Top Gun

LEONARD BERNSTEIN! (that's how it goes right)

I finally beat it this past week, and according to my Switch profile I was somewhere north of 220 hours. Maybe a bit of that was leaving the game paused, but still. I had pretty much everything I wanted to finish taken care of beforehand: all shrines, all lightroots, all main quests, pretty much every side quest I'd found, almost 500 Korok seeds, the gear I wanted fully 4-starred, you name it. The entire final sequence is the coolest thing I've ever seen in any Zelda game, full-on jaw-agape wonder. I may have shed a tear or two during the ending. What an absolutely stunning game. The crazy part is that after the fact, when it shows you the percentage completion for the map and quest numbers, I learned that there was one single solitary side quest that I haven't found yet. And I have absolutely no idea where it could be.

I just want to get the damn franchise over with already, and I know it'll take me ages to do it on my own, so I want it on the block so that I'm forced to suffer through it.

I genuinely love how they've seemingly leaned hard into a creepy circus vibe for Buggy.

Again, you have literally no idea what other series Toonami has or hasn't pursued over the past few years.

My guy, distributors chucked free shows at the block over 15 years ago. The current industry is absolutely nothing like what it was then. And I believe that they're constantly talking with people, but it's not as easy as just saying "Hey we want this/Okay sure." Shit happens.

Or maybe the prices for any of these series are more than [as] can afford for licensed shows anymore. Or maybe streaming services snap up the TV broadcast rights even knowing they're not going to use them in an attempt to stamp out competition. Or maybe most of the rights-holders are no longer concerned about having their series air on a late-night American linear TV block and don't even bother offering TV broadcast rights anymore. Or at least a half-dozen other far more sensible options than "zomg Demarco made some tweets and probably pissed off someone so that's why we don't get shows anymore he's the wooooorst."

I like how you guys still make all of these absurd exaggerated assumptions about what Demarco does or has done or his relationships with other people as if you have this grandiose inside information. It's hilarious to me.

"Two nights that absolutely no one will be watching for $400, Alex!"

TWO YEARS' WORTH.

Huh, weird.

Very impressive write-up. One tiny correction: Food Wars was a Sentai series, not Crunchyroll.

No plot either.

I mean Junji Ito has big name recognition among anime/manga fans by this point, so this is the sort of thing that people will actively seek out to watch.

Well that's, um...something?

Damn that looks cool though.

ANN currently has a survey up asking people what they know about the story and whether they plan to watch the new adaptation. There are a lot more "won't watch" responses than I expected.

...they had a whole column about the AX premiere that generated the predictable massive threadnaught, and they've run numerous articles about it since it was announced. Just because none of their reviewers want to help support the bank account of a convicted pedophile doesn't mean they're completely ignoring its existence. Like Jman said, even if I was somehow able to ignore all of that grossness, I still wouldn't understand the need for a full remake either. The original anime adaptation was very well-regarded, particularly the Kyoto arc, and that arc even got a crappy OVA adaptation itself a decade back. Just skip ahead and finally animate the Jinchuu arc that's never been touched before.

I've seen precious little of Gundam as a whole myself, really just 00 on SyFy and then the few assorted series that [as] has aired in the past decade, though I know at least a bit about what I haven't seen. Out of those, 00 was a fun ride and like Jman said is viewed as something of a more modern take on Wing. Iron-Blooded Orphans was...well, if you know the name Mari Okada, she did the series composition for it, and it's very much one of her series for better or worse. I really liked both Unicorn and Origin, but they're both very much part of the main Universal Century timeline (Origin is a direct prequel to the original Gundam series), so they'd probably work best after getting more exposure to that. On the Universal Century side of things, your core UC experience is the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, followed by Zeta, ZZ, and then the Char's Counterattack film that's the climax of the Amuro-vs-Char rivalry. Like Jman said, a lot of people recommend the movie trilogy for the original Gundam (Zeta has one too but I know less about it), since the series proper very much looks like a weekly television airing from 1978, but when I get around to it I think I want to go the OG route for authenticity's sake. Zeta gets pretty consistent high praise, ZZ is a "happy Tomino" series so there's some goofiness in there, and then Char's Counterattack is pretty universally loved too. Victory Gundam is UC too but set further in the future, and by all accounts it's peak "depressed Tomino" so yeah, brace yourself. Beyond those, I've heard many people say that "anything with an 8 in the title is awesome." 08th MS Team (which I think aired on the OG Toonami) is about as "real robot" as Gundam gets, focusing on a team of everyday soldiers during the One-Year War of the original series. 0080: War in the Pocket is a much more personal look at the tragedy of war theme that's so common in Gundam series, and like Masquerade said 0083: Stardust Memory is all about Gundam test pilots. The nice thing about all of these is that they're comparatively shorter as Gundam series go, so they don't require a huge time investment. For non-UC stuff, Wing is a Toonami classic that got a lot of US fans into the franchise in the first place, though I'm not sure just how well it holds up today. Turn A is another Tomino series that gets a good deal of praise, though by most accounts it's somewhat different than most other series in the franchise, particularly in its visual design. G Gundam is the one I'm probably most excited to watch myself, because it's pure hot-blooded super robot action, albeit nothing like anything else in the entire franchise. I don't know much about Seed other than the fact that it's absurdly popular in Japan (and has derpy sameface character designs by the same guy who worked on the likes of s-CRY-ed and Fafner), but Seed Destiny is widely considered to be hot garbage. I know jack squat about After War Gundam X or Gundam AGE (though I don't think the latter has the best reputation). The whole Gundam Build spinoff seems to be "what if Gunpla, but you could fight them against each other?" Reconguista in G is Tomino's most recent contribution, and from what I've heard it's...um...it's something all right. And then your most recent main thing is Witch from Mercury, which as Jman alluded to is basically LESBIANS!

"Could barely tell"? No more than two minutes in and I was asking myself, "Wait did we skip something here?" Did the fact that the ship was just leaving Japan at the end of the last episode and was suddenly at the island without any context not raise any flags for you? Or Senku talking about a specific material he needed from the Soyuz capsule as if the whole crew knew about it, when it was the first we were hearing of it? Or, I dunno, the prominent new character who showed up out of nowhere? Or most tellingly of all, the way that everyone was casually dropping the fact that there were people on the island? The show has never lurched ahead like that without filling in any details, and it stuck out like a sore thumb. Someone I know confirmed it was the wrong episode, and so I bailed right away, figuring in the worst case I could go back on my own and watch episode 6 first. Only I don't have to now, because the block made the right call and decided to air things in their proper order. How is this a hard concept for you to grasp?

Dude who gives a shit. Just don't fucking watch for a week then.

Maybe for those of us who bailed on the episode as soon as we figured out it was the wrong one, because we wanted to watch the story in its actual order? But yes I'm sure it was some deliberate plotted-out conspiracy instead of the same type of dumbass mistake that the block has been making for 20 years. Totally.

Good, now I can be a lazy slob and not worry about finding it on my own.

It was before my time but I think screwing up the finale of your most high-profile anime co-production of all wins it easily.

...it doesn't? Right from the start they're magically already at the island and talking about inhabitants whom we didn't even know existed. I was sitting there thinking, "Wait a second, did we skip something?"