12 Days 2014 (Late) Day 5 – A One-Episode Character Romance (Sailor Moon)


When Viz brought back the original Sailor Moon anime this year, I started watching it because I’d never seen it before. Anime-original episode 6 had a music-focused plot that stuck with me.

Jadeite’s minion Kyurene tries to use a cassette tape in a broadcast studio to steal life energy from people but the tape gets mixed up with a demo recording made by jazz pianist Yusuke Amade. Yusuke is in love with Akiko Yanagi, a record company employee that he sees often, and when she gets taken hostage by Kyurene, he and Usagi/Sailor Moon work together to rescue Akiko from danger.

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12 Days 2014 (Late) Day 3 – Watching “Terror in Resonance” on a Weekly Basis

Each anime season, I desire a good dramatic series I can watch on a weekly basis. In the recent past, that was satisfied through titles such as Mawaru Penguindrum and Madoka Magica. This summer, one I stuck with the whole way was Terror in Resonance (Zankyou no Terror). Like the other two series I mentioned, it had its own flaws but it prompted discussion and speculation among the people watching it including posts like Emily’s (aka ajthefourth). Those conversations propelled me along in conjunction with enjoying the plot of the show, similar to how I kept watching the American TV series Lost to the end despite its lackluster final season. Yoko Kanno’s fantastic score adding to the tension in certain scenes also contributed to me liking the show enough to call it one of my favorite anime of 2014.

12 Days 2014 Day 2 – A Couple of Character Crossovers (Wooser Season 2)


Miss Monochrome
was one of my favorite shorts from last year so I was happy to see the lead girl from that make an appearance in front of an alkaline batteries supermarket display during Wooser‘s second season.


The Chihaya birthday surprise was a more attention-grabbing crossover from later in the season.

Despite these two moments, the second season was disappointingly less funny overall than the first one. (I can’t remember what else happened in season 2 other than the character appearances I just mentioned.) The ending song was up there among the catchiest of the year, though, so that was a plus.

12 Days 2014 Day 1 – Experiencing the Ghost Stories Dub with Others


It’s the middle of December again, which means it’s time to begin reflecting on my anime-watching experiences from 2014 as part of the multi-blogger 12 Days project, spearheaded by The Cart Driver this year.

I think this will be my 8th year I’m participating in such a thing (you can see the titles of previous-year posts from 2007 to 2012 via Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – 2013’s list wasn’t captured unfortunately) so I should be experienced in writing posts for it but I still seem to run out of topics more than halfway through the process, mainly due to the declining amount of series I manage to finish during a calendar year. I tried to plan ahead this time around so I’m more confident that I’ll cross the figurative finish line than I might have otherwise.

One series that I watched with the SCCSAV Classics group this year was Ghost Stories. Of course, we watched the English dub done by ADV in the mid-2000’s for more humor than the Japanese track could have offered.

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Old Magazine Articles: Fred Patten on Anime for Starlog (April & May 1986)

While exploring the Internet Archive’s magazine collection earlier this month, I happened across a two-part article by Fred Patten in consecutive issues of Starlog (April 1986 #105, May 1986 #106).

The feature focused on science-fiction anime that had been translated into English as well as, in part two, mentioning “some of the most popular SF cartoons with American fans” that were only available in Japanese at the time. Notable black-and-white series from the 1960s – Astro Boy, 8th Man and Gigantor – led off part one while part two began with then-more-recent offerings like Robotech and TranZor Z (aka Mazinger Z).

The last page in part two highlighted six anime series that would all eventually get released on DVD in the US: Fist of the North Star (Discotek), Space Adventure Cobra (Nozomi), Mobile Suit Gundam (Bandai; Sunrise announced it would re-release Gundam in spring 2015 through a partnership with RightStuf), Urusei Yatsura (AnimEigo), Lupin III (Discotek) and Dirty Pair (Nozomi).

Both articles can also be found without pictures in Patten’s 2004 collection of his writings, Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews.

Catching Up On Detective Conan: Season One (Region 1)


The Detective Conan franchise has been around for almost 21 years. The manga has been serialized in Weekly Shonen Sunday since January 1994, its anime adaptation has been running on Japanese television since January 1996, and there have been movies released every April since 1997.

English-dubbed episodes started airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block in May 2004 so US audiences have been exposed to it for a little over 10 years. (Localized episodes ran for a longer time in Germany with channel RTL II airing first-run German-dubbed episodes from April 2002 until July 2006 for a total of 333 – according to German Wikipedia, some of the specials were run as miniseries so the number of adapted Japanese episodes was 308.)

After Crunchyroll began simulcasting new episodes last month beginning with number 754, I decided I would try to catch up to them and why not start from the beginning? I had watched many of the 50 Case Closed episodes that aired on cable during its first run and saw a couple of the movies but that was years ago so I’d forgotten details of many cases, like how crimes were committed and particular culprits, that I’m now picking up on while re-watching the early episodes.

I’m planning to roughly follow an order guide from the DC Rewatch Tumblr as to when I’ll watch the movies, specials and OVAs. (For those who might not be willing to subject themselves to 700+ episodes, the Reverse Thieves wrote a couple of guides in 2010 for the first season and the franchise as a whole, the latter of which was updated earlier this month.)

As far as blogging my progress, I’m going to start off by following the season grouping convention that FUNimation used for their Region 1 DVD box sets (25-27 episodes per season set) and then after that, well… I start treading into the multitude of middle episodes that have not been officially translated into English. A couple of wikis seem to have episodes organized into seasons based on Japanese DVD releases, although some episodes on those releases are grouped out of order so I haven’t come to a decision on how to divide up the other episodes into posts yet.

I’m also planning to write about the movies when they come up in my watching order as well as the 2009 Lupin crossover TV special & the 2013 crossover movie. However, I’m considering not watching the live-action drama episodes because I saw one of the live-action specials in the past and didn’t really like it.

Now that the preface is out of the way…

~~~ Detective Conan Catch-Up Post #1 ~~~
Last episode watched: JPN #25/US #26 – The Fake Ransom Case Continue reading