Re: Bringing LOGH to the US?
Graeme Lennon (graeme@balefire.net)
Thu, 22 Jul 1999 17:15:23 -0400 (EDT)
> > 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??
They are recent "mahou shoujo" series. For those of you unfamiliar with
the term, it translates roughly as "the Black Death".
> 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!
On the other hand, the purpose of a club isn't necessarily just to show
stuff. I first saw LoGH at a club showing just like you described -- 5
minutes in it was booed and hollered and after showing the first 2
episodes they never showed it again.
However, *I* liked it, so I went off and found some fansubs and some
friends who liked it too. So, yeah, the club stopped showing it, but it
brought the show to a wider audience (me), and that's a part of the
purpose of an anime club, too.
> 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?"
Evangelion isn't complex, it's referential. But...
> (But let us not let this become an Evangeion debate..)
... agreed. :)
> 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.
Lain was my hint that there are better things to come, but I'm a fan of
mindf**k film in general, so I may be the exception here.
--
Graeme Lennon -=- graeme@balefire.net -=- Toronto, Canada
... deadening the flow of relentless biography ...
