly McGee (season 2): A little surprised I stuck with this one, but I did. It helped that Disney released it in little chunks, so I could knock a few episodes out and then take a couple months off. The Ghost and Molly McGee continues to be cute, fluffy, and charmingly animated (they had some fun with Molly’s face this time), but some of the edge has worn off with time. They didn’t pull very many “oops we killed this animal” gags this year, which, fine, don’t want that to grow stale, but they also dialed back on Molly freakouts, which was my favorite part. However, I did enjoy the episode “A Period Piece,” where Molly’s friend Libby has her first period and Molly, uneducated about puberty, has to stand back while her former rival Andrea solves the problem. Molly then spirals into anxiety about falling behind her friends growing up and has an elaborate freakout that devolves into her slathering makeup all over her face (shades of Helga Pataki). Oh, and the boys decide to help by buying pads at the store and overcompensate to show they aren’t freaking out. It’s a funny episode, and I applaud them for getting that topic through whatever family-friendly approval process Disney has set up.

The main plot, such as it is, didn’t grab me as much as the first season. With the threat of the Chairman resolved, the ghost world is reduced to a minor annoyance to Scratch’s partying. The plot instead focuses on Molly’s new neighbors, the Chens, who are very friendly and cool but also ghost hunters, so Molly struggles to reconcile her friendship with them and Scratch. After a couple episodes about keeping secrets, Molly eventually comes clean and the Chen episodes become about helping the kids work through the prejudices their parents instilled in them, which is a good moral, but Star vs. the Forces of Evil did it earlier, and more realistically (everyone gets over their prejudices…real quick). Also, there’s a plot about who Scratch was before he died that I could not care less about. I’m just not feeling it as much this season.

39. Clone High: So the thing about this list is that I have to mention shows I haven’t watched until now, which is fine when I’m talking about weird old anime and stupid cartoons no one loves, but it also means I have to admit I never saw a full episode of Clone High until August 2023. Never, not ever! I’d seen clips, I knew about it, but I never watched it until now.

Which creates a bit of a conundrum, because if I had watched this back in 2003 it would be one of my favorite shows ever. It has that very sarcastic sense of humor that was popular among the very online back then. But I didn’t watch MTV! Well, I didn’t watch MTV and I wasn’t looking to pirate episodes when I heard about it a few years later. So, I just saw short clips, and knew in general about the whole India getting mad about their portrayal of Gandhi (completely missing the point of the nature vs. nurture element of the show, although we are talking about India, where groups tend to get angrier over things than even Americans do). I figured, hey, it’s on Paramount Plus, I’ll just watch it this year.

And then Max went and dropped ten more episodes and suddenly the prospect of watching Clone High became…weird.

I think the first thirteen episodes are still the high bar, even considering the problem of how the passage of time affects comedy. 2003 was a time where a squirrel almost murdering a man and calling him a bitch was the height of comedy, and it’s not Lord and Miller’s fault that it reads a little tired in 2023, that’s my fault. It got enough laughs out of me, or just times where I shook my head and said “that’s stupid,” which was mostly because I didn’t want to give the show the satisfaction of me smiling. The Kennedy jokes will never get old, though.

Should I count the new season as a separate show? Max does, but also who cares? Well, I’m not sure where they planned the cliffhanger ending of season 1 to do when they did it twenty years ago, but it definitely wasn’t to come back 20 years later with a plotline about how teenagers today are different. It…wasn’t a great way to start the season, I’ll say that. It’s not like the original Clone High was terribly topical; “very special episode” was a 20-year-old joke by the time Clone High aired, but it still seemed fresh. More importantly, teen dramas were extremely popular, and took themselves extremely seriously in 2003. In 2023, there’s…there’s Riverdale. Which just ended. I guess. Riverdale was goofy on purpose. The whole genre is parodying itself. How do you top that?

I’m not going to say they didn’t try, mostly because Polygon already had an article called “Clone High became the kind of show it made fun of,” and I don’t think that’s true. But there was a clear shift in tone, where the characters learn moral lessons and change as the second season went on, instead of just playing out a parody of learning a lesson and then having nothing change in the next episode. This is exemplified in the show’s shift from focusing on Abe Lincoln to focusing on Joan of Arc. Joan’s character in the first season was a parody of the cliché of the “best friend” girl who should REALLY be the one the “average guy” main character should be interested in romantically, even though it never made sense that she'd stick with being in love with Abe after he was very rude to her constantly. This was the joke! It's fine, because that was the joke. The new season, however, follows Joan learning to make female friends, finding acceptance with herself, and also learning what she actually wants from a relationship after she finds she actually kind of likes JFK. JFK, meanwhile, was portrayed as a meatheaded jerk in the original series, but here makes friends with the new kids through his amazing sex-positivity, and also learns to come to terms with his feelings.

Does this sound funny yet? Well, no. Not really. Which isn’t to say there’s no comedy here; there’s plenty of jokes, including one particularly wild Kennedy joke that was spicier than anything they did in 2003. But it’s a tamer kind of funny that comes from a more earnest setting. This would be a fine first season for a new show, but instead it’s a highly anticipated second season to a major cult hit. Even having not seen the original show until right before I watched the new episodes, I was a little let down. Like, did we really need the tragic backstory of why Mr. Bultertron calls everyone Wesley? I realize you did it as a joke (and an excuse to throw in some slick Disney and Ralph Bakshi-style animation), but the original joke was that he was Mr. Belvedere, why did we need another joke on top of that?

Nevertheless, I’ll probably still watch the announced season 3, whenever that happens. There’s enough room for a surprise improvement. It’s difficult to recapture the energy you had when you were young, but there’s plenty of talent to improve. We’ll see.

Also Christopher Miller’s JFK voice has slid into Homestar Runner territory over 20 years of disuse, just saying. And I didn’t expect Clone High to be the perfect example of how much Mandy Moore’s acting has improved in the past 20 years, but there it is. Wonder what caused that…?

38. The Galaxy Railways: I wanted to memorialize the passing of Leiji Matsumoto earlier this year, but I’d already seen his great series, Captain Harlock, Space Battleship Yamato, and Galaxy Express 999. Last year, as a joke, I’d bought Hank a copy of Galaxy Railways, a mid-00’s sequel-ish series to Galaxy Express 999, focusing on the…railway police? I guess we’ll call them? Of course, in 999, the police used normal spaceships, and the railways were a (highly regulated) relatively inexpensive way to travel long distances—although still too expensive for a little orphan kid to afford it without a mysterious, beautiful benefactor, but I’ve spoken about Maetel before. The reason I bought this for Hank as a joke is because he and Johnny had watched several episodes on YouTube back in high school, and it became a recurring joke among the friend group about the series going through three protagonists in one episode, which is essentially true; Captain Wataru Yuuki dies in the first scene from an alien attack, then his son Mamoru joins the force and dies off screen (though we see his death in the second episode, due to time travel shenanigans), then the younger son Manabu also joins the series and is the actual protagonist. Also, they have another character named Yuki who is a female robot doctor (a “sexaroid,” in the show’s parlance, although I don’t know if they understood how dirty that term feels to an English speaker). The other joke about the show was how many Scientology ads played when they watched it, but that doesn’t apply here.

So, it took me a while, but I did watch the show. It doesn’t start out great; Galaxy Express 999 trended toward the nihilistically depressing, and Galaxy Railways does nothing to change that, despite focusing on a rescue crew instead of a little boy learning hard life lessons. I suppose there is still some of that; early in the series Manabu refuses to fire a gun and his teammates chew him out for it. At some point Manabu starts using a gun, and I didn’t even remark on it until it was happening regularly. The early and middle of this show are a bit of a blur; the team is called in to help with a disastrous breakdown of the space train systems that isn’t supposed to happen but seems to occur with alarming regularity, Manabu makes an impulsive choice that makes things worse, somehow it all works out. It’s pretty dull, but I was watching a lot of bad shows at the time, so I let it slide a bit. Surprisingly, however, the show begins to improve as the characters develop, and it becomes more comfortable with its universe. By the time everyone goes to a hot spring at the end of the series, I was actually enjoying it. YES, THE HOT SPRING EPISODE IS GOOD. It’s not even gross and sexual; the only time a guy gets on the girls’ side of the hot spring is an accident. They sexualize the robot putting her stockings on more than the actual naked women.

That seems like a low bar without the context of certain other anime, but I appreciated the restraint. Even though the rest of the episode focused on Louis sulking because she can’t just tell people who she has a crush on for some reason.

Like, there’s no real reason to go out of your way to watch the Galaxy Railways, especially if you could watch some of the earlier, better shows based on the works of Leiji Matsumoto. It doesn’t make any sense for the characters to use a train (the trains should follow TRACKS, the rescue crews can have special space ships because they need to travel in all areas and don’t have to be mass transit—although, there are a few scenes where they load refugees onto trains, so I could see one as a support crew, but they literally have a laser gun car and an aircraft hangar car, it’s wild) and they never explain what was up with that weird lady whose job was to sit alone and talk about destiny, but if you end up watching it, I don’t think you’ll ultimately leave disappointed. It was pretty good, and that was more than I expected.

37. God Mazinger: A robot show that is somehow both by Go Nagai and made by mid-eighties TMS? The shows in both those categories I’ve watched recently don’t have a great track record, and this one is both together? AND it’s based on a footnote in the history of the famous Mazinger series, something Go Nagai put out to use the name but not the appearance of his most famous creation while he was fighting Toei over the rights? A show with a preposterously chill theme song for being about giant robots fighting dinosaurs? I admit, I didn’t have high expectations.

But you know, it’s pretty good, actually!

God Mazinger presents a simplified version of the same basic premise Sunrise’s Aura Battler Dunbine, release a year before God Mazinger and reviewed by me last year. God Mazinger is nowhere near as good as Dunbine, but it also aimed a bit lower and benefits from hitting its target, whereas Dunbine was overburdened with good ideas, some of which were left by the wayside. It’s hero, Yamato Hino, is a high school rugby star who somehow isn’t a hit with the ladies, until he’s summoned by the beautiful Princess Aira to the Kingdom of Mu, which is…well, I assumed it was another universe, but they also act like it’s from the past, because Yamato fears the bad guys becoming immortal and travelling to the future if they get the McGuffin. Said bad guys are King Dorado, who has used dark magic and high technology to resurrect dinosaurs to lay waste to Mu’s kingdom, along with his minions Bura, Yoname the half-dinosaur assassin lady, and Prince Eld (Eld-Dorado, get it?). The plot’s very straightforward; no one is ever anything other than what they present themselves to be, other than the episode where Yoname disguises herself as Yamato’s sister (said sister doesn’t have much to do in the series, as she’s very similar to the other young girl character, Madoma, so she got written out not too long after being written in). The amount of gore surprised me, not because it was particularly shocking for an anime of the time or for Go Nagai, but because the TMS robot shows I’d seen so far aimed much younger. God Mazinger isn’t afraid to bloodily decapitate a dinosaur or even show Yoname’s female assassins get impaled horribly, although these are brief segments in an otherwise inoffensive series. The character designs round off some of the eccentricities of Nagai’s artistic style, but they did keep the violence level comparable to his 1970’s work (I know enough about Violence Jack to know the level of violence in God Mazinger is far below that of Nagai’s other 1980’s work). The robot fights are oddly lacking in the flash and special attacks Nagai innovated a decade before; aside from a late-series change where Mazinger gets an angry, glowing-red powered-up version, there’s little variation in attacks, it’s all wrestling and swordfights. If this series was twice as long, it would be dull, but at a brisk 23 episode it moves along at a sharp pace and never lingers on a plot point long enough to become boring. Nothing to blow your socks off, but a fun diversion.

