SF and Fantasy Series Reviews A - LAgent Aika: Naked Missions (1997 Japan) ** Genres: SF Watched: the first 2 of 4 episodes The point of this series is that there's lots of scantily dressed women running around flashing their underwear enough to beat all existing or even currently feasible records of panty-flashing occurrences. The only times they're not flashing their underwear is when they're not wearing enough to make that possible. Nothing wrong with that, except the women all look pretty much alike. Panty shot after panty shot of the same female body type gets tedious. This series is directed by the same guy who did Project A-ko, which displays a wide array of nice female body types, aside from being much more intellectually stimulating. Agent Aika is fairly mindless. While the ridiculousness of the preponderance of panties is at least partly a gag, it's boring because nobody says anything interesting. Or coherent, necessarily. I guess porn necessarily has bad dialogue. Oh and they're running around in spaceships, specifically; that's the plot part. Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000) ***** Genres: SF Com Ani Smooth, brainy, lonely Frylock, poor darling little Meatwad, even jerkwad Master Shake, even white-trash Carl - they're all such freaks but I feel so sad for them and like they all need a hug. Maybe it's because I hang around freaky nerds and see how starved they are for actual human contact. And hugging them is perfectly harmless because they're "safe"; they're too timid to take it to the next level. I know better than to offer hugs to mutants or white trash though. Each episode is only 11 minutes and that's a good thing: it would be hard to process such concentrated hilarity and insanity for longer. No worries, a great deal of damage can be done in eleven minutes. And it's educational, too: I learned what "G" means (not "good" like in the Dilbert strip). Angel (1999) *** Genres: F Det Act Watched: some of the earlier episodes Reformed vampire and assorted sidekicks run a detective agency in LA that specializes in the supernatural. Usually too boring, but sometimes good. I think their more depressing writers should spend more time watching and learning from the better episodes of The Simpsons. A rich variety of whining is not a workable substitute for the several exciting plotlines that are due per episode. And what's up with Angel's weight? I mean, the guy's an actor. Being fit and beautiful is like his job description. Dude, lay off the pig's blood. Food will not make you any less depressed or broody in the long term. Find some more asses to kick instead. Berserk (1997 Japan) * Genres: F Ani Watched: first episode of 25
The medieval countryside is overrun with demons (nothing new there - this is the way it always is in anime, except this one is set in Europe). Now, demons apparently aren't known for their clever repartee; they mostly spout stuff like "Puny humans! You are no match for demons! Now I will kill you!" This is most unfortunate as everyone else seems to be picking it up from them and at this rate the Renaissance will be a very long time in coming. Fortunately there's a hot ripped guy with a big, really big, really really big sword who can slice them up no problem. The sword is actually pretty neat - it's as big as it needs to be. Or maybe the sword is not supposed to grow but the animators suck. Either way I like the imagery, but I imagine it would get old. Also the credits have damn annoying music. Bewitched (1964) ** Genres: F Com Pretty sweet for a sitcom for 60's homemakers. Charmed (1998) NR Genres: F Watched: bits of several episodes Crap. Like Buffy with zero creativity. Danger Mouse (1981 UK) **** Genres: SF Com Kid Ani A daring secret agent mouse and his bumbling hamster sidekick save the world from the weekly nefarious plans (e.g. drowning everyone in pudding) hatched by the world's most villainous toad and his ilk. Excitement and laughs for kids and grown-ups. And they are all so cute and British. Sadly Ian Fleming didn't live to see it.
