*This blog post was started on January 25, 2023.
I cannot say that it has been a good year for resolutions. It is kind of sad since the past two years were successes. NinetyForChill: The #Podcast was started in 2021. In 2022, learning to use chopsticks ended up being a success.
This year, I did not really have any ideas on how to approach resolutions. Perhaps Skimble's health was the bigger priority, but I had managed to screw anything that I thought would be obtainable goals before he passed away Sunday.
The first idea was, as always, to eat something Buffalo-flavored each day. The seond idea was consuming THC everyday, inspired by my pal Andrew "Couchman" Tiede. These streaks both ended when I tried to drink with kids that were 17 years younger after last Thursday's Trivia night.
Those goals, were kind of silly, which is why I took them on. The practical one was writing a blog every week that was not related to my podcast. Time management was the biggest challenge for that goal, and it came out as the victor. I wonder if I had successfully blogged every week when I was working for a glorified ATM that is Marine Bank?
That is a statement about management and I cannot wait to see the branch shutdown when Morton Community Bank takes them over. Serves them right for being hateful to genuinely compassionate people. My job was terminated because Marissa Embry ratted my blogging content out because I told her to quit watching racist and transphobic videos at work. This was something my manager, Angie Zindars, who okay my blogging on the clock while at the same time telling me to just accept that they had different views.
Hope kind of fucks me over to kick off every year. If only I knew that the state was going to just ignore my unemployment case, I would have gone on record telling the judge that I was terminated on the whims of hateful people. By the time I got a hearing, the anger seemed pointless.
The anger is there this year. I say that as a statement about losing Skimble. There is anger towards myself for failing to realize how sick he was. My most recent episode of the podcast discusses my angst towards society over it. To keep pushing on, only two friends have been told about him in person. If only society was as understanding as my queen kitty, Evangeline Stacia Stevens.
Eva has been doing her best to look after me. This means, if I am not in the room with her, she is meowing to get me back on the bed in the living room. I hate that it took a dead kitty to get me to watch more TV, but from a creative (at the very least, critical) standpoint, maybe I can get back to my writing goal this year.
The problem is, my best subject matters are wrestling, movies and politics. Echo chambers keeps me out of politics right now. I think I need to alternate content, but movies are the entire point of the podcast. So to follow up:
It's best to return to the subject matter that brought me to the internet to begin with, anime from the 1990's. Thank the gods that only the free streamers seem to carry that.
Imagine We Still Had VHS: Doomed Megalopolis (Volume 1: The Haunting of Tokyo)
Tokyo is on the verge of being a capital city of equal glory to any major city in the West. To further modernize, the government is in the midst of a major renovation. It may mean rebuilding on top of the old city, but if it will give them earthquake-proof skyscrapers, that is just the cost of progress.
So is ignoring the old gods and traditions of the East. Why reject tangible Western science? Well, the West cannot account for a 2000 year-old, anarchically-driven demon. Taira na Masakado was a well-meaning rebel, but when the government executed him, his soul remained in purgatory. Unable to rest, a vengeance capable of destroying Japan may occur if he were to be awoken. And there is a pagan priest called Kato who wants to wake him. This is the only way that Kato believes will bring about the utopia that Masakado fought and died for.
Unable to bring the demon back on his own, Kato seeks to capture Yukari. This young psychic woman may serve as a medium to pull Masakado back to the land of the living. His efforts start with using her as a vessel for demon spawn, but the priest Hirai is able to destroy them as they are born. In response, Kato has challenged Hirai and Yukari's lover to try and stop him from kidnapping her. The two priests are essentially reflections of each other, so can one even defeat the other? If our heroes do not prevail, what will the fate be for Tokyo?
"Doomed Megalopolis" is one of the latter acquisitions of Streamline Pictures, the first prominent anime distributor in the United States. Much of their library ended up being shown on Syfy in the mid to late 1990s. This is one of those titles (like "Crying Freeman") that was not going to be censored for cable television.
In the first episode of the OVA, there is nothing that is actually sexual aside from some lesbian innuendo, but once we get our first demon spawn, you cannot do that on television. What I am trying to state is the artwork can be rather phallic. According to Wikipedia, "Doomed Megalopolis" is an adaptation of Hiroshi Aramata's novel "Teito Monogatari":
The anime is darker in tone, more violent, and more sexually explicit than any previous adaptations of the novel; an artistic decision likely inspired by the financial success of the OVA Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend.
There are some nude images shown during Kato's first attempt to awaken the demon, but that is pretty much just a blur. The demon spawn birth is a combination of Lucio Fulci's woman puking up her internal organs from "City of the Living Dead", but with the head of the spawn immediately looking like a penis.
Aside from that imagery, I did not find anything to be too offensive. That includes the dub. It at least felt more natural that the original American voice over track for "Akira". The animation is a nice mix of the softer eighties style that was on the way out and the incoming sharper, more manga-inspired nineties style. Some brighter colors would have been appreciated, but this was up to the standards of the time.
The issues with this Original Video Animation are with the storytelling. It may be an effort to capture all of the characters' perspectives, but it feels like it is jumping all over the place. This is a premise that is rather prevalent in the genre, and the feature fails to be exceptional. Granted, "X" is the first anime I think of when it comes to apocalyptic Tokyo, and that was released eight years after this. Still, to come back to a title does not excuse it from not being coherent enough to keep my attention. There were many a time I rewound to see if I missed something, but it might be the storytelling and not my attention span that required this.
"Doomed Megalopolis" offers nothing to standout aside from some Cronenberg/Italian-style body horror. It is not fair to the series, but the idea of Tokyo being destroyed by ancient forces has been done better, so it may not be worth returning to. If the story was told better, this would be a nice piece of anime history. Sadly, it is nothing but a trivia answer.
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