I will say, Crunchyroll’s upload has horrible problems with synching the video, sound, and subtitles. Usually something will happen, then a second later it makes a sound, then a second later the subtitles appear, if needed. I don’t know if the YouTube upload is any different, and it’s a simple show so it shouldn’t affect comprehension, but you tend to see online uploads cleaned up more these days.

36. Star Trek: Prodigy: A Nickelodeon Star Trek show; a Star Trek show for kids. Seems a little unnecessary, doesn’t it? After all, Star Trek in its prime WAS for kids; it’s the classic family show, something parents and children could watch together. Maybe too scary, maybe a little sexual, but the parents could be there when things got too violent, and it’s a good gateway into adult programming. Star Trek handles difficult subjects with well-thought-out arguments, deference to all sides, and a calm, humane point of view that is very appealing as a best-case-scenario adult world. It’s a hell of a show, in other words.

But, is the current streaming market made for it? In a way, there’s no real difference between the modern Trek shows and the previous ones in content; maybe more cussing, maybe better SFX (and fewer episodes). It just seems to me that the idea of “family” programming has…gone away. I’m not sure if that’s true! I can’t see for myself, and the people with children I know are all my age with little babies, and they don’t watch Trek anyway. In any case, Star Wars seems to have had a ton of success with shows targeting the late-Elementary/early-Middle School crowd, so I’m sure Paramount wanted a piece of that action. But, while the Clone Wars series was able to follow Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, already-established big-name characters the whole universe revolved around, Prodigy takes the opposite approach, creating a mishmash cast of various Star Trek aliens (some established, some new for this show) and throws them into the deep end of a story already in progress, just a small part of the larger whole of the Star Trek universe. The resulting series acts as something of a travelogue of Star Trek best-ofs; there’s a Ferengi episode, a Borg episode, a holodeck episode, a time loop, some Klingons show up, a character tries the Kobayashi Maru (a very…odd sequence, as it brings back several classic characters and uses canned dialogue from older shows to match the new situation…except Dr. Crusher, they got Gates McFadden to do some new lines). Hell, the Outrageous Okona appears in two episodes, increasing the number of times that character showed up by 200%. It might be a fun introduction for a kid, but as someone who’s seen all of Star Trek already, Prodigy just felt…limp. Couldn’t you just show the kid TNG? Would they really prefer the CGI purple guy to enjoying the same show Dad watched as a kid?

What really confused me was how much more tepid this show felt than the Transformers cartoon Nickelodeon worked on at the same time. In many ways, they’re both very similar. They have about the same quality level of their animation, where most episodes are kind of stiff and use a lot of walk cycle loops, but they really pull out all the stops for the big moments where it counts (honestly, not that different from hand-drawn animation, but it’s less noticeable when you have different people drawing each walk cycle, unless we’re talking old Filmation rotoscoping). They both deal with found family, which is the big popular trope in kids cartoons right now. They both have a cute sidekick they keep talking about like I’m supposed to care (Fluffy Ears and Murph, naturally). But Transformers has those moments—few, but they are there—where they hint at something deeper. Megatron is haunted by the actions he took during the war, and conflicted about his decision to turn on those who followed him into the abyss, but he stands by his decision to do away with the class system of Cybertron by any means. Optimus Prime knows allying with the humans was the right thing to do, but he’s conflicted with GHOST’s abuses of its prisoners’ rights, and feels trapped, forced into helping GHOST or else he’ll be imprisoned too. Bumblebee has to bear the weight of Optimus’s guilt by being his spy on the outside, never allowed to stop running, to come in and be with his friends again. And of course, Prime is right, GHOST is corrupt, working with those who would enslave the Transformers for profit or for war. Star Trek Prodigy has none of that. The kids learn a valuable lesson about the reasons behind the prime directive, they learn about themselves and work together, sure. But the deeper meanings, the big questions Star Trek built itself on exploring, are left by the sidelines for easy answers. The characters are all former slaves, captured by an alien and kept from learning each other’s languages so they couldn’t coordinate an escape plan…but the heroes do learn how to communicate, and escape, and come back for everyone else, the villain is defeated, and the slaves all escape. There’s a bit of trying to make the villain into a somewhat sympathetic character—he explains that his planet was destroyed by a civil war after first contact with the Federation, between isolationists and…globalists? To the extent that word applies to an interplanetary organization, I guess. It’s the old “Bad guy has a beef with the Federation” angle that the Chris Pine movies fell back on every time, and there’s never much more to it than “Federation good, let’s protect it,” right? Even as they try to act like the villains are justified, it’s clear they’re just projecting their anger onto someone else; a common refrain is that “The Federation stood by and watched us kill ourselves,” but if the Federation got involved…wouldn’t it be on the pro-Federation side? Not only would that violate the prime directive (to the extent that even applies to a contacted, post-warp civilization) but it would violate the principle of self-governance, the Federation would basically become a conquering force for this planet. Like, no one made your planet kill itself over a “Do you like me? Y/N” note, dude. You want to kill an entire intergalactic civilization because you feel guilty. It’s not a compelling bad guy motivation.

It’s not aggressively bad like the first two seasons of Discovery, but it’s not good like…pretty much every other Star Trek show they’ve made since the first two seasons of Discovery (which still wasn’t as bad as Enterprise). It gave Kate Mulgrew something to do, at least (she’s had the most experience, but man is she a lot better at voice acting than Robert Beltran; he sounded so uncomfortable) (yes, Chakotay shows up too). There’s just not much new here, not yet. The second season promises to build on the first, so maybe something will happen. I just think the big moves in Trek will continue to be elsewhere.

Especially now that Paramount Plus delisted it and it moved to Netflix for its final season.

35. My Life as A Teenage Robot: This was another one of the many cartoons I skipped the first time it aired. I was trying to remember why, since it was during the era when I would still watch Nickelodeon but was slowly sliding away from it, and when I checked out the first episode I remembered: the first episode sucked. The second episode improved dramatically and the rest of the show kept at about that level of quality, but the first episode sucked, and it was one of a long line of vaguely retro-futuristic shows that came out around that time, the same as Atomic Betty and Robot Boy, that tried to crib from the general aesthetic of Powerpuff Girls. Indeed, the creator of MLaATR (whoof, what a mouthful) had worked on Powerpuff Girls in the early seasons, and it’s easy to see Teenage Robot as Nickelodeon’s answer to Cartoon Network’s big hit.

Okay sure, but why did I decide to watch this show now? Well, I had access to Paramount Plus and I didn’t want to watch much of anything else on there except Star Trek, that’s one thing. And Jenny, the main character, kept coming up in various locations. But most intriguing was I saw several references to Jenny as a trans character, including a trans flag-and-Jenny emote in Nickelodeon All Star Brawl before they even added Jenny as a character. I figured a trans-positive message was pretty edgy and subversive for 2003. Could they have really done that on purpose, or were fans reading something into this children’s cartoon that wasn’t there? I had to find out for myself.

In short: yes, the subtext is there, but no, I don’t think they did in on purpose. Jenny is a superhero robot built by her super-scientist mother, Nora Wakeman, to defend the Earth from alien threats now that Dr. Wakeman is too old to do it herself. However, she gave her robot daughter a personality, so she’s tired of constant toil and wants to have a personal life, and most of the smaller conflicts of the show are between Jenny and her mother. The early episodes especially have moments or even moral lessons I can see why a trans person would grasp onto; Jenny picked her name herself, and refuses to answer to her serial number, XJ-9 (later episodes see her treat Jenny as a kind of nickname and be more accepting of being called XJ-9; she has no sympathy for Vladimir, a lab rat her mother named Mr. Scruffles). At a few points in early episodes, especially the first one, Jenny expresses disdain for her metallic body, and longs for a suit that would help her pass as human: the first attempt is an ugly failure, the second works but pressures her to conform to regressive gender roles, so she rejects it. Generally, the whole show sticks with the theme of trying to fit in and facing prejudice against yourself just because of how you want to interact with everyone else, but as it goes along the show trends more toward morals about struggling to fit in with the popular kids instead of dealing with body issues.

Beyond that, Teenage Robot really does feel like Nickelodeon’s answer to Powerpuff Girls, but it also came along too late for that to mean anything; in 2003, PPG was starting to fade from the limelight. Jenny has an array of amusing enemies, including a surprisingly tight continuity with recurring villains (although Paramount Plus puts the hour-long season 2 finale at the end of season 3 for some reason, creating a continuity error with a season 3 episode). The main villains are the Cluster, led by Vexus (Eartha Kitt), an alien robot race that have been attacking Earth since before Jenny was made, and sometimes try to recruit her to their side, but other ones like the space bikers reoccur, and then there’s the Teen Team, whose member Misty eventually breaks from them, befriends Jenny, and then betrays her. (The Teen Team are clearly a jab at the Teen Titans, whose cartoon started around the same time as Teenage Robot and was more popular. The title of their second appearance also makes fun of Ninja Turtles, which had its popular second show running simultaneously, and an unrelated third episode mocks Samurai Jack, so clearly they made a habit of picking on their more popular competition.) I’d love to say that Jenny’s real problem were the Crust Cousins, two rich mean girls (they’re “upper-crust,” you see) who control the school and have an unfounded disdain for Jenny, and they keep making short-sighted, mean-spirited decisions that only grow their enmity, and they are amusing recurring characters (Cree Summer was clearly having run as Tiff Crust), but the true greatest enemy of the show is Sheldon.

I don’t know if the writers meant to make Sheldon as bad as he is. He’s a lovestruck nerd character, right? One episode even has a trip to the future where the girls who were mean to Sheldon regret it because he’s a rich tech mogul now, which depressingly reminds me of how people talked about Bill Gates at the time. (“Sure, girls didn’t date him at the time, but I bet they regret it now!” I think it was meant to cheer us nerds up, in the hopes we wouldn’t notice how sexist it was to say that.) But Sheldon is the worst sort of “nice guy” stereotype, the sex pest who won’t take “no” for an answer, who will acquiesce to just being friends as a ploy to stay near to his infatuation, who feels ownership of a girl who isn’t interested in him and goes to extreme lengths to torpedo her relationships with other men. I was so happy when they shot him into space at the start of season 3, but they just brought him back with some wacky time-travel shenanigans anyway. It would be a much better show with less Sheldon.