Dexter's Laboratory (1996) *** Genres: SF Com Ani Dee Dee's a good character. She is Dexter's opposite (except that neither is evil; that's Dexter's nemesis Mandark and his Russian sister Olga "Lalavava" Astronominoff) but she isn't stupid; she has a different set of interests. But this may be easy to misunderstand. It's nice that there are Russians making cartoons. Americans wouldn't make a cartoon where the boys were science geniuses and the girls were scampering bothersome airheads. In Russia they said that they promoted women, and they did, but at the same time they have always been chauvinist. They didn't seem chauvinists to themselves because when they compared themselves with the easily available other cultures to compare themselves with, all the dark mountain peoples, they certainly didn't come out to be chauvinists. Among those mountain people, women are women and men are men. (In America, my mom said you can't tell the men from the women; both wear t-shirts and jeans, both have similar hair and attitude.) And the mountain men considered Russian women to be sluts because they traveled alone, and had more progressive styles of dress and conduct. In Russia, at the same time you have people be educated and progressive in attitudes but also expecting the woman to do all the housework, and the men act all gallant but ogle her, you know, like in Southern Europe. In America there's all this pressure from a myriad of special interest groups that protest anything they can think of protesting, certainly any TV show, because the more stuff they can think to protest the more money they can wheedle out of their supporters. So when I said it was easy to misunderstand, I meant it's easy to lead someone to misunderstand; the people doing the misunderstanding-leading are clever weasels who don't misunderstand themselves. Or, I suppose they may have convinced themselves that their BS is true, so they can perform better. If this show were made by Americans then Dexter would have a next-door neighbor girl who would be his partner in the secret lab, and what would be the odds that she wouldn't be a racial minority as well, and Dee Dee would be a brother. So hurray for Russians! Not that I would want to go out with one. That's something émigré women agree on: American men are way better. Why would I go for someone with old-fashioned ideas about who is supposed to pick up whose socks? What kind of idiot would I have to be, when Americans come with all kinds of convenient PC functions? A big issue I have with the show is, what kind of name is G . . . y? It should be Gennady. G . . . y? That's so wrong. It disturbs me when I see the credits and detracts from my enjoyment of the cartoon. (I had to blank out his misspelled name in the review so it wouldn't disturb me.) Even my American boyfriend knows it should be Gennady, from having come across the name Gennady before. Or it could be Gena, like the crocodile. Except that Americans would pronounce it Jina and assume it was a girl. And then he could make the show even more chauvinistic because if it's made by a woman no-one could complain. Doomed Megalopolis (1988 Japan) * Genres: Hor F Ani Watched: first 2 episodes, of 4 Some of the ghost-battling scenes are nice enough but there's enough story here for maybe fifteen minutes, so it's too drawn out and repetitive. Basically, the point is: don't keep and raise demon spawn, no matter how cute it is. The penis demon spawn is sort of funny I guess. And the supervising producer; he is Takashige Ichinose. Dr. Who (1963 UK) *** Genres: SF The fairly silly but usually enjoyable perilous adventures of a time-traveling alien and his human retinue. They have a good system for rotating the cast: Dr. Who is killed off every few years and reborn as another actor, because he has twelve lives. So we have the series headed by different unattractive middle-aged men. They've actually a good reason for it. The Doctor manages to snag a steady stream of attractive young women to point at things and ask, "What's that, Doctor?" It would be a completely different sort of series if the women were fascinated with the Doctor's biceps. This way, everyone concentrates on the adventure at hand. It seems to be that whichever Dr. Who a viewer started out watching with, that one remains his favorite. To me it's that tall curly guy with the ridiculous and impractical, I would say dangerous, scarf. But I'm not saying the scarf is bad. It goes very well with the ridiculous and impractical and dangerous tactics that the group engages in. And the scarf is all crazy-colored too; that's how the Doctor thinks, all colorful and crazy and optimistic. And really I don't so much mind the silly tactics. They reflect the alien and batty Doctor. Of course he ought to die a hundred times more frequently with his attitude, but it's a TV show. Duckman (1994) *** Genres: F Com Ani Det Funny mysteries featuring a degenerate duck detective and his freakish family, associates, and enemies. Earth 2 (1994) NR Genres: SF Guest review: A colony of colonists who are terribly lacking in colonization supplies set up shop on a distant earthlike planet. They are led by a brittle woman, and are a bunch of psychos. The writers meant for the audience to view the colonists as normal folks having drama, but it's much easier to write drama if everybody is crazy. There is a stereotype whiny couple with Rebecca Gayheart, who then appeared in From Dusk Till Dawn 3 as the same character and then hit some kid with her car and went to jail. There's some sort of oppressive male patriarchy on satellites that secretly controls everything - I missed some intervening episodes so I'm not sure why they were in orbit around a distant uninhabited colony world. The brittle woman used to work for the patriarchy as a secretary or something but got fired and founded her own city. The colonists are all like 3-year-olds. The whiny couple mentioned earlier is inhumanly whiny ("We don't wannnna take cover from the charging monster, you're always telling us what to do, it's soooo unfair!") and such. Earthsea (2004) NR!!! Genres: F Adv miniseries Watched: 10 min Did the book suck this bad or did they put in extra suck for TV? The villain pointlessly killing his own sidekick is a movie cliché, not really a book cliché. And no matter what you might say about the literary value of genre books, their dialogue is never this embarrassing. If you have a small piece of an analytical function, you know the whole function everywhere. This show is a prime example of that. I.e. you can watch a few minutes and you know what the rest of it's like, and can gain no information by watching more. I watched more because I couldn't tear myself away from this mesmerizing freak show of badness.
