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Buried Treasure - Project A-ko

bj_waters wrote:

I still think C-Ko should be dropped off a cliff. A high one.

I couldn't decide if she was more annoying in Japanese or english.

Project A-Ko was the first anime that made me want to seek out anime.

My mind raced. What kind of cartoon has nudity in it? The mystery of it, and the sheer foreignness of it all was as attractive as it being forbidden.

Robin's friend had bought a bootleg copy at the local comic convention and happily loaned it to us.

Why were all the songs in English? Were they dubbed?

And what was with the strange speech patterns and constant breathless run-on sentences?

I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen... but I couldn't stop watching it!

As they introduce themselves to the class, C-ko catches the fancy of B-ko, a spoiled rich girl. She wants C-ko... maniacally.

While most Americans would only get a handful of the jokes and references, the show somehow maintains enough inherent weirdness to rise above being a simple parody.

BTW, possibly some of the best extras included in a DVD.

But that said, I'm hesitant to call Project A-Ko "the FLCL of the 80s," though maybe I should consider doing so if it means more people would consider watching it.

Moral of the story-if you see something that you want-or might think you want-get it when the opportunity presents it's self or forever hold your peace.

Those short space scenes share the best space battles -award with Macross: DYRL.

I can't see why anyone would want to rewatch it for anything other the occasional brilliant animation that Justin praised in his review. I wonder if I would have liked Project A-ko, and other old school "classics," if I also had to endure dark, stuffy rooms with other unwashed fans to watch it, or track down information on what was being parodied on USENET, or if I had begged my parents to rent a copy of it while hiding the large "CONTAINS NUDITY" sticker.

Back when this series was first released in Japan it was on CAV Laser disks. Because of this you could access any content on the disk as a single image. This allowed special content to be put on the LD that could only be seen by going to that particular frame. .... I have a feeling that this material is not accessible on DVDs as a DVD is not accessible frame by frame.
Billa

Ah, A-ko. Not the first anime I'd seen. I've been watching anime since the first time Astroboy was broadcast in the US. I've been watching anime for longer than most anime fans have been alive. A-ko will always be my favorite, even after Lain and Haibane Renmei and Akira and all the other wonderful productions. It was the first anime I rented. It was the first Japanese entertainment I had encountered that wasn't Americanized. The tape I rented was subbed. To this day, I hesitate to watch any dub. Dubs are never as good, and I don't want to hear your arguments. You can take that to the bank. Besides being its own kind of wonderful, it had one thing that the early Sixties broadcasts lacked: Japanese. There is something about the sound of that language that just entrances me. I can listen to Japanese people speaking, and it thrills me like the complicated melodies of Beethoven or the rousing choruses of Gilbert & Sullivan.

Isn't A-ko the result of Superman and Wonder Woman having a child?

I vaguely recall this from Sci-Fi Channel's Saturday Anime lineup.

Ah, A-ko. Not the first anime I'd seen. I've been watching anime since the first time Astroboy was broadcast in the US. I've been watching anime for longer than most anime fans have been alive. A-ko will always be my favorite, even after Lain and Haibane Renmei and Akira and all the other wonderful productions. It was the first anime I rented. It was the first Japanese entertainment I had encountered that wasn't Americanized. The tape I rented was subbed. To this day, I hesitate to watch any dub. Dubs are never as good, and I don't want to hear your arguments. You can take that to the bank. Besides being its own kind of wonderful, it had one thing that the early Sixties broadcasts lacked: Japanese. There is something about the sound of that language that just entrances me. I can listen to Japanese people speaking, and it thrills me like the complicated melodies of Beethoven or the rousing choruses of Gilbert & Sullivan. Watching A-ko in the original vernacular, and reading the subtitles, forced my brain into a kind of concentration that I usually reserved for reading a great novel or my own writing or drawing. I had to glue my mind to the screen. I absorbed that movie and took it into my being. And, like others writing here, it made me hungry for more anime. I quickly rented out everything that the store had, and went looking for more. I was just getting into the internet then, in the days when my 14.4kb [that's baud, not byte, kids] was the fastest connection in town, downloading A-ko images and even the first of the AMVs from Delphi (anybody here remember Delphi, with that UNIX file server interface? No? Am I due for the home?) I still have all that stuff on my Amiga floppy disks. A-ko has become such a archetype that it's been lampooned by American shows (one that I'm struggling to remember is a couple of friends entering a video store on a quest and the girl snidely remarking that the best they have is a couple of dusty copies of Project A-ko--was that in Free Enterprise? If you remember what that was, please note it here or I'll spend all night searching the net for it.) I don't know if there would be an American anime market without A-ko. The reminiscence of the article pretty much sums up all the reasons, except that, in comparison to any American cartoon fare, A-ko was what we would have seen had Tex Avery been reborn in Japan, and had been channeling Ralph Bakshi during production. No anime collection should be without Project A-ko.

Anyone here a fan of Doctor Slump? Now that's real anime!

However I think the Ako series was done almost for fun. I enjoyed it

Billa

This has too be one of the first import videos that really hooked me on Anime. Back in the day we watched our Anime raw, not many commercial subs or dubs.

I remember renting a 2nd gen copy of the import Project A-ko on VHS. If you wanted to rent the original tape, you had to put down a sizable deposit. Import Anime on VHS sold for over $100 back in 1987.

Take a trip down memory lane, note the original prices on the last column:

http://ohkami.sakura.ne.jp/meta-ovalist.htm

I still have one of the first fansubs on VHS, it was Bubble Gum Crisis subbed by Group Santa Cruz. Before the subs we would download a rough translation or a synopsis on the usenet. You guys are so lucky to have your Anime any way you want it these days.

I still have boxes of video tapes I recorded by tapping off the video feed of the monthly Anime club meetings.

I used to have Project-Ako. I bought it cheap, as a blind buy, because I had heard that all the old school fans seemed to like it. I didn't get it, didn't like it, and I sold it.