Aside from that, Teenage Robot is cute and fun but perhaps not deserving of its reputation. The designs are adorable (Jenny is super cute, especially when they give her a big gleeful smile, and I didn’t even mention her best friends Brad and Tuck but they have a lot of fun with Tuck’s big head) and they do a good enough job of threading the needle between big plots and fun one-shot, Dexter’s Lab-type gag episodes, but it does feel torn between two disparate eras, or between the action cartoons and gag cartoons it aired alongside. Perhaps on another network, it might have done better; overshadowed by the end of the Rugrats empire and the start of Spongebob’s, with Fairly Oddparents, Jimmy Neutron, and Avatar getting all the eyes, Teenage Robot was just a fun anomaly. Maybe five years later, somewhere else, it would have had the time and creatives to grow beyond its boundaries, but I think there’s more in the fan’s imaginations than in practice with this one.

34. Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos: When Hasbro funded the Transformers TV show in 1984, Takara, who made most of the robot toys Hasbro licensed for Transformers, looked across the Pacific, said, “Hey, thanks for the free show,” and went about rebranding their toylines to match what Hasbro had released, bringing the show over to Japan the next year. At the same time, Tonka licensed Bandai’s Machine Robo toyline under the name GoBots and released a TV show that was strangely similar to Transformers (some people will tell you GoBots aired before Transformers; they’re probably wrong but it’s a close thing and this is not the place to litigate that). Bandai brought GoBots to several other markets where they sold Machine Robo toys under a variety of names, like Machine Men or Robo Machine, but never back to Japan. Machine Robo continued for around four years without a TV show in Japan, and by the time competition forced Bandai to consider one, GoBots was out of date, advertising mostly old product, and also it wouldn’t appeal to Japanese audiences used to a certain type of robot adventure, and also it was very bad. Bandai made their own show. It’s better, but that’s a low bar, so let’s drill down on that.

Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos is the first and most famous of three Machine Robo TV shows. Like Transformers and GoBots before it, MR posits a planet of robot people who turn into cars for some reason; unlike those, planet Cronos is Earth-like, with only a few extreme deadly dangers like acid rivers and mysterious underground temples to threaten the heroes when the plot demands. The entire series takes place on Cronos, with no baseline humans; however, the planet is split into several “clans” of robots: Jet Clan are all airplanes, Battle Clan are all the other Machine Robo toys (I don’t know how Jet got their own clan, it seems like everyone could have just been Battle Clan), Rock People are what GoBots called the Rock Lords, and Cronos Clan are all androids in Mega Man-style armor (one of them is clearly patterned on Kamen Rider, too). Our hero is a Cronos Clan martial artist named Rom Stol, whose father Kirai was killed by Gandora, and intergalactic criminal organization led by Lord Gades and his servants, Devil Satan 6, Grujious, Diondora, and Gardi, along with several one-shot, non-toy villains who die quickly. Rom is a typical Japanese superhero-type, who will appear to help the downtrodden with a long speech built around a tortured metaphor for justice. Like Gatchaman, Cutie Honey, and probably a bunch of other Japanese superheroes I haven’t encountered, the speech ends with the enemy asking, “Who are you?!?” even and especially when the bad guys should know who it is, however, Rom answers, “You don’t deserve to know my name!” which I thought was a fun twist on the stereotype (aside from the final episode, where Rom does give Gades his name, there are also a few episodes where they switch things up by having another character do it, or interrupt Rom, to comedic effect). Rom is joined by his friends Blue Jet (based on the same toy as the GoBots character Fitor; he’s still red like Fitor so I don’t know why they named him Blue), Rod Drill (Screw Head), and Triple Jim (never released as a GoBot, although the French dub apparently named him Turbo, who was the same toy as Supercar Robo; the only similarity between Turbo and Jim is they’re both red), as well as his sister Leina Stol.

I’ll talk about Leina later.

The show was made by largely the same team that made Dancouga, which you may recall I didn’t like and didn’t have much to say about back in 2020. Machine Robo’s first half came dangerously close to following in Dancouga’s footsteps, as the ragtag group wandered aimlessly across Cronos, looking for Wolf’s-head markings left by Kirai to lead them to the Hyribead, a MacGuffin that can give you eternal life or whatever. They’re supposed to be guided to them by Rom’s magic Wolf Sword, with which he can summon the robots Kenryu and Baikanfu…or, Blade Dragon and Vikung-Fu, depending on if you’re going by the official subs or the spelling on the toy boxes. (Vikung-Fu feels like an English speaker trying to back-figure a reason for the nonsense syllables; he’s a kung-fu Viking, that makes a kind of sense, right?) Of course, the bad guys are also looking for the Hyribead, which means half the time Rom’s group shows up just in time to get mistaken for the bad guys and attacked. The show settles into a rut after about ten episodes of this; how many tragically doomed romances can a bunch of robot toys reasonably have, anyway? The answer is a lot. Also, I get the feeling someone at Bandai was a little pissed that they paid all this money to advertise their toyline, and most of the characters in their show were made-up, Mega Man-looking nobodies, or pretty anime ladies with a few lines drawn around their joints to show that they’re robots (well, and some of them did transform, too). So, around episode 19, the heroes team up with a bunch of characters who had toys (including a few who were actually re-releases of old Power Rangers robots—from before Power Rangers came to the US, so none you’d recognize, but still…) and move to Emerald City (not that one), forming a large army to fight off the invading Gandora. This is also when the plot starts moving forward; the group finds out that the Hyribead is split into four pieces of armor (one of which is…a Wolf Sword! When Rom asks, “Don’t I have the Wolf Sword?” someone answers, “No, different Wolf Sword.” And surprisingly, there’s no twist where Rom had a piece of the puzzle the whole time, it was a different Wolf Sword), Gardi shows up and they do a lot of hinting that he has a link to Rom and Leina only for Diondora to just say, “Hey isn’t Gardi Rom’s brother?” in one episode, and Gades responds, “Oh yeah I brainwashed him ages ago,” in what is either the worst bungling of the secret evil family member trope I’ve ever seen, or the best deconstruction of it. The show never upends expectations, but introducing a rotating cast of recurring characters (including bringing back a minor love interest for a bit) and switching up the setting, calling back to old episodes, bringing back one-shot characters…it all prevents the show from getting stale like Dancouga did, and I never lost interest, even though I knew where things were going. Machine Robo is a fun mid-eighties robot show, with a wild disregard for things like “consistent character design” and “anatomy” in favor of making every shot look as cool as they could (many episodes were animated by the same team that did the Transformers episode “Call of the Primitives,” if that means anything to anyone but me), although that one shot of Baikanfu/Vikung-Fu where his arms end at his waist should not have been reused as often as it was. The ending is a bit rushed, but satisfying. It’s fun.

Okay. Now we can talk about Leina.

In the mid-80s, anime fans were big into two things: robots and cute girls. Which I guess isn’t that different from today, but they’re less into robots for the moment. However, there was a trend of combining the two; people would make homemade models of, say, Lum as if she were a robot, and the Creamy Mami fanfic Pony Metal U-Gaim (Why was a Creamy Mami fanfic named after giant robot show Heavy Metal L-Gaim? No one knows) got so popular they made a short animation of it. A certain segment of the anime fandom was nuts for cute robot girls. And here comes Leina Stol, who is exactly that, no change needed. She outranked her brother on popularity charts and maintained that popularity for at least a year after the show ended.

The showrunners noticed.

In addition to releasing two tapes of music from the show playing over clips (think a Disney sing-along, but it’s the guy who sang the Kamen Rider theme talking about kicking ass) that both ended with new animation about Leina as if she was an actress playing the character of Leina in the show, they also made a three-episode direct-to-video series about Leina…or, ostensibly about Leina. You see, the show ends with Rom and Leina travelling to other universes to fight evil, which somehow involves them getting naked. The OVA picks up after this, and also has Jet, Drill, and Jim transmute from their toy-based forms into handsome dudes. Leina arrives on Earth and goes to school, only to find her new schoolchums are menaced by a ghost that’s capturing them from outside time, draining their life force to sustain himself. Leina uses Rom’s Wolf Sword to turn back into her robot self, like a Sailor Moon magical girl transformation, and saves the day. I thought for sure this was setting up a new status quo where Leina is a superhero trying to reconnect with her friends in a new life, and she and her new friends would fight supernatural foes for a bit.

No. She saves the day, everyone forgets any of it happened, and Leina goes to another dimension.

Episode 2 is a sequel to Machine Robo Battlehackers, another show that aired between the end of Revenge of Cronos and the start of Leina: Legend of the Wolf Sword, and just goes right back to Machine Robo stuff, just with a focus on Leina. She meets two other superhero ladies and fights a woman who’s been brainwashed by a dark wizard Rom and the others are fighting; Rom even busts out redesigned versions of Kenryu and Baikanfu. This is also where things get a little skeevy; there’s a disturbing trend in anime of shows assuming little sister is in love with big brother. Machine Robo had…dabbled in this, mostly with Leina hating Min for showing interest in Rom, but in the Leina OVA’s it’s hard to ignore, which is why I was so thankful Rom got stabbed through the chest and died in the third one. That one also brings back redesigned villains from the show and links all the OVA stories together, using a new villain who Kirai defeated before the start of Machine Robo, AND it gives Leina all of Rom’s powers, setting her up to be a big hero. So of course that’s the end of the series.

But they weren’t done.

You see, Ashi Productions made another robot show called Borgman, that isn’t available in the US, and people got creepily obsessed with that show’s heroine too. So, they wanted to do a crossover between the two shows, but couldn’t get all the rightsholders to Borgman on board, so they just redesigned and renamed the Borgman character (kept the voice actress, though) and produced the cartoon anyway, under the name Lightning Trap: Leina and Laika. I tell you, it was tough finding information about this cartoon online before it released in the US; for decades all I could find out was it existed and didn’t resemble Machine Robo at all. It’s…unusual. Laika is very clearly a completely different design style from the rest of the characters; it was 1990 by this point, and it shows, with this very 90s-anime chick rescuing 80s-anime Leina and her friends. 1990 is also an odd year to release something with Lightning Trap’s plot, as it’s a low-sci-fi Cold War thriller about terrorists stealing a superweapon being transported on an advanced passenger plane and trying to sell it to the USSR. YES! A COLD WAR THRILLER! This has nothing to do with the plot of Machine Robo or Borgman, Leina is there in the sense that she looks like Leina and sounds like Leina, but can’t possibly be the same character, she is just a Japanese school girl. Her friends from the first episode of Legend of the Wolf Sword are with her, which doesn’t fit anywhere in the plot of that series. Also, the terrorists are led by the bad guys of episode 2 of Wolf Sword, which makes NO sense with anything. They were really just saying, “Hey freaks, you like these cartoon ladies? Here’s something with them in it,” even after they COULDN’T USE ONE OF THEIR POPULAR CARTOON LADIES. I swear I assumed this was a backdoor pilot for Laika until I looked up what was going on. It’s the weirdest anime I own, and not for anything that actually happens IN it.