FLCL (2000 Japan) *** Genres: SF Ani Watched: one episode (the first one?) and most of another one Watching this is sort of like drinking from a fire hose. It doesn't even have a name that can give you any clues. The Japanese are pretty smart so it's no problem for them. I'm half Jewish so I could mostly follow it too. There's kids who have alien diseases but that is mostly incidental, mostly they have personal problems and humorous disasters and fractured interactions with each other which might help make them work out their personal problems. It's not bad, and has pretty art of angsty Japaneses with angsty Japanese music. I would be willing to watch more.
Harlock Saga: The Ring of Nibelung: The Rhinegold (1999 Japan) * Genres: SF Ani Watched: all six episodes I watched this DVD all through because my boyfriend and I both had colds and he wanted to keep watching it because "it has many great dumbnesses but at least the overall plot has some interesting stuff happening." He was also willing to excuse the cheapo animation, because he thought it was quite a bit older, because when he was a kid he used to watch some show that had a Captain Harlock in it too, which was "probably stupid too but I really loved it because it was much better than the American animated space adventures." Everybody has short-term memory loss. At least they all put up with Mimei who feels obliged to explain several times per episode all the salient points accumulated so far, like that they have to get the ring back, the ring made from the Rhine gold, or the universe will be destroyed. "Oh, Kermi!" She'd begin. I mean, "Oh, Harlock!" Mimei sounds like Miss Piggy and has a similar snout. "We must get the ring back, or the universe will be destroyed! The ring made from the Rhine gold, which was stolen." I can't recommend this drivel to anyone except guys with irrational love for SF anime and their loyal companions made lethargic by illness. Hercules (1995 New Zealand) **** Genres: F Adv Varies. Once the density of cool monsters lessened and the flavor shifted to social work, it got less interesting. On the bright side Hercules acquired Iolaus who provided hotness, something Hercules couldn't do for me. Apparently I, like a true artist, looked at the still-OK man and saw in his face his degradation. I found Hercules odd from the start. And indeed he turned into quite an odd sort of superhero as the show wore on. A superhero who enjoyed social work more than kicking butt. Then he went into space and continued his stupid social work there. What a dork. I like Iolaus a lot. He's so cute and sexy and funny. And so sweet. I'd be all like, "Hey Herc, what the heck is your problem? Stop with all the no-fun attitude. These here are perfectly good wenches. You're a total drag on my social life." But dear sweet Iolaus just follows along and does things the way Herc wants, all the while cheering Herc up with cheerful banter. He's like, "You're the superhero Herc, you're the man, whatever you say and do it just great." I don't even think Herc appreciates that poor Iolaus has all these girlfriends whom he has to hastily abandon when Herc beckons. Because Herc stoically brushes the women off. What a weirdo creep. Highlander (1992) ** Genres: F Act These aren't so bad, but pretty silly. Some are better than others. They have no damn goody-goody crap, which makes up for a lot. Plus various other goodies which make up for a lot. I Dream Of Jeannie (1965) NR Genres: F Boring Lexx (1997 Canada) * Genres: SF Watched: parts of several episodes A small crew flies around having sexy adventures. It's not as good as it sounds. The thing I can say with the most concreteness is that I watched only a few bits of this so obviously it was boring and not so sexy. Anyhow they didn't have a hunk exactly, just a girl with enormous lips. I remember the enormous lips. Having a theme can be good. And sexy is a good theme. But on the other hand when you try to do one thing half-assedly (like be sexy) and you can't even do that right, what hope is there that the plots are any good? (This was on SciFi Channel not a pay channel so it didn't have any actual nudity.) Yawn. Please note that all material on this page is Copyright © 2005 by D. Aline Lurie. |
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