Mahou Meido Meganekko

In the future, I’m going to hold my reviews until I have had time to think about a show and work through it in my mind. A couple of weeks ago, I posted three snap reviews, and in the end, I was only comfortable with one and a half of them. I need to spend more time mulling over my opinion and choosing my words. Also, I find that my opinion often changes around 48-72 hours after I’ve seen something, as the “refrigerator factor” kicks in: i.e.: that odd realization you have after the show on the way to the refrigerator. Ok, so I’m slow. I already posted the re-written Nuku Nuku Dash, and now I’m re-writing Those Who Hunt Elves for this post. However, this is going to be a much briefer review than the original. (Oh, stop thanking me. Grrr. :-[ )

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I need to learn how to write short reviews with fewer spoilers, like Steven Den Beste. He reviews the first of the three Nuku Nuku series here. He also includes more pictures. I was planning on doing a pictoral comparison of the T-74 in Those Who Hunt Elves with the actual Mitsubishi Heavy Industries T-74 (looks like they did a fantasticly accurate job drawing it), but ended up dealing with wireless router issues and decided to finish the “What’s Wrong” article (which still needs polishing, so it won’t appear today) and the Top Ten Worst Americans list.

Edit: Re-reading the above and seeing the abrupt train-of-thought change, it occurs to me that no one should have much trouble believing that I suffer from AD/HD.

This post was moved from Houblog.

Edit: 12/28/05: This is a very long review I wrote over two days, and it contains a ton of spoilers, even before the spoiler warning below. My original review was based on having seen only the first four episodes and then revised after thinking about it overnight. This one is based on the full 12-episode series, and goes into a lot of detail about what’s wrong with the series. If it’s more than you feel like reading, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’ll summarize for the brief-of-attention-span: It sucked. The writers tried to milk the Nuku Nuku franchise by changing it to a serious drama with a romance sub-plot, while keeping a lot of the whacky elements of the original two series. Ultimately, this doomed the story to mediocrity at best. However, a pair of twists the writers threw in during the last two minutes of the last episode left me furious at having my chain yanked. I thought that they’d actually done something daring with the romance sub-plot and was giving them high marks for it when, in the last ten seconds, they chickened out and went for the traditional happy ending.

All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku Dash:

This review is far different from the original one I wrote, as the original was based solely on the first DVD and how my thoughts developed after watching it. Unfortunately, after watching the last two, my opinion on this anime flipped straight into the “trash and never bother watching again” category. Oh, I might watch it–if and when I feel like screaming at the writers again.

There were 3 Nuku Nuku series, of which this one is the third. The first was an OVA (Original Video Animation, or as we call it, straight-to-video/DVD), the second was a TV series based on the OVA, and this third effort is an OVA — and a mess.

I was tempted to say it was a disaster, but that’s overboard; it wasn’t horrible, it was just a series of bad mistakes. The biggest was that the writers couldn’t make up their mind what story they were telling. The first two Nuku Nuku’s were comedy/farce. This OVA was serious romance/drama. Unfortunately, they chose not to make a clean sweep of characters and start over with a different setting. I am cynically inclined to think that was so they could milk the Nuku Nuku franchise, but for the purpose of this review, I am going to treat it as an artistic decision, not marketing.

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This post moved from Houblog.

Ok, now this isn’t going to become an anime blog (hahahaha, no, but Mahou did!), but this is the second time I’ve had a few minutes to sit down and write for the blog in two weeks, and anime is on my mind. Well, so is the city election we held Saturday, a week ago. Did you know we had one? Hard to tell if the Chronicle or any of the other so-called news agencies did, either. I mean, not one analysis article on Monday morning, telling us about the new make up of the council and what it means?

Another pathetic performance by the people who claim to bring you all the information you need to know. Make that “all the information they want you to know,” and I’ll agree. They say the winner writes the history books, but who writes the daily dialogue of our society that is used by the historians? Who decides what’s important today, what will be read by the historians of tomorrow?

And just whose best interests do they have at heart? The common man’s? You and me? I have my doubts…

Now that I have that off my chest, lets move on to the anime.
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