Does any of that drag Machine Robo down on the list? No, actually. It might help it. As much as the Leina series is weird fanservice for gross people, it never indulges in the kind of obvious, obnoxious “fanservice” other shows of the period stooped too; the “boi-oi-oi-oi-oing” sound effect is not deployed, and even though she does get naked (with no nipples, though; an odd bit of anime censorship I’ve seen elsewhere), there’s no gratuitous panty shots or anything (In Lightning Trap, a little kid sees up her skirt, but the audience doesn’t, thankfully but unusually). Machine Robo is fun, but unremarkable. Leina: Legend of the Wolf Sword is just WEIRD, in a way that only late-80s boom economy anime could be. It all merges together into a memorably unique series, so no regrets. A pretty good time.

33. Getter Robo Armageddon: I originally planned to watch this before Shin vs. Neo, but it didn’t work out that way. Getter Robo Armageddon is an odd duck; an original story that doesn’t match the manga or the previous anime at all, although it does crib a few scenes and characters from the manga. A wild reinvention of Getter Robo, but also a very retro throwback focused on the original characters more than the new characters who act like they should be the protagonists. A confusing mishmash of conflicting ideas no one ever properly explains and you can’t reason out for yourself. It’s a 90’s anime, is what I’m saying.

Getter Robo Armageddon was SUPPOSED to be Yasuhiro Imagawa’s follow-up to his earlier OVA series, Giant Robo The Animation: The Day The Earth Stood Still, a drastic reworking of Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Giant Robo series; a comparison further evoked by the Japanese name of Armageddon, Change Getter Robo! The Last Day of the World. You will recall I spoke highly of Giant Robo, my opinion hasn’t changed. However, the first three episodes of Getter Robo Armageddon are…confusing, to say the least. Set some years after the Getter Robo was created and mass-produced for a conflict with alien Invaders on the moon (a completely original conflict with no resemblance to anything from prior Getter anime or manga), Ryoma Nagara is in jail for killing Dr. Saotome, Hayato Jin is in hiding and appears to be the person who actually killed Dr. Saotome, Michiru Saotome was also killed in a botch Getter Change, and Musashi and Benkei are BOTH alive, although Musashi, as usual, doesn’t last too long. Musashi and Benkei receive a warning from Dr. Shikishima, unusually played straight instead of for comic relief, that Dr. Saotome was up to some shady shit with the Invaders, Saotome comes BACK to life, Ryoma is brought out of jail to fight Saotome’s huge “Shin Dragon” made up of thousands of Getter Robos, Shikishima is apparently consumed by Invaders, Invaders disguised as humans manipulate a government science council that had beef with Saotome, Saotome genetically-engineered three perfect Getter pilots based on the characters Go, Gore, and Brai, but with no relation to their characters from the previous (or subsequent) manga and anime, Gore and Brai betray him and fuse into a composite creature after reverting the surrounding area to dinosaur times, a missile is launched that might help humanity or maybe plays into the bad guy’s hands, Musashi dies, Ryoma, Hayato, and Go use the mysterious Shin Getter to blow up the missile, this poisons the whole world and the Getter team disappears. That’s three episodes. Out of thirteen.

That’s a lot for three episodes, and admittedly, Giant Robo wasn’t real clear on who was doing what in its early episodes either. But in Giant Robo, I could follow the plot. I didn’t have any idea where Getter Robo Armageddon was going with anything in its early episodes, and I still don’t, because Imagawa left due to some sort of behind-the-scenes SOMEthing. It doesn’t seem to have hurt his career any, he did a few shows after this, including the Go Nagai adaptation Mazinger Edition Z: The Impact!, so he’s fine. However, with episode 4 he was replaced by Jun Kawagoe, who has directed every Getter Robo since (and the good first thirteen episodes of Transformers: Energon, oddly enough; now I know why that show suddenly got a lot worse ¼ of the way through! It was Takashi Sano’s fault.); the fourth episode used a script from Imagawa before switching to ones by…two other guys, I’m dropping too many names this review, look it up. The plot calms down a lot after that, pivoting to a small team of Japanese soldiers led by Benkei who have emerged from underground shelters 13 years (!!) after the events of the first three episodes, only to stumble their way into an international coalition fighting the Shin Dragon. Everyone there seems to hate the Japanese for unleashing Shin Dragon on the world, although why they take this out on a band of randos who offer to help fight Shin Dragon and the Invaders and not on their commander, Hayato Jin, who was directly working for Dr. Saotome, I have no idea. Yes, Hayato is in charge of the UN army. No, it’s never explained how he got that position in the thirteen years since we saw him fail to destroy a missile. They do explain that Ryoma fell into a time warp and ended up on the moon a few months before the events of episode 4, so that’s nice. Presumably that also happened to Go, who shows up in the Shin Getter to save the day, recruiting Gai and Benkei’s mysterious adopted daughter Kei to be the other pilots. Oh, and they never explain how Dr. Shikishima came to work for Hayato after apparently being eaten by Invaders in episode 1; the Invaders are shown to be able to take over people’s corpses to infiltrate human bases, so you’d think that’s what was going on with Dr. Shikishima, but no, he’s just a weird dude the whole time, never betrays them or anything. Dr. Saotome is taken over by Invaders, and it’s never clear if that was his intention or not. It feels like the new writers didn’t understand what they were handed, bought some time with a loose adaptation of the Alaska arc of the Getter Robo Go manga (they toned down Schwartzkopf’s racism so he’s just angry about Japan unleashing Getter Dragon instead of a horrible person who spouts very realistic anti-Japanese prejudice, which makes his face turn easier to digest but disguises Ken Ishikawa’s message about the irrationality of racism). The plot from that point forward is very easy to follow, but doesn’t exactly jibe with those first three episodes. Why did Stinger and Cohen, the alien infiltrators, try to stop the bomb, and act like they were helping humanity by stopping the bomb and saving Shin Dragon? If Dr. Saotome built the Shin Dragon for revenge on humanity, what was the point of making Go able to reconfigure it into a cool, heroic form based on that Atlantean dragon robot from Getter Robo G that I forget the name of and don’t want to look up? The final episodes assume Saotome was controlled by Invaders the whole time, but it didn’t seem that way in the early episodes. Also, was that mid-series twist about Kei’s true identity planned the entire time, or…?

Alright, so, sure, the plot’s a mess. Fine. But does the robot blow stuff up real pretty? Yes. For all the nonsense to get there, the fights are gorgeous, and the two teams (Ryoma, Hayato, and Benkei on one hand, Go, Kei, and Gai on the other) switch things up, going back and forth between the original Getter Robo, Shin Getter, and Getter Dragon, just to keep things interesting. It never delves into cosmic horror like I like from my Getter; Shin Getter and Getter Dragon are portrayed as Dr. Saotome’s ideas entirely, without the implication that Getter Energy has an intelligence, although they keep the bit where it aids evolution. Also, they use a bit of Ryoma’s premonition from the Shin Getter manga for the end, where Getter Emperor is portrayed as a good thing, a future force created by the original team in a time loop to save the Earth. It’s a much more optimistic take on the series than even the original creator had, which helps keep the mood fun, just like Shin vs. Neo did after. Getter Robo Armageddon has an outsized reputation amongst modern Getters for its variety of robots and easy availability, but it never lives up to its narrative promise, either as a grittier follow-up to Giant Robo or as an adaptation of the excellent manga. It’s a compromise, the best they could get out of a bad situation, albeit a very pretty compromise. Worth a watch, but I still gotta say the manga is better.

32. Shin Getter Robo vs. Neo Getter Robo: After falling in love with Getter Robo Arc last year, I decided to take a look at some of the other Getter Robo anime available in America—starting with Shin vs. Neo, because it went out of stock on Amazon and I worried it might go out of print. This is a short 4-episode OVA released not long after the unrelated Getter Robo Armageddon; Shin vs. Neo is a compressed version of the Getter Robo Go manga with some elements from the original Getter Robo, such as the villains (Emperor Gore and the Dinosaur/Reptilian Empire instead of Dr. Rando and his Machine Beasts) and the American Texas Mack robot (which was only in the original anime, never the manga—the manga had a different American robot, the Stelber, with different pilots). This is all good enough, but the short runtime and other subtle changes to the narrative lead to a broader plot, with less nuance and simplified character arcs. It starts with an accurate adaptation of the death of Musashi and destruction of the original Getter Robo, then jumps to the creation of what they’re calling Neo Getter Robo, the one from Getter Robo Go (in the manga it was just the Getter Robo without prefix to differentiate from the previous ones, though it acknowledged there were previous ones—the anime was a standalone thing, and each of the three forms of the robot were named for the main pilots, Go, Sho, and Gai, so Neo is as good a descriptor as anything, though it was slightly redesigned for this anime) and the recruitment of Go, which is all pretty accurate to the manga, especially the scene where the test of Neo Getter kills one of the pilots. However, it lacks the palpable sense of menace that makes Ken Ishikawa’s Getter Robo manga such a fascinating read. The characters designers do an admirable job of giving all the heroes very Ishikawa/Nagai-ish, devil-may-care manic grins, but they never do anything more dangerous than believing in themselves and pushing through to win the fight. In Ishikawa’s manga there’s a sense that only someone truly unhinged can properly push through self-preservation to throw themselves into a Getter Robo, here they just…believe in themselves. Which is fine, that’s a typical giant robot series trope and shonen trope in general, but it detracts from the uniqueness of the Getter series. What’s more, I must compare the show to other series where the heroes win by believing real hard, and up against GaoGaiGar or Gurren Lagann, Shin vs. Neo just comes up short. Finally, despite the title, the Shin Getter and Neo Getter never fight; just like in the manga, the heroes abandon Neo Getter once they get Shin Getter up and running because it’s just better. My favorite thing about Shin Getter, though, is that it’s a Lovecraftian horror, the first hint Ishikawa dropped for what became the central thesis of his Getter Robo manga for the last two arcs: humanity thought they were utilizing Getter Radiation to defeat their enemies, but in the long term Getter Radiation was actually controlling us to its own ends. Shin Getter Robo is an existential horror, stripping the humanity from its pilots and either expanding their consciousness or supplanting their personalities, depending on your perspective. Getter is TERRIFYING, and that’s its appeal. So, there’s a moment in the final battle with Emperor Gore that Go, Sho, and Gai feel their consciousnesses being pulled into Shin Getter, and they push through and channel its Getter energy to a more powerful form (a Black Shin Getter, a concept reused in the Arc anime) where their cockpits merge around them. And then…they beat the robot dinosaur and everything’s cool and they go back to normal. No!!! You can’t just…be left with the Shin Getter and everything’s fine! Dr. Saotome doesn’t get to live! Where’s my cosmic horror?

So, yeah, Shin vs. Neo is a fun, movie-length OVA with some beautiful animation and good robot fights, and it has a silly robot cowboy whose hat is an airplane, so that’s cool. It’s a fun way to spend an hour and 45 minutes. But it could have been so much MORE, which is disappointing.

