Top Gun

An entire island's worth of characters in One Piece, though they do sort of straddle the "man Japan this is kind of blatantly offensive" line.

That is...very cheap as far as anime goes, and I'm not even counting Aniplex's supreme horseshit or Japan's domestic insanity. Like at one point the domestic anime industry ran on $30 single volumes with 3-4 episodes each. If you shop during a RightStuf sale and/or wait until a later bundled re-release, you're not paying any more than you would for a domestically-produced TV series.

Fuck this fucking motherfucker of a year.

I hope Paul McCartney wakes up every day on his giant pile of money in a state of existential horror over the fact that he released "Wonderful Christmastime."

We don't even have local providers around here. It's a Comcast/Verizon duopoly.

Ooh, that'll work.

Sword of the Stranger is fucking amazing. It's BONES going all-in on classic samurai action. Also this.

I'll stick to the Philly parade, thanks.

Wait, they've been showing fairly high-profile music videos on those marathon nights that I've completely ignored? Well that just seems silly.

In terms of long-distance space travel, it's not always nearly so much about how much you accelerate as it is how long you can continuously accelerate. If the EM Drive's apparent thrust actually holds up in practice, the fact that it doesn't require any reaction mass means that it can accelerate a spacecraft indefinitely, enabling it to eventually reach far greater speeds than a craft using chemical propellant, or even ion drives. Another system of propulsion that doesn't require a reaction mass is the solar sail, which relies on the radiation pressure of the Sun's light to adjust a spacecraft's trajectory and has already been tested. (Seriously though, I'm holding out for an Alcubierre drive.)

The Pirates of Dark Water. Just barely remember watching it when I was a young thing.

...oh man. I've been trying for ages to think of what you sound like whenever you do one of these ridiculous little screeds, and I've finally got it: you're literally the lawyer Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld. You are a TV character, ben.

Foley you must be an absolute joy to watch Looney Tunes shorts with.

No I freely acknowledge that there a metric shit-ton of bad critics out there. :3 Seriously though ben, your ability to put entirely too much effort into reading people while being totally off-base with your conclusions is commendable, but at the end of the day you still don't really get what I'm going for here. Hell, maybe the communication error is on my end. But do yourself the favor of not getting worked up over a caricature that only exists in your own mind.

"First of all, nobody fucks Yamcha but life."

Heh, you think this is slow? Just wait.

A lot of these ads must be local-market things, because I can't remember seeing many lower-budget sorts recently.

It's funny how you still can't tell the difference between personal enjoyment and critical analysis.

Why not both? Watch the Japanese premieres during the week, and then keep up with the dubbed episodes on Toonami. (And people still watch current Shippuuden? It already finished the story and is literally just making shit up at this point.)

Toriyama founded his entire franchise on a literal deus ex machina. Even taking into account the long-form shounen given of "yeah they won't really die here," any sense of temporary drama or tension blissfully vanishes the moment one remembers that everything's just going to be undone as soon as the dragon's summoned. This works a lot better in the original Dragon Ball, which was light-hearted enough to almost cross into gag territory at times, but when DBZ rolls around and there are supposed to be these apocalyptic world-ending stakes being established, it just falls completely flat. Hell, even when Toriyama placed limits on the Dragon Balls' resurrection abilities, he then swiftly proceeded to emasculate them by creating a whole new set without those limits. Good news Krillin, you can keep getting offed indefinitely! (And dear sweet lord, Cell's final resurrection there. "So yeah, I survived my own self-destruction by sheer luck. And now I'm stronger than ever. And now I have Goku's magic teleporting. Because reasons." I could feel my individual brain cells melting.) As loath as I am to agree with moose, he raised an excellent point. Dragon Ball was an immensely influential series that made Toriyama a household name and spawned myriad descendants. But at least in the DBZ portion...it barely has what one could consider a plot. Everyone's either fighting the big baddie, or in some sort of contrived training to face the next big baddie. There's no meat whatsoever on the narrative skeleton. And yes, it does nail the rare moment of awesome that hits home for your inner 12-year-old, but beyond that there's really nothing to recommend it beyond nostalgia. Future shounen series took what Dragon Ball spawned and did so much more with it, providing actual world-building and long-form character development and a general sense of being able to sink your teeth into them. Whether it's One Piece or Hunter x Hunter or Naruto or...well maybe not Bleach, but you get the idea.

Akira Toriyama's been drawing the same freaky-looking faces for a few decades too.

The decision's an obvious one. But after doggedly avoiding DBZ for so long, now that I'm forcing myself through Kai I have to describe it as nothing less than weaponized dumb.

This is gonna hurt my thinky parts, isn't it?

...wait, it was down?