Re: Bringing LOGH to the US?
Walter Amos (amos@sedl.org)
Thu, 22 Jul 1999 15:43:19 -0500 (CDT)
On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Trevor Menagh wrote:
> hehe, I was just talking to Lee about this the other day. My club (WSU Anime
> Club) hates LoGH. Insisting that there is no plot and it is a "dumb" show
> while at the same time praising CCS and LaLa as wonderful and great.
I have no idea what these two even are??
This is interesting - it does seem that reaction varies greatly with
the audience. Now when I would try to show some LoGH at UT Austin
Anime Club, there was a small but vocal group of detractors who moan
"Not the Boring Germans in Space!" However I was very pleased that
when I did the premiere screening of my sub of the 2nd movie the
audience in almost its entirety sat through it, shouted "Yeah!" when
Reinhard began to figure out how Yang was tricking him, laughed at the
comments about "I've never seen a formation like this before!", and
even applauded at the end of the movie!
Of course in those days (when I was still in Austin) we strove to show
a diversity of programs - a little shoujo, a little comedy, a little
mecha, etc. I get the feeling now that the program is strongly
dominated by the more cutesy mahou-shoujo stuff since that is what the
"showing czar" is more into. As a result I don't know what would
happen if they showed LoGH now - if you show predominantly only one
genre of anime, the people who will end up at your showings will be
those that only like that genre. Thus if you suddently show something
else, they won't like it. Maybe you need to "prime the pump" a bit by
gradually weaning them off goofy cutesy mahou-shoujo with slightly more
serious shows and working up to LoGH. It's like, you can't expect
people raised on a diet of nothing but "3rd Rock from the Sun" to
suddenly appreciate "Babylon 5."
> It's pretty disconcerning, nothing really great has come out for a few years
> now. There are some good shows (Outlaw Star, Lain, Spriggan, etc.) but
> nothing to marval at. Well, Memories was outstanding, but series wise there
> is just a good amount of fluff.
I really really liked Escaflowne (and of course Giant Robo). I am not
nearly as impressed with Evangelion as the rest of fandom thinks I
should be, in part because where I think LoGH has genuine
honest-to-goodness depth and real questions about human society,
Evangelion pretends to have these disguised as plain obfuscation and
red herrings. As my friend Steve Harrison puts it, fans discssing Eva
can debate about what all the weird contradictory psychedlic images
mean, coming to no real answer (because there isn't one) and then clap
their hands and say "Gee isn't it wonderful how complex this is?"
(But let us not let this become an Evangeion debate..)
However at the moment I agree, there isn't much Ive seen now that grabs
me. However anime seems to go through cycles where styles will change
and in time our way of thinking will come back into favor.
> I'm not a defeatist though, and I still have faith in anime, because I'm
> sure if you dig far enough into any hole you will find your gem.
==============================================================================
"Zu jeder Zeit, an jeder (sic) Ort, bleibt das Tun | Walter Amos
der Menschen das gleiche..." - Galactic Heroes II | amos@sedl.org