31. Aggretsuko Season 5: Ah, Aggretsuko. A good show, highly recommend. But it certainly has dealt with mission creep, yeah? Torn between wanting its heroine to grow past her work gripes, but also realizing that, if that ever happened, they’d have no show. I wasn’t sure where they’d go after season 3 put Retsuko in a girl band (which was an escape…until she got a stalker fan, like not a stan, an ACTUAL stalker fan who put her in physical danger, and then she dropped out), and season 4’s answer was to add tension to her relationship with Haida, which FINALLY happened, by making him too into her job. Season 5, the final season, continued this trend by catching up with Haida after leaving the company he and Retsuko worked for. The resulting storyline could have been stretched over two seasons, but they only had one, so we’re left with a tight, solid story that could still use a few more moments to let its characters breathe.

Not that there aren’t those! The main thrust of the story is Haida’s conflict with his father, who has secretly been a long-serving politician in the National Diet. Haida never fit in with their rigid, traditionalist family, but it was convenient for him to stay attached. Due to his unemployment, Haida ends up homeless for a bit; too prideful to tell Retsuko how depressed he is, he crashes in an internet café, where he happens to meet a friend from an online game, the disaffected Shikabane, who clearly is supposed to be the breakout character of the season like Tadano in season 2 and Manaka in season 3. I’m sure she would be, if the show continued, but instead I wish we’d spent a little more time with Shikabane; a lot of great moments are left to the viewer’s imagination, especially at the end. Part of this is the series finale curse of trying to wrap up all the plotlines in a concise message of what the creators wanted the show to mean, where the message must come first. However, the message became too much for the show to handle, which was a weakness. I still enjoyed the season, even though it wasn’t as funny as previous ones (I saw a person I follow on Twitter complaining she didn’t laugh until the photograph gag in episode 4, but they got me with the Lupin III reference at the start of episode 3, of course).

The main issue for me was the last-minute positioning of Retsuko as a populist candidate. This served two purposes: she was immediately at odds with Haida’s brother, running in the same district, and it allowed the theme of Retsuko airing private grievances that polite Japanese society encourages people to repress being a good for society. The show does some work to portray Japanese politics as being much more controlled than American politics; conservative by structure in addition to policies, built around keeping smaller candidacies from getting very far (there’s one scene about a deposit for running for office that I haven’t verified if it’s accurate, but if it is, whoof). The problem is, Retsuko doesn’t run on a platform. Her entire position is an appeal to the underappreciated, those who feel overlooked by the political system. WE, the viewers, know Retsuko is ultimately a person of high moral character, and we see her make steps to connect with Shikabane as an illustration of her connection with the disaffected in action, but we viewers also know Retsuko is a shy, reserved person easily bullied into working against her best interests. Her constituents show up for her personality alone, there’s no mention of policies. Perhaps that’s revolutionary in Japan, where the youth culture is massively outnumbered—true here, too, but not on the same scale. But as an American, I’ve also seen, in practice, where such personality-based candidacies go, and my experience makes me feel the show’s finale wasn’t quite as uplifting as it was supposed to be.

Well, she DID force her opponent to pick a position, that’s something.

30. The Sarah Jane Adventures: I’d seen a little bit of the Sarah Janes Adventures before; the first season ran on the Sci-Fi Channel in college, back when it was still called that, and the two episodes where the Tenth Doctor shows up were included in the complete David Tennant Blu-Ray collection, but I’d never experienced the whole show. Where Torchwood was ostensibly the adult-oriented spinoff of Doctor Who, Sarah Jane was something the kids could watch without parental supervision; an odd choice given the title character was someone who was famous for her time on Doctor Who in the mid-70’s, but I guess she was popular enough from her one guest spot in Season 2 to stick around (although they had some trouble negotiating the rights to K-9 with the original author, so his appearances are sporadic). The show makes the logical choice, from a children’s TV perspective, to make Sarah Jane the mentor for a group of children, although from an adult perspective this means she’s a horrible caretaker, constantly leading other peoples’ children into danger without their knowledge or consent—two different sets of parents get hypnotized to forget they ever saw aliens on two separate occasions, too. The kids rotate out over the course of the show’s five seasons; the first episode introduces Maria, who moved across the street from Sarah Jane after her parent’s messy divorce; her shy, reserved dad (with the extremely “We didn’t Google this” name of Alan Jackson) still dominated by her pushy, selfish mother, even after the divorce. Schoolmate Kimberly decides that they’re best friends and should go tour a soda factory that turns out to be an alien plot; they rescue a genetically engineered kid from the basement of the factory and Sarah Jane adopts him, naming him Luke. It’s a very classic Doctor Who plot from the late-Pertwee/Early-Tom Baker era, mixing something vaguely socially conscious with an extremely silly villain. However, apparently test audiences hated Kimberly, as she disappears after the pilot, replaced by Clyde Langer, a more laid-back character who doesn’t deny the existence of aliens that are right in front of him. Maria leaves in season 2 because the actor was too busy at school (and as a result is the only one whose father figures out what’s going on) and is replaced by Rani, an aspiring journalist (but not THE Rani, of course). Apparently Luke’s actor had school troubles too, as he appears less in the final seasons; the show ends abruptly during an arc introducing ANOTHER alien wonder-child, Sky. The strict adherence to this formula hurts the show a little, especially since it didn’t need to; as the series went on, the show naturally shifted to a focus on, of all characters, Clyde, who grew from the cocky friend character to a fully-developed young man with real personality, a complicated family history, and, you know, answering the call of the hero and all that jazz. He even gets a little TARDIS energy that links him to the Doctor for a couple of episodes, that’s great. Rani, too, becomes more independent; her interest in journalism means a more focused drive to pursue stories with or without Sarah Jane that Maria lacked (also, Rani’s parents are much less annoying). I understand they’ve recently given those characters an audio book series, and Clyde made an appearance on some 60th anniversary videos only available in the UK; I’m glad, those characters most deserve to be part of the Doctor Who canon of the ones they introduced in this show.

Because this IS a Doctor Who show, in its bones. The lower budgets of CBBC and the smaller adventures imbue it with some of the feel of classic Who, with shoddy special effects and sometimes nonsensical plots; but it also has all the heart of the Russel T. Davies era of Doctor Who. The recurring villain, the Trickster, is usually a sign of a good time; his three episodes, “Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?” “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith” and “The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith” feature wonderful anxiety-based plots that speak to children (“What if my mom remarries and everything changes?” “What would I do if my parents left me?”) and adults (“How can I ask someone to die for me?” “What would my parents think of me as an adult?”). Despite some of the creakier explanations for keeping the status quo, there’s some real good Doctor Who stuff buried in here; and the other stuff isn’t so bad either, even though its focus towards kids means way too many appearances of the farting, gross Slitheen (from planet Raxacoricofallapatorius, of course). Speaking of classic Who, for the fan boys, it also features more appearances of characters from the original series; the Brigadeer and Jo Grant make some fun appearances (Jo Grant’s also is one of the many episodes to focus on how lonely it is to be left by the Doctor; when she hears that he visited Sarah Jane on more than one occasion, but never her, it’s heartbreaking).

It's unfortunate, then, that the show ends abruptly in the middle of season 5, before the Sky plotline paid off (according to Wikipedia, the Trickster was somehow involved). Well, I couldn’t think of a better way to start that paragraph, but of course, the show ending is the least unfortunate thing about why it ended: Elisabeth Sladen, who had played Sarah Jane since 1974, had a cancer relapse and died. In 2020, one of the Doctor Who Lockdown special episodes on YouTube was a tribute to her, which was one of the things that made me want to finally go back and finish watching the series. I’m very glad I did, although, I will say, the script quality dropped off a bit at the end of Seaosn 4; the mystery of the Shopkeeper and the Captain didn’t grab me, since their introductory episode was very cluttered, heavy on artificial time limits and light on explanations. Season 5 did end on a good one, however; the first meeting between Sarah Jane’s two adopted kids was cute, and their iPad parody had a wonderfully puntastic bad guy name (the “SerfBoard”—yes, the episode ended up being about freeing slaves, shocker). If you liked that era of Doctor Who—and I feel like that’s the one most people like—this is a better way to get more of it than watching Torchwood, I’ll say that. Just be prepared for some really bad CGI in the first two seasons.

29. Scissor Seven: Jake Kurzer held me down and forced me to watch two episodes of this anime (a slight exaggeration). Actually, it’s not an anime, it’s Chinese, although marketing has diluted anime from being a loanword to describe a country’s specific output into a sales pitch for a vague style of cartoon. The series focuses on an amnesiac hairdresser who is bullied into becoming an assassin by his friend and mentor, Dai Bo the king of the chickens. The early episodes follow his adventures doing odd (murder) jobs for the people of remote Chicken Island which usually end in him, in a bungling, comic way, convincing them they don’t need to kill anyone, and everyone becomes friends. It’s a chill show like that, with comical designs that draw equally from Japanese and American design senses (not that either county has a monopoly on that style, just relying on stereotypes here). These early episodes are cool, relaxing stories with engaging, if broad, characters that were fun to just soak in for a while. The first season has some extra episodes with the tragic origins of Dai Bo and love interest (?) Plum Blossum Thirteen, and the episode that introduces Cola the cool girl with paralysis touch has a gut punch twist ending, but they’re mostly just fun stories that culminate in everyone teaming up against some mad scientist bastard who tries to use their country for his own ends.

I miss that. Like most shows these days, the plot escalates as it moves along, and reveals more about the setting and the characters to drive toward a world-shaking conclusion. We’re not there yet! I understand more episodes aired in China this year but Netflix doesn’t have them as of…the end of March (UPDATE, October 16: They aired but were just a series of fight scenes with very little character and plot development, Seven is in a sickbed or passed out on the ground for most of the season). But whereas other shows like, just to pick something off the top of my head, Star vs. the Forces of Evil have the same characters from the start of the show grow, and push them against their preconceptions and morality in interesting ways, I felt Scissor Seven lost something by taking Seven off the island. Divorced from his supporting cast and friends, the character seemed lost, the stakes in his confrontations with new villains lower because no one we cared about was in danger (well except Dai Bo and Xiaofei, but even they weren’t always around, especially by the end). The creative team attempts to compensate for this by having Seven reflect on his friends to drive himself to be better, or compare the villains to them, or even have one show up out of the blue to get injured, but we’re still left with our hero isolated among the enemies. I suppose that puts him in great peril, sure, which should be dramatic, but it also puts modern Seven in a situation more like the life of his past self, from the period he has amnesia for, who we get small snippets of throughout the series—and that guy just isn’t as INTERESTING as hairdresser Seven. It’s not COOL to find out that our hero, the hard-luck weirdo who manages to come through for everyone with kindness and a sense of humor, was actually a badass murderer soaked in blood who could do this in his sleep, that his hard-won battles should have been easy for him because he’s actually a prodigy who became a top assassin while still in high school or whatever. It posterizes the character into a stereotype—well, not that he wasn’t before, but I felt a depth there that’s missing from his “coolified” version. They try to make up for this by giving the character arc for the season to Thirteen, but she reacts to everything with the predictable mix of self-hatred and stabbing.

I’m cool with bigger fights, just maybe don’t isolate the hero as much, please. He’s better with friends.

