Anime Tuesday

Well, I don't know about every Tuesday... most likely it'll be just whenever I feel like it.  But I was thinking about paying tribute to another one of my fandoms - Anime.  I've always had a strange fascination with it.  I only say strange because I never had too many friends that liked it too.  But it attracted me by the colors and the teamwork that is common to most anime shows.  The rigid teamwork of everyone in their place doing the same thing every time.  But I also like the way it's changed over the years too.  It's a little different than it was back in the day.  I'm 41 years old, so in "the day" the first taste and first love for me was Voltron.

Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, and Black.  It's simplicity was it's charm.  They were robot lions.  Lol.. they had their finger on the pulse of cat-love before it was cool!  The lions would work individually and then transform and plug in together to form a champion defender who looked like a person... a person with roaring hands and feet.  I loved the chambers they went into to take them to their lions that were hidden beneath a castle.  And they'd emerge from different elemental environments... forest, water, desert, rocky surfaces, etc.  Colors and elements... it's all a signature of anime production.  Probably the Japanese sense of balance in nature.  But it spoke so strongly to me.  Not sure how they got out of their normal clothes into their uniforms in that quick drop, but stuff like that didn't and doesn't matter in these old simple cartoons.

I often wonder what he appeal is when they did the same thing every episode.  The lions would fight individually and then they'd form Voltron who would unleash his Blazing Sword to finish off the ro-beast.  It makes a person wonder why they even bothered to fight the lions solo in the first place.  But it was just very satisfying to watch... not unlike modern fighting games where there is a signature "finishing move" as well as in wrestling and other combative or competitive  arenas.  Everyone likes the finishing move in a story.  The final blow.  The thing that finally strikes fear into the enemy.  I loved to watch the blazing sword slice the beast in half every episode.  It was always the same.  But it was always cool.

I guess the appeal comes in the surprising complexities of the characters.  I mean, yes, the bad guys always have the same motivation.  And the evil prince is obsessed with the good princess.  But when you see the whole series unfold, it was like a soap opera for children.  Some characters changed and evolved. The best examples were Sven and the Princess, though I won't go into detail. I guess it appealed to my writer's heart.  Flirting and male-female tensions are always attractive to young girls while there's plenty of action for young boys and not too much of one or the other.  The repetitiveness of Voltron's wins and the minor character development held those two facets together and it worked brilliantly.

And then it was impaled on its own blazing sword.  The next incarnation was the vehicles.  Nobody liked the vehicles.  Looking back on it now, I understand what they were doing, but I think it was a little ahead of its time.  The idea was a little more complex than kids of my day would go for.  The Voltron forces weren't just in one part of the universe and there were others, so the story moved over to another part of the galaxy where another Voltron force was fighting different enemies.  There was the same sense of balance... a squadron that represented air, land and sea.  But it had too many characters.  And it seemed like... well, I guess technically it was... just a bad copy of the lions.  We weren't ready for this kind of transition.  And it didn't help that the vehicles didn't have anything original to speak of.

There was actually supposed to be a third incarnation as well.  Alpha, Beta, and Gamma robots to form another Voltron force, but it never aired because of the mass unpopularity of the vehicle version of Voltron.  I think I'd almost be interested to see what the concept for this one was like.

So that's my anime memory for this day.  There will be others.