Japanese Seizure Robots is a staple of those who have lived on the Internet a little too long. It’s a classic.
Sadly it slipped my mind for a few years. Upon return, I was horrified to see the spam crap they appended to it. I just want seizure robots, not a mail-order bride! Well, maybe we could strike a deal between the two.
Nikita Khrushchev dissolved most of the Gulag Archipelago in the late 1950s, but what of the Soviet prison system after that time? Japanese animators would love to fill you in: living in a 1961 cell involved bunnies. And 5-o’clock shadow chickens. And possessed doors. What’s that whiner Solzhenitsyn complaining about?
A friend identified a print error identifying 17913 A.D. as the year Marie Antoinette was beheaded. It must be a typo, he noted, because likely there will be no such person named that almost 11,600 years into the future. The truth of that is hard to deny. Still, I suggested the opposite is true with regards to prior fiction. Deep down I know that somewhere, somehow, there is a mecha anime series that combines the Earth of 17913 A.D. with a futuristic heroine named Marie Antoinette. Think Firefly meets Xenogears.
The volume of animated content Japan churns out every year makes this series’ existence reasonable. Indeed, the Japanese are so accomplished in their art that I would just as well expect an anime for any tangible object in any conceivable future. To put this closer to terms that can be published in the Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra,
For any time T and object X such that (for present time T0) T – T0 > 0 and X is in T, there exists an anime A.
(See also: Rule 34 of the Internet.)
I’m dead slow at reading, but when it comes to anime (which I’m not exactly obsessed with anyway), I’m a rock. One to two series is normal for a year: download one, rip through all the episodes in a month, get back to having a life for six months, repeat as many times as is allowable.
I tend to stick to the real-world situation shows, the ones conspicuously lacking lasers and explosions. If you think American TV is formulaic, Japanese scripts approach plagiarism! Furry fetishist crap aside, there are a lot of cats. A. Lot. Of them. ((Just so we’re clear, I hope Pokémon dies a horrible death in a fire.)) Hell, sometimes even the lasers-and-explosions media feature cats too.
There are too many other parallels to lump in one post—beach episodes, watermelon obsessions, and more await future days.
An old Atari game called Action 52 has such a sordid and amusing backstory to it that I won’t even delve into it here. There’s too much to be said about this $200 game not worth the plastic it was shipped in.
What I’d rather talk about is its spiritual sequel Cheetahmen II, a massive paradox of computing power. It was manufactured, but never shipped. It was coded, but never tested. Everything about it sucks, but the music is unbelievably good. You can tell all the budget went into one really good song. The digital media surrounding it is in shambles and the music that accompanies the later levels (unreachable except by ROM hack) is a braindead remix of the original. Since that music is inaccessible by normal means, this game has a perfect 10 for music! It has gained quite a following in Japan (Warning! Extra creepy YouTube!), bringing to mind the old T-shirt slogan I’M A STAR IN JAPAN.
If the Japanese can’t turn you on to this game, you have no soul. Download it here. Don’t worry, it’s guilt-free; the company went under 15 years ago. Wonder why.
The Japanese live their lives in a surreal magic world Americans love spectating at from a distance. But when these tired surreal sararimen go home to their families, do they give the madness a rest for the night? No! They must keep up appearances, even when enjoying their medium-priced liquor. Suntory, the #1 whiskey brand of Japan, understands and helps pick up the slack with their adverts. My god, they really do use mecha in everything.