(Are they implying that Seven and Thirteen are half-siblings? That’s messed up)

28. Amphibia: Well, as long as I have Disney Plus, I should keep watching shows like the ones I’d enjoyed before, right? I finished Gravity Falls, Star vs. The Forces of Evil, and The Owl House, so the only thing left like those was Amphibia, the second of three (recent?) Disney isekais. Here, Anne Boonchuy is a teenager transported by a magic music box to a world of frog people, where she befriends a weird small-town family of frogs (Sprig, Polly, and Hopadaiah “Hop Pop” Plantar) and tries to get home. Amphibia feels the most like the kind of kids show Disney WANTS to make, or be seen as making. Most of Amphibia is simple, comedic morality plays; most thirty-minute episodes are divided in half and provide bite-sized stories where either Anne or one of the Plantars makes a big mistake and has to fess up and learn an important lesson about friendship and honesty—you know, kids stuff (In a kids show? Unthinkable!). Seriously, it’s probably exactly what it needs to be for the target demographic of, you know, kids (as opposed to thousand-year-old deities, natch). In the first season especially, this sets up a great plotline where it’s clear Anne has to UN-learn plenty of the wrong lessons about how a friendship works, which culminates in a great season-finale where she faces the person who taught her the wrong lessons, but by the second season the focus of their character development strays a bit as the show pivots to worldbuilding and setting up a high-fantasy mystery. This is all fine, but I felt it didn’t mesh or push the boundaries quite as much as the other three shows I mentioned, not to mention the Cartoon Network shows from the last ten years. I found the Amphibia pitch cartoon on YouTube, and it seems like creator Matt Braly wanted the show to have a darker tone and be more of an adventure series, and I wonder whose decision it was to dial that back (to the point where they had to have a disclaimer before the season 2 finale for intense sequences, although to be fair someone got thrown out of an airplane and someone else was impaled so, good call). Even in the plot-heavy third season that upends the formula of the first two seasons by sending everyone to Earth where they’re ruthlessly pursued by FBI agent RuPaul, they still have time to do a Christmas episode, an episode where they just hang out at the mall, take the cat to the vet, learn about Thai culture—low-stakes sitcom stuff. Which is fine! I think that’s what the demographic wants. I don’t want to say Amphibia didn’t have heart, because it certainly did, and the ending was wonderfully bittersweet. It also kept some of the sardonic humor from Gravity Falls, though played a bit broader. I just didn’t feel it pushing against its boundaries in the way I appreciate from other shows of the time and the genre, and that’s really what I want as an adult watching children’s television. I want to be careful and say this isn’t BAD, the idea that the only kids shows worth existing are the ones with jokes for the parents leads to the kind of “my childhood was best” arguments that poison the medium. I had a fun time watching Amphibia, picking out all the video game and anime references and hearing Matt Chapman struggling to do a gruff Hispanic voice without sounding like his signature character, Strong Bad (he did pull it off, though). But Amphibia never broke my heart, and I’m afraid that’s become a requirement for me.

27. Star Trek: Picard, Season 3: Me, when this season started: I feel like they’re trying to make this Picard’s Wrath of Khan and you know, the last time they tried that it didn’t turn out so hot.

Me, after the season: Yeah, okay, that was pretty good. The almost lost me for a minute there, though.

Do I say this elsewhere in these reviews? I’ve written so many, I’ve forgotten what I’ve said, and who knows what order these will end up in before I’m done. But dang, everyone loves giving famous characters children these days, right? So one gets trotted out for Picard, the man who could never give romance a chance, who kept screwing things up, and who better to have had his kid than Beverly Crusher, the closest thing to a romantic interest he had on the show (well, okay, Vash, but she strikes me as someone who would use better protection). I do regret that this revelation kind of pushed away the romance they were building with Picard’s Romulan business manager Laris from last season (What, we couldn’t spare two minutes to show her meeting Jack?), but also it IS a kind of played-out story, one which, as I said, Trek has done before with Wrath of Khan, which remains a high point for the franchise and I always worry when they use something from it because it’s just setting them up for unfavorable comparisons. Like this one.

The other thing that bothers me about…well, all modern Trek, but Picard in particular, is I can’t tell how much of my enjoyment comes from the actual contents of the show or is just my brain yelling “The familiar! Oh, the familiar thing!” Even knowing the main bridge crew from TNG would be back (except Wesley, but I guess he’s busy running an interplanetary police force or whatever), they still filled in enough guest stars that made me go like Leo DiCaprio on the couch. Including archival audio from dead people! Please stop doing that, you guys!

Alright, I think I’ve lost track of my point here. I think one of the disconnects between a show like Picard and what fans of TNG want comes down to the actors. They needed a story that would appeal to a lot of very old, mostly-retired actors who don’t want to just step back into the same show they were in 30 years ago. Gates McFadden talked about this at GalaxyCon this year, she was very disappointed with how her character was portrayed for a lot of TNG, and needed a storyline that would bring her back and help her right what she saw as the way Beverly Crusher was mistreated by the writers. Same with Jeri Ryan, even though she’s been on Picard for three years, could you have ever imagined her showing up on Star Trek again after the way she talked about being treated on the set of Voyager? We’re talking about people who have enough money to do whatever they want, you have to give them a reason to WANT to go back to being these characters, and so each one of them has to have a little hook. Patrick Stewart never got to do a story where he deals with family? Well, okay, let’s give him one. Gates McFadden wants to show she can be a mother, in a way they never let her be with Wesley? Well, she spent Jack’s whole life teaching him how to be a good person and doctor. The Rikers get to deal with grief. Michael Dorn finally gets to show off the character arc for Worf he’s been pitching for its own show for twenty years. Geordi gets a fatherhood plot too, about expectations and relating to your kids...I don’t know, it felt like Picard’s plot in miniature; maybe LeVar just came back because they gave a job to his daughter too. Brent Spiner got to argue with himself, he loves hamming it up. I can see where this wouldn’t jibe with what some fans would want from a TNG reunion show. I’ve also seen people nitpicking how Worf killed that Ferengi early on, but give me a break. Honestly, the cast started to feel a little crowded by the end, but they did manage to give everyone a good moment, a little arc that made you appreciate them being there. In the depths of me not caring about Picard’s family issues, Worf and Riker were there to lighten things up and carry the show for me, and I appreciated that.

Hm? The plot? Well, thankfully it didn’t rely on references to past stories to carry it as much as I feared when that first Khan-style title card popped up, and instead we got some good, deep Trek lore. I don’t want to spoil it, because the reveal in episode 3 was just…so good, but there’s a wonderful returning villain—or rather, a new faction of villains—with legitimate beef with the Federation, who have a wonderful plan and cool weapons to go about hurting them. Unfortunately, these villains don’t really have any connection to Picard. So, they have a mysterious benefactor. Who really wants Picard, and Picard’s son. Picard’s son who has weird visions where a female voice calls out to him. Because, of course, he can’t just be the son of a famous character, he has to also have amazing powers that are both a curse and a blessing, and drive him towards yadda yadda, look it all pays off in the end, but for a few episodes there the main mystery of the show and their supposed breakout new character is the biggest drag on the plot. I did not like Jack Crusher, not because of the character, but his status as a McGuffin, and I hope he is allowed to grow into someone well-rounded, not just a tool and a source of guilt for Picard.

Like, I saw what was going on with Jack before I figured out it was linked to the mysterious benefactor of Vadic, the leader of the alien bad guys I’m not saying the name of. So yeah, I don’t care to spoil this, it’s the Borg Queen. The real one, not the alternate timeline one, not Agnes Good Borg who emerged from a wormhole at the end of the last season with a warning about a threat to the Federation that APPARENTLY IS DIFFERENT FROM THIS ONE, YOU COULDN’T HELP WITH THIS AGNES? (Showrunner Terry Matalas pointed out that Captain Shaw had a line earlier in the season that those other Borg were busy in the wormhole…and then the other characters promptly went about talking as if that other faction didn’t exist, smooth guys) But yes, the one from First Contact and Voyager. This was all part of a long-con plan she…well, didn’t actually anticipate working, from the looks of things. As last-minute twists go, this one should have been even more predictable to me than it was, and is kind of boring. I don’t know that it was really needed, either. It could have just been the…the other guys. All the tools were there. But I guess it allowed Picard some closure. Gave him that little moment to open himself up at the end. Really, I didn’t have any complaints about the final episode. It was a rousing adventure that brought everything together, reaching back over the second half of the season and consolidating everything together that didn’t really work the first time. It…felt pretty good. I’m tentatively interested in that sequel they’ve been pitching that everyone knows they’re pitching.

What else…oh, yeah, Todd Stashwick killed as Liam Shaw. Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut and Ed Speleers also were new characters who had a lot of things to do (among a cast crowded with characters we already knew, you see), but Liam Shaw stood out as the most complicated character, who stood in opposition to our characters in just about every way, but when the chips were down, showed a backbone and calm under pressure that the audience and the characters both didn’t see coming (“I believe I owe the captain an apology,” Picard says to Riker, then never actually apologizes). My favorite line of his is “Send someone to the back window to go look!” in response to being told rear sensors were disabled. I’m specifically avoiding talking about it, but the non-Borg villain’s backstory and motivations are really on-point, they were much better developed than the Borg Queen.

Seriously, I think it suffered most from having to wrap everything up, but one everything was wrapped, they made it a pretty satisfying conclusion that sort of reached back and sanded off the rough edges in my mind—but only SORT of. I’d be interested in re-watching this in a few years and seeing if I still feel the same, or if losing the novelty of it makes the show seem worse. I’m very reluctant to recommend Picard because I never know if people will be able to look past the differences and, yes, the flaws; the amount of references bothers me, but at least there’s a heart behind it. I don’t know. I liked it better than the first two seasons, and I liked those fine. I think this one turned out pretty well after all.

26. Doom Patrol Season 4 episodes 6-12: Robotman got to die. Peacefully. Surrounded by those he loves, doing what he loves. I’m happy for him.

…is that all I have to say about Doom Patrol? That Cliff Steele got the ending the comics will never give him? And should I really lead off a review of seven episodes of TV (Remember! The first half of the season ended in January!) with a spoiler for the final episode? Probably not, but that’s what stuck with me. Doom Patrol did an admirable job across its four seasons of managing the comic’s penchant for the bizarre and unexplained within a budget that didn’t allow for some of the more extreme displays of superheroism common on the printed page. The heroes tended to spend more time sitting around their mansion pouting about their crippling emotional issues than going on patrol (a situation Cyborg and Rita would point out at various opportunities) but that was okay, because the show never slowed down enough to wallow in despair with its characters. This final batch, however, starts to show some of the strain of a reduced budget (I am astonished they got Timothy Dalton back for one more episode, I assumed he was off the table) and a rush to the finish line. They spend a lot of time talking about how Rita was the glue that held the team together, when I hadn’t gotten that impression in the previous seasons; I mean, typically that would be Cliff in the comics, but his characterization here was slightly different so that didn’t fit as well. I suppose Rita is as good a “glue” as any, especially given her importance in season 3, but I also remember her saying her time away from the group in season 3 meant they were all effectively strangers to her after a century of other adventures, and now she’s their wonderful mom everyone is sad about? It’s a BIT of a stretch, but hey, this is Rita Farr, stretching is half her deal.

