Red, White, and Otaku
Season 1
Netflix's Cowboy Bebop (2021)
Hanna-Barbera's Godzilla (1978)
by Tangent-Man/Sheltered Snipe
In 1998, Studio Sunrise created a new property to rival their prior success of Gundam. Set in the open frontier of space, framed like the mythic outlaw age of the Wild West, Cowboy Bebop was an epic depicting the adventures of small crew in a large universe, effortlessly weaving comedy and pathos with action using some of the most gorgeous animation and bombastic music that had been seen on television. We are not talking about that show. Over twenty years later, Netflix decided to try and recreate Sunrise's masterpiece with bloated episode runtimes, scripts they dug out from the dumpster behind the studio, a casting director who I must charitably assume was drunk at the time, and a few million dollars. As a great man once said, we watched it so you don't have to. Three episodes in, we are already scraping the bottom of the barrel.
This week, our hosts travel back to the past to cover something that (sadly) isn't Samurai Jack. Instead we get Godzilla the Original Animated Series, animated by the same studio that brought you Scooby-Doo and Wacky Races. Just what will their take be on Godzilla? Anything but conventional. Meet our hero, the selfless yet blood thirsty Godzilla. And his nephew, the adorable if impossible to consistently animate Godzooky. And their gallery of evil kaiju! And the cast of human characters we definitely remember. Join Tangent Man and Sheltered Snipe as they take you on a tour of sample size of what America's first audio-visual adaptation of the King of Monsters had to offer. Will it thrill you? Will it startle you? Will it make the 1998 film seem like a work of art? You can't know till you've listened.
In this episode, our reviewers dive into the world of Night City. Specifically, the version depicted in an anime based on a videogame based on a tabletop game based off a literary and cinematic trend in the 70s. What better place to start a podcast? The stakes are high. The cast is morally dubious. And the tone couldn't be bleaker. That's without discussing the anime we are covering this week! Join our two hosts as they experience and discuss one of Studio Trigger's most exciting and heartbreakingly beautiful productions, and get caught up before the release of the second season this fall. Note this is considered RWO's pilot, and its kind of rough. The audio quality could use some work and the hosts are still learning how to podcast. On the upside, we can only go up from here.