Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - Etranger in an Etrange Land
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Emerje
 Posts: 7336 Location: Maine |
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I never got to watch Macron 1 on TV, but I do have a couple of VHS tapes I picked up some time ago before I had heard of GoShogun.
Emerje |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2442 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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As soon as you mentioned the crappy pop songs, I remembered seeing a Macron I battle sequence on Channel 62 in Detroit (back when they were a bare-bones independent station) staged to "The Reflex" by Duran Duran. Actually, forget "staging": I shouldn't imply that there was any deliberate interplay between the audio and the video. The effect was really like just turning off the sound and cranking up whatever cassette happened to be in the Walkman. It's pretty pathetic.
That said, I've got that same Time Étranger DVD - helpfully labelled Time Stranger when I got it at Fry's in Atlanta for like 10 bucks many years ago - and it really is good, even if you haven't seen any of the original series and just have to imagine from the flashbacks what it must have been like. Antonia Levi lavishes a lot of praise on this movie in her book Samurai from Outer Space, presenting it as typical of anime's outlook on life and death. |
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Great Rumbler
 Posts: 327 Location: Oklahoma |
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I love the Goshogun movie, one of my favorite anime movies ever, if you can believe that!
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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I'd like to see Etranger on BD. Watching what I thought was one of ugliest films, Genma Taisen, on BluRay really changed my opinion. The plot is still a mess, but the film is stunning, even cropped. Good transfers really transform what you're watching into something so much more. It's hard to fully describe, you're finally able to see the film for what it is rather than the limitations of inferior formats. There's an expression I see show up for older films out on BD: "It looks as if it were shot last year", and that does hold true to anime, design aesthetics aside. They suddenly appear to be a decade younger, it's weird.
I like the film for doing something so unique in anime, let alone based off of a super robot series. It only makes me sad that Yuyama's talents as a director have gone to waste on asinine kid programming, his three 80s features are some of the top anime of the time. |
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nargun
Posts: 924 |
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... which I guess puts Yume wo Kakeru Hashi in a bit more context. Thanks for that.
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KabaKabaFruit
 Posts: 1871 Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba |
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"Beat It?" They should've gone with Weird Al Yankovic's "Eat It!" in that video.
Did I hear Cam Clarke at the end? |
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DrizzlingEnthalpy
 Posts: 255 |
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I learned of GoShogun: The Time Etranger from the "Revenge of the '80s" ANNCast. My interest was piqued because 1) Pokémon was indescribably important to me as a child, so Shudo/Yuyama collaborations with real adult interest are of particular interest to me; and 2) I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of anime movies that are based on TV series but end up being auteur pieces with little resemblance to the shows they sprouted from. There are surprisingly many of those.
I like Étranger a lot; I have some issues with it that keep it from being an all-time favorite, but I can easily recommend it. The GoShogun TV series, on the other hand... I watched the two episodes that have been fansubbed, one before I watched Étranger so I'd know the characters beforehand, and the second a few months afterward. I wasn't really impressed with either one. I wouldn't be surprised if I missed something, as I've seen nothing but positive response to GoShogun from Japanese speakers who've seen the series, or perhaps the show gets much better as it progresses, but from what I saw the only things that stood out to me in a really positive fashion were Bundle's ostentatiousness and that the battle animation of the eponymous robot looked conspicuously better than the rest of the show. (If I had to guess, I'd say it's recycled for every subsequent battle.) I would be willing to try watching if the rest of the show were licensed or fansubbed, because I'm all for "the brilliantly humorous, ironic and satirical writing of scriptwriter Takeshi Shudo on shows like Minky Momo that refused to be bound by the context of children's shows and probed questions of identity and purpose in life" [1] that is also supposed to be in GoShogun [2]. P.S. The Time Étranger is actually the second of two GoShogun movies, the first of which was just called GoShogun Gekijouban. It may have been a recap. There were also several tie-in novels. The Time Étranger was adapted from one of them according to TV Tropes, but since it's TV Tropes it's equally likely the The Time Étranger novel was adapted from the movie. |
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duckman313
Posts: 1 |
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I used to love macron 1 as a kid. Would rush home after school to watch. @ invalid..I remember that EXACT staging you are talking about and yes channel 62 back in the day was very bare bones lol
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DmonHiro
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Oh, my GOD, I had no idea people were still talking about this. It aired in Romania in the 90's. We got the European version, so no pop music for us. I remember it fondly, and can actually remember a few episodes. always rushing home after school to watch it on TV... MAN... those were the days.
Now get off my lawn! |
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Sydney2K
Posts: 219 Location: Australia |
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I've not seen any incarnation of the tv series, but I know of Goshogun: Time E'tranger though the very first Roman Album I ever bought, over twenty years ago. It has a sweet looking image of Remy on the cover- gorgeous!
One thing not mentioned in the article is that the dream sequence takes place in a desert town, with the inhabitants obviously muslims. I wonder if that movie could be released under today's sensitivities? Widya Santoso |
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Monzo12782
Posts: 2 |
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Something that hasn't been mentioned about the VHS release of Macron I - it dropped the pop songs from the episodes, replacing them with wordless stock music. This resulted in the faux-music video scenes making even less sense than they originally did; you'd be watching the characters go into battle, and all of a sudden there'd be a bunch of random footage spliced together (presumably from other episodes) set to the stock music, and then the scenes would just... end, with the characters going on like they hadn't completely baffled the audience. It made for an incredibly confusing viewing experience, as I didn't learn the show had included the pop songs in the first place until years later.
I wrote a little about my experience with Macron I here, although at the time I was unaware that the cast did make indirect references to the songs before they played. |
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belvadeer
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Never heard of it, never seen it. Not surprising to see Saban screwed up yet another anime with their usual nonsense. Sounds like it would have been an interesting show had it not been spliced by stupidity. -_-
Do you have a mancrush on Savalas or what, Mike? |
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Snomaster1
 SubscriberPosts: 2796 |
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I've never seen "Macron-1" before now. I don't think I watched it growing up. I probably wouldn't have heard of it.
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ajr
Posts: 465 |
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Well, this sounds interesting enough. I've added it to my list, and this probably isn't the sort of thing I can safely wait a few years on. Between the best of the 80's ANNcast and Bandai's departure from the USA, I'm starting to realize maybe there were a few things worth watching from back then (hubris of youth, okay?).
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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The biggest obstacles preventing KIDS THESE DAYS from watching older titles is unfamiliarity followed by unavailability. After that comes them not being offered in HD featuring new transfers, which dramatically changes one's perception of a film by removing much of the "dated" look of VHS or VHS masters on DVD. For unfamiliarity, anime has a high turnover rate when it comes to fandom. Most get into it during youth, and get out of it as they enter into beginning of middle age, so their tastes and preferences leave with them. You don't have grandpa sitting you down and showing you Venus Wars like he would with The French Connection. The most proficient way to get people to watch the unfamiliar and old is on recommendation, whether it be a long article like Mike's, or a brief name drop, or even perhaps randomly stumbling across it via channel surfing or video stores. Doing research and finding titles completely on your own requires much more energy and devotion, you have to want to dig around. |
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