Everyone gets a bit posterized this season (half-season?) as the writers realize, oh shit, we need to work everything out for these doofuses AND resolve our TWO villain plotlines. The villains are fun, at least. The revival of Immortus plays out a lot differently than anything from the comics; where Drake and Premiani’s Immortus was a wrinkled old general, Doom Patrol brings back an enemy with ties to Rita, a reflection of Rita’s worst desires, paraded in front of her face to give her an opportunity to make a moral stand. Doom Patrol also has a musical episode, but the part where they all realize they’re singing comes halfway through, and also reality had been rewritten by a self-absorbed local theater nerd with an inflated ego so the songs are supposed to be kind of bad. The butts are kind of an afterthought, an additional menace with long ties to the show so the heroes have some unconvincing special effects to punch. Still, abrupt and devoid of recurring characters as it was, I can’t say the ending disappointed; everyone got a happy, if bittersweet, ending, sliding off into the sunset to finally work through their problems and make a better future, even if doing so involved a flamethrower for one of them. But, having read Drake, and Morrison, and Pollock, and Giffen, and Way, and Culver…live action might just be too limiting a medium for the unrestrained weirdness of Doom Patrol. They made an admirable try of it, though, and in a few cases got real close. Worth the time.

25. Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: I’m trying to remember why I skipped this one when it first aired. I can imagine a few reasons; it wasn’t available in the US for a while after it aired, and I didn’t want to pirate it probably being the main one. I also wasn’t yet a fan of showrunner Hiroyuki Imaishi, as I hadn’t watched Gurren Lagann when it first aired either, since it was in the middle of my stubborn anime burnout. But also I probably skipped P&S w/G because I could be weirdly puritan sometimes. This was 2010, when I was really into Lupin III, Cutie Honey, and South Park. What about Panty & Stocking did I think would be worse than any of those, especially South Park? I don’t know. I figured I should find out before the new season airs…probably next year?

Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is a raucous comedy about two angels who got kicked out of heaven for being too sinful (the show tends to use the term “bitch girls”) and now live in the local Catholic diocese working as ghostbusters. All the characters are named after lingerie/undergarments and the main characters can turn the items they’re named after into weapons. It’s very consciously over-the-top; after the emotional, sweeping story of Gurren Lagann, Imaishi wanted to do something stupid, and to his credit, he and his team succeeded. Chock-a-block with poop jokes, grossout sexual innuendo (and not innuendo), and Catholic priest jokes (you know the kind I mean), P&S laser-targets a very specific sense of humor. In this way, it didn’t do much for me; ten years of watching South Park burned me out on grossout humor and I don’t wish to go back. What Panty & Stocking has over South Park comes from its design sense. Eschewing the typical anime designs of the time (aside from a few short transformation sequences—their true, angelic forms), P&S has a unique aesthetic that drew a lot of comparisons to Powerpuff Girls at the time but looks to me more like Jet Set Radio or Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce, Go! The simple designs also help the animators, who were clearly working on a small budget; some of the later episodes have extensive Flash-animated segments, but they balance those out with gorgeous fight scenes or very specific heavily-animated sequences; I think specifically of the episode “One Angry Ghost,” which is mostly computer-manipulated still frames but features some segments of smooth, bendy-arm style animation, and very detailed shots of their monkey lawyer (including a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, spot-on Gundam joke for no reason), but there was also Vomiting Point, which was done in a completely different style than the rest of the series until the main characters showed up at the end.

Speaking of spot-on, wild jokes, they went all-in on pop culture references on the title screens of their episodes, aping the logo designs of High School Musical, Sex and the City, Dawn of the Dead, Back to the Future, Bad Boys, and even Once Upon a Time…in America. And of course, I of all people would be remiss to not include Trans-homers, the full 10-minute Transformers parody, with tons of…not obscure, but very specific Transformers references, including the intrusive narrator they added to the Japanese dub and a callout to the Studio Ox designs. Wild.

But, one of the reasons I was conflicted about this series was that the ending was spoiled for me. There’s a last-minute twist that recontextualizes the entire series, and from the way people talked about it I thought of it as a downer ending, a real dark twist that ruins the whole show. I was very torn because I liked the way the final episode handled the themes of the show; Panty loses everything, except her virginity, which comes back (Huh? Well, you ever hear that old wives’ tale about sleeping with a Bible on your crotch…? Now, Panty is an angel already, so…), and she gets kicked out of the church and has a crisis of conscience, only to regain her confidence and beat the villain, you know the deal. The lesson of the series, as expressed by Panty, is a girl-power, pro-sex affirmation, which I think is great. I worried that the twist ending would undo this, as the way I’d heard it described made it sound really dark, like Panty was being punished. Nope! No, it’s just a wild, out-of-nowhere CLIFFHANGER, where the villain, Corset (voiced by the great Shigeru Chiba, also appearing elsewhere on this list in Urusei Yatsura and Ghost Sweeper Mikami and also in a million great anime including personal favorites like Patlabor and Dragon Ball, congratulations I recognize your voice now) reveals he’s not dead, and uh, some other stuff happens and Panty is cut into pieces and kidnapped. Which would be really frustrating if I watched this in December 2010 and had to wait fourteen years to find out how she got out of this one, but since they’ve already announced a sequel and it included an animation of Panty reconstituting herself, now I’ll just have to see how that plays out.

24. Spy × Family (Season 2): Studio Wit’s adaptation of Tatsuya Endo’s manga continues to impress with fluid animation and exciting action scenes, blended well with cute comedy and anxiety-based misunderstandings. The 12-episode season format modern anime use doesn’t work too well with a straight manga adaptation like this, however; the season starts and ends with a random smattering of one-shot stories focused on either the main cast or side characters, with no relation to the overall plot or even with anything else going on in the episode. Some episodes even adapt three short manga chapters. I’m not complaining about adapting the manga accurately, in fact, I want to especially shout out “Berlint in Love,” where Becky finally meets Loid, who she’s had a crush on since Anya showed her a picture of him; I thought that contained some of the best jokes of the series. It’s just odd to have the main action of a season of television happen across episodes 8 and 9 of 12.

Speaking of that action, the main plot of this season finally gave me some movement on the themes I really want to see from this show: corruption in government and the heroes’ slow realization that their countries are manipulating them with naivete and patriotism. Yor’s boss asks her to protect the widow of a mob boss he owed a favor to (I appreciate the indifference with which the state apparatus addresses the revelation that their spy boss, a creepy looking dude who hangs out in a garden, had ties with the mafia—leaving the viewer to pick up that, hey, something isn’t right about that) which means Yor has to act as a bodyguard on a cruise they’re using to sneak the wife out. In a wild coincidence, Anya uses her psychic powers to win a ticket to the same cruise. Quelle coincidence! And a welcome one, at that, because it means we get half the season without any chance of seeing the hated Yuri or Nightfall. The cruise sequences are full of great fight scenes for Yor and dorky comedy scenes with Loid and Anya (don’t worry, Loid gets to defuse a bomb for a little action) but I really appreciated the moments during the big fight where Yor, seeing the mob wife running to freedom, to save her son from other mobsters and from his dad’s lifestyle, starts to question why she keeps working for the government as an assassin, and realizes she values Loid and Anya more than working for the government. It’s a small movement, and she doesn’t break from her old patterns—not yet anyway. But, it’s something; I worried that the writer may have gotten too used to the status quo. There were a lot of moments that asked us to respect members of the secret police, which made me worry we were settling into the manipulative cold war being…OKAY, or something? But Yor questioning her mission makes me hopeful that the show is progressing toward what I really want: Loid and Yor burning the whole system down (or some less violent equivalent). Fingers crossed.

Oh, and Anya saved the day by throwing the knife. Yay!

23. Umbrella Academy: The Umbrella Academy comic books, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, launched when I was in college, and I did not read them, because they were written by the singer from My Chemical Romance and who likes those guys? (It turned out everyone my age liked those guys and I was purposely being behind the times, but what else is new?) Flash forward twelve years and I’d actually read some of Way’s other comics, and Netflix was launching a show based on the Umbrella Academy, so I decided it was finally time to read the original comics…all three volumes of them. Turns out you make a lot more money being a famous rock star than you do writing a comic book; who knew? I read them, I put them on my shelf, I very quickly forgot basically everything that happened in them aside from a general feeling of, “Yes, that was like Way’s Doom Patrol and Rivera’s Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye, very good.” And then I didn’t watch the show.

So when I heard it was cancelled, I figured, time to catch up before the final season!

And then I had to reread the comics.

The Umbrella Academy is rare among modern superhero adaptations in that it truly ADAPTS the source material to fit not just the medium, but the budget. Superhero films have devolved from character-driven stories that coalesce the feel and thrill of a comic book arc into a brisk 100 minute film into three-hour slogs through buzzwords and appearances by actors and characters from somewhere else, promising that something interesting will happen in the next film without bothering to make something interesting happen in this one; superhero TV shows save up their episode budget for one special effects scene before the last commercial break and spend the rest of the episode killing time with hackneyed, inauthentic arguments to create the illusion of conflict in the hope the viewer will interpret the return to status quo as character development (although, with the fall of the CW and the move to streaming, superhero shows have begun to resemble their big screen counterparts). The Umbrella Academy deftly threads the needle between these two; six or seven-issue storylines are stretched out to ten hour-long episodes, but never feel like they’re treading water. Images and concepts from the comics are reinterpreted in unusual ways; the first season is a fairly straightforward adaptation of the first arc of the comic, with a bit of arc 2 thrown in; the second works up to the climax of arc 2 but otherwise is wholly original, and the third season is almost completely original, with iconography from the third arc of the comic used in completely different contexts from the source material. It’s a bold choice, and one that would get a certain type of fan up in arms for “changing things for no reason,” but it means the story can be enjoyed without understanding the context of the original work, without searching through articles to understand the smallest reference that fans are “supposed” to get to tantalize them for what’s to come. The work stands on its own.

Part of me regrets that Umbrella Academy lost some of the madcap energy of the comics in the translation; in the show, the flashback to the Academy’s first mission as children has them stop a simple bank robbery, whereas in the comics they battle a living Eiffel Tower, piloted by the zombie of Gustave Eiffel. Where the comic Academy lives in a superhero alternate history, one of many teams doing superscience and far-out, acid trip superhero stuff, the TV show’s Academy barely do any crimefighting, and seem to exist mostly as vapid teen heroes before sputtering out and moving on with their lives long before the show began, to no real change in the world. However, the additional room to move, the more mundane setting, does help with some of the major problems with the comics; we have more time to live with these characters, to understand their feelings and interpersonal relationships. In the comics, Vanya’s betrayal feels abrupt; approached by a supervillain group with ulterior motives, she joins the villains after her siblings are kind of rude to her while they’re fighting robots at a carnival. Vanya’s TV show counterpart, Viktor, (they worked in Elliot Page’s real life transition into the story in the third season; the characters don’t make a big deal about it, but it makes sense from where the story went in the second season) is seduced by a scheming, jealous fan, like a darker version of Syndrome from The Incredibles (yes, darker than killing Gazerbeam). Viktor’s panic and betrayal feel more real in the show, as does his redemption in the later seasons, something the published comics haven’t had the time to get around to. Even one-dimensional characters like Hazel and Cha-Cha, who were just crazy killers in the comics, secondary villains, have a whole arc about their relationship and their hopes for a better life, which is kind of sickly sweet and heartbreaking (also Cha-Cha gets to be played by Mary J. Blige somehow). The show is not without problems—if I arrived in 1963 with the knowledge that a war was about to break out with the Soviets because of my time travel, I would assume JFK NOT dying would be a more likely cause than JFK dying, but these guys sure do spend a lot of time assuming saving Kennedy’s life will save the world—but it’s an enjoyable little character piece superhero show, even if it doesn’t push against the Netflix drama style as much as you might think from the source material. They even benefitted by casting a nonwhite actress in a role that was originally white by being able to give her a whole plotline where she joins the civil rights movement in JFK times, so suck on THAT, weird racist fans who always need there to be a reason for a black person to be present! They had one!

Anyway, the guy who plays Luther looks like my brother Daniel sometimes. There’s a scene where Klaus finds him at a club and Luther just spreads his arms and shouts “BROTHER!” and I’m like, that’s exactly what Daniel does in these situations, what.

22. Urusei Yatsura (2022) Season 2: david production (sic) continues their more accurate adaptation of classic Urusei Yatsura stories with the aesthetic flair and comedic timing they perfected in the first season—which is to say, they’ve learned the pastel cutaways used for a beat between setup and punchline really sell the jokes, and I appreciate that. Like the first season that aired late last year, there are fewer changes to the source material than in the original UY cartoon, and after reading through all the manga over the last few years that makes this show feel more familiar to me than the original. Also, they continue to use the show as kind of a best-of collection instead of going in the manga’s order, as it jumps around from the first few years up to volumes in the mid-twenties, just to get the really good gags and introduce characters who were only important late in the series, like the middle school Sukeban girls (Pepper, Sugar, Ginger, and their giant robot, Salt-1…which has been redesigned, thankfully) or the kitsune who falls in love with Shinobu. They close out the season with the Tomo-1 Beauty Contest, pretty faithfully adapted over two episodes, though they do cut out some gags from the early selection process where Ataru tries to hide the evidence that the boys are ranking women based on looks, and cut a long sequence where Ryunosuke and her father fight over whether she’ll wear a bikini for the swimsuit wrestling match. I always liked Ryu and hated her asshole father (Ryu’s deal is very clearly a reference to a parent not approving of their trans child, but switched around so Rumiko Takahashi could say “No, look, she’s a cis woman, see? Her dad wanted a boy and is forcing her to be masculine against her wishes!” because it was still the 1980’s) but they toned down her dad a little for this show, which dilutes the metaphor but helps keep the good times going without being bogged down by this abusive, gaslighting, constant physical presence of manifested self-doubt for one of the most popular supporting characters.

Oh, if the swimsuit wrestling match sounds too sexual, don’t worry, they weren’t wrestling each other, they wrestled wild animals obtained from the zoo. Was still a little sexual though.

The one time they did significantly change a joke was in the episode “A Date for Just the Two of Us,” where Ataru gives Ten bad advice on where to take a woman on dates so he could ruin Ten’s chances with Sakura (I’m not sure why, since Ataru knows Sakura is engaged and Ten is like one year old, but let us remember Ataru is a moron). Yadda yadda they all end up at a porn theater, and in the MANGA they’re clearly watching an actual pornographic movie and all become enthralled (except Ten, who is so bored by things babies don’t understand, he falls asleep); Sakura eventually remembers “Wait I work at these kids’ high school” and drags them all out of there, Lum and Ataru both complaining that they’re missing the good part. It’s a great moment, and one that shows Lum and Ataru actually HAVE great chemistry, they just ruin it by wanting different things from their relationship (and it’s mostly Ataru’s fault). For whatever reason (rules about what you can show on TV, when?) the new show undercuts the joke by repeatedly showing the screen, making clear that nothing sexual is actually happening. Weaksauce! Well, they made up for it with their subtle changes to “Ran, Scent of a Woman”, another favorite of mine that the show combines with the lesser “Hello, Sailor Suit!” The story revolves around a miscommunication where Ryunosuke wants to become Ran’s friend to learn how to be more feminine but Ran thinks she got a date with a cute boy (Lum tells Ran the truth, but Ran is so hateful of Lum she thinks it’s a lie and goes on the date to make Lum jealous or something). The comedic timing of the jokes is improved since they don’t have to fit everything onto one page, some bits are moved around to have better impact in a moment, and oh yeah they cut out all the scenes with Ryu’s dad. Success all around.

21. Giant Gorg: This one’s difficult to review, because just when you think you have it pinned down, it swerves into something a little different. That’s not a bad thing, unless you’re a parent watching it with your kids and suddenly the violence racks up a couple extra notches, but I get ahead of myself. Continuing my trek through robot shows I haven’t seen, Giant Gorg is a 1984 variant on the genre that owes more to Tintin and Jonny Quest than to Gundam or Mazinger Z (I keep thinking of Terry and the Pirates and its famous Dragon Lady character, more for her sex appeal like Gorg’s Lady Lynx, not for her racist depiction; but I haven’t read that to compare the tone directly). In the not-too-distant future of 1998, orphan Yuu Tagami journeys to New York after the sudden death of his father, hoping to meet one of his father’s students, Dr. Tom Wave. Unbeknownst to either of them, Yuu’s father was killed by the head of the GAIL Corporation (pronounced “guile”) that has been subcontracted by the UN to investigate strange ruins on New Austral Island, which rose from the Pacific Ocean eight years prior and has been kept hidden from the world by international conspiracy. GAIL was involved in the death of Yuu’s father, and now it’s owner Roy Balboa is clearing up loose ends before he sends his grandson Rod to oversee New Austral’s administration as a test to take over GAIL when Roy retires. These early episodes are some of my favorite, and why I compare the series to Tintin. Yuu, Dr. Wave, Wave’s younger sister Doris, and the mysterious Skipper travel the world, combatting GAIL’s forces and crossing with the criminal organization the Cougar Connection, led by the aforementioned Lady Lynx. It’s all good fun, with mild action and violence (people get shot and fall off cliffs, but no blood) and exciting cliffhangers every episode (always ending with “TUNE IN TO THE NEXT—Same Gorg Time, Same Gorg Channel”—you HAVE to love a Batman reference). I was honestly a little disappointed when they finally made it to the island and Yuu met the mysterious Gorg robot.

This is still a Sunrise anime from the eighties, after all. Once on the island, the show starts to explore its true themes; the old standbys of corporate greed, abuse of minorities, humanity’s tendency to resort to violence out of ignorance, Cold War nuclear panic, and just straight-up wartime PTSD. As Yuu gets deeper into the mystery of Gorg and New Austral, he also has to deal with intense violence, from GAIL and the mysterious ancient inhabitants of the island. Now in his element, the Skipper will sometimes just pop into a scene and start shooting dudes in the head right up in the camera, and there’s a bit in episode 22 where he assaults Lady Lynx that goes way too far (I would argue he took it too far on purpose to goad Rod, who had a secret romantic history with Lady Lynx, into action against the Skipper, but that’s some complicated character stuff). Oh, and there’s the scene in episode 17 where a robot Guardian just opens fire with plasma weapons and laser guns on a group of frogmen with bazookas, treating us to two minutes of absolutely beautiful animation of men disintegrating. I think everyone working at Sunrise in the eighties had depression pretty bad.

Now, none of this is a problem for me, an adult man. I enjoyed Giant Gorg thoroughly—the character designs are amazing, the animation was always top notch, the characters are deeper than they first appear. I’d watch it again in a heartbeat. But it is curious how anime in the eighties could veer so widely between content targeted to different age groups, and no one would bat an eye. Were parents okay with watching this with their kids? It definitely doesn’t start out with a “this is for adults” vibe in the way Gundam or VOTOMS do. It even gets a happy ending, where the main characters all make up, laugh, and go about their lives free from GAIL’s interference, and show Ronald Reagan that he isn’t the fucking boss of them. Was there really no one to say “Hey having this dude rip this woman’s shirt off isn’t okay for this kid’s show?” It’s wild, it’s wild to me what they got away with back then.

Anyway yeah it’s really good though.

20. Castlevania: Nocturne: After sufficiently wrapping up Trevor’s story in the last season of Castlevania, I was happy to see what they would do with other games in the series, and extra happy when Netflix released the trailer showing the next season of Castlevania would focus on Richter, even if it meant skipping Simon, my favorite Belmont. I didn’t expect the show to immediately blow its predecessor out of the water with its deft melding of setting and theme, casting off the plot of the game but keeping the key elements to truly adapt the classic Rondo of Blood into an entirely unique work. Still set in 1792, like the game, Nocturne eschews the traditional Castlevania plot of a fight against Dracula, because they just did that in the previous show. Instead, the writing team looked at the year, looked at what was ACTUALLY GOING ON in that year, and set the show in a small town during the French Revolution. Maria Renard, the secondary character of Rondo (who is unexpectedly over powered once you get the hang of her) is recast as a revolutionary who befriended Richter, and they both work to spread democratic ideals to the countryside. Richter fled Boston as a young man after witnessing his mother’s death at the hands of the vampire Olrox. The events of the late 1700s allows the show to capitalize on the vague distaste for organized religion of the first four seasons and channel it into a compelling theme for the narrative, as each character is torn between their religion, their species, their family—and not everyone ends up on the same side they started on, or you would expect. Olrox’s place as a Native American vampire in alliance with European nobles rubs him the wrong way immediately. The local parish priest, Emmanuel, hates the Revolution because of its secular, anti-religious nature, but the characters assume he would work with them against the vampires…assuming he wouldn’t be consumed by his own ego. Even the compelling new characters, Annette and Edouard, an escaped slave and mixed-race singer who journeyed to France to help the revolution in their native French Caribbean, THE least conflicted, most morally straightforward characters in the show, have their own tough choices to make in a pivotal moment. And I didn’t even mention Richter, who is so sure of his status as a major vampire killer, but hasn’t come to terms with his mother’s death, is still that scared little boy. Which is not to say they don’t fall back on the easy “The aristocracy are like vampires” story beat, they REALLY do, but there’s so much more going on than the general “It’s the Middle Ages and that sucks” setting of the original Castlevania TV show. People have something to fight for beyond “Vampires ruling the world would be bad,” although those are still the stakes here. And hey, if they snuck in a few cool references to the games, too? Including all of Maria’s awesome powers from Rondo? And a few guest stars NOT from Rondo? All the better, right?

After wondering if there was anywhere left to go after Trevor’s story ended, I’m happy to say they delivered the best season of Castlevania yet. Season 2 already announced. Let’s go.

Haha! Wix won't let me post something longer than this; I did take the time to write more this year, it's true. Let's...split it. Continues here.